Wisława Szymborska

Years ago, my girlfriend and I were sitting on the floor of a friend in Berkeley, California, arguing theology, reading poetry, drinking tea. I observed about a poem of Wisława Szymborska's that it felt "Buddhist"--a perilous remark, as the friend we were visiting had studied Buddhism at Naropa, whereas I what I had done at the time was a little sitting at the Zen Center and some reading. Truth be told, that's still what I've done. "Hmmmm," said my girlfriend, raising an unconvinced eyebrow. "Buddhist?!" retorted our host. "There's too much self in it!" The poem, if I recall corretly, was the title poem in her 1995 selected poems:

View with a grain of sand

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine, without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch means nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is not different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
The water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beheath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like courier with urgent news.
But that's just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make believe,
his news inhuman.

There's a lot of chatter I could offer here, about qualities and things, about the indifference of the in-itself. I could add that that I stand by my assessment of the poem as resonating with (though probably not motivated by) Buddhism. But I want to juxtapose the poem to another of Szymborska's which certainly has, I think, more "self" in it, albeit in a way which sits easily alongside the other poem. The difference between poetry and theory is that poetry is not anxious about getting its story straight. It has an easier conscience, or at least it knows what it's likely to get.

Could Have

It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.

You survived because you were first.
You survived because you were last.
Because alone. Because the others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because it was sunny.
Because a shadow fell.

Luckily there was a forest.
Luckily there were no trees.
Luckily a rail, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A frame, a turn, an inch, a second.
Luckily a straw just then was floating by.

Thanks to, because, despite, and yet.
What would have happened if a hand, a leg,
A step, a hair away...?

So you are here? Straight from that moment still suspended?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn't be more wonderstruck, can't be silent enough.
Listen,
how your heart pounds inside me.

The first poem keeps undoing it's own figures, reminding us that its simile is "only a simile," that our descriptions of the lake or the pebble or the cloud mean nothing to them. The self is there, but compelled to assume its quiet and contingent station. In the second poem, the self's contingency is center stage, but it is not "my" contingency--until the eerie and disorienting inversions of the last stanza and especially the last line.

Wisława Szymborska died today. She was 88 years old.

Moderatio

R. Joseph Hoffman has opined, in the fine old tradition of legitimate hyperbole, that

Complacency is what killed European Christianity. The fruits and comforts of the industrial revolution killed it. Not education and science; not curiosity; not Darwin’s dangerous idea. Just the creeping rot of not really giving a damn about anything.

Hoffman, who is writing as a non-Christian (albeit a scholar of early Christianity), has the good sense to be on the right side of the "accommodationist" debate ("Can religion and science be compatible, ever, ever, ever?") His point in his admirable post is that the negative answer to this question arises from the excesses of an over-reaching intellectual ambition; and he sees this excess as the equal and opposite cultural reaction to the aforementioned complacency, a complacency which, I might add, was widely diagnosed in the 19th century (read Nietzsche, or Kierkegaard, for instance, though I take my lead here from Baudelaire, whose opening poem in the Fleurs du Mal famously names it Ennui). Hoffman's answer to this complacency is simple and has a venerable philosophical lineage:

The opposite of complacency is not excess. It is moderation.

What's important here is not just that the back-&-forth we are enduring now over this question--the stupid tug-of-war between a superstitious Bibliolatry which was already withering away, and a hubristic scientism that has allowed itself to be distracted from "the business of finding things out" into a tar-pit of unwinnable polemics--that this tension is essentially the spasms of one excess answering another, over the abyss of a fundamental apathy:

American culture is not hardwired to evoke curiosity about science, religion, or anything else. It’s designed to breed complacency. If Theodore Roethke had lived today, he would write about the inexorable sadness of shopping malls and gated communities and universities where nothing happens and a society where conscience dies daily in the onslaught of the latest economic data.

One can quibble, if one likes, with Hoffman's diagnosis, or try to resist the cynicism one detects here, but despite the brief signs of life one glimpses in the #Occupy movement, it is hard for me to dispute the gist of this. As I have said before, there is an oscillation between fear and boredom at work in us. (I don't think this is unique to post-Christian or late-capitalist society; the ancient ascetic spiritual struggle has always been against the Midday Demon-- melancholia and panic).

As regards saving both religion and science from their own excesses: this temper-tantrum-with-two-backs has an answer in the tradition of common sense and ordinary wisdom. As Hoffman points out, it goes by the venerable name "Moderation", the ratio between extremes, the key to virtue in Confucius, the Buddha, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Spinoza. (Not to mention Jane Austen, which really ought to be enough.) Does moderation sometimes look like timidity? Certainly; and vice-versa--timidity sometimes styles itself "moderation." After all, moderation, as pursuit of a mean, will partake of the extremes it attempts to balance. And who said keeping one's balance was easy--especially when everyone at either end is pulling you back and forth?

Point is, all that energy that goes into the pulling, is being generated by something. The "Accommodationism" argument is a symptom of a deeper malaise in our culture--I would say a spiritual malaise, if the word wasn't so loaded. But then, that loadedness is the problem, isn't it?

Please enjoy your trip through this door

Always in search of a more satisfying philosophical experience, and in keeping with our conviction that there is no pure, unmediated experience, we here at SCT are indefatigable in our web-page fine-tuning. After a year of cream-colored poor wannabe approximation of parchment, we are pleased to present our new look: a soothing evening-sky-blue, appropriate for the taking-wing of Minerva's owl. We hope this will aid in putting your mind into a calm and relaxed state, aware but un-agitated, suitable for the contemplative life. Your feedback is, as always, welcome. Thank you for choosing SCT.

Myth & object

Plato frequently shows Socrates inventing myths. Whatever one may think about why this is (shelves have been written about it), I regard the interface between philosophy and myth as of paramount significance; it is neither an accident of genealogy or an idiosyncrasy of certain writers.

A myth is a kind of fiction, but unlike ordinary fiction its denizens seem to have not less but more reality than the inhabitants of our ordinary and familiar world. There is a curious parallel between mythification and what Viktor Shklovsky called ostranenie or "defamiliarization," a notion I have had recourse to before. The latter effect renders us "estranged" from the familiar, usually by some striking trope or vivid description, inflecting the ordinary in such a way as to show it shot through either with significance or with an uncanny refusal of significance. Mythification can also effect this, not however by contrasting the ordinary with some conventional setting (making it stand out against it), but rather precisely by placing it into such a conventional system. "The wine-dark sea," "flashing-helmeted Hector", and so on, are only the smallest-scale examples of the workings of such a system, which extended as far as vast interpretive parallels between various events, natural phenomena, and concepts. These equivalences are indeed conventional, i.e., "arbitrary," and philosophy must address itself to understanding them as such, because treating them as "natural" is just superstitious. But philosophy's myths are meant to indicate their own fictitious status in a way that does not undermine the effect of estrangement, but rather produces it in a particularly philosophical mode. A conscious mode, I want to say, though that's only partly accurate.

The long-time reader of SCT will note that this notion has some resonance with earlier posts on fiction, theme, and secondary worlds. Or, to refer back to just yesterday, the whole notion of defamiliarization is a close parallel to the seeing of an object as "withdrawn"--the perplexing or even uncanny vorhanden hammer instead of the friendly, accessible zuhanden one, or (to switch from Heidegger to Sartre) the eerie, nausea-inducing tree-root that refuses any appellation rather than the one to which the word "root" obligingly adheres.

(Part of these reflections was sparked by reading chapter 4 of Thomas Pavel's Fictional Worlds.)

Does the matter withdraw? Does the withdrawal matter?

Levi Bryant has posted a brief take on one of the two hard (and deceptively simple) questions that I think must be faced by any philosophy which takes its lead from Harman. [Update: in a follow-up post, Bryant distinguishes further between his own conception of withdrawal and Harman's before moving on to elucidate his own position more.] Both these questions have to do with the "withdrawn" object. One of them I asked some while ago--how do such metaphysicians know there are any such objects? This question can easily get disregarded in the enthusiasm for doing ontology rather than epistemology. I happen to think this is a dicey game, but I don't think it renders Harman or Bryant unable to continue doing their work. It just means we should place them more in the line of Descartes (despite Descartes' supposed epistemological bias) than of Locke or Hume--they are after "clear and distinct ideas"--and that's no surprise, as we know that the stakes of the crusade against correlationism are set by Meillassoux as the answer to "Hume's problem." When you recall that one half of Harman's project comes to us courtesy of Husserl, this makes perfect sense. Husserl had already set his face against Kant when he declared in the Logical Investigations that

What is true is absolutely true, is true "in itself." Truth is identically one, whether men or non-men, angels or gods, apprehend it. (I sec.36; p79)

The other question, which Bryant is addressing now, is what difference the thesis of the withdrawn object makes. Bryant rightly compares it to the question of whether everything might be doubling in size; one could add any number of others. ("Could the world have sprung into being half a second ago complete with fossils and records?" is a popular one.) These are the questions that critics of "metaphysics" like to lampoon as pointless. A passage from Wittgenstein always occurs to me in this context:

“a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism. (Philosophical Investigations 271)

Bryant compares the withdrawn object to the infinitely receding transcendental signified beloved of deconstructionists. And here too he's right, though I read this in a slightly different way; Terry Eagleton objected to deconstruction that the problem with deconstruction was that it "left everything as it is." That we can "allude" to the in-itself may not strike us as very significant, if that's really all we can do. Some while ago I blogged on this notion of allusion, and there I remarked that to me this allusion is very much like the Socratic spinning of a "likely story;" the example that comes to mind if the account of anamnesis in the Meno, another instance in which an infinite regression threatens. Latour's account of mediation is another. Latour essentially thinks we trace mediation until we get bored--i.e., his is a pragmatist solution. Harman's way out of this is to give us a circuit between real and sensual objects, but this (as he realizes) still leaves us with a very strange situation, and one could be forgiven for thinking it "just pushes the question back a stage." But it is worth recalling that Eagleton's comparison derives not from Marx (though there is a similarity with the famous line about interpreting the world vs. changing it), but rather from Wittgenstein, who believed that what we could only allude to was precisely ethics:

if I contemplate what Ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to me quite obvious. It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing.

It is philosophy itself, Wittgenstein famously held, that "leaves everything as it is" (P.I. 124). Despite the gulf that would seem to separate Wittgenstein (at least in his familiar role as prophet of the linguistic turn) from Speculative Realism in general and OO-thinking in particular, here I think we see a place where object-oriented thought comes close to seeing in any object at all what Wittgenstein sees in ethics--and that seems to me to be extremely significant. (I have earlier juxtaposed before Harman's claim that "aesthetics is first philosophy" with Wittgenstein's that "ethics and aesthetics are one.")

John McDowell (who would seem to be very close to the quietism of Wittgenstein in some ways) is at pains in Mind and World to avoid the consequence that our empirical thinking is a frictionless spinning in a void, a possibility he thinks is raised by what, following Kant, he calls the spontaneity of our judgment--the fact that we decide when we judge, and do not feel caused. Although McDowell is thinking of minds and their decisions, this is in some measure quite analogous to the question of causality in general as it arises for Harman (and I presume for Bryant, though I have not read Democracy of Objects closely yet), because Harman has followed Whitehead in thinking of every interaction as prehension. McDowell thinks he has a way to safeguard against this result. It depends upon granting a distinction between human and animal consciousness (McDowell calls the latter "proto-subjectivity") which may or may not strike one as being the sort of "basic ontological rift" that Harman objects to. For McDowell, the problem arises on the side of subjectivity--it's free, so it seemingly offers no purchase for the natural world to impinge on it; for Harman and Bryant, the problem arises on the side of the (real) object--it withdraws, so how does it interact with anything else?

This question of causality is not quite the same as the question Bryant raises of "so what?", but it is (I think) closer than it may at first appear. The causal question has to do with ontology; the what-difference question has to do with discourse. I have urged before that the difference between epistemology and ontology as philosophical practices is more fluid than rigid; and I expect that Kant still has a thing or two to teach us about this. This may seem like welcoming correlationism in again through the back door, which doesn't concern me as much as it would some. Bryant concludes by saying that

in answering this question it seems that it’s necessary to concede that withdrawn objects make differences that aren’t withdrawn. This isn’t a retreat back to correlationism, but rather the suggestion that perhaps what’s important in object-orientation doesn’t lie in withdrawal as it’s been dominantly conceived.

Or it might mean that correlationism is different from how it has been dominantly conceived. What if the question proved to be a sort of antinomy?

I am very pleased to see Bryant taking this issue on. For myself, I believe that these irruptions of the question of the infinite, and of propositions that have (apparently) no traction, are symptomatic of philosophy not just at its most "pointless" but also, potentially, at its best. One thinker's "pseudo-problem" is another's crux of the matter. Socrates does not stop being friends with people just because their every attempt to say what friendship is is stymied. Though the object "recedes", ones "allusion" to it still occurs--but it occurs in practice. Which means, in participation.

Good luck with that

The resident teenager pointed out yesterday that the Wikipedia article List of Numbers begins with this stock disclaimer:

This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness.

To quote G.K. Chesterton: that is what one calls a powerful understatement.

You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

Yet one more way to waste time on the internet, or crowdsourcing at its finest?

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?

(That last bit is from a different Wikipedia article. No need to expand Browning.)

Eleven from '11

Top four most visited posts of 2011:

Bullshit again
Eucatastrophe vs. Yog-Sothery
Occupy Wall Street: the supply of demands
We have still never been modern

Seven of my own favorites, either because they got some good discussion, or because I got something off my chest, or just because:

Passivity
Theme
The stone (on Holy Saturday)
Homeopathic immortality
Beyond alienation
Weirdness
Flavor/mechanics

No overlap. The public is an ass.

Sir Michael Dummett, RIP

I learned from Brandon at Siris that Sir Michael Dummett has died.

It is too often the foolish caricature of Analytic philosophy that it contents itself with the question of the meanings and syntax of statements and has stepped back from the grand questions--the questions the "man in the street" thinks of then the word "philosophy" comes up: questions of the nature of space and time, of the relation between truth and appearance, and the meaning of life. Dummett--a student of Quine, a specialist on Frege--was unapologetic about the "linguistic turn" in one way; he maintained that

Other forms of intellectual enquiry seek to determine which propositions are true. Metaphysics seeks to determine what it is for them to be true. (Thought and Reality, p23)

This meant that metaphysics had

to unravel the nature of propositions – of the thoughts we are capable of thinking.(ibid.)

But Dummett did not believe we needed to stop there, and he provided over the years many explorations into the question of time, of ethics, and indeed of the existence of God, for which he resuscitated the usually scoffed-at argument of Berkeley. I'll add parenthetically that I consider this ability to make use of discarded and discredited arguments one of the signs of the catholicity of thought that philosophy requires--a feeling at ease with the whole stream of the millennia-long conversation and an indifference (which is not the same as hostility) to contemporary trends.

Somewhat presciently, he ruminated in his book on The Nature and Future of Philosophy that

It is by no means obvious that universities...should support philosophy but for historical precedent. If universities had been an invention of the second half of the twentieth century, would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied? It seems very doubtful.

Dummett attributed the continuing existence of philosophy departments to the inertia of tradition; but as the last few years have shown, when pressed down against the bottom line with the heel of the call for "results" on their throat, universities will be ready to cut loose from tradition without thinking twice.

He had a wide range of other interests. I remember my astonishment years ago when a friend informed me that Dummett had written two books of the tarot deck. I have read A Wicked Pack of Cards, and while I am not persuaded by him that there is no esoteric tradition behind the deck, Dummett makes a strong case that it was primarily a tool of recreation, not divination; and that it likely had its origin in the 15th century,pace the fanciful speculations of the 18th-century occultists (and their successors). (See his response to Frances Yates' review of The Game of Tarot.)

Maybe more significantly, Dummett did serious work in election theory; and he was for about half a century a champion against racism in the U.K. He and his wife co-founded the Institute of Race Relations in 1958. In 2001 Dummett was still at it, arguing that much European opposition to immigration was at least tacitly racist, this being particularly so in Britain. (When he was knighted, he called for the replacement of the entire staff of the British Home Office.)

I cannot of course demonstrate this, but I suspect that Dummett's work in this regard shared a root with his religious faith as a Roman Catholic, a confession he quietly maintained since the 1940's. Dummett was thoughtfully engaged with his faith in its doctrinal and its ritual dimensions. Staunchly in sympathy with the calls for a vernacular Mass, he was appalled by any number of other innovations that came in its wake. His essay on the matter (here) insists and laments:

Liturgy is an art form; one especially in the service of God, but an art form none the less.... [I am] one who for many years longed for the liturgy to be translated into the vernacular; and I was sustained by the thought that, when it happened, it would be carried out by people who would have such sensitivity to language.... Alas, it has been carried out by people with tin ears both for English and for Latin, who moreover thought themselves entitled to revise the liturgy when it did not please them, not just to translate it.

(This sort of thing will get knowing nods from the choir, and raise a "huh?" of incomprehension for the rest; that's fine.) Dummett did not restrict himself to questions of liturgical style. He defended the doctrine of Real Presence (while criticizing the Thomistic presentation thereof); he argued against the Roman church's position on contraception; he criticized modern philosophers for "worshiping" science and insisted that (as Ombhurbhuva reminded me in a comment on the last post)

the price of denying that God exists is to relinquish the idea that there is such a thing as how reality is in itself.

Dummett's colleague Philippa Foot, a professed atheist, recounted in an interview (included here) that she once asked him,

“What happens when your argument goes one way and your religious belief goes the other?” And he said, “How would it be if you knew that something was true? Other things would have to fit with it.”

But Dummett insisted his faith had experienced long periods of doubt, often brought on by reflection on the problem of evil, which, as he wryly conceded in his Gifford lectures, gave the atheists "a local argumentative advantage." In an autobiographical essay included in the book The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, he gives an account that will sound familiar to anyone who has done any of this wrestling:

I have undergone several periods when I have been overcome by such doubts; during them, I have not ceased to attend Sunday Mass, but have abstained from the sacraments. My doubts have always been global rather than local; my reasons for believing in God are philosophical rather than affective; they can suddenly strike me as unconvincing. ...But most usually my doubts have been engendered by what troubles everyone: can a world in which such suffering occurs be one made by a God who is said to love?...That world looks as if governed by uncaring forces. The pain of animals is a good example ...As for human pain, it is not its mere occurrence that has usually troubled me: after the Cross, no one can say to God, ‘You don’t know what it is like.’ ...What troubles me most is the way some people die. Some deaths are too devoid of dignity or peace to allow any self-surrender; how can they be the means by which anyone’s soul is supposed to pass into eternity?

Dummett did not shy from the matter:

I have no answer to these questions; they trouble me continually. It has been only sporadically, and not for a long time now, that they have overwhelmed me and prevented me for a period from being a whole-hearted believer. When the period has ended and my faith in God has been restored, it has not been because I have found the answers, but because I have become able to live with the agony of not knowing them, confident that they are to be found...I remain a Catholic, and hope to die one.

Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Ancilla theologiae ?

A word of clarification re. my theological posts. The subtitle of this blog is Open Letters on Philosophical Praxis. I take it for granted that philosophy is aimed at the cultivation of experience of a particular kind. There are plenty of snide ways of saying what philosophy is not (yawn yawn "grammatical analysis," "footnote-chasing," etc.), but it is obvious to me that these just name strategies of thought that have on occasion got out of their bottles; I'm not interested in breaking them on the wheel. What I [want to] do here is understood as keeping open the question of philosophy's status as ancilla theologiae. If it were not for the issue of "whose theology?" I would say there is no "question" about it; but theology proves itself to be both the willing and the unconscious handmaid herself of so many ideologies that considerable reticence is called for. In some moods, I would say that philosophy opens onto theology, that theology is the silent culmination of philosophy; but that leaves a great deal of talk which is certainly understood as theology, and this is the stuff I worry about.

In another mood I would suggest that, at least in our postmod situation, the handmaid is like Gorakhnath, and the onetime queen of the sciences is like Matsyendranath. These two sages from Medieval Indian lore are disciple and master respectively, but Matsyendranath once entered into a trance and is eventually found by Gorakhnath as an amnesiac prisoner in the retinue of the enchanting Queen of Ceylon (or is it 1,600 different queens? the stories differ). A brief recounting of this myth is found in a paper by Mircea Eliade here (reprinted as chapter VII in his book Myth and Reality.) The disciple disguises himself as a dancing girl and in a long and symbolic dance he recalls his teacher, by hints and gestures, to his right mind. (There is a whole range of hermeneutic and historical issues that this legend raises--questions about the roles of sex, sexuality, and gender in Indian religion, about the lineages of the Natha Sampradaya [an initiatic tradition, ascetic and in some cases tantric], its relation to Buddhism, and so on. You can see some of that explored in this post by Mike Magee, but I'm not getting into any of it here.) My illustration simply means; theology has forgotten itself. Philosophy is (in this analogy) a disciple; but its role today is in part to raise the issues that theology itself ought to; to convene theology; to call theology to itself.

This sets me apart from plenty of people whose work interests me quite a lot, I know. And there is of course a further tension: of its very nature, philosophy encounters aporiae which can be addressed by the response of faith, but to take this step is in some sense to leave philosophy behind. The philosopher would therefore always in some manner be aspiring to leave his own mode of existence qua philosopher. I do not think this tension can be resolved, at least not on its own level--the level (at least) of discourse. But it can be exploited, and exploited philosophically--that is, for the purposes of cultivating philosophical experience. By this phrase I mean, among other things, the entry into such tension or aporia fully, so that they inform ones whole life. This means, n.b., tha tone continues to "live"--to act politically, socially, and so on--i.e., without the caricature of "paralyzed thought" which supposedly skepticism brings on--though this may be a requisite stage, Socrates' stingray numbness (and let's face it, in one of its modes philosophy just is skepticism). Philosophy in the way I mean it (and this is the way the tradition going back--yes, pretty much continuously--to Plato means it) never lets go of the question quid sit deus?--but for philosophy at least, it remains a question.

From Christmas to Easter, every Sunday

At Christmas Day Mass I can't help but be struck as was T.S. Eliot's Thomas Beckett in Murder in the Cathedral:

whenever Mass is said, we re-enact the Passion and Death of Our Lord; and on this Christmas Day we do this in celebration of His Birth. So that at the same moment we rejoice in His coming for the salvation of men, and offer again to God His Body and Blood in sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. It was in this same night that has just passed, that a multitude of the heavenly host appeared before the shepherds at Bethlehem, saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men'; at this same time of all the year that we celebrate at once the Birth of Our Lord and His Passion and Death upon the Cross.

Eliot has Beckett remark to his flock, "Beloved, as the World sees, this is to behave in a strange fashion." But indeed, this is what the Church does every Sunday.

The Gloria in excelsis, called "a most ancient and venerable hymn by which the Church, gathered in the Holy Spirit, glorifies and entreats God the Father and the Lamb" in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, occurs in the entrance rites of every Sunday Mass. Its opening clauses,

Gloria in excelsis Deo
et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis,

are of course the declaration of the angels before the shepherds, which Eliot has Beckett cite from Luke 2:14 (it can also be "peace to men of good will," depending on your translation). Commencing its worship with this phrase, the Church is already doing what it later declares expressly, "joining with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven," with which words the Mass proceeds to declare

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus
Dominus Deus Sabaoth.
Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua.
Hosanna in excelsis.

The Sanctus comes as the final words of the preface for the Eucharistic prayer. That is: the Mass identifies the Church with the angelic choir, implicitly at its beginning, and again explicitly at the beginning of the Eucharist proper. There is thus a sense in which the Church is, with every Mass, recapitulating the distance and the conjunction between Christmas and Holy Week; and this sense is in some wise bound up with its angelic vocation.

Václav Havel: "hope is not optimism"

As Advent, the "season of waiting," winds to its close, Václav Havel has died.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. (Disturbing the Peace p 181)

This is a motif that runs through Havel's work from Letters to Olga to his many late addresses, collected in The Art of the Impossible. In the wake of Havel's death I have been turning this distinction over in my mind. I have said before that philosophy is in some sense optimistic, but Havel's "hope" is far closer to what I mean.

I know it's a strange thing to contend: that philosophy is "hopeful." But philosophy arises (in Greece at any rate) out of the question of whether life can be good. The tragedians were by no means sanguine about this, and Solon's famous warning ("Call no man happy...") is meant to resonate with the sad wisdom of Silenus: Best for man is not to be born, and next-best, to die soon. I believe Socrates means to counter this dour tale (and if I were writing a paper, here would be the place for all the stuff about Alcibiades' characterizations of Socrates as Silenus in the Symposium). Socrates says that life can be good, and he tells us what makes it so: "examination." He does acknowledge that life can be not worth living; but he believes he has found an answer to this, the one thing needful, which his fellow Athenians neglect, at risk of moral bankruptcy.

In the same place, Havel says that hope

transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. I don't think you can explain it as a mere derivative of something here, of some movement, or of some favorable sign in the world. I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are, though of course I can't--unlike Christians, for instance--say anything concrete about the transcendental.

In pointing beyond the horizon of the world to indicate the unspecifiable grounds of hope, I suspect that Havel is following in the steps of his friend Jan Patočka, whose essay "Negative Platonism" (included here) tries to show that the Socratic orientation of philosophy towards a horizon was inherent in thinking itself. Havel's reticence, his confessed inability to "say anything concrete," is the fitting response to a hope whose articulation would seem to take us even beyond the premises of the meaningful; and Havel is right to gently chide Christians who have been far too ready to wax loquacious on the street address of God, though it is difficult to see how one might entirely avoid "saying too much" here. Havel himself seemed to hold out interest in the Gaia hypothesis and the Anthropic principle, proposals which certainly risk at least as much in the way of trespassing beyond the articulable, at least when explicitly connected to "the transcendental."

Asked whether the death and return of Gandalf, in The Lord of the Rings, was meant to suggest the passion of Christ, J.R.R. Tolkien demurred:

Gandalf faced and suffered death; and came back or was sent back, as he says, with enhanced power. But though one may be in this reminded of the Gospels, it is not really the same thing at all. The Incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write. Here I am only concerned with Death as part of the nature, physical and spiritual, of Man, and with Hope without guarantees. (Tolkien, Letters, #181)

Tolkien was of course a Roman Catholic and accepted some measure of our capacity to be explicit about hope, but this explicitness in the end turns out to be always framed by liturgical language and action. Art, he insisted, could not sustain the link between hope and the primary world; it required routing through the imagination.

Even here, of course, one risks a great deal, because the line between art and thinking in general is blurry. All such speech turns out to be a figure of speech.

I hear in the many voices which either expressly avow nihilism--some with a show of regret, others with a kind of unseemly and ill-concealed eagerness--or else impatiently wave it aside as a distraction from their empty triumphalism, a perverse celebration of the mortification of hope. In other quarters, the post-humanists offer bizarre anticipations of a kind of all-too-concrete "hope" of a different kind, not merely seeking refuge in just such a "secondary world" as Tolkien described, but seeking to make it the primary world; indeed to re-make this secondary world over into the primary one. This project will turn out to be the nihilistic one of erasing experience altogether.

One must be willing to (advisedly) risk "saying too much," in facing down the perverse celebrants of the mortification of hope. As Saint Leo the Great said, Inde oritur difficulas fandi, unde adest ratio non tacendi (The difficulty of speaking comes from the same source as the reason for not keeping silent.) I know nihilism from the inside, as does anyone with faith worthy of the name. if I did not, it would be hard to persuade myself that such an attitude is not an abdication of the life of the mind, but one of its essential forms, a necessary part of its life-cycle.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

T.S. Eliot, "East Coker"

From imprisoned dissident to president of his country, Havel could have seen the course of his life as a pure vindication. But for millions of human beings who had the misfortune to, say, die in prison (Patočka was one) before the Velvet Revolution, this eventual historical denouement made no difference--at least none we dare name; the very attempt would tip us over into kitsch. The stature of Havel's character is shown by the fact that he knew very well, after his success, that such "turning out well" meant nothing in terms of hope. What counted was the surety--the faith--that it made sense. But the nature of that "sense" cannot be specified. One can at best try to hazard its grammar, not its content.

How to avoid not thinking -- some non-foolproof tips

Harman, here:

Holism has now evolved from a formerly minority position into a sort of universally accepted cracker barrel wisdom, good for scoring easy points on fossilized and oppressive reactionary patriarchs who are supposedly naive enough to miss the way in which “everything is connected.” The problem is that this is an idea once but no longer liberating. Ideas have lifespans just like humans, and just like humans they can fall into a robotic decadence. My wager, as Badiou would put it, is that interconnectivity is a spent force, and that the intellectual theme of our time will be the recovery of a more robust and weirder model of autonomous individual things.

My first reaction to this was, "liberating" is not the first criterion by which I evaluate assertions. But I always question my first reactions.

There is a real sense in which formerly daring positions become substitutes for thinking. It is much, much harder than one thinks to escape from this. The feeling of "scoring easy points" seems to give validation, for defeating an opponent (or at least, in one's own opinion, taking them down a notch) is a fairly satisfying simulacrum of being right, and all the better if the opponent is one of the establishment.

My own way (certainly not foolproof) of navigating this danger is roughly threefold. Each of these modes carries its own risks.

First, I read widely, from no single school. I know I risk eclecticism in this way; a more grave danger is a kind of scatteredness or shallowness, a dilettantism. I'm not too afraid of this because I consider philosophy a matter of life and death, but it is true that one can't study everything.

Second, I avoid in-crowds where I can. I value friendship above most other goods and even think that the question of friendship is one of the few perennial philosophical matters; but I cultivate an allergy to the subtle allure of relationships in which mutual interest in the truth is eclipsed by a creeping disdain for all those poor benighted other sods who just don't get it. The risk here is a certain loneliness and (again, more dangerous) a chance of being broad-minded-to-a-fault.

Lastly, in those positions that rub me the wrong way, I try to find these in their strongest form. (This is at least half of why I am drawn to Badiou, for instance). This is of course a venerable technique of keeping oneself honest, and I have to admit I think it would do a few contemporary debates a world of good; but it too carries a danger, of remaining in polemical mode too long and failing to articulate a position of one's own.

I'm sure I succumb to all of these in different degrees. What I don't do is look for the cutting edge.

As for Holism, I consider Harman one of the strong points in the case against it. His strength does not lie in his characterization of it as no-longer-liberating. (And of course this is hardly the main thrust of his critique.) He's certainly right that it has become, in some circles, a default position. (On the other hand, there is also a case to be made that reductionism remains the ideological default mode of western culture.) Which position currently holds the attention of the doxa, in whatever circles, is not really the main question. The challenge is to formulate whatever position you hold in a manner that thinks. It is always worth asking oneself if one is scoring easy points. But that is because philosophy is above all a spiritual discipline, not just the construction of arguments.