What is the truth about the Good and the True? (And what good is it?)

A friend writes me off-blog to observe that the point I made a couple of days ago in passing, regarding naturalism and moral realism skirts (or maybe doesn't skirt) a difficulty:

If God exists (for lack of a better word), then God IS natural. And there is no reason to take that naturalness as any more grounding than the "ewwww" you posit here as problematic for naturalists. What transcendence do you seek at that point to ground your moral verities?

Seriously, I think Plato's Euthyphro still shows the gaping chasm of trying to ground morality in God as everyone keeps trying to do.

I might quibble with "natural" here, but I think that issue may be a red herring.

As to the main difficulty, I don't have an answer to this (and neither, as far as I can see, did Socrates), except to say that as long as the Truth and the Good are kept separate there will always be the question of what the Truth is about the Good, and whether it is always Good to know the Truth.

This is also bound up in the connection and distinction between jnana and bhakti I referred to yesterday. In an earlier post I related these to abstraction and encounter, and I noted that this can generate apparent paradoxes: privileging encounter over abstraction leads to abstractions like "encounter" rather than specific, um, encounters with whoever you are living with and alongside.

I'll add that it is not the "ewwww" recoil which is itself, in my opinion, problematic, but rather the claim that moral indignation reduces to this emotive state. One question that arises is, are there any wrong actions that, in any given setting, don't arouse this response, and ought to? (On can ask this, for instance, with regard to the eating of meat, or the procuring of an abortion, or the continued use of fossil fuels, or the assassination of political enemies. Some aspects of these questions might hinge on epistemic or even empirical issues; for instance, a "climate change skeptic" might even be ready to concede that driving a gas-powered car is wrong under any conditions at all if there is a link between climate change and fossil fuels, but reject all evidence of the latter. But it is also possible (though alas, unnecessary) to imagine someone who shrugs off the moral issue of whether oil consumption and air pollution is right or wrong. Even if such a one decides to drive less, it will be solely for what Kant called reasons of prudence.) This is, I take it, part of Libresco's point that moral norms cannot be merely equated with cultural ones. (see, e.g., here, and other of her posts in the series.)

And another one.

As an addendum to my last post:

Just a few hours after I posted it, I stumbled on a post at the New APPS Blog about philosopher Michael Sidduth, who converted last year from a Christianity of the Reformed flavor to a Hindu devotion to Krsna. The post's author, Helen De Cruz, observes in terms that fairly closely match my own, but also render the matter a bit more subtle:

I think religious conversion is rarely, if ever, a matter of disinterested rational thinking. There are always pragmatic and contextual factors involved. For one thing, had Sudduth not taught world religions, he would probably not have been sufficiently familiar with hindu writings to know what they are about. And his religious experiences postdate his familiarization with this. But obviously, religious conversion is also a matter of making a conscious live choice (as William James said). The fact is that people tend to underplay contextual factors for conversions they do like, and overplay them for conversions they don't like.

Sidduth's own account of his conversion was posted on his Facebook account, and reblogged frequently. It can be found, e.g., here, courtesy of the Maverick Philosopher, and in numerous other places online. So, alas, can a lot of the depressingly reductive critique I am talking about. "He was on antidepressants...." "How do you know it was Krishna?" Sigh.

In addition to the rather obvious point this story raises (it's not just Christian conversions at issue), this reminds me that I'd mean to suggest a tentative analogy between, on the one hand, the terms Leah Libresco used -- Truth and Person -- when she described her intuitions about Morality, and on the other hand, the Indian tradtitions pertaining to Jnana(roughly "wisdom") and Bhakhti yoga. I talked a little bit about these in a post on the problem of evil for Gospel and Dharma. This is, as I say, only a rough-and-ready analogy, but I think it holds up.

Two conversions

In one corner of the internet not long ago, Leah Libresco announced that she had been swayed by argument to convert to Roman Catholicism. Apparently Libresco is, or was, in some circles, a "prominent atheist blogger"; at least that's what the first few Google hits say. (I had not heard of her until I read Amod Lele's post about her conversion, but as you can tell from how often this blog is updated, I don't spend as much time online as I used to.) What is clear from my (far from complete) reading of her blog is that she's very smart, and loves a good argument (also a good meal). (She also writes perhaps a bit too quickly, but then I am a glacier, so I don't really understand cataracts.) Libresco identifies as a virtue ethicist and a moral realist, and she eventually conceded --to oversimplify a bit -- that this position was untenable if one's presuppositions are strictly naturalist. This is an argument I find very appealing, personally; I do not understand how one can get to moral realism -- the claim that, say, stealing a dollar, or tossing your estranged spouse in front of a subway, or driving a species to extinction through willfully ignorant rapaciousness, is really wrong (if it is wrong) in a way that means more than "ewwww" -- from premises that the universe, the life within it, and the consciousness some life exhibits, arose purely as Lucretian swerves of some energy-matter. (I think the same about sentience, but then, I would.) So Libresco's conversion makes sense; she says she has been "translating" her moral arguments "out of Catholic" for a good long while; that both atheists and Christians had been telling her "convert already!", and one night, when pressed for an account of where she thought moral intuitions actually came from, she found herself spontaneously improvising that "Morality loves me," (and thus, implicitly, communicates itself.)

I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant. It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth.

I've begun to categorize the general forms of analysis of reaction to Libresco's announcement. On the Christian side, there are Christians who make gratified noises, either rejoicing over the prodigal or merrily triumphalist crowing -- an embarrassing gesture that, needless to say, persuades no one. There are Christians who say she hasn't gone far enough ("Another cafeteria Catholic, so what?" or "Catholcism isn't Christian" are the two forms this takes). At the very least, all of this seems a bit premature, if only because Libresco has only announced her intention to convert (she's still a catechumen, she's not shy about saying what she can and can't buy into, and whether she can, as it were, "suspend judgment" to the point of baptism is an open question).

On the atheist side, some are dismayed ("How can someone so smart..."), some say they saw it coming long ago ("she always did have these weird notions..."; at its extreme, this becomes the silly assertion that she was never really an atheist at all!), some are engaging on some level ("Well, but then give up moral realism instead!" or at least "OK, but Leah, how do you justify...") and some are outright dismissive ("Well, she certainly boosted her blog readership!" or even "Duh! She was dating a Catholic! Next question.") There is also the surprisingly popular theory that she's suffered a stroke.

In a different corner of the 'net, earlier this year, Tim Lavenz at fragilekeys posted an account of a number of experiences over many years: his parents' deaths, his own struggles with cancer and with drugs, his engagements with poetry, philosophy, and meditation. Partly as a culmination of these and partly as a surprising interruption of them, Lavenz found himself in a kind of crisis which culminated in a different conversion experience; on the other side of which he found himself saying things about God like

All my work in philosophy – years – has amounted to nothing compared with just a few days in prayer with Him. Why is that? Because with reading, studying philosophy, writing, you can always dwell in the realm of concepts, ideas, argumentation. You can compare and contrast, you can make theses. But before God, you can only repent (metanoia). Before God, you can only melt your heart into pieces. You can only humble yourself – infinitely.

This remark was in response to a comment I had left on his blog to the effect that his self-revelation risked putting him in the line of public ridicule. I shuddered to imagine the snide mockery of his experience as a trivial fallout from ordinary human suffering and easy-target college student stereotypes. Happily, Lavenz was not a "prominent atheist blogger," and his post has not garnered the sort of attention (negative or positive) that Libresco's has. Most responses have been long on supportiveness, and so far, anyone doing head-shaking is keeping it off the comments section.

But it's the contrast between the styles of his announcement and Libresco's that has me pondering. Lavenz's post wears its personal history on its sleeve; written not so much in arguments as in existential gestures, it would be well placed next to Shestov or Unamuno or Pascal. Libresco's post on the other hand is fraught with rationale, like Aquinas or MacIntyre. It would be a caricature to say that Libresco has thought her way to where she is now, whereas Lavenz has felt his way. Lavenz's blog is full of considered reasoning, and Libresco's narrative is after all a frankly personal one. But it strikes me that the more dismissive kinds of objections Libresco is receiving are, weirdly, easier for Lavenz to fend off than for her. Not that Libresco is remotely vulnerable to them; but she has considered them less; her energy is not directed towards that front. Whereas Lavenz, while he is not concerned about people being snide, knows that his rationale is motivated with the whole body and soul; and so while he would not need to fend off every pointless dismissal ("sure dude, you're on drugs, whatya expect?"), he is also more sensitive to where such reactions come from -- an existential recoil.

Yet oddly, this recoil projects itself outward: religion is a wish-fulfillment, an opiate flower bedecking our human chains, the echo of the infant bawling of our species. In other words, a recoil from the starkness of what is. These critiques all boil down to reducing the reasons offered for a position (or change of position) to causes. In a discussion over at Amod's blog, Sabio Lantz commented that

“we are rarely aware of what makes us decide things. we make up “just so” stories that satisfy our listeners and remain blind to the mysterious complex working of minds we are deluded to thinking we control.”

My response to this, slightly modified, was: I rather suspect that this skepticism about what lies behind our own decisions is well-founded, and there is a growing body of psychological research (not to mention What the Buddha Taught) that lends ammunition to anyone who likes to talk this way. (Christian theology of grace has never quite settled the issue of motive in conversion, either. Augustine, for instance, went back and forth on whether God persuaded the will, or simply changed it.) But there is a difficulty: what are my reasons for deciding that this is true? (Or will we insert a special distinction between 'judgment' and 'decision' here?)
What, indeed, would count as knowing why one had decided? Holding a distillate of the decision in a test-tube? Plotting a graph of all the moments that led up to the “moment” of conscious decision? A Eureka moment on a Viennese couch? Doesn’t the very act of evaluating any evidence of “what really motivated me” involve its own decision, a deciding that this is evidence? And in that case, don’t we back ourselves into a series of just-so stories– unless we grant that there is such a thing as an unconstrained evaluation of our own decision-making? But of course, if we admit that, we don’t need to open the issue of “evidence” at all.

In short, we may be as skeptical as we like about any given account of a reason, but we cannot reduce all reasons to causes.

It was only after I had posted this (in a slightly less complicated form) that I reflected on the contrast between Lavenz's and Libresco's posts and indeed the whole style of their respective blogs. I cannot, frankly, imagine the run-of-the-mill internet atheist currently engaging Libresco giving Lavenz anything like the respect they give her, because she is at least engaged in the giving and defending of reasons -- a common language between her and those outside the church. Lavenz on the other hand is writing (and I must emphasize, I am giving my impressions) a kind of poetry that wishes to demonstrate the attractiveness of where it stands but is also resigned to a kind of failure of communication. This resignation is well-founded. Reading his heartfelt spiritual autobiography (e.g. here, from a more recent follow-up to his original announcement) is a chastening experience for me:

it is important for me to tell you how I got here, so that you will not think I am living under any illusions or that I have somehow gone off the deep end. I’ve told you how my reading shifted almost imperceptibly to Christian authors and then to the Gospel, which is an important piece here. But much more important has been my sobering up before the Lord. I have been led to this revelation because, for the first time in my life, I began asking for what I’d always wanted to know: Lord, what am I to do with the vast emptiness inside of me? Lord, how am I to make sense of suffering and death? Lord, how am I to address this world that is so full of lies, deceit, hatred, and selfishness? I’ve realized that I cannot answer these questions on my own. The depth of the problem, which I spent years struggling to understand, has led me to the depth of the solution: it can only come through a pact of eternal love and the labor of love that flows from it. This pact is precisely what took place “once and for all” in the revelation of the Son of God. I cannot get in to how all the “dogmas” in the Church support and have helped me understand the mystery of this pact and the mystery of its eternal work. But I can tell you, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7). If you really want the truth, it is there waiting for you. If there is one person who never lied, it was Jesus Christ. But once you understand that, and then realize that this applies to everything recorded in the New Testament (which you are now reading with the “eyes of faith”), you will see how there is no turning back

I read all this with a strong sense of recognition, and if I would phrase it differently than Lavenz in places, it's a question of nuance. But I can easily imagine a different response than my own.
One of Leah Libresco's brilliant inventions is the Ideological Turing Test, in which she posts three questions, then has a set of self-declared atheists and of self-declared Christians each post two sets of answers: one setting out their own, honest responses, and one in which they try to adopt the voice of the other side. The test here is to see whether they can aptly and persuasively argue not with but like their opponent, surely one precondition of being able to say they understand them. There are problems with this method and methodology (it can just turn into the engineering of trolls), but in general it's a thought-provoking "intuition pump," as Daniel Dennet likes to say. When I play this game with Lavenz's posts, I get something like this:

"Your discovery of the magnitude of the problem of suffering may seem like a revelation to you, but this is no reason to grasp at a "revealing" god, let alone a "church" which by your own admission you have to see "with the eyes of faith," i.e., disregarding an enormous amount of empirical and anecdotal evidence as to just how human it is. When it comes to explaining what "pact of love" means, there are some promises about the dogmas of the church again, an understanding that's in the wings if I just "ask" (but, you know, really ask) -- and then, watch out! because there will be "no turning back"-- which can only mean, you've surrendered your right to critically evaluate, to trust yourself or your own capacity to understand; you trust instead a "person who never lied", but who you don't even know existed, except that you are told so in a book (but of course, it's a holy book). As to why you believe this, you give us some stories of your own: you had questions that were "answered," you cried in a church, you "sobered up" figuratively or literally; all no doubt very good for you; but not furnishing any reason to think it is true outside of your head."

I wrote this pretty quickly and felt downright dirty after I had composed it, even after editing out the more trollish heckling. Note that there's an elision here between argument and dismissal (e.g. "oooh, a holy book," in which flippancy functions as a surrogate for a reason). But this elision is mirrored in Lavenz's paragraph that I've cited, which is fraught, and, I must emphasize, must be fraught, with a kind of deferral of articulated rationale, because the experience it names is on the far side of reasons. Not the near side -- where a reason collapses into a cause -- but the far side, where one meets The Cause (ἀρχή), The Aim (τέλος), the Beginning and the End, and where one's freedom and one's being acted upon are too inextricably bound up with each other to distinguish.

But one doesn't just jump there, or start there; one starts here. The difficulty facing Libresco is: eventually, you have to see things Lavenz's way. The difficulty facing Lavenz is: talk that way too soon and you will get dismissed without a hearing. They will just shrug you off with a remark -- polite, if you are lucky -- about a stroke, or who you were who you were dating, or what you were smoking.

Those we understand, have reasons. Those we cannot comprehend, are caused.

Philosophy as discourse is the rejection of this impasse.

Toward the beginning of this post I cited Libresco's insight about her own position:

I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant. It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth.

A simple (far too simple) reduction would be to say: Lavenz is talking about the Person; Libresco is talking about the Truth.

Beyond (and pointed to by) the discourse of philosophy is the experience which dissolves this distinction.

A brief note on Adorno and Tillich

I have been reading some of Adorno's lectures from 1965-66, as a way back into Negative Dialectics. The printed English translation of this latter work is subject to so much negative press it is almost impossible to read it with a good conscience. It reads perfectly fine and smoothly to someone like me, whose facility in German exhausts itself in being able to pronounce "Goethe" more or less correctly, but the denunciations one finds of it (e.g., "a kind of pidgin Adorno") are many and vociferous, and made by those who seem to know what they are talking about, so I have been supplementing it with a couple of available online versions, and the aforementioned lectures, which often go over the same ground in a more brief and, well, "lecturey" style. Recently I've been looking at the 1965 course Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems and the '65-'66 course Lectures on Negative Dialectics. This latter opens up with a brief homage to Paul Tillich, who had died a few weeks before the first lecture of the course was delivered. Tillich approved Adorno's 1931 Habilitation thesis on Kierkegaard (which became his first book); Adorno was Tillich's unofficial assistant for a few years, and they remained collaborators in seminars until Tillich's death, but the usual scholarly verdict is that there was little intellectual influence between them in either direction. No doubt Tillich was more open to the spirit of existentialism in general, and Heidegger in particular, than was Adorno, who is pretty scathing in The Jargon of Authenticity. While Adorno in this tribute is explicit in attributing to Tillich "whatever I have myself acquired in the way of pedagogic expertise" (he says he has never met anyone more gifted as a teacher), it seems to me there is more here than just interpersonal or professional skills.

What strikes me is that Tillich's famous conception of "ultimate concern" is itself an instance of what Adorno calls a constellation. Adorno writes:

The determinate flaw in every concept makes it necessary to cite other [concepts]; this is the font of those constellations which alone inherited some of the hope of the Name. (Negative Dialectics, p 53).

I read Adorno here as saying roughly that the "Name" would have been the (impossibly) fully sufficient word for the thing; the constellation is the way concepts are deployed to correct for one another in order to bring the thing, as it were, into focus for consciousness. Late in the lectures on Metaphysics, Adorno, commenting upon what is probably the remark that everyone knows even if they know nothing else about him -- his declaration that it is impossible after Auschwitz to write poetry -- says that he was surprised by the storm of controversy that followed this judgment.

I did not anticipate it because it is in the nature of philosophy... that nothing is meant quite literally. Philosophy always relates to tendencies and does not consist in statements of fact....[i]t could equally well be said, on the other hand, that one must write poems....And, heaven knows, I do not claim to be able to resolve this antinomy. (Metaphysics p. 110)>

This seems to me to illustrate well the notion of the constellation. Every statement is an overstatement, and needs to be balanced, countered, in a delicate play of conceptual interaction. I might note that this is even true of "nothing is meant quite literally"-- though this strikes me as one of the best one-sentence accounts of philosophy I've ever read.

Tillich's account of ultimate concern has obvious resonance here. Tillich's categories are the absolute and the concrete. Only what is concrete can concern us at all, because concern just is a concrete engagement; but, Tillich goes on, only what is absolute can concern us ultimately, without reservation, without condition. The notion of ultimate concern is thus a constellation of two opposing tendencies in thought moving dialectically across each other. But how does it actually play out in ordinary human practice? Early in volume I of Systematic Theology, Tillich gives his answer. He writes,

What is the content of our ultimate concern? What does concern us unconditionally? ...Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being. (Systematic Theology vol I, p. 15)

In the same passage as he talks about the question of poetry after Auschwitz, Adorno says that this issue mutates into another one, connected, but with larger consequences.

One must ask a further question, and this is a metaphysical question, although it has its basis in the total suspension of metaphysics.... It is the question whether one can live after Auschwitz....the bleaters of connivance soon turned this into the argument that it was high time for anyone who thought as I did to do away with himself as well....But...since it concerns the possibility of any affirmation of life, this question cannot be evaded. (Metaphysics pp 110-111)

Adorno's question and Tillich's are not absolutely identical, but it's obvious that they share a field of overlapping issues. I will add that this question of "to be or not to be" really does seem to me to be the question to which philosophy was devised to engage. The Greek tragic poets are, emphatically, not sanguine about whether human life can be good. "Best of all for man is not to be born," is the melancholy advice of Silenus to Midas, "and next-best is to die soon." Against this (and I believe it was expressly devised as a response) Socrates claims that the difference between a human life worth living and one not worth living is examination, a kind of intense and unrelenting scrutiny, and declares that "what is best for man" is

daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others. (Plato, Apology 38a)

Two thousand years later, Adorno and Tillich formulated different (not opposite) responses to the question, but they both knew that this was the question.

Triumphalism at any cost?

In that terrific tale of the passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. ...When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross; the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionist choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will only find one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.
--G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Žižek makes a big deal of quoting Chesterton, including this somewhat overstated passage (mythology does record other rebel gods), in a Hegelian key, in a way that more or less scans as an attempt to read the death of Christ as the death of God, and unpacking a chastened dialectics from an cosmosoteriological myth. I think that knife cuts both ways, but I am going to keep this post nice and simple and leave Hegel out of it.

Christianity Today has an article by Al Hsu, asserting that the cry from the cross, eloi eloi lama sabachthani, is not a cry of despondency but of a kind of triumph. It's a citation of the whole of Psalm 22, the author avers, not just the first line. This is on its face an admissible argument (albeit not a new one); to this day in the Latin, the Psalms are each denoted by their first lines, just as in Hebrew the books of the Torah are called by their opening phrases. So, Hsu continues, since Psalm 22 as a whole goes on to say, "I will declare thy Name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee," and "I will declare to a people yet unborn the saving deeds that He has done," its occurrence among Jesus' last words must also include these resonances. Hence, the cry is not one of abandonment, but one of exultation! QED.

I was referred to the article in question by Kevin Davis of After Existentialism, Light, who takes a dim view of the article:

He completely undermines the significance of Jesus’ cry — neutralizing the impact it does and should have on all readers.

I should clarify that Davis disclaims any attempt to do the full critique he thinks is called for. After all, one may not care for the writing (Davis finds it "meandering all over the place," whereas I think Hsu is just trying to situate his article for the sake of what is known as "relevance"; and anyway, I like to meander myself.) One may recoil from the conclusions the article reaches (or at least its possible triumphalist implications). But a refutation of the argument must go beyond "but that would mean-- [something I don't like]!"

Davis restricts himself to the observation,

I really do not want to see the author handle the garden at Gethsemane scene in the previous chapter of Mark: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (14.34) and “remove this cup from me” (14.36). Maybe these also mean the exact opposite of what they say.

The claim that quotation of the opening of the psalm intends to refer listeners to its entirety is an old one, and not in itself implausible. That said, one must go deeper by far than Hsu goes, and I share Davis' suspicion of any interpretation of the cross-cry that conjures away the despondency. I don't think much of the views he takes himself to be refuting ("God can't stand sin, so He turned away from Jesus"--please), but why such views should need a "refutation"--and what it would take to make them feel vulnerable to refutation--is beyond me.

Hsu's way of putting it leaves something to be desired--

Is Jesus saying "I have been forsaken by God"? No. He's declaring, "Psalm 22!"

The whole thing reminds me of a joke about jokes:

On his first night in prison, a new convict is lying in his bunk after lights out. Suddenly someone in another cell calls out "Thirty-four!" The whole cell block erupts in laughter. A bit later another voice calls "Fifty-nine!" and again everyone laughs. The guy whispers to his cellmate, "What's going on? What're these numbers?"

"Some of us have been here so long, we know all the jokes by now," comes the answer. "We've compiled a big book of them-- it's in the prison library. We've memorized all the jokes. So if anybody wants to tell one, they just call out the number."

The guy spends the next day studying the joke book in the prison library, noting the numbers of the best ones. That night, sure enough, someone shouts "Nineteen!" to raucous laughter. Someone else responds "Sixty-one!" and the prisoners all guffaw. Then there's a lull, so the new guy, remembering his favorite, calls out "Thirty-seven!" Silence. So he tries again, "Forty-eight!" But no one laughs.

"What's going on?" the guy asks. "Why isn't anyone laughing?"

And his cell mate sighs, "Well, man, some people can tell 'em, and some can't."

It must be conceded that it is absurd to think Jesus would cite the beginning of the psalm--or that Matthew or mark would attribute this to him--without knowing where it came from. Indeed,attributing this to Matthew or Mark is worse, because one has to ignore all the other details of the text which the writers clearly intended to resonate with the Psalm:

they cast lots for my clothing,

or again,

All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out their lips, and shake their head, saying, “He trusted in God that he would deliver him: let Him deliver him, if He delights in him.”

These issues are entirely distinct from whether these are Jesus' own words or not; they refer to the meaning intended by the evangelists.

If I have quoted almost nothing from Hsu's article here, it's because I don't find it's central thesis all that controversial or even interesting. I'm not interested much in his opponents, either--neither his "atheists" who, he says, dismiss Evangelical Christianity as a religion of "divine child abuse", nor his Evangelical readers who are the atheists' targets. These are welcome to each other. Hsu's argument seems to me to be offering Evangelicals a triumphalism at any cost, and an exegetical evasion of the Church's declaration made, and not just by Chesterton, that in Christ God assumed the whole of human nature--and all its temptations. One can stipulate, if one likes, that Jesus meant to refer to all thirty-one verses and not just the first. But the case for what Hsu thinks follows from this is not self-evident. One piece of Hsu's article that I think worth quoting is this:

Both Matthew and Mark record the cry, but neither unpacks the meaning. They just let it stand.

And that's what I'm going to do with this from Hsu as well.

The notion that Jesus was citing the whole of Psalm 22 is not absurd, and even has a scholarly case to be made for it. But the notion that he would cry out the first line as a kind of didactic address to his followers, meaning them to "call to mind" the psalm in question--this is absurd. If Jesus cried this out, he did so the way a devout Jew in extemis says the Psalms; as a prayer. The entire exercise of reading the cross-cry in this way is a grotesque anachronism. Jesus was not a 19th-century Fundamentalist provider of proof-texts. More to the point, the citation of the entire psalm leaves the attribution of despair to Jesus completely untouched. This is clear from the argument itself. The whole allegation that these words of Jesus' indicate exaltation and triumph rather than despair turns on the observation that the Psalm as a whole contains all of these. But if Psalm 22 itself includes both the exaltation and the despair, then so would Christ's cry of "Psalm 22"! There is a hope of deliverance in the psalm, but it comes out of the despondency and abandonment, not instead of it; and if Jesus meant the whole thing, he meant the whole thing. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" One may coherently claim that there is more than despair in this; I do not see how one can hold that there is less.

"Toward an Unknown Real"

I have a short list of books--the books themselves are mostly short too, as it happens--which have informed not just my mind but my soul. I'm not speaking of novels here, which are in a separate category, but the spiritual guide, the book of quiet wisdom. I and Thou by Martin Buber; Wittgenstein's notebooks; Three Poems by John Ashbery; the collection of Simone Weil's writings called Waiting for God; these are a few of these.

When I travel, at least one of these volumes comes with me. They are for me what The Way of the Pilgrim was to Salinger's Franny Glass, what the Diamond Sutra was to Kerouac's Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder, what Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief apparently was to Wittgenstein himself; what Franny and Zooey and The Dharma Bums have been to countless people in their late 'teens and early twenties.

None of these titles are all that surprising; I and Thou probably figures on many people's similar lists; so too with Simone Weil; and I have bonded almost immediately with the few, the sensitive and wise few, who meet my eyes with an "Ah" of understanding upon the mention not just of John Ashbery but of Three Poems. But there is one book in my private canon that I am consistently surprised to find almost unknown.

Mirror to the Light by Lewis Thompson is a spare volume of a little more than 130 pages (plus a preface by editor Richard Lannoy, from which I lift a number of facts for what follows). The book is one of the great under-appreciated spiritual classics of the 20th century. I know how overblown, how "pretentious" that can sound--who the Hell am I to grant a work such accolades?--and, the answer is, I'm no one, but the work is what it is. Thompspon had been at work on this slim masterpiece for two decades when he died suddenly at the age of forty, from the effects of sunstroke, in Benares. He had been a wanderer and an ascetic poet for most of that time, the last seventeen years more or less penniless in India. I have sometimes wondered, idly and without any real evidence that it could be the case, whether Thompson inspired Somerset Maugham's character Larry Durrell in The Razor's Edge, published about five years before Thompson died. I might add, speaking of J.D. Salinger, that the figure who seems to me to resemble Thompson the most is Franny and Zooey's older brother Seymour--who was also a poet, was also drawn to the East, and who also died young. There is a passage in Salinger's "Seymour: an Introduction" which resonates strongly with how I read Thompson:

I'll champion indiscrimination till doomsday, on the ground that it leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness. Followed purely, it's the way of the Tao, and undoubtedly the highest way. But for a discriminating man to achieve this, it would mean that he would have to dispossess himself of poetry, go beyond poetry. That is, he couldn't possibly learn or drive himself to like bad poetry in the abstract, let alone equate it with good poetry. He would have to drop poetry altogether. ...it would be no easy thing to do.

Some poets do manage to drop poetry altogether. In George Oppen's career there is a lacuna of twenty-eight years. Laura Riding turned her back on poetry entirely; so, notoriously, at twenty-one, did Rimbaud. When Thompson was around the same age, he too went through a profound crisis over the paradox of poetry--the drive to articulate the truth, and the inevitable falling-short of any effort of articulation. At one point during this struggle, Thompson burned a manuscript on which he had worked for five years--the first drafts of what would become Mirror to the Light. Yet the writing inexorably, Thompson recounted, "always grew up
again from its roots." What Thompson did entirely renounce was a "literary life." Though he continued to write to the end of his life--poems, journals (which have now also been edited and published), and his extensive notes for his book--and referred to his writing as a yoga, he was on the other hand almost hostilely indifferent to public "success"; when he died, two poems were all that had appeared in print; there are 102 in the edition Black Sun: the Collected Poems of Lewis Thompson, including "Black Angel," a poem of which Lawrence Durrell said he would give five years of his life to have written it. And yet, Thompson insisted, "somewhere between eighteen and twenty I believe I too experienced all that is implied in Rimbaud's rejection of literature."

Yet he knew his roots were in the literary, artistic and religious culture of Europe. He had been raised a Protestant in England; he was a sensitive pianist who loved Debussy, Chopin, and Bach. Though he read translations of Chinese, Japanese and Indian classics, he never learned any Asian language, and his poetic idiom remains lyrical, in tune with the work of Wordsworth and Keats, and with Valéry, Mallarmé, and Rilke, who he translated. His was also a self-consciously modern mind--more than once he cites Rimbaud's injunction to "be absolutely modern"--but he had also schooled himself in the philosophia perennis from an early age and he went to India intentionally seeking to immerse himself not as a tourist but as a real seeker. His meditations and aphorisms are the distillation of critical modernity and ancient asceticism each fired in the crucible of the other. He was fierce and unsparing, most of all with himself, but Mirror to the Light betrays no tendency to castigate himself, no abstinent recoil from life's allure; there is simply a calm disinterest in being distracted. He reminds one of Simone Weil in his uncompromising insistence on truth, of Laura Riding in his care with the precision of words. There is an unaffected earnestness that cannot be reduced to the caricature of "earnest youth," and a ferocity that belies his apparent resemblance, in the brevity of his remarks, to the moralist tradition. He belongs in the company of those he considered his models: Pascal, Blake, Nietzsche, Villon, Eckhart, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud.

He was absolutely indifferent to ordinary comforts, whether of the body or of sociability, and endured the everyday life of subsistence begging in India and the loneliness of one who may travel shoulder-to-shoulder with friends but who is ready, at a moment's notice, to struggle with them to the death. He traveled for a long while with Ella Maillart, the Swiss ski champion and travel writer; he stayed with Earl Brewster, the American painter who had traveled with his friend D.H. Lawrence in Sri Lanka (Brewster told Richard Lannoy that Lawrence and Thompson were the only two men he had known who he considered to have been giants, and that "physically the two could have been brothers"); he had a long period of devotional study under Sri Atmananda Krishna Menon. Yet he was uncompromising, and these relationships could be painful. To Brewster he wrote,

I am not your friend or anybody's friend. I have no more use for 'friendship' than has--let me modestly say, a cat. The fault is mine, you understand. I let myself be confused by undisciplined good nature.... good nature in itself, of course, is purely a matter of individual rebirth...and to be confused by it is spiritually self-betrayal. ...I have no motive of 'goodness' and no belief in it. In any case, if I am good at all and goodness is real, I am good without it. On the contrary, I consider moral adjustment to others a weakness harmful to both. I find you almost suffocated in the coils of such virtue--either a deep lie or a painful stupidity. ... You have been brought up to think everybody needs it. Or do you, like most in this world, project your own need upon others and half consciously try to suborn them? In this way you make whatever goodness and sweetness I actually have false, poisonous, finally explosive! Just because it refuses to be falsified! I believe for respect of each others' essence two friends--any two men--should be prepared, if necessary, to kill each other. Short of this, 'love' is sentimentality, self-indulgence, a conspiracy of confusions or weaknesses.

One might be rather taken aback after receiving such a letter. But Brewster, in the context of the relationship, was able after all this to say to Thompson, "I feel a relation with you one seldom feels--a kind of chemical affinity, quite without barriers."

I quote this letter from Thompson (it is cited by Lannoy in his introduction) to underline the strong disregard for social niceties that runs through his work and character. He was most seriously bent upon one thing only, the nature of realization, and like his models--Nietzsche and Rimbaud stand out--he was utterly unconcerned with anything else. His unconventional "discipleship" under Sri Atmananda is a case in point. Thompson undoubtedly considered this man--who he knew by the name Krishna Menon, but who he always referred to simply as "the Jnani"--a great teacher and a realized soul; yet in a letter, he spelled out to him unambiguously his nuanced and agonistic critique of discipleship:

As a conception, a dogma, a considered possibility, a proposed means, or something separately sought, the guru can only be a superstition.
What then is my attitude to those who seem to me realized men and why am I not indifferent to them? Of course one feels love and respect for, and delight in, anyone or thing that for one's consciousness is a convincing expression of the Fullness one would realize.
But otherwise I question men who appear realized in order to find out why I question them. --Because they can by definition offer the spiritual resistance that one can nowhere else find.

Sri Atmananda accepted this abrasive disciple and even eventually said of him that he needed no guru. There is a report that one day as Thompson reclined with his head in his teacher's lap, the latter spontaneously entered samadhi. Such an unconventional relationship between master and disciple inevitably aroused the envy of the more traditional students, but the real tension seems to have arisen from Thompson's forthrightness, which would not let him silently pass over perceived inconsistencies in the Jnani's teachings. This was no mere rationalistic insistence on the excluded middle; Thompson was a poet before all else, and keenly appreciative of paradox--but he was willing to question and question and question. At a certain point, Sri Atmananda unilaterally withdrew from the relationship and dismissed Thompson. The abandonment left Thompson "like a beaten dog," according to Ella Maillart, but he made no attempt to gain readmittance, though he dedicated his last poems to the Jnani and only a year before his death--six years after his dismissal--wrote that "my whole existence is in suspense until I can recover, or find, my true relationship with him--with all that that implies." But, he added, "it is too deep and important, to me, to be forced or hurried."

One would go wrong if one read Thompson as a chaser after the "mystical east." His roots are in the west, and particularly in the western poetic tradition, the tradition of Dante, Villon, Blake; of Rimbaud, Yeats, and Rilke. "The only thing that interests me in this world is Poetry and all that serves it," he told Ella Maillart. For him, Christ was "the supreme poet," and his own last written words were an account of why poetry was his path:

The discipline of fidelity to the non-mental in poetry...is for me an immediate and congenial means of beginning to 'go beyond the mind'--of attaining and establishing a purely transmental vision and speech.

Two days before he wrote these words, on June 20, 1949, Thompson had been found by a friend wandering in the blazing high summer noon near the Ganges riverside in Benares, dazed with sunstroke. His impoverished dwelling was an attic with a corrugated metal roof. His friend brought him home, but sunstroke had already set in. Thompson died on June 23; he was cremated and his ashes scattered over the Ganges.

Mirror to the Light is the book Richard Lannoy edited from Thompson's notes, a book Thompson clearly envisioned himself--the notes were found in two large cardboard boxes of pages, meticulously organized by topic and by alphabetical order. (Thompson's only long-term employment in India seems to have been his job as librarian at the Rajghat School just outside Benares.) My patient reader has doubtless observed that, so far, I have cited a few letters and journal entries by Thompson but nothing from Mirror to the Light. Doubtless this betrays a "biographical fallacy" in myself, but I find I cannot separate the force of personality I feel in Thompson's aphorisms from their wisdom and their quest. I am loathe to offer here at the end a kind of "sampler" of his thought, but I know how hollow must sound the rationale that "his work is all of a piece," or that it "must be taken as a whole"--deeply though I have felt it as I make these few selections. And indeed, Thompson labored to shape his thoughts into a form that was memorable, brief, and unified. There are passages of considerable simplicity and beauty, and notes that are remarkable as much for their brevity as for their insight--most were written on small slips of paper, and probably the size of the paper was meant in part as a constraint upon the expression. He wrote, he says once, in order to forget his thoughts, to not be ruled by them. He also warns his readers to not forget what sort of book they are reading:

My aim in this book is to overcome the mind even on its own ground--completion of Hypocrisy. It is organized only as a poem. the whole synthesis, the integral interpretation, intellectually, critically, and in experience, is made by Poetry.

"to overcome the mind even on its own ground"--one of the most succinct and apt accounts of the methods and aims of philosophy--what I mean by philosophy, anyway. Thompson meant very seriously this crossing of poetic symbol and rigorous intellect, a tool that had to be mastered, not discarded:

Those who most concretely and consciously intend the Real are in their minds, to the confounding of the sentimental, absolutely analytical. The mind cannot be surpassed or put in its proper place without being fulfilled. "He who is not faithful in little, who will give him much?"

Or again:

You can entirely dissipate yourself in intelligence. It is a pure and may be a very athletic life. But because you must continue to live it it represents a premature, and thus essentially a tragic, surrender.
Intelligence must be entirely employed, it must be spontaneous not for its own sake, but in being limited by what surpasses its conditions. And then alone has it its own full and proper flexibility, and a promptitude free of accident.

There are observations on the political forms of mid-20th century life, which immediately render implausible any reading of Thompson as a reactionary or naïf:

...now only a world-culture is possible. The undifferentiated mass, formerly controlled within limits or hierarchically, has now to be dealt with as a whole on the ground of its own overflooding of cultural order.... There are no longer priests and kings of quite another order from the slave, as a man is different from an animal.... Now the lowest common factor rules--the modern abstract brutishness. There is only this actual material democracy or mere reaction from it into fascism or communism.

Thompson draws an interesting corollary:

This fact also prepares a truly universal recognition of spiritual values. For since they are themselves universal there is no question of a universal religion: no limited cultural form can any longer be dynamic here.

There are observations on the economic situation of the rich, the poor, and the actually free:

Most people mean by work--slavery: they have nothing to do, and are not inwardly free enough to play. In fact they can conceive 'play' only in complement with work. Thus they are either wage-slaves or unemployed--in either case slave of the modern 'historical situation.'... What is the historical situation of a leopard, or a man who lives first and 'begs' of those who are afraid to? ...The man who lives first is the reverse of the parasite. those who are afraid have created standards by which he is indistinguishable from the parasites produced by their own state. And this is the measure of the whole evil.

These remarks on politics and economics are somewhat surprising in the context of a book of apparently "private," "spiritual" observations, but always they are tied back into reference to what Thompson considers the root questions, the questions of what is Real and who one is.

Thompson is ruthlessly abrupt sometimes with those who see only partway. He is equally brusque with 'Humanism'--"the romantic sentimentalism of the ego"--as with all forms of "occultism": "modern magic is perverse or sentimental and like Faust's only an extreme of romanticism."

Our 'common humanity' is, after all, our common fatigue and imperfection, common evasion, confusion, compromise, hypocrisy. The Buddha, the Christ--all Liberators--have been 'inhuman.' We consent together to flatter them. It is like flattering fire, lightning, or the Sun.

His remarks on sexuality--"this accidental joy"--are sane, gentle and uncompromisingly ascetic.

Sexuality in itself, like everything relative, is entirely destructive. In this, as in general, it has a direct polar correspondence with the brain. Thought completing itself in its own sense destroys itself. It is only so far as sexuality, incapable of exceeding its [own] limits falls short of this, that it continues the endless process of relativities: what it perpetuates is not life, but old age and death. In itself it is a powerful expression of life, but of life divided.

Again:

The sexual problem exists only so long as we have not first of all discovered how very small a part of ourselves sexuality can engage--so long as we have not perceived its limits, so long as it is still psychological, with overcharged confusion, Anguish, dreams--so long as we are not disinterested and realistic in this sphere.

Or again, perhaps most succinctly:

There is only one way to be chaste if chastity is not to be negative, that is, to love deeply.

Thompson never ceases being a poet:

Solitude is resonant with a music as remote and vivid as the tremor of the stars. Out of all dream Athene arises, grave, clear-eyed, forever youthful. About her a void tuned beyond all music, crossed by speedless intimation, threads of sound, of force, of light, more oure than frost.

And he never stops being concerned with what Poetry means:

All disinterested expression is poem.

This disinterestedness is not easily attained; it is only painfully wrested from the acknowledgment that (as Thompson frequently reiterates), "the truth cannot be told." His was a quest "towards an Unknown Real." This emphasis on the incommunicability of truth is of a piece other of Thompson's concerns: his indifference to social niceties, his dim view of "morality," his emphasis upon solitude, his interest in the limits of poetry, and on the utterly instantaneous nature of realization:

He meets me exactly who offers me complete resistance, who allows me to retain my silence.
*
Poetry is the dance of truth among limits and which it explodes....

Poetry is the speech of love, universal by its perfect particularity. Love is the key to it all.
*
Love absolutely does not need to be recognized.

No one is capable of love who has not first been capable of his own spiritual solitude.
*
The 'Real' is--what is perceived with perfect disinterestedness--what does not need to be real.

Reality is first achieved as the exhaustion of every possible sentimentality.
*
Our language contains one word whose power is directly magical: NOW. But first it will bring us face to face with the complete agony of our own incapacity and our ignorance.

And, finally:

You can escape in a moment, but only in a moment.

Mirror to the Light was published in 1984. I think there may have been only one printing. For a long time I have wondered what was amiss with the world that this jewel of a book received so little attention. Then two Sundays ago I was in one of the last few local independent bookstores that seems to be making a go of it, and there on the shelf was Fathomless Heart, by Lewis Thompson, edited by Richard Lannoy. This is a much expanded edition of the Thompson's masterwork, and Lannoy must be praised for his long labor in the effort to make known the work of this remarkable English "poet-sage," as Thompson is called in the subtitle. Lannoy has expanded his Introduction, and there is a fine Preface by William Stranger (from which I have also gleaned a few items for this post). The book may herald the long-overdue widespread appreciation of Lewis Thompson.

Nothing would have displeased Thompson more than to become a cult or a cause célèbre, but if one reads him with his warning in mind, one may not go far wrong:

Do not believe what I say, any more than you believe a poem: only see the intention, what it means spiritually. There are enough theories and dogmas as it is.

This fundamentally provisional nature of his work, his flawed articulation of spiritual intention, is summed up for me in an anecdote Lannoy rightly characterizes as almost Zen-like. Though Thompson was very interested in the work of J. Krishnamurti, he met him only once, by chance, in a narrow hallway. Neither man said anything. Thompson only met Krishnamurti's smiling and silent gaze with his own, in quiet composure. After several moments of silence, Krishnamurti slowly lifted his hand and quietly pointed to a place in white cotton garment Thompson was wearing. There was a small hole torn there. Still smiling, still meeting Thompson's eyes, he pointed to his own, similar garment. There in the corresponding spot was an identical tear. The two men parted, neither having spoken a word. He meets me exactly who offers me complete resistance, who allows me to retain my silence.

Social Darwinism

On Interfluidity, there is an argument to the effect that opacity in our financial system is good, or at least functional, because it convinces enough people to be "in" in the markets, which is what enables enough capital to get moving. I am somewhat late in posting my reflections on this, and the comment-storm is now abating (the posts are dated last December and January), but I want to record a few thoughts. Steve Waldman argues there in a series of three separate posts that the critical mass of investment is reached only by virtue of everyone being convinced that in the event of the (inevitable) downturn, it will be someone else, not them, who takes the loss. I have some questions about the differences between institutional opacity vs. the ordinary kind of inability to accurately assess risk and the tendency to devalue the future which just seem to beset human choice-making by nature, but the argument is unsettling and provocative, as evidenced by the numerous comments Waldman received. Waldman followed up his original post with some clarifications and further clarifications about where he himself stands, to wit: opacity has all kinds of deleterious effects, and he is not championing it but describing what he thinks its current function is. I think he gets right the magnitude of the problem, in a way I find something hopeful in its candor, even though it is none too optimisitic:

I became interested in financial systems as a large scale information system. It is with great unhappiness and reluctance that, after devoting years of my life to thinking about finance, I’ve concluded that financial systems are better characterized as large-scale disinformation systems and that disinformation is at the core of how they function.... I think we should try to develop financial systems that are honest and transparent, that do not combine kleptocracy and effectiveness into a bundle that’s both impossible to refuse and debilitating to accept. But that is a larger and very different project from, say, increasing capital and liquidity ratios at status quo banks.... developing such a system is an ambitious and ahistorical project, not a mere matter of “fixing what’s broken”. Under present arrangements, transparency and what we perceive as effectiveness stand in opposition to one another.

Moreover, Waldman points out, there is a historical correlation between this opacity and industrial success:

societies with financial systems that mobilize capital opaquely and at very large scale have completely dominated those that have relied only upon consenting risk assumption by well-informed individuals. Industrialization occurs in societies with corrupt and fragile big banks, or else in societies where the state coerces and obscures risk-bearing and reward-shifting on a large-scale, or (more usually) both.

Now Waldman is not arguing from an "Austrian" economic perspective a la Hayek, but I cannot help but be reminded of Hayek's paradoxical definition of economics' "curious task",

to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. (The Fatal Conceit p 76)

In other words, it may be impossible to design good mechanisms of "transparency," and this might (Waldman argues) not be a wholly bad thing.

What Waldman's argument amounts to is the contention that many, many more people must believe in their chances of succeeding than can realistically expect to succeed, in order for anyone to succeed; but that, over the long term, this relative scarcity of success is compensated for by the scale of the success. This compensation does not mean that Waldman approves, as I think my citations show; he thinks we can and should aspire to a different sort of system, but he wants us to be realistic about what is involved in such aspirations. I have long held that the economy can be justly described as a more or less functional pyramid scheme. I understand, of course, that a classical pyramid scheme is supposed to be inherently unstable and so eventually doomed to implode, and I recognize that the mechanism which theoretically destines that implosion is different in the case of the economy "as a whole," but the working assumption still seems to be that the implosion is coming, boom-and-bust-cycle fashion, and that therefore the economy is a game with inherent winners and losers, a game of musical chairs, albeit one in which you can supposedly reserve your seat ahead of time as well. The whole thing depends upon our believing that we won't be the one stuck with the check at the end of the binge, when we all also acknowledge that the end will surely come. But this "end" is also a function of a collective choice, or at least the congeries of millions of choices--the choice to stop the money from "moving."

There is something about this that seems deeply perverse. No wonder the psychoanalysts and the alchemists link the symbolism of shit and gold, money and waste. Gregory Bateson argued that information asymmetry was an inherent feature of all systems; it was not just a fact, but an important and indispensable fact, that ones left hand might not know what one's right hand did. Bateson's choice illustration of this principle was from Coleridge: when the Ancient Mariner, cursed for his crime of shooting the albatross, finds himself alone on his ship in the south seas, he gazes over the rail and sees below him the writhing and flashing of water-snakes:

They moved in tracks of shining white
And when they moved, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes

Something in their beauty enchants him, and despite his forlorn and lost condition, he cannot help but be glad of and for them:

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.

He "blesses" the water-snakes--but, Coleridge writes, he blesses them "unaware," not knowing what he is doing. At that moment the curse is broken and the albatross falls off from around the Mariner's neck where his crew had (most improbably) hung it. But, Bateson pointed out, had the Mariner intended to go to the south seas and track down some water-snakes to bless, the poem would have been a farce. Coleridge's point (and he belabors it, using the adjective "unaware" twice) succeeds only because the Mariner blesses the snakes in his heart without knowing what he is doing, spontaneously.

Bateson's point was that in many circumstances it is salutary to have an unequal distribution of information. For Bateson this "communication gap" was a fundamental principle, and he applied it widely. Across anthropological settings, there is frequently a cultural pressure to demarcate the everyday world from the sacred, a category Bateson treated as knowledge pertaining to the whole. This gives a clue as to what the gap meant to Bateson: it had to do with his application of the Russell-Whitehead Theory of Logical Types; cross-communication was a category mistake. Prohibitions on continuity of communication can be compared to one another in different sorts of context. Bateson cites myths concerning communication across gender lines (e.g. the story of Tiresias' blinding, according to which Tiresias, who having been magically transformed into a woman for seven years was in a position to know, declared (in settling a bet between Hera and Zeus) that women had "ten times" the pleasure men had during sex; the disgruntled Hera blinded Tiresias and Zeus tried to make it up to him by granting him the gift of prophecy (seeing the future, another ambiguous case boundary-crossing information). Bateson also applied this to the case of our inability to accurately introspect on our own mechanisms of perception, even though we may understand these in a third-person way.

One of Bateson's central exhibits in his case was Darwinism. Darwinism was superior to Lamarckianism, Bateson contended, not just as a description of evolution, but as an actual state of affairs, precisely on these grounds. A symmetrical flow of information from genotype to phenotype, as Lamarck posited, is not only supported by no apparent mechanism; if it had such a mechanism, Bateson contended, it would stymie evolution, because offspring would be overdetermined by the input from parents. Species would either change too rapidly or become locked into rigid forms.

But there is also a perverse or a vicious non-communication, which Bateson also analyzed famously in his consideration of the double-bind. This is a situation in which meta-communication contradicts communication. One of Bateson's examples is the unkind parents "assuring" the child of their love verbally but maintaining a rigid over-controlling hostility to all self-expression, a state of affairs Bateson linked to the genesis of some instances of schizophrenia. The salient detail here is that comment upon the meta-communication is disallowed. This is what leads to the elephant-in-the-room feeling of family therapy sessions, in which no one can mention Dad's drinking or kid' brother's chronic incapacity to live within his means. On a large scale, this is summed up in Marx's telling definition, in Capital, of ideology a la false consciousness: "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es". "They do not know it, but they are doing it."

All of this is what I thought of as I read through Waldman's argument and the comments. There is a widespread understanding that no economic arrangement will benefit all; that our economy is a zero-sum game with winners and losers, and far more of the latter. With one side of our mind, we accept this. But we also (says Waldman) deny it, because the game's occurring depends upon the illusion that winning is a plausible and even likely eventuality. Which is why I consider the pyramid-scheme of our economy, and our continual denial that it is a pyramid-scheme, a kind of perverse apotheosis of Marxian ideology. As is well known, Žižek (in The Sublime Object of Ideology) takes a page from Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason to re-cast marx's definition for our era: "They know very well what they are doing, and yet they do it." I am reconfirmed in this conclusion every time I get a reaction of righteous condescension to my use the words "pyramid scheme" or "Ponzi scheme" for the economy in general. But I do not know what else to call a system in which money is created by banks in a kind of sanctioned forgery, in which money is nothing but an agreement to respect certain electronic entries in computer ledgers, in which we endure "cycles" of musical chairs in which it is known from the outset that the number of seats is dwarfed by the number of tickets sold, and in which, somehow, huh!, there's this chasm between the super-rich and everyone else, including the merely rich.

It is interesting that some reaction to Waldman's pieces included the feeling that he had himself broken a kind of taboo, communicating about what was best left unsaid; that he was providing an excuse for unethical non-disclosure of risks to investors in the name of providing a lubricating "belief in the system". Waldman responded , in his third article:

It is worth trying to understand the mechanics of real-world capital mobilization, and its role in underwriting prosperity (or perhaps militarism). I don’t think we have to fear talking about this stuff. The proposition that looting and misdeployment of capital serve the public good is easy to debunk. The proposition that there are arrangements which serve useful purposes but also create space for corruption is not controversial. We need to understand how institutions actually function and how they are abused if we are to have any hope of minimizing their pathologies while preserving their benefits. And we have to understand the purposes our institutions actually serve if we are to have any hope of replacing very problematic arrangements with something better.

It seems to me that in the absence of the full-scale world meltdown of industrial capitalism which some expect, what this "something better" would look like is a little Social Lamarckianism. When I think this, I am haunted by Hayek's warning that this could just be hankering after a category mistake. And then, I hear Žižek's dark chuckle.

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.