Readings: The Panopticon

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The musings of Anais Hendricks, the wonderful teenage protagonist of Jenna Fagan’s great novel, The Panopticon:

They say the devil’s best trick was to make everyone believe he didnae exist. Maybe God’s just a scientist. This is all an experiment gone wrong, every single one of us, just wonky as fuck because of some chemical cock-up that was meant to produce something less faulty.

Yes. Quite possibly so.

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Readings: Thinking About Thinking

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Below are more excerpts from Rudolf Steiner's seminal work, The Philosophy of Freedom. While contemplating his words about our perceptions of the outside world, it is important to keep in mind that we, ourselves, are objects of the world outside. We know ourselves directly and initially only as percepts, just as we know trees, tables, sunlight, and the starry sky first as percepts. Everything that Steiner says here also pertains to you as an existing being:

In thinking we have that element given us which welds our separate individuality into one whole with the cosmos. In so far as we sense and feel (and also perceive), we are single beings; in so far as we think, we are the all-one being that pervades everything. This is the deeper meaning of our two-sided nature: We see coming into being in us a force complete and absolute in itself, a force which is universal but which we learn to know, not as it issues from the center of the world, but rather at a point in the periphery. Were we to know it at its source, we should understand the whole riddle of the universe the moment we became conscious. But since we stand at a point in the periphery, and find that our own existence is bounded by definite limits, we must explore the region which lies outside our own being with the help of thinking which projects into us the universal world existence.

[…]



In contrast to the content of the percept which is given to us from without, the content of thinking appears inwardly. The form in which this first makes its appearance we will call intuition. Intuition is for thinking what observation is for the percept. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge.

[…]

To explain a thing, to make it intelligible, means nothing else than to place it into the context from which it has been torn by the peculiar character of our organization… . A thing cut off from the world-whole does not exist. All isolating has only subjective validity for our organization. For us the universe divides itself up into above and below, before and after, cause and effect, thing and mental picture, matter and force, object and subject, etc. What appears to us in observation as separate parts becomes combined, bit by bit, through the coherent, unified world of our intuitions. By thinking we fit together again into one piece all that we have taken apart through perceiving.

By thinking, we also, then, fit ourselves together again as integral parts of the cosmos which is the context from which we have torn ourselves through the self-creation of that suffering personality which we know as "ego."
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Quote du Jour: from The Philosophy of Freedom

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The following is from the Preface to the first edition of Rudolf Steiner's seminal work The Philosophy of Freedom, first published in 1894 and revised in 1918:

[W]e do not want any knowledge of the kind that has become frozen once and for all into rigid academic rules, preserved in encyclopedias valid for all time. Each of us claims the right to start from the facts that lie nearest to hand, from his own immediate experiences, and thence to ascend to a knowledge of the whole universe. We strive after certainty in knowledge, but each in his own way.

Yes. And this is precisely the mind-set that is capable of producing the artist and/or the saint.
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Reflections: Kant vs. Christ

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I have long recognized that a person looking for the first existentialist has to go back at least as far as Jesus Christ. Despite the fact that a Christian (albeit a disgruntled one), Søren Kierkegaard, is often cited in that role, many people wrongly assume that existentialism implies atheism. This is nonsense.

Any person who reads the Gospels with an open mind will readily discover that the focus of Christ’s teachings was always on the individual as the responsible moral agent. The idea that Christ came to establish a new mode of herd mentality is a travesty established subsequent to his ministry by hierarchical corporate entities primarily concerned with their own growth and survival, rather than with the souls of their members.

A true disciple of Christ would be an existential hero—an artist, a revolutionary, or a saint—not the obedient, compliant pawn of a self-serving authority structure. Establishment of a multiplicity of rigidly enforced statutes, leading to psychological disorientation and spiritual chaos, is among the most essential projects of the Enemy. The manifold is the lie; simplicity is Truth itself.

Consider the following excerpt from The Bridge to Nothingness by Shlomo Giora Shoham, and ask yourself if his description of existentialist morality is not in line with Christ’s imperative to love your neighbor as you love yourself.  When contrasted with Kant’s categorical imperative--the basis of most modern systems of normative morality--we can see, perhaps, the primary source of the cognitive dissonance that grips the collective psyche of political conservatives who mistakenly believe themselves to be “Christians,” while marching in lockstep to a demonic cadence:

Kant’s categorical imperative entails a judgment and a duty. It is natural, objective, and not experiential; it has nothing to do with social relationships and is hence absolute.

       […]

Kant’s morality has a life of its own, unrelated to nature, emotions, and suffering of those who are supposed to be subject to it. The categorical imperative has an I-it relationship with the people under its yoke. It is authoritarian and oppressive, a Wilhelmean Prussian schoolroom. Kant’s moral duty is uniform; individual peculiarities should be disregarded. In extremo, Kant’s categorical imperative considers all individuals to be Orwellian zombies, devoid of peculiarities, singularities, and specifics. Per contra, existentialist morality rejects impersonal pluralities. Masses are important only to the demiurgos. For the existentialist, the individual is everything. An existentialist moral act is not only always a posteriori, but relates to the experience of the other, as perceived by the other, within his specific personal context. Existentialist morality is based on—suffering with the other on his own turf and according to his terms. Suffering as an experiential dynamic is necessarily disregarded by Kantean, a priori morality. For the existentialist, the suffering of the other is the basis, criterion, and vehicle for the moral act. …A person who closes himself to the suffering of the other is existentially immoral, and one who is unable to empathize with the predicament of the other is an existential psychopath.  [pp.278-279]

It is clear that what Shoham characterizes as “the demiurge” – i.e. the amoral, chaotic natural forces wielding ultimate power on the plane of material existence – are in full control of any person who “goes along to get along” in this world. In order to have an authentic life, one must either fearlessly separate from the mass, in pursuit of one’s own creativity, or one must shed every last vestige of self in order to merge back into the One out of which one came into existence.

Groupthink is death by demonic orchestration.
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Readings: The Quest for Authentic Existence

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This should hold any readers that I still have for awhile. It is several pages of excerpts that I typed out this morning from one of the books on my current early-morning reading list. The excerpts serve--for me anyway--to outline Shoham's central thesis pretty well. His study encorporates philosophy, religion, psychology, and art, to synthesize epistemology, existentialism, and several varieties of gnosticism--a mix that appeals to me, big-time. I offer the excerpts without commentary. I apologize up front for the many typos readers will probably encounter. [The page numbers refer to the Associated University Presses 1994 edition]

Excerpts from the “Introduction” of The Bridge to Nothingness by Shlomo Giora Shoham

[pp.14-15]  In the first phase of separation, man is ejected from the cozy womb and cruelly exposed to the elements in a manner that was registered mythoempirically by the Kabalist catastrophe of the breaking of the vessels. However, before birth, there is pregnancy and the formation of the human fetus. This is depicted mythoempirically by the Kabalist dynamic of Tzimtzum—“contraction.”  Rabbi Haim Vital, the foremost disciple of Rabbi Isaac Luria and chief exponent of Lurianic Kabala, describes the process of Tzimtzum as follows:  “and when He (Infinity which is tantamount to Emanating Divinity) contracted Himself. A space all around was formed… After this contraction a space was, (thus), formed for emanant creatures to be created… And a line like a thin pipe extended from Infinity to create the worlds… And the pipe-line created a round form…linked to to emanatory (Infinity) by the pipe-line only…and the line is thin so that it emanates light (livelihood) by measure and ration as needed by the emanant.”  This seems to be a plastic, mythoempirical depiction of the formation of the fetus within the round womb fed according to its needs by the umbilical cord stemming from an unknown (to the fetus) emanatory in the away and beyond, perceived by the nascent awareness of the fetus and later projected onto mythology as infinity.

[p.17]  Psychologically, the pantheistic neonate learns by deprivational interaction with surrounding objects and life forms and especially with the mother or her surrogate who cannot fulfill all his wishes immediately and automatically as in the womb; the neonate is not with everything but against everything. The moment he becomes embodied in the scar tissue of the delimiting, individual “ego boundary,” pantheistic, participant togetherness gives way to the loneliness and encapsulated existence of the human individualized separtum. This separation, which is the existential coagulation of the individual self, is also perceived by the organism as a catastrophe and is projected onto mythology as the ejection from paradise following Original Sin, which according to the Kabala disrupted the equilibrium of all the worlds both divine and temporal.” [the “sin” here is the mutual sexual pleasure of the neonate and mother in nursing]

[p.26]  The separant vector generates life. It propels us out of the womb and induces us to develop, grow, and reproduce. It also guards against the participant vector’s wish to revert back to the unity of nonbeing. To this end, the separant vector implants in us the search for diversity and the rejection of similarity, whereas the participant vector seeks the togetherness of the family, membership in reference groups, the immersion in the engulfing cosiness of the camaraderie of “the boys in the back room,” the rotary club, the “people like us,” the party, the nation, the church. Per contra, the separant vector programs life forms to be attracted to nonlikes and to reject or be in conflict with likes. The separant vector thus places numerous obstacles and barriers against likeness, similarity, and uniformity; because these are intermediate steps towards the forbidden (from the separant vector’s point of view) partaking in the nonlife, nongrowth, and nonbeing of unity. We seem to be barred from communicating with the objects “out there” as well as from communicating with other people. The separant vector seem to program man to grow and become progressively separate, distinct, and unattached to surrounding objects and life forms. This is projected onto transcendence as the injunction of Genesis and similar myths in other creeds against epistemological “knowledge” (i.e., participant communication).  Indeed for the participant, the Ding An-Sich (the thing in itself) is nothingness and the injunction against knowledge in the Tantalic context is the proscription of partaking in the nonbeing of God and thus becoming like God. The prohibition of knowledge by the theistic God of Genesis may have both a separant and participant application.

[pp. 30-31]   From God's vantage point, man and creation are part of him and he experiences the world through them in infinite kaleidescopic ways; but man feels cut off, lonely, and free. So whatever the 'truth' behind his self-consciousness, it is less important than his own self-definition. If he defines himself as free of transcendence, free he is. This stems from W. I. Thomas's very useful basic theorum of the sciences of man, namely, that if man defines a given situation as real it becomes real in its consequences. Thus man's freedom is even independent of God's views about it. This has a very ingenious mythoempirical anchor in the Kabala. Keter, crown, is the first rung, sometimes regarded as part of infinity and thus not counted in the ten emanated rungs. Da'at, knowledge, is added in its stead as the third rung. However, if Keter is counted in the ten emanated rungs, Da'at is omitted. Hence, if God is present in creation, independent, separate self-consciousness is impossible, because consciousness is one and it belongs to God. However, if God is not within creation then the self-conscious freedom of the exiled individuals is feasible. The feeling of independence of the individual separata enables them to relay their experiences in an authentic context to their maker, precisely because they are not aware of their bondage. Man should not feel guilty about his freedom. He was created for purposes known to God but not to him. For the very same purposes, he was also cut off from his sense of partaking in the totality of unity and each of us became an individual separatum  through Original Sin. Hence, this sin was committed by God and not by man, who is a tool in a divine plan unknown to him. Thus, man's independence being instrumental to God, cannot and should not induce human guilt. This is the ideological essence of man's metaphysical rebellion.

[p. 43]  The participation with one’s surroundings is problematic, because ego’s interaction with objects and life forms is mostly conflictual and always dialectical. The I-it, non-dialogical relationship with other people is petrifying, and the I-thou dialogue borders, according to Buber, on the miraculous. A creative relationship with an object may effect extasis, in the Greek sense, of the creator’s spirit from time and space, and lend him a feeling of union with the object. However, this feeling is completely within the psyche of ego and regardless of his initial creative quests, they are bound to be different dialectically in the synthetic outcome. This is the fate of all Sisyphean endeavors directed towards the outside.

            The “generalized other,” the abstracted normative collectivity of other people, is oppressive, controlling, and depressing both from without and from within. Through authentic art the collectivity may become an audience and then its petrifying I-it attributes may change into a receptive I-thou, attuned for a while to a Paganini piercing souls with his violin, a van Gogh reaching his viewers through his savage yet structured colors on his canvas, and a Jacques Brel conveying his desperate sincerity to the whole nervous system of his listeners.

[…]

            As we ever crave for what we are not and for what we do not have, we are living in inauthentic time. The separant vector aims for the future and the participant vector longs for the past. When dominated by these two vectors, man does not exist in the present and his time is therefore a nonentity, false and inauthentic. If the quests and longings inherent in his core personality vectors cannot be fulfilled, there is an inevitable and constant rift between man’s aspirations and expectations, and his perceived reality. Hence man is ever confronted with the absurd.  This dual impasse of inauthenticity and the absurd makes the myths of Sisyphus and Tantalus so central to the human condition that they can rightly be considered metamyths. The initial inauthenticity of man’s existence in the world and his inevitable experience of the absurd, constitute man’s existential impasse, from which creativity and revelation are able to extricate him. Creativity thus constitutes the modus vivendi of Sisyphus with his stone burden, and revelation is the means by which Tantalus can go on living within his predicament. Man thus starts as an initial failure, yet through his ability to sublimate his unrealized quests into creativity and revelation, he is able to transform his initial impasse into authentic experience and existence. It seems that our programmer, whoever or whatever it is—God, chance, evolution, or the devil, programmed us to yearn to achieve goals that can never be achieved, to yearn to be different than we are at a given time and place, and not to cherish the present but to long either for earlier developmental phases and for nonbeing in the past or for the away and beyond in the future. Our nonrealizable, core personality quests control us the way the lure in front of the racing bitch controls the dog races. Our programmer intends, apparently, to see how our Sisyphean quests that cannot be fulfilled and our impossible Tantalic longings can be sublimated dialectically into creativity and revelation. …Both creativity and revelation are dynamic processes fueled by Sisyphean aims and Tantalic longings that would never be fulfilled. If they are, our yearnings are extinguished, and our potential for authentic being through creativity and revelation die with them.  …Revelation is not transferable, but through creativity, the revelatory insight of the creator becomes communicable.

[p. 48]  Authentic revelation should aim at the participant exposure of man to God, which constitutes a Tikkun, a mending of the blemished God and of the individual who partakes him. …Creativity should also be authentic in the sense that it should not be conducted in order to please a given audience or clique or for financial gain. It should be carried out in desperation, with one becoming immersed totally in one’s creativity. Marcel Azzola, Jacques Brel’s accordianist, described the performance of his late master thus: “…I have rarely seen such sincerity. With him one is obliged to give oneself completely. He committed suicide with each song.”

[pp. 50-51]  As neither the goals of the Sisyphean or Tantalic core vectors can be achieved, the only epistemic reality in existence is the dialectic interaction between the Sisyphean, nonrealizable, separant quests and the Tantalic, equally impossible, participant longing. Because the Sisyphean quests face the future and the Tantalic longing aims at the past, man is in an absurd impasse, without a present and within inauthentic time. Creativity and revelation are therefore meant to extricate man from his absurd and inauthentic impasse. Those who cannot be creative and revelatory also try to escape their absurd and oppressive reality by entertainment, fantasy, for daydreaming, which feed passively, with or without the aid of alcohol or drugs, on their pent-up yearnings. The dialectics of our yearning thus provide the fuel and energy with which ego can emerge from its inauthentic slumber and interact creatively or in a revelatory manner with objective and human surroundings. Moreover, as the dialectics between the Sisyphean quests and Tantalic longings constitute the epistemic processes underlying apparent reality, they are the prime movers of life and creation. Without the dialectic of yearning, both ego and its surroundings are dead and nonexistent.

            The “inspiration” for creativity and the sudden “enlightenment” attendant upon the experience of revelation are the conscious and cognitive awareness of the otherwise clandestine dialectics of yearnings.

[p. 53]  The Sisyphean component of the prime mover, emerging from the dialectical quests, tried to achieve a rapport, a Tikkun, or, a system-in-balance with its surroundings through creativity; whereas the Tantalic component tries to achieve a Tikkun with transcendence by revelation. Hence, the synthetic interplay of the dialectical quest necessitates both a Tantalic participant longing for revelation and a Sisyphean quest for creativity.

[pp. 65-66]  Both man and God are ever longing and striving, and it is precisely this characteristic that makes them ever revelatory and creative. Indeed, Dante sends the souls of those whose wishes came true and whose longings were fulfilled to eternal damnation in hell. The less-than-perfect God with his capacity to long for and strive, which are the prime movers of life, creativity, and revelation (these are similar to Bergson’s “creative evolution”), is perfect precisely because of his imperfection. This is brought to life in Saint Anselm’s “proof” for the existence of God but in an inverse manner: the imperfection of our transcendence lends it more perfection than if it was perfect. Perfection in God sterilizes him into nonbeing, whereas non-perfection gives him the evolving perfectibility of longing, together with his junior partners—man and other life forms—for revelation and of striving for creativity, which are the essences of authentic existence.

[p. 69]  Inclusion as the unifying mechanism of existence ordains that man can never achieve his Sisyphean quests and Tantalic longings but only a synthesis between them that then serves as a thesis for another dialectical zigzag ad infinitum.  Consequently, man’s fate is to ever seek something and always attain something else. …We can therefore never achieve whatever our aims might be because dialectics will lead us somewhere else. Hence, authentic rebellion concentrates on processes of creativity and revelation, because their goals are unattainable to begin with and because whatever aim we may wish to attain, dialectics will move us to another synthetic goal.

[…]

…If one exceeds the middle course and one’s moira (i.e. one’s lot in life), one commits the capital sin of hubris…

[p. 72]  As Sisyphus has to have his stone in order to be creative, so ego has to feel apart and separate from transcendence for the interactive experience of creativity or, for that matter, for all experience except for revelation, to take place. Hence, ego is a partner of transcendence in creativity, and through the metaphysical programming of Sisyphus, transcendence vicariously experiences ego’s triumphs and disasters.

[p. 76]  The catastrophe of the breaking of the vessels bound both God and man in an endless cycle of dialectics of creation and perdition. The Original Sin bound God and man within the fetters of space and time, but established man as a unique and ontologically separate individual, capable of independent volition. The sacrifice, of Isaac and Jesus bound man normatively to God, but enabled man to judge God morally for having exploited him for his own purposes, unknown to man.

[p. 79]  One awareness permeates both God and all his creatures including man. Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud deprived man of his primacy among creatures, and modern physics deprived the physical world of any purpose, seeing it as particles moving around like drunken sailors without any goal or motivation. With the help of the teleological models of the Kabala one may envisage a purpose in both a blemished God and his erratic mortal partners. Their dialectical interaction is all there is, but in it they are free both to face their common predicament and, perchance, to experience grace.

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Readings: The Virtue of Wisdom

Philokalia: St Mark the Ascetic, “On the Spiritual Law”

79. I have seen unlearned men who were truly humble, and they became wiser than the wise.

80. Another unlearned man, upon hearing them praised, instead of imitating their humility, prided himself on being unlearned and so fell into arrogance.

St Mark the Ascetic; early fifth century (?); a desert hermit, probably in Egypt or Palestine.

The wisdom of this ancient monk has outlived his biography; a state of immortality to which we should all aspire.

It occurs to me that the corrosive anti-intellectualism so rampant today in our conservative political class might find its antidote in the wisdom of item "79" above...
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Readings: Are You Positive About That?

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I am currently about one-third of the way through Marilynne Robinson’s interesting book of essays, Absence of Mind: the Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. Specifically, I am on the second essay, entitled “The Strange History of Altruism.” In this chapter, Robinson briefly recalls the history and cultural influence of positivism, and offers her thoughts on the pernicious effects positivism has had on the concept of the self, in science as well as in art and literature.

Since Darwin, Comte, Freud, et al. and the advent of what she labels “parascientific thought,” the notion of persons acting to benefit others at a real cost to themselves has been discredited, she argues, at a huge cost to the idea of an essential human nature.

I shall post an excerpt from this chapter below, and ask that my readers—particularly the writers and poets among you—to contemplate the significance of this kind of parascientific thought on your creative life project:

…[evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey] Miller states, ‘Evolution cannot favor altruistic information-sharing any more than it can favor altruistic food-sharing. Therefore, most animals’ signals must have evolved to manipulate the behavior of another animal for the signaler’s own benefit.’ And other animals have evolved to ignore them, because it didn’t pay to listen to manipulators. Ergo, it seems, we, alone among the animals, have language. Why the complexity of language and our adeptness in the use of it? Gazzaniga says, “Considering this conundrum, Miller proposes that language’s complexities evolved for verbal courtship. This solves the altruism problem by providing a sexual payoff for eloquent speaking by the male and female.”

Is it true? Are the astonishing sonnets of Shakespeare and the elegant word-play of a Dylan Thomas or a Sandra Agricola (plug!), nothing more than grand elaborations on such classic pickup lines as “Fuck me if I’m wrong, but isn’t your name Martha?”

Is a poet essentially of a kind with the short-lived and behaviorally hard-wired moth on its herky-jerky flight towards an artificial light?
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Readings: Those Mean Ol' Existential Blues

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Below are several short excerpts from three books that I am currently reading simultaneously. I was struck by how certain of the themes in these disparate volumes seem to strike sympathetic chords. I’ll kick it off with the following quote by Simone Weil from First and Last Notebooks:

Everything that is in the world is conditional.

That sounds harmless enough, even kind of obvious, until you start to consider some of its theoretical implications. Consider it, for instance, in the light of these excerpts from David L. Clark’s essay, “Otherwise than God: Schelling, Marion” *

Ineradicable melancholy is Schelling’s name for the underlying rapport that beings share with what conditions them, but which also forever eludes them.

And,

Life is no more and no less than the originary incorporation of its ground, the binding of itself to the absent alterity that sets existent beings on their perilous, mortal way. Ineradicable melancholy names the absolute conditionality of life, the subjectless, structural ‘recognition’ that life has from the start ‘lost control’ over its condition.

In the series of notebooks collected in one volume under the title, Some of the Dharma, Jack Kerouac makes the melancholy observation that:

It’s like we were all in jail and I’ve received instructions on how to escape. However I’m the only one now who realizes we’re all in jail, the others don’t know it yet they have an uneasy feeling that something is wrong but they put on gay fronts.

Kerouac—whose musing are heavily influenced by his contemplation of Buddhist scriptures—by equating human life to jail-time, implies that mere existence entails a kind of transgression, or guilt, resulting in the pain of an involuntary confinement.

Following Simone Weil, who sees this fundamental transgression as a theft, maybe we can understand Kerouac’s “jail” as a kind of “debtors’ prison”:

We have stolen a little of God’s being to make it ours.
God has made us a gift of it. But we have stolen it.
We must return it.

If only we could bring about Kerouac’s jail-break, we could, perhaps, begin to make this restitution.

But, while Simone Weil sees this feeling of conditioned freedom and existential debt as being owed to God, David L. Clark, explains F.W. Schelling’s interpretation that:

[H]umankind can never wholly possess itself or live entirely within itself, because it is always in arrears vis-à-vis its determining grounds.

Perhaps it is that which Jack Kerouac characterizes as “putting on a gay face” that Simone Weil sees as “lying to oneself” in extending the trope of existence as a borrowing transaction in the following:

The things of this world can serve as a kind of bank for the portion of our energy at our disposal – and it can be stored in them and even greatly increased by lucky speculations – but only at the price of lying to oneself.

Consciously or not, we intuit our indebtedness to the ground (or God) that gives us existence. Defensively, we create for ourselves the illusion of an autonomous self, either by self-delusion (Weil), or by self-distraction (Kerouac). Schelling, according to Clark, would have it that there is no exit through which to escape from these mean ol’ been-down-so-long-it-looks-like-up-to-me blues:

Life is the fundamental ontological structure of existent beings, whose pattern lies in God. If it were not for their agonistic and, in a sense, contingent struggle with the dark ground, these beings – divine and human alike – would instantly fade into the bloodless abstractions for which Schelling castigates European philosophy. Without the contrasting medium of the ground, without being conditioned by the ground’s otherness, nothing could ex-ist or stand-out, not even God. Animated and actualized beings are dependent beings: this is the lively equation that Schelling’s essay on freedom writes and rewrites.

Simone Weil speaks of this kind of thing elsewhere in terms of the need for obedience to necessity.

My personal observation is this: Only on Calvary do we see the tableau—sans any fancy philosophical birdsong—of the cost of true Freedom.
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*Clark’s essay appears in the anthology, Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, edited by Philip Leonard


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Reflections: It's Not What You Think

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In my on-going effort to stir up interest in the thought of Simone Weil, I have begun posting selected examples of her aphoristic writings to my Twitter page on a daily basis.

One of the first volumes of Weil’s writings that I read several years back was First and Last Notebooks. As this book is rare and much too expensive for me to purchase, I later borrowed it a second time from the university library and took extensive notes on its contents. It is from these notes that I’ve been gleaning those lines that I’ve been posting on Twitter. Following below is one recent example:

The imagination works incessantly to block up the tiniest cracks through which grace might enter.

I also recently did a computer search of the library’s catalog for “Simone Weil.” One of the titles this search turned up was a book of philosophical essays, Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, which included an essay on Weil authored by one James Winchell and titled “Semantics of the Unspeakable: Six Sentences by Simone Weil”. This sounded interesting, so I borrowed it.

As it turns out, I don’t much care for the piece on Weil: it’s too technical for the likes of me. I have found much in the book that I do like, however. For instance, in another essay, while explaining the influence of theologian Jonathan Edwards on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the author provides the following excerpts from Edwards’ “A Divine and Supernatural Light”:

The spiritual and divine light does not consist in any impression made upon the imagination. It is no impression upon the mind, as though one saw any thing with the bodily eyes; it is no imagination or idea of an outward light or glory or any beauty of form or countenance, or a visible luster or brightness of any object. The imagination may be strongly impressed by such things; but this is not spiritual light.

[…]

Natural men may have lively impressions on their imagination; and we cannot determine but the devil, who transforms himself into an angel of light, may cause imaginations of an outward beauty, or visible glory, and of sounds and speeches, and other such things; but these are things of vastly inferior nature to spiritual light.

Both Weil and Edwards present the reader (and prospective spiritual pilgrim) with a strong warning concerning the imagination. Simone Weil describes the imagination as blocking grace and thereby absenting it from the careless and inattentive soul. Edwards writes of imagination as distinct from the ultimate reality of the divine light, adding a strong caveat against the danger of delusion due to the imagination’s capacity to blind one with dazzling bullshit of great beauty.

Distrust the pontificating poet equally as you would the posturing pole dancer.
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Readings: A Sop for Philosophers

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Here is an excerpt from author Robert Coover’s exemplary postmodernist book of fictions, Pricksongs and Descants, presented here as a critical comment on hyper-philosophizing bloggers and hairsplitting combox nitpickers—not excluding myself—and the tangled argumentative webs we all weave. The excerpt is from part 5, entitled “Klee Dead” of the narrative, Seven Exemplary Fictions.

As for Wilbur Klee, I’ve not much more to say about him either, you’ll be glad to know, just this: that he jumped from a high place and is now dead. I think you can take my word for it. The proof is, as it were, in the pudding. Need I tell you from what high place? Your questions, friend, are foolish, disease of the western mind. On the other hand, if you wish to assume a cause-and-effect relationship—that he is dead because he jumped from a high place—well, you are free to do so, I confess it has occurred to me more than once and has colored my whole narration. Certainly, there is some relationship: the remains of Klee, still moist, are splattered out in their now several and discontinuous parts from a point directly below the high place from which he jumped only a moment before. But that’s as far as I’ll go, thank you. I refuse to be inveigled into any of the almost endless and no doubt learned arguments which so gratify and absorb the nation’s savants. I don’t mean to belittle, a man must take his pleasures where he finds them, it’s only that, if I weren’t careful, one would think before they’d had done with me that Klee had died to save physics. That Klee is dead, however, leaves less room for dissent: he’ll never be the same again and only the worst sort of morbid emotionalism could imagine a suitable future for him in his present condition. So here is where I’ll stand my ground: Klee is dead. As for the rest of it, if you wish to believe as I do that he took his own life, fine! It certainly will make it easier for me as we wind this up. But I won’t be dogmatic about it.

NB: the phrase “disease of the western mind”.

Also consider, as a core element in my use of this excerpt as a critical comment on typical blog comment threads, Coover's clause, "...one would think before they'd had done with me that Klee had died to save physics."

Do you catch my drift here?
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Readings: Staunchly Equivocal

At the conclusion of this post, I wrote:

“I am hopeful that Murdoch, herself being the author of some really kick-ass novels, will pull art's fat out of Plato's fire by the end of the essay.”

I have since gone on to other essays, and other books, without ever tying up that loose thread. To do so, it would seem to be sufficient to merely let Murdoch put the matter to rest with the closing paragraph of the essay in question, “The Fire and the Sun”:

Plato feared the consolations of art. He did not offer a consoling theology. His psychological realism depicted God as subjecting mankind to a judgment as relentless as that of the old Zeus, although more just. A finely meshed moral causality determines the fate of the soul. That the movement of the saving of Eros is toward an impersonal pictureless void is one of the paradoxes of a complete religion. To present the idea of God at all, even as myth, is a consolation, since it is impossible to defend this image against the prettifying attentions of art. Art will mediate and adorn, and develop magical structures to conceal the absence of God or his distance. We live now amid the collapse of many such structures, and as religion and metaphysics in the West withdraw from the embraces of art, we are it might seem being forced to become mystics through the lack of any imagery which could satisfy the mind. Sophistry and magic break down at intervals, but they never go away and there is no end to their collusion with art and to the consolations which, perhaps fortunately for the human race, they can provide; and art, like writing and like Eros, goes on existing for better and for worse.

Murdoch kind of fudges it in the end, don’t you think? She seems to be saying, You can have art, but be aware, at the same time, that all art is essentially an idolatry, the aesthetic consolations of which are a stumbling block to the pilgrim on the way to perfection. Art is for individuals who are willing to make compromises with Existence and to settle for second best; it is not for aspiring saints.

Art: Murdoch voted for it before she voted against it.

Reflections: Thought Exercise

Here is a little mental exercise which may provide some insights into the relationship between Truth and Freedom:

First, consider the epistemological implications of Rebecca Goldstein’s statement concerning the quintessence of Spinoza’s philosophy [the following excerpts are from Goldstein’s book, Betraying Spinoza]:

Reality is ontologically enriched logic.

How does what we are—the conditions of our existence—relate to what we can know?

Next, consider the following excerpt from a letter written by Spinoza in response to the letter of a former tutee, who has converted to Catholicism and subsequently written to Spinoza, condemning Spinoza’s system of thought:

If you ask me in what way I know [that I understand the true philosophy], I answer: In the same way as you know that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles: that this is sufficient, will be denied by no one whose brain is sound, and who does not go dreaming of evil spirits inspiring us with false ideas like the true. For the truth is the index of itself and of what is false.

As explained by Goldstein:

Spinoza is claiming here that since he has relied on nothing but a priori reason to deduce his system, just a mathematics relies on nothing but a priori reason, his conclusions (granted that his deductions are valid) enjoy precisely the same degree of certitude as mathematics. His conclusions, just as those of mathematics, must be necessary truths, those which could not possibly have been otherwise.

Now consider the following statements of D-503, the thoroughly conditioned and indoctrinated narrator/protagonist of Eugene Zamiatin’s fictional dystopia, the United State, in the novel, WE:

The ancient god created ancient man, i.e., the man capable of mistakes; ergo, the ancient god himself made a mistake. The multiplication table is more wise and more absolute than the ancient god, for the multiplication table never (do you understand – never) makes mistakes! There are no more fortunate and happy people than those who live according to the correct, eternal laws of the multiplication table. No hesitation! No errors! There is but one truth, and there is but one path to it; and that truth is: four, and that path is: two times two. Would it not seem preposterous for these happily multiplied twos suddenly to begin thinking of some foolish kind of freedom? – i.e., …of a mistake?

Exercise:

Both Spinoza’s philosophy and the totalitarian doctrine of the United State claim to provide man—in direct opposition to religion—with his only hope of salvation. With this in mind,

1) Compare and contrast the relationship between Spinoza’s philosophy and the totalitarian doctrine of the United State, as expounded in Zamiatin’s novel.

2) If Spinoza’s philosophy cannot be shown to be fundamentally in error, what is the relationship between intellectual freedom and Objective Truth? Does the latter negate the former?

3) Consider the question: If, as is implied by the above, what we normally mean by “freedom” is a logical impossibility, what, then, are the implications for our concept of “free will”?

4) Is political “freedom” actually—if paradoxically—bondage to imaginative error and avoidable contingency?