More on “Lost”–and on the Sacraments

My earlier post, Thorea-driven as it was, I offered as a prelude to this. When Thoreau takes it that, upon awaking from metaphyical sleep or metaphysical abstraction, we discover our infinite relatedness to nature, he strikes me as shedding light on what it means to think of philosophical problems in relation to the sacraments. The sacraments affirm our infinite relations, infinite relations that, again, condition our knowledge, and not the other way around. The sacraments awaken us. In that sense, philosophical problems themselves can be approached like the sacraments. Approached in that way, philosophical problems limn the outskirts of mysteries and deepen the mysteries. Stanley Cavell’s work seems to me to approach philosophical problems in this way. He writes somewhere that of course philosophical problems cannot be solved, but there are better and worse ways of thinking about them, ways worth the time of our life to discover.

My point is not that philosophical problems can replace the sacraments. —No, they can’t. But approached in the right way, philosophical problems can prepare us for the sacraments, they can make us aware of how little we know and of how little our knowledge determines whether we live for good or for ill. The sacraments do not just awaken us to the mysteries, they make us part of the mysteries, and make us awake to ourselves as part of the mysteries.

Philosophical problems, approached in the right way, can help us prepare us for the sacraments by opening to us the need for intellectual repentance, for recognizing our limits. When we approach philosophical problems in this way, we can see why Socrates is worthy of a kind of veneration, since his way of approaching philosophical problems, leading as it does to aporia, and not to answers, can be thought of as one (one) species of the approach I am recommending. When Hamann nominates Socrates the prophet of the Unknown God, it is this that Hamann sees, I think. (Cavell, and Wittgenstein (who I mentioned in my earlier post) provide examples of other species of the approach.)

Heidegger’s Caveat

There is a significant darkness in every philosophical endeavor, and even the most radical of these endeavors remains finite.

Tradition

Tradition is rooted in the present, not the past; and the old growth is constantly revitalized by the new. Or so I say is true of the traditions I care about. The present daily reclaims the past.

Lost

Wittgenstein characterizes philosophical problems as having the form: “I don’t know my way about.” (Philosophical Investigations 123) At first hearing, this sounds like an unflattering form to assign to philosophical problems. Philosophical problems have the form of being lost. Being lost is unpleasant and unproductive. —But is it? Consider these comments of Thoreau’s:

In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, —for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, —do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. (Walden, The Village)

Thoreau treats the physical as the sign of the metaphysical; I take him to be bringing out the resemblance of relations between being physically lost and metaphysically, i.e., philosophically, lost. So Thoreau is commenting on the form of being lost physically and metaphysically. What fascinates me is that he does not take that to be an unflattering form. Being lost turns out to be productive: only when we have gotten metaphysically lost can we begin to find ourselves, to realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. And just as it is easy to get lost physically, so, too it is easy (easier?) to get lost metaphysically. We need only turn round once with our eyes shut. I reckon that Thoreau believes that we typically do not shut our eyes voluntarily; we shut them involuntarily, either by falling asleep metaphysically, becoming slothful and inert, instead of awake and alert for action, or by drifting off into abstraction and so losing our ability to confront the concrete in good earnest. Each of these Thoreau takes to be easy to have happen. It is easy to fall asleep, to fall into stony insensibility, to stop caring. And it is easy for our caring to come unmoored from what we really care about, for our caring to metamorphose into caring about something else—into caring about an abstraction from what we really care about. When we wake from such sleep or from such abstraction, we wake to the vastness and strangeness of (our) nature, and we have to relearn which ways are north, south, east, and west. Until we wake to that, we have lost ourselves in having lost the world. As we relearn our directions, we find not only who and where we are but the infinite extent of our relations, meaning that we find just how deeply implicated in nature we actually are, just how intimate we are with its vastness and strangeness. And we find out that our infinite relatedness is prior to and conditions our knowledge of the world, and not the other way around.

So if the form of a philosophical problem is the form of being lost, it can turn out that getting lost philosophically is among the best things that can happen to us—at least it is if we can keep the philosophical problem from itself chanting us to sleep or unchaining us from the real. Oddly, a philosophical problem may be one of the best ways of being awakened to the hic et nunc. Perhaps we could rephrase Wittgenstein: A philosophical problem has the form: “I’m awake but don’t know where I am!”

Reading (Arnold Bennett)

You say: “I know all that. But it is not so easy to translate literature into life. When I think of all the time I have wasted in reading masterpieces, I stand aghast.”

The explanation is simple. Idleness, intellectual sloth, is the explanation. Self-conceit is the explanation. If you were invited to meet a great writer, you would brace yourself to the occasion. You would say to yourself: “I must keep my ears open, and my brain wide-awake, so as to miss nothing.” You would tingle with your own bracing of yourself. But you—I mean “we”—will sit down to a great book as though we were sitting down to a ham sandwich. No sense of personal inferiority in us? No mood to resolve! No “tuning up” of the intellectual apparatus! But just a casual, easy air, as if saying to the book: “Well, come along, let’s have a look at you!”

Ezra Pound’s Goodly Fere (Final Lines)

A master of men was the Goodly Fere,

A mate of the wind and sea,

If they think they ha’ slain our Goodly Fere

They are fools eternally.

I ha’ seen him eat o’ the honey-comb

Sin’ they nailed him to the tree.

Poetry from Young: “Tomorrow is the satire on today”

From man’s too curious and impatient sight,

The future, Heaven involves in thickest night.

Credit gray hairs: though freedom we boast,

Some least perform, what they determine most.

What sudden changes our resolves betray!

To-morrow is the satire on to-day,

And shows its weakness. Whom shall men believe,

When constantly themselves, themselves deceive?

Hamann to Herder, 8 Dec, 1783

For everyone shattered by The Critique of Pure Reason:

My poor head is a broken pot compared with Kant’s—earthenware against iron.

All chatter about reason is pure wind: language is its organ and criterion, as Young says. Tradition is the second element.

The Hard Way

It is hard to accept the transplant of God’s will for your own. Rejection is common. We want to keep what’s ours. “After all”, some will say, “mine is a perfectly good will; it gets me ’round about town and keeps me from overeating.” Yes. Yes. “All I need to do,” some will say, “is to nudge and pat and poke and scrape my will a bit; then I’ll be all God wants me to be.” Yes. Yes. –But God does not want my will, not even after it has been trimmed, curled and perfumed. He wants my will broken; he wants my will surrendered. He does not want my will doll-ed up and playing at imitating His. “Look at my will. How godly it is!”

So long as I mix caring for righteousness with caring for myself, the best I’ll manage is self-righteousness. To be righteous, and not self-righteous, I must let obedience obliterate self completely. “Not my will but thine.” Not. My. Will.

O. K. Bousma on the God of the Philosophers

“Can a man by thinking add a cubit to his stature”? Why, yes, he can if he is a philosopher. “And can a man by thinking find out God”? Why, yes, if he is a philosopher. And which God would that be? The God one can find out by thinking. That is the God of the philosopher. If Abraham had been a philosopher he wouldn’t have to wait until God found him. He would then have sat down on a stone and thought and so found out God. What is a man rational for save that by thinking he should do things? What things? Things such as adding a cubit to his stature and, of course, finding out God. Many philosophers have done these things and do. Some try and do not quite make it. Had Abraham continued to sit on that stone he would never have left Ur of Chaldees, quite a nice place to bring up a family. As it is he left under orders, leaving the stone behind, the philosophers’ stone.