Last thoughts for 2023.

Every mood implies a different version of the world. Few people can translate a particular mood into a more or less permanent disposition – e.g. the mood or joy, of Sehnsucht (longing for a metaphysical home always out of reach such that the desiring itself is preferable to anything else the world has to offer); or the mood of despair, the loss of meaning, the inability to love. I can’t. My convictions about the world are disclosed in moods that on a normal day do not visit me, though rarely does a day go by that I do not remember and long for their return. 

    Like Scrooge, in my normal set of moods, I fear the world too much. Unlike him, my response is to flee from it into imaginary literature or history books that let me travel to another time and place. This is the response of the romantic, which is one side of a coin, the other side of which features Scrooge and other assorted reductionists and utilitarians. Both share a fear of the world, a conviction (as long as the mood lasts) that the world (and nature) is cruel, indifferent, without intrinsic meaning, the enemy of the Good, of love. Scrooge embraces that “reality”; I flee from it - especially from those parts of myself that are part of it. But in a mood I know all-too-well, I am not too far from Scrooge. Indeed, Scrooge as a child also escaped the hostile and lonely reality of the boarding school by fleeing to imaginative books. He is overjoyed to meet Ali Baba again when the Ghost of Christmas Past takes him back to his old school. 

   What makes me different from Scrooge is that I judge this mood and this set of convictions by a higher standard of goodness and reality, the one that reveals itself when I actively love or when I am in the grip of Sehnsucht or – more rarely – when joy overcomes me. Such moods do not, unfortunately, rule my life. I lack the virtue to make love the permanent mood. I am too damaged to escape my escapist romantic side completely. But reality as it reveals itself in joy, longing, and love feels the most real. 

    The convictions about the world that originate in longing, joy, and love make the most sense of my life and the world. So even if I am cut off from them much of the time, I see them as a geometric circle against which all the physical circles I may try to draw are measured. Of course, I could judge that the convictions about the world that reveal themselves in longing, joy, and love are unreal, wishful delusions of a romantic mind. Should I do so, then my life and the world would be measured by convictions that originate in the various moods of despair – would be judged meaningless by those standards. 

   This is not an intellectual puzzle for me or a difficult intellectual struggle. Intellectually, a draw obtains: both basic positions can bring serious evidence to support them; both have been explored in depth by philosophers of genius. Both can be authentically held and lived. But when I see or remember the faces of my children, the force of such despairing philosophies dissipates in an instant. I can't take Schopenhauer or Nietzsche seriously while reading a story to my children, for example, though I do love both men in a way and have taken their work very seriously over the course of my adult life. 

 Another meditation of A Christmas Carol

                                                 

     The understanding of existence after death puzzles me. It doesn’t seem to fit neatly into any Christian scheme I know of. As I said, it can’t be Hell because Marley intervenes for good in the case of Scrooge, and suffers from the impotent desire to intervene for the good. Hell is hate. Hell is the absence of love. Hell is final isolation, a kind of imprisonment in one's own ego. It is a kind of solipsism: nothing is real except one’s own “fat, relentless ego.” That doesn’t describe Marley’s spiritual condition. But neither does there seem to be any hope, which is a feature of Purgatory.  However much the souls suffer in Purgatory – in Catholic doctrine – their salvation is assured. Marley has no such knowledge or hope. Marley is depicted as a ghost, condemned to wander the earth bound in heavy chains as a punishment for his selfish and greedy behavior during his lifetime. The chains he wears are a symbol of the burdens he forged through his own avarice and lack of compassion. Marley's punishment is not framed in terms of traditional Christian concepts of Hell or Purgatory but rather as a state of unrest or torment associated with his past actions. It’s like the soul is frozen in the spiritual state it was in at death and must see itself from the perspective of love or understand that spiritual state for what it was forever.  

     It is most deeply a picture of remorse. Remorse would not be remorse if it vanished. It's not like you do someone wrong, take the sacrament of confession, and then the remorse disappears. The harm you have done lives on after you, whether God forgives you or not. Thus remorse becomes part of your being. 

     At least that has the advantage that the good he wanted to do for Scrooge – and all the living that he can no longer do good for – is unmotivated by hope of reward. In that case, the desire would not have essentially changed in death; and would not be essentially different from Scrooge’s desires. The only thing that would have changed would be a genuine knowledge of the nature of reality. Then, in the false conception, it was in his interest to pursue wealth and block off the heart from compassion; in the real world revealed to him after death, compassion and helping others would be in his interest. A different accounting based on different conceptions of realities, but underlying both is the self-centered wish to thrive.

    But his desire to help Scrooge is gratuitous. It is unmotivated by the hope of reward, for he has no hope. His only motive is that Scrooge escape his fate. That is goodness. It is a kind of paradox: goodness deserves hope, faith, love; yet goodness by definition just is to doing good for someone just because it is good, without any motivation external to that. Insofar as Marley acted in any hope to help himself, his act would have been tainted with ego. Yet the idea of any goodness condemned to an existence without hope of salvation is tough.

   The same problem for Scrooge. Is his conversion just for the sake of avoiding the fate shown him by the Ghost of Christmas Future? Then no real conversion would have taken place, only a more accurate set of facts about what it means to succeed. There are hints that avoiding this fate does motivate Scrooge, though in general he seems to act out of a joy and generosity of spirit after the hauntings. This is why I think it important to leave it open whether Scrooge believes it was all a dream. That would leave open the question of the nature of reality to human capacities of hope, faith, and love. Which in turn would allow us to see Scrooge as a good man and not just as a selfish man acting in his own interests as the ghosts have revealed those interests to be. The effect of the hauntings is that the blinders have been removed from Scrooge’s spiritual eyes and the chains from his heart.

   This is a theological problem at the heart of Christianity. If I believe in Hell and Heaven, I follow the rules – in my interest – to get there. Heaven is the reward for following God’s rules; Hell the punishment if I don’t. It is a given that the soul seeks happiness, and the only question is what reality is like such that I can act in a way to make myself happy. That has nothing to do with goodness, but with getting the facts right and trusting the right authority since the facts in question transcend mortal knowledge. God did not become flesh and die on the cross to make himself happy. God is goodness, which is just another way of saying God is love. The lover doesn’t ask what’s in it for him when he does something good for the beloved; that parent doesn’t ask what’s in it for them when they raise their children (unless they are vulgar). Marley’s gratuitous care for Scrooge’s participates in this goodness. Scrooge’s newfound compassion, we must assume, is a gratuitous care for Tiny Tim and the rest – not just a way of avoiding Marley’s fate. I am not convinced the novel is coherent on this issue.

   And that raises questions about the relation of the afterlife to goodness. One interesting truth captured by Marley’s ghost: this life is important; this life is meaningful; we have one life, one chance to realize our potential – that is, to love well, to know God in the finite ways God can be known in this life. If you believe in an afterlife – perhaps also in a Purgatory – then this life is not final. There is hope in that, but it lessens the meaning of what we do and how we live. In Dickens’ vision everything we do here either moves us closer to the Good (God) or farther away from it. Death could come at any time, and the state of our souls at death determines our being for eternity. Well, that is a way of picturing meaning.

   The Good (love), moreover, is so absolute that our existence in a possible life after death is irrelevant to it – as irrelevant as the hope of improving his condition was to Marley’s desire to help Scrooge avoid his fate. Even if I believed that death was final, that there was no God or cosmic justice, I would still be bound to love and do good for my children, for example, and would lucidly suffer remorse if I neglected or abused them. I don’t refrain from neglecting or abusing them to avoid Hell or a fate like Marley’s; I don’t love them to punch my ticket to Heaven. It is not unimportant whether I believe or do not believe in a life after death – it colors how I see life. But it makes no moral difference, no difference concerning love and goodness – perhaps unless you cannot believe that life is good/loveable or your children are good/loveable without believing in an afterlife. To me, the fact that people really love their children or really do good without such a belief system shows that the two are separable. I go back and forth, but again, my hopes and fears about a possible afterlife don’t affect my loves.

     Honestly, it is mostly for the sake of those who have been deprived of life and love – victims of terrible fates – that I feel the need to affirm a possible life after death. It is hard to live with the fact that a child gets tortured and murdered, and that is all. The outrageous evil of such things is the seed for the hope that at least in an afterlife there may be comfort. And if the fear of Hell prevents some people from doing evil, I don’t want to say that is a bad thing. It is just not relevant to goodness (morality) – and the call to be good, to love others.

   Just a footnote. I am not sure what an afterlife even means – what time, for example, would be like. Part of me thinks: that after the heart stops, while the brain is dying but still generating electrical energy, perhaps we are given a vision like Dickens’ of Heaven or Hell which in our experience is timeless, though in the physical universe it happens in the few seconds before final brain death. That is one possibility. We couldn’t distinguish that from any other. I personally would like to be greeted by an angel and enlightened about my life and the world. It doesn’t matter to the deepest regions of our moral lives. Literary depictions of an afterlife – as in Dickens, Dante, Milton, or Lewis – allow us to picture moral reality and the nature of meaning. They are not newspaper reports of a distant country.

. . .

Afterthought

I wonder: if you knew – which you don’t – that death was the final end to every life, and that the earth itself and indeed all life in the universe, would you still choose to be born? Would you still be able to see life as a gift or blessing (assuming reasonable good fortune)? If not, I suppose, you definitely have to cling to hope in an afterlife. I myself would see human life as more deeply tragic than I already see it, but would still say yes to it. Anything more would be icing on the cake. (Again, I can say this because of reasonably good fortune. Could someone say it in Auschwitz or one of the other hells human beings have made for other human beings? That thought is beyond me.) I would still be grateful for life. I could still love my Creator. Again, it would be the lack of justice and consolation for those who have lived through those human hells that I would feel had a right to say no to life, and thus makes me hope there is a God that somehow holds them. I completely understand Ivan Karamazov though when he says the torture of one child is enough for him to reject God and the Creation. 

     

 

Further reflections on A Christmas Carol. 

Something else interesting about Marley’s ghost. Toward the end of the uncanny interview, Scrooge gets a vision of the afterlife – here is just the end of the vision:

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to his ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom he saw below, upon a doorstep. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power forever.

What interests me about this passage is that Scrooge is being shown a picture of reality – of an essential aspect of human nature, of an essential part of the meaning of each person’s life. Scrooge’s life – the closing of his heart, the refusal to respond to reality emotionally and intellectually – represents a conscious denial of reality. He constructs his own reality, his world version, one that allows him to give in to his strategy to conquer his fears of being alone and abandoned. He mistakes his construction for reality itself, and thus cuts himself off from reality – which is to say, from the Good. The vision of people like Scrooge suffering regret and remorse because, having only one mortal life to realize their nature and having failed, they can no longer actualize what they were created to do, exposes his capitalist construction as false to the world. It is a vision of reality, from a negative point of view of having failed it. If we could all only have such a sublime vision of reality itself, of the Good itself! Well, we can, indirectly, through art. Almost all of my favorite works offer such a vision from some point of view.

    This raises another question. The book, a work of fiction, allows us to experience together with Scrooge the “proof” of a higher reality of which our world is only a part. Since within the confines of the work of fiction we know the world is meaningful and good, all doubt is taken from us. But if we are given the correct answer to the nature of reality, then our life becomes an intellectual matter. I took Kili to the dentist yesterday. He had a cavity that needed to be filled. It was a perfectly rational action. Science understands in great detail and perfection why cavities form. It thus serves as a firm basis for action – developing the tools and techniques to deal with a reality nearly completely understood. If we are given a key to all of reality as such, as is Scrooge through the vision and indeed the encounter with all the Christmas spirits, then acting becomes a no-brainer. As though you simply needed to say “4” to the problem of 2 + 2. If God appeared in the sky and compelled us to listen to the full Truth, we would all share one Truth and all act in ways that accord with this Truth.

   But that seems wrong. (It is what many Christian and also existentialist philosophers (e.g. Dreyfus and Kelly in All Things Shining) complain about when they criticize Plato and Aristotle). If evil is nothing but ignorance, then all we need is truth to be good. Our problem in this mortal life is ignorance; it is that we cannot know the Truth in the same way and with this same degree of assurance that dentists can understand cavities and what to do about them. Dickens through Marley almost seems to give us “the correct answer”:

 “Oh! Captive, bound and double-ironed,” cried the phantom, “not to know that ages of incessant labor, by immortal creatures, for this earth, must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed! Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness! Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunities misused!”

 There is, however, a vast gulf that separates the one kind of knowledge from the other. Where there is knowledge, there is no need for hope, faith, and love. And yet – at least in the Christian-Catholic world version – hope, faith, and love are the essential relations of the mortal creature to Truth, necessary for realizing the good that lies hidden in each of us. Knowledge can’t bypass these ‘theological virtues.’ All knowledge of the whole of reality must be mediated by hope, faith, and love – or it misses the mark. Hope, faith, and love are what philosophers like to call cognitive when it comes to metaphysical knowledge. It is through the heart and the imagination that Being reveals itself to mortals - not the cold, calculating intellect of a Scrooge. (Had Plato written philosophical treatises rather than dramatic dialogues, he would hardly be read today.) Pascal meant this perhaps when he wrote that "the heart has its reasons." It is not that such knowledge is less certain than the scientific knowledge and practice dentistry relies on, but it is less grounded in the material world. It requires the soul to transcend the everyday working world, the everyday world of the senses and indeed science (except at its outmost limits). Dickens can allow most people to do this better than Aquinas. I'm not knocking Aquinas. Aquinas helped me to understand Dickens and Dickens helped me to understand Aquinas. I need both to understand.

   Does this make the novel incoherent? Does the novel pretend to give us a knowledge of facts, substituting this for a knowledge grounded in hope, faith, and love? I don’t think so. Indeed, it is not certain that for Scrooge the whole story wasn’t a dream – a vision, like Dante’s. It is certainly more real than, say, the dream of the Wizard of Oz. But when Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning, and we with him, we are not positive that the whole thing wasn’t a true dream, a myth. Some faith and hope are required at this point to affirm it. After all, he was quite willing to reduce Marley to a bit of undigested beef earlier in the story; the same strategy lay open to him after he awakes on Christmas morning. And then Dickens explicitly puts the story in fairyland when he begins the narrative with: "once upon a time." And the whole knowledge awakens in the sympathetic reader a love of the world. Through love and love alone can we understand the story, and thus we are in the same position as Scrooge, who can only understand himself and the world through opening his heart to love – and thus joy.

 Going on with my reflections on A Christmas Carol. 

Marley’s Ghost. In the beginning, when the narrator was making sure we understood – and making sure we knew that Scrooge understood – that Marley was dead, he invokes the comparison with Hamlet’s father. (I think it was great how much Dickens could assume his readers knew both of Shakespeare and the Bible – literature as a bond of culture. The debunkers hated this culture and thus sought to destroy the bonds that kept it together. If they had limited themselves to destroying what blinded men to its dark side, I would have been fine with that. But they threw the baby out with the dirty bath water.) Both spirits return from some dark place of the soul. But Hamlet’s father returns to demand revenge following primitive honor codes; thus, he may have returned from Hell. Marley returns to do Scrooge good, after somehow – makes no sense in a way – intervening on Scrooge’s behalf. No good can exist in Hell; if a soul cares for another soul, then that soul is not damned. Therefore, wherever Marley’s spirit is – Purgatory, I assume, though not Dante’s – it is not Hell.

    But the most interesting connection with this scene in Hamlet is metaphysical. After seeing the ghost of his father, Hamlet exclaims to the more worldly Horatio – who studies philosophy, I think: “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy [science].” This is just as basic as the question – formulated by Leibniz: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” How one stands to Hamlet’s exclamatory assertion determines one’s life. Or if you are not reflective, your life determines how you stand to this assertion. Obviously, our intellects are not infinite. We are vastly more aware of what is on the TV screen than a dog, for example, but the dog probably can’t even express the idea of a difference. If angels exist, we would be to them a bit like the dogs are to us. We can’t access what is beyond our intellects, senses, and emotional life, so if there is anything beyond it, we can’t know it. Perhaps we can hope, dream, or make myths about it through our imagination and our hearts. I sometimes wonder whether some music connects us with something higher. I even fantasize that Bach was a fallen angel.

    If you believe like Hamlet, then your world is big. You can’t know it all. The narrator of A Christmas Carol puts us directly in touch with this bigger world – which is unseen except in sublime moments. While in the grip of the story, we don’t question its reality. The characters that live in this real, bigger world, the one we can’t really know, are the ones who understand Christmas and love it. Scrooge’s nephew Fred is a perfect example. There could, of course, be a bigger world beyond our senses and intellects that was demonic. Perhaps the world was fabricated by demons to enjoy our sufferings and evil. In such a world it would have been better never to have been born. Shakespeare’s Gloucester, in King Lear, gives expression to such a world when he says: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” Gloucester speaks these words as he wanders on the heath after being blinded (4.1. 37–38). But Fred’s bigger world is one of hope – a particular version of a Christian world. This is the source of his good cheer. This is the source of his radically different accounting from Scrooge, of his different conceptions of what does him “good,” and of his life in the light in which the things so important to Scrooge are revealed to be of no intrinsic value. His happiness and his love have their source in this bigger world.

   Scrooge, however, is a reductionist. He will not trust even his senses. Marley’s ghost must be a figment of his imagination. Why must? Because in his world version – stipulated by the form his life has assumed – leaves no conceptual space for the possibility that there are more things in heaven and earth than we dream of. In fact, his money-grubbing life demands that there be fewer. Thus Christmas cheer and love are reduced to the delusions of fools who are too weak to look “reality” in the face, as Scrooge does. Marley’s ghost – hilariously – is reduced to an undigested big of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. He says – hilariously – there is more of gravy than grave to Marley’s ghost. His belief system, the belief system required by his self-sufficient, calculated, cold life devoid of human sympathy, rules out the possibility of ghosts and an afterlife in advance. Thus he was even able to explain away the fact right in front of him – he, who prides himself on being a man of facts.

    And indeed, even we after the three spirits have ended their haunting, wonder whether it was all a dream. This is all the novel concedes to our real situation in which we have no rational ground to make a judgment on Hamlet’s exclamation. But it is clear: “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man (Wittgenstein).” The world of the unhappy man – Scrooge here – is a world in which every experience is reduced to a preconceived procrustean bed made by the “fat, relentless ego” (Murdoch). The world of the happy man is a big world in which we are part of a bigger story we cannot see the end of but which we – in trust – believe in the goodness of the story and the happy end. Of course, the novel gives us the superhuman experience of glimpsing this invisible bigger world and being a part of it without the pains of doubt.

 Continuing with a reflection on Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

It’s bitterly cold out and foggy – outside and in Scrooge’s soul. It’s Christmas and there are scenes of people making merry and singing – light and warmth in the cold, dark time. There are scenes of wonderful food in the shops contrasted with Scrooge’s “melancholy meal” and the “gruel” he wants to eat before bed.

   Marley had died seven years ago. Why seven? Why not six or eight? Perhaps Dickens is smuggling in the idea of abundance: seven is important in Christian symbolism because of the seven days of Creation. Creation, as the novel invites us to believe, is itself an overflowing excess, completely gratuitous, born of love. Light, warmth, water, earth – being arising in the cold void of nothingness. The number seven plays a role in the story of Jesus feeding the multitude as well. Jesus fed a crowd of 4,000 people with seven loaves of bread and a few fish. Jesus blessed the food, distributed it among the people, and afterward, seven baskets full of leftover fragments were collected. The use of the number seven in the baskets of leftovers invites the idea of divine completeness and abundance. I don’t think Dickens expects readers to unravel this chain of significance, but it is there notwithstanding.

   Why does anything at all exist, and not rather nothing? (associated with Leibniz, revived in philosophy by Heidegger) The very idea of God as God signifies perfection and the absence of any need (deficiency). As such, the very idea of God implies that God is self-contained, in need of nothing external to complete his nature.  Aristotle conceived God – against a metaphysical background it is not important to go into now - as "thought thinking itself", emphasizing divine intellect and self-contemplation. God's contemplation is not directed toward the changing world but is self-contained and eternal; it would lessen God to give one thought to humanity or the world. That would be a good model for Scrooge, constantly about “his own business.” Indeed, the first passage describing Scrooge could almost describe God as Aristotle imagined God: “…self-contained and solitary as an oyster.” Notice the repetition of the word “sole” in the early part of the book to describe Scrooge: “Scrooge was his [Marley’s] sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner.” And Scrooge did not mourn inwardly as the narrator makes clear, and so he was no real friend. He and Marley were alone together, allies, not friends. 

     Scrooge is cold and self-contained, pitiless and calculating because he closed his heart to love – to being, reality, nature, as imagined in the novel – under the pressure of childhood fears. This aspiring to the ideal of self-sufficiently following the laws of nature – cruel laws in Scrooge’s capitalist world – separates the Christian image of life from its classical predecessors from Socrates to the Stoics. The main difference between Scrooge and these ancient proponents of self-sufficiency and reason is that Scrooge lives – in his own mind – in a Hobbesian world of a war of all against all, a Darwinian world of the survival of the fittest, a Schopenhauerian world of atoms striving to be by absorbing other atoms. If that were reality, then Scrooge’s response would be rational and the lovers of Christmas would be the sentimental fools that he imagines them to be.

  But in terms of the novel, reality is not like that.  The Christian God overflows into the Creation, and his essence is love, which is just a kind of giving of the self. God gave of himself in creating the world and so loved the world that he gave himself to it to save it from itself. So Dickens pictures God as abundance, as love expressing itself through abundance and giving.  And this wanting to give oneself away radiates throughout Creation – in images of people going out of themselves to love others or simply wish them well. Even the food is depicted as wanting to give itself away. The descriptions of food throughout suggest this, but especially in Stave Three in the encounter with the Spirit of Christmas Present. This theme of the novel presents itself clearly in the following passage:

  For the people who were shoveling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee, callout out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball – better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest – laughing heartily if it went right, and not less heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers’ shops were still half open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were peans and apples clustered in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers’ benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed….

This goes on and on. Dickens is implicitly connecting the self-giving that is the essence of Christmas to the very fabric of Being itself, which like its Creator is made to give itself away. This gives a more precise meaning to the old thought that only God’s love keeps the universe in being. The novel – like Dante’s great poem – contains an entire metaphysical-theological picture of the universe, one more sympathetic to me than Dante’s. Part of this comes from the joy I experienced at Christmas during my childhood. 

  Christmas theology and a meditation on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

I studied – among many other things – literature. I studied literature trusting, first, that the professors of literature loved literature; and secondly, that since they had the enormous privilege of earning a living by reading, thinking, and writing about literature, which they loved, they would be able to help me read better in general and read individual works that I loved better in particular. Not every professor of literature I had in class could do this. Some were.

    Today, most literature professors don’t even see this as their task. Indeed, most don’t seem to love literature so much as debunking literature that other people have loved, often for no other reason than it was written by a “white man,” as though that fact somehow pollutes it. How primitive and revealing of a toxic resentment. (To understand the debunkers, read what Nietzsche wrote – ironically – about Christians in A Genealogy of Morals.) But I digress.

    Looking to recover at least the Sehnsucht (i.e. the painful longing for the distant and unrecoverable home for my soul) for the lost joy I have known at Christmas time, my Internet algorithm flashed up a course from Hillsdale College on Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, a book I have truly enjoyed but which I have never considered essential. A cool story. Well, the professor – Dwight Lindley – uncovered layers of meaning that allowed me to see a depth in the story I had been blind to. Which was strange, since the depth he uncovered connected to and expanded my core convictions about life. Dickens seemed to have done even better than Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or Lewis.

    What did he see in the story that I was not fully aware of? Several interrelated disclosures of the meaning of Christmas, that in turn revealed the meaning of Creation.  

 . . . 

Stave One. Hell. Or it would be except for all the people gathered around light in the darkness, singing songs; and all the good food in the shops waiting to be eaten. Scrooge's inner life - or lack thereof - is Hell, but the narrator let's us know it is not real, and so we don't fear it - or Scrooge. Scrooge’s life is that of a damned soul – but the language evokes an atmosphere lighter than Dante’s Inferno because Scrooge is framed by the real – good – world throughout. And there is humor. We are definitely not in the world of Dante's Inferno. The world would be a hell, people all like Scrooge, but for all the light and all the cheer. 

    The first descriptive sentence ends with the word “sinner.” But the whole person embodies in almost every facet the essence of sin, or Hell. Not just the particular form of greed he embodies: I suppose he would be among the hoarders in Dante’s Inferno. But he reveals the very meaning of ‘being damned.’ He is alienated, cut off from other people (his nephew, his clerk, the carolers), from nature, from joy, from his own past (all of Stave Two), from light (“darkness is cheap”) from human sympathy (“decrease the surplus population”), from simply human pleasures like eating and drinking (he eats gruel) – from reality, from Being. From the Creation. From his own essential nature as part of the Creation. Scrooge is loveless. Still, he can’t completely mask his humanity. The pleasure he takes in his use of language – while used for destruction – is a genuine pleasure, one that connects him somehow to the Human albeit it negatively.  These themes are deepened in the following staves.  

   We see from the beginning two worlds – Scrooges’ world, on the one hand, full of the cold and darkness (lovelessness) that such lost souls spread; a world in which everything is measured by quantitative, monetary gain; a world of bare facts and mechanical time; a world where every soul is alienated from other souls, each looking after their own business. And this business is accumulating wealth and thus power over others, a cruel world in which we are all nothing but covetous machines, a Darwinian world where one person’s gain is another’s loss in the end, in spite of temporary alliances based on mutual interest (like Scrooge and Marley). This is how Scrooge sees the world and he has adapted himself perfectly to this environment. (Indeed, it is the world of capitalism, of the stock exchange.)

    On the other hand, there is the real world, the world Scrooge is blind to, the world that capitalism surrounds with cold and darkness but can no more extinguish than darkness can extinguish light. This is the Christian world, though the novel keeps the links to Christ in the background and understated. But the central message of Christmas is, as John puts it (1:5): “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (Roman imperial domination, another form of darkness. Capitalism has no monopoly on that.) And that light is the light of love. Within this real world – in terms of the novel – there is joy, excess, giving, abundance, pleasure (in a good sense), conviviality, festiveness, compassion, and a transcendence of time in time, so to speak. This real world of warmth and light and the darkness and coldness – in Dante’s Inferno Satan is immobilized in ice – of Scrooge’s world, a false world: this is the metaphysical background of the story.

     These two world versions collide in the first scene. Scrooge is in his counting house office. The weather was winter – the appropriate season for Christmas, for light coming into the darkness. Also “the fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without…the houses opposite were mere phantoms – as other people are to Scrooge. He emits cold and fog himself to all around him; he makes Bob Cratchit work in the cold “in a dismal little cell, a sort of tank.” And into this cold, dismal world (and soul) – a reflection of Christ – the nephew enters with a cheerful “Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” Knowing the whole story, that seems like a prayer that was answered.

    We see the different accounting in the false and real worlds. For Scrooge, his nephew has nothing to be merry about since he is rather poor. Everything is weighed by gain. Christmas is pure waste, a gratuitous pouring out of everything valuable in celebration. The novel will hit this theme hard: in this, it is expressing the essence of the Creation itself. Being itself is just such a gratuitous pouring out in love. If God’s nature were as Scrooge’s, there would have been no Creation, which from Scrooge’s own point of view would have been the more rational choice. “Much good has it [Christmas] ever done you!” It’s like saying to the Creator: “Much good as this Creation ever done you!” Fred, Scrooge’s nephew, tries to state in words the logic of Christmas, which is the logic of Creation itself, of the real world with its different sense of good, its different accounting, that Scrooge has cut himself off from:

There are many things from which I might have derived good by which I have not profited, I dare say, Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it has come round – apart from the veneration due its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that [it can’t] – as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it.

    The contest between worlds is about opening hearts – not only to other human beings with whom we share a common humanity (and mortality) but to Being itself – as Creation. The whole story is teeming with festive joy and giving, and there is never a doubt that this is the real world. Christmas is a picture of Creation as it would be without the cold and darkness of sin, of shutting up the heart. Scrooge must be brought to open his heart, and then he will know.

   I will comment on Stave Two tomorrow and pick up on some other themes in Stave One.

 

When my boys are grown, if I am still here, I will check into a monastery for four weeks every Christmas season. I am serious. I have never experienced Christmas spiritually, not fully. Intimations perhaps, joyful ones that give rise to a powerful Sehnsucht. I want to find out whether that joyful longing could be made real someday. 

What draws me to philosophy

 I do think there are other reasons for becoming the sort of person who needs to understand and thus inquire. For me, I didn't like the feeling that my thoughts and feelings at an early age had been put there by the powers that be. I hated the feeling of being a puppet on someone else's strings, thinking what they intended that I think, feeling what they intended I feel. Philosophy is thus a great defense against those who would exercise power over me by controlling what I think and feel.

   To really get into the philosophy of a great thinker is to enter another world. It is a bit like reading Tolkien or great science fiction in this respect. I love to tarry in certain worlds. I feel like an explorer of worlds. 

    A person can also feel that it belongs to their integrity to face truth, accept the argument wherever it leads. If a person wants to affirm their wonder at any cost, they might lose sight of truth, and become sentimental. Faith must sometimes be tested. Philosophy might begin in wonder but it doesn't always end there. 

Philosophy Begins in Wonder

SOCRATES: I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher; for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. (Plato, Theaetetus 155c-d).

     Well, it depends on what a person means by philosophy. Socrates and Plato were at the beginning of a particular conception of philosophy, reflected in the very word they chose to express it: philosophy means “love of wisdom.” The word “philosophy” is still applied to frameworks used to interpret the world that originated with Descartes and Bacon, and the frameworks that originated with Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, and Foucault. And there are the modes of interpreting the world that have grown out of the Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianist, and Zoroastrian traditions – and many others. Those frameworks are so radically different from philosophy in its origin that they don’t really share the same concept – except perhaps all the frameworks involve interpretations of being as such (even the skeptical frameworks, for which Being is transcendent and unknowable). New words need to be coined for those other frameworks to avoid confusion. 

       But philosophy – the love of wisdom – is for me one distinct framework, one particular way to live and understand the world. Not one among others. It is more accurate to say these frameworks represent incompatible interpretations of life and the world than to say they represent different forms of loving wisdom, since many do not love wisdom; others believe it unobtainable and go off on other projects; still others believe that own wisdom, and thus have no need to seek it.

     Philosophy begins in wonder. Not in the knowledge that life is suffering, as does Buddhism. Not in an purported proof that knowledge of the most important things is impossible, as does empiricist thought (culminating in Kant and the early Wittgenstein). Not in the dogma that the material world is evil, as in Gnosticism. Not in the brave facing of the alleged truth that the universe is meaningless and violent, and the life of man, or of most men, would have been better not to have existed, as in Nietzsche. In wonder.

    Wonder over what? Mostly that which is beautiful and loveable. Children. Great art. The wonders of nature. Existence itself. The good and just person or the sublime act.

     Life is full of suffering and ugliness; of evil and dying – Buddha sure is right about that. Who but a fool can be blind to it? If this is all you can see, then, if you think it through, you will end up with Tolstoy, who wrote: “The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.”

    But joy and wonder are also possible because with a little bit of luck it is not all suffering and ugliness, evil and death. Ugliness and suffering, evil and death are then only properly understood in the light of goodness, beauty, love, joy, and wonder. Philosophy begins in the faith (trust) that the latter are more revealing of Being than the former, and that evil, death, and suffering must be understood in light of what is good, true, and beautiful. How what human beings do to one another challenges that faith!

    To wonder leads to the desire to know (in a certain way). When you fall in love with someone, and are in the grip of that joy, you want to spend all your time with them and learn everything you can about them. The least detail seems full of significance. Not the kind of knowledge that science or the pseudo-science of psychology can give. Not even the “theoretical” knowledge that in some readings Plato and Aristotle sought – an outside kind of knowledge, a bloodless kind of knowledge; at worst, the kind of knowledge to need to have to gain power over what is known (as science gives certain individuals and organizations power over nature through engineering and technology). It is a very different kind of knowing, one that can never be ended because any object that inspires wonder by definition explodes the categories of finite understanding.

    What is loved is like a great book that we can read over and over again, and generations can read over and over again, and always find fresh new insights. Nature is experienced like that great book, but it exceeds by far the book that is but a small part of it in complexity and wonder.

    Wonder inspires love, and love reveals the Good and the Real. The wisdom that philosophy sought in its origin – Socrates himself is the main object of wonder in Plato, the reality and the wisdom that Plato seeks as a lover – is an ever-deepening, never-ending quest to get to know that which inspires love. 

 Interlocking ideas, interlocking questions

What is real? What can we know? How do our ideas and thoughts relate to what they are ideas and thoughts of? How should we think of the mind? Against the background of what assumptions do such questions even make sense?  What can be hope for? How should I live?

    Being in the world, we cannot avoid such questions. Or rather, avoiding them means accepting answers thoughtlessly. We answer the questions in the form our lives take whether we think about them or not. 

    You can’t answer one of these questions without answering the other one, and others besides these two. More precisely, ideas about the limits of what can be real condition our ideas about what we can know (and understand, interpret, judge, feel – the entire intellect), and both relate to ideas of what language is and how it connects to realty; what the human mind or  intellect is; about what human beings are, and more. 

     If you think the only things that can be real are the things that can be known by science, you won’t believe you really love your children, because you will only believe you see the world right when the scientific method justifies your beliefs - and there is no way to find love real within science. At the most expansive science would reduce love of children to something evolutionary that the survival of the species, not a finding someone's existence good and wonderful. 

     If you pursue a career because it affords money and status, as a means to the end of money and status, you have also answered all the questions through that choice. Having make your life choices, your answers if you were asked and wanted to give an answer, would conform with those prior life choices. They would be unreflective justifications of those choices in all likelihood. 

   Philosophy is not about validating your choices, preferences, identity, or religion. It can get uncomfortable because it can undermine the kind of account that justifies a life devoted to things like wealth and status - or to latching on to an identity. The wise person loves to be corrected. Philosophy frees you to think about your life from a higher perspective. It orients you away from the self and toward what is truly good, toward truth. 

   

It is Kilian's birthday today. It amazes me how much joy a child can bring into life. It depresses me that so many people close it off - something damaged in their hearts. Over generations perhaps. I guess I am fortunate that my children can make me so happy. 

Getting Real

 

The closer you get to the grave, the more real things become – not only death but life, your life as a whole, the lives of beloved people, and the lives of strangers better and worse; the light, the colors, the beauty of the earth, the little things that are part of your world - how precious it all becomes when you are about to lose it! Which means we spend much of our lives not aware of reality in all its fullness. 

   In this connection, I can’t stop thinking about the dying scene of Plato’s Socrates, a character I have loved throughout the dialogs but who becomes alien to me precisely during this scene when it matters most, when in a sense the meaning of his life is revealed.

    During his trial and sentencing to death for heresy and corrupting the young as portrayed in the Apology, the Athenian majority (a slim one) thought to do him the worst evil by putting him to death. He – for me hilariously – deprived them of their satisfaction by presenting a dispassionate argument to the effect that death means either unconsciousness (likened to a deep, restful sleep) or an afterlife for the soul. If, moreover, there is an afterlife for the soul, then rewards and punishments as measured by the goodness of one’s life on earth. As Socrates does not doubt the goodness of his life, a life devoted to inquiry in the pursuit of goodness and truth, he anticipates a wonderful afterlife in which he can go on learning and deepening his understanding. In either case, death is not an evil. The ignorant Athenian majority imagine they are doing him harm but in fact, they are doing him good. I enjoy imagining their perplexity.

    Facing immediate death in the Phaedo, Socrates delves into arguments concerning the immortality of the soul, but without much sense of urgency and not overly invested in the outcome. It’s like he knows the answer – perhaps he has had a vision of the Good, as portrayed in the myth he concludes the chain of arguments with. It is like he is just curious to see how close human reasoning can get to it. And then the scene that disturbs me. Socrates indicates that he should take the poison. Crito objects, telling Socrates that there is still time and that many prisoners don't take the poison until well into the night. Socrates replies that men cling too desperately to life, whereas he has no reason to fear death. Socrates is brought the cup of hemlock, which he receives quite cheerfully. Socrates offers a prayer to the gods that his journey from this world to the next may be prosperous – a prayer that suggests that life is a disease and death its cure. Then he downs the cup in one gulp. At this point, Phaedo and all the others break down in tears of grief. Socrates chastises them, saying he sent the women away to avoid such a show of tears and urges his friends to be brave. Ashamed by his rebuke, Socrates' friends fall silent.

     This scene, as I respond to it, embodies the following view of the meaning of death:

·        It is a good thing because life is a misfortune, at least to the extent it is not lived in search of the wisdom of its own unimportance.

·        Grieving over the death of a beloved friend is like an irrational superstition, based on a mistake of sorts – the belief that life is good and death is bad.  

·        Facing death does not really involve courage, not in the sense most people understand courage – as the overcoming of the fear of death (or harm) to do the good thing. The fear itself is irrational. It is a matter of knowledge and acting on that knowledge. The knowledge that death is not an evil takes away the fear, a fear that arises only in our ignorance.

This is the key to Socrates. It tells us why as a soldier he retreated before the Spartans while perfectly calm, inspiring the wonder of his fellows. Death was a matter of indifference; life not something to cling to. It tells us why a good man can’t be harmed: because nothing done to him, not even killing him, touches the soul devoted to goodness. This life doesn’t matter once the philosopher has arrived at that insight. It tells us why it is better to suffer rather than do injustice: doing injustice damns your soul; suffering injustice doesn’t. This death scene ties all the fundamental Socratic thoughts together.

     I am sure that grief is not irrational, not a superstition. It is a response to the reality of loving another and losing that beloved person. To love another person is to affirm their life in this world. To lose that person leaves a void in this life. This life matters if you love. Thus death does mean a real loss. The Athenians did Socrates an evil by having his executed. Socrates did his friends an injustice by chastising them for grieving, violating in a way their love for him. If he had said “courage, friends, courage” – meaning overcome your fear, don’t lose hope even in the face of death – that would have been human. But he equates them with pre-rational women, who were considered by most Greeks as purely emotional creatures, not much advanced beyond childhood. He shames them for their grief, which is to say, their love for him. 

     To me, that reveals a nihilism as deep as the abyss, at least concerning this world. What can friendship mean in a world in which life is a disease and death the cure? I think the friendship between Socrates and anyone could only have been a form of pity, a willingness to go back into the cave of the world a lead a few promising souls out of it. No space for affirming life; thus no space for affirming worldly friendship. It’s cold. Almost fanatical. The only thing that distinguishes Socrates from, say, the 9/11 terrorists is his love for the Good, the transcendent Good in whose light he saw the world as nothing more than a dark cave of fantasy to escape from.

   In short, I don’t think Socrates could face the reality of death and love. I won’t do it here, but it is interesting to compare Socrates’ death with Jesus’. There was no “let this cup pass from me” or “my God, my God, why hath Thou forsaken me” with Socrates because he did not “so love the world.”

   When my time comes, I know it will take all my courage to die lucidly and with some dignity (if I am given that chance). Life is precious. I won’t “rage at the dying of the light” like a juvenile existentialist. I accept my mortality. I don’t think life at any cost is a worthy attitude. Life is not something to cling to at any cost. But in its mortal form, it is precious.

   And my grief, ironically, is precious because it is the form my relationship must take with people I have loved and lost. Not only grief. There is gratitude mixed with my grief. But I won’t treat it as an irrational superstition.

 Death and Philosophy

  Philosophy - life! - only gets interesting when death gets real. It is our mortality that makes the question of meaning so inescapable. Socrates in the Phaedo said that philosophy is preparation to die, that philosophy was already a kind of dying to the world. I think Socrates was able to face death because he had made, through his philosophy, the grief of his friends unintelligible. He had made himself into a kind of android, an artificial intelligence. Not in general but in that scene, which is one of the few that I suffer to read. (Plato made him into that. I suspect that character was more Plato in a certain mood than Socrates.)

   To take to sting of death you must make life on this earth meaningless, or terrible, a disease.  Or you must make death unreal: for example, what is really alive in a spirit, which leaves the body, which is not you or your life, when the body ceases to be. But you body is of the earth, and that is just another way of demeaning earthly life.

  To say yes to this world is to let the sting of death cause you fear and grief. Life affirmed is at best bittersweet. 

Celebrations as a Yes to Life and the World

It is Kelly’s birthday today. I can’t be with her. Here I offer some thoughts about celebrating birthdays – in connection with the last two entries. Not as good as a birthday party, but...

To celebrate anything presupposes a certain kind of world.  You can’t say anything meaningful about celebrations – similar in this to eros and death – without reflecting on the whole world in the background.

A celebration is set apart from the everyday work world. A celebration is not an everyday occurrence. It is something special. Apart. It is an interruption of our normal experience of time.  I recall the absurdity of Monty Python’s depiction of Heaven: every day is Christmas. If every day were Christmas, there would be no Christmas. Celebrations only exist in a world in which the workday is the norm. No work, no celebration. Only work, however – and no celebration. Work would become a form of Hell without anything to celebrate.

The luxury class loses the reality of celebration. A life of luxury and ease thus seems to me a form of despair; in any case, a life in which celebrating life is not possible. Their pseudo-celebrations are more an expression of the horror of the vacuum than a genuine celebration of anything. There are so many reasons for seeing the life of a billionaire as a foretaste of Hell. Well, you can’t serve God and Mammon.

A celebration, however, cannot just be reduced to a non-work time. Work is typically ‘for the sake of’ something outside the work – to sustain biological and social life. It may be for the sake of the community or one’s clients. Celebrations have no external purpose. Everything that is part of a celebration is without practical purpose. There is an element of play involved.

 A celebration – to live through a good or special day. What is a good or special day? That depends on what you think a human being is. If you think it were better had human beings never existed, obviously there would be nothing to celebrate. There must, therefore, be something good in play. We celebrate only what is good. A celebration points to the best in what we are. A celebration points almost to a vision of a kind of paradise. A celebration is connected to a vision of human happiness.

 A celebration lives from a yes-saying to the world and to our lives in the world. If your world version is this:

Human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. It's a sick joke that the closer we get to truth, the further we get from meaning. The rational thing to do is to stop breeding and die out, or blow out our brains, but we're all too scared of the unknown.

then I can’t imagine you celebrating. This is something else essential to a genuine celebration. The celebration brings to our awareness an aspect of life that work cannot, at least most work cannot. I think that we may become aware that the world itself, in the face of human evil and misery, is something sublime, some “good, very good” as God says of it in Genesis. A celebration holds up a vision that negates evil and misery. Celebrating only makes sense in a world version that leaves conception space for the goodness of existence.

Birthdays in particular have this reference. If we were nothing more than exemplars of some original model – like a Ford Fiesta is at once a particular car but more fundamentally a replica of a model that can be reproduced – then birthday celebrations would make no sense. We don’t celebrate the birthdays of cows on a farm because they (in our conceptions of them anyway) lack the individuality that raises them above others of their kind. One cow is much like another. Nor do we grieve for them as we do when we lose a father or a mother. We don’t celebrate their lives in a funeral ritual or give them gravestones. The Romans did not celebrate the lives of the slaves they oppressed either. They felt no remorse for any evil done because it was not intelligible to them to see anything special in the human being as such. There was nothing that violated the nature of things to make property of other human beings - to use them as property. Raping a slave was one use of property among others. 

 Human beings are potentially always a new beginning. No human being has ever been like my daughter. No human being is like her now. No human being will ever be like her in the future. It is not that she is not similar to every other human being biologically. It is not that she does not share similarities with other people of her own culture. But her story is no one else’s story. Her words and her actions have the potential to make a difference in the world. If that is the way human beings are conceived in your world version, celebrating their advent into the world will make sense.

But there is also the sublime aspect. The faith that it is “good, very good” that she came into the world. That it is wonderful that she exists. That her life is a gift. All these expressions belong to the language of love. Love just is a yes-saying to the existence of the loved one. It is joy at seeing – and the celebration should bring this out if it is genuine – the true meaning of the loved one’s individual existence. That gets covered up in the everyday work world. Perhaps it must be covered up to see it in celebrating?

I recall as a boy experiencing another celebration – Christmas. One song went deep with me – O Holy Night. Rather one line in this song:

                                     Long lay the world

                                    In sin and error pining

                                    Til he appeared

                                    And the soul felt its worth.

 In my youthful mind, “he”, Jesus, was a divine gift of love. Love makes the soul feel its worth. The Romans – I had seen enough movies about them – had no idea of human worth. They had no idea that ‘it is good, very good’ that a particular human being was born. Their economy lived from slavery. They entertained themselves by watching men slaughter each other in the arena. They can and did inflict genocide on peoples that opposed them. Human worth for them was a function of being born into the aristocracy of a state powerful enough to impose its will on others. There was nothing loveable about human beings as such. I say: there was nothing loveable about the damn Romans. They were blind.

To celebrate a birthday is to allow to soul to feel its worth. That is sublime, though we tend to take it for granted in the everyday work-a-day world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Further Thoughts on Axioms and Worldmaking

  

 In the last entry. I thought of sets of core convictions we hold at different levels – convictions we at any time are incapable of doubting – as analogous to axioms in a logical-mathematical system. Here I want to add another analogy: analogies between “world-making” (Goodman) and writing the software for a virtual world – as in a video game or a fantasy movie. How are our core convictions, the ones that in some sense make the world we live in at any given time, like the rules of the software engineer constructing virtual reality?

·        Like the analogy of constructing a formal logical language, constructing a virtual world involves establishing a set of rules that govern the behavior of entities within the system. These rules define how objects interact with each other and respond to various stimuli. Well, no world-maker is free the do that. Physical realities like gravity are a real part of our world and can’t be imagined away, even if we may never exactly understand what gravity is. There are physical and biological facts of life that no world version can change. Note, however, that nature was not always imagined as a closed system obeying fixed rules. The idea of God resurrecting Jesus from the dead, while miraculous to be sure, was not a violation of the rules of the universe for Jesus' contemporaries as it is for us. It is more difficult for us to believe. It is more difficult for us not to understand it as myth. The convictions about nature that are part of our mental DNA can usually be set aside only in a difficult rebellion and at the price of open irrationality. Like believing the sky is a dome or the earth is a flat disc. 

 ·        Writing a program involves defining the syntax and semantics of the virtual world. The syntax specifies the correct structure of commands and statements, while the semantics define the meaning and behavior associated with those constructs. Similarly, formal languages in logic have syntax and semantics that dictate how symbols can be combined and interpreted. Again, no world-maker can substitute a private language for the languages we live with. That is a part of the world as it is in itself.

·        Ensuring consistency and coherence is crucial in both cases. In programming, this involves avoiding bugs and ensuring that the virtual world behaves predictably. In formal logic, maintaining consistency ensures that the logical system is sound and free from contradictions. In world-making, a latent contradiction does not exist until we become conscious of it. We also live with tensions between our convictions just beneath the surface of consciousness. These may cause unease or cognitive dissonance. But we typically only confront contradictions between our core convictions when life forces that upon us. Philosophy is partly the attempt to make everything cohere and also respect those aspects of the world that are given – gravity, the need for oxygen and water to live, sexual reproduction, etc. In any case, unlike a formal language or a computer program for a virtual world, we typically live with contradictions. Perhaps we are partly defined by the contradictions we live with.

         We don’t program our worlds or construct them from scratch. We are not creators. We inherit a set of possibilities, take some variation of them over, and perhaps if we are alive extend them – we do not create ex nihilo. In that world-making is not analogous to writing the program for a virtual world. Still, I can imagine representing my world version by identifying as many core convictions as possible on all levels and modeling a virtual world to represent – in a novel, an autobiography, or even a computer game.

 . . .

    In a footnote, I mentioned that formative experiences are almost the foundation of our world versions. I think we must distinguish between different qualities of formative experiences and different characters that live them. It makes a difference whether, for example, I master some human discipline. Bach was able through music to have formative experiences that I cannot, or cannot directly. Perhaps indirectly, when I listen attentively to his music. Also it makes a different whether an individual subliminally comes down on the side of certain core convictions because they are bitter at life, have an urge to elevate their egos (their status, etc.) over other egos, rationalize guilt, console themselves, make themselves “happy”, etc. Or whether they strive to become virtuous, strive for truth, strive to see the world right, etc. Of course, we all have a bit of both in us, some further on the good end of the scale, others on the bad. But things like this must be known to evaluate the depth of one’s core convictions.