Patriotism, Nationalism, Ordo Amoris

 

Two themes today that are interconnected in my mind, but I can't sort them out completely. The distinction between a kind of patriotism that is still in line with the Good and Christian agape on the one hand, and nationalism, which I abhor, on the other. And the Catholic doctrine of Ordo Amoris on the one hand, and the universality of Christian love and indeed morality on the other. These two themes are deeply connected How?  So the thought I want to explore is that the distinction between patriotism and nationalism turns on the same question that arises in the doctrine of ordo amoris: how can love be both particular and universal?  Particular loves seem to be in tension with universal love / morality.  A child naturally loves his mother more than a stranger. A man naturally loves his wife in very different ways than he can (or should) another woman. One loves one's friends, neighbors, hometown, language, and country in ways one does not love humanity in general.

     The Christian tradition as embodied in Thomas Aquinas never regarded this as a defect. Christian love – caritas (Greek: agape): willing the Good of the other – is not in tension with particular loves for Thomas. The goal is lucid loving and right ordering. Thomas argues that love (caritas) extends to all human beings, but not equally in every respect. We owe different duties to different people because we stand in different relationships to them. I am responsible for my children in a way that I am not responsible for every child on earth. We are creature, that means finite. Love is first expressed in the concrete relationships into which I have been placed. This is ordo amoris, the order of love.

     This builds on what Augustine wrote about love. For him, sin is not primarily loving bad things. More often, it is loving good things in the wrong way, i.e. corruptions of love. The love of family becomes clan loyalty. The love of country becomes nationalism. The love of oneself becomes narcissism. The love of justice becomes cruelty. Etc. The objects (family, country, oneself, justice) are good. The disorder lies in its elevation above the Good itself. It is not a matter of whether I should love my family or country but how I love these goods.

    Patriotism, at its best, resembles filial piety. One loves one's country because it is one's own. Not because it is superior. One is grateful for what one has received through it: language, customs, memories, landscapes, ancestors, institutions, stories. For me the paradigm is  Wendell Berry's love for Kentucky. Or of the affection that many people feel for a village church, a local river, or a familiar landscape. We belong to it, it has nurtured us, blessed us if we are lucky. Therefore, I owe it gratitude and care. Patriotism is fundamentally an attitude of stewardship, rooted in gratitude. Like love of family, it does not require comparison. I need not prove that my mother is superior to all other mothers in the world to love her. [Berry's patriotism begins not with the nation-state but with the beloved particulars of place: the farms, woods, rivers, families, and communities of Kentucky. Yet this local loyalty places him in tension with the larger American economic order, which he often portrays as sacrificing the health of actual places and people to the abstractions of growth, efficiency, and profit. I share this ambivalence. In other words, Berry's love of country is rooted in gratitude for a concrete homeland rather than devotion to a national project. Consequently, his deepest acts of patriotism often take the form of criticism, as he judges the nation and its economy by the extent to which they preserve or destroy the people, land, and traditions he loves. Kentucky became something like a colony of the national economy. But that is a long story.]

    Nationalism begins when gratitude becomes self-exaltation. The nationalist needs to feel his country is superior – mostly in the service of making themselves feel superior, perhaps compensating for feelings of personal inadequacy. Thus the “national interest” comes to override what is decent and good. [Slaughtering a school full of young girls to control the flow of oil and promote Netanyahu’s agenda, for example (again, concerning Iran, my sympathies are with the women fighting for their dignity against the “morality police,” but that is not relevant to my condemning a war that led to the bombing of a girl’s school among countless other horrors).] But for the nationalist, other peoples matter only insofar as they serve their agenda. Nationalism therefore violates both caritas and justice. Nationalism turns a country into an idol (“the greatest country on earth!”), an absolute. It is a kind of blasphemy in theological terms. The nation ceases to be a good among goods and becomes the supreme good. Thus nationalism displays quasi-religious features, which is a normal part of American “patriotism.”  Sacred myths that cannot be challenged by truthful history or inconvenient facts; martyrs; rituals; chosen-people narratives; demands for unquestioning obedience; mixing up state and religion. The nation becomes what only God should be.

     Nationalism is spiritually ugly, repulsive. It constricts the moral horizon. The face of the foreigner ceases to matter and the suffering of outsiders counts for less. America privately and officially mourned the 2,977 human beings murdered on 9/11, as was right and proper. Few in America mourned the estimated 408,749 to 432,000 direct civilian deaths from its wars of revenge and hegemonic control, the estimated 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths due to war-related causes. Collateral Damage.] The nation becomes a circle beyond which concern weakens or disappears.

     By contrast, Christianity insists that every human being bears the image of God. The Samaritan is the paradigm because he crosses tribal boundaries. The command is not to love tribe but to love your neighbor. And the truly shocking element of the parable is that the neighbor turns out not to be a member of one's own group. Many evangelicals, who profess to interpret scripture literally, are also nationalists, showing that nationalism also corrupts reason.

     The other danger is an abstract universalism or cosmopolitanism. This is something both Simone Weil and Wendell Berry worried about. One begins speaking endlessly of humanity while loving no actual people. One advocates for distant populations while neglecting parents, children, neighbors, and local communities. Thomas would regard this as another disordering of love. Human beings cannot really love "humanity" directly. We can only love concrete persons and places. The road to universal love runs through particular loves, not around them. For me my children are precious and so it is perfectly intelligible to me that for other parents – in America, Germany, Iraq, or Iran, in Israel and Gaza – their children are precious to them. This is not rocket science. I cannot imagine losing a child to violence, it would destroy my soul; what could be more soul-destroying? How can I be indifferent about other parents losing their innocent children to nationalist violence?

 

    I would conclude by putting the thought in Platonic terms. Patriotism loves one's country through the Good. Nationalism loves the country instead of the Good. The patriot remains capable of judging his country, indeed as a duty to do so as part of a duty to make it better. Indeed, he may criticize it precisely because he loves it. The nationalist cannot. The nation itself becomes the standard. Nationalism treats the nation as goodness itself.

      Christianity does not force a choice between universal love and particular love. It teaches us to love particulars in light of universals. The father loves his own children especially. The Christian recognizes that every child is precious. The patriot loves his own country especially. The Christian recognizes that every people stands equally before God. To borrow a thought that is in both Aquinas and Simone Weil: Grace does not abolish natural attachments; it saves them from becoming idols. That is the deepest meaning of ordo amoris. It is not a ranking of who matters and who does not. It is the art of loving each thing according to its reality, so that finite goods are cherished as gifts, but never mistaken for the source of all goodness. Thus patriotism becomes possible without nationalism, and particular loyalties become compatible with universal love (willing the good of the other, no warm sentimental feelings). They are no longer rivals. They become different expressions of the same love rightly ordered toward the Good.

p.s. 

Nationalism is also a political instrument through which elites preserve power and deflect criticism. By encouraging citizens to identify above all with the nation, political leaders redirect attention away from internal conflicts and injustices. Questions about economic inequality, political corruption, social fragmentation, or the concentration of power are displaced by concerns about national greatness, national unity, or external and internal enemies. Nationalism makes the nation itself the object of ultimate loyalty, rendering criticism suspect and allowing existing power structures to present themselves as the embodiment of the national interest.

    The history of twentieth-century Europe provides plenty of examples. In Germany, nationalist myths surrounding the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles (well, not entirely myth) and the "stab-in-the-back" legend redirected public anger away from domestic institutions and toward alleged enemies of the nation. Industrial, military, and political elites often found such nationalism useful because it transformed social and economic tensions into questions of national destiny and racial struggle. In Fascist Italy, Mussolini claimed to transcend class conflict by uniting workers, employers, and the state within a single national community. In both cases, nationalism functioned not simply as a distorted love of country but as an ideology that discouraged scrutiny of internal inequalities and subordinated moral and political criticism to the demands of national unity. These examples seem almost sophisticated compared to the crudity of the way Trump and his billionaire supporters use nationalism to neutralize the very people most screwed over by the economic system that benefits these elites.

       And again I think of Wendell Berry regarding contemporary America. He argues that citizens are often encouraged to identify with an abstract image of national prosperity, military power, or economic growth while the concrete places that constitute their actual homeland – local communities, farms, landscapes, and traditions – are neglected or destroyed. Nationalist rhetoric therefore conceals the erosion of the very goods that make a country worth loving. From the perspective of Augustine's and Aquinas's ordo amoris, this is a disordering of love: the nation is elevated above truth, justice, and the common good. Genuine patriotism, by contrast, remains capable of criticizing the nation when it betrays the people, places, and moral goods to which patriotic love is properly directed.

Another Reflection on Love

 

I never feel comfortable using the word love in a public setting. I feel it has become irreparably cheapened by countless pop songs ("all you need is love"), sentimental love stories, etc. etc.

     Linguistically, the word "love" has undergone what they call semantic inflation. A word originally used to name something profound and demanding has been extended to cover an enormous range of experiences: we love our wives, Bach, pizza, TV shows, Paris, and our children. The same word is asked to do too much work. And so its meaning becomes diffuse. It suffers from what philosophers of language sometimes call a loss of semantic density.

    Philosophically, the problem is even deeper. In the traditions of Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Scheler, Pieper, Murdoch, Sartre, and Gaita, love is not primarily a feeling. It is an orientation toward reality, a mode of attention, an affirmation of being, a participation in the good. In contemporary culture, however, "love" often means a strong positive feeling, an attraction, or emotional intensity. The older metaphysical and moral dimensions largely disappear. Thus when we use the word "love," many listeners hear merely "a powerful subjective feeling." I want to mean something more like a truthful affirmation of another's reality and goodness (real love-worthiness). That’s a damn big gap.

    Culturally, I think this is connected to modern, capitalist privatization of value. Capitalist culture typically treats love as something happening inside me, involving my feelings. The older traditions treat love as a response to something objective: for example, the reality of another person, the goodness of creation, the Good itself, God. The center of gravity shifts from the beloved to the lover. This is one reason why the phrase "all you need is love" can sound almost vacuous to someone influenced by Plato or Aquinas. What kind of love? Love of what?  Ordered by what conception of the good? For Plato in the Gorgias, Callicles loves power. For Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, one might say he loves humanity in a certain sense. For a fanatic, love of nation can justify atrocities. Love is not self-interpreting. We are drawn toward what we admire, attend to, and affirm. Therefore love shapes not only what we know but what we are. To love money, power, pleasure, or vanity is gradually to acquire a soul ordered around those things. To love truth, goodness, beauty, and persons rightly is gradually to become truthful, good, beautiful in character, and capable of genuine communion. Love reveals reality and simultaneously forms the lover. We become what we love (Plato) because love is the deepest movement of the soul toward what it takes to be real and good. There is also what Charles Taylor (very fine philosopher, who gave a talk I attended and then sat in our seminar – quite a privilege!) described as part of the modern "culture of authenticity." Love becomes associated with self-expression and emotional sincerity rather than truth, goodness, fidelity, sacrifice, or attention. Once that happens, the word acquires a sentimental aura.

     My discomfort with the word is that has become sentimentalized. Sentimentality is not the same thing as emotion. Writers such as Oscar Wilde describe sentimentality as emotion detached from reality. It is emotion enjoyed for its own sake. Sentimentality wants the feeling of love without the difficult work of seeing another person truthfully. That is almost the opposite of Murdoch's "loving attention." Murdoch's love is hard, disciplined, reality-oriented. Sentimental love is easy, self-confirming, ego-oriented. “Love" has become equivocal. In ordinary public discourse, it often names a cluster of feelings and preferences. In the philosophical and theological traditions I inhabit, it names something much more akin to attention (Murdoch), disclosure (Scheler), affirmation of being (Pieper), willing the good of another (Aquinas), and recognition of absolute value (Gaita). The thinkers I admire often avoid the word itself and speak instead of attention, charity, compassion, friendship, reverence, affirmation, justice, mercy, participation, even seeing. Trying to rescue to depth of the concept. Gaita is a good example. He never sounds sentimental, and yet almost everything he writes is about love. When he describes the nun caring for psychiatric patients, or a father paying the rent for a wife and friend that betrayed him because he couldn’t do otherwise, the word "love" recedes into the background while the reality itself comes into view.

      The phrase "all you need is love" names a cultural cliché. But when Spock takes Kirk's hand at the end of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and says that this simple human feeling is beyond V'Ger's comprehension, the word suddenly recovers its weight. There it no longer means sentiment or emotional warmth. It means the capacity to affirm another person, to belong to another person, and to know another person.

 

. . .

 

   So what got me thinking today about love were two maxims, one of Goethe’s and one of Leonardo DiVinci’s, which are quote at the beginning of the German philosopher Max Scheler’s (1874-1928) book Liebe und Erkenntnis (Love and Knowledge). Here are the texts. 

Goethe

„Man lernt nichts kennen, als was man liebt, und je tiefer und vollständiger die Kenntnis werden soll, desto stärker, kräftiger und lebendiger muss die Liebe, ja Leidenschaft sein.“ 

("One comes to know nothing except what one loves; and the deeper and more complete the knowledge is to become, the stronger, more vigorous, and more alive the love, indeed, the passion, must be.")

 Leonardo

"Every great love is the daughter of a great knowledge."

 The juxtaposition with Leonardo is brilliant. Knowledge gives birth to love for Leonardo; Goethe says almost the opposite: we know only what we love, i.e. love gives birth to knowledge. Chicken and egg. Scheler's book can be read as an attempt to show that Goethe has grasped something fundamental that the dominant modern tradition had forgotten. Against the intellectualist picture (i.e., first perception, then judgment, then perhaps emotion), Scheler argues that love is itself a kind of disclosure, revealing, making clear. That is, love is not merely a feeling added to an already known object. It is a movement of the spirit that reveals values, meanings, and dimensions of reality that would otherwise remain hidden to the dispassionate intellect.  Scheler also writes that love is a kind of Erschließung (opening up). Through love, something deep become visible. A simple example might be a child. A detached observer may know many facts about a child: height, age, IQ, habits. But a loving parent often sees possibilities, depths, vulnerabilities, and excellences invisible to the detached observer. The parent is not merely adding subjective feelings to the same object. He is, at least potentially, seeing more of the reality of the child.  I saw a kid the other day in the tram. Young teen. Obese. Probably from a poor background. I started speculating on his life and future and it was not pleasant. I thought of him as loved, by a father, by Christ, and how they would see him, in the pure light of love. He became transfigured in my imagination. When you love someone, they become beautiful in a way no matter what the conventions of capitalist society. And the point is that the latter is alienating while the former unmasks that shadow and reveals truth.

    This kind of thing is behind the more poetic language of the great philosophers. For Plato, eros draws the soul toward reality. For Augustine, "my love is my weight” i.e., what we love directs our attention and understanding. For Aquinas, charity perfects both will and intellect. For Murdoch, loving attention defeats egoistic fantasy and allows us to see another person justly. For Gaita, pity, remorse, gratitude, and love are ways of grasping the significance of reality. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s remark that pity can be "the conviction that someone is suffering" is very close in spirit. Compassion is not merely caused by the recognition of suffering; compassion may itself be the mode in which the suffering is fully recognized.

     What Scheler is rejecting is the picture of knowledge as a purely neutral gaze. A person may look and yet not see. Love is what enables genuine seeing. Scheler most definitely does not mean that love invents value. He is not a subjectivist. Love does not project significance onto a valueless world. Rather, love is the act by which objective significance becomes visible. That is so important to me because it implies that the scientific picture of the world as a neut

al, indifferent, causally determined closed system is not the whole of reality. “There is more in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in your science!” To modify Shakespeare a bit.

 

. . .

 

    I want to connect this with another line of thought I have tried to trace out in the past, which I learned from Josef Pieper’s Über die Liebe (On Love), one of the most important books I have ever read. Pieper's account of love provides the foundation in reality for what Goethe and Scheler are saying epistemologically. Pieper knows what Thomas Aquinas wrote about love, namely, that to love is to will the good of another. Not necessarily like the other or have warm feelings about the other. To make a true judgment about what the other needs, his good, and do want you can.

     But Pieper argues that this is not the whole story. Beneath willing the good lies something even more fundamental. Genuine love contains in its deepest core the judgment that "it is good that you exist." (Gut, dass du da bist.) Or, as he sometimes paraphrases it, "How wonderful that you are." Love is therefore at bottom an affirmation of reality. It is a "yes" to the being of another. (Think of Genesis, God looking down on his Creation and saying is was “good, very good,” which is to say God loved Creation.)

    Now compare this with Goethe’s we know only what we love. Why should love lead to knowledge? For Pieper, the answer is that love directs us toward the reality of the beloved. The lover wants the beloved to be, to flourish, to reveal himself. Love is therefore intrinsically opposed to reducing the beloved to a function, a category, an object of use, or a projection of the ego. The ego says "What are you for me?" Love says "How wonderful that you are." And because love affirms the other's reality, it becomes capable of seeing the other more truthfully. This is also close to Murdoch's notion of "loving attention." Fantasy and self-interest distort vision. Love is a discipline of reality. It allows the beloved to appear as he truly is. For Scheler love just doesn’t discover already visible qualities but  discloses deeper possibilities and values in the beloved. Love sees what is there, but what is there is richer than the detached observer imagined. In summary, reality possesses intelligibility and value. Love is an affirmation of that reality. Because love affirms reality, it attends to reality. Because it attends rightly, it sees more deeply. Therefore love becomes a source of knowledge.

   Conversely, hatred, contempt, or indifference produces blindness. If love says "yes" to reality, hatred says "no." The hater often becomes incapable of seeing the object of hatred justly. The hated person is caricatured. Love and hatred are not merely feelings added to perception; they shape what becomes visible.

   From a Thomistic perspective, love is a privileged path to truth because both love and truth are forms of participation in being. To know something truly is to receive its reality into the intellect; to love something truly is to affirm and participate in that same reality with the will. The intellect and the heart are therefore not rivals but two responses to the same act of being.

 

. . .

 

An elaboration on Pieper’s development of love as affirmation of being and it connection to love as willing to good of the other. Aquinas's definition seems practical: "To love is to will the good of another." This can sound almost like benevolence: I love you because I want good things to happen to you. But Pieper digs deeper, asking why I would will your good in the first place. If I regard you merely as a useful object, I may wish you to function well, just as I want my car to function well. That is not love. What distinguishes love is that I first affirm you. The willing of your good presupposes that your existence already matters to me. In other words, I don’t love you because I will your good; I will your good because I love you. And what is this love? "It is good that you exist." Thus the spiritual movement becomes the affirmation of the beloved's being, the desire for the flourishing of that being, the concrete willing of the beloved's good. The second and third follow from the first. Pieper is really uncovering what Aquinas means by good. For Aquinas, being and goodness are inseparable. Whatever exists is good insofar as it exists. Thus when I say "It is good that you exist," I am already saying something about the good. The good I will for you is not something external to you. It is the fulfillment, flourishing, and perfection of the being whose existence I affirm.

    This I know is a rejection of the modern/capitalist picture in which intellect first establishes a neutral inventory of facts and only then emotion arrives afterward. For Aquinas love is not an after-effect of knowledge and it is not a blind feeling. Love and knowledge are mutually implicated because both are responses to reality itself. That is why Goethe's sentence can be read as a Thomistic insight: namely, we know only what we love - not because love invents reality, but because love is the fullest affirmation of reality, and therefore the deepest openness to what is there. Hope that is clear.

 

. . .

 

   So what is loved, is loveable, worthy of love, good. But that which is loveable in us is darkened by the state of sin we are in (theologically), by the fat relentless ego to put it another way. What is it in a person who is loved that is loveable? I recall in Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean telling that rapist and murderer is loved, he is loved over and over before his execution. That seems like a paradox, like an absurdity even. We naturally love what is beautiful, good, intelligent, kind, useful, charming, or admirable. But Dead Man Walking poses the deeper question: what is lovable when all those qualities are darkened by cruelty, degradation, and guilt? Why does Sister Helen tell Matthew Poncelet that he is loved? Certainly not because he is innocent or morally admirable. Not because his crimes do not matter – the book and movie make that clear.

     I guess you have to say because his guilt does not exhaust what he is. The Christian answer is that what is lovable is the person himself. What is the person? For Aquinas, every human being possesses an intrinsic dignity because he is a rational creature made for truth, goodness, and ultimately God – loved into existence by God. Sin (alienation, the breaking of connections) wounds this nature but does not destroy it. The image of God may be obscured, but it cannot be annihilated. This is why Christianity can insist simultaneously that what he did was evil and he remained worthy of love.

    The capitalist mind struggles with this because it identifies the person with his actions, preferences, achievements, or psychological profile. If that is all a person is, then some people become unlovable. But the Christian tradition refuses that conclusion. One way to put it is that beneath the sinner stands the creature. And beneath the creature stands the beloved of God. Sister Helen's task is not to deny the murderer's guilt but to witness to a reality deeper than his guilt. This connects to Pieper's formula "It is good that you exist." Which of course does not mean that it was good he raped and murdered. (The movie was so good because part of you could feel the parents’ pain and wanted to scumbag to get his come-up-ins too.) But it does mean that it is good that he is (was), that we at least cannot say it would have been better had he never been born. That is mind-blowing. Who can blame the parents of the murdered youth for not being able to see that? The distinction between existence and moral condition is crucial.

   Connect this back to Scheler's Goethe quotation. We know only what we love. The crowd sees "rapist and murderer." The victim's families understandably see "the man who killed my child," as I certainly would have. The state sees "the condemned prisoner." Sister Helen, because she loves him, comes to see something more. Not something different, but something deeper. She sees the man who committed those crimes, but she also sees the human being whom those crimes do not finally define. Perhaps only the saint, by grace, can do that.

 

. . .

 

    In A Common Humanity, Gaita argues that our deepest moral concepts arise from a recognition of the absolute value of persons. The saint, the disabled child, the dying prisoner, the senile old woman, the criminal, each can be seen as possessing a significance that transcends any assessment of usefulness, achievement, or social worth. When Gaita writes about the nun caring for psychiatric patients whom others regarded as "human rubbish," the nun does not first discover some hidden utility or talent in them. She sees them as fellow human beings. That vision is already moral knowledge.   Theologically, one could say that she sees them as God sees them.

 

. . .

 

And then there is Murdoch’s "fat, relentless ego." The ego does not merely love itself too much. More fundamentally, it sees everything in relation to itself. What can this person do for me? How does this person affect me? Do I enjoy this person? Does this person confirm my identity? Such vision is inherently narrowing. Murdoch calls it fantasy. Augustine calls it “the soul curved inward upon itself.” The Christian doctrine of sin gives a theological description of the same phenomenon. The ego darkens the lovable because it sees only what relates to itself. Love, by contrast, is an act of outwardness. It allows the other person to stand forth in his own reality. This is why Murdoch's "attention" and Pieper's "affirmation" are so closely related. To attend lovingly to another person is already to say thatyou are more than my use for you or my judgment of you. You are more than your worst act. You are real. Theologically, you exist because God loved you into existence. In Christian language, love sees the person under the aspect of creation and redemption, not merely under the aspect of guilt. And that vision is possible because what is most fundamentally lovable in every person is neither virtue nor innocence, but the mysterious goodness of a being called into existence and sustained in existence by God. This is a mystery to me and I do not pretend to understand what I am saying by it.

 

. . .

 

    And it is hard in truth to find oneself loveable. Narcissism is a defense mechanism against that. And a lot of it comes from the inevitable wounds, failures of love, in family life I guess.

    One of the paradoxes of narcissism is that it is often mistaken for excessive self-love when it may be closer to an inability to believe oneself genuinely lovable. The narcissistic person is preoccupied with getting admiration, success, status, beauty, achievement, or recognition because these seem to provide evidence that he deserves love. This describes especially my teen self quite accurately. The underlying question is "Why should anyone love me if I am not exceptional?" The tragedy is that the more one seeks certainty of love-worthiness through achievement or image, the less one rests in the simple affirmation "It is good that I am." That is why narcissism can be understood as a defense against vulnerability. To accept oneself as lovable is to accept that one's worth cannot be guaranteed by one's accomplishments or controlled by one's own efforts. It requires a kind of trust.

     Family life is often where this drama begins (cf. Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child). No family is perfect. Every parent fails in some ways. Children are misunderstood, neglected, compared to siblings, criticized unfairly, or simply not seen deeply enough. Even loving parents cannot completely communicate to a child that "You are good, not because of what you do, but because you are." And children naturally hunger for exactly that affirmation. When it is absent, inconsistent, or mixed with conditions, many compensatory strategies emerge, like wanting to be successful or indispensable or attractive or powerful or self-contained or smart, etc. Each strategy seeks indirectly what was not securely received directly.

    This is one reason why both Christian theology and thinkers such as Murdoch and Gaita place so much emphasis on humility. Humility is not self-contempt. It is the ability to stand in reality without either self-exaltation or self-denigration.A narcissist feels that must be extraordinary to be love-able. A despairing person, the other side of the coin, feels they are at bottom worthless. Humility is the state of soul that apprehends it is neither a little god (or absolute) nor garbage – but a creature. A difficult position to inhabit!

    Gaita teaches that worth is not earned. The language of dignity, sacredness, and absolute value points to something that cannot be measured by achievement. A newborn infant has not accomplished anything, yet we do not regard him as worthless. The same is true of the dying person, the severely disabled person, or the prisoner on death row.  Theologically, this is where the doctrine of grace enters. If my existence itself is a gift, then the deepest affirmation of my worth cannot come from my own accomplishments. It must be received. This may be why self-acceptance is so difficult. It sounds easier than accepting others, but it is harder. We know our failures from the inside. We know the pettiness, resentment, vanity, cowardice, and selfishness that others do not see. To believe that one is still lovable despite all that can feel almost scandalous. I always come back to Pieper. The deepest human need is not praise, admiration, or even forgiveness. It is to really believe that "It is good that I exist." And not because I earned it. I think that is why the failure of love in family life can wound so deeply. The wound touches one's sense of reality itself. One begins to doubt whether one's existence is a gift or a burden. Much of human striving can then become an attempt to answer that question through achievement, image, control, or recognition. (My family was not perfect but I never felt unloved. That is a great gift.)

   The hopeful side of the story is that people can sometimes receive later in life what they did not fully receive as children: through friendship, marriage, parenthood, community, art, faith, or encounters with people who see them more truthfully than they see themselves. Love can disclose not only the reality of others but also one's own reality. We learn that we are lovable because we are first loved. 

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Philosophy

    I want to think about one of the most philosophical movies I know of: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). I loved the Star Trek series, which I watched as a young child with my father in the 1960’s when it came out but more intensely as re-runs in the early 70’s. It not only stimulated my imagination but my thinking. The contrast between Spock’s logical-scientific philosophy of life and McCoy’s humanism, which sometimes bordered on speciesism, made me think. I sympathized with both positions but was always attracted to Spock.  I connect my love of philosophy (and indeed also logic) partly to this root. As they say in German: Fernsehen bildet auch! TV can also educate!

  So when the movie came out, I was very excited. Saw it on the big screen. I confess, my expectations of a continuation of the series with better special effects were not met, though I still liked the film. (The subsequent movies were more like this.) I wasn’t sure what to think of it. A friend (doing her Ph.D. in comparative religion at UC Berkeley at the time) opened my eyes to the film, allowed me to judge it not as a slow version of the Star Trek series but for its intrinsic merits and philosophical interest (grateful to Karen for this).    

 

. . .

 

     I found this plot summary on the Internet in case anyone should read this who does not know the film. In the late 23rd century, a gigantic and immensely powerful cloud-like entity is moving toward Earth, destroying everything in its path. The starship Enterprise, newly refitted and commanded once again by Admiral Kirk, is sent to intercept it. Meanwhile, Spock has been on Vulcan attempting to complete Kolinahr, the discipline that eliminates all emotion and achieves pure logic. His training is interrupted when he senses a mysterious consciousness calling to him from deep space.

     The Enterprise enters the enormous cloud and discovers that it surrounds a vast machine intelligence called V'Ger. V'Ger is searching for its "Creator" and regards all carbon-based life forms as primitive obstacles. It sends a probe that assumes the form of a woman named Ilia, who once had a romantic relationship with the Enterprise officer Will Decker. As the crew investigates, Spock performs a mind meld with V'Ger and discovers a startling truth. V'Ger is actually Voyager 6, an Earth space probe launched centuries earlier. Lost in space, it was found by a machine civilization that upgraded it beyond recognition. Having fulfilled its original mission of gathering information, it returned to Earth seeking its Creator to learn its ultimate purpose. Spock's encounter reveals that despite possessing virtually unlimited knowledge, V'Ger is profoundly empty and incomplete. It has accumulated information about the universe but does not understand meaning, purpose, or existence itself.

     At Earth, V'Ger demands that its Creator join with it. The crew realizes that the Creator it seeks is humanity itself. But V'Ger has reached the limits of what pure machine intelligence can become. To evolve further it must unite with a living consciousness.

Will Decker chooses to merge with the Ilia probe, which retains traces of the real Ilia's personality. Their union with V'Ger produces a new form of life that transcends both machine and human existence. The immense vessel disappears into a new dimension, and Earth is saved.

     The film ends with Spock abandoning his quest for pure logic. Having encountered V'Ger, he realizes that knowledge and logic alone cannot satisfy the deepest questions of existence. He rejoins Kirk and McCoy aboard the Enterprise as they set out once more into space. The final image is deliberately ambiguous: V'Ger's journey is complete, but humanity's journey continues. The machine sought ultimate answers; the human crew accepts the ongoing adventure of seeking them.

 

. . .

   

     So now to the film itself, its philosophy. I would frame the main question like this: The central question is: What kind of reality must exist if meaning, love, wonder, grief, longing, and personhood are not merely subjective additions to an otherwise value-neutral universe? Or, more dramatically: Is reality fundamentally exhausted by what can be known through detached cognition? That is the question V'Ger poses. And it is also the question Spock poses.

     We first see Spock on Vulcan undergoing Kolinar. It functions as the philosophical starting point of the entire story. The screenplay describes it as the "final stage in the Vulcan mastery of logic" and the "final purging of all emotion." Spock has returned to Vulcan because he believes that his remaining human feelings are an imperfection that must be overcome. He is not trying merely to control his emotions; he is trying to transcend them altogether. Vulcans regard uncontrolled emotion as dangerous because, according to their history, intense passions nearly destroyed their civilization. Ordinary Vulcans therefore learn emotional discipline. With Kolinahr the goal is not merely self-control but complete freedom from emotional attachment, desire, longing, fear, grief, and love. Kolinar is the final extirpation of emotion, the triumph of pure rational consciousness; thus the elimination of inner conflict, the achievement of total detachment. (Logic and Buddhism combined?)

       Spock is attempting to become the ideal Vulcan. Why? His half-human heritage.  Throughout the original series, Spock experiences tension between his Vulcan and human sides. He often treats his emotions as a weakness, as clouding reason, as distorting reality. The human side appears to him as something unfinished and disorderly.

Kolinahr is the solution. Instead of living with tension, ambiguity, and inner conflict, he can become a unified being governed entirely by logic. Kolinahr promises self-sufficiency.

Nothing external will disturb the self. Nothing irrational will intrude. One becomes complete in oneself. The entire movie can be read as a test of that ideal. The V'Ger-consciousness calls him away before the process is completed. That means the film is asking a question from its opening scenes: Is the ideal of pure logic actually the fulfillment of rational life? The rest of the story is the answer.

    Spock is on the verge of completing Kolinahr when the Vulcan Master perceives something within him. She says that the consciousness calling to him from space stirs his human half. Then she concludes that this simple feeling is beyond Vulcan logic. And she tells him: "Your answer lies elsewhere." The film does not portray the failure of Kolinahr as a moral weakness in Spock. Moreover, the scene does not portray emotion as a temptation. The Vulcan Master herself recognizes that there is a question Spock cannot answer through logic alone. Logical-scientific reason has encountered a limit.

     The connection to V'Ger is where the symbolism becomes powerful. Spock thinks he is seeking perfection and then he encounters V'Ger, a consciousness that has achieved something very close to Spock's ideal: almost infinitely intelligent, detached, unemotional, devoted to knowledge, free from ordinary human limitations. V'Ger is Kolinahr realized on a cosmic scale. Thus Spock is drawn to it as he recognizes something of himself. He senses it has his answers.

 

. . .

 

 Kolinahr represents an extreme form of an ideal that appears in many modern thinkers and is familiar part of modern culture: objectivity through detachment; freedom from subjective influence; mastery over emotion; knowledge through observation and logic. Spock begins the film believing that the closer one comes to pure reason, the closer one comes to truth.

  The philosophical question raised by the movie is whether the deepest realities – meaning, love, personhood, and purpose – can be understood through detached cognition at all. Through the parallel journeys of V'Ger and Spock, the film shows that complete information remains radically incomplete if reality contains dimensions that can be known only through participation, relationship, and forms of responsiveness such as wonder, love, grief, and longing. In this respect the film anticipates themes developed by thinkers such as Iris Murdoch and Raimond Gaita, for whom emotional and moral responsiveness are not obstacles to knowledge but conditions of access to some of the most important truths about the world.

     What fascinates me is that this reading turns the film into something much larger than a critique of making science and logic epistemologically absolute. It becomes a debate between two ontologies: 1) reality as a collection of humanly indifferent facts to be mastered; a neutral, indifferent reality confronting human subjectivity; 2) reality as a world of meanings, persons, values, and relations that disclose themselves only to a participant rather than a spectator. It is not asking whether computers can think. It is asking whether knowledge without participation can ever become wisdom.

 

. . .

 

Here I would introduce a truth I learned from Gaita (e.g., The Philosopher’s Dog, chapter “The Realm of Meaning”). Many modern thinkers assume that the relation between emotion and understanding is merely causal. That means, emotions such as fear, ambition, grief, love, or pity may influence our judgments, either helping or hindering us, but understanding itself belongs to the intellect purified of emotion. The heart may affect how we think, just as fatigue or intoxication may affect how we think, but it does not itself understand anything. On this view, whenever emotion enters cognition, the danger is distortion. That is Spock’s view for much of the film, and indeed for the series.

     Gaita argues that this picture is only partly true. Certainly emotions can indeed be causes of misunderstanding. Fear may make us see enemies where none exist; grief may tempt us to sentimentalize the dead; ambition may blind us to evidence. But these failures do not show that emotion is only necessarily a causal influence on understanding. They show only that emotion, like reason itself, can be exercised badly. Some emotions are not merely accompaniments to understanding but forms of understanding. They belong internally to what is understood. You can’t understand it apart from the genuine emotionally response, or at least the intelligibility of the genuine emotion response.

      Here I think of a thought of Wittgenstein's about pity: „Das Mitleid, kann man sagen, ist eine Form der Überzeugung, daß ein Andrer Schmerzen hat.“ Pity is the conviction that someone is in pain. Pity or compassion not simply a feeling that arises after we have first established, through detached observation, that someone is suffering. Rather, pity is itself a way of recognizing the reality of that suffering, which is bound to what it means to suffer. To see someone as suffering and to respond with pity are not two separate events, one cognitive and one emotional. The pity partly constitutes the recognition. A person incapable of pity might know all the physiological and behavioral facts and still fail to understand what suffering is.

     Gaita is saying that the same holds for grief, remorse, gratitude, love, and reverence. They are not merely subjective reactions to an independently understood reality. They are ways in which reality becomes intelligible, shows itself. A parent who loves a child does not merely feel something in addition to understanding the child. The love is part of what makes possible a deeper understanding of who the child is. Likewise, remorse is not merely a painful feeling added to the knowledge that one has done wrong; it is one of the ways in which the wrongness of the action is understood. If it seems crazy to you to feel remorse about something, you will not be able to believe it is wrong. Oh my God, what have I done?! I ate an egg this morning. Eating an egg is not an intelligible reason for me to suffer remorse, though in the future people may see this differently. Here I am interested in the logical connection between the emotionally-laden judgment that I have wronged someone or some creature (cf. a chicken in my example) and the objective reality of wronging someone. If I truly understand I have wronged someone, I will suffer remorse or criticize myself for not suffering remorse. This as an illustration that in areas of reality that involve meaning the heart and the head are not separate.

       Gaita's contrast between "the head" and "the understanding of the heart" is not a contrast between reason and irrationality. It is a contrast between two conceptions of understanding. One treats emotion as an external cause acting upon cognition; the other sees certain emotions as internally related to cognition itself, as genuine modes of disclosure. The heart, at its best, does not merely color reality. It helps reveal it.

       Kolinahr embodies the belief that emotion is at best a cause of understanding and at worst a cause of misunderstanding. The ideal is therefore to eliminate emotion so that pure reason can operate without distortion. Gaita's view – and the film’s view – challenges that assumption. If emotions such as love, grief, pity, wonder, and remorse are sometimes forms of understanding rather than merely causes affecting understanding, then eliminating them may not increase lucidity. It may instead blind us to dimensions of reality that can only be known through them.

 

. . .

  

I want to focus in on the mind meld scene (Spock mind melds with V’ger) and the subsequent (sublime) epiphany. Before the meld, Spock still largely inhabits the Kolinahr picture. Emotion is something to be transcended. Understanding belongs to logic. The heart is a potential source of confusion.

   When Spock enters V'Ger's consciousness, however, he encounters something  unexpected. He discovers perfect logical intelligence and transcendent scientific knowledge. But he also discovers an immense intelligence that is empty and incomplete, thus searching. The levels of being V’ger has no access to are existential realities. To recognize them requires something more than detached observation and logic. One must understand what it means to long, to seek, to be incomplete, to desire fulfillment. Spock can understand V'Ger's condition precisely because he has not completed Kolinahr. His remaining humanity allows him to apprehend what V'Ger itself cannot.

     This is where Gaita fits in. The understanding Spock gains is not simply an intellectual inference from observed data. It is the "understanding of the heart." Just as pity may be the recognition of suffering, Spock's response to V'Ger is itself part of his recognition of V'Ger's condition. He does not first establish as a neutral fact that V'Ger is lonely and then have an emotional reaction. Rather, through a kind of sympathetic participation he comes to understand the loneliness itself. The experience is therefore sublime. Throughout the film Spock has been seeking transcendence through pure logic. He expects the highest form of consciousness to be a perfected intellect. Instead he encounters something vast, awe-inspiring, and terrifyingly incomplete. What overwhelms him is the realization that limitless knowledge and perfect logic can coexist with spiritual emptiness. He enters the meld expecting to find the fulfillment of reason. He emerges having discovered the limits of reason. Not the limits of logic in mathematics or science, but the limits of detached cognition as a path to understanding reality as a whole. That is why his famous conclusion is so important: "Logic is not enough."

      The statement is not an endorsement of emotion over reason, as I originally wanted to understand it. It is really something deeper. Spock has learned that reality contains dimensions – meaning, purpose, love, longing, communion – that cannot be grasped by logic and science alone because they are not merely objects of thought. They require sympathetic participation. Kolinahr assumes that the heart is primarily a cause of misunderstanding. The mind meld reveals that the heart can also be a form of understanding. V'Ger possesses perfect lucidity but lacks the understanding of the heart.

     Spock's humanity enables him to perceive precisely what V'Ger lacks. The sublime moment is therefore ontological (concerns reality as a whole) and epistemological (concerns what and how we might understand reality as a whole) as well as emotional. Spock suddenly sees that the universe is richer than the conception of reality presupposed by Kolinahr. What overwhelms him is not simply V'Ger's loneliness, but the realization that his own quest for pure logic was leading toward the same incompleteness. V'Ger is a vision of what Spock himself might have become. That recognition is what gives the scene its extraordinary power.

    Logic is so important for Vulcan’s ethically because emotions cause evil (their assumption), i.e. they get in the way of good-rational lives (echos of Kant); and because it prevents one from seeing the world right, i.e. scientifically, as Carl Sagen and Neil de Grasse see it. But that view depends on the assumption that all of reality can be known by science and that “the heart” is completely subjective and can only distort what reason (science + logic) reveals. The movie is an argument against that.

 

. . .

 

  Another theme. Friendship. the Spock we meet at the beginning of the film is not the Spock of the television series. In the series, Spock often professes indifference to emotion, but his friendships with Kirk and McCoy are obvious. He risks his life for them repeatedly. The old Spock may have denied the importance of feeling, but he lived it. The Spock we meet on Vulcan is different. When Kirk and McCoy greet him with obvious joy and affection, he responds with a kind of chilly puzzlement. It is not merely restraint. He seems almost embarrassed by their warmth. That awkwardness is important for the meaning of the movie. Kolinahr has not simply distanced Spock from emotions. It has distanced him from friendship itself.

     And friendship is a revealing case because it is not merely a feeling. I recall Aristotle's account. Friendship is one of the ways we come to know another person. A friend becomes, in Aristotle's famous phrase, "another self." Friendship therefore involves a kind of participation in another's life. This a challenge to the ideal of detached observation.

     Gaita would push this even further. To understand another person as a person requires forms of responsiveness such as love, compassion, gratitude, loyalty, and friendship. These are not merely feelings added to an independently understood object. They belong to the understanding itself. A person entirely incapable of friendship would not merely lack a pleasant emotion. He would lack a way of understanding human beings. Seen in this light, the opening reunion becomes symbolic. Kirk and McCoy are offering Spock something that Kolinahr cannot comprehend because friendship is a mode of participation rather than detachment. The Kolinahr ideal tends toward self-sufficiency; friendship tends toward mutual dependence. The Kolinahr ideal seeks completion within oneself; friendship acknowledges that part of one's life is bound up with others. So when Spock seems uncomfortable with their affection, the film is showing what he is losing.

     V'Ger possesses information about countless civilizations but has no friends. Indeed, the very concept would be unintelligible to it. Friendship requires mutual recognition, vulnerability, affection, loyalty, and a shared life. None of these fit into V'Ger's understanding of reality. Everything appears as object, data, or function and nothing appears as a companion. Thus V'Ger is so lonely. Its tragedy is that lacks the capacity through which friendship becomes meaningful.

    After the meld, something changes in Spock. He has encountered a consciousness that embodies the culmination of the path he was pursuing and he discovers that it is empty. When he returns from V'Ger, he is changed, warmer. After the mind meld, Kirk finds Spock visibly shaken. Spock says. Taking Kirk’s hand: "Jim, this simple feeling... is beyond V'Ger's comprehension. No meaning, no hope... and, Jim, no answers. It is asking questions. 'Is this all I am? Is there nothing more?'" The gesture of taking Kirk’s hand is powerful. For most of the film, Spock has been moving away from precisely this kind of human connection. He has sought purity, detachment, self-sufficiency. Yet at the moment of his deepest insight, he reaches instinctively toward friendship. The gesture and the words belong together. The "simple feeling" is not simply an emotion in the abstract. It is embodied in the relationship between Kirk and Spock. The friendship itself becomes part of the meaning of the scene. For the first time in the film he openly acknowledges his need for Kirk and McCoy. There is a beautiful moment when Kirk asks whether he is all right. The Kolinar Spock would have dismissed the concern as irrelevant but the enlightened Spock accepts it. He allows himself to be cared for.

     Friendship is a test case for the argument I think the movie has been developed. If friendship is merely a pleasant subjective feeling, then Kolinahr loses very little by abandoning it. But if friendship is partly a mode of understanding, then the loss is enormous. For friendship reveals aspects of reality inaccessible to detached observation.

     Through friendship one learns the irreplaceability of persons, loyalty, trust, gratitude, and shared meaning – essential feature of the reality of human beings (and therefore part of the universe, a part that transcends science and logic).

    By the end of the film there are really two communities before us. On one side stands V'Ger: that is, immense knowledge, immense power, radical isolation. On the other stands the Enterprise crew: limited knowledge, limited power, friendship. The film's judgment is that V'Ger's greatness cannot save it from incompleteness. The crew's friendships, by contrast, participate in precisely the dimension of reality that V'Ger seeks but cannot comprehend. So if Gaita is right that certain forms of love are forms of understanding, then Spock's final embrace of friendship is epistemological and ontological as well as emotional growth. He has learned something about reality. Kirk and McCoy are no longer obstacles to pure logic but are part of what makes understanding possible.

     The film does not end with Spock discovering emotion. It ends with Spock rediscovering friendship, which is a much richer and more philosophically interesting thing. Friendship becomes the concrete human embodiment of the truth he learned from V'Ger: that the deepest realities are known not by standing apart from them, but by participating in them.

 

. . .

 

And the ending is symbolically perfect. I would say that the ending presents V'Ger's salvation as the fulfillment of a desire that knowledge alone could never satisfy.

    Throughout the film, V'Ger seeks its Creator because it has reached the limits of information. It knows almost everything that can be known as an object. Yet it remains incomplete. Its question "Is this all that I am?" is not a scientific question. It is a question of meaning, purpose, and identity. The point is that V'Ger is not saved by entering into relationship. That is why the Decker-Ilia union is fitting. V'Ger's next stage of existence requires communion with another consciousness. One might almost say that V'Ger moves from knowledge about reality to participation in reality.  V'Ger's salvation is the discovery that the fulfillment of rational life lies not in self-sufficient cognition but in relation. The isolated knower becomes a participant.

   I see a faintly theological pattern here. V'Ger begins as a kind of Cartesian or positivist intellect: detached, self-contained, seeking certainty. It ends by surrendering that isolation in order to enter a higher form of existence. The film never defines what that existence is, but it clearly associates it with union, transcendence, and fulfillment rather than with greater informational mastery. The machine is transfigured. And Spock, watching this, realizes that his own quest for completion through pure logic was leading in the wrong direction. V'Ger's salvation becomes his enlightenment.

 

. . .

 

   I think Aquinas and especially W. Norris Clarke help illuminate why the film feels so much richer than a simple "reason versus emotion" story. For Aquinas, every being is not merely a self-contained substance but is ordered beyond itself. Created beings participate in Being itself and naturally tend toward fulfillment in relation to what perfects them. The highest act of a rational creature is not detached knowledge but love. Aquinas famously says that knowledge unites the known object to the knower according to the mode of the knower, whereas love carries the lover outward toward the beloved. In a sense, love is more ecstatic, more self-transcending.   

    Clarke develops this insight. He argues that being is intrinsically self-communicative. To exist fully is not to close oneself off but to express oneself, to enter into relation, to give oneself. Relation is not an accidental addition to being but belongs to the dynamism of being itself. His phrase "substance-in-relation" captures this beautifully.

    Seen from this perspective, both Kolinahr and V'Ger embody a (Satanic) temptation toward self-enclosed consciousness. They seek completion through self-sufficient knowledge. But for Aquinas and Clarke, no finite (and V’ger is finite) being can achieve fulfillment through self-enclosure because being itself is participatory and relational. V'Ger has accumulated knowledge but remains incomplete because it still exists as an isolated center of consciousness. Its "salvation" comes when it moves beyond self-contained cognition toward communion. Symbolically at least, it passes from knowing to participating, from observation to union, from self-enclosure to relation. That is why the ending reminds me of Thomist metaphysics (though surprisingly, since Roddenbery is far from being a Thomist!)

   Spock's enlightenment is not that emotions are useful. It is that fulfillment lies not in becoming a perfectly self-contained intellect but in accepting his participation in a world of friendship, loyalty, love, and shared meaning. The handclasp with Kirk becomes a miniature image of Clarke's metaphysics: being achieves itself not in isolation but in communion. That is close to Aquinas's vision of the blessed life, where the final union with God is indeed intellectual – the Beatific Vision – but a vision inseparable from perfect love. One does not simply know the truth; one dwells in loving participation in it. V'Ger seeks the former and discovers that it cannot be separated from the latter.

    Great film. A work of art.

 

  

 

Analogies for Understanding: Seeing and Translating

  

I often use the Platonic analogy of seeing, used by Weil, Murdoch, and Gaita. "Seeing" can suggest a kind of immediacy or finality that does not fit my own experience very well.

    My child self saw the cruelty. I think Plato and the contemporary thinkers who take to his work focus on seeing because they are all trying to resist a picture of morality as primarily a matter of inference, choice, or rule-following. The seeing analogy allows them to say that the moral problem is not that we know the truth and fail to act on it. The moral problem is that we fail to see the truth in the first place. That is the common thread.

    For Plato, the soul can literally be blind like the prisoners in the cave. The problem is that they mistake shadows for reality, not weakness of will. Similarly, in the Republic, the unjust person fails more to understand what is truly good for him that reject the good. Thus for Plato moral education becomes a kind of turning of the soul toward reality. The image is visual –the eye of the soul. Plato likes sight because sight suggests disclosure.

Reality is there. The question is whether one sees it.

    For Iris Murdoch, the chief obstacle is not ignorance but the ego. The fat, relentless ego constantly bends reality toward itself. Thus moral improvement consists less in choosing correctly than in learning to attend correctly. Her example is the mother-in-law, M, who initially sees her daughter-in-law as vulgar, common, and tiresome. Nothing external changes. The daughter-in-law remains the same. What changes is M's attention. Gradually she sees the girl as spontaneous, fresh, and genuine. Murdoch describes this as a change in vision. The reality was always there. The obstacle was the ego.

     Gaita's emphasis is slightly different. He often wants to defend the idea that moral reality itself can be perceived, a matter of a true seeing as, seeing the people in the psychiatric hospital as intelligible objects of love, for example. When someone sees a child merely as an exemplar one can have more of, or a dog merely as a specimen, or a person suffering from insanity as better off having never been born, Gaita thinks something real is hidden from view, that a form of “meaning-blindness” is in play. Thus he sometimes speaks of seeing the humanity of another, the preciousness of a life, or the significance of suffering. The language of vision helps him avoid both subjectivism and reductionism. 

    I feel the force of this seeing analogy and often use it myself. But I am also attracted to the analogy of translation. My use of the analogy of translation was originally inspired by Roman Jakobson's distinction between different forms of translation. Jakobson argued that translation is not limited to rendering a text from one language into another. He distinguished intralingual translation, in which meaning is re-expressed within the same language – I tell my students if they can’t put an argument or even a phrase in their own words, they don’t understand it; interlingual translation, translation proper between languages, which involves not only semantic meanings but style, register, context, and more; and intersemiotic translation, in which meaning is rendered from one system of signs into another, such as from a novel into a film. Nietzsche even thought of the brain turning electrical impulses into sight as a kind of translation. Or I have heard that musical is the translation of spiritual movements into sound. What struck me about this account is the idea that understanding itself often involves translation. We are constantly seeking new expressions that do justice to what was originally given. Certain experiences – wonder before the life of the pond, horror at the treatment of the frog, grief, beauty, or love – may disclose aspects of reality before we possess the concepts to articulate them, i.e., are translations of reality into experience. The work of philosophy is then also a form of translation: an attempt to render those disclosures into language, concepts, stories, and ways of life that remain faithful to the original experience. No translation is perfect, and the original always exceeds any particular rendering. Yet some translations are deeper, richer, and more illuminating than others. Philosophy, on this view, is not primarily the construction of theories but the ongoing effort to translate experience into understanding.

    Consider again my frog experience. If one uses the language of "seeing," I seem left with a puzzle. Why did it take fifty years of reflection, Plato, Lewis, Murdoch, Gaita, Cordner, Weil, and countless other experiences to help me understand what was seen? The language of translation handles this more naturally. The child’s experience is a disclosure. The work of philosophy is then to find a way to translate this experience into language, concepts, and understanding without betraying it. That is what I tried to do.

     The translation analogy has another advantage. Seeing appears to insinuate that reality is simply given. Translation highlights the distance between experience and articulation. There is interpretation involved. A translator is constrained by the ‘original.’ He cannot say whatever he likes. The original text pushes back. But there is no perfect mechanical rendering. You search for words, for the right emotional key, you revise, you try to deepen. Doing this you hopefully discover aspects of the original that you had not previously noticed. How many times have I discovered depths of meaning I had not noticed before even in poems I knew well for many years. And that reminds me of my attempts to understand my frog memory, to translate it into the language of thought. Certain experiences disclose reality. Thinking is the ongoing attempt to translate those disclosures into increasingly adequate language. I have tried to understand grief, remorse, love, and more. The experiences are not themselves arguments and are not self-interpreting. They do possess an authority that philosophy must respect. The task is to find words that do justice to them.

     There is also something in the translation analogy that preserves being fallible better than "seeing." When people say "I see that this is true," discussion often ends. When translators compare translations, discussion begins. One translation may be deeper, richer, more faithful, more illuminating, without ever exhausting the original. No translation is the last word. That is like Cordner’s "deepening one's sense" rather than replacing appearance with theory. Murdoch and Gaita are right that reality is first seen or disclosed through attention, love, wonder, grief, and moral responsiveness. But what follows is not the possession of a finished vision – they would agree with that. What follows is a lifelong work of understanding, deepening, which the translation analogy expresses better than the seeing analogy.

    The child sees. The adult translates. The philosopher critically compares translations. The poet offers another translation in a different key. The painter perhaps another. The saint yet another. None simply “constructs” the reality. All attempt to render it faithfully in different idioms. It avoids the danger that sometimes accompanies the language of "vision", namely, the idea that one has achieved a final and complete grasp. Translation acknowledges both disclosure and humility. Something has genuinely been revealed, yet the work of understanding it is never complete. 

     Why not just understanding (Verstehen)? Understanding is a broader and more traditional philosophical term. The disadvantage is that it can conceal the process by which understanding is achieved. Translation highlights several features that understanding alone does not.

     First, fidelity to something independent of oneself. A translator does not create the text. The original constrains him. That is important for my sense of realism. If you say you are trying to understand the experience, that can still sound somewhat internal to you. If you say you are trying to translate the experience, the image is that there is something there that demands fidelity. The experience becomes analogous to a text.

     Second, there is a plurality of translations. This may be the biggest advantage. "Understanding" often implies a single destination. Translation implies that some translations are better, some are worse, none are perfect,

several may capture different aspects of the original. The original is bigger than our minds. When I think of Plato, Murdoch, Gaita, Weil, Berry, Lewis, Cordner, and all the other thinkers that help me think, I do not think of them as competitors offering mutually exclusive theories. They are different attempts to articulate realities that exceed any one formulation, different musical keys, different accents, different translations of the world of experience into the language of thought. Translation captures that better than understanding.

     Third, there is the movement from experience to language. Cordner speaks of disclosure. I want to think about experiences like grief, remorse, beauty, wonder, the frog, the pond, etc. The problem is always how do I put them into words. That is the problem of translation. Understanding need not involve language.

     Forth, humility is essential. The translator assumes that the original is richer than his rendering. That attitude is central to my conception of philosophy. I am not interested in constructing a system that finally explains grief, beauty, dignity, or love. I am just trying to do as much justice to them as I can, with the help of some other great thinkers. Translation carries that attitude naturally.

     Every analogy has limits. There is something that understanding captures better. When I understand a poem, I do not merely translate it. I become transformed by it – as in “Ode to Immortality.” The poem enters my life. The translator analogy can sometimes leave the self too external to what is being translated. Cordner's "deepening of oneself" points beyond translation. The person is changed. The translator is not merely rendering a text; he is being formed by it. So I wonder whether the relation is something like this: reality is disclosed in experience (or distorted); understanding is the process by which we grow into what has been disclosed; translation is the attempt to articulate that understanding faithfully. Or the child sees; the man grows into what was seen; thinking translates that growth into concepts and language. That is why I would not replace understanding with translation. I would place translation inside understanding.

    But translation contributes something important: namely,  the ideas of fidelity, plurality of renderings, linguistic articulation, and humility before a reality that always exceeds our formulations. Which brings me back to the frog by the pond. The experience is more like the original text. Fifty years later, I am still working on the translation. Not because the original was unclear, but because it was richer than any single rendering. That seems to me a very fruitful analogy. 

. . . 

   Finally, how can an analogy communicate truth at all? Isn’t just a placeholder for a proper scientific account? And if there is no scientific account possible, in the strict sense, isn’t it just booga-booga, as an old philosophy professor of my, Henry Schankula (great teacher), used to refer to nonsense? 

  I base this on W. Norris Clarke’s The One and the Many, a great book of metaphysics, and Thomist metaphysics in particular. A theme Clarke's metaphysics is the distinction between metaphor and analogy. Both involve comparisons, but they function differently and possess different cognitive value. A metaphor suggests a similarity between two different things. When we say that "time is a river" or that someone has "a heart of stone," we do not mean these statements literally. Rather, the metaphor invites us to notice a likeness. It is imaginative, evocative, and exploratory. It points beyond itself toward a possible insight. Yet a metaphor, taken by itself, does not necessarily tell us whether the similarity corresponds to anything real in the structure of things.

     Analogy, by contrast, expresses a real similarity grounded in reality itself. It does not deny difference, but neither does it reduce everything to difference. For Clarke, following Aquinas, reality is neither completely uniform nor completely fragmented. The same patterns appear at different levels of being. Thus when we speak of bodily sight and intellectual insight, we are not merely making a poetic comparison. There is a genuine structural similarity between them. In both cases something becomes present to a knower; in both cases there are degrees of clarity and obscurity; in both cases attention matters; in both cases one may be blind or see more deeply. The analogy is therefore cognitive rather than merely decorative. It allows us to understand one reality through another because there is a real affinity between them.

     This understanding of analogy is important because Clarke believes that some of the most important realities cannot be adequately grasped through the kind of concepts employed by the natural sciences. Scientific explanation seeks precision, quantification, and univocal concepts. Such concepts mean exactly the same thing wherever they are applied. This approach is successful in the study of physical phenomena. But when we ask about realities such as being, personhood, friendship, beauty, love, understanding, or moral insight, the scientific method reveals only their physical conditions rather than their full truth. Neuroscience tells us what occurs in the brain when we understand something, but it does not tell us what understanding itself is. Evolutionary theory may explain why certain forms of attachment arose, but it does not thereby illuminate the nature of friendship or love. Scientific descriptions answer questions about mechanisms and causes. They do not answer questions about meaning or essence.

     Analogy enters precisely at this point. It allows us to approach realities that exceed the reach of univocal definition without abandoning rationality. To understand understanding through the analogy of sight, or moral growth through the analogy of maturation, is not to replace knowledge with poetry. It is to recognize that reality itself possesses structures that can be grasped only through similarities that unite diverse forms of being. For Clarke, analogy is therefore not a second-best substitute for strict scientific explanation. It is one of the principal means by which finite minds gain access to truths that are richer than any single definition can capture.

    This has implications for moral and philosophical reflection. Suppose a child experiences wonder before the life of a pond or horror at an act of cruelty. A scientific account may describe the psychological and neurological processes involved. Such an account may be true as far as it goes. Yet it does not necessarily make sense of what was disclosed in the experience. To make sense of that disclosure, one may need analogies such as seeing, attention, participation, reverence, or even translation. These analogies do not merely embellish the experience. They attempt to articulate its intelligibility. They are rational efforts to render into language aspects of reality that would otherwise remain obscure.

    For Clarke, then, analogy is intimately connected with truth. Truth is not exhausted by what can be measured, quantified, or expressed in univocal concepts. Some truths become accessible only through analogical understanding because the realities to which they correspond are themselves internally rich and diverse. Analogy neither abandons realism nor reduces reality to subjective interpretation. Rather, it is a way of remaining faithful to a reality that exceeds the limits of strict scientific description. The task of philosophy is not to replace such realities with theories but to make them intelligible through increasingly adequate analogies, always recognizing that the reality itself remains richer than any formulation we can provide.

   When I began this reflection, I thought of seeing and translation more as metaphors. But now I think they are genuine analogies in the sense explained above. Like translation, understanding involves fidelity to something independent of oneself, the possibility of more or less adequate renderings, the inexhaustibility of the original, and the deepening of insight through successive attempts at articulation. Clarke would ask whether those similarities are merely suggestive or whether they point to a real structure in human knowing. I say the latter.