Schopenhauer on Weeping

     Schopenhauer - 

wrote something profound and moving on weeping.

 

This is also the place to discuss one of the most striking peculiarities of human nature, weeping, which, like laughter, belongs to the manifestations that distinguish man from the animal. Weeping is by no means a positive manifestation of pain, for it occurs where pains are least. In my opinion, we never weep directly over pain that is felt, but always only over its repetition in reflection. Thus we pass from the felt pain, even when it is physical, to a mere mental picture or representation of it; we then find our own state so deserving of sympathy that, if another were the sufferer, we are firmly and sincerely convinced that we would be full of sympathy and love to help him. Now we ourselves are the object of our own sincere sympathy; with the most charitable disposition, we ourselves are most in need of help. We feel that we endure more than we could see another endure, and in this peculiarly involved frame of mind, in which the directly felt suffering comes to perception only in a doubly indirect way, pictured as the suffering of another and sympathized with as such, and then suddenly perceived again as directly our own; in such a frame of mind nature finds relief through that curious physical convulsion.

  In this passage I find everything I love and hate in Schopenhauer, whose metaphysics I would caricature (but I hope my caricature is of something there) thus: 1) reality, Being, the world is necessarily human constructions of reality, and our constructions (re-presentations, Vor-stellungen) necessarily cannot reach their objects; we are cut off from any knowledge or true understanding of Being; 2) with one exception: we know our acts of willing directly; they are least are not constructed, no matter how constructed the objects are to which are will is directed; 3) thus, ultimate reality is the blind, cruel will-to-exist; the phenomenal world we live are manifestation of this underlying force; 4) the will-to-exist expresses itself only in the self-assertion of the individual existent in the battle to survive, to expand, to increase its power (the range of willing); 5) there is no other meaning or purpose to existence; existence is horrible; pain is its essence; better not to have existed 6) knowing this is sublime, a negative sublime, a kind of disgust or horror; 7) the point is to escape this prison of the will – art allows temporary escape, especially music; above all, pity, compassion negates the will-to-exist, the source of all suffering; 8) pity and compassion can ultimately only be for the self-as-center-of-willing, the only reality any of us can know, the only reality any of our acts can be directed to; 9) thus when we pity the suffering of others, we negate our own will, we become objects of our own pity.

      This weird conclusion follows only if it is true that our compassion reveals nothing about its object – another human being, an animal, or whatever. But other human beings, in Schopenhauer’s system, can be nothing other than constructs, re-presentations – they are never fully real. But to love another human being, without sentimentality or false pathos, is just a response to something deeply real – no less that response to the beauty of a sunrise is a response to something real in nature and not just a construction of nature, though of course it can be that, too, and often is (a travel brochure enticing paying tourists to the beach with a picture of a sunrise). For Schopenhauer pity is the only form of love that reveals reality. Other forms are masks for the ruthless, pitiless primeval will. We are lovable only in our suffering. 

      To me the problem with so many philosophers, metaphysicians like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – they take a common perversion, mistake the perversion for some a priori truth about whatever they are writing about, and then draw metaphysical conclusions about the reality of nature or humanity. Nietzsche perceptively sees resentment at work in much of what is called morality and Christian religion; he then writes as though morality and the Christian religion as a whole were nothing but masked expressions of reality such that we know, a priori, that when we encounter moralists and Christians we know at some level they are eaten up with resentment. So Schopenhauer: he has a good insight – much of life is ruled by unconscious forces expressed through the will that one might see as a blind struggle for survival, kind of war of all against all. He makes that into a metaphysical principle such that we know, in advance, that anything and everything anyone does, except in rare moments of compassion and moments when we are entranced by great art, is nothing but the expression of this blind instinct. So weeping is a form of pity for existence itself.

      More charitably, apart from any reading of his metaphysics, I guess one could see in this passage the recognition of a common humanity in a community of suffering, a kind of ‘ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’ thought. I still love this passage though.

 Are morals just feelings one approves of?

My thesis that feelings are, like thinking, like ideas, like checking facts and doing experiments, disclose reality, or cover it up, depending. Love and grief – when authentic (not sentimental or counterfeit) disclose the being of the beloved person; remorse discloses the evilness of the action and the human dignity of the person wronged; awe and reverence disclose our relation to the universe (as can fear); desecrating life as in the horrid practices of industrial meat reveals the being of animals precisely through its violation; the silence during the Eucharist is appropriate to the occasion and partly discloses its sublimity; the jubilation at the end of WWII in allied countries disclosed the significance of the victory.

    Emotions can conceal reality when not a lucid response to it.  The tourist who beholds the Grand Canyon and says, “yeah, and? A big hole” cannot see the Grand Canyon; their reaction is that of a blind person. The person who can only use the “grief” over the loss of a pet or relative to garner attention to themselves as an object of sympathy is cut off from the reality of the pet or relative. The bastards who acquired logging rights to the redwood forest, reducing it to “natural resources” waiting to become profits, are spiritually retarded. Feelings, emotions not only reveal and conceal reality, but reveal very clearly the reality of the person responding.

   And said feelings, emotions – I could add moods – give rise to our basic attitudes toward life and the world as a whole, which then color our perceptions and beliefs all the way down (and not worried about precise distinctions between these words at this point). The bastards who profited by destroying large parts of the redwood forests were perhaps stunted by an unloving family or hated nature because of some fear or past trauma. We humans are not free to love and hate, see and not-see, as are the angels, as we are creatures of flesh and blood, living in a history conditioned significantly by violence, injustice, and disharmony. If we see and feel as a response to reality rather than our seeing and feeling being blocked by past damage to our souls, then we are more lucky than deserving praise. [I think this is the background for Christ’s “let he who is without sin cast the first stone…” and “for he maketh. his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” But I digress.] We develop attitudes (Einstellung) to life and the world always under the pressure of our lives growing up – attitudes in Wittgenstein’s sense: a comprehensive stance or perspective that goes beyond a simple cognitive opinion. It involves the person's entire orientation – including emotional responses, personal values, and the overall way in which they engage with whatever. The original meaning of both the German and English suggests a sense of positioning or orientation, suggesting a way in which an individual positions themselves mentally or emotionally in relation to a particular concept or experience (the attitude of a compass, in an older usage; or in a Jane Austin novel, how a character sits in a certain attitude.). And these attitudes condition one’s feelings – upon seeing the Grand Canyon or the Redwood forest, etc. Again, I digress.]

                                                            

  

    Now I put forth a thesis, which I will now refine: this whole complex of “subjective” feelings, emotions, moods, and, importantly, the attitudes that condition them, attitudes formed under the pressures of an individual life . . . this whole complex of emotions, for short, gives rise to myth, gives rise to metaphysics (intellectualized myth, purely cognitive content abstracted from its living source in poetry, myth, imagination, emotional response to life), gives rise to religion (though power is often what shapes and perpetuates religion – officially sanctioned myth). Rational thought, when it goes beyond the kinds of things we can understand through the disciplined use of our senses and intellect, through theories, conceptual analysis, empirical testing, etc. – in short, through “natural reason” – … rational thought is conditioned by this matrix of “subjectivity,” itself conditioned by history, culture, economy, and so on.

 

. . .

      And so I am reminded of a deceptively similar approach to thinking about morals, religion, art, and metaphysics that came out of the logical positivist style of philosophy: emotivism. I first learned in a book titled After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981) by Alasdair MacIntyre – a book that I have thought a lot about over the years. This is the way MacIntyre characterizes emotivism:

Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character. Particular judgments may of course unite moral and factual elements. ‘Arson, being destructive of property, is wrong’ unites the factual judgment that arson destroys property with the moral judgment that arson is wrong. But the moral element in such a judgment is always to be sharply distinguished from the factual. Factual judgments are true or false; and in the realm of fact there are rational criteria by means of which we may secure agreement as to what is true and what is false. But moral judgments, being expressions of attitude or feeling, are neither true nor false; and agreement in moral judgment is not to be secured by any rational method, for there are none. It is to be secured, if at all, by producing certain non-rational effects on the emotions or attitudes of those who disagree with one. We use moral judgments not only to express our own feelings and attitudes, but also precisely to produce such effects in others (14).

 

So am I an “emotivist”? (I dislike jargon in philosophy.) No, at least I hope not. Like emotivism I do assert that feelings/emotions – certain feelings/emotions, experienced in a particular quality conditioned by deeper attitudes – are the source of myth, religion, art, and morals. But for me this part of our inner lives (the whole complex I just mentioned) reaches out to and responds to something real and can, if ‘pure’ reveal essential aspects of the reality they are responses to. In this they are like thoughts – and I don’t consider thoughts something logically clearly distinct from these kinds of feelings. The thought ‘Both the slaughter of the people at the music festival as well as the people in Gaza through the retaliatory bombing involve unspeakable cruelty’ is a thought and the thought is intelligible unless cruelty provokes some emotional response; it is a thought-feeling. More importantly, it is not reduced to psychology. It reveals something about the person’s inner life, no doubt. But also something about its object.

  [Again, the will to reduce emotions to psychology – the subjective – stems from the logical positivists' faith in the metaphysical myth that science was not just science but also metaphysics: that scientific methods reveal the entire essence – or lack thereof – of the universe. While it is true that science must make assumptions about nature – that it is uniform, for example – it is not a possible scientific hypothesis that Being can be reduced to what science can understand of it. If anyone believes that nature is reducible to what a finished science could understand of it, then they live by a faith as unsupported by science as an evangelical. Indeed, there was something fundamentalist about the scientism of the logical positivists: they never tried to give an argument for their metaphysics because they thought all metaphysical argument was meaningless – it was on their narrow understanding of meaning and truth – and thus left no room for any awareness that their entire project of eliminating metaphysics and religion always presupposed their metaphysical scientism: an example of a world version exploding from an internal contradiction.]

    But I do think at the level of myth and metaphysics, since they make sense of our most profound responses to life, some incommensurability does exist, intellectually. I don’t think there are proofs or knock-down arguments against many possible incommensurable belief constellations. Emotions are cognitive, connected with thought. But reality is big, and we all experience it through our own lives. Perhaps some emotivists would feel that is the core of emotivism. Our finitude, our fallibility (that stems not only from our finitude but the ways we all get damaged during the course of a life) mean that natural reason can only take us so far, and that subjective certitude (or lack thereof) has to pick up from there. So Nietzsche was right when he wrote to his sister:

 

One last question: If from our youth we had believed that the salvation of the soul emanates from someone other than Jesus, say, from Muhammad, wouldn't we have partaken in the same blessings? Indeed, faith alone blesses, not the objective reality that stands behind faith. I write this to you, dear Lisbeth, to counter the most common proof that people of faith rely on, those who appeal to their inner experiences and derive from them the infallibility of their faith. Every true faith is thus infallible; it accomplishes what the believing person hopes to find within it, but it offers no basis whatsoever for establishing an objective truth.

 

But Nietzsche was referring to the level of belief systems here – Christianity, Islam – or by implication metaphysical systems like Hegel’s. I am talking about immediate responses to life. My child is born; joy fills me. Therefore, I cannot accept a belief system like Schopenhauer’s that makes the individual an illusion and life a mistake. The infallibility and certain do not come from the tenets of Christianity or Islam; the infallibility is at the level of the joy over the new life. You don’t believe that you have joy, as a proposition that may be true or false; the unquestioned joy forces certain beliefs on you, if you at another time come to inquire. The incommensurably comes because not everybody can respond to the birth of a child with joy. The question is: how do we see that? As a tragedy? I must see it that way because I cannot doubt and have lived with this certainty through thick and thin that life – despite all the bad stuff – is in its core a gift, and that it is terrible (sin) that this is covered up by the things people do and the power structures they some people erect and perpetuate.

 True and False Myths

An example of the sense in which a myth can be true – or reveal our relationship to a reality that is beyond our ability to know in the way we can know things about nature through science or about actions through the judicial system, and so on. That the Creation of man in Genesis, as understood by Michelangelo in his famous Sistine Chapel work:

           

The point is not to give a realistic portrayal of God and Adam, though it uses the pictural language of representation. That would reduce the picture to absurdity, imagining the painting substitutes for a camera taking a snapshot. The point is to symbolize God's love reaching out to mankind, mankind’s love reaching out to its Creator. It is communicated in 'factual' i.e. representational mode, the same mode as is used to paint real people we know and can compare to representation to – this wanting to represent holy or spiritual things disturbs Muslims and iconoclastic Christians, who can only see works like this as attempts to photograph that which cannot and may not be photographed, i.e. represent anthropologically that can’t be so represented without making an idol. (Many Muslims don’t like to be photographed, suggesting that the self or the soul is also transcendent and made into an idol by doing so – interesting.) I see no problem with such representations on the condition that they are understood in the sense that I am understanding them here, which is the same as both the Roman and Orthodox Churches do understand them. I confess I cannot relate to Michelangelo's work even though I think I understand it: the trope of God as an old man with a gray beard, used in so much caricature and comedy, has destroyed my ability to relate to it, perhaps giving some credence to iconoclasm. 

     If myth is like Michelangelo’s painting, a symbolic representation of our relationship to a reality transcendent to our everyday modes of knowing, indeed, to our ideas and language, how can it be true? How can it connect with reality if not through stating facts, falsifying hypotheses through scientific experience, following up on leads as the detective does,  realistically depicting physical objects as in portrait painting, constructing models that can predict future events as in meteorology, proving something deductively – all the ways our minds do make contact with reality.  Even in illustrating a storybook, the illustrator makes contact with the reality of the text – such as this illustration of Beatrix Potter’s character Mr. Jackson (a frog):

The illustration makes contact with the story, brings Mr. Jackson to life. In a way, Michelangelo did something like that with God and Adam, but the difference is that the Genesis story is a myth in the deepest sense, connecting us to a transcendence we cannot otherwise have access to. Again, how can that connect to reality?

     My answer: it pictures transcendence as it could or must be if we are to trust our deepest experiences of life. Wittgenstein related a feeling he experienced during his time as a soldier in WWI:

…the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.

A crazy feeling when you are subject to regular artillery barrages and sniper fire even when not engaged in direct combat. I know this irrational feeling. I could just discount it as a defense mechanism, as Freud would. In many cases, it is probably just that, or something like it. But with Wittgenstein, the feeling came to have absolute or intrinsic value. With me it is connected to the feeling of being unconditionally loved. Also crazy. Freud would say, I suppose, that such a feeling is the echo of an infantile experience of mother love. Perhaps it is, or something else like that. I relive that feeling every time I take communion. Again, Freud would say I am trying to get back into an infantile state, a defense mechanism against a reality in which I am certainly not loved unconditionally. Unconditional love among human beings is rather like an oasis in the desert: rare. The mother who loves and pities her son about to be executed for a horrible crime. The man who puts himself in front of a speeding subway to save a stranger. The soldier who remains behind to face certain death to give his brothers time to get away. I guess these are forms of unconditional love. Whatever its origin the feeling has absolute value for me and so I cannot reduce it to its speculative origin or reduce it to psychological categories. The myths of God reaching out to us in love, and the continuation of that story in God self-revealing and self-sacrifice on earth connect to reality in that they make contact with this sublime feeling – or crazy feeling, depending on how you see it. (You are not irrational if you see it as crazy.) The access to God, to Christ, to a reality beyond our ideas and evidence-based knowledge, is literally this feeling, which I guess you can liken to an inner eye. The rituals (Modern philosophy has no use for inner eyes because it has no use for the idea that feeling can reveal – as well as distort - reality.) All the myths and representational art like Michelangelo’s work – as well as all the conceptual thought that attempts to make sense of the myths – are attempts to illustrate or make sense of something our rational intellects proper can’t: sublime feelings, something we can’t observe in the physical world, can’t empirically test.

Some comments on this:

·       Christianity is great myth, as C. S. Lewis wrote. But it also, for most believers, claims to be history. That raises different issues that are not relevant to my consideration of the truth of myths.

·       Do the myths give rise to the sublime feelings, or do the sublime feelings give rise to the myths? Chicken-and-egg question. But I suppose, logically, the feelings must have come first. It really doesn’t matter to the point I am trying to make.

·       Sublime feelings disrupt normal, everyday experience. They are prägende (soul-forming). Your normal work-a-day relation to people, objects, the world becomes unstable and you either drown, emotionally, or reconstitute the world in terms of a symbolic relation to it. Language or images can only hold in place a symbolic relation to a perception of literally what lies beyond or behind everyday, prosaic experience. This is the source of myth. Examples: to see a loved one in a radically different way through grief over their death; the awe or reverence one may feel in the presence of great natural beauty or heroism – or moral goodness; the transformation of a woman when experienced in the light of a pure Eros; the horror of a Colonel Kurz when faced with the darkest possibilities of human cruelty; the joy over the birth of a child; the pain of a lucid remorse, revealing evil done. These and more are the source of myth.

·       I resist the modern will to reduce feelings to prosaic psychological categories, to cut them off from Being and imprison them in the human brain. The will to do this stems from the general modern will to de-mean “external” reality to conquer and subdue it for human purposes. To do that, “external” reality is seen as science-technology-capitalism must see it to go about their business of conquering nature – including human nature. It is no more or less scientific to believe that science-technology-capitalism exhaustively reveals reality as it really is, absolutely, conclusively, without remainder. That is a metaphysical view, as untestable as Creation by Plato’s Demiurge. If you believe that, it is not for any scientific reason. Indeed, metaphysical theories are like intellectualized myths – which does not mean they are necessarily “false.” Indeed, the myth from which the metaphysical interpretation of reality held by science-technology-capitalism stems is best captured by Milton’s Satan, who states: “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.” To embrace that myth I would have to deny the absolute worth of the feeling of being “unconditionally loved” – would have to see it as Freud would have perhaps. To embrace the myths that help explain the world to me, the capitalist would have to give up the project of conquering nature and the elevated feeling of power and possibility that go with it. Myth confronts reality at this level.  

·       A false myth – and this is completely circular reasoning, but nothing else is possible – is one that it used to justify injustice or other forms of evil by demeaning something good, from an animal to the world as a whole. Earlier in the journal I wrote about the myth of Thanksgiving, based on the idea that the natives were “noble savages.” I contrasted that with the extermination of the natives in New England through disease and massacres (yes, the natives also engaged in massacres) in which the noble savages were “merciless savages.” Here rather than myth-making, a cool-headed anthropologist would have been better. The point: real people were seen in light of myths that demeaned or sentimentalized them because they supported a political agenda. The myth was not truth-seeking and sense-making; the myths that support a political regime do not symbolize our relation to transcendence but exploit a purported relation to transcendence for legitimate very worldly purposes, political or personal. 

 

Seeing as verses Seeing that (and the Role of Myth) 

Human worlds. We are not androids. If androids or artificial computer-based intelligence could have a world – a nonsensical thought, I believe – it would be incommensurable with any possible human world. The fundamental features that condition any possible human world are T. S. Elliot’s of ‘birth, copulation and death.’ It is no accident that these are of such deep and abiding concern. We are mortal creatures of flesh and blood aware of our own mortality. That places a gulf between us and an android like Data:

 

                          

        The fact that we come new into a world that was there before us and (hopefully) will be there after us – that distinguishes our birth from the births of cats and dogs. We come into the world not as exemplars of the species but as individual persons. Thus we receive names at birth rather than numbers. In the world, we experience what Hannah Arendt called ‘plurality’:

 

It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings … The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world.

 

      Therefore, our death means not only the end of biological life but the end of our world. Unlike the death of our animal cousins, our deaths are not just events in the world. As Winch, following Wittgenstein, puts it:

 

When I speak of ‘my death’, I am not speaking of any future event in my life; I am not even speaking of a future event in anyone else’s life. I am speaking of the cessation of my world. That is also a cessation of my ability to do good and evil. It is not just that as a matter of fact I shall no longer be able to do good or evil after I am dead; the point is that my very concept of what it is to be able to do good or evil is deeply bound up with my concept of life as ending in death. If ethics is a concern with the right way to live, then clearly the nature of this concern must be deeply affected by the concept of life as ending in death.

 

Moreover, the significance of sex transcends ‘copulation’ precisely because human life in the world, conditioned by the newness of birth and our mortality, allows a whole different dimension to emerge out of the biological act: meaning, the meaning of the individual life. We bring forth into the world through the fertility of sex not only another instance of a species, but a new soul, with among other things the capacity to experience joy as well as unspeakable suffering; with the capacity to bless life or curse the day he was born. Sex cannot be merely biological for us.         

 

     Meaning exists only in the world, and the world exists because of our need to live as human beings, making sense of our births, our deaths, and the perpetuation of life in the world through sex. A machine intelligence is worldless, meaningless.  Meaning – what to see the world as, and thus what to see particular things in the world as, or rather, how to experience them: this is why there are myths, and religions as canonized myths. No fact – particular (I am in bed) or general (Water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius) – in and of itself is meaningful. Two potential facts: the destruction of life on earth through a cataclysmic event; an itch in my back – Hume wrote: "tis not unreasonable for me to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." By “unreasonable” he meant the preferring itself was an attitude to these potential facts, something we bring to them.

       From the point of view of “reason” – defined by Hume as more or less as the capacity to judge whether a given statement corresponds to an actual state of affairs (i.e. is true, expresses a fact) and to draw logical conclusions – both potential facts would be neutral, without value, like the universe itself. As Wittgenstein puts the point: “All propositions are of equal value” – a proposition being nothing more than the logical picture of a state of affairs, a fact in our ordinary sense (if not quite in Wittgenstein’s technical use of the word).

 

. . .

 

        This is how an android intelligence like Data would see the world: objectively, without emotion. Jesus died on the cross. The humidity level was 26% at the time of his death. The soil at the foot of the cross had a measure of 2 on the PH scale, and so was rather acidic. A speck of dust fell to the earth precisely 2.273 meters from the foot of the cross at the precise time that Jesus’ heart went into ventricular fibrillation. The temperature on the south pole of Mars was precisely -45 degrees Celsius. Peter did not cut his toenails on the day of Jesus’ crucifixion. A particular cow in Bethlehem urinated at a particular place at a particular time.  Etc. An android or an army of androids recording such a vast ocean of facts would have no way of judging the significance or insignificance of any of them because he has no frame of reference, no scale of value, no mortal body of flesh and blood, and thus no emotions – in short, he has no world.

 

     And the world is created when we become, as creatures of flesh and blood, self-conscious of our responses to the facts of life, so to speak. A deer is a creature of flesh and blood and is conscious. A doe senses the presence of danger – a hunter perhaps – and flees in fear. We also flee in fear in the presence of danger. But there are times when we must overcome our fear. If we witness a group of thugs brutalizing someone who cannot defend themselves, we have to act in some way to help. If fear overcomes us, we are rightly called cowards. We wouldn’t apply the concept coward to the deer that flees the hunter or to any animal. If the person was killed by the thugs, their death would also mean something: we might say, ‘they died a hero’s death.’ We of course experience emotions – not only of fear but of how we deal with it. We may be deeply moved by someone sacrificing their life in an attempt to help a stranger fend off evil. We may even feel awe and reverence.

 

 . . .

 

    Our concepts of ‘good’ or ‘God’ (and religion), typically expressed in the stories we tell ourselves and the myths we live by – and all the cultural and individual practices, rituals, enactments, or extensions of such concepts and stories – are rooted in our collective responses to such acts. Such acts themselves are enactments of said concepts (the chicken-and-the-egg question suggests itself). [I am tracing a thought of Wittgenstein’s, and Peter Winch’s here.] I guess the most profound question here is whether we are open to such responses – or whether, for example, like Trump, we reject them and consider such people “suckers” or “losers.”

        I will switch examples. Most of us respond to the late John McCain’s years spent in the “Hanoi Hilton” with a kind of reverence for the suffering he endured and for the courage he showed by refusing early release for the sake of others. We know the facts: When and where his plane was shot down; his extensive injuries; his brutal treatment at the hands of his captures, etc. Well, we know these facts like we know most facts: second-hand, based on witness testimony and the reporting of witness testimony. Thus if an enemy like Trump were intent on trashing McCain’s reputation together with the political authority that reputation gave him as well as erasing in the mind of his cult following the contrast between a man of courage and character and himself, he could just invent “alternative facts” – that McCain was shot down while cowardly retreating; that he was not tortured by cooperated with the North Vietnamese; that he betrayed other servicemen. That would not have been a good tactic in 2016 as McCain was still alive – and other witnesses. Now that McCain is dead, and perhaps most witnesses as well, the inventing of  “alternative facts” to fit and reinforce the fantasies images Trump has of himself and wants others to have of McCain could have worked. Much of our world, our sense of reality, is built on facts we accept on trust in the authority of others, that we ourselves cannot directly verify. Thus attacks on the sources of trust and authority as a political weapon are an attack on that sense of reality. Trump’s attempt to steal the election and install himself in a coup played on the fragility of factual truth as well as his claim that his sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll is a political scam – his word against others, and he has a whole media empire that is an echo chamber whose main function is to discredit whatever information he determines should be discredited.

     Another level of reality is fixed by concepts like POW or captive. In our normal understanding these words set up criteria we use to judge reality. We apply them to McCain because all the conditions are met: he was taken by force against his will and imprisoned, etc. Trump might have said he wasn’t a true POW since, for example, no declared state of war was in force or he had a chance to choose freedom. In other words, Trump could have twisted our normal use of the relevant concepts. But there are strong limits here: he would get to a point in this game where he would simply not make sense to other speakers of the language. But our sense of reality is also limited by the sense we can make using our language. To deny that McCain was a captive is not only false factually, but makes no sense because the meaning of captive has become unintelligible. The limits of sense of concepts (like captive) determine the limits of what can be real for us, and thus true or false, factually.

    Trump neither invented “alternative facts” nor stretched the meaning of our language beyond sense in his campaign to elevate himself by diminishing John McCain, his better in every respect. He tried to change the way people see the facts and thus see McCain. Before Trump, almost everyone in America saw McCain as a hero and his comportment during torture and captivity as heroic. Trump wanted his people to see the same things as a defect: being captured as losing; enduring torture as not worthy of respect; implicitly, seeing military service as something only worthy of admiration if it benefits you – makes you wealthier, increases your pleasure, etc. Only success is admirable; nothing one can do as a captive can count as success; therefore, nothing one can do as a captive can be admirable. Heroism is admirable; nothing that one can do as a captive can be admirable; therefore, nothing one can do as a captive can be heroic. Trump doesn’t use arguments, but if his attack on McCain were translated into an argument it would look something like that.

     Seeing McCain as this or that does not require us to deny any fact or stretch any concepts. Our sense of reality is thus not bound to facts we all acknowledge as facts or the limits of sense we all somehow abide by. Most people outside the Trump cult as well as Trump acknowledge the same facts about McCain.  Those of us outside the cult of Trump see him as a hero whereas those in the cult see him as a failure deserving of no admiration.  Since both acknowledge the same facts, no fact can change the way each group sees him. Neither interpretation violates the facts – as in those cases where Trump uses “alternative facts” to undermine people’s sense of reality and conform people’s reason to his will.

     Just like two obstetricians, one a devout Catholic and the other a progressive feminist, will look at an ultrasound – with the same image and the same medical facts: the Catholic sees an unborn child, a soul in the process of becoming loved and wanted by God (if not the woman carrying her); the progressive feminist of the Gloria Steinem bent sees a fetus that is nothing but a part of the woman’s body (her own property) to do with as she pleases. Again, no fact forces either to see it as this or that.   

     Or just like a forest – same facts, same object. Robert Frost sees a mystery: “the woods are lovely, dark, and deep.” The capitalist sees raw materials he can transform into products and profits. Same principle.

     It is not like this: the supermarket sees the dated can of beans as garbage whereas the person who gets it from the garbage can sees it as nourishment. It can be both. From one point of view, that of the supermarket, it is garbage because they can no longer sell it; the person who gets it from the garbage sees it as nourishment because it can be still eaten without danger of poisoning. Different senses of garbage are in play, a verbal disagreement. The examples about McCain, the fetus, and the forest are either-or: McCain can’t both be a hero and a failure. But the facts alone won’t tell you which.

      What does? “The narrative” – the myth, the philosophy, or the theology that serves as the overarching interpretation of the world as a whole and our lives in it. These myths are frameworks in which the phenomena are seen as this or that, in which they appear as this or that. And as I have argued before, myths – and philosophy and theology are translations of myths into conceptual thought – are not theories explaining facts but frameworks that make sense of whatever facts there are, determine their significance, and sometimes whether a given x is to be regarded as a fact at all.

    McCain risked his life and also killed – for the decent man, a sacrifice of another sort – for others. The sublimity of self-sacrifice is expressed in myth and story – culminating perhaps in the sacrifice of God for man in Christianity. That Trump’s world version has no conceptual space for such a deep and abiding source of humanity speaks volumes about the baseness of his soul.

GL 

 

 

 

 

                   

 

 

Myths at Work

    First Oedipus, which was creatively adapted by Aeschylus into the great tragedies. It takes some imagination. You have to get out of our world and imagine yourself back in an archaic Greek world. 

But it’s possible. A self-confident, assertive man in all innocence kills his father and marries his mother – unimaginably terrible taboos, the violation of which means pollution, not only of the one who does it but his family and in this case his city through time. And then, at the height of his self-confidence as king, seeking the answer to why there has come a plague, must discover to his horror that it was his murder and incest that caused it. He curses life and blinds himself. Again, with some effort of imagination, his story moved me to pity. And through pity the story moved me. Through my being moved, the myth did its work. The my pity the an image of the human predicament entered my heart. our radical insecurity, epitomized by a sudden fall into catastrophe; our blindness to our real situation; the curse of virtue, over-confidence; the inevitability of tragedy; and the injustice that seems woven into the very fabric of life. I might have known these things intellectually if I had thought about it. But through the myth-become-tragedy, I became much more intimately acquainted with them: I knew these truths, not merely know about them. This image of life became real through Aeschylus’ treatment of the myth in a way that reached my heart, which allowed my mind to reach out to reality itself. (Compare knowing about someone not really important to you or some public figure, and someone you love and know intimately: that points toward the distinction I am trying to make.)    

  Beowulf and Ragnarök.  Ragnarök is a Norse myth about the end of the world, an end even for the gods, the end of everything. I have read that it probably originated in the 6^th century during a time of famine and war caused by the darkening of the sky (due to the eruption of more than one super volcano presumedly). It was a time during which half the population of northern Europe was thought to have perished (Neil Price, The Children of Ash & Elm: A History of the Vikings, Penguin, 2020).  

    The thought that the world is finite and a future in which the Nothing awaits is not new to us. But to believe in gods and other forces of nature that were immune to natural death, and then to believe that they, too, will perish, well, that seems a bit depressing. (The gods and a host of other mythical creatures from trolls to ice giants to elves and fairies to goblins were all part of nature for peoples of the North in those days – not supernatural beings.)

    This is the background – never made explicit – to the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, a kind of creative myth, or a poetic treatment of myth and legend. What moved me as an 18 year-old reading Beowulf for the first time was the hero’s noble attitude facing death, even in the knowledge that everything that mattered to him and that he loved was doomed to perish. Still, the hero faced danger and death nobly. That mattered even with Ragnarök in the background. That mattered even with Ragnarök in the background. It doesn’t matter that the warrior culture of Beowulf doesn’t appeal to me in the least. That is but a variation of a theme – nobility, goodness involves sacrifice without the hope of reward.

   So let me translate my feeling – the primary data, the gift of the poem –  here into conceptual language, the light of common day, so to speak [“Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” (Ode of Wordsworth) That’s what it feels like to put the experience of myth – or creative myth i.e. literature, also painting or music – into conceptual language.] Being moved by Beowulf’s comportment to death is the feeling of being in the presence of goodness: you do what you have to do because it is good – noble for the heroic ethos; not for any reward; not so that your name will live forever or so that you can go to Valhalla and live a great afterlife feasting with the gods. That doing something for its own sake connects true nobility to true goodness. That thought, furthermore, exposes just how far apart those who call themselves nobles are from true nobility, just as it does those who call themselves Christians who are a universe apart from goodness. Again, the image imparted by the myth goes to the heart and then the head has something it can translate into conceptual understanding – all the time realizing that the translation pales in comparison to the original.

     But the new conceptual understanding signifies a heightened consciousness. This is the sense in which a myth (including creative myth – art) can express a truth that cannot be expressed any other way. “It’s the edge, the interface, between what can be known [scientifically, intellectually] and what is never to be discovered because it is a mystery transcendent of all human research,” as Joseph Campbell puts it. Our hearts and imaginations connect us more directly with metaphysical realities, with our understanding (Verstand) trying to make sense of truths our hearts give us through our imagination. That is our epistemological relation with transcendence, mystery – that which our finite senses and intellects cannot reach.    GL

    

Theses about myth. An old interest of mine, partly stimulated by reading Joseph Campbell as a student.

And also by the way Plato uses myth to express truths when the Socratic method of dialectic (i.e. philosophical conversation) reaches a limit, but mainly by the fact that I enjoying reading them. These are just theses I would love to discuss with someone who really understood myth.

 

·         I doubt myth ever really had the function of explaining, in anything remotely resembling scientific explanation, the physical causes at work in the origin or nature or the physical workings of nature itself.

 

·         To the extent that certain complexes of myths and rites were intended to influence or control the forces of nature that had particular groups at its mercy, this has been totally replaced by science and technology, and thus cut off from myth. I would call the attempt to control nature rather 'magic' than myth in the proper sense, though magical practices can integrate myth-like stories. ["The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse.” - C. S. Lewis]

 

·         Religious stories are canonized, officially sanctioned or perhaps in some cases spiritually sanctioned myths. (Joseph Campbell)

 

·         Myths are like public dreams. (Joseph Campbell, C. J. Jung)

 

·         Some myths, the ones people have lived by, concern the deepest mysteries and sources of the human: why something exists at all and not rather nothing, coming to be (birth), passing away (transience, death), sex, etc. They make the terror of existence bearable and give expression to the deepest joys. Myths relate us to the same ultimate realities that metaphysics does, but through narrative and symbols, imagination and emotion.

 

·         Myths can serve different purposes – to entertain, to communicate ethical insights, etc. But when they are candidates for religion, when they deal with the phenomena on which all else depends, they express sublime experiences in a symbolic-picturesque narrative that is a placeholder standing for our relationship to a transcendence beyond our conceptual thought and scientific categories. This need not be religious or mythological in the narrow sense; the story of man’s progress (StarTrek view of the world) or Woody Allen’s nihilism are as mythical in this sense as religious narratives: the Nothing, the Void, is just as much a transcendence as the diverse pictures of God or the Buddhist universe. To that extent, there is nothing deeper, or higher, than mythical consciousness. Neither science nor philosophy can touch it.

 

·         Myth, unfortunately, I am almost tempted to say, gets used to relate the individual to the social order, which has always been an order in which some have power over others; that is to say, it is typically modified to function ideologically in a society or culture. To this extent, the dimension of depth, the symbolic relation to transcendence, is diluted or even perverted. Typically, when a priestly caste assumes authority over the interpretation and development of myth, that means trouble. Campbell says this is a function of myth, and I agree myths that do not connect us to the social order have no life. But myths that reinforce an unjust hierarchy are ideology.

 

·         A myth is a translation of a human relationship to transcendence. [Campbell, like Jung, located transcendence in the human psyche; that seems reductive to me.] To treat it as a factual account of transcendence – to read Genesis, for example, as a report of events that happened in space and time, something like a newspaper article on the origins of the universe – kills the myth. The source of myth is dream, the subconscious mind. The meaning-loaded images it gives rise to do not get their force from states of affairs in the waking world that they are thought to describe, but from the light and value and meaning they shed on the waking world. If the waking world were not imbued with mystery, if the subconscious mind was cut off from it, so to speak, because the mystery of it had been lost to view, if birth, sex, and death had no more significance and wonder than any other trivial fact, then there would be no myth.

 

·         To conclude from the belief that myth has its location in the subconscious mind – the spirit if you will – that myths are nothing but subjective-intersubjective psychological energies translated into conscious images and narratives, that therefore the ‘primitives’ and ‘medieval people’ were less ‘advanced’ than we enlightened moderns, is a modern prejudice and naiveté that many past peoples never made. It is wrong to believe that the Greeks, for example, really imagined Zeus and Hera up on Mount Olympus having a marital quarrel over Zeus’ infidelity, or on the contrary that they believed that Zeus and Hera were nothing but masks for psychological brain workings that could be understood by physical science purely naturalistically. Neither. Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Ares, etc. and the stories connected with them were placeholders for spiritual forces beyond the human ken that entered into human life at various critical times. The reality of Aphrodite consisted precisely in the human inability to comprehend Aphrodite’s reality except indirectly through the experience of the sublime in certain forms connected with erotic love. There was never any assumption that the myths were factual stories or entertaining ways of describing human psychology in purely naturalistic terms. Indeed, what lies beyond what our minds can conceptualize or theorize about scientifically is not a possible scientific question, and it is not something philosophy can grasp except speculatively. What realities our mythical (sublime) consciousness interacts with and translates into human symbols is mystery, the conceptual space in which myth may live.

 

·         The monotheistic religions, in essence, present themselves as myths that were sublimely and uniquely enacted in the waking world. A myth that erupted into history, so to speak, from the other realm.

 

·         Myths can be criticized, but only from within a perspective that draws on another mythical or at least supra-natural (metaphysical) intuition. For example, the dominant image of most if not all oriental mythical narratives – that “there is no such thing as individual life, but only one great cosmic law by which all things are governed in their places,” such that one’s birth determines absolutely what one is to be, and thus what one is to think and do: such a way of imagining the individual’s relation to the cosmos may be deep and even noble in some ways. But as it seems incompatible with the reality of the individual soul, a reality that comes to be in the many forms of love, including the grief over the loss of a beloved individual, it is not a myth I could live by. I don’t think the myths I do live by are true in any absolute sense, and the ones I don’t are false. I think there is a price for the myths that do give rise to the significance of the individual soul. Still, the love of the particular is real to me. So either that is an illusion (Buddhism, for example, would see it like that) or it is real; and if real, then the cycles of myth that reduce individuality to social function, and society to a mirror of some transcendent order, is blind to certain phenomena. Either way, it is not an empirical state of affairs that is at stake but ways of experiencing self and the world.

 

·         Perhaps I am wrong, but I think Campbell’s illuminating thought about myth – in the tradition of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Jung – presupposes a certain metaphysical philosophy that is unquestioned and in the background: that the universe is the mechanical universe of science – indifferent, deterministic, meaningless – and the myth is a subjective, subconscious symbolic response to our place in this universe making it possible for us to live with the horror at the center of our existence. In my thinking, I would replace this closed metaphysic with an open one, one that leaves space for all the don’t know. Myths relate us to transcendence – that which is beyond our conceptual or scientific knowledge. They deal at their deepest with birth, death, and sex; with our connections to the soul, the community, strangers, nature, and the divine – metaphysical realities in the end. There is no need to believe none of these phenomena are disconnected from the rest of being, are illusions produced by a meaning-seeking animal thrust into an inherently meaningless universe. That, too, is a myth.

 

 

C. S. Lewis on the relation of Christianity to myth. C. S. Lewis wrote that Christianity is great myth – true myth. I believe a myth is true when it illuminates spiritual realities in the only way such realities can be illuminated: with images that form some connection between the sublime and the human; that are sublime analogies to experiences we can grasp and which then point to transcendence. Lewis then added: it is a myth that happened in our world. For me, honestly, the truth in the myth would be enough to connect me to Christianity. The becoming real in our world would be icing on the cake.