The Philosopher at 90

Themes: Philosophy

PAUL RICOEUR: “You know, the different ages of life meet with different kinds of happiness and unhappiness, as well as with, how should I say, different traps. The two traps of old age are sadness and boredom. Sadness? “It is so sad that one must leave all this, that one must prepare to go . . .” So here, I say, one must not succumb to sadness . . . To assent to sadness is what the old monks would call acedia. There is no modern word for acedia: it is a kind of melancholia, which is not Freud’s melancholia, but perhaps it is Dürer’s, when he paints Melencolia I, where one can see a women, with her head lowered, a fist under her chin, looking at geometrical figures which no longer signify anything to her; and there is the clock which marks the hours. That is acedia: Dürer’s melencolia. And the remedy is the
pleasure of an encounter, the pleasure of always seeing something new, of  rejoicing. And in the same gesture, I answer the second great temptation of old age—boredom. Not the boredom of children who, when bored, say: “Mummy, I don’t know what to do.” For me, it is the opposite. I do know what to do. But it is to say, “I have already seen all this, and I have already seen all that . . .” Well, the remedy is similar to that for sadness: to continue to be astonished. What Descartes at the beginning of his Treatise on Passions, called admiration.”

(From, Memory, History, Forgiveness: A Dialogue Between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi, p. 20-21)

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In defence of the proximate.

Themes: Art and Imagination, Beauty, Hope, Philosophy, The Future, The Trinity

Defence of the Defence (2 sentences)

1. Not the ‘approximate’, although it is worthy in its way. It is an attribute of God to be proximate to all and thus (a)proximate to human understanding. There are pleasant idle hours to spend in contemplation of the alpha privative. (Particularly one as odd as the ‘a’ in approximate). I nod in friendly estimation toward the Negative Theologian. But the via negativa is hardly a road, more of a fence to keep you on the road. We must journey further on the Way who proceeds.

2. And I challenge anyone to question my commitment to the ‘farther off’. Many of the finest things are farther off, don’t you think? Mountain ranges are an obvious case. In fact a double case: fine to behold from afar, and when you’re perched on the crest, making far-off things fine.
I long for the Delectable Mountains, to be shepherded in Immanuel’s Land; for the glimpse from Mt Clear of the gates of the Celestial City. I am tortured with the thought that perhaps they will always be farther off.

I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
where does my help come from?

Psalm 121:1

This, of course, is the dangerous ambivalence of the ‘farther off’. It can be constantly removing itself to the horizon. Perhaps because something in the human heart was created for visions, for anticipation and expectation, the ‘farther off’ is the most powerful of the modern techniques of power. Some things that appear farther off are not really there at all, no matter how fast you run. No trophy, no flowers, no flashbulbs, no line. The desire for the ‘farther off’ when undisciplined, when cultivated without wisdom or direction, flowers into an infinite dissatisfaction whose-not-entirely-approximate name is Hell.

The true lover of the ‘farther off’ engages a double aesthetic: on the one hand, a disciplined appreciation that somethings are fine simply because they are distant; and therefore one must keep one’s proper distance to love them truly. On the other, acknowledging that there is a ‘farther off’ which beckons us come closer: its name is ‘promise’. The true lover of the ‘farther off’ engages in this aesthetic discipline: cultivating joy, wonder, reverence, sublimity at the contemplation of the essentially ‘father off’; and yearning to come closer to the promised. (the cultivation of this discernment in human affairs is one of the true uses of philosophy, even of the post-modern hermeneutic of suspicion). This double aesthetic is the heart of Christian worship: it is its dynamism and transcendence; it is what makes it interesting for all eternity. It is the double aesthetic of the resurrection: the place where the true lover of the ‘farther off’ learns to cultivate discernment, to learn what it is that beckons us closer, and what demands that we remain distant. It is the double aesthetic of the Trinity and Incarnation. It is the character of God.

3. I rest my defence of the defence.

 

In defence of the proximate:

The proximate is neither approximate, nor farther off, nor promise.
It is what we must be in order to love them truly.

You and me and the friend
who draws near in faith.

“And they said one to another,
Did not our heart burn within us,
while he talked with us by the way.” (Luke 24:32 KJV)

I rest my defence.

(for Emma on her 30th Birthday)

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The Purpose Driven Space

Themes: 4th Yr Project, Philosophy

The spatiality of created beings is not an accident. Much of the attention given to the explaining spatiality in our philosophical tradition has focussed on the necessity of space. Space is ‘necessary’ in the sense I was talking about last post: we find it impossible to think of objects in the world without thinking or relying upon a concept of spatiality at the same time.
Philosophical reasoning first entered on this path by trying to tease out the relationship between being, and non-being, and multiple ‘beings’. This might appear to be a hopelessly abstract question, but for the ancient Greeks it was intimately bound up with the fundamentals of life. I’d like to come back and tell the story in more detail sometime. Let me just give you the conclusion: for the Greek philosophical tradition (which is still deeply influential) spatiality was necessary as a logical feature of what it means for the cosmos to be rather than not be. For a very important reason, however, this answer was completely unacceptable to Christians.

If spatiality is a logical deduction from the concept of being, then it is a property shared equally by all beings, whether God or the cosmos. Greeks had no problem with this, their concept of God as ‘Perfect Being’, meant that the being of God was both the foundation and totality of all other beings: in a sense, God was co-extensive with the cosmos, and embraced the cosmos as part of his own being. For the Greeks, God was perfectly spatial.

The Christian God would have no truck with this. We approach our God, not from the understanding that he is Supreme Being, but as the Author of Being – The Creator. God is not the foundation or pinnacle of a chain of being that leads from greatest to least. God is not part of the chain. Of course, we believe that God is, and therefore is a Being, but his Being and our being cannot be related by forms of logical deduction or degrees of quality/quantity. This leads Christians claim two things about God that Greek philosophy has a real problem with: he is transcendent, and he is infinite. At their root, these are claims that features of created being do not apply unproblematically to God, we speak of him analogically.

This means that, in an intellectual world shaped by knowledge of the Christian God, we cannot rest the necessity of space on a necessity of being qua being. The non-negotiable nature of spatiality for our explanations of experience must rest upon features of created being, the created order. Space is necessary in that it is a fixed property of the created order spoken into existence by God. But Christians do not believe that this universal order is itself a fixed, logical, eternal property of being. Rather, in its fundamental aspect as created, it is radically contingent (i.e., it could have been otherwise or not at all). God created spatiality in freedom, just as he freely called all the other aspects of created being into existence.

Contingency opens up the question of meaning. Necessary Beings are fundamentally uninteresting from the perspective of meaning because they are impervious to the question ‘why?’ When you ask a necessary Being, ‘why?’, it just stares back at you, ’til you either blink and go away or your head explodes. But if spatiality is a created necessity, resting upon an act of freedom, then we can legitimately investigate the possibility that God created spatiality with a purpose: that in its fundamental enactment as a law of created being, space carries an intention. So here’s a thesis: Space is meaningful all the way down, it shares in the basic rationality of all creation as a work of the Spirit. Space communicates just by being the being it is. It endlessly echoes with the words that called it out of nothing. Because:

all things have been created through Him and for Him. (Colossians 1:16 HCSB)

This is a tangent, but isn’t it interesting that it is precisely this excess of signal, the sheer overwhelming amount of communication that occurs in, through, by space that makes it necessary for our brains to have sophisticated filters which constantly screen away irrelevant communication and allow us to focus on matters of interest. It’s one of my favourite non-conscious features of my brain (It’s nice to just sit back and enjoy your brain occasionally). I’m enjoying it right now while I write this in the busy atmosphere of a cafe. However, in a world whose order is distorted by the wrenching entropy of sin, our feverish minds not only filter out the particular communications occurring in space around us, we harden ourselves against the meaning of space itself.

He demonstrated |this power| in the Messiah by raising Him from the dead and seating Him at His right hand in the heavens— far above every ruler and authority, power and dominion, and every title given, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And He put everything under His feet and appointed Him as head over everything for the church, which is His body, the fullness of the One who fills all things in every way. (Ephesians 1:20–23 HCSB)

image by kevindooley

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The Socratic Method, Part 2

Themes: Pedagogy, Philosophy

What happens if you answer the question?

There is an interesting little dynamic created within the classroom:
Everybody knows that the teacher already knows the answer, and the answer that the teacher knows is the right answer. The question (as question) is thereby subverted, transformed from an expression of relational dependence (asking for help) into an invitation to seek affirmation.

1. Even if Plato had a correct understanding of how knowledge and learning function, we are not Socrates, nor pupils of Socrates: the relationship dynamic we share between teacher and pupil is nothing like Socrates and his interlocutors. Plato is careful to present those who dialogue with Socrates as conceiving themselves as his intellectual equals, or as too frivolous to care – either way, there is no consideration of seeking affirmation in giving an answer to his questions. In our contemporary situations, the power balance has significantly shifted, creating a very different illocution (communicative act) out of a superficially similar locution (communicative form).

2. This change in the force of the question creates a whole host of resonances within the dynamics of the classroom:
students feel they are either need to have learned all the material before they come to class, or that they are a very poor students and incapable of class participation. They become involved in a very difficult attempt to already know what they are there to learn. They are placed in situations of ethical conflict within themselves, and in political conflict with each other – showing off, tall-poppy syndrome, all the rest.

At the end of the day though, what fascinates me about the Socratic Method is the way is the way in which it throws open for us the question of The Question – the way in which the kind of beings we think we are, and the kind of world we think we dwell in, resolves itself concretely into the types and lines of questions that we ask.

Socratic Pedagogy buys into an epistemology and anthropology that is incompatible with Christianity, and therefore results in classrooms that fail to be characterised by love, grace, and mutual dependence.
What difference does it make that we believe in a substantial, knowable creation – as well as an unseen eternal?
What difference does it make that we believe epistemic maturity consists in faith and dependence upon The Knower, rather than participation in It/Him?
What do we believe about the complex matrix of the teacher/student relationship? what is its goal? what is the effect of sin upon this? what is its redemption? how can it be conformed to the image of The Son?
For we have “one teacher, The Christ.” (Matt 23:10).

Having asked those questions, then what sort of questions would we ask?

The Socratic Method romances us with a vision of teacher and learner as partners in a quest for enlightenment. We are the happy few, the band of brothers standing before the walls of Harfleur or upon the field of Agincourt, ready together to storm the citadels of ignorance, to lay waste to the armies of incomprehension. The teacher is our general, our Alexander, marshalling the classroom forces for an expedition to extend the empire of The Known, even unto the Lands behind the rising of the Sun. Each probing question is a line upon our internal world-map, a trajectory for advance straight through the heart of darkness, through the twisted pictures of serpents, beyond the merely ‘uncharted’, and into the great Terra Incognita that spans the reverse of every chart.

Those Questions!

Isn’t it right that come the end, everyone stands on their desks and says, “captain, my captain”, while choking back sobs of gratitude for the privilege of taking part in such an educational experience?

[Actually, if there is anyone who could mount a challenge to Socrates as the most pervasive influence on the Imaginary of Education it would be John Keating (Robin Williams) in the film Dead Poets Society.
What teacher does not want to be loved like that? And what aspect of pedagogy is not directly affected by the need of a teacher to be loved? (There is a whole line of thought to be followed here, another time...)]

Don’t get me wrong, there is definitely something to be romantical about here. There is something wonderfully humble and wise about a teacher who asks questions. It is like a parent teaching their child to walk, gradually withdrawing support and setting greater challenges until the child is confident to progress on his or her own. In response to this skilful questioning, the students discover new dimensions and connections within their experience of the world and are helped to a greater sense of confidence in their ability to explore and learn outside the classroom. And further, the classroom becomes the site of free-flowing multiparty dialogue between the teacher and the students thus presenting opportunities for students to be challenged and provoked in their understanding, not only by the professional teacher, but also by their fellow students.
Still further, this loving questioning acknowledges something true: that there are kinds of knowing which are only given as experiences. There are no combinations of paragraphs or slides capable of communicating it.
The Question fires the imagination, and the imagination transports and orients us to the experience.
All Good. I think.

If it’s the right question.

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The Socratic Method, Part 1

Themes: Pedagogy, Philosophy

Of the many, many things Socrates fathered in Western Society, none more directly messes with my day than the Socratic Method.

You know when you’re in the presence of the Socratic Method when a teacher or lecturer adopts the “I’m a little tea-pot” pose (one hand bent so that dorsal side of wrist makes contact with waist, other arm extended with hand doing “eensy weensy spider” – although numerous variations have been observed). And then, while sawing the air, climbing the pipe, and summoning up a good head of steam, spouts something like:

“Who here can tell me what was the Prophet Jeffaniah’s motive for building a replica temple from toothpicks? Anyone?”

Don’t be fooled by the weird attempt to mash-up nursery rhymes, it’s a trick! They already know the answer (and if they don’t, they’ll pretend that they did anyway). Seek shelter under your desk! Stop up your ears! Look away! Just don’t answer the question.

Here’s why:
1. Socrates’ teaching method was part of his (or Plato’s) larger theory of human knowledge, which, through various exciting convolutions, derived from the belief that learning was essentially about remembering.

You see, back in the day, before our Souls became trapped in mortal flesh, we all beheld the naked truth of the Eternal Forms. Our fall from this state of perfect rational contemplation into darkness and error has caused us to forget those beautiful truths. And, because our souls are nourished by the Truth, not being able to contemplate the Forms makes us sluggish and stupid.

But all is not lost! Occasionally, we gain glimpses of the truth even through the distorted airs of this world, and these glimpses can stoke up memories of the Forms which can, in turn, nourish our souls and help us to ascend once again out of this body of flesh into the eternal, rational, world. Perhaps we should think of Socrates as a Philosopher-Evangelist who conceived of his task as liberation through remembrance.

Socrates thought that his theory could be proved by demonstrating that people could solve complex philosophical problems and come to the knowledge of the Truth simply by asking them the right series of questions. There was no need for input from a teacher or any external source of data, because your soul knew truth before you were born.
Everything you need to know about everything is already inside your head. Socrates’ particular voodoo was getting it out.

That, fellow critters, was why Socrates haunted the lane-ways of Athens, surprising unsuspecting artisans with bizarre thought experiments and generally minding everyone’s business but his own.

And this CRACKPOT is responsible for a method of PEDAGOGY!!!
I ask you…

More on the ill after-effects of the Socratic Method will be forthcoming.

photo by samantha celera

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On Weariness

Themes: Genesis, Philosophy, Selections, Sin

One of the unusual, and I think powerful, features of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy was that he took moods seriously. For him, a mood can be an insight into the real, bare-bones conditions of our human existence:

A mood makes manifest ‘how one is’ and ‘how one is faring’. In this ‘how one is’, having a mood brings Being to its There. (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 173)

However, the conditions under which we all operate – our individual ways of getting through the day – tend to require that we ignore moods as best we can. They are the kind of thing that we paper over or drown out as we busy ourselves in being the kind of person that others need us to be. Heidegger was particularly interested in what lies behind such human experiences as Anxiety, and Boredom. What do these experiences mean? What do they tell us about being human, and as such, what do they tell us about Being?

I think Weariness can be an experience, a ‘Mood’, that lets us lift the veil and glimpse something real.

There is a kind of weariness that fixes us in our being. It is the ‘pushing-back’ of the world against my exertions, the ‘Something’ that properly resists me, and thereby fixes me as a being with will, and desire, and goal. How good this is! It enables us to be creatures and to create – there is no music without friction. It lets me be an individual. It lets me love – to find myself in finitude, with limited powers, and to trust, embrace, and depend upon the love of others. It is the kind of weariness that I imagine pouring through the arms of the First Man, after a day working the Garden, that led him to take pleasure in kicking his boots off and lying out full stretch in front of the fire.

But there is a kind of weariness that threatens to overwhelm. The bone-tired, aching weariness that flows from wrestling with a ‘Something’ that does not merely push back, rather it holds us in a death grip, dragging us down to Nothing, to be consumed and disintegrated.

For a while we might believe that this Weariness will not win out in the end: that it is not the truth of the world. We fool ourselves into thinking that if we only keep trying we can roll our boulder to the top of the hill, and not have it roll back down the other side. A myth.

There is no Rest here. There is no point in this world at which motion may cease. This is fundamental physics: if you do not move you will shiver, starve, be caught up, be dragged down, be eaten alive. Thou Shalt not Rest!

By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.
(Genesis 3:19 NIV)

‘Fatigue’ is how Engineers describe a weakness that develops in materials through repeated variations of stress. Weariness can sometimes be like this, a similar weakness induced through conflicting forces. To be weary can be to experience in ourselves the particular ‘There’, of Being in This World. A world riven by a multitude of opposing wills, conflicting desires. moving toward multiple goals, operating under both a Curse and a Blessing.

And in which, if there was no reconciliation, no proper administration, would eventually shake itself apart.

photo (which is brilliant) by
Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

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