G. I. Gurdjieff, drawing, it seems, on a much more ancient wisdom, saw the average man as being composed of different independently functioning ‘centers’: there was basically the intellectual center, the emotional center, and, combining the physical and instinctive, an instinctive-moving center. These centers tended in general to be out of balance with each other, with consequent knock-on problems for the health, sanity and stability of the ordinary man. A fundamental aspect of the Gurdjieff system involved reconciling the centers, helping and training them to function like a well-oiled team, and no longer at odds one with the other.
This, of course, is to a certain extent a simplification of what Gurdjieff taught—but it is sufficient for the moment to our purposes here.
In several of the last few mailings, I have suggested that the wellsprings of our actions lie more with the instincts (and, indeed, the emotions too) than with our rational mind or will. In one mailing, I suggested that the existence of ethics demonstrated how it was possible to bring the instincts under conscious control. But as it generally works, this represents a fairly brutal control. A stamping on the instincts rather than a co-operation, much in the way that one would morning-after put a campfire out.
Looking at your typical ‘ethical’ man, the impression one often gets is of a rather dry old stick, who having succeeded in strangling his natural instincts, is rather proud of the fact. Yet an argument can exist that often he is deceiving himself, that rather than being in control of the instincts he is in fact a victim of their deviousness—or the deviousness of at least one of them.
In a recent mailing I mentioned the almost instinctive drive of man’s need to make sense of the world, to create a world vision, whether it be true or false, that will allow him the illusion of being in control of things. Of a comparable power is the drive to ‘belong’—something discussed in an even earlier posting. Those that claim to know about these things—the experts—say that the social instinct in man shares the same neural pathways as are involved in physical pain, so that the urge to belong operates arguably on the same reactive level as that which compels the fool to pull his finger back from the flame.
And lest you think I exaggerate, a recent report, for what it’s worth, in the Daily Telegraph, carried the following: ‘Love really does hurt, according to scientists, who found that breaking up can cause physical pain. Researchers discovered a genetic link between physical pain and social rejection . . .’ (DT, 5/12/2009).
What I am suggesting is that the outward probity of individuals has often less to do with an ethical approach to life than with the compulsive desire to belong. The strength of specific impulses varies from individual to individual—but if in any particular instance the overriding one happens to be the desire to belong, then there is not necessarily any virtue underlying the adoption of an ethical stance. What is involved is simply a roundabout way of satisfying the ruling instinct—much as in the case of the serial masturbator or the compulsive coward.
Now I am not saying that the ethical life is not possible—of course it is. But what I am suggesting is that often what appears to be an ethical life is only a simulacrum of it, much in the way that in nature the, say, harmless scarlet kingsnake is an at-first-glance copy of the venomous coral snake—though perhaps the analogy should be other way round.
The ethical man (if such a creature there be) arrives at his principles through the confluence of his desires, conscience and a perception of the broader social needs. The pseudo-ethical man arrives at his ‘principles’—the principles of the ‘social ethic’, as I described it in an earlier posting—as a consequence of his being inwardly driven to embrace them. And the dangerous thing is that in his panic to belong he tramples ruthlessly underfoot any aspect of his nature that might seem threatening to the paradigm of respectability that he craves. A third option, of course, is that of drawing a cloak about the privacy of one’s ‘sins’—rather like the figure on the Sandeman’s Port bottle—and surmounting it with a pious face.
In the mailing cited immediately above, I also mentioned the Ten Commandments and the sins or tendencies they were logically intended to curb—tendencies that are in themselves not directly instinctive, but are rather expressions of an innate and more basic animal/human drive to individual survival and self-expression. If you look at the list closely, they are all personal sins. If they have a social context at all, it is only to the extent that everybody has a propensity to them. They are expressions purely of individual self-interest, and as such ultimately at war with all other individual self-interests.
Yet there are circumstances where such self-interests can combine together to their mutual advantage. One thinks, for example, of the vast herds of wildebeest etc. that migrate up and down the Serengeti Plain, where the individual’s chance of survival is greatly increased through the sheer mass of numbers involved.
And something similar occurs in human life. In an earlier posting—and I’m sick at this stage of citing earlier postings—I mentioned the human propensity under threat to ‘circle the wagons’. For the fact is that there is an instinctive human reaction when nervous and scared to fold like sheep. Walter Laqueur, in his book, The Terrible Secret, reports a standard response among ghettoized East European Jews to news of massacres and exterminations as ‘“they can’t kill us all”’.
But, of course, they could—or nearly so. And this points to a danger implicit in the operation of any unconscious instinctive mechanism: automatic reactions that historically have aided survival may, through time and the development of technology, turn into their opposite. This is not to say that the idea of safety in numbers is not necessarily a correct one—most times it is; but there are circumstances where it may not be so.
The reason I raise this point is that I think it illustrates the possibility for a fruitful cooperation between the instincts and the intellect, as opposed to a knock-down-and -winner-take-all type of relationship.
Imagine some vague sense of danger that has the effect of setting people nervously milling and gathering together out of instinct; then allow also for an individual who is influenced by the general mood. The immediate unconscious impulse is for him to gather together with the rest. But it is within the power of his rational mind, if it understands the implicit fallibility of the instinctive response, to put up a hand, as it were, to the impulse and say: Wait a while—you may well be right. But there are circumstances where this particular response may be wrong. Let’s just discuss it for a moment . . .
It may turn out that he after all goes with the crowd, it may turn out that he doesn’t. And it may turn out that whatever decision he makes, it will be the wrong one. But the fact is that whatever conclusion he reaches will be as a result of a partnership between the two separate aspects of his nature, the intellectual and the instinctive; and that fact alone may give him the slightest of edges when it comes to deciding on the right course.
We have concentrated here on only one aspect of the instincts—the human tendency to crowd together under threat. But if that one can sometimes be iffy, then it opens up the possibility that under differing circumstances so also may all the instincts. And the knowledge that we cannot automatically depend on the instincts to do the right thing by us in changed situations makes it sensible that we adopt alternative strategies. It allows for the introduction of the intellect as friend, intimate or counselor to the instincts, and not necessarily as enemy—a cooperation in aid of what was after all the fundamental purpose of the instincts: our individual survival and opportunity for self-assertion.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Last week’s Sunday Times, under the headline “Turkish farmers ‘fathered the Irish’”, detailed how genetic research had shown the roots of the Irish race to lie in the geographical area of Turkey.
I remember reading some forty years ago a book (the name now escapes me) by Leonard Cottrell that spoke of an ancient people called the Danae (at least, I think that was the spelling) migrating at some stage from the region of Turkey and seemingly disappearing from history. Immediately, an association sprung to mind with the Tuatha de Danaan.
Some years later I was reading a book (the name of which also escapes me) from the library on Turkey and was struck by the resemblance between certain words of Turkish and certain Irish words that would have had a more or less related meaning. The only one that sticks in my mind now is oglum, apparently the Turkish for ‘young man’.
Of course, there was no proof of anything here, nor would I have been competent to make any claims on the basis of it even if there had been—just two signposts pointing in an interesting direction had anyone in the ethnographic field connected them and been interested in following them up.
Funny enough, the only other thing I remember from the book about Turkey was the description of the area between the Black and Caspian Seas as constituting on of the great marching grounds of history, i.e. a geographical funnel for the march and countermarch of invading armies over thousands of years. The author made the point that over the period of recorded history the region had known nothing more than the odd fifty or so snatched years of peace. And when one pondered the statement, one realized in retrospect the futility of human effort in the face of war upon war upon war.
But equally one also realized, especially given the limited lifespans of previous ages, that it would have been possible for someone to live out their life from cradle to grave in just such a lacuna of peace, and no doubt persuade themselves at the same time that things had changed forever for the better.
[The promised second part of yesterday’s mailing will appear in the next day or two.]
I remember reading some forty years ago a book (the name now escapes me) by Leonard Cottrell that spoke of an ancient people called the Danae (at least, I think that was the spelling) migrating at some stage from the region of Turkey and seemingly disappearing from history. Immediately, an association sprung to mind with the Tuatha de Danaan.
Some years later I was reading a book (the name of which also escapes me) from the library on Turkey and was struck by the resemblance between certain words of Turkish and certain Irish words that would have had a more or less related meaning. The only one that sticks in my mind now is oglum, apparently the Turkish for ‘young man’.
Of course, there was no proof of anything here, nor would I have been competent to make any claims on the basis of it even if there had been—just two signposts pointing in an interesting direction had anyone in the ethnographic field connected them and been interested in following them up.
Funny enough, the only other thing I remember from the book about Turkey was the description of the area between the Black and Caspian Seas as constituting on of the great marching grounds of history, i.e. a geographical funnel for the march and countermarch of invading armies over thousands of years. The author made the point that over the period of recorded history the region had known nothing more than the odd fifty or so snatched years of peace. And when one pondered the statement, one realized in retrospect the futility of human effort in the face of war upon war upon war.
But equally one also realized, especially given the limited lifespans of previous ages, that it would have been possible for someone to live out their life from cradle to grave in just such a lacuna of peace, and no doubt persuade themselves at the same time that things had changed forever for the better.
[The promised second part of yesterday’s mailing will appear in the next day or two.]
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Getting to the Root (I) . . .
‘But the fact is that neurological science has by now shown exhaustively that it is possible to trace the evolution and existence of a thought before we become consciously aware of it.’
I wrote this in the posting before last, and since then someone has challenged me to prove the fact. Now I have not Googled it—but I have no doubt that if you choose to Google it, you will find fairly extensive background to the claim. There have been various studies and various methodologies used in researching the matter, including the tracking of minute blood flows in the brain and sequences of cerebral electronic impulses etc.
But there is a much more, to my mind, elegant indication—I hesitate to use the word ‘proof’—of the reality of what I have been describing. This involves the phenomenon called the post-hypnotic suggestion. Hans J. Eysenck, who in his time was one of the most famous and respected clinical psychologists in the world, describes it in the following terms:
‘This is a very curious phenomenon, which has been known for well over a hundred years. A suggestion is given to a person in the hypnotic trance, telling him that after waking up he will carry out a certain act. The suggestion may be to the effect that he will go out of the room, pick up an umbrella, bring it back and open it up in front of an audience at a given time, say when the clock chimes five, or when the experimenter [hypnotist/psychologist] blows his nose. The subject will in almost every case carry out the suggestion. If asked later why he did this particular thing, he will rationalize his conduct by some kind of semi-reasonable explanation . . .’ (Uses and Abuses of Psychology: H. J. Eysenck, Pelican, 1967).
The important point lies in the section I have emphasized. F.L. Marcuse, another eminent clinical psychologist and contemporary of Eysenck’s, describes this specific aspect of the phenomenon as follows: ‘Spurious reasons (rationalizations) for post-hypnotic acts may often follow as a sequel to the post-hypnotic behaviour, especially if the individual has no memory of the suggestion’s origin. This occurs in all probability because we prefer to think of our behaviour as being the result of fully-conscious motives’ (Hypnosis - Fact and Fiction: F.L. Marcuse, Pelican, 1970).
Now what is being said here is that the person who has been hypnotized into carrying out the behaviour (for handiness sake, we will from here on call him the ‘patient’) will generally come up with some rationally-sounding excuse as to why he has done what he has done. Some rationally sounding gibberish, in other words: for the reason given is a purely an after-the-event concoction, one with absolutely no causal connection to the action carried out.
An interesting point is the suggestion made by Marcuse, above, that the motivation for the post-operative rationalization has to do primarily with shoring up the patient’s sense of self, his belief to the effect that he is a consciously rational being.
Now here I have to make a certain leap—not much of a leap, given the scientific evidence, which anyone interested can look up for themselves—and suggest that the post-hypnotic-suggestion process and its aftermath are not very different from what goes on in the general everyday operation of the human psyche. Logically, it seems to me, that that the whole hypnotic process, and especially the possibility of suggestion implicit in it, is something that taps directly into whatever chain of communication exists normally between the unconscious (or instinctive) mind and the conscious mind.
We are creatures who like certainty, routine, who don’t particularly like surprises. Certainly we don’t like unexplained dissonances in our world. If, say, someone you have been acquainted with suddenly starts behaving towards you in an untoward way, then of course you can ask them about it, and receive an answer or not receive an answer, as the case may be. But if for whatever reason you fail to enquire, this I can guarantee: you will instead trawl and trawl through your memories until you come up with a reason for the other person’s attitude—no matter how objectively silly that ‘reason’ may be. And once you have locked on to that reason, you will experience a sudden satisfaction. You may not be any happier, but at least the logical parameters of your world have been restored.
I hesitate to call it an instinct, for instincts are generally those things that tie us to the animal. Yet that is what it may well be. What I am talking about is a fundamental and all encompassing individual human need to make sense of one’s environment, especially one’s social environment. We demand a clear cause and effect in our world, rather like a child with building blocks. If I do this, then this will follow; if such and such a thing has happened, then it is logically because of this something else that . . . etc. etc.
And over time we build up a whole system of tried and trusted 'certainties' regarding people and things, certainties as fundamental and necessary to our individual selves, and to our view of ourselves, as the axioms of mathematics. We demand and need a stable and calculable view of the world around us, especially the social world, and our place in it, even at the cost often of inventing it. And any collapse in this fabric of logical interconnections that make up the backdrop to our personal experience is likely to have the most terrible effects.
As I say, it is an inexorable human need; perhaps even an instinct. It is akin to a bird building a nest. In detail no nest is quite like any other; but the fact is that all—or most—birds build nests. Equally there is a species of crab that scuttles about the ocean floor, disguising its shell with the detritus of the seabed, so that externally no two crabs look alike, though under the shell they are all still sisters and brothers.
It is a universal and an individual process— this underlying process of personally and unconsciously orienting ourselves within the world as we perceive it. It is only when for whatever reason the framework we have created begins to break down that we are forced into the process of rationalization—of consciously reacting to that breakdown, in a way often analogous to that of a patient in the wake of a post-hypnotic suggestion.
It has often been suggested there is an innate human propensity to ‘curiosity’ underlying all our efforts, scientific and artistic and philosophical, at explaining the world. I would suggest it is less a matter of curiosity and more a matter of a compulsive need to make sense of things, to find some point at which our feet hit at least the illusion of solid ground and we can begin building upwards. We hate mysteries, we hate unknowns, we hate the sense that there may be things that do not fit into the general scheme of our knowledge. Perhaps it is this obsessive facet of our natures that accounts for the perennial popularity, in book, TV and film, of the who-dun-it.
I mentioned earlier how any collapse in the illusions that form our unique individual view of the world can have a terrible effect on the person at the receiving end of it. To illustrate this, two very perceptive movie instances spring to mind:
The first involves Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) in The Long Good Friday; the other, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) in Coppola’s The Conversation. In both cases, these men find their assumptions regarding the world and their place in it turned suddenly and menacingly upside down. For each of them it is a watershed moment: one that throws them naked and unprepared into a new reality, while at the same time barring any comforting return to their old way of thinking. The closing scenes of both films are, I would suggest, masterpieces of psychological observation.
[This is the first part of a somewhat longer thread of related discussions. The second part, if anyone’s interested, will appear in the course of the next few days.]
I wrote this in the posting before last, and since then someone has challenged me to prove the fact. Now I have not Googled it—but I have no doubt that if you choose to Google it, you will find fairly extensive background to the claim. There have been various studies and various methodologies used in researching the matter, including the tracking of minute blood flows in the brain and sequences of cerebral electronic impulses etc.
But there is a much more, to my mind, elegant indication—I hesitate to use the word ‘proof’—of the reality of what I have been describing. This involves the phenomenon called the post-hypnotic suggestion. Hans J. Eysenck, who in his time was one of the most famous and respected clinical psychologists in the world, describes it in the following terms:
‘This is a very curious phenomenon, which has been known for well over a hundred years. A suggestion is given to a person in the hypnotic trance, telling him that after waking up he will carry out a certain act. The suggestion may be to the effect that he will go out of the room, pick up an umbrella, bring it back and open it up in front of an audience at a given time, say when the clock chimes five, or when the experimenter [hypnotist/psychologist] blows his nose. The subject will in almost every case carry out the suggestion. If asked later why he did this particular thing, he will rationalize his conduct by some kind of semi-reasonable explanation . . .’ (Uses and Abuses of Psychology: H. J. Eysenck, Pelican, 1967).
The important point lies in the section I have emphasized. F.L. Marcuse, another eminent clinical psychologist and contemporary of Eysenck’s, describes this specific aspect of the phenomenon as follows: ‘Spurious reasons (rationalizations) for post-hypnotic acts may often follow as a sequel to the post-hypnotic behaviour, especially if the individual has no memory of the suggestion’s origin. This occurs in all probability because we prefer to think of our behaviour as being the result of fully-conscious motives’ (Hypnosis - Fact and Fiction: F.L. Marcuse, Pelican, 1970).
Now what is being said here is that the person who has been hypnotized into carrying out the behaviour (for handiness sake, we will from here on call him the ‘patient’) will generally come up with some rationally-sounding excuse as to why he has done what he has done. Some rationally sounding gibberish, in other words: for the reason given is a purely an after-the-event concoction, one with absolutely no causal connection to the action carried out.
An interesting point is the suggestion made by Marcuse, above, that the motivation for the post-operative rationalization has to do primarily with shoring up the patient’s sense of self, his belief to the effect that he is a consciously rational being.
Now here I have to make a certain leap—not much of a leap, given the scientific evidence, which anyone interested can look up for themselves—and suggest that the post-hypnotic-suggestion process and its aftermath are not very different from what goes on in the general everyday operation of the human psyche. Logically, it seems to me, that that the whole hypnotic process, and especially the possibility of suggestion implicit in it, is something that taps directly into whatever chain of communication exists normally between the unconscious (or instinctive) mind and the conscious mind.
We are creatures who like certainty, routine, who don’t particularly like surprises. Certainly we don’t like unexplained dissonances in our world. If, say, someone you have been acquainted with suddenly starts behaving towards you in an untoward way, then of course you can ask them about it, and receive an answer or not receive an answer, as the case may be. But if for whatever reason you fail to enquire, this I can guarantee: you will instead trawl and trawl through your memories until you come up with a reason for the other person’s attitude—no matter how objectively silly that ‘reason’ may be. And once you have locked on to that reason, you will experience a sudden satisfaction. You may not be any happier, but at least the logical parameters of your world have been restored.
I hesitate to call it an instinct, for instincts are generally those things that tie us to the animal. Yet that is what it may well be. What I am talking about is a fundamental and all encompassing individual human need to make sense of one’s environment, especially one’s social environment. We demand a clear cause and effect in our world, rather like a child with building blocks. If I do this, then this will follow; if such and such a thing has happened, then it is logically because of this something else that . . . etc. etc.
And over time we build up a whole system of tried and trusted 'certainties' regarding people and things, certainties as fundamental and necessary to our individual selves, and to our view of ourselves, as the axioms of mathematics. We demand and need a stable and calculable view of the world around us, especially the social world, and our place in it, even at the cost often of inventing it. And any collapse in this fabric of logical interconnections that make up the backdrop to our personal experience is likely to have the most terrible effects.
As I say, it is an inexorable human need; perhaps even an instinct. It is akin to a bird building a nest. In detail no nest is quite like any other; but the fact is that all—or most—birds build nests. Equally there is a species of crab that scuttles about the ocean floor, disguising its shell with the detritus of the seabed, so that externally no two crabs look alike, though under the shell they are all still sisters and brothers.
It is a universal and an individual process— this underlying process of personally and unconsciously orienting ourselves within the world as we perceive it. It is only when for whatever reason the framework we have created begins to break down that we are forced into the process of rationalization—of consciously reacting to that breakdown, in a way often analogous to that of a patient in the wake of a post-hypnotic suggestion.
It has often been suggested there is an innate human propensity to ‘curiosity’ underlying all our efforts, scientific and artistic and philosophical, at explaining the world. I would suggest it is less a matter of curiosity and more a matter of a compulsive need to make sense of things, to find some point at which our feet hit at least the illusion of solid ground and we can begin building upwards. We hate mysteries, we hate unknowns, we hate the sense that there may be things that do not fit into the general scheme of our knowledge. Perhaps it is this obsessive facet of our natures that accounts for the perennial popularity, in book, TV and film, of the who-dun-it.
I mentioned earlier how any collapse in the illusions that form our unique individual view of the world can have a terrible effect on the person at the receiving end of it. To illustrate this, two very perceptive movie instances spring to mind:
The first involves Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) in The Long Good Friday; the other, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) in Coppola’s The Conversation. In both cases, these men find their assumptions regarding the world and their place in it turned suddenly and menacingly upside down. For each of them it is a watershed moment: one that throws them naked and unprepared into a new reality, while at the same time barring any comforting return to their old way of thinking. The closing scenes of both films are, I would suggest, masterpieces of psychological observation.
[This is the first part of a somewhat longer thread of related discussions. The second part, if anyone’s interested, will appear in the course of the next few days.]
Thursday, January 28, 2010
If It Ain't Broken . . .
Back some forty years ago, Thor Heyerdahl, of Kon-Tiki fame, embarked on another ocean voyage aboard an Egyptian papyrus reed boat called Ra. The purpose of the voyage, if my memory serves me right, was to do with proving the possibility of ancient contacts between Egypt and South America. The boat itself was based upon ancient Egyptian designs, culled from manuscripts and tomb decorations etc.
In the course of building it, they ran up against a technical problem arising from the design, something to do with the prow. The more they examined it, the more they became convinced that the feature, even though it was part of the historic design, wasn’t an essential one. They called in the marine engineers, who agreed with them. And so they modified the design, leaving the feature to one side.
A short time into the voyage they ran into trouble, trouble resulting from their failure to follow the traditional design. It proved after all that the discarded feature played an important part in the boat’s seaworthiness. After a couple of months the boat had to be abandoned.
We live in a world where increasingly the demand is that everything that exists justifies itself before the court of reason. It doesn’t matter that this ‘reason’ is often a shorthand for special pleading. What it usually means is that such and such a thing is not reasonable simply because ‘it doesn’t suit me’. Such egoism is easily given a universalist spin by changing the phraseology from ‘It’s not reasonable to ask me to do or believe in this’ to ‘It is not reasonable to ask people to do or believe in this.’ And immediately one has a political programme.
Now change is endemic to the world we live in. Arguably, everything changes under the sun—even the sun itself; and so must we in our thinking and in our practice and in our institutions if we are to have any ongoing relevance. It is just as dangerous to lag behind change as to be too far ahead of it. Yet, in normal circumstances, the changes that we choose or are forced to make, if they are not to be counterproductive, should be reflective of the real state of things in the external world. They should not be undertaken merely as a consequence of well-organised fashionable pressure or dissent.
And it should be recognized that there are often ‘dumb’ things out there in the world, seemingly unable to make a case for themselves in the jostling marketplace of liberal opinion, that are (as in the original detail of the Ra) nonetheless essential to our existence.
In the course of building it, they ran up against a technical problem arising from the design, something to do with the prow. The more they examined it, the more they became convinced that the feature, even though it was part of the historic design, wasn’t an essential one. They called in the marine engineers, who agreed with them. And so they modified the design, leaving the feature to one side.
A short time into the voyage they ran into trouble, trouble resulting from their failure to follow the traditional design. It proved after all that the discarded feature played an important part in the boat’s seaworthiness. After a couple of months the boat had to be abandoned.
We live in a world where increasingly the demand is that everything that exists justifies itself before the court of reason. It doesn’t matter that this ‘reason’ is often a shorthand for special pleading. What it usually means is that such and such a thing is not reasonable simply because ‘it doesn’t suit me’. Such egoism is easily given a universalist spin by changing the phraseology from ‘It’s not reasonable to ask me to do or believe in this’ to ‘It is not reasonable to ask people to do or believe in this.’ And immediately one has a political programme.
Now change is endemic to the world we live in. Arguably, everything changes under the sun—even the sun itself; and so must we in our thinking and in our practice and in our institutions if we are to have any ongoing relevance. It is just as dangerous to lag behind change as to be too far ahead of it. Yet, in normal circumstances, the changes that we choose or are forced to make, if they are not to be counterproductive, should be reflective of the real state of things in the external world. They should not be undertaken merely as a consequence of well-organised fashionable pressure or dissent.
And it should be recognized that there are often ‘dumb’ things out there in the world, seemingly unable to make a case for themselves in the jostling marketplace of liberal opinion, that are (as in the original detail of the Ra) nonetheless essential to our existence.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Taking the Long Road . . .
Human beings are social animals. It is not something unique to them. It is a trait they share with many other animal species, so that one must suspect that it is an instinct lodged way back the evolutionary stem. When people gather in groups, or engage in the social behaviours of inclusion or exclusion or social climbing, it is not an expression of some higher evolutionary status, but rather it is the more primitive aspects of their nature that are involved.
Being instinctive, the roots of such behaviours are fundamentally unconscious, and our rationalizations of our actions—I did it because . . . etc.—are really rationalizations after the event, justifications made to persuade ourselves that we are really in control and do things from conscious motivations.
But the fact is that neurological science has by now shown exhaustively that it is possible to trace the evolution and existence of a thought before we become consciously aware of it.
Now ethics, whether as a result of divine revelation or human design, represent something different. Ethics open up human behaviour to the field of reason, and offer the individual the possibility of armouring himself in advance against the depredations of the instincts. For any situation, we can have a strategy practiced ahead of time that will stymie the knee-jerk propensities of the unconscious drives.
More than that, ethics and the various ethical systems can tell us a lot about human nature. Take the Ten Commandments: what they tell us about the Jews who came out of Egypt with Moses, the Chosen People, is that they had no inherent belief in or respect for God, were indifferent to family ties, were murderous, adulterous, prone to stealing, malicious liars and gossips, and prey to begrudgery and envy . . . it all has a very modern ring to it.
Above I mentioned ethics in the context of the individual, to the extent that he can convince himself of their relevance. But there also exists a social ethic, in the sense of a composite picture of what a respectable member of a community (to the extent nowadays that it is possible to still talk of community) should be. In terms of modern society, the necessary virtues would, one imagines, still include honesty, the refusal to speak ill of others, an eschewal of violence and pettiness and revenge, a submission to sexual morality, even within the loosened restrictions of the times etc. etc.
Fifty years ago, say, the conditions would have been tougher and much harder to abide by. But then, of course, the social ethic isn’t intended to be literally true of the individual members of a society. It is more an aspiration. Actually, it is more akin to a passport—a passport which is issued to each and every member of the community at birth, so that one doesn’t have to earn one’s reputation, one has it automatically, and can only be deprived of it through one’s own misdemeanours or enemy action, or a combination of both.
[This, of course, is at best broadly true. The process involved is much more complex and contradictory than the one outlined. What is represented here, on my part, is a selective vision—and even as I write it I’m aware of the fact. But sometimes you have to put your thumb into the inkwell and draw a thick black smear through things, one that conveniently blots out all the complexities, if you are to have the possibility of saying anything at all.]
The social ethic is a fiction that people collude in—generally from the best of motives. It is a rare and, one has to say, somewhat unreal human being that would be capable of embodying it completely. For it tends to run contrary to the wellsprings of human nature, as described in terms of the Jews of the Exodus, above.
The Catholic Church, perhaps, encapsulated the reality of the human condition best, with its theology of sin and forgiveness and the inherent frailty of human nature, notwithstanding a general popular commitment, or at least lip service, to doing the right thing. The phrase that perhaps best sums up the traditional approach, in all its humility and wisdom, is ‘There but for the Grace of God go I’.
By contrast, and contrary to what one might expect, the liberals are much more hardline in this regard—and usually much more vicious, too.
Of course, the idea of sinners and sin is now somewhat passé. Sin, to the extent it still exists, is now a behavioural category, involving degenerates and unregenerates—‘not people like us’—so far removed as to constitute almost a separate species.
By the same dispensation, people are no longer compelled to regard themselves universally as sinners. The liberal agenda has narrowed the basis of wrongdoing to such an extent that it is now possible for people to feel positively righteous about themselves—to the extent that, if they had lived two thousand years ago, they would have felt quite within their rights to ‘skull’ the woman taken in adultery (allowing, of course, that relatively speaking adultery is no longer a sin and . . . blah, blah, blah!)
If the wagons of the social consensus (certainly, the social consensus the liberals would have us believe in) were nowadays to be circled, then there would be any number of people inside firing out, who only a couple of decades ago would have been outside firing in. And a few people outside firing in, who . . . well, you get the picture!
If one were to take an inventory of the twelve commandments, in terms of current liberal social practice, one would find that there is not one of them that has not been changed to a greater or lesser degree. The first three, for example, have completely disappeared. Belief in or respect for God are no longer essentials; indeed, we are reaching towards a stage where, like in the warning on the cigarette packet, such things could be positively damaging to your health, or at least your career prospects.
Likewise the prescriptions against adultery and coveting another’s wife, hypocritical protests aside, have also disappeared—as it was necessary that they disappear in order to justify accepted modern social mores.
But this is all by way of a digression—and an illustration of how easy it is to get sidetracked at this game . . .
To get back to where I was: the social ethic doesn’t represent something to be striven for and achieved. Rather it represents a default position—something accorded to individuals almost as a right, and to be protected at all costs. It is not about making one’s reputation, but primarily about saving it. And the process comes less under the first twelve of the commandments than under the thirteenth: Don’t be caught.
The behaviour of the social individual, prey to the demands of unregenerate human nature and, at the same time, the need to keep onside of the social consensus, is akin to that of a snooker player who has the freedom to bend himself into any shape he likes so long as he keeps a foot on the floor.
There are further implications to this . . . but the no-doubt exhausted patience of my readers compels me to put them on hold. This mailing has gone on far longer than I intended—not at all helped by the digression in the middle of it, which logically should comprise a separate posting. As it stands, nothing is satisfactorily resolved. I will return to both strands of the argument at another time
As well, it is probably now time to formalize the disclaimer that has already appeared in various guises in the course of these mailings:
All opinions and commentary in this publication are purely those of a neutral observer and any resemblance to prejudices or hypocrisies on the part of the author, living or dead, are purely coincidental.
Being instinctive, the roots of such behaviours are fundamentally unconscious, and our rationalizations of our actions—I did it because . . . etc.—are really rationalizations after the event, justifications made to persuade ourselves that we are really in control and do things from conscious motivations.
But the fact is that neurological science has by now shown exhaustively that it is possible to trace the evolution and existence of a thought before we become consciously aware of it.
Now ethics, whether as a result of divine revelation or human design, represent something different. Ethics open up human behaviour to the field of reason, and offer the individual the possibility of armouring himself in advance against the depredations of the instincts. For any situation, we can have a strategy practiced ahead of time that will stymie the knee-jerk propensities of the unconscious drives.
More than that, ethics and the various ethical systems can tell us a lot about human nature. Take the Ten Commandments: what they tell us about the Jews who came out of Egypt with Moses, the Chosen People, is that they had no inherent belief in or respect for God, were indifferent to family ties, were murderous, adulterous, prone to stealing, malicious liars and gossips, and prey to begrudgery and envy . . . it all has a very modern ring to it.
Above I mentioned ethics in the context of the individual, to the extent that he can convince himself of their relevance. But there also exists a social ethic, in the sense of a composite picture of what a respectable member of a community (to the extent nowadays that it is possible to still talk of community) should be. In terms of modern society, the necessary virtues would, one imagines, still include honesty, the refusal to speak ill of others, an eschewal of violence and pettiness and revenge, a submission to sexual morality, even within the loosened restrictions of the times etc. etc.
Fifty years ago, say, the conditions would have been tougher and much harder to abide by. But then, of course, the social ethic isn’t intended to be literally true of the individual members of a society. It is more an aspiration. Actually, it is more akin to a passport—a passport which is issued to each and every member of the community at birth, so that one doesn’t have to earn one’s reputation, one has it automatically, and can only be deprived of it through one’s own misdemeanours or enemy action, or a combination of both.
[This, of course, is at best broadly true. The process involved is much more complex and contradictory than the one outlined. What is represented here, on my part, is a selective vision—and even as I write it I’m aware of the fact. But sometimes you have to put your thumb into the inkwell and draw a thick black smear through things, one that conveniently blots out all the complexities, if you are to have the possibility of saying anything at all.]
The social ethic is a fiction that people collude in—generally from the best of motives. It is a rare and, one has to say, somewhat unreal human being that would be capable of embodying it completely. For it tends to run contrary to the wellsprings of human nature, as described in terms of the Jews of the Exodus, above.
The Catholic Church, perhaps, encapsulated the reality of the human condition best, with its theology of sin and forgiveness and the inherent frailty of human nature, notwithstanding a general popular commitment, or at least lip service, to doing the right thing. The phrase that perhaps best sums up the traditional approach, in all its humility and wisdom, is ‘There but for the Grace of God go I’.
By contrast, and contrary to what one might expect, the liberals are much more hardline in this regard—and usually much more vicious, too.
Of course, the idea of sinners and sin is now somewhat passé. Sin, to the extent it still exists, is now a behavioural category, involving degenerates and unregenerates—‘not people like us’—so far removed as to constitute almost a separate species.
By the same dispensation, people are no longer compelled to regard themselves universally as sinners. The liberal agenda has narrowed the basis of wrongdoing to such an extent that it is now possible for people to feel positively righteous about themselves—to the extent that, if they had lived two thousand years ago, they would have felt quite within their rights to ‘skull’ the woman taken in adultery (allowing, of course, that relatively speaking adultery is no longer a sin and . . . blah, blah, blah!)
If the wagons of the social consensus (certainly, the social consensus the liberals would have us believe in) were nowadays to be circled, then there would be any number of people inside firing out, who only a couple of decades ago would have been outside firing in. And a few people outside firing in, who . . . well, you get the picture!
If one were to take an inventory of the twelve commandments, in terms of current liberal social practice, one would find that there is not one of them that has not been changed to a greater or lesser degree. The first three, for example, have completely disappeared. Belief in or respect for God are no longer essentials; indeed, we are reaching towards a stage where, like in the warning on the cigarette packet, such things could be positively damaging to your health, or at least your career prospects.
Likewise the prescriptions against adultery and coveting another’s wife, hypocritical protests aside, have also disappeared—as it was necessary that they disappear in order to justify accepted modern social mores.
But this is all by way of a digression—and an illustration of how easy it is to get sidetracked at this game . . .
To get back to where I was: the social ethic doesn’t represent something to be striven for and achieved. Rather it represents a default position—something accorded to individuals almost as a right, and to be protected at all costs. It is not about making one’s reputation, but primarily about saving it. And the process comes less under the first twelve of the commandments than under the thirteenth: Don’t be caught.
The behaviour of the social individual, prey to the demands of unregenerate human nature and, at the same time, the need to keep onside of the social consensus, is akin to that of a snooker player who has the freedom to bend himself into any shape he likes so long as he keeps a foot on the floor.
There are further implications to this . . . but the no-doubt exhausted patience of my readers compels me to put them on hold. This mailing has gone on far longer than I intended—not at all helped by the digression in the middle of it, which logically should comprise a separate posting. As it stands, nothing is satisfactorily resolved. I will return to both strands of the argument at another time
As well, it is probably now time to formalize the disclaimer that has already appeared in various guises in the course of these mailings:
All opinions and commentary in this publication are purely those of a neutral observer and any resemblance to prejudices or hypocrisies on the part of the author, living or dead, are purely coincidental.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Brave New World . . .
If I want to write a book that can be read equally by people with IQs of, say, 50 and 150—and before anyone gets pedantic about it, the figures are notional and just being used by way of illustration. . . . As I was saying: If I want to write a book that can be read equally by people with IQs of 50 and 150, then, if it is to achieve its purpose, I cannot write it at the median line of 100, but must do so at the lower level of 50.
Years ago—back in the nineties—in the place that I was working, an advertisement for a promotional position at head office was pinned up on the noticeboard. The advertisement stated that applications from staff members with a disability would be (and I am working from memory here) specially welcome, even if (and this I remember more clearly) they ‘could not fulfill the full range of duties’ associated with the position.
Now however laudable the intention, the fact was that ability to do the job seemed suddenly to have become a non-essential, or at least a less-essential, in terms of advancing one’s career path.
Nothing new here, I’m sure many would say . . .
The difference is that the conspiracy against ability involved here is radically different from the old furtive nepotism and who-you-know way of doing things. Here it is all out in the open and operates as a matter of principle.
And if I write in the context of physical ability/disability, it is simply because it arises from the experience related above—but it also serves handily to exemplify what is a much broader cause for concern. The fact is that under the liberal agenda there is any number of pet categories, a potentially infinite number, demanding of special consideration at any particular time.
The liberal philosopher, Mary Midgley, whom I mentioned in an earlier posting, describes (writing in 1983) how ‘the original term [of liberal concern] racism, has proved so fertile, spawning in turn sexism, ageism, speciesism, and uglyism to date, no doubt with more to come.’
Now there is a case to be made for essential interventions in situations where justice demands it. Historically, the advent of free third-level education was just such a necessary intervention, allowing young people of ability from ordinary families to compete on more or less level terms with the sons and daughters of those more privileged. The point here, of course, is that it represented a levelling upwards—it represented the unchaining of ability, not a restriction of it.
By contrast, so many of the pet liberal causes seem to involve a levelling down. The buzz-word, or buzz-phrase, is positive discrimination. This means setting the bar at a level low enough that members of certain pet categories qualify—and more than qualify, are positively advantaged—not on the basis of ability, but purely on the basis that they happen to belong to those categories. It is seen as a counterbalancing discrimination to that discrimination believed to have been practiced as a matter of course over centuries by entrenched, and generally male, elites.
The victim culture that has come into being over the past decades is another aspect of this same race to the bottom. Nowadays it is the victim, or, as is often the case, the alleged or self-proclaimed victim, who is hero, and weakness has become the new strength.
Some twenty or so years ago, a case was reported in the papers concerning a young Irish couple in England—they were settled travelers—whose house had been set on fire and their child killed. Petrol and lighted papers had been put through their letterbox. Except that it transpired that it had not been done by any third party, but by themselves. The fire had got unintentionally out of control and tragedy had ensued.
The reason they had done it, it turned out, was that they wanted their neighbours to accept them—which meant setting themselves up as victims so that people would feel sorry for them.
When I was young any connection between heroism and fire, and any fantasy that one might have regarding the same, would have involved rescuing someone trapped in just such a situation. Nowadays, as in the case above, the road to social approval and acclaim seems to involve instead casting oneself in the role of victim.
Now it was a foolish strategy on the young couple’s part—but they didn’t pick it out of the air. Or rather, perhaps, they did.
The strongest instinct in the general human population is the instinct to belong. This involves shaping one’s face in accord with the prevailing social climate, so as not to seem out of step. In general, people’s social antennae are always on and twitching (even if they don’t consciously realize it), forever checking out the exact climatic balance, and seeking automatically to adjust themselves to it. And anyone testing the temperature of the water of this current age—especially if they feel marginalised or unsure of their place in the scale of things or are just merely neurotic—must surely come to the conclusion that victimhood is the way to go. It’s the new cool.
In the third mailing of this series of blogs, I spoke about how liberalism and the liberal agenda was eating away at the entrails of western society, like the larvae of ichneumon wasps cannibalizing still-living caterpillars. The things I have been talking about here are part of that process. They represent the destruction and dismantling of all the internal support structures of the society, until all that is left is a hollow shell, ready to collapse in on itself at the first blow.
Now as I also said in that earlier blog, the fundamental weakness of western society isn’t ultimately a product of liberalism. Liberalism—left-liberalism—is merely something that battens on this weakness, rather like flies on a carcass. It thinks it is building a new, more enlightened and more equal world—but its delusions don’t count for anything.
At best it is unconsciously fulfilling a natural function—‘like microphages programmed to cleanse a wound / before fibroblasts come to knit it.’ Its purpose is essentially destructive: it is engaged in pulling down a society—admittedly, a sick society, a moribund society—with really no idea at all of what it is opening the door for.
We face a world filled with renewed threats. All the old evils that liberalism has sought to talk away—war, famine, the mass movement of populations—are arguably beating at the door once again. And what have we got with which to face them? A generation of whiners, turned neurotic and self-pitying under the blandishments of the victim agenda. A social structure whose institutions—public and private—are filled to the top with incompetents, whose only asset seems to be an uncanny ability to keep onside of the demands of political correctness.
No wonder we’re fucked.
Years ago—back in the nineties—in the place that I was working, an advertisement for a promotional position at head office was pinned up on the noticeboard. The advertisement stated that applications from staff members with a disability would be (and I am working from memory here) specially welcome, even if (and this I remember more clearly) they ‘could not fulfill the full range of duties’ associated with the position.
Now however laudable the intention, the fact was that ability to do the job seemed suddenly to have become a non-essential, or at least a less-essential, in terms of advancing one’s career path.
Nothing new here, I’m sure many would say . . .
The difference is that the conspiracy against ability involved here is radically different from the old furtive nepotism and who-you-know way of doing things. Here it is all out in the open and operates as a matter of principle.
And if I write in the context of physical ability/disability, it is simply because it arises from the experience related above—but it also serves handily to exemplify what is a much broader cause for concern. The fact is that under the liberal agenda there is any number of pet categories, a potentially infinite number, demanding of special consideration at any particular time.
The liberal philosopher, Mary Midgley, whom I mentioned in an earlier posting, describes (writing in 1983) how ‘the original term [of liberal concern] racism, has proved so fertile, spawning in turn sexism, ageism, speciesism, and uglyism to date, no doubt with more to come.’
Now there is a case to be made for essential interventions in situations where justice demands it. Historically, the advent of free third-level education was just such a necessary intervention, allowing young people of ability from ordinary families to compete on more or less level terms with the sons and daughters of those more privileged. The point here, of course, is that it represented a levelling upwards—it represented the unchaining of ability, not a restriction of it.
By contrast, so many of the pet liberal causes seem to involve a levelling down. The buzz-word, or buzz-phrase, is positive discrimination. This means setting the bar at a level low enough that members of certain pet categories qualify—and more than qualify, are positively advantaged—not on the basis of ability, but purely on the basis that they happen to belong to those categories. It is seen as a counterbalancing discrimination to that discrimination believed to have been practiced as a matter of course over centuries by entrenched, and generally male, elites.
The victim culture that has come into being over the past decades is another aspect of this same race to the bottom. Nowadays it is the victim, or, as is often the case, the alleged or self-proclaimed victim, who is hero, and weakness has become the new strength.
Some twenty or so years ago, a case was reported in the papers concerning a young Irish couple in England—they were settled travelers—whose house had been set on fire and their child killed. Petrol and lighted papers had been put through their letterbox. Except that it transpired that it had not been done by any third party, but by themselves. The fire had got unintentionally out of control and tragedy had ensued.
The reason they had done it, it turned out, was that they wanted their neighbours to accept them—which meant setting themselves up as victims so that people would feel sorry for them.
When I was young any connection between heroism and fire, and any fantasy that one might have regarding the same, would have involved rescuing someone trapped in just such a situation. Nowadays, as in the case above, the road to social approval and acclaim seems to involve instead casting oneself in the role of victim.
Now it was a foolish strategy on the young couple’s part—but they didn’t pick it out of the air. Or rather, perhaps, they did.
The strongest instinct in the general human population is the instinct to belong. This involves shaping one’s face in accord with the prevailing social climate, so as not to seem out of step. In general, people’s social antennae are always on and twitching (even if they don’t consciously realize it), forever checking out the exact climatic balance, and seeking automatically to adjust themselves to it. And anyone testing the temperature of the water of this current age—especially if they feel marginalised or unsure of their place in the scale of things or are just merely neurotic—must surely come to the conclusion that victimhood is the way to go. It’s the new cool.
In the third mailing of this series of blogs, I spoke about how liberalism and the liberal agenda was eating away at the entrails of western society, like the larvae of ichneumon wasps cannibalizing still-living caterpillars. The things I have been talking about here are part of that process. They represent the destruction and dismantling of all the internal support structures of the society, until all that is left is a hollow shell, ready to collapse in on itself at the first blow.
Now as I also said in that earlier blog, the fundamental weakness of western society isn’t ultimately a product of liberalism. Liberalism—left-liberalism—is merely something that battens on this weakness, rather like flies on a carcass. It thinks it is building a new, more enlightened and more equal world—but its delusions don’t count for anything.
At best it is unconsciously fulfilling a natural function—‘like microphages programmed to cleanse a wound / before fibroblasts come to knit it.’ Its purpose is essentially destructive: it is engaged in pulling down a society—admittedly, a sick society, a moribund society—with really no idea at all of what it is opening the door for.
We face a world filled with renewed threats. All the old evils that liberalism has sought to talk away—war, famine, the mass movement of populations—are arguably beating at the door once again. And what have we got with which to face them? A generation of whiners, turned neurotic and self-pitying under the blandishments of the victim agenda. A social structure whose institutions—public and private—are filled to the top with incompetents, whose only asset seems to be an uncanny ability to keep onside of the demands of political correctness.
No wonder we’re fucked.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
More Old Flannel . . .
Earlier in these mailings, I mentioned the story of cattle in the Himalayas who follow travelers in order to lick their sweat, there being an apparent dearth of salt in the region. Now one must surmise that the cattle do not realize that they are suffering from a deficiency, nor what it actually is that they are deficient in. It is the smell or whatever of salt that compels them to automatic action to compensate for their unconscious lack.
Likewise one might imagine a similar situation in relation to religion or philosophy or love. In the film Godfather I, Al Pacino is smitten at first sight—‘hit by the thunderbolt’—by the appearance of the girl, Apollonia. In some sense, she either triggers or fulfils something in himself that he was not even aware of.
I am suspicious of pure reason—of reason unseasoned by emotional insight. Starting off from first premises (which in any event can never be proven to be true) and working purely through logic can lead one to some strange places. But then I don’t believe there is such a thing as a pure process of reason—dig deep enough and you will always find an emotional component involved.
Thomas Aquinas’s five cosmological proofs of God have, for example, always left me cold. They have been incapable of proving anything to me—which may be more a reflection on me than on them. Yet at the same time one has to realize that Aquinas did not formulate them in order to convince himself of the existence of God. He already believed in God, setting out on the process.
Nor am I denying reason a role in the pursuit of truth. Reason is as essential to the outcome as emotion. Emotion (and I am not at all sure where is the dividing line between emotion and spirit) on its own, unballasted by reason, is just as capable of leading one astray as is untrammeled logic.
Indeed, it may be possible to arrive at truth by the purely intellectual path. The thing is, I don’t know. I can’t know. All I can know is that it is a way that doesn’t work for me. The ultimate egoism is to take oneself as representative man (or representative woman) and think that because one thinks or feels in this particular way, so then must the rest of the world. At best we can only know ourselves—and even that is a somewhat dubious proposition. And arguably there are perhaps as many potential paths to God or Truth or whatever as there are people in the world.
Imagine a man who knows in theory what shoes are, but has never owned a pair or seen a pair (we will allow that he takes a size eleven, although he would have no idea what this means). Put him into a shoe shop and watch him randomly try on and discard the various samples. Suddenly he finds and tries on a pair of size nines, then a pair of size tens, and thinks to himself: ‘Now I’m getting somewhere!’
This analogy might best explain my attitude to Simone Weil. Her writings make me feel that I am getting somewhere, without ever providing quite the exact fit. There is much that I am uncertain about in Weil—not least the question (academic, given that she died in 1943) of how her characterization of necessity would have stood up under evidence of the murder of the Jews in Europe during the war. But the fact is, nonetheless, that she touches some internal receptor in me in a way that, say, Aquinas could not.
To date we have looked at different suggested possibilities for approaching the idea (or the reality) of Truth. One is mainly intellectual, via the use of reason. Another is, if you like, akin to Pacino’s ‘thunderbolt’, a sudden and transformative experience, best seen perhaps in terms of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. A third way, as with me and Weil, is individual susceptibility to the infectious influence of another’s insights. Then there is a fourth way—perhaps the most interesting of all.
A footprint in the snow (philosophical quibbling aside) is proof of the existence of the foot that made it. It is a ‘negative’ proof of the foot—proof of its existence despite its absence. We all of us [there I go making representative claims again]—or at least most of us, I think, have something akin to the footprint in our deepest selves, an absence that cannot be assuaged by pleasure or material goods or fame or fellowship, no matter how frantically we might try to fill it. It is, I would suggest, the negative imprint of whatever it is we lack—the equivalent in each of us of his or her own individual Turin Shroud.
The shape of that absence—in the form of our own inextinguishable dissatisfactions and emptinesses—is the mould in which we can blindly trace the lineaments of whatever it is that might satisfy it. But it is beyond our power to force the issue. According to Weil, for example, all one can do is basic housekeeping, sweeping the spot and keeping it clean of all distractions and encumbrances—and then wait.
I write all this as an outsider, an observer. Not necessarily as a player.
Likewise one might imagine a similar situation in relation to religion or philosophy or love. In the film Godfather I, Al Pacino is smitten at first sight—‘hit by the thunderbolt’—by the appearance of the girl, Apollonia. In some sense, she either triggers or fulfils something in himself that he was not even aware of.
I am suspicious of pure reason—of reason unseasoned by emotional insight. Starting off from first premises (which in any event can never be proven to be true) and working purely through logic can lead one to some strange places. But then I don’t believe there is such a thing as a pure process of reason—dig deep enough and you will always find an emotional component involved.
Thomas Aquinas’s five cosmological proofs of God have, for example, always left me cold. They have been incapable of proving anything to me—which may be more a reflection on me than on them. Yet at the same time one has to realize that Aquinas did not formulate them in order to convince himself of the existence of God. He already believed in God, setting out on the process.
Nor am I denying reason a role in the pursuit of truth. Reason is as essential to the outcome as emotion. Emotion (and I am not at all sure where is the dividing line between emotion and spirit) on its own, unballasted by reason, is just as capable of leading one astray as is untrammeled logic.
Indeed, it may be possible to arrive at truth by the purely intellectual path. The thing is, I don’t know. I can’t know. All I can know is that it is a way that doesn’t work for me. The ultimate egoism is to take oneself as representative man (or representative woman) and think that because one thinks or feels in this particular way, so then must the rest of the world. At best we can only know ourselves—and even that is a somewhat dubious proposition. And arguably there are perhaps as many potential paths to God or Truth or whatever as there are people in the world.
Imagine a man who knows in theory what shoes are, but has never owned a pair or seen a pair (we will allow that he takes a size eleven, although he would have no idea what this means). Put him into a shoe shop and watch him randomly try on and discard the various samples. Suddenly he finds and tries on a pair of size nines, then a pair of size tens, and thinks to himself: ‘Now I’m getting somewhere!’
This analogy might best explain my attitude to Simone Weil. Her writings make me feel that I am getting somewhere, without ever providing quite the exact fit. There is much that I am uncertain about in Weil—not least the question (academic, given that she died in 1943) of how her characterization of necessity would have stood up under evidence of the murder of the Jews in Europe during the war. But the fact is, nonetheless, that she touches some internal receptor in me in a way that, say, Aquinas could not.
To date we have looked at different suggested possibilities for approaching the idea (or the reality) of Truth. One is mainly intellectual, via the use of reason. Another is, if you like, akin to Pacino’s ‘thunderbolt’, a sudden and transformative experience, best seen perhaps in terms of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. A third way, as with me and Weil, is individual susceptibility to the infectious influence of another’s insights. Then there is a fourth way—perhaps the most interesting of all.
A footprint in the snow (philosophical quibbling aside) is proof of the existence of the foot that made it. It is a ‘negative’ proof of the foot—proof of its existence despite its absence. We all of us [there I go making representative claims again]—or at least most of us, I think, have something akin to the footprint in our deepest selves, an absence that cannot be assuaged by pleasure or material goods or fame or fellowship, no matter how frantically we might try to fill it. It is, I would suggest, the negative imprint of whatever it is we lack—the equivalent in each of us of his or her own individual Turin Shroud.
The shape of that absence—in the form of our own inextinguishable dissatisfactions and emptinesses—is the mould in which we can blindly trace the lineaments of whatever it is that might satisfy it. But it is beyond our power to force the issue. According to Weil, for example, all one can do is basic housekeeping, sweeping the spot and keeping it clean of all distractions and encumbrances—and then wait.
I write all this as an outsider, an observer. Not necessarily as a player.
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