Human Predicament – Page 17 – Maverick Philosopher

On Hitchens and Death

Christopher Hitchens died on this date in 2011. Herewith, a meditation composed in August 2010, slightly revised.

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I just caught the last third of an interview of Christopher Hitchens by Charlie Rose. Hitchens looks bad, the chemotherapy having done a nasty tonsorial number on him. But his trademark intellectual incandescence appears undiminished. 'Brilliant' is a word I don't toss around lightly, but Hitch is one to whom it unarguably applies. Public intellectuals of his caliber are rare and it will be sad to see him go. Agree or disagree with him, it is discourse at his level that justifies the high regard we place on free speech.

In the teeth of death the man remains intransigent in his unbelief. And why not? He lived in unbelief and so it is only fitting that he should die in it as well. He lived for this life alone; it is fitting that he should die without hope. God and the soul were never Jamesian live options for him. To cop out now as debility and death approach must appear to him to be utterly contemptible, a grasping at straws, a fooling himself into a palliative illusion to ease the horror of annihilation.

For what he takes to be the illusion of immortality, Hitchens substitutes literary immortality. "As an adult whose hopes lay assuredly in the intellect, not in the hereafter, he concluded, 'Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and — since there is no other metaphor — also the soul.'" (Here)

But to the clearheaded, literary immortality is little more than a joke, and itself an illusion. Only a few read Hitchens now, and soon enough he will be unread, his books remaindered, put into storage, forgotten. This is a fate that awaits all scribblers but a tiny few. And even they will drink the dust of oblivion in the fullness of time.

To live on in one's books is a paltry substitute for immortality, especially when one recalls Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's aphorism: Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel, aus dem kein Apostel herausgucken kann, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt. "A book is a mirror: if an ape peers in, no apostle will look out." Most readers are more apish than apostolic. The fame they confer cannot be worth much, given that they confer it.

To live on in one's books is only marginally better than to live on in the flickering and mainly indifferent memories of a few friends and relatives. And how can reduction to the status of a merely intentional object count as living on?

The besetting sin of powerful intellects is pride. Lucifer, as his name indicates, is or was the light-bearer. Blinded by his own light, he could see nothing beyond himself. Such is the peril of intellectual incandescence. Otherworldly light simply can't get through. One thinks of Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, and to a lesser extent Hitchens. A mortal man with a huge ego — one which is soon to pop like an over-inflated balloon.

The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego. The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of non-being. And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another. "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." But this of course is what the Luciferian intellect cannot do. It cannot relax, it must hold on and stay in control. It must struggle helplessly as the ego implodes in upon itself. The ego, having gone supernova, collapses into a black hole. What we fear when we fear death is not so much the destruction of the body, but the dissolution of the ego. That is the true horror and evil of death. And without religion you are going to have to take it straight.

Have you read Philip Larkin's Aubade?

What would Hitchens lose by believing? Of course, he can't bring himself to believe, it is not a Jamesian live option, but suppose he could. Would he lose 'the truth'? But nobody knows what the truth is about death and the hereafter. People only think they do. They bluster and whistle in the dark. But suppose 'the truth' is that we are nothing but complex physical systems slated for annihilation. Why would knowing this 'truth' be a value? Even if one is facing reality by believing that death is the utter end of the self, what is the good of facing reality in a situation in which one is but a material system? How could truth be a value in a purely material world?

If materialism is true, then I think Nietzsche is right: truth is not a value; life-enhancing illusions are to be preferred. If truth is out of all relation to human flourishing, why should we value it? And if materialism is true, could truth even exist? It is not a physical thing or property. It is not empirically detectable. It is inherently mind-involving.

Vita Brevis

This mess we are in, this predicament, the fall into time . . . leaves us no time for its solution.

The Idolatry of the Transient

It is because we want more than the transient that we cling to it.

Life and Chess

What has been said about chess may also apply to life: For a game it is too serious, and for seriousness too much of a game.

Can Philosophy be Justified in a Time of Crisis?

An abstract with the above title has been making the rounds. No doubt you have seen it, so there is no need to link to it, nor does it deserve a link. It is almost certainly a joke, and if not, then the author is a fool. But since I have just made a harsh allegation, perhaps you should see for yourself.

There have always been crises. Human history is just one crisis after another. The 20th Century was a doosy: two world wars, economic depression, the rise of unspeakably evil totalitarian states, genocide, the nuclear annihilation of whole cities, the Cold War that nearly led to WWIII (remember the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962?), and then after the Evil Empire was quashed, the resurrection of radical Islam. Should we conclude that philosophy has never been justified? But then science has never been justified and much of the rest of what we consider high culture. For they have their origin in philosophy.

Perhaps you don't agree with my 'origins' claim. Still, plenty in life is of value regardless of its utility in mitigating whatever crisis happens to be in progress. Or do you think Beethoven should have been a social worker?

But the really fundamental error is to think that philosophy needs justification in terms of something external to it. I demolish this notion with the precision and trenchancy you have come to expect in Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy or the Humanities?

Envy

The mother wanted the son to amount to something while the father was afraid he would — and make the father look small.

Envy is a major player in human life.

I present a substantial analysis in The Role of Envy in Human Affairs.

Man is Risible

In that he jokes? Or in that he is a joke? Or both?

Why Forgive?

Because we ourselves need to be forgiven.

"But I have never done anything that requires forgiveness." Really? Then please forgive me for considering you either a liar, or deeply self-deceived, or an amnesiac, or insane, or a joker, or someone unfamiliar with the English language . . . .

Other People

We need those distorting mirrors called other people to achieve self-knowledge. For a distorting mirror, while it distorts, also mirrors.

On Keeping Folks in Check

An appeal to reason works with a few, and an appeal to self-interest with most. But then there are the hopelessly recalcitrant for whom only the appeal to force is effective. The only argument that reaches them is the argumentum ad baculum. Herein yet another reason to uphold Second Amendment rights.

Those who call for the repeal of the Second Amendment not only fail to appreciate its importance but also vastly underestimate the difficulty of actually repealing it. On the latter point, see Charles C. W. Cooke.

Life Without Views

Could one live well without views, 'long' views? I address the question in Long Views and Short Views: Is Shorter Better?

A Battle of Titans: Plato Versus Aristotle

It is sometimes said that there are only two kinds of philosophers, Platonists and Aristotelians. What follows is a quotation from Heinrich Heine which expresses one version of this useful simplification. Carl Gustav Jung places it at the very beginning of his Psychological Types (Princeton UP, 1971, p. 2.)

Plato and Aristotle! These are not merely two systems: they are also types of two distinct human natures, which from time immemorial, under every sort of disguise, stand more or less inimically opposed. The whole medieval period in particular was riven by this conflict, which persists down to the present day, and which forms the most essential content of the history of the Christian Church. Although under other names, it is always of Plato and Aristotle that we speak. Visionary, mystical, Platonic natures disclose Christian ideas and their corresponding symbols from the fathomless depths of their souls. Practical, orderly, Aristotelian natures build out of these ideas and symbols a fixed system, a dogma and a cult. Finally, the Church eventually embraces both natures—one of them entrenched in the clergy, and the other in monasticism; but both keeping up a constant feud. ~ H. Heine, Deutschland

Plato, on the left carrying The Timaeus, points upwards while Aristotle, on the right carrying his Ethics, points either forward (thereby valorizing the 'horizontal' dimension of time and change as against Plato's 'vertical' gesture) or downwards (emphasizing the foundational status of sense particulars and sense knowledge.) At least five contrasts are suggested: vita contemplativa versus vita activa, mundus intelligibilis versus mundus sensibilis, transcendence versus immanence, eternity versus time, mystical unity versus rational-cum-empirical plurality.

Heine is right about the battle within Christianity between the Platonic and Aristotelian tendencies. Trinity, Incarnation, Transubstantiation, Divine Simplicity — these are at bottom mystical notions impervious to penetration by the discursive intellect as we have been lately observing. Nevertheless,"Practical, orderly, Aristotelian natures build out of these ideas and symbols a fixed system, a dogma and a cult." But the dogmatic constructions, no matter how clever and detailed, never succeed in rendering intelligible the transintelligible, mystical contents.

The Monetary Criterion

When are people serious? When money is involved — their money.

My mind drifts back to faculty meetings in which half-listening colleagues doodled and dozed. But when salary considerations came to the table, the dullest among them pricked up their ears. Suddenly they became sharp and serious.

The Strange Tale of Chris Knight, the Central Maine Hermit-Thief

A hell of a story. This one goes into the Questers and Other Oddballs file.

Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: "dilettante."

Again I am astonished by the wild diversity of human types as between, say, Zelda Kaplan and Dolores Hart. Who or what is man that he should admit of such wide diversity?

Waiting for St. Benedict. Various Withdrawal Options

Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 After Virtue ends on this ominous and prescient note:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead –- often not recognizing fully what they were doing –- was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict. (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, pp. 244-245.)

This was written 34 years ago, 20 years before 9/11. It is the charter for Rod Dreher's recent talk of a Benedict Option. Excerpts from an eponymous article of his:

Why are medieval monks relevant to our time? Because, says the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, they show that it is possible to construct “new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained” in a Dark Age—including, perhaps, an age like our own.

For MacIntyre, we too are living through a Fall of Rome-like catastrophe, one that is concealed by our liberty and prosperity. In his influential 1981 book After Virtue, MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment’s failure to replace an expiring Christianity caused Western civilization to lose its moral coherence. Like the early medievals, we too have been cut off from our roots, and a shadow of cultural amnesia is falling across the land.

The Great Forgetting is taking a particular toll on American Christianity, which is losing its young in dramatic numbers. Those who remain within churches often succumb to a potent form of feel-good relativism that sociologists have called “moralistic therapeutic deism,” which is dissolving historic Christian moral and theological orthodoxy.

A recent Pew survey found that Jews in America are in an even more advanced state of assimilation to secular modernity. The only Jews successfully resisting are the Orthodox, many of whom live in communities meaningfully separate and by traditions distinct from the world.

Is there a lesson here for Christians? Should they take what might be called the “Benedict Option”: communal withdrawal from the mainstream, for the sake of sheltering one’s faith and family from corrosive modernity and cultivating a more traditional way of life?

The broader topic here is that of voluntary withdrawal from a morally corrupt society and its morally corrupt institutions. There are various options. One could join a monastic order and live in community. This is the monastic cenobitic option. There is also the monastic eremitic option: one lives as a hermit within a religious context subject to its rules and having taken vows. Both the cenobitic and the eremitic options can be made less rigorous in various ways. One could attach oneself as an oblate to a monastery visiting it from time to time and participating in its communal prayers and other activities (Ora, labora, et lectio are the three 'legs' of the Benedictine 'stool.'). This could also be done in an eremitic way. (From the Greek eremos, desert.)

Spiritual withdrawal is of course greatly aided by physical withdrawal from cities into deserts and other remote locales; but one could voluntarily withdraw from a morally corrupt society while living in the midst of it in, say, Manhattan. (I cannot, however, advise setting up as the resident monk in a bordello in Pahrump, Nevada.)

What of the Maverick Option? As I have been living it since 1991 it does not involve drastic physical isolation: I live on the edge of a major metropolitan area which is also the edge of a rugged wilderness area. Ready access to raw nature (as opposed to, say, Manhattan's Central Park) may not be absolutely essential for spiritual development, but it is extremely conducive to it (in tandem with other things of course). Nature, experienced alone, removes one from the levelling effects of the social. (Henry David Thoreau: "I have no walks to throw away on company." That sounds misanthropic and perhaps from Henry David's mouth it was; but it can be given a positive reading.) It would be the height of folly to suppose that man's sociality is wholly negative; but its corrupting side cannot be denied. Encounter with nature in solitude pulls one out of one's social comfort zone in such a way that the ultimate questions obtrude themselves with full force. In society, they can strike one like jokes from a Woody Allen movie; in solitude, in the desert, they are serious. Nature is not God; but the solitary encounter with it, by breaking the spell of the social, can orient us toward Nature's God.

I will have more to say of the Maverick Option, its nature and pitfalls, in a later post.

There is also the Jeremiah Option:

Where Jeremiah counsels engagement without assimilation, Benedict represents the possibility of withdrawal. The former goal is to be achieved by the pursuit of ordinary life: the establishment of homes, the foundation of families, all amid the wider culture. The latter is to be achieved by the establishment of special communities governed by a heightened standard of holiness.

Although it can be interpreted as a prophecy of doom, the Jeremiah Option is fundamentally optimistic. It suggests that the captives can and should lead fulfilling lives even in exile. The Benedict Option is more pessimistic. It suggests that mainstream society is basically intolerable, and that those who yearn for decent lives should have as little to do with it as possible. MacIntyre is careful to point out that the new St. Benedict would have to be very different from the original and might not demand rigorous separation. Even so, his outlook remains bleak.

We need to catalog and examine all the options. A man once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. He was the wisest of mortals.