Nietzsche’s parable of the “Madman” has all too often been grossly misunderstood.[1] In this text we encounter the infamous Nietzschean slogan, “God is dead.” Was Nietzsche by way of the madman proclaiming in a triumphalist tone the literal death of God? Though he is often labeled a nihilist and is considered the grand advocate for nihilism, this is a misreading of Nietzsche’s text (whether those who propagate the Nietzsche is a nihilist line have actually read the text is another story).
The text recounts a story of a madman who runs into a market place, crying, “I seek God, I seek God.” The people mock him, asking whether God has gotten lost or perhaps has emigrated. The madman then stands among them and says,
Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him -you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?
The text continues in a similar vein with the madman clearly lamenting the fact that “God is dead” and acknowledging that “we have killed him.“ In what sense have we killed God? Does he mean this literally? Of course not. Rather, he means that we have come to a place in history where we no longer believe that we need God. We now believe in the progress of science, and we have given up on the possibility of knowing reality in itself. We now see ourselves as the creators, the constructors of reality. In short, we have made ourselves gods. In such a situation there is no “space” for recognition of the divine. In this sense, God is dead to us and we have killed him. Understood in this way, Nietzsche’s text has a profoundly prophetic dimension to it, as contemporary society exhibits all the symptoms of Nietzsche’s diagnosis.
On a close, non-literal reading of the text, Nietzsche’s madman is not rejoicing in the death of God but is deeply troubled by it. As he says, “We have killed him-you and I. All of us are his murders. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?’” What does Nietzsche mean by horizon, and what happens when the horizon is erased? A horizon carves out a space for vision. Or you might say the horizon creates a space within which we can live because it sets a boundary of sorts for what we can see. So what happens when I “wipe away the entire horizon?” I destroy the very boundaries that define human existence. Again, the madman does not take joy in this situation. Rather, he is describing where we are in history, what we’ve become as a society. We are a people who think we don’t need God; we’ve become, as Nietzsche says explicitly, a prideful people. In fact, pride characterizes modern life (and a good bit of postmodern life as well). As Nietzsche explains,
It is remarkable that this was brought about by the intellect, which was certainly allotted to these most unfortunate, delicate and ephemeral beings, merely as a device for detaining them a minute within existence. For without this addition, they would have every reason to flee this existence as quickly as Lessing’s son. The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing (italics added).
According to Nietzsche, we’ve become prideful in a number of ways. First of all, we built grander and grander conceptual edifices (what Nietzsche poetically calls, “columbaria”) that lead us away from the forces of life and toward a culture of death. We forget that our metaphors have lowly origins and believe that our columbaria are impenetrable. Having such great confidence in the progress of modern science, we believe that with enough time we can even overcome death. In such an environment, Nietzsche asks, who needs faith? We have denied our finitude, have made ourselves gods; thus, practically speaking God is dead. The madman laments this situation. Do we? Or do we continue by the way we live our lives to confirm Nietzsche’s prophetic judgment? Я виновна, as the Russians say.
Notes
[1] The “Madman” is found in The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125.
In his work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Johannes Climacus discusses what he calls the dialectical aspects of Christianity or those aspects of Christian belief that one might call intellectual. Climacus of course do not think that Christianity is merely a set of doctrines to which one must assent. Rather, Christianity is a way of existence-as Climacus says, “Christianity is not a doctrine,” but is “an existence-communication” (VII, 328-29; pp. 379-380).[1] As C. Stephen Evans observes, this statement has been misunderstood often. Climacus himself anticipated the potential misunderstanding and gives a lengthy footnote to clarify his meaning. Here he explains,
Surely a philosophical theory that is to be comprehended and speculatively understood is one thing, and a doctrine that is to be actualized in existence is something else. If there is to be any question of understanding with regard to this latter doctrine, then this understanding must be: to understand that it is to be existed in, to understand the difficulty of existing in it, what a prodigious existence-task [Existents-Opgave] this doctrine assigns to the learner (VII, 329; p. 379).
Because the Christianity of Climacus’ day had become overly speculative, he purposely distances himself from the word “doctrine,” as he fears that by employing the word, Christianity will continue to be categorized and understood as a philosophical theory instead of way of existence. Thus, he comes up with a new term, “existence-communication.” In no way is Climacus denying that Christianity has intellectual content; rather, he wants to make sure that this content is set forth in such a way that the uniqueness of Christianity as a transcendent (as opposed to an immanent) religion is upheld. As Climacus explains,
If Christianity were a doctrine, it would eo ipso not constitute the opposite of speculative thought but would be an element within it. Christianity pertains to existence, to existing, but existence and existing are the very opposite of speculation. The Eleatic doctrine, for example, is not related to existing but to speculation; therefore it must be assigned its place within speculation. Precisely because Christianity is not a doctrine, it holds true, as developed previously, that there is an enormous difference between knowing what Christianity is and being a Christian. With regard to a doctrine, this distinction is unthinkable, because the doctrine is not related to existing. I cannot help it that our age has reversed the relation and changed Christianity into a philosophical theory that is to be comprehended and being a Christian into something negligible. Furthermore, to say that Christianity is empty of content because it is not a doctrine is only chicanery. When a believer exists in faith, his existence has enormous content, but not in the sense of a yield in the paragraphs (VII, 329; p. 380).
The content of Christianity is dialectical; it is the “absolute paradox” and as such, it differentiates Christianity from immanent religions in which in principle all doctrines can be penetrated rationally, making revelation superfluous. Climacus is firmly committed to what the orthodox Christian tradition calls the “mysteries of the faith”-the Incarnation, the Trinity and other doctrines which are both central to the Christian faith and can only be known through revelation. In addition and related to the previous passage, Climacus believes that the content of Christianity has the potential to actually transform a person’s existence, giving him/her a new passion-”it is relating to the pathos-filled as an impetus for a new pathos” (VII, 488; p. 559). Christian belief then is intimated related to action. As Evans explains,
Climacus understands Christian belief as not merely accompanied by action but as essentially expressing itself in action. Because of this he attempts to rethink the nature of that belief in such a way that it does not exclude belief as an intellectual act but does exclude even the possibility of belief being only an intellectual act. This conception of Christian belief is itself demanded by “existential appropriation” that is Christianity and the content of Christianity, which is the absolute paradox, can be seen to correspond exactly to each other [VII, 532; pp. 610-611]. Both the content of Christianity and the appropriation of Christianity become “specifically different” from everything else (Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript, p. 210).
Johannes Climacus, whose view often overlaps with Kierkegaard’s own view yet is never to be simply identified with the latter, emphasizes Christianity as a transcendent religion. By this he doesn’t mean to suggest that there is no continuity whatsoever between nature and grace or that grace destroys nature. Rather, his point is to stress the uniqueness of Christianity in comparison with what he calls “immanent” religions, religions that do not require any kind of divine revelation but which arise from the human mind itself and are, as you might guess, obtainable by unaided human reason or via religious experience. Because Climacus believes that human beings in their current state “lack the truth” due to sin and that this condition causes them to be prideful and to proclaim their own self-sufficiency, Climacus points to humanity’s need for “the God” to become man, for the eternal to enter into time and reconfigure all of history. Given these beliefs, Climacus draws attention to the Incarnate Christ as the object of the Christian’s faith; thus, according to his account, the historicity of the incarnation is a non-negotiable. Commenting on Climacus’ view, C. Stephen Evans observes,
If Jesus’ life is merely a collection of stories or myths, or if Jesus is merely a creation of the early church (so that it is considered unimportant whether or not what the early Christians believed is literally true), then Christianity is essentially transformed into its opposite, and no “advance” on Socrates has been made at all. For in such a case Jesus’ life would merely represent a possibility that man must be assumed to be able to know. What distinguishes Christianity, according to Climacus, is that man is assumed to really lack the truth, and therefore must acquire it in existence in a genuinely historical relation to the God as he actually appeared (Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript, p. 249).
As Socrates unfolds his city-in-thought, the so-called perfectly just city of the Republic, he speaks of the need for the rulers to promulgate the notorious “noble lie” (414c).[1] The noble lie consists in two parts. First, the citizens are told that their true parent is the earth, that is, the city or polis (414d). This part of the noble lie is designed to promote a kind of sold-out commitment to the polis-a loyalty willing to forsake even the closest (traditional) familial ties. When this aspect of the noble lie is embraced, the citizens view each other as brothers and sisters who are all connected to a common parent, the polis (”Father/Motherland” themes come to mind). Second, the citizens are presented with the “myth of metals.” According to this myth, each citizen is born with one of three kinds of soul: gold, silver or bronze. As you might expect, the citizen’s worth and function in the city is determined by what kind of soul s/he possesses. The myth of metals is created to promote strict class separation and is an attempt to eliminate factionalism. The gold-souled people are best-suited to rule, the silver-souled people (the warrior class) assist the rulers in their plans for the city, and the bronze-souled people are simply to obey. In addition, the classes must never intermarry, as those who “by nature” are superior cannot be tainted by a lower class. For the good of the polis, the bronze-souled people must come to recognize their natural inferiority to the silver and gold-souled classes and be willing to obey and carry out their orders-after all, they are intellectually inferior to gold-souled rulers and cannot properly direct their own lives without the guidance of their natural superiors.
Of course Plato is not giving us a blueprint for an actual city (contra Popper); however, Socrates’ “building plans” strike a similar chord with modern racist projects. (There are, no doubt, significant differences between the two projects; I’m not claiming that a one-to-one correspondence exists. Nonetheless, the commonalities are worth pondering). Drawing from the insights of historian Kenneth Stampp, Floyd W. Hayes III describes the ways in which slave-owners in the American ant-bellum south attempted to “create a good slave.”[2] The following are five common strategies employed by slave-owners in the process of making and managing a slave class.
First, those who managed the slaves had to maintain strict discipline. One slave-owner said, “Unconditional submission is the only footing upon which slavery should be placed.” Another said, “the slave must know that his master is to govern absolutely and he is to obey implicitly, that he is never, for a moment, to exercise either his will or judgment in opposition to a positive order” [Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery and the Ante-Bellum South, p. 145]. Second, slave-owners thought that they had to implant in the slave a consciousness of personal inferiority. They deliberately extended this sense of personal inferiority to the slave’s past. Slave-owners believed that in order to control black people, the slaves “had to feel that African ancestry tainted them, that their color was a badge of degradation” [to use Socrates' language, they needed to feel that they were mere "bronze" souls] (ibid.). The third step in the training process was to awe the slaves with a sense of the slave-owner’s enormous power. It was essential, various slave-owners declared, “to make them stand in fear” (p. 146) [following the Republic, to show them the force of the warrior class/silver-souls if they decide to overstep class boundaries]. The fourth aspect was the attempt to “persuade the bondsman to take an interest in the master’s enterprise and to accept his standards of ‘good conduct’” (p. 147) [you must believe our "noble lie" and embrace the solidarity and customs of the city-after all, it's for the good of the city, which is our Mother]. Thus the slave-owner sought to train slaves to accept unquestionably his criteria of what was good and true and beautiful. The final step, according to Stampp’s documents was “to impress Negroes with their helplessness: to create in them a habit of perfect dependence upon their masters (ibid.)”[3]
Notes
[1] On my interpretation, the city-in-thought is not a kind of blueprint for an actual city. Rather, by showing the impossibility of such a (totalitarian, calculation-oriented) city, Plato highlights the theme of eros (broadly construed as “love”, “desire”, “longing,” etc.) as that which constitutes human existence and which cannot be controlled or managed by mathematics, calculated reason, eugenics etc. In other words, all humans are lovers of something and these various loves, desires and longings are what drive us and direct our lives, actions and decisions.
[2] Hayes, Floyd W. III. “Fanon, Oppression, and Resentment The Black Experience in the United States,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader. Gordon, Lewis R., Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean, and White, Renee T. eds., (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), p. 16.
According to Johhanes Climacus, though the ethical is not absent from the religious person’s concerns, what separates the two spheres is the manner in which the religious person (in particular, the Christian) relates to God. As C. Stephen Evans explains,
[h]er relation to God [...] consists primarily not in self-confident action but in repentance. Her task is not primarily to achieve a God-relationship herself by positively realizing her moral duty, but to achieve a sate of inward obedience to God by allowing God to transform her character. This is well illustrated by Fear and Trembling where Johannes de Silentio claims that “an ethic which ignores sin is an absolutely idle science, but if it acknowledge sin, then it eo ipso transcends itself” (III, 146; p. 108). The reason for this is given in a footnote attached to the same paragraph: “As soon as sin appears, ethics perishes, precisely because of repentance; for repentance is the highest ethical expression, but precisely as such the deepest ethical self-contradiction” (III, 146n, p. 108n).[1]
Notes
[1] C. Stephen Evans. Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus, (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), 140.
Increasingly, I think that a good way to read the Republic is to see it as highlighting the failure of mathematics/calculation to control human eros (e.g. the failure of the marriage number/lottery), as eros is constitutive of what it is to be human. Here eros is understood in a broad sense as desire or longing for something. For example, the philosopher is a lover of wisdom. In that sense, s/he is erotic.
In book VII of the Republic, Socrates describes life immersed in the visible realm as a life of slavery. For example, the people who are in bonds in the cave are lovers of sights and sound. So we have a critique of lovers of sights and sounds, and the implication that freedom comes in the study of essences. Hence, only the philosopher is truly “free.” The philosopher, because he knows “true” reality, the essences, must then go back into the cave (the polis) and rule. However, there are a number of tensions with this account. Does knowing the essences of x make you better at doing x? Or is it that knowing the particular x makes you better at doing x? For example, someone could have an excellent grasp of the essence of music theory, yet be tone deaf and completely unable to make music. Glaucon, whose shortcomings we often highlight, actually seems to have an insight on this point. In other words, Glaucon’s attempts to bring Socrates down to the visible world seems reasonable because he sees correctly that Socrates is setting up an educational system that produces people who are not comfortable in the cave or the city; they don’t like it; they want to be contemplating the essences. Some scholars attempt to resolve this tension by appealing to the ancients’ communal sense over against a more modern, individualistic leaning, which makes what “I” want more important than the needs of the city. However, that doesn’t seem to solve the issue, because I’m suggesting that it would not be better for the city for the philosopher to rule, as knowing x does not necessarily make one better at doing x.
Plato’s Socrates is of course incredibly subtle and often leads us in one direction simply to show us that that particular path is a dead end. Perhaps that is what he is doing here. For example, Socrates is aware that the philosophers who have come out of the cave and glimpsed the light of the Sun (the Form of the Good) will not want to go back down (just as Socrates didn’t want to go down to the Piraeus at the beginning of book I). At 520d Socrates intimates that a democracy would not be the best regime because the leaders all want to rule and are power-grabbers. Later in the Republic in his discussion of the different regimes, he shows how each character type is conflicted and deficient in his erotic attachments (e.g., oligarch is a money-lover). Since the philosopher is also erotic-a lover of wisdom (Cephalus’ being the foil, as his lack of eros disqualifies him as a potential philosopher), to rule would cause him to live in a disordered state, as he would have to (at least part of the time) turn away from his love of contemplation. In other words, the philosopher would be conflicted. This confliction is not exactly parallel with the internal tension experienced by the oligarch or timocrat; yet, it is a genuine tension because he is pulled away from what he loves and does best and is forced to engage in something for which he has no erotic attraction.
Though Plato’s Socrates makes several critical statements concerning the democratic regime, it just might be the case that he is actually ambivalent to democracies. For example at 557, he states, “It [the democratic regime] is probably the fairest, the most beautiful of all regimes.” Then at 557d, he says, “It is probably necessary for the man who wishes to organize a city, as we were just doing, to go to a city under a democracy.” Here in effect Socrates is saying, if we want to do what we are doing right now (i.e. engaging in philosophy), then maybe we have live in a democratic regime. Consider the “clues” that we’ve been given that his might be the case. A basic feature of democracy is the protection of privacy. With regard to our present concern this means there is no compulsion or obligation to be political. This is the opposite of what we find in the parable of the cave, where the philosopher is forced to return to the cave; hence, he is forced to be political. We see this mimicked at the very beginning of the Republic when Socrates is “forced” metaphorically to stay in the Piraeus. Thus, in contrast to Socrates’ supposed perfectly just city, in a democracy, because privacy is assured, a person could pursue philosophy, as there is no compulsion to be political. If, as I believe it is, the city in thought is a failure, a purposed reductio ad absurdum, and eros is constitutive of humans and cannot be controlled by mathematics (which has a kind of necessity to it), then a democracy is in fact the best (although imperfect human-all-too-human) regime for the politician and the philosopher. Why? It allows the eros of the politician to be satisfied because s/he is doing what s/he is best suited to do. The same thing goes for the philosopher. Whether this works out for the artisans (and for their ultimate good) is another question, which will have to wait for another time.
As Walter Lammi explains, Gadamer altered his predecessors’ notion of “horizon” in significant ways.[1] Working in the tradition of phenomenology, Gadamer was of course influenced by Husserl, as well as Heidegger. Regarding the term “horizon,” Gadamer mentions explicitly his debt to Husserl. The concept of “horizon,” however, did not originate with Husserl but can be traced back to Nietzsche. We should stress up front that in each of these philosophers, the term “horizon” means something different. For example, according to Gadamer’s interpretation of Nietzsche, horizon is a “limiting concept in that human beings cannot see beyond their historical or cultural horizons” (493). For Nietzsche, it is crucial that we embrace the fact of our limited horizons; yet, in doing so, we ultimately land in despair, as we can no longer hope to find any ultimate meaning in an absolute sense. “Historicism for Nietzsche is a great but life-destroying truth because it takes away our ability to believe absolutely in anything” (494). (N.b., Lammi states in footnote 48 that Gadamer’s interpretation of Nietzsche is problematic; nonetheless, Gadamer’s dynamic concept of horizon is on target. The contents of this footnote appear in my post as note 2).
Husserl also utilizes the concept of “horizon”; however, his focus is not on horizon as a limiting concept, locking us into our diverse cultural-historical frameworks. Instead, Husserl’s understanding of horizon is much more fluid, and his focus is on the inner experience of time-consciousness, where “the horizons of one experience flow into those of another so that in the continuum of experiences there is a constant flux of horizons” (494). Gadamer comes along, takes the insights of Nietzsche and Husserl, and formulates his own notion of horizon for the purposes of his hermeneutical project. Rejecting what he understands as Nietzsche’s closed-horizon view and accepting Husserl’s less-staticized conception, Gadamer, in essence, offers a fundamental critique of Nietzsche (or what he understands as Nietzsche’s position), while de-subjectivizing Husserl. As Lammi explains,
On the one hand Gadamer, like Nietzsche, understands “horizon” to denote the finite limitations of any particular perspective at any particular time [TM, 269]. However, he interprets Nietzsche as believing that a horizon can be simply “closed,” which in Gadamer’s judgment constitutes a “romantic reflection, a kind of Robinson Crusoe dream,” [Ibid., 271] because just as no individual exists without others, no cultural or historical horizon exists in static and total isolation from others.[2] Horizons, most particularly the horizon of the past that we call “tradition,” are always in motion just as human life is always in motion [Ibid., 217]. There is no historical consciousness in the sense of Nietzsche’s “historicist insight” that sets the horizons into motion; all historical consciousness does is make that motion aware of itself [Ibid., 271]. The awareness that our horizons are fluid, rather than teaching that nothing is true, makes it possible to find new truths-to “expand our horizons,” as the saying has it. Thus the self-awareness of historical consciousness, far from being a “deadly truth” about the relativity of all values, is for Gadamer the key for reaching beyond or behind a given horizon to confront the possibility that there is truth to be learned from the past. “I am convinced of the fact that, quite simply, we can learn from the classics,” Gadamer concludes [Ibid.,490] (494-95).
Gadamer wholeheartedly agrees with the aspect of Nietzsche’s historicist claim which emphasizes our finitude and the fact that our knowledge of our world and ourselves always remains partial and limited. Yet, Gadamer believes that Nietzsche’s historicism “fails to understand temporal distance as a positive aid to discovering which is the way Gadamer understands the interpreter’s hermeneutical situation once it is brought to self-consciousness” (495).
Notes
[1] Walter Lammi, “Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘Correction’ of Heidegger,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52:3 (1991): 487-507.
[2] Gadamer’s interpretation of Nietzsche is problematic on this point. Whether or not his critique is on target, however, Gadamer’s positive argument for the dynamic concept of “horizon” remains cogent.
“When we rethink the ‘there’ of our identity and community, the historical and contemporary figures that we embody, we may ask, Who sings the praises of those valiant warriors that fought against the colonizers? Who laments the mothers raped, trapped, and left to die in the decadent slums of cities barely on the realm of modernity when they are no longer fit to be servants in the households of the colonizers-or servants in the households of the newly enriched postcolonial post-avant garde? Where are the mourners for those who suffer from the rotten foods sold to the postcolonials, enriching world metropolitan centers, now romanticized as postmodern? Who cares for the amputees from foreign-made land-mines, now abandoned by those who planted them?
The warriors, the mothers, the servants, the truck drivers, the children-these are not ghosts, they are not specters, they are not images in our heads. These are bodies, black bodies; bodies of black men seen as inherently criminal; bodies of black women unseen, commodities of exchange, objects, things, toys, subjectless receptacles; children seen as already damned and irredeemable” (Fanon: A Criticial Reader, xvii).
According to Gadamer, we all come to the text with different horizons. As we engage the text, our horizons, as well as our foremeanings are confirmed, altered, or perhaps a combination of both occurs. Gadamer understands textual hermeneutics as analogous to a live conversation in which, when fruitful, we have attentive listening, respect for the alterity of the other, and an interplay of give and take. Consider, for example, a conversation you’ve had in which you already anticipated ahead of time what a certain person was going to say. You need an extension on your paper, but your professor has made it clear in the past that she rarely grants such extensions. Here you approach the conversation with a fairly fixed idea of how the conversation will enfold. After class you begin to make your case for an extension, explaining that your daughter has been ill quite a bit this month, and you’ve had to keep her at home. Consequently, you were not able to complete your paper on time. At first, the likelihood of an extension without penalty seems less than hopeful. However, as the dialogue continues, your professor seems more open and in the end grants you an extension. The banality of the example aside, it does provide a window into Gadamer’s understanding of the back and forth movement of our hermeneutical experience. For example, as Gadamer explains,
A person who is trying to understand a text has to keep something at a distance-namely everything that suggests itself, on the basis of his own prejudices, as the meaning expected-as soon as it is rejected by the sense of the text itself. Even the experience of reversal (which happens unceasingly in talking, and which is the real experience of dialectic) has its equivalent here. Explicating the whole of meaning towards which understanding is directed forces us to make interpretative conjectures and to take them back again. The self-cancellation of the interpretation is dialectical not primarily because the one-sidedness of every statement can be balanced by another side-this is, as we shall see, a secondary phenomenon in interpretation-but because the word that interpretatively fits the meaning of the text expresses the whole of this meaning-i.e., allows an infinity of meaning to be represented within it in a finite way (Truth and Method, p. 465).
The latter part of the passage introduces the idea of a “self-cancellation” involved in a hermeneutical exchange. As Gadamer explains, the dialectic involved here is not simply an attempt to present the opposing viewpoint to balance out the perspective given. Rather, (I think) he means something analogous to the following. In a symphony, one has a meaningful whole, which consists of various particular parts organized in a very complex way. Each instrument group (brass, strings, woodwinds etc.) plays a different melodic line (melodic lines are analogous to sentences). These horizontal melodic lines, when considered vertically, constitute the various harmonies of the symphony (analogous to words). If we zero in on one particular harmonic moment in say the third movement of the symphony, we might find, for example, a C major triad. That C major triad can be abstracted and identified as a C major triad consisting of the notes C, E, G. However, within the larger meaning of the symphony, that C major triad, because of its function at that particular place within the whole, cannot be understand as merely a C major triad (though technically it is that); rather, it must be seen as integrally connected with all the notes that precede it, as well as all the notes that follow it. In a sense, the C major triad is both a one and a many-it is a C major triad and thus has an integral unity of meaning; yet, it is a many because of its intimate connection to and function within the symphony itself-that place where it lives and moves and has its being. The dialectical self-cancelling movement occurs due to the fact that as the C major triad emerges from the background of the whole, it must “cancel” part of itself (the whole) in order to do so. (This sounds very Heideggerian, which is no surprise given the latter’s influence on Gadamer). Yet, to avoid mis-interpretation, it must not become completely severed from the whole, lest in a very real sense it die. If this is a correct understanding of Gadamer on this point, there are some interesting Christian connections to be made.
In Foucault’s essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” he emphasizes that history should not be guided by any overriding criteria from outside of history. Hegel of course is an example of one engaged in the approach to history that Foucault condemns. According to Hegel, history is the unfolding of Spirit in which Spirit becomes increasingly conscious of itself and increasingly more free etc. A person operating under this methodology starts with a certain metaphysical assumption or theory and selects those events that support his/her theory. We see this at work in Hegel’s read of history in which anything that happens to contradict his vision of the telos of history is simply not part of the account. In other words, Hegel, while narrating history simultaneously and selectively erases and deletes history in order to substantiate his thesis.
Hegel isn’t the only one who falls prey to Foucault’s critique. It seems that any philosophical or theological position that advocates a suprahistorical principle which guides history teleologically would likewise be guilty. As Foucault explains, genealogy “rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies”[1] (”Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 242). In other words, Foucault’s genealogical approach to history rejects any factors or principles that come from outside of history or that are not rooted in history. One the one hand, Foucault’s critique is absolutely valid and makes excellent sense. For example, Hegel’s account of the unfolding of Spirit in history, his ridiculous (not to mention racist) accounts of Africans and other people groups and the ultimate realization of absolute Spirit in modern Prussia fails to do justice to the complexity of history and historical events. On the other hand, is it not possible to incorporate Foucault’s warnings against contorting history into our theoretical molds while still allowing for a suprahistorical principle, or as Christians claim, a God who transcends the historical process (yet who also entered into that process in the Incarnation) and guides history to end? In other words, perhaps the complexity and contrapuntal nature of our in-time, historical existence can be acknowledged without having to deny God’s involvement in and providential guidance over the course of history. Is it the case that every aspect of both positions are mutually exclusive? That is, from a Christian point of view, can we not mine some of Foucault’s “Egyptian gold”, while leaving the “dross” behind? Of course Foucault would say, “no, you cannot and that is just my point.”
Yet, perhaps this mining activity is what biblical theology attempts to do by distinguishing between first (diachronic) and second (synchronic or synthesizing) readings of Scripture. That is, Christian exegetes must to be careful not to allow second reading synthetic conclusions to flatten unduly the terrain of the first reading material. In other words, we shouldn’t be too quick to harmonize the tensions in Scripture, as the diachronic dissonances might themselves be revelatory and instructive. For example, as some scholars suggest, the NT itself shows us that there were differing and competing theologies among Christians (Paul and the Jewish Christians come to mind, also the different emphases in the synoptics); yet, these different and even opposing groups and theologies still found unity in the Christ-event (his death and resurrection) and were unified by means of the rituals connected with these events (as it the case for the Church throughout history). If this is the case, then perhaps those communal tensions and differing doctrinal emphases have something important to teach us today not only about the nature of Scripture itself but also about the difficulties of ecclesial existence. If dissonances existed then among God’s people and were not fully resolved (as the NT itself suggests) and in fact were needed as mutual correctives to one another, then why should we think that something analogous should not be the case today as we continue to struggle to “translate” the Gospel and all its implications for this-world-living in contemporary society? This is not to say that we should not make every effort to pursue ecumenical unity (which also involves acknowledging genuine differences) and to pray that the Church would be one. However, it is to suggest that jumping too quickly to resolves the tensions and harmonize the discordant voices of Scripture might be to miss the fact that God has purposed a-tonal moments in his symphony and that these aspects of revelation speak to us as well. Reading Scripture diachronically (as well as eschatologically)[2] and connecting its time to our time and seeing ourselves as part of the narrative of salvation history, may, as Rowan Williams puts it,
encourage us to take historical responsibility for arranging and exploring how the gospel is going to be heard in our day. It can do this because it shows us a history (inside and outside the text) of real and harsh divisions that is both taken up and “overtaken” by grace. It suggests that what matters is not our ability to finish our business or to secure consensus, as if Christ would be “audible” only in this mode, but our readiness to decide, to take sides, as adult persons, and to live with the consequence and cost of that within the disciplines we share with other Christians of openness to the judgement of the Easter mystery. These disciplines we share with both past and present, with those near and distant, those we agree with and those we resist, those who are congenial and those who are not” (On Christian Theology, 59).
Notes
[1] Lawrence Cahoone. From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. London: Blackwell.
[2] None of this is meant to suggest that synthesizing should be done away with as something inherently evil. The Church needs great minds like those of Thomas Aquinas and others who have helped move the Church forward by engaging in great synthesizing projects. So too the Church today must be willing to cautiously re-synthesize as history unfolds and new challenges arise.
Here’s my quarterly non-academic post–an ipod recording of me playing a solo jazz guitar version of Lennon and McCartney’s tune, “Yesterday” (to listen to the recording, click the arrow below).
There are, however, a few philosophical questions that I can’t resist asking: how is the identity of the tune, “Yesterday,” retained when I have re-harmonized the melody and added notes to and subtracted notes from the melody? Also, clearly I have interpreted/performed the tune in a way that exceeds the intention of the “original authors,” yet, the piece is still clearly recognizable as Lennon/McCartney’s tune, “Yesterday.” What are the implications for “authorship”? What view of interpretation best captures the phenomena that emerge–an interpretor as co-author with a productive role? If so, what are the givens of the tune itself that function as limiting structures–structures that both allow for new re-interpretations and allow the tune to emerge in an identifiable way (while simultaneously dis-allowing any and every interpretation to count as “legitimate”)?
“Expressing the real is an arduous job. But when you take it into your head to express existence, you will very likely encounter nothing but the nonexistent. What is certain is that at the very moment when I endeavored to grasp my being, Sartre, who remains ‘the Other,’ by naming me shattered my last illusion. While I was telling him:
My negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral
It reaches deep down into the red flesh of the soil
It reaches deep into the blazing flesh of the sky
It pierces opaque prostration with its patience
[Césaire, Notebook of a Return
to My Native Land,
trans. Rosello and Pritchard, p. 114].
While I, in a paroxysm of experience and rage, was proclaiming this, he reminded me that my negritude was nothing but a weak stage. Truthfully, I’m telling you, I sensed my shoulders slipping from this world, and my feet no longer felt the caress of the ground. Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness. Not yet white, no longer completely black, I was damned. Jean-Paul Sartre forgets that the black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (Black Skin, White Masks, 116-17).
As Sartre explains, negritude is the antithesis of the assertion [not Sartre's personal belief] of the supremacy of the white (the thesis). Thus, negritude is the moment of negativity; a moment to be overcome. In contrast to Césaire’s and Senghor’s understanding of black consciousness as an “absolute density,” Sartre presents negritude as a lack, as a “minor term” in the syllogism.[1] How might we understand Fanon’s statement, “Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness”? Here one could perhaps apply Derrida’s insights while simultaneously expanding them by way of Fanon’s critique of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. According to Derrida, the meaning of a person’s life is always constituted at the intersection of a reference to the past and some kind of anticipation of the future. Of course Derrida has in view a deconstruction of the completely transparent, stable, secure Cartesian self. Nonetheless, Derrida’s emphasis on the role of past and future in constructing the self seems applicable here; yet, it is in need of Fanon’s stress on the fundamental difference of the black man’s experience of the world as mediated by a black body.[2] If a (black) person’s past is erased and re-written in the image of a violent, totalizing (white) other (the project of colonialization), and his future is largely pre-determined by that same other, “damned” is a pretty good description of his present experience.
Notes
[1] Ronald A.T. Judy, “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, (eds) Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T. White. (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996): 63.
[2] Fanon replaces Merleau Ponty’s corporeal schema (schéma corporel) with his own schéma historico-racial and schéma épidermique racial.
As Rowan Williams explains, Scripture is narrative, but it is a particularly interesting kind of narrative, since it “weaves together history and liturgy” (On Christian Theology, 7). The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not only talked about, but he is spoken to. He is praised; He is worshipped in song and poetry; He is addressed in prayer. Not only in Scripture and the liturgy, but also in works like Augustine’s Confessions we find this interplay of speaking about God and speaking to God; yet, in each of these instances the discourse involved is open to the other and willing to be attentive to and challenged by what the other has to say.
The language of worship ascribes supreme value, supreme resource or power, to something other than the worshipper, so that liturgy attempts to be a “giving over” of our words to God (as opposed to speaking in a way that seeks to retain distance or control over what’s being spoken of: it is in this sense that good liturgy does what good poetry does). This is not to say that the language of worship itself cannot be starkly and effectively ideological; but where we find a developing and imaginative liturgical idiom operating in a community that is itself constantly re-imagining itself and its past, we may recognize that worship is at some level doing its job. That is what the overall canonical structure of Jewish Scripture puts before the reader; and insofar as the New Testament portrays the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as something which opens up an unprecedentedly direct and undistorted language for prayer, praise, “sacrifice”, and so on it is to be read as reinforcing the same point. The integrity of a community’s language about God, the degree to which it escapes its own pressures to power and closure, is tied to the integrity it directs to God (7).
Our words about God are not final, not comprehensive, but ought to remain open-ended and receptive of new meanings (not just any meanings of course), just as we remain open to what the Word has to say to us. The words we hear in Scripture and in the liturgy may require us to amend, alter, or give up not only certain ways of being but also certain ways of speaking (about God, others and our world). Thus, the theologian must resist, to borrow a Nietzschean metaphor, a tendency to allow his/her theological discourse to become a columbarium, and hence, a language of death, rather than words of life. Or as Williams puts it from a slightly different but related angle: “Language about God is kept honest in the degree to which it turns on itself in the name of God, and so surrenders itself to God” (8).
As Robert Sokolowski explains in his book, Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure, in the Eucharist past and future are made present. That is, past events of salvation history such as the Jewish Passover, but especially the Christ-event and future eschatological realities are brought together. Sokolowski then offers a beautiful reflection on our union with Christ in death.
[W]e in the Eucharist anticipate our own death as to be joined to the death of Jesus. Our death becomes part of the divine mystery, part of the great saving actions of God, because it can be identified with the sacrificial death of Christ. [...] The celebrations of the Eucharist at which we assist are like so many rehearsals of the one transition, the one exodus that is reserved for each of us, the one offering in which we no longer sacramentally but bodily participate in the death of the Lord. As Jesus acted toward the Father in his death, so we are enabled to make our death an act before God, an act in which life is changed, not taken away. [...] Our death, which is the horizon marking off the edge of our life, becomes a particular image of the final restoration of all things in Christ, an image of the death of things that is now to be understood as a transition into the kingdom of God. The Eucharist thus presents a double future to each of us as we participate in it: it presents our own entrance into the death and Resurrection of Jesus, and it presents the more remote setting in which everything will be restored in the kingdom of God.
These enactments of past are future are all woven into the Eucharist we celebrate in the present. The celebration of the Eucharist is surrounded by temporal ripples through which past and future things are refracted. The Eucharist does not give us merely images or signs of what is past and future; it presents these things as past and as future to us now. The Eucharist involves memory and anticipation, but it does not involve them as mere psychological states; rather, it reenacts and preenacts things God has done and will do (104-5).
Sokolowski, a few pages later, says that the Eucharist is from one perspective something that takes place in time. That is, it takes time to celebrate it; yet, “it also overcomes time as it reenacts an event that took place at another time. In doing this, the Eucharist calls time into question. It claims to go beyond time and thereby indicates that time and its succession are not ultimate. It makes time to be an image; it makes succession to be a representation. Thus the Eucharist, in its reenactment of the past and anticipation of the future, also enacts for us the context that encloses past, future, and present: it enacts the eternal life of the God who could be all that he is, in undiminished goodness and greatness, even if the world and its time were not [!]. The Eucharist engages, and perpetually reminds us of, the Christian distinction between the world and God” (107).
As Alfred North Whitehead famously said, the history of Western philosophy “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” The more I study the Western philosophical tradition, the more convinced I am that this is the case. At the center of Plato’s philosophy is his doctrine of the Forms or Ideas. In Greek there are two words, which we translate into English as “idea”: εἶδος (eidos) and ἰδέα (idea). Interestingly, in Greek these works mean something that is seen; however, Plato uses the terms to mean that which is not seen physically, but mentally. Nonetheless, seeing is still the root metaphor pervading his philosophy. Consider some of his most famous images-the cave, the sun, and so on. In the cave, there is no light, no knowledge. When one emerges from the cave into the light, one comes to know (or potentially comes to know) reality by first seeing the things of the sense world and then ascending to the Forms or Ideas in which the sense objects participate and imitate. As is well-known these days, postmoderns have challenged this privileging of the visual metaphor and have attempted to imagine what it might mean for some of the other senses to serve as a central metaphors. For example, postmodern philosophers and theologians such as Jean-Luc Marion and Catherine Pickstock have written with great effect on the more “neglected” senses such as taste and hearing.
Personally, I think that touch offers particularly fertile ground that ought be explored and put to use in philosophy. To be touched is, I submit, something that all humans need. Unfortunately, it is something that has been lost in our interactions with one another-perhaps in part due to our technological mode of being-in-the-world and perhaps also because of a fear of communicating the wrong idea or of a negative response from the other to whom we wish to encourage. Yet, an embrace and a simple clasping of hands can often communicate more than anything we might say. Two examples come to mind: one personal and the other Scriptural.
My husband and I lived in Moscow, Russia for about three years. During our time in Russia, we had the opportunity to visit various cities, small towns and villages. One winter we traveled by train to Kirov, staying approximately two weeks. While there we were invited to spend a day at one of the orphanages just outside the city. The memories of that visit are quite vivid, and the time with the children, though brief, was a life- changing experience. When we first arrived, the children, who ranged in age from 4-16 years old, were extremely shy and stand-off-ish. I noticed immediately a small, very cute little boy, Sasha, who was about 5 years old and very withdrawn. I walked up to Sasha and said, “Привет Саша,” (”hello, Sasha”). But Sasha said nothing - no smile, no handshake, no eye contact - nothing. As the day progressed, we played games, performed skits, ate lunch and attempted to get to know the children better. While playing one of the more active games (something like dodge-ball), Sasha and I began slowly to “bond.” When it was time to eat, I noticed that he wanted to sit with me (which made me of course extremely happy), so I tried to take his hand; however, he did not want me to touch him and quickly pulled his hand away. Nonetheless, he still wanted to sit with me. So we sat and ate borsch together and then went off to play more games. As the day was drawing to a close, I was sitting on a bench resting and Sasha walked up to me, sat next to me, and to my surprise (and joy) he let me hold his hand. After that connection, he would not leave my side and even let me hold him. He actually wanted very much to be held and touched, but he of course was simply “one among many” in the orphanage and had been for most of his short life deprived of physical touch. When it was time to leave, he did not want to let go of my hand (nor did I want to let go of his). Then the dreaded time came and we were told that the bus was leaving and we’d better pack up and board the bus. As we drove off, the kids ran behind the bus as long as they could keep up, and we of course cried our eyes out. I often think about Sasha, and hope that he remembers me-more than that, I hope that he finds a home and a family that will give him the love and affection for which he longs, needs, and deserves.
Not long after our short trip to Kirov, I began studying the book of Leviticus, which among other things describes the law of the leper’s cleansing (chapter 13).[1] For example in Lev. 13:45-46, we read,
The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.
Why must the leper wear torn clothes? In the Old Testament, the rending of a person’s clothes was a symbolic expression of mourning over death. Here the leper is to wear torn garments to represent his/her absolutely hopeless condition-after all, the disease was incurable. Prior to aids, leprosy was perhaps the most dreadful disease a person might contract. For example, the body becomes covered with ulcers, the person loses his/her hair, s/he experiences extremely slow bodily decay even to the point of losing limbs, and the mental and psychological anguish endured is excruciating. The person with leprosy is alienated from his/her own family and from societal life; s/he experiences death daily, moment by moment over period of many years and, worse of all, isolated, alienated. Although we are not exactly certain of the kind of leprosy that existed in the time of the OT, we can, however, grasp how this disease illustrates well the nature of sin in the spiritual sphere.
In addition to wearing torn clothes, the leper must cry, “Unclean, unclean.” Here “unclean” is not so much a reference to the physical disease itself, but speaks of the ceremonial status of the person according to Levitical law. That is, the individual remains unclean ceremonially until s/he is pronounced “clean” by the priest - that is, when and if healing comes. As mentioned above, “He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.” The leper experiences a separation, s/he has no koinonia with the people of God, and is considered ceremonially under judgment.
Though we do read in the OT of some lepers who were healed, there are very few illustrations of healing the disease until Jesus came on the scene. In other words, as to the “tonal center” of the OT, it was extremely unusual for anyone to be healed of leprosy. Yet, in Mark’s Gospel account, we read:
A leper came to him [Jesus] begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.
Jesus, who was well-acquainted with the Torah and the intricacies of Levitical law, did not rebuke the leper, explaining that lepers are social outcasts who belong outside the camp. Nor did He worry about being socially stigmatized or becoming ceremonially unclean through contact with the leper. Rather, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the leper. Then the Incarnate Word said, “be made clean,” and it was so. Jesus, who would soon know exile, alienation, condemnation and ultimately death, stretched out his hand of flesh and touched this diseased, dying leprous man. Jesus, whose body was rent and broken for us - we, who in Adam are spiritual lepers - acted with compassion towards the leper, touching him and thereby affirming his humanity, and I assure you the leper knew love as he had never known it before.
If philosophy can’t find a use for these kinds of images, then theology certain should, indeed, it must.
Notes
[1] Many of the observations given here were first brought to my attention about a decade ago through a lecture series on Leviticus by Dr. S. Lewis Johnson.
The second eccentric “outsider” Williams discusses is Etty Hillesum, who, like Simone Weil, was also of Jewish origins. Hillesum grew up in Holland and during the German invasions was arrested and eventually died at Auschwitz. Like Simone Weil, her family was secular; yet unlike Weil, she had a wild youth, which she describes in detail in her wonderful diaries. Williams, having read some of her diary entries, describes her as “full-blooded.” Increasingly, however, she felt unsettled by a certain lack in her intellectual and emotional life. As has sometimes happened with other famous figures who have endured grave suffering, during the most severe period of Gestapo activity in Amsterdam, Hillesum begins to discover God. She already had an interest in religion, and reads, for example, Augustine and Dostoevsky. However, she comes to realize that simply reading about them and nothing more is not sufficient.
In Hillesum’s case something more, something that she didn’t quite understand was happening to her, and she describes in her diary a new desire to kneel. This is significant for her own story, because she describes herself as having been one who would never kneel. But now she felt that the most appropriate response to whatever it was that happening to her was to kneel. She wasn’t sure to whom she was kneeling, yet it was something she was compelled to do. As Williams explains, “she sensed that there was something that had such a claim on her that she had to express with her whole body what that claim is. Actually, the fact that she had been a very sexually active young woman and had thought a great deal about the body, she felt that she had to use her body to express her faith.”
Hillesum reads from her own Jewish tradition and from the Christian tradition, and she senses increasingly that something or someone has a claim on her life. After her arrest and while waiting to be deported, she writes that she has come to realize that in this world someone has to take responsibility for God. “That is, someone in the middle of the horrors of the Gestapo destruction in Holland-somebody has to live as thought the Gestapo was not controlling the universe. Somebody has to live as though things are just different, and she says that someone unfortunately seems to be me” (rough quote of Williams’ commentary). So Hillesum becomes burdened with the idea of taking responsibility for God-that is, living in such a way that God becomes credible. And that is precisely how she lived in the deportation camp and at Auschwitz. In some of her last diary pages which were crumpled up and thrown out of the train, she writes, “and we left the camp singing.” Williams’ then highlights the notion of “making oneself a sign of God in a godless world.” Then he adds, “you can see that that is about your body, not just about what you say but putting your whole self on the line, as when you kneel down you are expressing a wholeness in response to God.” Thus, even in the midst of something as horrible as Auschwitz, one can by becoming a sign of God “make God real.” This recalls what Williams said in his first lecture about Nyssa and prayer and reconciliation. It also sits well with the 17th century idea of “landing where you are” (discussed in his second lecture). Williams sees Etty Hillesum as “a powerful and unconventional 20th century version” of just such a landing. Sadly, she died at the very young age of 27 at Auschwitz. Like Weil, Hillesum was never baptized and no one is quite sure where she stood at the end of her life with regard to the Christian faith. Nonetheless, in the last years of her life, she lived the Gospel in a way that would perhaps put most modern, Western Christians to shame. Interestingly, among the people whom she met at Westerbork, which was the holding camp which people were sent before being shipped to Auschwitz, were two Jewish, Carmelite nuns both members of St. Theresa’s reformed Carmelite order. One of these nuns was the great Edith Stein, who was of course one of the greatest Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. Stein also died in Auschwitz because she refused to separate herself as a Catholic from her Jewish brothers and sisters.
These are Williams’ “outsiders,” all of which, as he says, are “challenging, quirky, strange figures.” Before transitioning to discuss the monks, Williams ends with a great line and an image that has made me smile for several days: “I sometimes fantasize about that particular corner in heaven where 20th century, Jewish, women philosophers get together. Simone Weil, Etty Hillesum, Edith Stein, Gillian Rose, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt. And my goodness that would be a hard place to eavesdrop.”
Archbishop Rowan Williams’ recent Holy Week lectures focused on the subject of prayer. He began by discussing insights of three early Church figures: Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Cassian. In his second lecture, he discussed several Protestant and Catholic Reformers, highlighting their common emphases on God’s free action, God’s majesty and God’s mystery. (Williams, by the way, gave a very positive presentation of John Calvin’s views on prayer, referring to one of Calvin’s sermons on Abraham and Isaac. Hermeneutically speaking, it is interesting to note that Calvin’s exposition of the text is anything but a strict grammatico-historical reading. I applaud Williams for avoiding the herd mentality about Calvin and engaging in a bit of 21st century ad fontes activity). In this post, I draw our attention to the Archbishop’s third lecture, viz., those who have written on prayer in the 20th century. More specifically, I focus on the two eccentric female “outsiders” (that is, outsiders to Christian orthodoxy), Simone Weil and Etty Hillesum.
The question of prayer and how to pray, as Williams’ points out, was still quite pressing in the 20th century. That is, the events of the war, the Nazi invasions and the resultant crimes against humanity, all played a role in pushing people to seek God. First, Williams’ discusses Simone Weil, a Jewish philosopher, who died in 1943 at the young age of 34. Because of Jewish identity, her historical situation, and her own desire to connect with the plight of the poor, Weil was intimately acquainted with suffering. For example, when the Nazis took over France, Simone was uprooted and forced to flee. In the final months of her life, she decided to eat no more food than was available to the poorest in France in her day. This decision had deleterious consequences on her health and contributed to her death. Weil’s family was a secular Jewish family and also a very intellectual family. At an early age, Simone evinced intellectual gifts and a proclivity for philosophy and languages. In addition to teaching at a high school, Weil also worked in a factory, as she wanted to relate with the working class and their struggles. Weil’s life was one of intensity, and that intensity comes through in her writings.
As Williams explains, although she was an intellectual, Simone had a life-changing mystical experience in her twenties while on a retreat at a Benedictine Abbey. As she read George Herbert’s poem, “Love Bade Me Welcome,” she had what she describes as an encounter with Christ-as she puts it, “Christ came down and took possession of me.” She, however, was eccentric and struggled with Catholic theology. For example, she refused to be baptized. Why? She believed that most of the human race was not baptized and out in the cold and felt that her call was to stay out in the cold with most of the human race. Had she lived longer, perhaps her views on baptism would have changed; nonetheless, one can respect her desire to existentially connect with the alienated and downtrodden. Weil did, in spite of her differences with traditional theology, spend much time reflecting on the Eucharist and the Trinity. In addition, she spoke out against the impersonal and technological totalitarianism of her day-that is, against the kind of life she had seen and experienced in the factory.
Weil’s best known book is entitled, Waiting for God. As Williams’ explains, for Simone, the essence of prayer begins in attention, in waiting attention. This kind of posture involves self-denial, a kind of selflessness. That is, (quoting Williams) “you put your thoughts and anxieties on the backburner, [you] let your self be there and let your mind be shaped by what is in front of you. In learning a language, you submit your mind and your feelings to the structure of something that is there, and as you do that you enter into a kind of freedom.” In other words, by de-centering the self and one’s own concerns and preoccupations, you allow what is there to shape you. You allow the Other a voice, a potentially transforming voice. In fact, Weil sees the de-centering necessary for prayer as that which is required in many “ordinary” activities. As Williams’ puts it, “the selflessness of learning a language or a craft-all of that is a preparation for the deep attention of waiting in which you turn toward God. That is her most central idea. It connects experiences that we all share in some way with the experience of connecting with God.” Thus, whether learning to ride a bicycle (or in my daughter’s case, a tricycle), learning a craft, or learning a foreign language, we are de-centering ourselves and being shaped by an “other.”
Weil’s philosophical ideas are quite complex. (Interestingly, they remind me of some of Balthasar’s teachings). For example, “Simone sees this selfless giving as the ground of God, because God himself is always giving himself so selflessly that you can almost say that he cancels himself out, so that the world can exist, can come to light. That gift, in which you cancel yourself as the giver, she translates into the idea that somehow in our own relationship to God, we, in response to God’s stepping out of sight, cancel ourselves and our absorbed into God.” Weil speaks of this as “de-creating” ourselves. Of course, that moves a bit outside of Christian orthodoxy; yet, her point about self-less giving is very much at the heart of Christianity. Williams ends by saying, “the power and density of her writing is addictive. She covers such a range of thinking and feeling, and though she herself found it very hard to accept love, she never lost sight of that experience where Christ came down and ‘took possession of me’ when she was contemplating George Herbert’s poem,
‘LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.’”
In part II, I shall summarize Williams’ lecture on Etty Hillesum.
According to Nietzsche in his essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense,”[1] what we take to be knowledge involves two metaphors. Here metaphor is understood in a broad sense, namely, as transference. First, we have a transfer that occurs from a nerve stimulus caused by the external world, which is then translated into an image. Secondly, that image is then transferred into a sound, that is, it becomes language. Nietzsche’s point is that we construct our knowledge at a distance from (here at least two steps) the flow of life. For example, when I look out the window and see a tree, a series of brain and nerve activities occurs, but these neural stimulations bear no intrinsic similarities to the tree “out there.” Thus, we have the first metaphoric-ization or transference. Then, having received this stimuli, I translate this information into a word, into language, which provides the second transference. From this picture, Nietzsche concludes that there is no natural connection between what is perceived in the external world and knowledge. Rather, the relation between what is out there and my claims to know it is purely conventional. According to Nietzsche, language is not a reflection of essences. Our knowledge does not reflect the deep structures of reality; rather, it is a mere human construct.
Failure to recognize this state of affairs is, for Nietzsche, one of the central problems with the scientist or rational human being in contrast with the artist or intuitive person. That is, the scientist, who, of course, also constructs metaphors, takes his metaphors to be the truth, the way things really are. According to Nietzsche, the scientist takes his metaphors too seriously; he ossifies them, whereas the artist recognizes their fluidity and transiency. To be sure, these metaphors do serve practical and pragmatic purposes. They help us to affirm ourselves and aid in our self-preservation to some degree. However, when we forget about their provisional nature, we come to believe that our conceptual edifices are immovable. When this occurs, the metaphors harden, they ossify-rather, we ossify them, and turn them into columbaria. (A columbarium is a Roman vault for funeral urns!) So the rational human being has lost touch with the metaphorical origins of human knowledge and lives his life constructing conceptual systems that display “the regularity of a Roman columbarium” (112). According to Nietzsche, our (rationalistic) tendency to forget the earthy, metaphorical rootedness of human knowledge, moves us to increasing levels of abstraction-abstractions which we then take to be reality. These systems of abstractions are likened to a columbarium; they are life-denying and lead to death. (By the way, I think his critique of the scientist also applies to the philosopher and the theologian).
Clearly, Nietzsche values the flow of life and wants us to remain close to our, so to speak, humble origins. His warnings against taking our conceptual edifices to be the reality and the one and only way to truthfully describe and explain the world are compelling and worthy of our reflection. Part of his critique also involves cautioning against pride and calling us to acknowledge our finitude-two points that Christians ought to take seriously. Yet, as a Christian, there are certain matters, which are central to the Christian narrative and understanding of reality, which Nietzsche fails to consider. For example, according to the Christian tradition, the created order is now not as it originally was. In fact, St. Paul, employing a number of earthy metaphors, tells us that creation has been subjected to futility and eagerly awaits its eschatological renewal.
The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience (NRSV, Rom 8:19-25).
So there is a sense in which, for the Christian, life and the world as now experienced involves a struggle against the natural world-a natural world, which groans and awaits a final release from its dislocation and disintegration. In other words, something more than a return to the flow of life or even a recognition of the metaphorical origins of knowledge is needed to overcome the prideful tendencies of which Nietzsche speaks. According to the Christian narrative, a kind of cosmic redemption is needed-a redemption that not only saves us from our pride but also transforms and renews the present state of creation itself. This is of course precisely what St. Paul claims Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection accomplished and is accomplishing. St. Paul doesn’t deny that our life in-between Christ’s advents is a life of eschatological tension both within ourselves and with creation as a whole.
In addition to St. Paul’s use of metaphors, we should also consider the use of metaphor and mythical language in the Genesis creation account. For example, the author of Genesis speaks of a solid dome upon which fixed stars hang (the raqia). This mythical description, of course, doesn’t square with contemporary science and our current understanding of the sky, stars etc. Nonetheless, God chose to condescend to the then-current conceptual categories and to use this mythical language to speak of his creation, as his point was not to give us a scientific account of the universe but to proclaim himself as the Creator. So perhaps we could say that God himself is more like the artist, who plays with metaphor and recognizes its inherent limitations. Yet, he is unlike the artist (at least the artist in Nietzsche’s description) in that he is in fact trying to teach us something about reality itself, the reality that he himself brought into being and the reality which he is.
Lastly, perhaps participating in liturgical life provides a way to properly acknowledge our finitude and to combat modernity’s “columbaric” tendencies which Nietzsche so aptly describes. For example, in the Ash Wednesday liturgy of the Anglican/Episcopal Church, as the priest marks our foreheads with ashes, s/he says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Of course, for those in Christ, there’s more to story. We, who are in Christ, shall be resurrected in glorified bodies). In addition, participation in the Eucharist reminds us through humble material means (bread and wine) of our need for spiritual nourishment, that is, our need to be nourished by Christ’s resurrection life. Confession of sin reminds us of our weakness, our proclivity to idolatry and our continual, moment-by-moment need for God’s grace and forgiveness. The preaching of the word keeps us rooted in the Christian story and challenges us to submit to God’s, as it were, “interpretation” of reality.
How fitting on this Easter Sunday to allow Nietzsche to teach us about the power and relevance of the Christ-event. Whether ancient, stone columbariua or modern, conceptual columbaria, neither are able to contain Christus Victor. He is risen! He is risen indeed!
Below are links to Archbishop Rowan Williams’ Holy Week lectures (HT, Jason at Per Crucem ad Lucem). I recently listened to lecture one, in which Williams discusses three early church figures and their insights on prayer: Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and John Cassian. For all three saints, the Lord’s Prayer plays a huge role in teaching us how to pray. From Origen, Williams highlights praying “in Jesus” to the Father. From Gregory of Nyssa, we see how prayer is closely connected to our various relationship with others. A solid prayer life, in other words, makes us people who want to be reconciled with others. Turning to Cassian, the Archbishop leaves us with some practical advice to help us when we become distracted in prayer (as is so often the case). To help us re-focus when distracting thoughts enter, pray, as did Cassian this short, easy-to-recall phrase, “Oh God, make speed to save me.” Also, Cassian advises, it’s better to begin with a commitment to frequent, short, yet focused times of prayer than to attempt three-hour sessions of prayer. As one who struggles to maintain a consistent prayer life and who wants to grow in this area, I found these reflections exceedingly helpful and inspiring.
The following is a transcription of an interview between Jonathan Derbyshire and Tommie Shelby provided by The Prospect . On their website, they have also posted an interesting interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher, cultural theorist and novelist. Dr. Appiah is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.
5th November 2008
Conversation between Jonathan Derbyshire and Tommie Shelby
Tommie Shelby is a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, author of We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity and co-author of Hip-Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason
JD: In your book, We Who Are Dark, you try to articulate a non-essentialist conception of black racial identity as the basis for political solidarity. Is it plausible to try to understand Barack Obama’s campaign in these terms?
TS: In my book, I claim that we should think of black political solidarity as resting not on a common black identity, but on the common experience of racism and the joint commitment to work together to combat it. Despite the diversity within the black population in the US, Obama received overwhelming black support, not just in the general election, where as a Democrat he could expect to get at least 88 per cent of the black vote, but also in the primary against Clinton, where
a number of blacks thought he was unfairly criticised because of his race. I think this black support, especially in the south, reflects in part the historical commitment of blacks, despite their many internal differences, to stand together in the fight for racial justice. Obama is seen by many blacks as a symbol of the successes of our collective historical struggle, and he gives us hope that further progress lies ahead. Moreover, Obama received overwhelming black support despite the fact that his mother is white and his father is not a descendent of black American slaves. Because he is generally
regarded as black (given the one-drop rule) and strongly identifies as black, he is accepted as an equal member in the black community and can lay claim to the legacy of the historic African-American fight for justice. The fact that he attended a black church, is married to an African-American woman, and has mastered elements of traditional black oratory also helped to solidify his black support.
JD: Does an Obama victory also herald the end of a particular way of doing politics? Specifically, identity politics or the “politics of recognition”?
TS: Many whites are weary, and have long been weary, of black claims of grievance. Most whites are impatient with black claims about the continuing significance of racism. They don’t think there is a serious race problem anymore, and they will point to Obama’s election as proof that racism does not affect black life chances, at least not in any serious way. They think that black political solidarity is no longer necessary and that blacks should stop suggesting that America is a racist society and reconcile with their fellow white citizens, dropping all talk of “black America.” For some whites, this is the
significance of Obama’s victory-it undermines black claims of grievance and puts the last nail in the coffin of black identity politics. The fact that Obama ran on a platform of racial reconciliation, did not specify any concrete proposals for how to combat racial discrimination in employment and housing or segregation in public schools, and did not make any overt racial appeals to black voters only seems to buttress the legitimacy of this “post-racial” stance. As this stance becomes more entrenched, and I expect it will, blacks will find it even more difficult to put problems of racial injustice on the public agenda.
JD: Do you, as some African-American intellectuals have argued, think that substantial political costs are incurred when black politicians try to reinvent the political language of race as Obama has? Glen Loury, for instance, argued that Obama’s presuming to “renegotiate the implicit American racial contract” threatens to throw away something valuable; it threatens to obliterate the moral legacy of the black struggle for freedom.
TS: Insofar as Obama has communicated to whites, whether intentionally or not, that what we most need now is interracial unity and racial reconciliation, rather than a concerted effort on the part of government to ensure that no one’s basic rights and opportunities are attenuated because of racism (past and present), then he has made a bad bargain. I don’t think that this was his intention, but some may interpret him this way.
Of course, what I am hoping is that his racial rhetoric was simply pragmatic. He needed to gain significant white support- I think he got about 45 percent nationally-to win, and knowing that most whites are tired of hearing about racism and the black plight, maybe he avoided talking about such things and instead emphasised interracial unity. But he may govern in a way that takes problems of race seriously-for instance, with respect to appointments to the judiciary, to the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, and to Housing and Urban Development.
JD: Finally, what do you think will happen when, as is almost unavoidable, disappointment with a President Obama sets in Is there anywhere for the black political enthusiasm that this campaign has awakened to go?
TS: I don’t think that blacks are expecting Obama to do all that much to help their cause for racial justice. Many of us just liked the idea of having a black Democratic president, recognising that we’re electing a pragmatic left-of-centre politician who will likely govern in much the same way that Bill Clinton did, as a moderate. So while blacks may be disappointed by this or that decision, I don’t think they will be deeply disillusioned by the way he governs.
very likely encounter nothing but the nonexistent. What is certain is that at the very moment when I endeavored to grasp my being, Sartre, who remains ‘the Other,’ by naming me shattered my last illusion. While I was telling him:
As Alfred North Whitehead famously said, the history of Western philosophy “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” The more I study the Western philosophical tradition, the more convinced I am that this is the case. At the center of Plato’s philosophy is his doctrine of the Forms or Ideas. In Greek there are two words, which we translate into English as “idea”: εἶδος (eidos) and ἰδέα (idea). Interestingly, in Greek these works mean something that is seen; however, Plato uses the terms to mean that which is not seen physically, but mentally. Nonetheless, seeing is still the root metaphor pervading his philosophy. Consider some of his most famous images-the cave, the sun, and so on. In the cave, there is no light, no knowledge. When one emerges from the cave into the light, one comes to know (or potentially comes to know) reality by first seeing the things of the sense world and then ascending to the Forms or Ideas in which the sense objects participate and imitate. As is well-known these days, postmoderns have challenged this privileging of the visual metaphor and have attempted to imagine what it might mean for some of the other senses to serve as a central metaphors. For example, postmodern philosophers and theologians such as Jean-Luc Marion and Catherine Pickstock have written with great effect on the more “neglected” senses such as taste and hearing.
