I haven’t decided what I’m going to say yet. I feel like I’m at my 8th grade dance before I ask Juan out to the dance floor. Indeed, I had a crush on a nice Mexican boy named Juan, who was absolutely smothered in acne—I was a gay boy! Don’t worry, though—I’m cured now: the gayness has subsided; I am now a deeply repressed homosexual in a tenuous bond with a woman. But, the anxiety about the dance is a lie; the truth-nuke is this: there was a dance circle, and I busted that shit down. BOOM! A collection of tweens in a gymnasium, about 30 or 40 of us in the corner by the bleachers…I hopped right in the middle, and as is prophesied in the tomes of old: “No matter what the gay, white boy do in the dance circle, it will be hype as fuck.” I attempted to break dance. God damn that shit was invigorating. I looked like a pale green bean flopping in a pan of hot oil. I looked amazing.

That’s a good type of nervous like wondering how you’ll feel, how it will all seem, when you see someone again that you haven’t seen in months; before the rollercoaster plummets, hurtling toward the cold steel and wind; in that space of anticipation and queasy hope in fun moments before you know whether or not they like you back. There’s lots of good types of nervous. But there’s lots of bad types of nervous: feeling obliged to do something you don’t want to do, and it’s coming up soon; feeling stuck in a weird loop, uncertain whether its your fault, or somebody’s or nobody’s; feeling unwelcome.

I’m stinky. I’m on the floor of my girlfriend’s apartment. I’m drinking a smores flavored latte from the coffee shop with the mean barista. (She hasn’t ever been mean to me though. Guess I’m just fucking awesome.) I have been on break for almost a month now. Soon, I’ll fly back to Colorado from Chicago. Becoming comfortable in a place takes a lot of time, but eventually it starts to happen; it showed itself to me in how familiar Chicago is to me: how much I like just walking around, seeing the people, seeing the same buildings, visiting my friends. I know it, more or less—enough to not be afraid, to hang my hat for awhile.

The problem with writing on this here blog—besides the oscillation between being far too busy to pay it any mind, or relaxing from being too busy—is that I don’t want to. What I mean is that I don’t need to write to understand anything, at least via this medium anymore. Y’all are chilling; ya don’t need me to tell you nothing. So what else? It would have to be just because I like writing or because there’s something I really feel the need to talk about.

Writing is fine. So, is there anything I just gotta say? Well. Not really. Whatever mission I’m putting myself on learning all this philosophy has yet to fully articulate itself. But, there might be things I sorta gotta say. There’s certainly things I know folks would find interesting.

I know a lot more about this guy Xunzi, the guy placed third in line of the great, ancient Confucian thinkers: moving from the vaguely, maybe existent Confucius, to Mencius, and finally to Xunzi. I was taught about him from a buff Nordic man with mutton chops, whose primary allotment of examples included hunting me down with assassins: “So. What distinguishes virtue from skill is…for example…the … hmm … assassins I have trained to take out Nicholas…they are very skilled, but not so virtuous.” I learned about Animal Rights from the newest professorial inductee to CSU, Andrew Lopez. I still eat burgers, but now I think the burgers came from something that has rights. Then, from Jeff Kasser, a wry-witted, incredibly kind, southerner, I learned about the value of stability in one’s beliefs: though even here my beliefs aren’t steady.

But, what should I tell you?

There’s a mission that reveals itself spottily in what I’m attracted to and what I attack. There’s an odd logic that’s like a thread with many colors unspooling. I have an inkling that I avoid putting it together because then there, indented and affixed, would be my Area of Specialization, my Area of Competence, written at the top of my CV the way your name is written on your tombstone. Its not that that makes me bad nervous.

Part of it is I’m not much sure of nothing. Old news. But, the other part of the bad nervous is that, even though I’m not sure, there’s better and worse. There’s themes I resonate with: the political supersedes over the ethical whenever they conflict (Machiavelli, Hegel, Xunzi); that the religious is not a route to the supernatural, most primarily, but to the richly natural and ethical, to your neighbor (Kierkegaard [says me], Nietzsche, Hegel); that the natural and the ethical is best captured by talking about virtues and vices (Aristotle, Plato, Xunzi, McDowell); that this is tied intimately to how we inquire and what we can know (Pyrrho, Peirce, Descartes, Hume); that this itself is a matter of virtue (Zagzebski, Sosa); and that this epistemic-ethical basis of reasoning loops back to the political and the material, which forms the basis of our aesthetic experiences and molds us (Janet McCracken; Marx).

In short, the broad areas of axiology: Ethics, Political Philosophy, Aesthetics, and, arguably, Epistemology in many of its moods: some how, some way is intertwined and, somewhere in there is the answer to the good life, and the good life for everyone. Maybe. But, no one lets you build systems anymore. Talking to academic philosophers is like talking to architectural connoisseurs. You go, “Taj Mahal, hell of a project. One of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen right?” And they agree, and they do more than agree: they launch into tales about the investigations they’ve put together about the minutest corners of the Taj Mahal, about one staircase, one pillar, one facade. It’s enriching and you come to appreciate the architectural precision and magnificence. But then you realize, no one is trying to build the Taj Mahal anymore. Everyone is a puzzler: “How does Descartes’ letter to Bum-Fuck reveal that proposition 13 from the Principles of Philosophy is better applied to his early metaphysics than his later epistemology?” No one takes non-puzzlers seriously, which is fair, because oftentimes you take on the air of a conspiracy theorist on Facebook talking about his celestial visions if you begin to be grandiose. Philosophy done well is methodical and time-consuming, and even pedantic.

Nonetheless, there’s something lost. Or, not even lost, just odd. Because then there’s tomes like Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, or John Rawls’ titanically influencing oeuvre, or Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue that leave indelible and gargantuan marks on the entire realm of human thinking. Maybe they aren’t system-builders in the sense that Aristotle and Hegel are: covering each area, propounding propositions from the axioms of logic and how that connects to the right way to love your friends: but they are taking swings, and they get talked about. Hume wrote A Treatise of Human Nature when he was like 22. Bro.

I think, though, where the mythos of it all breaks down is that somehow these folks had one vivid insight—a theophany, a deific vision—that builds out from itself, that came to them distinctly, unified, and all at once. Probably, you have what you believe to be true and good, and piece by piece you work it out: incorporating resistances, enriching it with your experiences, with what other people teach you, but united by a desire to get at something right. I’m not sure where Aristotle and Hegel got their damn gumption, but in the absence of an Angel of Gabriel who will come show me the true dialectic, I likely have to chip away at the vision in fragments, not chunks. So, away I chip.1

Ritualistic Self-Cultivation

In Janet McCracken’s book Taste and the Household, she convinced me that how one reasons about domestic aesthetic matters—securing one’s survival, and pleasantly—is the ground of your reasoning about many matters, though most importantly, your reasoning about moral and political purposes and goods. Then, there’s the platitudinous truths that “you are who you hang out with” and the becoming-to-be-triteness that you need to structure your environment instead of relying on willpower, advice stocking the sagging shelves of self-help sections the world round. But one tangible way in which we can chip away at these suggestions, instead of withering under the shaky, foggy nervousness of “wanting to change,” is realizing the power of rituals—which are something like material habits, repetitive and powerful sets of meaningful behaviors, often with accoutrement to round it out.

Xunzi is, as far as I can tell, the philosopher who has undertaken the most sustained analysis of rituals. The Chinese term that he employs that means rituals and rites is Li, which doubles to mean ritual propriety, i.e. proper adherence to and care for rituals. The first thing to note is that li is pervasive in ancient Chinese culture, and Xunzi means something much wider than what we mean. Obviously, religion comes to mind: the somber and golden tones and hues of a Catholic mass or the cyclical prostrations of a Muslim woman on her prayer mat. But, we also use the term for things like “morning rituals”—itself a category bastardized and social-media-ized beyond recognizable usefulness—where one sustains a habit of stretching, lighting a candle, having some coffee, or what-have-you. But Xunzi means everything from handshakes to day-long celebrations of the emperor. Rituals, and the virtue of adhering to them well, refers to etiquette and ceremonies, and anything in between.

That’s damn broad. But the second Western hurdle to understanding li is probably our quick-on-the-draw suspicion of anything utterly humane—anything that can be dropped under the Martian microscope of the sociology and anthropology (when perpetrated, not when practiced). The physical world is neatly chopped up with our measurements and hypotheses, and the human world is a bit messier, but in principle, any curious behavior is just an outgrowth of our desire for sex, intimacy, power, and food, or perhaps a vestigial attempt at truth. Rituals, at best, are imperfect symbolizations of things we can better get at some other way. Prime target in this suspicion—harkening back to the corrosive, de-Aestheticization of religion wrought by Martin Luther—are the ornate and gaudy world of Catholic and Orthodox services. Manipulation of the spirit and a taste for silver and gold chalices: not more, but maybe even less. Like amber ear wax, a bloody booger, or some grey bellybutton lint, rituals are unsightly byproducts of natural functions, our desires for beauty and meaning.

But, Xunzi helps us here, too. While the disenchantment of the world is hasty, and we always always always think we know more than we do—explain to me, in detail, what the naturalistic, scientific, empirical worldview commits you to, and what it doesn’t, and why: you almost certainly cannot2 —Xunzi bypasses all of this because in the entire Confucian tradition, he is the most consonant with this modern picture. He is a naturalist and, arguably, a symbolic realist about rituals. His conception of Heaven (tian) diverges entirely from the personalist and supernaturalist Confucian ideas, and instead just refers to the patterns of the cosmos and nature. That means that rituals do not point to, or actually involve anything supernatural, even when the more dimwitted of adherents think they do, even when the surface reading encourages it. Rituals ornament our emotions, our joys and sorrows: extending and shortening the type, degree, and length with which we feel. Rituals teach us about the right way to live because, for Xunzi, they reflect the Dao, which refers to something like the objectively best normative patterning inherent in the world.

The clearest example of this in Xunzi, and the example he talks the most about in his discourse on rituals, are funeral rituals. Grief threatens people’s wellbeing, if it is carried out without help. Grief is inevitable, but it does not inevitably undermine people’s lives and communities. The first way it can go wrong is delayed grief: where someone carries on with their life as if nothing happened. They don’t appear torn up at all. The second pathology is excessive melancholia, wherein someone grieves so intensely that they don’t give up their attachment—they don’t accept the objective loss—at all. They cease functioning at all; they’ll do things like keep the deceased’s room exactly as it was. Xunzi’s account of avoiding these pathologies is rich and detailed. For example, you puncture their kitchen utensils, but put them in the coffin, so as to show that you care for them, but they won’t be needing their things anymore. You prepare the dead meticulously, so that they are beautiful and you aren’t repulsed at the sight of them. But, you must move their coffin further away each day, to symbolize the need to move on. All aspects of the rituals realizing the strength of feelings, but also the need to channel them in a healthy way. Indeed, the prescribed amount of time for grieving is 3 years, which comes out to 25 months in the ancient Chinese timetable.3 We tell people to get back to work the next week.

Another concern. Rituals seem stagnant, dusty. How could the rigid codification of behavior accommodate the vicissitudes, emotional tightropes, and blaring, terrifying difference of moral life? But the rituals were created by the sages—this mysterious type of character who is the “ultimate in the Way,” but who “shifts and alters, adapting to changes without end” (Xunzi 21/226-227/100 121).4 The Dao itself—the normative ordering of the world, the best way to arrange things, “is constant, yet it covers all changes": one cannot fixate on any one good, whether it be usefulness, dignity, legal order, or living in accordance with nature (19/206/167-168; 173). The sage has a broad array of sensitivities. They take into account all relevant factors, and clearly discern the evidence. Their goal in creating the rituals was multifarious, but unified in the end of creating social order and allowing people to flourish. Li satisfies, nurtures, and reforms natural, inevitable human desires.

Li accomplishes many, many things in Xunzi’s system, for example: (1) it generates and maintains yi, or proper social order, i.e., your elders should be treated like this, your mother like that, and so on; (2) it cultivates and channels ren, the virtue of care and benevolence, which increases or decreases dependent on the relation of yi one stands to someone (a stranger deserves limited generosity, whereas one’s close friends and family deserve closer attention); (3) it satisfies our need for beautiful sights, sounds, and feelings; (4) it prevents ritual and emotional pathologies. The two ritual pathologies are either (a) taking rituals literally, wherein one assumes the supernatural meanings are to be taken seriously, and (b) not dwelling in rituals, not feeling them, and so taking too reductive of a viewpoint of them. Rituals aren’t meant to produce delusions, for Xunzi, but neither are you meant to participate in them without feeling, just “going through the motions.”

I won’t get too much into it, but, I argue in my term paper that li is fundamental and just shy of sufficient in creating moral connoisseurs. Moral connoisseurship is a form of virtue ethics wherein what constitutes the virtuous person is their reliable, perceptual sensitivity and practical reasoning process, which allows them to identify morally salient features of situations. This is in much the same way that a wine connoisseur, through careful and deliberate practice, gains the ability to distinguish the reasons that make a wine good or bad, the capacity to justify their reasoning, and to do all of this consistently.5 Being a good person is being sensitive to the fine-grained differences of situations, and what in them require what sorts of responses. I think something like rituals—in the comprehensive sense of etiquette to ceremonies—can provide people with the moral distinctions that matter, why they matter, and how they can come to be motivated by them.

Back to School

Well. There’s one shard in the mosaic. I did some writing on the role of contracts in facilitating a sense of belonging and agency in the modern social world this semester. I wrote on the role of sentiments in relationships generally, but specifically in the ever-expanding category of long-distance relationships in the modern world. I don’t know exactly what I’ll learn next semester. I’m taking another seminar on normative ethical theory, one on Plato’s Republic, and another of the philosophy of medicine. I’m sure I’ll arc toward a courage at being pinned down by the academic hammer further still. There was a period in the semester that was so brutal that I kept considering responding to people when they asked me how I am: “In Santideva’s work The Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra, he describes the practice where monks, before they understand why, are tasked to go the morgues, stare at the dead bodies, chanting and meditating on the fact that they too will be like these dead bodies one day. I feel like the monks before they understand the point of the practice.”

Nonetheless, I had a wonderful time with all of my professors, and with all of my fellow GTA pals, with whom I went camping for the first time, to trivia almost every week, and dwelled in excessive and constant shenanigans. All of my lovely people still got nothing but love for me in Kansas and Illinois. Chipping away at that story, I’m happy there are so many good people in my life. I expect great things these coming months. Maybe I’ll even write something here before summer…

Yeah, probably not.

Much love,

Nicholas

And the tree was happy…

This is how Shel Silverstein’s picture book The Giving Tree begins.

Silverstein tells the story of a tree and a boy. The boy enjoys playing with the tree—swinging on her branches and eating her apples. Their relationship was free and loving. But, the boy grows up and grows distant. Then, less out of love and more out of brute, material desire, the boy, now a man, asks for money. (Though, he is still called a boy.) So, she gives him all of her apples in the hopes that this makes him happy again (for he does not seem very happy anymore)—and giving him what he wants makes her happy.

Then, older still, the boy comes back, of middle age, and wants a house so he can raise a wife and kids. The tree gives him all of her branches.1 And she is happy, for she gave him what he wanted.

Then, as an old man, the boy wants a boat that will take him away, and she offers her whole trunk. He chops her trunk down and lugs it away. It is only then, when he has taken everything from her, that she is not happy.

He comes back one the last time, frail and tired, and he doesn’t want anything she could offer him before—not her apples, or branches, or trunk. He simply wants somewhere to rest. He “doesn’t need very much now.” So he sits on the tree, now nothing but a stump, and the tree was happy.

This story presses us to ask how it is that we take and how it is that we give. When we do so, are we giving away too much of ourselves? Does that make us happy? Does it even make the person taking happy? How do we guarantee that our relationships of exchange are free, loving, and thoughtful, instead of being built on ill-conceived desires and obligation? The boy at the start and end of his life loves the tree for what she is and what she can naturally give. Their relationship is defined by mutuality, by a fitting reciprocity of their needs. But the work of their relationship in mid-life is riddled with that uneasy, maternal generosity—the running ragged and running thin; giving from lack, not from abundance.

So, what makes for a good gift?

Your acquaintance is getting married. Invited to the bridal shower, you are neutral, but easily swayed into tagging along because your best friends will be in the troupe. One thing though: you have to bring a gift. At the mall, alongside its typical terrors, you see a book that purports to be about how to cook a variety of bite-size, dinner deserts. Not thinking about whether the bride would like that sort of thing, you buy it, get the gift receipt, and toss it in your purse.

Again, it is Christmas. Alongside its usual horrors, this time some of your third cousins will be there. You have never met them. You are told to buy them gifts. You don’t know the first thing about them, but any attempt to shirk the request is met with trenchant and furrowing passive-aggression. You buy some kitchenware and stationery and call it a day.

Again at the office party, then again at the birthday party, and again, and again…Events roll up throughout the year where you must give someone a gift. It is not really about you. It is not really about them. In his article “The Gift” Clive Dilnot calls this obligatory exchange, swarming with resentment, the transaction of the gift-article.2

The true gift is different. The true gift finds its best expression in someone freely finding or making something for their beloved pal. The giver discovers a double joy in this. First, there is the pleasure of pleasing another; you learn what they want and need, what’s on their mind, their quirks and character, and it feels good to see them satisfied through your attention; second, there is the pleasure in finding just the right thing, an object that perfectly fits the bill, that screams out their name.

The receiver finds a double joy in this as well. First, most obviously, the friend gets what they want. “Oh my god! I’ve been looking for something just like this forever!” Perhaps, most specially, this joy is met with a sort of self-discovery, wherein you didn’t even know that you needed it. Second, there is the joy of recognition: “I feel so seen!” This is the satisfaction of thinking about the time they spent thinking about you; your friend spent time imagining you opening up potential gifts, seeing your reaction, until they knew what would bring you the most joy.

The gift is not a mere thing, but a symbol of love and recognition between two people, and a sign of tender effort and time spent.

The gift-article is simply the market-manifestation of the fact that we are put in situations where we ought to give a gift, but do not want to do any of the imaginative work. When we, in fact, don’t even want to give a gift. It is a sign of expenditure, and nothing more. The scenarios of pseudo-giving arrive to us as stuffy and alien requirements. This situation is worsened by the economic pressures teaching us that we do not have what we need (and buying something will fix that)—that your world of things is scarcely enough—and that you must buy more than you need (for this is freedom). One must be spendthrift and gluttonous. The only meaning of the gift-article is the price tag.

Gift-articles come in two varieties: the “relentlessly practical” and the useless. Basically, when you don’t actually want to give someone a gift, or someone you don’t know “requires” a gift, then it will either be a frying pan or a book that isn’t meant to be read.3 This guarantees that the relation will spurred by resentment and obligation instead of freely imagined love.

Why is this? What made the difference between a world full of gifts to ones full of substitutes?

Dilnot evinces two primary reasons for the atrophying of our gift-giving practices. First, there are just more situations today where you must give a gift to someone when you do not want to. Second, the market responds like water to cracks in the pavement and sensed this need: the need for something that was like a gift but that wasn’t really a gift—something to merely buy and hand over. The gift-article is an economic substitute for personal gift-giving relations. As Dilnot puts it, “a generalized culture of gift-articles marks the existence of a formal but not a substantial relationship to the other.”4 We simply have more relationships that are purely formal and empty now.

Dilnot takes the gift-article to be a reflection of, and evidence for, the larger trend in the industrial creation of objects wherein the process of their design and creation has nothing to do with actual people’s relationships.5 Products are considered possessions (for consumption, ownership, or display) or commodities for exchange.6 But these the objects around us can also be considered dialogically, as physical avenues to promote welfare and maintain (or change) relationships. This dialogic relation between people and objects is one in which people consider how objects can be made more beautiful and useful in our shared lives. So, one can train yourself to see objects not as mere stuff, but as so many fulcrums upon which we exercise our creativity and imagination toward bettering our relationship to the world and each other. In other words, we make objects to stay alive, to live pleasantly together, and to create a world that reflects us. Objects can enter into a dialogue with us; they are external opportunities for reflection on what is good for us and, by extension, for the people with whom we share a physically, intimate life with.

The world-making function of gifts (or gift-articles) can simply be a matter of dressing, feeding, and sheltering ourselves, or of alleviating some deficiency; lightbulbs help us see in the dark and chairs allow us to rest after standing too long. Gifts make up our worlds—if we are giving well—in a way that reflects our needs, our awareness of our needs, and visions of a well-lived life. Since gifts are physically in the world, they can serve as further objects of reflection. When you notice a chair, you can then ask, “Does this allow me to relax and relieve pressure from my feet and spine? Should this chair be here or somewhere else?”

Besides objects (potentially) clearly reflecting our needs and awareness, objects “function or work is giftlike in that its form embodies recognition of our concrete needs and desires.” (58) Objects should be well-designed such that they ergonomically and obviously teach us ways to live better. Products should clearly represent their usefulness and beauty. (People and products alike will hide themselves to the extent that they are useless. Vagueness in presentation is a good sign of a worthless, sophistic object.) Gift-articles are often indiscernible as sources of recognition. One looks at it and thinks, “This is junk. Who would need this?” We can’t imagine a good life with it because it wasn’t made with that in mind. It was, by definition, not made with any particular person in mind. Often, it is made to make money, or was altered to increase efficiency, and not with anyone in mind.7

We make objects and objects make our world up. Whether or not this relationship is grounded in our actual desires, relationships, and ideas of beauty is up to us. Dilnot hammers this point in:

All commodities, all products, are subject to an act of choice as to whether they may potentially function as a true gift. This implies that the difference between "gift-objects" and products is not a difference of types of object, but of the conditions of things (which includes the conditions of how we receive and understand things to be). Most, if not all, gift-articles are not gifts in this sense. Equally, most mundane objects contain (or may potentially contain) a moment of the "gift" in the second, better, sense of the term. (61)

Objects are necessary for securing our survival and doing so pleasantly.8 Objects make up our world. We, then, have a role and a responsibility to engage with this world of objects such that it doesn’t debase us and instead reflects our needs and our tastes. We must view objects, as much as we can, as gifts and not as gift-articles: as something connected and responsive to the world we want and need. Otherwise, life will simply be full of meaningless garbage.

We, too, are objects to be augmented and designed, sensible and changeable. Make of yourself a gift, too. Otherwise, one day, you’ll find that you’ve become a gift-article, shuffled about by laws and markets, without a sense of friendship, unrecognizable, and cold like a present bought just for the price tag. To be a gift is to recognize your own needs and the needs of others, and to make this as clear as you can. Accept the gift you are to love the gifts you are given.

Freely and with you in the mind,

Nicholas

I got into graduate school. Therefore, I am better than you. Valid and sound argument.

One day before the national deadline, I was notified by Colorado State University in Fort Collins that I was whisked off the waitlist and accepted into their graduate teaching assistantship. Elation was met quickly by my neurotic desire to learn everything. Tempering said voracity—“You are going to school to learn, Nicholas…not to already know everything…”—I replaced it with the study of Richard Watson’s book Writing Philosophy and a few enlightening conversations with two current grad students and my previous professors. The month of April, in other words, had been a reservicing of my ambitions and a revival of my hopes. (The month of May has been equal parts relaxation and research.) I’ve been tinkering with ways I can best take advantage of this opportunity, especially with the end of a PhD in mind. I’ve settled on some ideas and I am open to having them shift when I actually get my boots on the ground this August.1

Besides the prospect of freezing my loans (Mohela, you are an omen of the end-times, and I wish you nothing but despair and ruin) and completely creaming my boxers because I have access to JStor again, it has been exhilarating to think about how I can combine my current interests with the upcoming seminars on virtue ethics, the value of knowledge, and the role of animals in political philosophy.

I’ve been secondarily concerned with this here blog. It will have to become a much smaller priority, but I’ve wondered if I might tweak how I post such that this place doesn’t become a dusty cavern; instead of cave paintings, the walls would be marked with esoteric concerns about Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and the ineffable…

One way of proceeding is to continue to have scattered, larger posts about what I’m reading, but have more frequent, smaller posts, on this, that, or the other argument or idea I happen to be engaging with. I like this. Why? Many folks have wanted smaller posts anyways. Many folks like my looser, less involved posts. There’s a few cultic followers here that don’t mind a tome here and there about the ontological schemas of early Wittgenstein or the whole religious theory of an out-of-date anthropologist. I don’t suspect this describes most of you. The big’uns won’t go away but will recede.

Subscribe now

Share

Recent Curiosities

I’ve been studying Virtue Epistemology again.2

So, there’s Epistemology. Cuh-lassic! Everyone’s favorite. Epistemologists ask questions like “How the fuck do we know things?” and “Is a justified true belief fucking knowledge?” and “Skeptics: they are bozo, fuck-o morons…right?” In other words, epistemology focuses on (fucking) beliefs and evidential relations between beliefs, and what conditions need to obtain for a belief to count as knowledge. Epistemology is concerned with the properties of beliefs that make them rational and justified (or irrational and unjustified).

Virtue epistemologists, on the other hand, ask questions like “How the fuck do I be good at knowing?” and “What the fuck is it to intellectually flourish?” Virtue epistemologists want to know what makes for a good believer, an “excellent cognizer" as they sometimes awkwardly put it. The field is essentially normative in that it focuses on epistemic evaluation and values, making claims about what is reasonable to believe, how one ought to behave as a believing person (if you value truth). Virtue epistemologists also focus on the properties of agents instead of their beliefs. They explain the successful or defective status of belief by analyzing the properties of the believer. The historical antecedent to this, some may have realized by now, is virtue ethics.3 In Virtue Ethics, one explains and derives the normative status of actions by looking at the character of the actor. Instead of asking (when doing an ethical analysis) whether or not an action conformed to a universal duty or maximized some desirable consequence, one asks whether the action stemmed from a courageous, charitable, or loving person. The locus of evaluation in virtue ethics is the person. Virtue ethicists ask what it’s good for a person to be, how to be excellent, and how we can flourish and establish our wellbeing.

A traditional epistemologist might analyze a successful belief by looking to the fact that the belief is well-supported by evidence, coheres with a broader system of background assumptions, and adheres to Occam’s razor; a virtue epistemologist might rather analyze a successful belief by noting that the believer is attentive, has a good memory, and is tenacious and open-minded. In other words, they explain good beliefs by looking to people’s reliable cognitive faculties and their admirable, responsible character traits. They are concerned with the normative status of cognitive attempts to achieve the truth. (This means, of course, virtue epistemologists are also vice epistemologists asking what makes for a bad attempt to acquire the truth. Typically, the vices picked out are closed-mindedness, intellectual hubris, and the like.)

Credit, Value, and the Sailor in the Storm

To immediately recant: many Virtue Epistemologists like Ernest Sosa and Linda Zagzebski are interested in traditional epistemological questions such as what counts as knowledge, what counts as good justification, and responding to Gettier problems and skeptical attacks. But, many others like Jonathan Kvanvig, James A. Montmarquet, Miranda Fricker, and Lorraine Code do truly advocate leaning into virtue epistemology’s newfound strengths, emphasizing the communal aspects of intellectual wellbeing, educational reform, and combatting epistemic injustice. If you like, it is similar to the stereotypical portrayal of the Analytic-Continental divide. The analytics fiddle with their mathematical puzzles and linguistic riddles and logical toys, blind to the messy world; the Continentals care about what matters, but are befuddled by coherence and are cast into fits of fury when you confront them with logic (non-dialectical logic, that is): each worse off, trading blindspots.4

In general, though, virtue epistemologists analyze knowledge as non-accidental true belief, that was arrived at due to an intellectual virtue. (They differ on what the intellectual virtues are.) Generally, they believe knowledge is a cognitive state for which the person deserves credit. So, knowledge is a credit-worthy state that is produced and/or sustained by properties intrinsic to the person. This means that knowledge is totally incompatible with luck, accident, or chance for the virtue epistemologist. Or, if you prefer a weaker cocktail, true belief must be due more to one’s virtues than it is to random chance.

I keep returning to one of Desiderius Erasmus’ analogies in “The Freedom of the Will,” when studying the above-mentioned Credit Thesis in VE. In this essay, Erasmus is absolutely pooping on Martin Luther. The crux of their debate is about the interaction of God’s grace and foreknowledge with the human will, especially as this relation pertains to salvation. It is simple, yet can get surprisingly technical, but this doesn’t stop the fur from flying. When defending his synergism, the view that we cooperate in some sense with God’s grace and that we contribute something to the equation of our salvation, however small, Erasmus puts forth the analogy of sailor in a storm.

Imagine a sailor alone on a small boat, fit with a mast 15 feet tall and a moldy, wooden wheel. He’s out at sea; it rages. The waves tower and winds howl. He has to recruit every bit of his skill to navigate through the danger. Miraculously (eh!), he makes it ashore. The mermaids swoon; the gay seamen (which is all of them) swoon. Whose fault was that?

To say the sailor had nothing to do with his being saved seems incredibly hard-headed and uncharitable.5 The sailor’s competence at reading the direction and strength of the winds, divining the texture and demands of the water, and his resilience of spirit and body were necessary for getting ashore. But, these factors were not sufficient. In many nearby possible worlds, he dies. He does everything perfectly, but still is damned to the depths. In other words, the world had to work with him to save him. The conditions were not entirely up to him. But most vitally, if he did not try his absolute hardest, then he would’ve died either way. We do not know if we will succeed. But the only way—the only way—we will find out if we will succeed is if, by ground teeth and bleeding palms, we try by all, beside everything, with our entirety.

Likewise, the quest for knowledge may be a lot like Erasmus’ sailor praying for saving grace with all of his efforts and abilities. Perhaps we can manifest complete competence in the tasks of intellectual life—being dogged, charitable, and collaborative; protecting our memories, honing our perceptive capacities—but still miss the mark. The world still has to meet us with the truth. There is another side to the task that may never be up to us. But if we do achieve it, we still—despite the chance involved—deserve credit for reaching our goal.

It is like a cartoon character who waltzes through a dangerous bar to schmooze with a pretty lady. Along the way, he narrowly avoids an arrow whizzing by his head, that by chance slays the scimitar-wielding, burly man about to chop his head off. His drink, spiked with poison, placed on a mat, is pulled to the right on accident: unbeknownst to him, he sips from a different ale. Despite all of the evil hooliganry and tomfoolery, grace has allowed him to slip through the cracks and charm the lady. Dancing through the rest of the night—accidentally knocking out bad guys left and right—he achieves his aim, and deserves it. A bullseye is a bullseye, regardless. But, of course, it requires trying, or in Ernest Sosa’s terms, adroitness.

For Sosa, all performance with an aim can be analyzed on his triple A model: accuracy, adroitness, and aptness. A successful performance is accurate if it achieves its aim; adroit if it manifests competence; and apt if it is accurate because it is adroit. (The aim was achieved because the person was competent.) The act of believing, for Sosa, is a performance with the aim of achieving truth. So, if, when believing, you aim for the truth, manifest intellectual competence (like careful perception), and achieve the truth because of your competence, then you’ve achieved knowledge. Like the sailor beating out the storm, or the cartoon man slipping by his assailants, knowledge ends up being apt belief—truth caught for your skill.

The Baby, The Fish, and What the Fuck is Going on?

Where I am looking next in this field is understanding. Whatever it might be, it is slightly different than knowledge. Understanding is tied to explanations. Inferring to the best explanation requires that some phenomenon Q is better explained by E than any of the alternatives. Finally, since E is the best of all explanations, E is probably the case, and accounts for how or why Q is true. If you grasp some explanation of a phenomenon, you gain a better understanding of that phenomenon. Now, it can get dicey when one tries to elaborate upon the criterions for adequacy of choosing one explanation over the other. The simpler hypothesis is better because less truth-conditions means less chances of being falsified. (But why can’t the more complex hypothesis end up being true?) The more conservative hypothesis—the one that melds better with our background beliefs—is more likely to be true because it leaves our network of knowledge intact. (This network better be built on firm foundations.)

Now, I am interested in the value of understanding. That’s what I want to study next. Why? (Explain yourself.) I don’t fucking understand anything.

When I visited my home in Kansas for a week I realized, through various philosophical discussions, that I don’t get how anything works: dishwashers, colors, birds, the television, car engines, psychological biases, chemical change, the conditions of peace, evolution, the act of hearing. I mean, I don’t understand a single thing. What the hell is going on? What is going on? I don’t know.

Now, I don’t care. So, that explains why I don’t understand most things. But, other things, I do want to understand. For example, what the hell it is to understand something. Also, why it is valuable to understand something.

Going back to Plato’s Meno, there is the problem of why justified true belief is more valuable than mere true belief. If true belief is sufficient for properly guiding action, then if I happen to have a firm conviction about how to get to Walmart (and my conviction is correct), then I will get to Walmart fine. So, why would I need to be justified in believing it? Why would my belief need to be perfectly in accordance with reason? To use Zagzebski’s analogy, if an unreliable coffee maker makes a good cup of coffee and a reliable one does too, what’s the difference between the cups of coffee? One was made by a bad coffee maker, sure, but it’s still good coffee. Isn’t the good coffee the point? Isn’t getting to Walmart okay what is valuable?

What is the value problem for understanding? I don’t know, but I’ll try to figure it out now. Let’s say I know that something is the case, but not how or why it is the case: I have no explanation. I know that if I rock a crying baby and sing a soft lullaby, then the baby will stop crying. But, I do not understand why this is the case. Is it more valuable to know why? It works either way, doesn’t it?

My instinct is that it is more valuable to have knowledge than mere true belief and it is more valuable to understand than to know. But why? I’m not exactly sure. But for knowledge, as Plato’s Socrates’ mentions, it is more stable. If it starts to seem like I’m not really on the way to Walmart: I’m approaching a wide-open field with no buildings, say: then I will not be perturbed if I know it’s the right way. Because…I know, and I know for sure. Another reason is that knowledge and understanding might help me in the future and protect me against the whims of fate. If I understand why the baby is calmed, then I must have some intellectual grasp of their emotions and the types of things they react to pleasantly, and so on. This means that if rocking and singing doesn’t work, I may be able to come up with an alternative. However, if I didn’t understand the baby’s feelings, I might come up empty on ideas.

Another good analogy is cooking. If you know how to cook a fish one way—say, on the grill—but the grill is broken, then you are at a loss. But if you understand what it is to cook a fish well, then you can improvise. Also, I don’t feel like I am good at what I am doing until I personally grasp and understand why I am doing it. It helps to improvise in future situations, and it allows you to break the rules. In chess, it might be a general rule to always castle early in the opening. But, if you know that and blindly follow that rule, it may result in you blundering checkmate in a foolish way. This example doesn’t quite work, because you could say that it’s not a failure in understanding that explains the blunder, but a failure to know some other rule. And it’s rules all the way down…. Rats!

So, alongside my other side projects—namely, Nietzsche bullshit, Hegelian political philosophy, virtue ethics—I have decided to try to understand understanding. As for the long wait for this wacky post, and the uncertainty about the exact future of the blog,

I hope you can understand.

Best,

Nicholas

In the Book of Numbers, chapters 22-24, the Moabite people—foreigners to the Israelites, God’s chosen people—noticed the expanding onslaught of the tribe of Jacob. The king of the Moabites, Balak, got the heebie-jeebies, and declared, “Shit!” He followed that up with: “Go get Balaam and tell that mothafucka to cast a curse on these scary-ass Israelites! He a freak. He’ll know what to do.”

Balaam was a powerful diviner. When the men delivered the message, Balaam told them to wait until nightfall, for the Lord would tell him what to do. Sure enough, night comes and God tells Balaam not to curse the Israelites; they have the Lord’s blessing. Balak, being a frightened king and all, is not easily swayed and sends “more distinguished” liaisons. (I suppose they were…sexier?) Balaam refuses again, but then God, in his mysterious and cryptic inconstancy, typical of the Old Testament, commands Balaam to go with them.

Here is my favorite part. Balaam saddles his donkey and begins his divinely sanctioned mission. And, as if God were drunk and tired when he talked to Balaam last night, gets extremely pissed of. He has a terrifying angel with a sword appear to the donkey three times, which is invisible to Balaam. This causes the ass to veer off the road twice and crush Balaam’s toes. Balaam, understandably if a bit imprudently, beats the donkey’s ass.

Subscribe now

The donkey, then, through the power of the Lord, speaks to Balaam, saying “Bro. Stop. Why are you beating my ass?”

Balaam is unphased; I suppose since he is used to supernatural hijinks. He replies that the ass is making an ass out of him. The donkey, defending itself, retorts, “But you’ve always ridden me. I’ve never done this before, so clearly something is up, no?” Balaam concedes that, indeed, something is up.

Just then, the angel appears and chides Balaam. “You beat the poor donkey, but if he didn’t stop, I would have sliced your damn head off—SCHWING—so you should be grateful to the donkey.” Balam collapses and apologizes for his “sin.” He then goes to the King, and after some ritual sacrifices, relays God’s blessings unto the Israelites many times, which inflames the King of the Moabites even more.

I love this story because I don’t understand it at all. Besides the story of Ruth, we rarely get to see the perspective of the tribes that the Israelites trample with providential permission. This sudden shift to a strange and powerful foreign soothsayer is made all the more odd because God is at his most capricious. First, “Nah, fuck the King, don’t help him.” Right after, “Sike, yeah, no go with them.” Right after that, “Why are you going with them?”

This would be like if you asked me to go out for milkshakes, and I said “That is forbidden.” To which you reply, “O.K.” Then, I follow up with, “Never mind. Let’s go get milkshakes.” To which you reply, “Uh. okay…” Then, we begin our walk, and I become utterly incensed that we are doing so. I mind-control a squirrel to block your path way three times, then, when you are peeved by the squirrel, I reprimand you. “The squirrel was really my messenger. Why didn’t you listen to the squirrel, asshole? Bitch? Fuckwad? Shitface? I would have killed you if you stepped past the squirrel.”

I could tell more religious stories and myths: of Rama and the Golden Deer; Mohammad and the Cave of Hira; Siddhartha Gautama’s many lifetimes of preparations before becoming the Buddha. How are we supposed to go about understanding all of this? How do we define and explain religion?

Theories of Religion

Over the coming months, I’ll be working from Daniel L. Pals book, Eight Theories of Religion. Pals starts with E.B. Tylor and J.G. Frazer. These are the forerunners of the field. They are clear examples of substantive, intellectualist theorists—people who believe you can define religion (usually, as a belief-system) and that religion is an attempt to understand the world. Then, there is the three-headed Cerberus of Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, and Karl Marx. All three are functional reductionists: psychological, sociological, and economic, respectively. They think religion satisfies some need. After that, there is the dissent, starting with the sociologist Max Weber and growing into the holy triad of interpretative theorists: Mircea Eliade, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Clifford Geertz. They tend to reject the search for a clean definition and emphasize the complex systems of meanings religions inhabit and create. I will then go rogue, because I believe a few other theorists deserve individual attention, like Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I may well just continue down the rabbit hole, visiting the likes of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and William James. But let’s start with the start—the very start: what would make for a good definition, and a good theory, of religion?1

Definitions and Explanations

A perfect definition would capture the essential features of every religion and would not describe anything that was not a religion. It would not be over- or under-inclusive. One could use the definition to plop every religion into a blob and be assured that nothing like Baseball or your Tuesday Tango class would get mixed in there. The perfect definition would enumerate the necessary conditions of religion. What, if you take it away, makes something stop being a religion? It would establish the sufficient conditions of religion. What quality, if present, guarantees that religion is also present? In other words, what is the essence of religion, such that we could pick every religion out and get no false positives?2

On most folks first go-around, they answer by pointing out the major examples. Religions are whatever Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism are.

This isn’t bad. But, it’s not informative and it likely will leave out religions that don’t have as many adherents. What ties those examples together? But, let’s step back and look at what types of definitions theorists give.

Some offer substantive definitions. This is the view that religions are defined by ideas and beliefs. One can also relax the attempt to define religion strictly, and describe religion broadly as the sacred activities of a group—those rituals and behaviors that folks hold to have a special, numinous place in their lives. Finally, you can abandon an eye toward specific ideas and rituals altogether and give a functional definition. These theorists define religion as whatever serves a certain psychological, social, or economic need. Then, depending on what you’ve decided you’re looking at—networks of beliefs, sacred activities, or some cultural cogs—you have to explain where it came from and why it exists.

An explanation can be interpretative or functional. An interpretative theorist focuses on the ideas and beliefs, once again. The interpretative theorist thinks people are religious because people actually believe in their tradition to be good, true, and valuable. Religion is not subject to the types of universal, immutable regularities of science, and neither is it best studied as if people were objects. People are complex and engage in practices of meaning-making; accordingly, a subtler, more textured approach is appropriate. Religiosity is the result of people’s authentic fulfillment inside of a tradition’s rituals and creeds.

The functionalist ignores the specific content of religion. Regardless of what people believe or do, underneath the surface—whether anyone is conscious of it or not—religions arise in response to individual or social needs. People need comfort and stability. Society needs peace and control. A robust economy requires folks to get to work, but also to create valuable services and goods outside of work. So, religion makes folks feel good, makes society more consistent, and gets people to volunteer at the soup kitchen.

A theory of religion will offer some definition (or refuse to do so) and will try to explain why religions are the way they are. It will also give an account of the origin of religion. We could just be eating hotdogs and looking at the sky. But instead we think gnomes have homes in the trees and that God watches you pee. Why?

Four types of origins are usually given: prehistoric, intellectual, historic, and functional. Prehistoric theorists will tell a story about how the first people acquired religion. Intellectualist theorists claim that religions start because people perceive some truth about the world. Historic theorists claim that religions arise in specific times and places, due to definitive and discoverable events, like prophets and profit margins. Functional theorists (you guessed it) claim that religions have their origin in individual or group needs and desires.

Something curious about this way of talking—which betrays the pedigree of religious studies—is that it keeps us cautiously and curiously aloof and agnostic as to the the parables and pantheons of religion. Notice that in this game we’ll be playing in the coming weeks, the divine or supernatural explanation and origin of religion is not allowed: that religion is true is not allowed. Why did the Jewish people begin practicing and protecting the tenants and stories of the Torah? Well, because God chose the Israelites as his people and high-fives this dude name Jacob and then there was this guy Samuel, like it was a whole thing. Nope. Not here. Not in this dugout.3

This could be. Perhaps, people are Muslim because…Islam is true…and Mohammad truly received a revelation in that grotto of Hira…and so on. Praise Allah, man... But these theories all come out of the 19th- and 20th centuries, occasionally finding some precursors in the 18th century. In other words, science is high and mighty, brother! There will be no appeals to divine revelation. That’s the easy way out. Even if God is the reason the universe started, that isn’t an explanation of why the apple falls from the tree in that way and not some other way. So, sure, maybe Christ is God, but why do people believe it? Why’d it catch on? And even if one is true, that doesn’t help with defining or explaining other religions. (It also leads to religious version of the one, true Scotsman fallacy. “No, no! That’s not true religion. Christianity is the only real religion.” This is quite unhelpful…)

E.B. Tylor: The Prehistoric Mind

Tylor was born in 1832 to liberal, well-to-do, wealthy Quakers who had amassed their riches through their brass factory in London. At twenty-three, however, his parents died, leaving him to run the family business. Soon afterwards, he began showing signs of Tuberculosis. Womp, womp. On doctor’s orders, he spent some time in Mexico to breathe in warmer air.

While there, however, he took elaborate notes on the practices and beliefs of Mexican tribes, and began publishing his findings. He continued his investigations, essentially developing what we now know as ethnology or anthropology, the scientific exploration of human cultures and peoples. In his most famous book, Primitive Culture (1871), he propounded his theory of religion, diverging from Max Müller, a comparative philologist whose theory was having its heyday.

Nomina to Numina: Slipping into Spirits

Müller began his historical studies to find the base impulses behind all religion, confident that he would confirm his heartfelt love of Christ. By gathering facts about religions, categorizing them, and formulating hypotheses that could be tested and revised, Müller had a vision of a comprehensive, scientific understanding of religion as such. What we need to know about now is his theory of myths, which can be summed up as the linguistic slippage from Nomina to Numina, “names” to “gods.”

Müller’s central thesis was that out of awe and need, humans begin to describe the world. We come up with words to call attention to and discuss phenomenon like sunrises and droughts. In Ancient Greek, the word “Apollo” once simply meant “sun” and “Daphne” meant “dawn.” The words, through a process of grammatical imprecision and personification (helped along by time, imagination, and phenomenon like the masculine and feminine gendering of words), eventually came to refer to deities. So, what started as an awe-inspired description of dawn slipping away as the sun chased it became the myth of Daphne dying in Apollo’s arms.

Progress and Reason…and the Leftovers

E.B. Tylor shared Müller’s instinct that religion could be understood scientifically. However, he rebutted that Müller was overconfident in his etymological reasoning. To gain a scientific understanding of religion, one had to attend to the behaviors, beliefs, and intricate materials of culture: the tools, technologies, rituals, and worldviews. Furthermore, to understand that one had to go even further back and understand the primitive precursors to myth and religion. To do that, he thought, one has to compare and categorize tribal religions, which contain traces of the prehistoric beginnings of religion.

Through his anthropological studies, Tylor became convinced of two principles: Psychic Unity and Cultural Progress. First, human beings—at all times and places—share the same rational faculties, are equal in their mental capacities, and attempt to understand the world as best they can. Secondly, the story of culture from prehistory to modern times is a story of progression and growth. Then, by wading through the tumbling contradictions of history, he developed his Doctrine of Survivals.

It is worth mentioning at this stage that the attainment of a scientific understanding of the world, the development of industry and architecture, and the abandonment of mythic, religious superstitions is synonymous with “doing better.” The attentive reader will have their colonialism alarm bells firing at ear-shattering volume. Swooping in uninvited to indigenous lands, applying theories that detail Europe as unilaterally more advanced, and dated, icky terms like “primitive” and “savage” swamping the pages. I would wager that it’s not quite what it seems, but it’s not exactly great either.

The genuinely imprecise and mistaken bits to me seem to lie in the empirically imprudent and conveniently defined idea of progress. I agree with him that there are aspects of magic, myth, and religion that are drastic failures compared to the findings of science: ritualistic compulsions will not cause the weather to change, and the Bible is not a great guide to how old the earth is. But this constrains intellectual and cultural progress to the narrow task of expanding our certainty and control over our environment; perhaps, progress can be an aesthetic reminder of our real position with respect to the world, and a nudge us toward our inability to control things.4

Finally, though his terms may give the ick, since Tylor earnestly believes in the mental equality of all people, and truly thinks that the earlier stages of culture are solid attempts at understanding the world, I think the veneer of “savage” and “primitive” falsely leads one to think he demeans the subjects of his studies. (It’s not the words we would or should use, of course.) The deeper rebuttal would be to note that painting “primitive” thought as childish can be used as justification for taking over lands and inculcating “better” values of Enlightenment science and industry. He comes off okay, in the end, but later theorists in the series will harshly critique the possibility of a scientific anthropology, and contend that theorists inevitably stumble over their own prejudices before getting close to the real meanings of the mind of another culture.

Anyways, the gist is that everyone reasons the same way, attempts to figure out what is going on in the world, and is getting better at this over time. The Doctrine of Survivals is used to explain why some superstitious vestiges linger. Why do we say, “Bless you!” when most of us do not believe that after you sneeze, you are at a higher risk of being possessed. Why do we hunt for sport when we have long since mastered the art of agriculture? The answer is that as culture progresses aspects of magical and mythic thinking and practice dilute but stick around. Cultures don’t progress at the same rate and neither does every single area within a culture. However, time eventually wears everything down to the truth.

The Growth of Religion

Alright. Stage set. Now, what is Tylor’s definition of religion?

Tylor defines religion as the belief in spirits. He calls this Animism. Animism, Tylor thinks, is the prehistoric key to understanding the birth of religion.

But, why would the belief in spirits arise? What facts would the belief in spirits adequately explain? How could it assist our understanding of the world? Tylor answers that it came out of a perplexity at two things: Death and Dreams.

In death, a once spritely and mobile body becomes sterile and still. People that are alive move, breathe, and think. But, when you die, you become inert. Second, when you drift off at night (and, curiously, become quite similar to a dead guy), you begin to see phantasmic figures, that are much like what you experience in waking life but who are eerily altered. What explains the difference between these alive and dead states? The waking and restful figures? The answer is found with spirits, films over- and in-laying bodies: these souls animate bodies and inhabit dreams.

Tylor also thought that the psychic unity connecting all people, our primary rational faculty, was the association of ideas.5 One of the functions of these associations was to analogize and extend ideas. What holds of ideas, holds of the world, and when one idea leads to the next, so too does one reality lead to another. So, people have souls. Why not the trees? If the trees and people have souls, and these things pass away, then these spirits can have an independence from any bodily vessel. So, too, perhaps these spirits have personalities and varying powers: some good, some bad; some weak, some strong. So, we get the likes of angels, demons, and gods, all who can possess (inhabit) many different bodies. The world is getting packed, folks!

Animistic belief combined with this magical association of ideas explains many cultural artifacts. For example, one can explain the funerary ritual sacrifice of servants when someone of high status dies. This is because the servants were thought to exit the body of the king and the servants, and the poor sods could continue pampering the man in death, slinging ghastly grapes and uncorking ghoulish wines. Fasting would bring you closer to death, and therefore to the spirit realm. The belief in an afterlife that crops up in so many religions begins to look almost obvious. And so on.

How, then, did religion develop out of magical and spiritual thinking? It happened through a simple process of abstraction.

Trees have spirits. So, too, must the whole forest. This forest spirit, then, becomes a distinct entity independent of the forest. It can move freely. This spirit gains personal traits and interacts with other Biome Spirits. These biome spirits become gods, like Poseidon and Zeus. Then, the final step of abstraction. There must be a god of the gods, a spirit who animates the whole universe. Ergo, the development of magic to myth to monotheistic religion.

Tylor collected all of his data and crunched it into a hypothesis of the cultural progression of humanity. We began in the primitive age of hunting and animism, then moved to the barbaric age of agriculture and pantheons. We shed the many gods for One God. Finally, we shed him too, favoring the understanding of science. Now, since the man was studying cultures closely, he obviously could not lean too heavily on this narrative. He admits that not all cultures are marching along at the same rate. After all, it would be confusing why there are still tribal magicians and people who believe in God. The astrophysicist lives across from the conspiracy theorist who lives across from the theologian, and so on.

J.G. Frazer and Scientific Sympathies

J.G. Frazer, born on New Year’s Day of 1854 in Glasgow, was the spitting image of an ivory tower scholar: a Cambridge bookworm who spent decades, and multiple editions, perfecting his tome, The Golden Bough; one coddling wife and no kids; no interest in the field—unending interest in the text. When one pictures an anthropologist nowadays, one sees a rainbow mohawk, tattoos, and photos of their year-long stints in Papua New Guinea. While Tylor fit the bill for the adventurous and worldly type of anthropologist, Frazer is his bookish counterpart, and built upon Tylor’s framework.

First, Frazer wants to remind us something basic about life, especially during prehistoric times. It is easy to forget, or to brush it off as trite. People back then, primarily, are trying to survive. Sometimes, you finish up your survival chores or you cannot complete them, whether due to the weather, a big beastly, or a sickness. This, Frazer says, is when people think. We think once we aren’t doing what we have to do—once we’re not in survival mode. What do you do once survival mode ends, but you still need to worry about surviving? Or, when surviving isn’t quite working out? (No bunnies to hunt, no rain to grow crops…) You try to understand nature better, in order to gain mastery over it. To survive, we attempt to gain knowledge and control.

Sympathetic Magic: The Mental Mirror

Frazer elaborates on the idea of magical thinking, calling it Sympathetic Magic. In magical thinking, nature is sympathetic. The mind mirrors the world: what you can connect in the mind can be connected in nature. This influence of the world is achieved through two means: similarity and contagion. One can affect the world when two things are similar—like by like—or when two things are, or were once, connected to one another—part by part.

Frazer gives two good examples of this. Russian peasants would huddle around buckets with mesh strainers placed on top; they would then pour water over it. This was an attempt at sympathetic, magical causation by similarity; water seeping through a mesh and pattering into a bucket mirrors rain falling from the sky. Second, think of the voodoo priest who pricks a doll made up of a target’s finger nails or hair. Since the doll has parts of the target’s body attached to it, affecting the doll will affect the target. Importantly, in magic, after the ritual, the intended effect must occur: magic, like scientific laws of cause and effect, are immutable, universal, and impersonal. Whether through similarity or contagion, you can nudge nature along. But, there is a small problem...

Magic…uhh…doesn’t work.

This, Frazer says, is why religion arises. No matter how much the magician explains the failures away, it eventually becomes clear that pouring water through a mesh or pricking a doll does not actually influence nature. It certainly does not guarantee an effect, at least. This is where Frazer believes that religion is a leap forward in the progress toward the critical associations of ideas. Ritualistic currency transforms from certainty and control to uncertainty and a lack of control. The impersonal gives way to the personal. Magical power is replaced with pleading and prayer to a pantheon of personages, many at odds with each other—sometimes indifferent to humans, sometimes caring. This describes the world more accurately. We ask for things and try to bend the world this way or that, but oftentimes, nothing happens. We get lucky; we get unlucky. What pantheistic religion gets right is that trying to know the world, or get what we want out of nature, is like dealing with a bunch of brawling meatheads in the sky.

But, magic did not die out entirely, it melded with religion. People used magic to try to influence gods. Frazer reasoned that these prehistoric practices and thought patterns are the origins and explanation of religions. While we may not send scapegoats into the wilderness or burn virgins to fire up the loins of Zeus anymore, we have abstracted even further. The same reasoning capacity that connects us to the prehistoric people has become more clarified. We no longer know the world and try to control it using sympathetic magic, nor do we plead helplessly to a god, but we scientifically investigate the world and know that it operates under the laws of cause and effect.

Science, Origins, and Individualism

For Tylor and Frazer, religion is best studied scientifically, without any appeals to the supernatural or divine revelation. Primitive Culture and The Golden Bough are tremendously, jam-packed tomes. This is because they believed that their new anthropological method—collecting the facts of behavior from every culture they could, then comparing and contrasting, and forming hypotheses—was the best route to explaining religion. Religion ultimately stemmed from a prehistoric, savage philosopher. (Please start calling me the savage philosopher. Thank you.) This person tried to understand the world, to get ahold of nature as best they could. Eventually, their animistic and magical ideas caught on with others. So, magical thinking and animistic rituals transformed into mythic thinking, which became religion. (With the Doctrine of Survivals, there’s some mixing and matching.) But, eventually, we grew out of it through more careful observation of the world, and became more decent and civilized.

Regardless of what you think, the story that individual people developed magic, myth, and religion naturally as a way to cope with their circumstances: to control and understand a world that was ready to kill and starve them: is wildly influential. Many people still see religion in the light of the doctrine of survivals, as a vestigial, childish belief in magic and miracles, superseded by the methods of science. Religion being nothing more than a diluted remnant of more savage myths past.

There’s a great benefit to knowing theorists like this. I’ve talked to many people about religion and everyone has their “pet theory.” It is unlikely that the ideas you have about religion are purely original. When you ask someone, “What is religion?” and they answer that it’s a societal mechanism made to control people, with or without their knowledge, they are inheriting some form of functional reductionism. Some person spent a lifetime perfecting the thing you sorta think. Which is not bad news! It means that if you do truly agree, for example, that religion can be defined and that it grew out of our earlier, mythic understandings of the world, then there’s some guys who worked that theory out as far as it could be worked out.

Final Thoughts

I don’t think religion is simply an attempt to understand the world. I also don’t think—even if religion were just that—that understanding the world only means describing the physical facts correctly. Religious figures have spent millennia exploring the traps and travails of ethical development, for example. Myriads of religious rituals and practices are breathtakingly beautiful: images of Muslims surrounding the Kaaba on their knees during hajj come to mind. I mean, we don’t walk through a museum going, “Jesus. None of this even comes close to the accuracy achieved by the theories of physics.”

I also am not sure that Tylor and Frazer’s scientific approach is the best; at the very least, it could be done better. Pals mentions—and I am not an anthropologist, so I’m trusting here—that Tylor and Frazer cling to their grand outline of cultural progress to the detriment of the data. For example, Frazer discusses Scandinavian and Celtic fire festivals. But, despite the fact that fire was involved, there were no other similarities. They occur in different seasons, mean different things, and the Celts notably throw human effigies into the fire, whereas the Nords don’t. But, since Frazer’s architectonic picture of things required it, he simply presumed that the Scandinavian’s threw effigies in as well, but we just don’t have any record of it. I’m smelling an unfalsifiable theory, Mr. Frazer.

Another dubious part is that everything about the prehistoric philosophers and ways of life is just that: pre-historic. That is to say, they tell these vivid stories of the origins of magical thinking and animism according to the association of ideas, but there is no data by definition about prehistoric practices. There is no extant historical record. In other words, the lynchpin of their theory about the beginning of cultural progress has no scientific basis. It can’t be proven or disproven. It could be true, but we cannot know.

Finally, a charge oft lobbied at our theorists is that they have an overly individualistic conception of religion. Religion is inherently social. It isn’t the result of a bunch of dudes separately assenting to a description of the world, but about community and learning to live well together. This seems right to me.

I am not ready to abandon broadly scientific approaches or quests toward definitions and origins. But, Tylor and Frazer, for their broad and overwhelming curiosity and creativity, do seem to overshoot, generalizing more than they ought’ve. Besides the intellectual aspects of religion and myth, where is the attentiveness to the aesthetic, the ethical, and the psychological? And, worst of all, none of this seems to have equipped me with the power to crack the code of Balaam and his poh’, poh’ donkey.

Thanks for reading—keep your spirits toasty.

Nicholas

P.P.S. (Poem Post-Script)

This one is by Mary Oliver. It’s called, “Poem.” This seems about right. Taken from Mary Oliver’s collection Devotions, p. 351-352.

The spirit
     likes to dress up like this:
           ten fingers,
                 ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
     at night
         in the black branches,
              in the morning

in the blue branches 
      of the world.
            It could float, of course,
                 but would rather

plumb rough matter.
     Airy and shapeless thing,
           it needs
                 the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
      the oceanic fluids;
            it needs the body's world,
                 instinct

and imagination
    and the dark hug of time,
         sweetness
              and tangibility,

.   .   .

to be understood,
     to be more than pure light
          that burns
                  where no one is—

so it enters us—
     in the morning
          shines from brute comfort
               like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
      lights up the deep and wondrous
           drownings of the body
                 like a star.

P.S.

My past two posts have been a curious experiment. I write from memory. I don’t keep meticulous citations, and I condense many pages of material into the main ideas. My citation for this whole post could just be Eight Theories of Religion by Daniel L. Pals (3-48). I’m not sure if it has been noticeable, but if it has been, then there’s the explanation. I believe it’s going to help me better understand and remember everything I write about. I like keeping the knowledge knocking around, livelier for longer than it might have been.

What about God? If you see God, do you know there is a God? Perhaps even more important, if you experience God, what should I then believe? If you see a cardinal—bright red body, face like a black dart, donning a wicked little mohawk—perched on the branch outside your window, and tell me, “Look, there’s a cardinal outside!” Perhaps, I will turn, and the cardinal will have flown away. I would believe you, though. But, say you see God, turn, and tell me: what then should I believe?

Subscribe now

Share

This will be a short journey in three parts that ends up leaving us with more questions than it answers, as most stories do. I’ll be using Cheryl K. Chen’s article “Religious Experience and the Philosophy of Perception,” as inspiration and as a guide. It’s a story about the epistemology of ordinary perception: whether we know what we see, how it is that that’s the case, and what exactly it is that we know. It’s a winding path that will take us through Skepticism, Dogmatism, and out into Disjunctivism. We’ll see if that journey: from doubt, to dogged certainty, to the subtle obviousness of two choices: can then teach us about extraordinary perception. We’ll see whether or not simply sight of a cardinal on a branch might teach us about the experience of God.

Why Not?

William James, in his 1923 book The Varieties of Religious Experience, wondered why one should not simply take people’s experiences of God at face value. He interviewed people who had these experiences, and reported that they all shared the qualities of ineffability, transience, and passivity. The experiences were difficult to articulate, brief, and purely receptive as if they were in the throes of something totally other than themselves. They all thought theses experience were noetic, that is, that these experiences revealed truth.

So, in the ordinary case—good lighting, eyes open, not hopped up on Molly—I see a vase of flowers on a table and this gives me reason to believe there is a vase of flowers in my immediate environment. I know that there is a vase of flowers on the basis of my seeing it. The mere fact of seeing is good justification and evidence for my beliefs about the external world. Likewise, experiences of God have the same exact qualities. Why wouldn’t they?

Skepticism: Demons, Dreaming, and Brains in Vats

Hold up. Not so fast. What about DEMONS?!?!?!?!?!

Hold your horses, Skeptic. We’ll get to the demons in a second. Let’s set some things up.

Before we can assume a supernatural and extraordinary explanation, we need to rule out the natural and ordinary ones.1 In our everyday lives, we reason, explain, and seek the cause of things by considering previous correlations between events. I hear a chirping, a fluttering of wings and color, and an environment of trees and open air, therefore, I reason, there is a bird about. I infer that there’s a bird: I’d explain the sights and sounds as a bird. Why? Because every time I’ve seen the conjunction of chirping and a small body fluttering in the sky, it’s been a bird. There is a tight regularity and constant correlation between those sensory impressions and the cause “bird.” Also important: I’ve never witnessed those phenomenon—pitched sing-song and a colorful flapping of wings—without a bird having been the cause.

Chen’s example is a wet sidewalk, which also happens to be my nickname in middle school. If I walked outside, and saw the sidewalk was soaked, I’d infer that it had rained. Why? Because whenever the sidewalk is wet, it’s been because of the weather, not because someone busted open all of the fire hydrants or because a Tyrannosaurus Rex licked the sidewalk.

The clinker: it’s always going to be more likely that an experience that could’ve had a supernatural origin has an ordinary causal explanation. If you see fairies do a jig in a forest, slap their booty cheeks, then soar into a grassy knoll, which is the more likely explanation (and how would most people explain it): that you actually saw that happen, or that you’re crazy.

“But Hold the Phone!” Sayeth the Jamesian. “This logic applies to ordinary events too! Not just miracles and fairies twerking in the fields! Aha! You’ve doomed ordinary experiential epistemology!? Reductio ad absurdum, good sir!”

To which the Skeptic then replies: “Yes.”

When we see anything, like a vase of flowers, we infer that the vase of flowers is actually there, because in every past instance the visual impression of a vase of flowers has been correlated to an actual vase of flowers in my immediate environment. Every time I’ve seen some roses and daffodils in a bouquet on my counter, my visual impression has been caused by real roses and daffodils.

“Mm. No.” Quoth the Skeptic. “That is begging the question.” Whether our visual impressions are caused by the external world is the problem, and you can’t just assume that visual impressions are caused by objects outside of us. You can’t appeal to the “fact” that every time you’ve seen something, it’s been correlated to the real thing, because that’s the question at hand. It would be like responding to the question, “How do you know that the guy at the coffee shop you go to all the time is really Guy Fieri?” with “Because every time I ask if he’s Guy Fieri, he says ‘Yes. I am Guy Fieri.’” How can we justify our belief that the experience of an object was caused by the object? What in our visual impressions tells us that the object is actually in front of us?

We could be brains in vats being fed experiences via electrical stimulation. We could be in a vivid dream. We could be tricked by a demon, being fed a steady stream of hallucinations our whole lives. We need to rule out the many bad options that could be happening before we can say that we know anything about the external world.

The foothold of the skeptic is that we make mistakes and bad inferences. Most of us have had a dream that’s realistic enough that when we wake up, we’re disoriented. We’ve all assumed that we picked up our keys when really we didn’t, or thought that we had the right answer when we really we were completely wrong. If the world was perfect, we would know things and know that we know them. In the perfect world, there wouldn’t be any need for epistemology, and skepticism wouldn’t make much sense. But this ain’t that world.

Dogmatism: A Dogged “Yes”

The Dogmatist has a rejoinder for the Skeptic: You are dumb and wrong.

The burden of proof is in the wrong hands. When I see something, I have direct and immediate access to the object. When there is a cookie before me, I know there is a cookie before me.2 Unless there is a positive reason to disbelieve that this is the case, then I am warranted in believing it. In other words, visual perception gives me a defeasible reason for believing that what I see is actually there.

There are two types of defeaters: undercutting and rebutting. An undercutting defeater gives us reason to think that our perception is unreliable and untrustworthy. A rebutting defeater gives us reason to think that any beliefs we would form based on the perception is false. Chen’s examples are apt, so I’ll share them wholesale.

First, her example of an undercutting defeater: imagine you are in a room and on a desk you see a sheet of pink paper. You infer, “There’s a pink paper.” But, when you look up, you notice that there are many pink, overhead lights. The presence of pink lighting is an undercutting defeat of the belief, “There’s a bunch of pink paper in here,” because the papers could be any color, the pink light gives us reason to not trust our visual sense data.

Second, her example of a rebutting defeater: Imagine you know that your grandpa has been dead for 20 years, but then you see him standing in the hallway. Normally, when you see a person in your hallway, you think, “Holy spooky fuck that’s a ghost!” Nah, but you do go, “Ah. A person.” But, the knowledge that your grandpa is dead is a rebutting defeater of the belief “My grandpa is standing in front of me,” because you know that can’t be true. Something else you know overrules the belief that you would have formed from your visual experience.

But how does Dogmatism fare when tasked with upholding the Jamesian task? Can it justify beliefs based on religious perception? Well, it doesn’t seem likely.

If I experience God, then unless there is a positive reason to disbelieve my experience, then I can simply take it seriously. I will then have good evidence and knowledge of God. The perception alone is straightforward justification of my belief. So, first I rule out the undercutting defeaters: I’m not hallucinating, tired, extremely stressed or extremely blissful, on drugs, grieving, horned up to high hell, or whatever else might deficiently alter my perception.3 Then, I need to deal with the rebutting defeaters. What if I have a positive reason to think that belief in God is false? What if the existence of evil disproves God? What if the idea of God is incompatible with the findings of science? What if the very notion of a divine, maximally perfect, immutable, and good being is incoherent? What if what usually goes by the name “God” is better explained by historical or psychological forces? If we respond with a long list of “No”s to those, and I’m sane and sober, then I can believe in God.

The problem for the Dogmatist—if they want to apply their theory to safeguard religious belief based on perception—is that is a lot of defeaters to get through: quite a few plausible combatants. Their theory works far better for the ordinary cases than the extraordinary ones. If I see a chair and I’m not on drugs or observing a contemporary art-piece or in Fake Chair Land, then it is hard to imagine the presence of plausible defeaters. Every instance of an undercutting or rebutting defeater seems silly: “Actually, it’s a projection of a chair!” “Actually, the idea of a chair is incoherent!” But for belief in God, it seems more testy than an ordinary case. The likelihood that an ordinary experience of a chair will be proven to be a hallucination, or that a belief about the chair will be proven false through argument, seems quite low. The likelihood that an experience of God might be proven to be illusory or false seems higher.

So, what about a theory that doesn’t rely on dogfighting our way through waves of potential defeaters, spiraling through so many fiery hoops?

Disjunctivism: Either “Yes” Or “No”

The Disjunctivist claims that everyone so far has the wrong conception of what is happening when we look at something. A sentence I can say because of philosophy.

The skeptic would have us think that in ordinary instances of perception, we are like someone sitting in a windowless room lined with TVs. We have no direct access to the world outside of the room except through the televisions. The televisions are like our sensory organs, feeding us sense data. But, how are we to know that what is showing up on the TV has anything to do with what is outside? To put it differently, how do we know that what is glaring out from the screens is truly correlated, caused, or conditioned by anything outside of the room? How do we even know there is an “outside” of our room? How are we to tell that what is showing up on the Television is like what is outside? As in, even if it is correlated to the outside world4, how can we tell that the experience of a vase of flowers is anything at all like what it is in itself, viewed objectively?

The disjunctivist reframes the situation. There are two, and only two, situations when we perceive. There is the good case and there is the bad case. In the good case, the object is actually before my eyes. The object is a constitutive part of my perception. It is related to my experience in the right way, namely…it’s really there. In other words, I can only experience, say, my phone on my lap if my phone is actually on my lap. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be seeing my phone. This is a really simple and obvious intuition that answers questions like this. “Why am I seeing an orange, and not a banana, or a giraffe, or my grandpa’s ghost?” Well, because an orange is the object that is related to your sense organs right now, and not any of the other stuff. The bad case is just the case where the object isn’t there, so it just appears as if it is.

So, what is one thing that has shifted from the Skeptic to the Disjunctivist? The Disjunctivist thinks that there is no inference in perception. Perception is not an inferential capacity.5 When I see something and I’m in the good case, that entails that I know that it is there. That’s all it takes. The skeptic can squeeze in and cause problems when perception is an inference from our mental states, our sense datum, to the world out there. The gap causes problems…or…is regularly correlated to problems? Anyways. That’s not what’s going on, so says the Disjunctivist. The world out there needs to already be properly related to us, at all, for us to see anything. No squeeze!

But there is another fundamental disagreement between the disjunctivist and the skeptic. The disagreement centers around whether or not the good and bad case are distinguishable. Chen thinks that in most cases, the good and bad case can be told apart. When the object is really before my eyes, the situation is far different than the one where I am hallucinating, dreaming, or otherwise deceived. But, it is theoretically possible that the good and bad case could be the exact same. The world where there is a glass of milk on the table is potentially indistinguishable from the one where it’s an elaborately constructed art piece, or an especially clear and distinct dream. There is no perceptible difference. The disjunctivist, even so, distinguishes between the good and bad case externally. The skeptic is trapped in his mind. But the disjunctivist gets to step outside of their mind and just say, “Well. The good case is the one where it’s actually there. The bad case is the one where it isn’t. So, if the glass of milk is actually an exquisitely crafted sculpture, then that’s what it is. Perhaps the person experiencing it can’t tell. But those are different situations.”

Alright. How does this fare against the task of justifying beliefs in God based on perceptions of God?

Eh.

Enchanted Worlds and Porous Selves

How does it transfer over? If we are in the good case, then when we experience God, that is because we are genuinely perceptively related to God. This entails that we know that God is real. Or, we are in the bad case, in which case God is not a part of our perception, and we don’t know that he is real. As Chen puts it, “none of this establishes that anyone is ever in the good case,” just that if they are, then their belief in God would be justified “just by virtue of having the experience” (9).

This seems to reduce to the uninteresting and unpersuasive conception that if we experience God, then we experience God, and if we don’t experience God, then we don’t experience God. The question of God’s existence becomes the question of whether we are in the world where we experience God. This begins to shift into the most fraught question, whether the world could become enchanted again.

Charles Taylor proposes the idea that the world used to be enchanted, that our selves used to be porous. We are not neutral agents staring out at the world, who then make inferences and decisions about the sense data that is flooding into us—singular sailors soaring across a vast sea of sights. We are struck through with the world, and the world brims with spirituality and meaning. Our bodies and minds, our perceptions, are laced with the outside, each interpenetrating each other. There is no clean line between the world and our perceiving it. We share in the world; our mind is not merely causally related to the world. The disjunctivist rejects the TV-wall picture of epistemology, the view where our self is buffered from the world, our perceptual experience locked away in our heads, coldly correlated but otherwise alienated from the outside. The disjunctivist is suggesting that we go back to this porous, enchanted worldview.

Under the skeptic’s picture, and within the cool and internalized worldview, religious perception will never seem plausible. Under the disjunctivist’s epistemology, alongside the enchanted worldview, one would not even need for the belief to be plausible, nor for it to be justified, because it would be normal and pervasive. God would be indubitable. We are either vacuously and perpetually immersed or there is not a single trace of the divine.

In other words, it is not from the avenue of perception alone that we will be able to decide what an experience of God means. It depends upon what world we live in and what context surrounds that perception. In the enchanted world, God suffuses all of this world, so he becomes tautological, simple, and indefeasible. God becomes as obvious as the sky, as the idea that if you see something, it is there. But we don’t live in that world anymore. The existential problem is whether we can reach back into that network of beliefs and sights, to not only take it seriously but live in that world past. Hell, there is the question of whether we can live in this world. Caught.

The Bad Case of Disenchantment

At the start, I asked a question. If someone else sees something, then, usually, I believe them. But what if they see something wild as hell? A ghost, a ghoul, a nun on a unicycle? What are the conditions under which I should believe what they say? Should I always keep in mind the risk that testimony could be deceptive or false? Or be less on skeptical, but keep an eye out for defeaters? Or, should I simply hope that I’m in the good case and hope that I can tell the difference? At the very least, there is a difference between me seeing something and you seeing something. Maybe if I see God, that’s better evidence than Joe-Schmo seeing God. Joe-Schmo’s sights and beliefs—by virtue of his being not-me, or not a part of my accepted entourage—seem more defeasible. Is he saying this for attention? For money? Cuz’ he’s a kook? Can I figure out if the content of his testimony is true independently? Just like the problem earlier with belief in God, these could all plausibly be the case.

The other qualm I have is the slippage in Chen’s article between perceptual experience and experience as such. Now, it may be the case that every type of experience, by the very fact that it’s an experience, shares the same epistemological quality. Sight is the same as sound is the same as taste (epistemologically). No sense datum from any of of our sense organs is privileged over another. So, what holds for visual perception carries over to any other perception, including the more diffuse and strange experience of God. If smelling a rose gives us evidence of a rose, so too does seeing it, so too feeling it, and so on.

But I’m not sure that sensory experience is the only experience. What is it to experience certitude or understanding? When you learn something, comprehend it through and through, and have the feeling “Aha! Finally, I get it.” Is that experience visual? Auditory? Somatic? Well, it might tangentially involve or cause something somatic, for example, like tingles or goosebumps, but the primary experience seems to be in yourself. Nonetheless, my point is simple: an experience of God (which is probably not sensory, primarily…probably) may be thoroughly disanalogous to ordinary cases of experience, and require different tools entirely.

One final note of doubt. Why call it God? It seems to be a quirk of our historical position that we use the word “God” when braced with grandeur, sublimity, and beauty. People throughout history have had strange and wondrous experiences, but why imbue these awe-inspiring experiences with the tremendous blight and baggage of the word “God”? I am not making the claim that God reduces to something in history—a cultural, psychological, or linguistic contingency—but rather that there is a deeply contestable word, “God,” that gets bandied around, and we should be very careful when choosing when to use it. The world may be simply strange and sublime.

I only ever see through to more questions, that much is sure.

Disenchanted, and probably in the bad case,

Nicholas

P.P.S (Poem Post-Script)

transport

did they matter?those
thousands in this graveyard?

i find myself starved for
an answer.

all of it looks like
a cancer:

monuments, ephemera,
roads, and getting bodies
here 
and then

there:

when you know every 
one will be

under ground, or 

ash, or something
even less,

basting in the sun-

worked

-or blistered in the cold-

worked.

no one is great,
even less of us are good,

and most of us don't

let go of us for enough
time for some

smarter thing to eek out
from our fingers and toes,

and

we don't often enough smile.

yes, then, i guess I'll
hope they danced
and that they did not look out

at the world

the way I do.

This is a dumb question. It produces dumb answers. Ask it and you will get the backwater inheritance of a dimly lit, shoddily wrought “to-each-his-own”-ism: “Like, dude, the meaning of life is to, like...live it, man. You gotta make your own meaning, man.” Or, you will get the shanty hut of dingy, sneaking-a-drag-of-vape-during-class-into-the-hoodie nihilism: “Nothing matters, bro. *drags a fattie from a dab pen* Nothing at all, bro.” Finally, you might get the innocent bystander response.

This person holds onto what matters where and when they can, in between work and grocery runs, up from the bleeding togetherness of tired loneliness. When they can eek out the time, they hang out with buddies, make love1, spend time with their kids, and take moments to practice their favorite hobby, like woodworking or knitting; they soak in the simple and deeply needed satisfactions of human life. This person might respond: “Family, friends, love, and hard-work.”

These responses might lead to some sneering from the “make your own meaning” and “there is no meaning” kids above, followed quickly by a jab, “Oh, the meaning of life can be found down the decor aisle of Hobby Lobby?” But, they’re right. These folk’s answers are insufficient. But that’s because they’re not responding to the right question.

Galen Strawson and I share the same response to the dumb question. He calls it the “mind-blanking” question in his article “Just Live.”2 No matter how long he sits with it, no gears start turning. No movement of thought. Nothing. Same here.

Share

What is Meaning In Life?

Let’s replace the preposition. Asking the meaning of life is like asking for the meaning of the sky above your head. What are you talking about? It’s just there.

But, surely there is meaning in our lives. What of that? Galen asks if analyzing this more active question can help us with another vital worry, Socrates’ Question: “How Should One Live?”

Could be.

But first, what is one of the biggest dogs in the ring regarding these ponderous, trip-into-a-well-while-philosophizing questions? The big contender? The real schmooze cabooze, the slam-dunk, the stinkiest cheese in the drawer?

Galen claims that the answer that has the biggest sway in this arena, the hot money, is (what I will call) The Exclusivist Narrativist account of Meaning. This is the idea that the only way or the best way to find and create meaning in life is by conceiving of one’s life as having the structure of a story or stories: whether that narrative be a grand one ending in your death, or a bit by bit, day by day, comic strip. The strongest version of the claim is easiest to dismantle, which is that we necessarily narrativize, and that this is the only way achieve meaning.

This stronger claim is easily swept away by the existence of people who…don’t narrativize their lives, like Strawson, me, and—Galen notes—Jean-Paul Sartre and Iris Murdoch, who view Narrativity as a form of self-delusion and bad faith. One tries to cram one’s rich life into the cozy confines of a story, with rising and falling action, climaxes and conclusions. One creates large imaginaries of one’s self, the characters in one’s life, and romantically conforms to it: one creates a mold, then makes oneself fit into it.

The claim that requires a bit more poking and prodding at is whether Narrativity is the best avenue to a life full of meaning.

There’s different types of people. Some folks simply do not conceive of their lives narratively. It’s not their style. Some people have boring lives. Some people have miserable lives. Should we claim that this entire set of people would have their lives bettered by viewing their life as a story? Would their lives be more meaningful?

This is a good time to introduce another distinction Galen makes between Meaning and Good Meaning. A story might be interesting and full of meaning, but rather miserable, heinous, or tragic.

Alright. We want Good Meaning in life. Well, let’s return to the Meaning part of this phrase, and see if we can’t make some progress on it.

What is Meaning?

Galen Strawson writes that meaning is not the same thing as value, nor does it mean point or purpose. This seems reasonable. We value clean, safe, and well-paved roads, but roads in good condition aren’t exactly full of meaning. If someone is stuck in the throes of a Kafka-esque, bureaucratic, nightmarish, slavish job, there may be not point or purpose to what they are doing, but we can find or create lots of meanings to their plight. So, Galen suggests an unexpected answer to the question of the meaning of meaning: Interest.

Interest is surely necessary for Meaning (if Meaning, then Interest) and I think it’s also sufficient (if Interest, then Meaning). It doesn’t follow that they’re the same thing, but I’m going to assume they are, for now (Meaning = Interest) and see what happens.

So, if something is meaningful, it’s interesting. If something is interesting, it is meaningful. There could be cases where you cannot substitute the one for the other. But, for the most part, they are are a natural pair. What happens when he plugs away with this assumption?

First, he sees how this interacts with the Exclusivist Narrative Account of Meaning. He asks, “What’s the relation between Narrativity and Interest?” He concludes that there is no necessary connection. One can live a life with no narrative, and it can be beautiful, interesting, and full of pleasurable and good experiences. I imagine many people live like this and have lived like this.

Is Narrativity necessary or sufficient for interest? No again. One can lead an interesting life—both from your perspective and other’s—without narrativizing it (Not Necessary). With the example of Sisyphus the Bored (as opposed to Sisyphus the Happy, pace Camus), Galen shows that Narrativity is insufficient for interest, it’s not enough. If Sisyphus, for eternity, was condemned to push a boulder up a hill, conceiving of his eternal life as a story does not automatically make it interesting to himself or to others. Indeed, it might make it much worse. As Strawson notes, “Sisyphus the Bored might be far better off without constant vivid narrative awareness of the terrible sameness of his life.”

What is Good Meaning in life?

Hey, sub-heading, check this out. What is bad meaning in life? Fuck you, subheading. I can talk about whatever I want.

Narratives and interesting things are not necessarily good. A narrative about our own life can be made more interesting the more we deceive ourselves, the more we decorate, exaggerate, omit, and alter the facts of ourselves and our lives. Events can be horrifically interesting. Think of reading an article about some massacre or genocide. Galen notes that the “Interest of something terrible can reside wholly in its terribleness. It can be all bad.” Someone who is depressed might have built up an intricate narrative about their misery, but nothing is the better for it. Job, the tortured plaything of the devil in the Bible, had an interesting life full of meaning…that was horrible. Stalin led a life rich with participation in some of history’s most studied and interesting events.3 And so on.

Bad meaning.

This is not to say that there are not things that are good for all of us: climbing up Maslow’s Pyramid, going for a stroll, and taking your vitamins will make your life better. One thing that perplexes me about the staunchest of relativists, the fiercest of the “There is no One path to flourishing” folks, is that their logic only starts to make some sense at the top of the mountain. We eat, drink, shit, piss, sleep, work, exercise, connect, learn, and grow. Once we fulfill these things, we start to reach a place where we can orient our lives toward some purpose: a vocation, a dream, a community, a person. But it does not seem obvious that what is good in these things is “relative,” except in the drowsily pedantic sense that we have different passions and directions. So, this woman wants to be physician, that woman wants to be a dancer. This doesn’t mean “meaning” in life is relative, just that the good takes many forms.

Strawson asks, “What is the general form of a human life high in Good Meaning?” He follows Susan Wolf. She claims that it “arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness, and one is able to do something about it or with it.” Good Meaning arises when a pursuit that is objectively valuable coalesces with subjective interest, and you get after it, man! Pursuits like those of friendship, of romantic and sexual love, of pleasure, and of knowledge.

Narrativity—thinking of one’s life as a story, living as if it is—is not necessary for Good Meaning in life. It is not necessary to answering the question of how we should live. Galen Strawson comes upon something of a free and original thesis near the end of his article. (Like most polemical pieces, too little time is given to the creative act. Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Nietzsche…Blah, bloo, blah.) Regardless, here he goes:

Narrativity is, for some, a particularly rich source of pleasure: not to be wasted. It doesn’t follow that it’s necessary to a good life. Those who don’t enjoy it, or who just don’t do it, aren’t therefore ‘deficient and empty’. They simply have other interests and pleasures. All experience of Meaning, meaning in life, lies in the quality of experience in the present moment. Certainly you can enjoy thinking narratively about yourself; that’s one thing you can do in the living moment of experience. But there are many other things.

He skirts around the particular poignant and pithy take on the question of Good Meaning in life for most of his article, which is that it is dependent upon the “quality of experience in the present moment.” To synthesize some of Strawson’s ideas, and to add my own, I will say this. The innocent bystander from earlier is probably right. It is the pursuit of love, of friendship, of pleasure, and of knowledge that is worthwhile, that is the source of good meaning in our lives. These pursuits accompanied by tender, humorous, and earnest appreciation, attentiveness, and gratitude create the quality of moments. To take Galen one step further, one can consider the quality of moments as they add up to your whole person and life, then work toward a holistic excellence.

This is not to say that these pursuits can’t go awry. For example, one can pursue one at the expense of all of the others, or tragedy ensues making what would have been a healthy desire a disastrous one. We live in a messy world. The whole host of ethical, aesthetic, and political concerns that go into balancing the pursuits of good meaning are fraught and difficult. It requires more thought. I will read more Susan Wolf, revisit Aristotle, Hegel, Arendt, and Nietzsche, and discover other great ethicists and political philosophers with hawk’s eyes for the intricacies of human struggles for value. Then, chat about it here with you sometime.

The Good Life, Unnarrated

I’ve never conceived of my life as a story nor of it as being meaningful. It’s an odd thing to ask of life. It is akin to seeing a rock in a stream and demanding of it, “Where is the meaning, rock? What’s the point of you? Where is your purpose?” This reaction invites, justly, laughter and the rejoinder, “It’s just a rock. Maybe, it can be beautiful, valuable, good, or interesting. Perhaps, we can learn to see it as intriguing by collecting rocks, through curious exploration, by painting it or penning a poem about it. But, in the end, it is just a rock.”

As Wittgenstein remarked at the tail-end of the Tractatus, “It is not how the world is that is mystical, but that it is.” No matter the figure, we’re formed here, an odd spontaneity, like the spasms of bubbles over a stone in a brook: that it is, that it is, that it is. Where the meaning is, and how the point works out—when the interest flowers—may not be from a story. It may be from the simple pleasures and pursuits of a life well-lived.

Until next time,

Nicholas

P. P. S. (Poem Post-Script)

glow

the sun is coming through the stain glass

with an-

   whatisthat, 

an   orange?

   hue,but

 No,  it is kinder and more like
a mother,

every day coming around the 
corner,

letting light shine through her for
another,

dressing anyone that walks by;

joyously, dutifully,

she caresses the white doorposts,

letting them be,

or rather,

letting them glow.

Feelings and attitudes somehow flit away from the facts, or hover amongst them like fog. Our attitudes can reflect something deeper about us. If someone believes something, oftentimes it’s how they feel about what it is that they believe that is more interesting, more revealing. We are often worried about divergence in opinion, disagreements about the facts. Rightfully so. What’s true matters. But what about when we all agree, but still don’t feel the same way?

Imagine you and a friend watch a movie. Your friend hates it, but you love it. You seem to agree on everything that happened. You agree on the director’s intentions, the meanings and functions of the different characters, and the reasons behind the decisions made in cinematography, editing, and sound design. Arguing and arguing for hours, it becomes apparent that there’s something deeper than the description that is different between you. There’s a certain point where you describe the exact same thing but you love it and your friend hates it. What then?

More than the practical question, why is it that, even still, we feel the need to fight for it?1 Even though you realize, “Oh shit. This isn’t a matter of disagreement about the facts. This is about who we are. It’s almost moral. I can’t convince them the way I could teach them that a triangle has three sides.” Despite everything, you still have the feeling, “I’m right, motherfucker.”

I had a discussion with my girlfriend recently that one of the fundamental reasons that generations are alienated from one another is that they grew up on different aesthetic foundations. I grew up watching Courage the Cowardly Dog, Wizards of Waverly Place, and movies like Ratatouille and The Incredibles; I played Ratchet and Clank, Kingdom Hearts, Runescape, and Team Fortress 2; I grew up as the internet grew up. I saw social media go from nothing to “oh-my-god-what-the-fuck-oh-shit-the-kids-are-killing-themselves, they-own-the-politicians-what-the-fuck.” The vast network of dispositions, feelings, attitudes, desires, and proclivities that my manner of life instilled in me is only privy to people who grew up in the 2000s. Eventually, in 2040, the 2000s will be to the new kids what the 80’s was to me: slightly alien, a bit silly, and mostly uninteresting. These generational divides conjure up nigh ineffable aesthetic attitudes. I say “nigh” because I am pretentious. I also say “nigh” because it’s not totally incommunicable, it just takes a lot of effort to cross that divide. But I don’t take this fact to condemn us to alterity. It’s a bit sad, though.

Another example would be, in line with the above example, how one feels about “the irreducibility of the subjective.” There’s a camp of folks who, from various angles and for various reasons, think that subjectivity—or something in the neighborhood, like consciousness or personality or selfhood—cannot be collapsed into the objective. It resists being reduced. I am in that camp from the angle of philosophy of mind. But one’s attitudes are sharply revealed when you look around at who is rallying under the same flag as you. “Shit: THAT’S what you think our thing means?” That irreducibility, the sharp line stopping mind from sliding softly into science without a trace, is to me an ambiguous and fascinating thing that motivates me to inquire further. But some people think it’s a dramatic and eternal difference that traps us in our tiny solipsistic homes, and that consciousness will never be solved so science should give up, and that our inwardness is the key to the infinite and … DAMN. I didn’t sign up for all that shit! I just think Nagel had a good argument, man…

Anywho, so, now I ask: What are philosophical attitudes? Why are they important?

Total Outlooks and Worldviews

Worldviews are closely related to attitudes and feelings. Total outlooks—our pictures of the world—may even determine our attitudes. But, shit, every time I start to bite down on some philosophical topic, a looming face turns back at me—the real giant behind the miniscule notion I’ve bitten into. I, like a puny piranha with my teeth sunk into the small of one of its vestigial appendages, look up at the big idea and go, “Fuck. Well. I guess I’ll just rip this part off for now.” Likewise, the grander concept of worldviews will have to wait; in much the same way, I want to talk about truth soon, but I’ll end up having to fight through many other dungeons first: The Coherentist’s and Correspondence Theorist’s Caves, Tarski’s Toolshed, and the Pragmatist’s Den. It’s just the way this shit goes. Philosophy wasn’t meant for finite beings. (It’s a disease. Go build a chair.)

I’m going to talk about a short, sweet article by Louis Mackey2, “From the Open Universe to the Closed World: A Meditation on Philosophic Attitudes.”3 Here’s the gist before I give the deets. Mackey looks at passages from Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Christian theologian, and Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century dumbass. He then examines what underlies their quintessential doctrines, the historical attitude shift that reveals itself when comparing their ideas. The attitude that is being examined is not the historical and material preconditions of their thought nor the logic and reasons motivating them; not to say that it is disconnected from these factors. Rather, Mackey is after “how each of these men approaches the philosophic quest and what he hopes to gain from it” (93).

As Mackey does in the article, it'll be good to lay out each passage for reference. Tommy is talking about the opinion that "no created intellect can see the essence of God" in this passage, and is generally remarking on the powers and possibilities of the human capacities of faith and reason:

This opinion is not tenable. For the ultimate beatitude of man consists in his highest activity, which is the activity of the intellect. Hence if a created intellect could never see the essence of God, then either it would never attain beatitude, or its beatitude would consist in something other than God, which is opposed to faith. Now the ultimate perfection of a rational creature is to be found in that which is the source of its being, for anything is perfect in so far as it attains to its source.

Likewise this opinion is also against reason. For there is in man a natural desire to know the cause when he perceives the effect - and from this arises wonder in men. If then the intellect of the rational creature cannot attain to the first cause of things, the desire of nature will remain vain. Whence it must be conceded absolutely that the blessed see the essence of God. (ST la, 12, 1, C).

Kant, however, has a more dour outlook, and presumes that our powers put us in a predicament, one from which faith does not readily extricate us. The predicament is that reason asks questions that it can't get the answers to, namely, it asks for knowledge of God, the external world, and the soul:

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer. (KrV Avii)

Before I dive into Mr. Mackey's takes, I'm going speak on these for a moment.

First, as always, I don't know what anyone is talking about.

I know beatitude connotes bliss, perfection, and blessedness; I know that it is a distinctively Christian concept related to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount; finally, I think beatitude is, perhaps, connected to notions of flourishing and maximal attainment. But, Aquinas has a curious belief, which Mackey doesn’t put to the question. We can perfect ourselves through our intellect by coming to know our ultimate origin.

But—leaning toward Kant here, I suppose—why should we assume that because we have a capacity that has a telos, an end for which is seems to have been made, that it can fulfill its purpose? Maybe a spaghetti strainer is meant to strain motherfucking spaghetti, but if it lives in a universe without spaghetti, or is never given any spaghetti to strain, so much for its telos! Womp-womp, Mr. Spaghetti Strainer. Likewise, perhaps our perfect state requires that we come to know our ultimate source, but whose to say that its available to us? Certainly the mere fact that something has a purpose doesn’t entail that its purpose could be fulfilled?

The bit about wonder I find fascinating. I wondered about curiosity two posts ago and surely the two experiences are connected. If you wonder or awe at something, no doubt you’ll have your curiosity piqued and ready to follow the trail of your wide-eyed attention like a pig after a truffle. Philosophy, as Aristotle says, begins in Wonder at the World: “Wow, motherfucker, I betta check this shit out!” I wonder, though, if wonder usually comes about because we desire to know the cause of something. I feel as if most people would more readily connect wonderment with the sublime: something that is beyond our capacities to grasp; wonderment arises at something great and terrifying. But, like with beatitude, I think I just I don’t fully understand what Aquinas means by wonder here.

As for Kant, first, I really don’t know what “prescribed by the very nature of reason itself” means. My main guess is that the very structure of rationality is such that it tries to solve problems, get places, and investigate phenomenon. In this manner, Kant’s rationality is like Hegel’s notion of the will. Our ability to will is infinite in that it can rearrange itself and choose anything: I can imagine myself not wanting the things I want and I can actively make decisions to change my life so that I want different things. But, Hegel says that there is a limit to this capacity of the will to infinitely rearrange its object: it must choose.

There’s no non-willing. It is like desire, even if you desire to stop desiring…you’re still desiring. Ergo, like the will, the rationality must do what it is designed to do, which is to search, seek, and solve! We can bring our rationality down to earth by, say, becoming a car mechanic. Your rationality, then, is fully committed to the endless problems and solutions that come with working with hundreds of types of cars: one puts the power of the mind to finding the ultimate origin of oil leaks, alternator jams, and engine malfunctions. To put it another way, I don’t think it’s true that the rationality is “not able to ignore” metaphysical questions. Ask any tradesman…

The second probing suspicion is whether the questions Kant claims are being posed to rationality are not rather being posed due to historically contingent circumstances. To make a point in a similar vein, why can’t it be the case that rationality asking about God, the world, and the soul are misuses of rationality? Could this not just be a misunderstanding of the purpose of the mind? It’s not that we are spaghetti strainers with spaghetti to strain (Aquinas) or spaghetti-less (Kant), it’s that we aren’t fucking spaghetti strainers (Nicholas, maybe).

Mackey, in his consistently persuasive and punchy analysis, ends up siding with Aquinas’ attitude, more-or-less. So, let’s see how he gets there.

Aquinas and Kant: Mackey’s Many Lackies

Mackey takes the central point of Aquinas to be that we want to know the causes of the effects we perceive, and God is the ultimate cause of all effects, and so we, in wonder, desire to know this ultimate cause (94). If we couldn’t see God, then our natural desires would be innately and permanently frustrated, which Aquinas takes to be a reductio ad absurdum of that position. Aquinas thinks that, though it may not happen in this life or by our own power alone (c.f. grace and eternal life, etc., might have to be supposed), the “philosophical pilgrimage, faithfully followed and guided by revelation, leads to the fulfillment of the desires of the rational creature” (95).

Kant also thinks that the ends of our desires cannot be vain. Nonetheless, he maintains that the total, theoretical, and metaphysical answer that we desire is unavailable to us. A deductive, closed, complete comprehension of everything (knowledge of all reality, all experience, and all of ourselves) is what our minds ask for, but cannot receive (95). So how is this desire sated? It is transformed into the practical: our “destiny is not to know but to act” (95). We are denied beatitude and knowledge—intellectual perfection and the vision of God—so that we may have faith in our own freedom. For Kant, if we had the complete picture, we would see the necessity of everything, and so we would be determined and hence unfree. As Mackey so beautifully puts it, “Achievement of the goal of reason would have meant the negation of freedom. Metaphysical knowledge must be impossible, or man is reduced to a mere nexus in the deductive chain of reality” (96).4

What is the bigger picture in magnifying these two thinker’s attitudes? For one, Mackey wants to show how attitudes shifted from medieval to modern. One of his takeaways is that the previous age of philosophy loved wisdom, but followed the Augustinian precept “believe in order that you may understand.” One can pair this with Anselm’s dictum, fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. God is the free and creative source of everything, but one must first believe this before it becomes apparent.

The most persuasive and vivid metaphor that Mackey uses to illustrate the plausibility of fides quaerens intellectum is that of the man and his wife. If the man trusts the signs that the wife gives—the evidence—his relationship with her will flourish, and he will feel the love, and therefore come to understand the intricate beauty of that love. But, if he refuses to trust the signs she gives him and continually doubts these affections: her sending him letters, her adoring caresses and kisses, and her passionate tenderness for his character and personality: “then he will never understand whether she loves him or not” (97). If you are always scared of getting burned, or acting as if the love might not be true and might be pulled out from under you, then you’ll never really feel it.

Of course, as anyone who has been hurt by a friend or slighted by a lover will know, we do get deceived. We do get burned. That’s why doubt is healthy on occasion. The fellow who trounces through the world without a cautionary bone in his body would leave Chicago with a lot of shoddy necklaces and second-hand magazines, and a lot lighter on cash. But, the signs of God are indubitable and infallible, so they say. He created everything and desires the wellbeing of all created things: one must believe first to come to know this.

The facts that contribute to a hypothesis underdetermine the hypothesis. If you collected all of the events that underlie our theory of gravity, or what-have-you, then the theory of gravity itself would not be a part of those facts. It wouldn’t even be the sum aggregate of those facts. It is an interpretation—a robustly and carefully qualified interpretation, to be sure—that collects all of the facts together. Mackey says that the data of a hypothesis, “which are the signs of the truth represented by the hypothesis, do not make fully evident the hypothesis that explains them. Until they are accepted as evidence of it, they do not help to establish it” (98). Likewise, God transcends all of the facts, so the principle here applies all the more rigorously. One must believe the God hypothesis—test it by believing it—before it becomes apparent.

God, for the medieval, was everywhere obvious once you took to it, and was all you needed to focus on. Kant agreed that it was what we wanted more than anything to know, but that the signs did not come forged in the phenomenal realm glistening with self-warranted acceptability. God drifted from being the foundation of truth and trust, to being more like a wife that one must believe in, to being more like the fake monk on Michigan Avenue trying to peddle some necklaces: just one more thing to scoot around on your way to work.

One can see the harsh juxtaposition that Descartes and Kant make when placed beside these medieval thinkers; Descartes only permitting that knowledge should proceed from the strictest, most thorough application of doubt, and Kant throwing down the iron gates for good. The way Mackey puts it is that “fear has replaced love as the motive of philosophic inquiry, and when doubt has replaced belief as its rule of thumb, then it is not unnatural that philosophers should begin to value a secure ignorance more than an uncertain wisdom” (96).

There’s one more drastic difference between the modern and the medieval that Mackey remarks on that differs from the modern, epistemological cowering into narrower and narrower cave systems. The difference is between the meaning of our perfected rationality. Kant believes it meant a deductive, necessary totality, founded on firm principles, and from which—in Spinozistic, geometric precision—all of reality could be summed up. Aquinas believed that God freely created the world, and is not bound by necessity. So, neither are we bound. Where Kant clambers darkly through a skeptical chamber, in Aquinas’ world, reality was “large enough spiritually to allow full scope to men’s potential for intellection, action, love, and reverence” (100).

After all of this, Mackey reflects in a telling last paragraph, which anticipates an objection that hope is no foundation for a philosophy. He also anticipates the objection that—as I was saying earlier—simply because we have a capacity doesn’t mean it will necessarily be possible to exercise it perfectly. In a beautiful closing phrase, he writes:

It may well be objected—and with reason—that a philosophy is not necessarily true just because it is hopeful. But neither is it obvious—though it has seemed so to many modern philosophers—that truth must be indifferent to our desires. While we may not wish to presume that we shall find simply because we seek, neither, I suspect, will we be impelled to seek by the certainty that we shall not find. Hope is no guarantee of wisdom. But, like faith and love, it may well be the condition without which wisdom cannot be sought. (101)

While I continue to wonder about the relation between truth, the world, and our desires and capacities, the question of trust is worth posing; calling trust a question suggests how far my attitude may be from knowledge to begin with. I say that I want to know, but am I simply wading in a loveless and ignorant security, wallowing unwise in loneliness? If you place enough conditions and requirements on entry into somewhere—the right certifications, the right heritage, the right story—then, eventually, as the requirements raise higher and higher, the potential visitors turn away. Likewise, perhaps we ask too much of knowledge, and, like love, we have to let down our barriers to let wisdom in.

Thanks for reading,

Nicholas

Subscribe now

P.P.S (Poem Post Script)

frost on my windshield,
no tread on my tires,

I am doing the things
I gotta do.

The more I follow
someone else
the more of me
starts showing up

underneath sweaty blankets and
floorboards.

But, I’m learning a freedom that tastes like 


letting   him   in,

and a stop sign,

and a lamplight.


so, you're figuring things out.

well, that's alright.

you can keep it to yourself.


all's always peddling,

and the bazar rattles with
excitement and self-propogation.

but no one hears how
a shopping cart left in the snow

creaks like foreign tongue,

and how foreign tongue leaves
more room for brown eyes smiling.

But I guess it's a story that ain't
worth hearing.

and, i suppose, the shovel of
myself through the day is
not the next thing,

or the glossy, plump item
you look to eat.

that ' s  O.K.

i' ll be resting here as best  I try

what i want so far away
like day by day

everything begs me
to give up mystery,

each day a sphinx
and the night is hard and empty:

the toothpaste rolls down the sink
and the waters start to tempt me.

Damn, man. Shit. Lean into the stake like I’m doin’ the cha-cha, brother. Life like a macaroni noodle, sister: you are born supple, grow hard, get boiled, and become soft once more.

During New Years Eve, my friend announced to the room once that I shat on my floor twice. I denied it because I had genuinely forgot. Which is worse, asketh the philosopher, that I shit on the floor, that I shit on it twice, or that I forgot?

This past month or two, let’s see…I have had to top off oil and coolant into my 330,000 mile car in weather deep below freezing without anything to prop up the hood. So, I would just plop the hood heavy on my head, wind blowing oil all over the old engine, thinking to myself, “Shit man, this is what it is to be in your 20s. You just gotta do shit and no one really cares that you’re doin’ it.” I quit the job that got me up here—the Nicholas shuffle, man. After putting in my two weeks, they just said to not come in after the New Year. I’m deeply grateful for the chance it gave me to leap up here, but I was miserable.

I’ve been reading about truth. Kids these days with their IBone and pump-fake spice lattes and misdemeanors; adults these days with their crippling attendance to their daily woes; elders these days with their alt-right, alternative social media and inability to tell what was generated by AI. Not I! I’m cool as fuck, and better than everyone, for I read about truth. Mainly, though, I’m thinking about the pragmatists take on truth and how that relates to religion.

I read a book by a popular (by philosophy standards) philosopher of religion who thinks that all religions are basically true. (Whatever the hell we end up meaning by “true”…) Dude’s name is John Caputo. Book is On Religion. I didn’t like the book. I didn’t expect to. But I’ve been souring more and more on religious perennialist/pluralistic/syncretistic theories, so I did what I always do when I become suspicious of something: I explore it more. I hated Luther then wrote a damn thesis on him. I hated Nietzsche and then methodically studied one of his books for half a year. It’s the way I deal with stuff I disagree with.

I’m getting back into George Berkeley, that feckin’ Irish bishop. He was my first love in philosophy—Oh, how he had my heart!—but enough conversations with enough bright people convinced me that he wasn’t good for me. Yet here I am rapping on his bedroom door, with flowers in one hand, a love letter in the other, and a condom in the back pocket: ignoring our breakup because man…I just love the taste…of…idealism? I guess? After my philosophy of mind midterm my Junior year, Professor Henne mentioned, while going over the final in class, that I was the only person that defended an idealist response to the mind-body problem on the exam (and probably was the only one to do so for many years).

I’ll dedicate a post to each of these. For now, at the end of this post, I’ll share a bit more about where my head’s at with these different topics.

What else. There was Thanksgiving with my girlfriend’s family at her grandparents house, where I was shown to be both horribly educated and woefully unsophisticated. I ate shrimp with the skin on—wait, oh, they taught me it’s called a “shell.” I cursed like a sailor during cards with the grandparents; in my defense, motherfuckers were being goddamn motherfuckers at the time. (Olivia was definitely pocketing aces.) Suspicions were cast that someone peed in the sink in the dead of night: I have been advised by my counsel to invoke the fifth regarding any further questioning about that event.

But more than that, I just was getting railed to high heaven by my job. It was mind-numbing and exhausting. It underutilized my skills. It was stagnant and inert. It was one hour there, one hour back, through Chicago traffic, which really makes the decomposition of one’s spiritual powers pungent after a month or two. This was topped off by a week of being sick, then being sick in a different way, and yet again a different way. Now that I’m reflecting all this time later, the misery and the sickness were probably related. But, I kept up with the Sticky Note Anthology, so I’ll share the rest of those.

Then there was starting a new job. I now work at the symphony in town, which is fun. Advice to those about to graduate: don’t work for a for-profit and don’t take a job with a long transit unless you really like the job. Regardless of how nice they are on the front in a for-profit, there’s an irrevocable, underlying sense that you are not a human person, but a node with an efficiency rating. It is more fun and loose at the symphony. It is much better for me.

I joined during a chaotic transition. A board member died. A key staff member retired suddenly. The company that provided the ticketing system decided to pull their services off of the market, so the symphony is the middle of switching to another service. Then there was my lovely coworker Luiza who does what I now do, but they were about to go on a month-long vacation. AND there was a special two day holiday concert to help run. Phew!

Goddammit, then I was just fuckin’ tired. Took a 12-hour train-ride to Kansas: I doodled on my Kalimba that Audrey got me for my birthday; I talked to Carol and Vince, an old couple on the train, about God and the government budget; I ate fruit snacks for brunch, lunch, and dinner since the café car was not operational. Then, I made it to Kansas for the Holidays and I wasn’t worried about a damn thing. It wasn’t even my mission to not do nothing: that implies I was thinking. It was nothing but coffee-walks with my mom, watching movies, and eating chocolate. Duolingo streak: toast. Exercise? A relic of the past. Goals? On motherfucking hold.

Now, I’m feeling a bit better, though my car is screeching death rattles at me daily. Every time I turn it on, it’s as if I just jabbed it full of adrenaline: VRUH Vreeh VROOOoooOOOm. “What the fuck—*cough cough*—man…I was on the other side…I saw my grandma, that ol’ jalopy. Why’d you bring me back? There ain’t nothin’ for me here, man…just war…war…” But who gives a shit?1 Here’s some Sticky Notes.

I’m Thinking About: Death, Truth, Religion…and Berkeley

R.I.P.!

Heidegger and a Hippo walk Through Those Pearly Gates, opens with a question:

Do you really think you’re going to die?

Really and truly?

Do you really think your life is going to come to and end some day?

Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein2 respond for us, chiming that if we are anything like them, “you probably don’t totally believe that the final curtain will come down one day.” We all dryly and neutrally assent to that deductively sumptuous pairing of propositions: All Humans Die + I am a Human. But that’s not what is being asked. In much the way Kierkegaard might cheekily ask a well-kempt citizen of Christendom, “Do you believe in Christ?”, what is being got at is that there’s something in us that kinda doesn’t believe.

The good, Christian man will reply, “Of course I believe in Christ! And that all of Christ’s teachings are true!” But, as Kierkegaard is quick to point out, these people are ignorant knowers, as scholar Jennifer Lockhart deems them. These people know all of the correct things to say about the facts and qualities about something in the world, especially ways of life and ethical matters. They know, for example, that being polite means to listen carefully and to not speak over people. But the ignorant knower knows this, but they do not walk the walk. Likewise, the Christian says Christ is the best exemplar of ethical living, but lives nothing at all like Christ. They know they are supposed to believe in God, but maybe deep down, they really don’t—at the very least, they don’t act like it. (And isn’t that what’s important?)

So, likewise, we say we know death is inevitable, that Mr. Scary Grim Reaper has got his eyes on us, wielding a scythe and a stopwatch, but are we in a state of ignorant knowledge? Do we live like we are going to die? Do we really think we’ll die?

They peruse our various strategies for embracing or rejecting death, and evaluate our many immortality schemes and their varying degrees of plausibility. Their angle is mostly continental: Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud…and so on. But there are smatterings of Stoicism, Buddhism, American Pragmatism, and philosophy of mind. And the book is topped off with the contemporary cherry of exploring whether we might achieve biological immortality through technological augmentation. (Well, immortal insofar as a grand piano doesn’t plop atop your head.)

Nothing really grabbed me, but it was a great read. Freud’s idea of our Todestriebe, or death drive, I found fascinating and relatable: that we strive to mimic the inert, inorganic matter all around us, to rest the way a rock does, to slow down to a halt. But fascinating and relatable is all I found it. I enjoyed the take from Heidegger that being conscious of our “being-toward-death” is the only way to brighten up this mortal shuffling. Acknowledging our precarity, that none of this will stay the way it is, orients you toward life in an enriching, active manner. And Kierkegaard is always astute about the many different tricks that we play on ourselves to avoid despairing.

True!

I’ve begun to read up on the pragmatists. I’m beginning to suspect that they are just anti-authoritarian Nietzscheans with a fascination for pipefitting. I read What’s the Use of Truth?, which is a debate between Pascal Engel and Richard Rorty, a so-called “minimal realist” and a pragmatist. I also have been working my way through Pragmatism: A Reader edited by Louis Menand.

I never studied pragmatism in too much depth in my undergrad, but something always irked me about it. This is, as anyone who has lived long enough should know, partly because there’s a lot of it in me. If something gets under your skin, that means you’re connected to it, you feel the force of it. When I met a staunch pragmatist, an eccentric biology professor at my college, and I invited him to talk at the philosophy club about some topic in the philosophy of biology, I was indelibly struck by how little they cared for considering most philosophical issues. (Or at least their curious internal procedure for determining what mattered.)

The pragmatist attitude struck me as dumbly cavalier and pompous, yet there was an admirable orientation toward the concrete world. A metaphor would always come to mind when I’d read the pragmatists. Imagine three people playing a game. One person declares, “I’m not going to play this game anymore.” The other two go, “Okay.” Then, from outside of the rules of the game, the person who left says, “Your game is dumb.” The people still playing reply, “Okay, you can think that,” and continue playing. Insistent, the person on the sidelines demands, “No. You don’t get it. I win. Your game is really stupid and you should stop playing it.” To which the people inside dryly reply, “Well, no. You can’t win if you’re not playing, and we don’t think it’s stupid.” At that point, presumably, the person outside the game (the pragmatist) goes about their day, as do the pair playing.

The point of the metaphor is that pragmatists are constantly and frustratingly asking one question over and over again: “What’s the point of this? What’s the upshot?” These are important questions to ask. We are frequently, when tasked to think through something, led to ask, “What’s the advantage of this way of thinking over that one?” Or, when we are being taught something, we ask innumerable times, “Okay, okay. All that technical stuff is fine, but what I am supposed to do with that tool? Under what conditions should I use it?” When one orients oneself toward what actually needs to get done, it clarifies things. They think many of the problems of philosophy are not problems at all, or are useless scholastic quibbles. The game they refuse to play is the game of tinkering with issues that won’t affect human life. “If the Virgin Mary conceived without a man’s sperm, then what exactly happened such that one of her eggs became fertilized?” Don’t care. “Does the universe stretch on forever or does it end at some point?” Either way, it is a waste of time.

But the problem I always felt with this way of thinking is that isn’t an answer. It’s fine to not want to think about it, but the blank-stared floating over the issue isn’t an engagement with it. Second of all, I’m not sure we are always in a position to know what questions will be useful if we solve them. Mathematics surely brings this to bear. Inconceivably technical and mentally tasking mathematical problems that seem hopelessly abstract sometimes end up having deeply practical consequences.

The reason this has been bothering me in particular recently is because pragmatists miss something about truth. Here’s the basic matter. Rorty asks us to think about the debate between realists and anti-realists3 the same way we would answer the question about whether the universe is infinite or finite: Who cares? It’s a debate that has no practical cache, and there’s more helpful ways of talking. Rorty thinks that all of this debate about reality and truth is missing the more important fact that we are a bunch of people talking to each other, trying to get stuff done. He doesn’t want us to bow down to some external, non-human entity, whether that be Truth, God, or Reality. (You see why I think of him as deeply Nietzschean?)

Well, what’s the upshot of denying the upshot of the truth debate? Well, it is that truth, objective reality, and similar terms end collapsing into the broader notion of justification. When I say that something is true, really all I’m doing is saying this: “This is the best thing to believe given what I know right now and I can give good reasons to my community for acting this way.” What about when you say you think something might be true. In that case, you are saying “This is the best thing to believe right now, but I think that it might be the case that if I tried to justify this belief to some future community with more technology, sophisticated language, etc., then it might be proven wrong.” But if all we are doing is trying to justify ourselves to each other, then there’s never any contact with anything like “the facts,” “the world,” etc.

I don’t think the concept of a mind-independent reality, or a correspondence theory of truth, is the best way to think of things, sure. But if we ask “Is the cat on the mat?” and you say, “It is justified to believe that the cat is on the mat.” I can rightly say back, “But that’s not what I asked. I asked whether or not it is the case that the cat is on the mat?” You say, “We never have access to that, so let’s just focus on our justifications.” I would actually agree with you, but that doesn’t entail that there isn’t a fact of the matter or that it isn’t important to maintain that there is a way that it is.

Yay Religious Perennialism

Let me rephrase: Not yay religious perennialism.

Religious perennialism, like any-fucking-thing, has many forms. It is basically a claim that there is something strongly similar across all religions, something that connects religions and religiosity at a deep level. It could mean that all religions fundamentally react to the same underlying reality or truth. It could mean that all religious experience is fundamentally the same (especially all mystical experiences). It could mean something more vague, like that all religions share the same moral spirit and aim. But the thing that ties it together is a movement towards showing that all religions are “true,” however construed—we’re all climbing the same mountain. It also tends, I’ve found, to be monistic, or at least non-dualistic. It’s all one love, man! Or…uh…one undifferentiated process that is neither love nor not love? (And, through my studies, I’ve noticed affinities between religious perennialism and the theology via negativa (by way of denial) or negative/apophatic theology, liberalism and multi-culturalism, pragmatism, and postmodernism, and more. Much to know…)

My good friend Sam Bickersteth runs the blog Admoni on Substack. He’s got ^ that vibe. He is my mortal enemy who I will defeat. I shall slay him in battle, and as my blade gently slits the tubes of his heart, as I unsheathe my steel from his chest, grazing his ventricles, I will whisper to him, staring into his weeping, blue eyes: “You have a bad reading of Kierkegaard.”

His philosophy is beautifully and seamlessly synthetic and syncretistic. I believe it is a good force in many respects and he is attempting to wipe away that distinctively contemporary smudge, that tired battle between fundamentalists and atheists, creationism and science, literalism and total abandonment of metaphor. It is a gambit that stems from a surprising love. His is a theology with aspirations of showing us that God is uncontained in the dreams of our philosophies, and that it is our attachment to these contingent, worldly things that prevents us from feeling God—that this clinging is the only thing that could blind us so.

But I am an evil man and I don’t think he’s right. So far, what I cannot stop ruminating over when I rest my mind on this coming friendly feud, are the following three ideas:

1. The Simple Believer: Perrenialism ignores sociological and anthropological difference. If you think religions are fundamentally the same underneath it all, I simply beg you to look again. The simple (non-pejorative use) believers are just not with you, man. The average Muslim does not think what the average Christian does, nor would they say that “ultimately” they react to the same thing. If one’s idea is that all religions are true and are caught up together in the same thing, that’s not a theory of religions, that’s just a new religion. It appears to me to simply be a weird way to define “religion” that simply picks out a very specific strand running through specific strands of mystics. It defines religiosity so narrowly that only about 500 people probably are religious in the required sense, i.e., its an absurdly demanding, hyper-Kierkegardiaan theory. To undercut this though, I’ve met many, many ordinary folks that really jive with this conception: from my mom to the sweet lady who pours coffee at Lake Forest to a guy named Eric I met on the train the other week. (So, I think I’m likely right, but that’s not to say perennialism isn’t popular in its own right, that it hasn’t found a foothold in our imagination. The Baháʼí exist don’t they?)

2. Why God?: I just never understand why the concept God enters the picture. In Caputo’s book, there is one animating question: “What do I love when I love my God?” He says that there is an ineliminable ambiguity, an undecidability, between the words “love” and “God,” and that we don’t know which is which, or “who started it” to phrase it like I’m in kindergarten. But I never see why we start talking about God, why he waltzes onto the stage. And to go back to point 1, damn man, a lot of religious people do not conceive of the universe theistically, yet perrenialists constantly return to the idea that God underlies it all.

3. Truth: They have a fucked up idea of truth.

Elaboration is for another time. I just wanted to show where I’m going next. There has been a bit between me and my friends that there is a “blog war” brewing. The phrase demonstrates the high stakes. It also cheekily ignores that me and Sam are probably in love with each other. (Love and war are twins. It’s hard to tell them apart.) There have been hilarious portents of this, like when we published posts at the same time of antithetical leanings. Sam’s was titled grandiosely “Historicity, Christ, and Faith II” and mine, boldly, as if in mocking response, was titled “Gnomes are Real.”4

In truth, though, he inspires me and I miss him tenderly. I will show how gay I am by sharing a poem I once wrote about him that became an inside joke in our group because of how romantic it is. All that being said, this post is more of an envoy, and the battle is not toward Sam. Nietzsche put it nicely in Ecce Homo when he said that “I never attack people - I use a person merely as a powerful magnifying glass that allows me to make visible a general but insidious and elusive calamity” (41). The difference here is that I think Sam’s thinking, even writ large, would not be a calamity, but would probably be a good thing for the world. If my engagement with him spurs his thought to greater clarity, new heights, and popularity, then that would be welcome: not the least because I’m too self-doubting to know whether or not I even stand on the right side.

Berkeley

I’m just not gonna talk about Berkeley right now. I don’t wanna. But rest assured, (I know everybody was wondering):

End of Weird Post

I am going to get back to regular posting. There is something I really believe about people not doing things: it reveals their values. I, obviously, value my practical wellbeing. I was sick—dealt with being sick; my car was getting fucked up—dealt with car; I need money to continue to persist in Illinois—dealt with jobs. Hungee? Grocery. Sleepy? Rest. Then, after all the torrential plowing through of that, I value my emotional wellbeing, which means that if I had some time, and my lovely girlfriend or friends had some time, then I launched myself over to them without hesitation. Then, I value learning and doing philosophy. And it’s way up there! Despite the craziness, I read a bunch! I talked philosophy with my friends and professors, but I didn’t keep up this blog. Mr. Blog just doesn’t take precedence over my wellbeing. It doesn’t even take precedence over actually doing philosophy. I could have squeezed it in at the expense of some other stuff, but I didn’t want to.

All this to say: my life is such that I have more time to value this blog. I hope to post about some of the stuff I’ve talked about here soon, and to post in general at a more regular interval. I look forward to it! It is a fun way to work through what I’m thinking about.

goodbye. may fate be kind to you.

Nicholas

Subscribe now

G.P.P.S. (Gay Poem Post Script)

my whole walk I pondered the phrase:
"The limits of my language are the limits of my world."

I had considered horizons, which 
don't declare
"No more to see here,"

rather they state,

"No more for you to see here."

I had gotten as far as Sartre with his
"radical other"

when from a window and breaking 
past a lyrical, minor phrase on the piano,

Sam's voice called out.

I asked if it was his room,
stood there in a window, and he 
said, "Obviously." (So very Britishly.)

I remarked that he looked like a burglar.

He replied that he was off to dinner.

I said goodbye. He said see you soon.
He said it sweetly and sincerely,
held in a future with us in it.

I saw genuine delight in his eyes.

I walked back to my dorm where,
with my feeble words in my
tiny world, I try to reach out
to my friend Sam,

an orange horizon
teasing my meaning.

I’m either that or I’m a sweet, little boy. As John Mulaney’s psychiatrist once told him, “Half of you is this really nice guy who wants to do the right thing and be a good person, and the other half of you is a gorilla whose sole purpose in life is to destroy the first half.”1 I also have a nefarious, violent gorilla inside of me next to the sweet boy: but, I’ve been a good mediator, so they get along, or make compromises. 

The compromise I am working out between the gorilla and the boy now is what the value of curiosity is. Indeed, as a recent debate with Audrey revealed, I’m not even sure I know what curiosity means. Initially, I was considering it to refer to the phenomenon where we study things for their own sake, and no other. This would mean that curiosity essentially involves a collector’s instinct for facts of a niche kind. So, I was taking the archetypical example of the curious person to be the nerd of some kind. Like the nerd about trains, who knows every little gear and feature of locomotives from centuries ago—their particular histories, where they are now, what routes they go on, and so on. As in, I took it that curiosity is that psychological proclivity where humans sought out facts or stories about something out of mere fascination, private pleasure, and for the sake of the facts and stories themselves. I am fine with this, in the liberal sense of, “to each their own.” But, it aroused some kind of contempt in me when considered as a value to be promoted, that we should all be this type of “curious.”

One can now see the mustache-twirling villainy of this train of thought: walking into libraries, seeing posters in kids sections that say “Foster your child’s curiosity!”, tearing them down and crumpling them up, dashing the poster beneath my boots. Stealing a child’s trainset, and throwing it in the bin, “What is this for? What is it’s purpose, little girl!?!?!?” 

However, in the next breath, I really am rather curious, or perhaps a better word would be inquisitive. But it is an inquisitiveness that has been read as parasitic a lot of my life (until I took some philosophy classes). Teachers and church leaders found it parasitic because there is an unmitigated philosophizing and curiosity that finds its best example in the kid incessantly asking “Why?”

“Why is the sun so bright?” “But why is it a big ball of fire?” “But why is it there in the first place?”

Kids pick up that things are some way because of other things, and that you can generally figure out more by asking about it. Kids are really the best philosophers and scientists at this age because they are unrelenting in seeking the foundations of things.2 The problem is, of course, that teachers and parents stop the inquiring at some point. (And, of course they do, because we are not eternal beings of infinite knowledge.)3 Most figures of authority in a child’s life play the part of the Socratic interlocutor who suddenly has an appointment they are about to miss just as Socrates’ questions are getting to the heart of things: “Well, Socrates, I would love to talk about why rainbows are made up of so many pretty colors, but I really have to get to the dentist…” 

In this sense of curious, I’m insatiably curious, and it has led to a lot of discontent for me. I’ve never felt like I’ve really known anything. Most of the time in school, people teach you things without telling you why you are learning it or what underlies the facts. So, if you are learning how to multiply, they don’t tell the kids why, or, to what end, you are multiplying, and they don’t tell you exactly what multiplication is. Same for history. Why are we learning about Columbus, or the building of the railroads, or the Alamo, or World War II? Better yet, why aren’t we interrogating these events further? Their conditions? Their relation to my life right now? I never felt like I had a grasp on anything. Rather, I realized early on that they were training the dull part of the intellect—the droll capacity—that is, that part and capacity that allows us to memorize some pattern and excrete it at will. They wanted me to get good at learning how to churn out what they had printed on their answer sheets. Fine, I thought, I’ll do that for them, and then go home and play video games ‘till my eyes bleed.

Friedrich Nietzsche was also pissed off with this lack of youthfulness in education and science; this icy discursiveness that amasses “knowledge without reference to consequence,” or, “in plain terms, that comes to nothing” (35). In his essay “The Use and Abuse of History for Life,” he attends to questions that are in the neighborhood of my curious concerns (my concerns about the curious). He asks of life and knowledge: which takes priority? And he answers that “life is the higher and dominating power" because knowledge presupposes life and it is meant to protect and preserve our lives (70). But there is a detached, graying, and cold kind of knowledge that he is harshly critical of the whole essay—objective history, without any aim toward the future or life. So, Nietzsche examines the many ways we can study history, the ends of these methods, and the value (if any) of a objective, scientific approach to history that exists simply for the sake of accruing facts.

Nietzsche claims that relating to history—and to the past, in general (this, importantly, includes our personal past)—is something that we must do as the kinds of things that we are. He says many men envy the likes of cows and children, that aren’t aware of the many pasts behind them, the many futures ahead. We’re stuck with the knowledge of the past and of the impending future, and the question is how we’re supposed to harness that fact to promote life, health, and a great, artistic culture. We can make use of the past for life, for Nietzsche, in three healthy ways.

First, we can use the past for our present goals and actions. This goal is marked by the method of monumental history. Second, we can relate to our predecessors with respect and gratitude for the part they played in who we are now. This goal corresponds to the antiquarian need in historical study. Finally, we may look to the past for consolation in our suffering and to meet our “desire for deliverance” (12). This maps onto what he calls the critical method in dissecting the past.

Monuments and Heroes: The Man of Action

If you are an athlete, artist, writer, statesman, leader, or pretty much anyone who has a daunting and big responsibility in front of you, then you could use some good examples: role models and praiseworthy predecessors. In other words, the person who has concrete and difficult goals ahead of them, which requires great and risky action, can look to the past for advice and consolation. The knowledge gained is that “the great thing existed and was therefore possible, and so may be possible again” (14).

He says this type of history requires falsification of the facts, or the very least a quite liberal interpretation of them. If looking to the past in this way is going to be encouraging, we have to ignore the many differences in our situation when compared with our predecessor’s. The man of action who looks to the past for examples is more akin to a myth-maker, for he passes over the “unimportant” parts. (Unimportant meaning “inconducive to his goals, life, culture, power,” etc.) Indeed, it may even require misunderstanding the person or culture or event you are looking to for inspiration. If you are trying to start a revolution, and you look to the French for help, you will have to translate it into your circumstance; in any translation effort, meaning will drag, then leap, away from the source.

Antique Preservation: Reverence for Inheritance

Some are grateful by nature and look to their parents, neighborhood, and culture with reverence, with “love and trust” (17). She wants to preserve history because she respects the form of life that her predecessors have allowed to exist on earth: it is beautiful and worth propagating. But, not only does the antiquarian respect his inheritance, he attempts to “reproduce the conditions of his own upbringing.” In a powerfully illustrative passage, Nietzsche puts it like this:

The history of his town becomes the history of himself; he looks on the walls, the turreted gate, the town council, the fair, as an illustrated diary of his youth, and sees himself in it all—his strength, industry, desire, reason, faults, and follies. ‘Here one could live,’ he says, ‘as one can live here now—and will go on living; for we are tough folk, and will not be uprooted in the night.

The soul of the many persons past—of their customs and ways of life—become like gemstones amplifying his own soul. In another metaphor, Nietzsche compares the antiquarian method to the “feeling of the tree that clings to its roots,” for the tree is happy knowing that its growth is not random, but is an inheritance. This outlook “does not merely justify but crowns the present.” But this, once more, involves a passing over of many facts of the past, for a tree “feels its roots better than it can see them.” The tree only feels the world as a heap of things that hinder or help it: and looking to the past in this way will require that you miss a lot.

Salvation as Suspicion: Critique as Deliverance

But something might strike some of you in these two methods. The monumental appears nastily false in that it is severely individual, honing in on a single person, event, or cultural moment—even for all that great action it may produce. And the antiquarian appears crudely false in that no culture is without blemish—even for all that noble rebuilding and communal rearing that may come in its wake. The third method is the critical, and it unveils these illusions, looks right into the inky eye of the past, and sees a long board of jagged nails: slavery, domination, malice, wanton power, and every manner of injustice. The past does not produce noble examples, and past cultures are not worth preserving. Nietzsche puts the critical theorists M.O. as so: “Man must have the strength to break up the past, and apply it, too, in order to live. He must bring the past to the bar of judgement, interrogate it remorselessly, and finally condemn it” (20 and 21). For every “past is worth condemning.” For it is not justice, but “human power and human weakness” and life’s insatiable desire to perpetuate itself that governs history.

When such injustices become “obvious—a monopoly, a caste, a dynasty, for example—the thing deserves to fall,” the people will tear it down (21). But he admits there is a great danger in this way of proceeding. Namely, that we come from these pasts. We are the “resultant of their errors, passions, and crimes; it is impossible to shake off this chain. Though we condemn the errors and think we have escaped them, we cannot escape the fact that we spring from them” (21). Destroy. Act. But do so with an aim to rebuild. Do not neglect the other un(historical) methods: that one can look back for examples and worthy things (as false as this might be) to build a better future.

Justice as Judgement: Perspective as Inevitable

Throughout the essay, Nietzsche lampoons the dual-headed, limping old-age of modern culture: the ironical and the cynical outlooks: as the result of an educational system and culture that views itself as the end of all ages, as epigoni. As Nietzsche is wont to do, he spins an intriguing—if probably dubious—mythological account and genealogy of our current plight.4 He says that the Medieval obsession with the end-times and eschaton—that this life is a flimsy stepping stone on the way to the true finality—was merely transformed into the Hegelian flavored idea that our current age is the end of history, the complete package, the slimiest slice in the epoch pizza box. Nietzsche claims that a religion that considers the last moment to be the most important, and that “has prophesied the end of earthly life…may call forth the subtlest and noblest powers of man.” But, it will also be an “enemy to all new planting.” This type of thinking will oppose “all flight into the unknown because it has no life or hope there itself” (49). The problem with that is that now all of the past has become an inert thing, useless to pick at, except in order to accumulate evidence that progress has reached its zenith. The other problem is that now the future—in the sense of hope for greater heights—is blotted out. We made it to the end: now it’s just time to scoot along the same road until it ends.5

He says that in this condition, we have lost all sense of historical justice. If we simply build up a dragon’s hoard of “knowledge,” but refuse to turn it into wisdom, into action, then we are not acting justly, for Nietzsche. Justice requires judgement. Justice requires that we make decisions about what is good and bad for us and for the future of the world. The facts don’t betray rich soil, a narrative and direction, on their own. We must pulse into the past with an eye toward a noble future, otherwise, the past is infertile dirt.

Furthermore, justice is not objective. The objective historian, purportedly, “sees the procession of motive and consequence too clearly for it to have an effect on his own personality” (37). He calls this out as a superstition, that the object of study could show its own truth by its “own activity.” People describe the person “who is not affected at all by some particular moment in the past as the right man to describe it” (39). Nietzsche suggests that if you are going to do history, one must do so only when you are “straining the noblest qualities you have to their highest power,” and only then “will you find out what is greatest in the past, most worth knowing and reserving.” Otherwise, “you will draw the past to your own level” (40). If you have no goal, no purpose, and only weakness, then the history you will dredge up will be lifeless, too.

How do we ameliorate this condition of historical injustice? We must become (partly) unhistorical. Nietzsche claims that “we must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember” because each is “equally necessary to the health of an individual, a community, and a system of culture” (8). We must learn to forget in order to bring about new futures. Otherwise, our various pasts will just hold us back. Anyone who has contemplated history (even recent history) and felt that a better world is impossible, or has holed up in their room ruminating day after day on the same event, knows how debilitating the past can be. The past will either anchor us, or allow us to surge forward. And sometimes, we must throw it off entirely to step forth.

But, not only can the past consume the present, it can consume the future. If you think that the unfeeling wheel of history is going to sort out all of the world’s current yearning needs and not a person, then you are sorely mistaken, Nietzsche scorns. So, we must unlearn our education and act dumbly: and this uncanny youth, in it’s forgetting, also cleanses itself of irony, of cynicism, of “it’ll sort itself out,” and of the myriad dregs of memory that keep you from doing what you need to do. Adding in purposeful forgetfulness into our history: by seeking monuments for action; reverence for what is worth preserving; and to uncover the wild, wanton murder, arbitrariness, and cruelty of every past: will enable us to spring forward.

Nietzsche exclaims that the “world must go forward, the ideal condition cannot be won by dreaming, it must be fought and wrestled for, and the way to redemption lies only through joyousness, the way to redemption from that dull, owlish seriousness” (59). So, much like the parent or the Socratic interlocutor, it is often not ignorance, spite, or anger that leads to inquiry being shut down, but that tired, weary reality of time, and time’s old dog—ever our companion, too—Drowsiness. But Drowsiness slumps along by our side to remind us that we should not always question, always seek, always beg for “Why?” but lay down, close our eyes, and restore ourselves for tomorrow. For tomorrow, there is a bright “Why?” in the sky that will rise, as it tends to do, in the east.

Thanks for reading,

Nicholas

P.P.S (Poem Post-Script)

Confucius weeps

everyone is mighty pent-up and

set on being a superhero,

and riddled with guilt to boot, for

they are not succeeding.

I fear me, Aristotle, and Confucius

are the only fellows now who

think that is a distraction.

(And they’re dead! Sorta.)

We should rather be concerned with

being good and dignified people

with a salted dash of reverence and

a sugared scoop of wit.

I fear that we all want to save the

world precisely because

we are not good

and

we don’t know how to live a good life.

I fear that we put justice beside

big words like “Global” and “All”

because we are afraid of

confronting each other—our neighbors—

with simple kindness and generosity.

And so we contribute more every day to the

ethical off-sourcing,

and we drift from one another;

not realizing that our desire for a

savior

(or for us to take up that dusty mantle

and be the hero ourselves)

is the belated sigh of our goodness

rotting,

of the courage to simply

reach out to who is near

withering.

Subscribe now

Share

Mr. Charles, here. As in, Nicholas Charles. As in, Nicholas Charles Urich. As in, Nicholas Charles Urich who lives in Elgin, now. Security Deposit? Deposited. Renty-schmenty? Renty-schmentied. This has been making people jealous—most of my Illinois people had barely heard of it, or not heard of it at all. So, let’s hear a bit about it.

I’m staring out from the sunlit library windows that overlook Fox River flowing south. Across from the river is the Metra, and up that hill is where I got my digs—a corner room on the second floor. The reason everyone is jealous is it is a big, Victorian home built in 1892. It is furnished and decorated with ornate rugs, chandeliers, and antiques from all over the world, because the hospitable and accommodating man who owns the place used to work for the Arts and Culture section for the U.S. State Department. He now manages a symphony, which means the house has musicians, artists, and fancy-types coming through regularly, and a lovely-sounding piano (which I am quite pleased about, though, I’m yet to know if the residents will enjoy my consistent, morning doodlings). There’s a finch named Finch in the kitchen, who sounds like a robot to me, but his beady, inky eyes tell me he is indeed figuring things out. There is a cat named Zena who has speedily taking a liking to me, making snickering, cackling noises at me—though she rushes out of my room when I catch her investigating my fresh presence in the house. And everyone I’ve met is nice, meek, and busy.

I haven’t learned much about this place yet. A man named Ryan, who is here dealing a Poker tournament, told me that the city got its start manufacturing watches. Well, I got my start here walking 25 minutes to the library and gym in full Winter gear: puffy, parka sweats and a fat, grey coat: sweating my fucking ass off because I read “41” on my weather app and didn’t account for the notable fact that weather, indeed, changes. So, this town, with its river running through and past industry in timepieces, is better acquainted with keeping track of change than I am. But here’s me trying.

Every other sign is in Spanish, and it’s mostly Mexican folk who live here—so I might want to pick up more than “Hola” in the coming months. There’s a Dia De Los Muertos, offrenda exhibit in the library, and many big ol’, Olmec heads painted by artists across Mexico: both very cool. There are many little stores that peddle vintage goods, knitting supplies, ceramic tea-ware; there is a gym right nearby run by a gregarious man—with the stature of a heftier, more nose-haired1, Pop-Eye—named Dave; and plenty of nooks to grab bites to eat. There’s a breakfast and lunch cafeteria where I had a Cortado and Tostado yesterday. (Did I say, “Could I have the Breakfast Cortado?” when I meant to say “Tostado?” Yes, I did. But we persist. Nay, we thrive against all odds.) As someone who only knew the honky-fied version of a cortado, I was pleasantly surprised to have it served in a small glass cup with a club soda chaser. Yummy. Starbobs essentially just makes some sort of big, spumy, and awkward latte.

So, I did my grocery shopping (Because one more day of—“Oh fuck, I haven’t had a meal today. I shall now eat dried, ranch-flavored chickpeas and goldfish and apples until I can’t anymore.”—was not going to cut it.), unpacked my room, vacuumed and hung some art and sentiments up, and now I have a few days to take a beat or two. I am feeling good. I will likely need the next few weeks to find my rhythm. But, I did it. I did it with a shit-ton of help from my friends’ families and my family—indeed, to do this without that cushion on either end would have made things significantly more difficult. But damn, motherfucker, I did it. Applied to graduate schools, moved my booty across state lines, caught myself something of a job, and now there’s many months ahead of me. I’m sure the town counts their hours on different metrics than me, but how I’m doing it now—thank God—has me counting the moments on a few things: making the money I need to; waiting to hear back from Grad School in the summer; and (the best part) spending as much time as I can in between now and then loving Audrey and my friends. You’re all the reason I’m here.

So, I work as an administrative assistant. In the downtime (and, there’s a lot of it), I’ve been doing doodles, short poems, squibs and squiggles on sticky notes, then posting those sticky notes to a yellow, legal pad. I’m calling it my “Sticky Note Anthology” for my Partners in Design arc. I’d like to share the first four days of them that I’ve accrued. I have visions of doing some exhibit of the many, many of them I’ll have created many months down the line. So, here’s a taste. Also, I don’t really know if I’m allowed to have the company name on this—LOL. But y’know, we’ll see. I’ll just put this post behind the paywall sooner than the others or something.

I hope some of these made you giggle or go “hm! i disagree!” or “Mm. I like that.” I’m sure I’ll post lil’ sneak peaks on the completion of this series as I go along. I think next week, when I return to my desired posting schedule of once every two weeks, I’ll write either something on Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Truth, On Inequality, or on Nietzsche’s On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. I’m leaning toward Nietzsche, as that’s the one I’m currently reading, and really liking so far—I find it quite agreeable, yes.. yes!

And no, you don’t get to know what the secret one says.

Thanks for reading, talk soon.

Nicholas

P.P.S. (Poem Post-Script)

to dam up the sky

leak the strings of yes and no

then batter then whisk the yolks,

for matter is yoke, neither high nor low:

its “let go” held up like an obelisk,

reaching on tiptoes on stepladders,

block on block, the sky springs a leak,

So, the many people are making pyramids.

Why?

To dam up the sky.

Subscribe now

Share

Bullshit is prolific. Everywhere you turn, people are saying whatever they need to paint the perfect image of themselves in someone’s mind: the dude at the bar flexing his accolades and attributes to the lady (in hopes for a smoochie), the nervous nineteen-year old at their first big-boy job interview tinkering finicky with their accomplishments (in hopes for a matched 401k and stock options), the president of the college praising the student body at commencement (in hopes for more enrollment, some future alumni donations).

“Hello Lake Forest Graduates! Your perseverance, integrity, and your upholding of the Forester Five Ideals of Integrity, Learning—uh, I forget the third— erm, Community, and Togetherness shines bright as you stand here today! Well, you’re sitting right now—have been for a few hours, pretty cold. But the world will warm with…your entrepreneurial…ah who gives a fuck. Anyone watching this who wants to enroll, please enroll, I want your money. And you fuckers, give me your money, most of it. Alright.”

Indifference, Truth, and Sincerity

But bullshit is more than being short of lying, on some spectrum. And it’s not simply trying to get away with something, namely, manipulating how other people think of you. The bullshitter doesn’t care to describe things right, he “just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose” (131). Frankfurt says that it is “this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as the essence of bullshit” (125).

A bullshitter then is not attendant to truth or falsity. A bullshitter is entirely indifferent to the facts, to how things are, to his beliefs and the world. A liar—at the very least, in order to be a liar—has to be carefully attendant to what is true and false, and what he and others know is true or false. Frankfurt claims that “the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.” Bullshit, in terms of its content, could end up being true—perhaps America is a great nation, or whatever. Frankfurt says that what’s wrong with a phony artifact, with a counterfeit piece of artwork, for example, is not what it’s like—how akin it is to the original—but “how it was made” (128). What’s wrong with the bullshitter is not whether or not they are deceiving us about their beliefs or the world. What’s wrong is that the bullshitter “necessarily attempt[s] to deceive us about…his enterprise” (130). He “misrepresents what is up to.”

The dishonest and honest man are playing “playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game” (132). Both respond “to the facts as he understands them,” it’s just that one respects the authority of truth, the other does not. The bullshitter ignores the force of the truth altogether. He simply doesn’t pay attention to it. Frankfurt continues by noting that the people who tell the truth or lie presuppose that there is “a difference between getting things wrong and getting them right, and that is at least occasionally possible to tell the difference.” (132). But what of the person that doesn’t believe we can do this? Well, one person—some sort of ataraxic skeptic, some odd monastic—simply refrains from trying to tell the truth or deceive, on taking any shot at the facts. But there’s another, the bullshitter. This person continues “making assertions that purport to describe the way things are,” nevertheless (132). They bullshit. It is for these reasons Frankfurt consider bullshit to be “a greater enemy of the truth than lies are” (132).

Finally, Frankfurt postulates one of the reasons we bullshit so much is that bullshit “is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about” (132). We’re placed in this situations all the time—think about almost every school presentation that has ever happened: “Uhhh. So yeah, the mitochondria is like the biological powerhouse…of the…membrane.” One persistent cause arises “from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything” (133). And more bullshit will arise if someone “believes it his responsibility…to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world” (133). Most of us don’t know enough about stuff to defend and talk about it at length, but we’re constantly being pressured to—to produce images of ourselves and project it into audiences: about world politics, moral rectitude, and about what you’re reading that week in school…

Some Closing Remarks on Method and Style

Harry G. Frankfurt is a beacon of lucid, comprehensible, and unpretentious philosophizing. I’m going to continue to write about him for awhile—I spun this piece out loosely (I’m…in-between living arrangements at the moment, but have found some good options! So soon enough!) He is wary when straying away from the practical and the usual, and he always wants to anchor his case in ordinary usage and everyday happenstance. If you read philosophy and get up to philosophizing, you often encounter people who have the conception of philosophy as highfalutin, fancy-schmancy, useless chatter: of philosophers as ivory-tower shills who have their main business in redefining terms in unusual ways, but who get pissed off when you don’t accept their fancy re-tooling of words as simple as “thing.” And I agree that this type of philosophizing is annoying.

But, it’s another issue entirely—one I have my temperaments and strategies about, but not a settled, accepted idea about—regarding how philosophy ought to interact with the world and our words. There is the Stoic* and Wittgensteinian* idea that philosophy should be therapeutic.2 Philosophy—when oriented toward the world—should elucidate and provide clear pictures of how things are, but keep the world as it is; it should divest us of illusions, but stop there. Philosophy—when oriented toward ourselves and our language—should describe and demystify what we get up to in order to banish puzzlement and the many, bewildering and metaphysical pitfalls we stumble into when contemplating words like “soul,” “God,” or “universe.” This seems reasonable. But there is also the reasonable reply, “What does ordinary belief and usage have to do with what is actually true?” Or, to put it another way, “Is there any necessary connection between what people typically believe and how people typically use words and the way the world is?” And furthermore, whose “typically” are we really referring to here? We might say, “Humans are mortal.” But what about the billions of people that think that Jesus was human, and is in an important sense, immortal. So much for “All men are mortal” being an entirely accepted and uncontroversial premise.

It’s certainly true that most philosophers I’ve read try to pitch themselves as not fucking with ordinary beliefs. And that it’s annoying to say, “So. I’ve built a massive, interconnected system of concepts. Therefore, I now know that every ordinary object we refer to, like ‘Chair,’ actually means ‘Spaghetti Monster.’” Annoying. But what if chair does mean spaghetti monster? Or if what a chair is reduces to spaghetti monster? Or, for example, take the case of George Berkeley. He is an immaterialist idealist. This means he thinks that there is no such thing as material, or physical stuff out there, that makes up the world. There is only the mental and the perceived. He claims to say that this, in the final analysis, concurs with ordinary thought. This is false, but pop off, King. But here’s the more fucked up thing…I really like Berkeley. I know, I know. I’m rather convinced by his metaphysical arguments against materialism. A tree probably doesn’t make a sound if it falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it: what’s an unheard sound?3

Or, to move from metaphysics to ethics and politics, think about race. Let’s say that most people think that race refers to a biological category or natural kind. We think this such that to say “Dave is black” is to say that Dave’s blackness puts him in a different biological category than Mr. Cracker, who is white. Now, let’s also say that this is false. Racial categories don’t refer to anything biological (species, types, significant genetic variation), but rather refer to some conglomeration of culture and some less-consequential process of population-mixing: as in, to be Mr. Cracker or Dave doesn’t put you in a different type or kind of humanity, just a unique cultural-phenotypical population group. Or, even more in that direction, race isn’t real in any important sense, it’s just some arbitrary chopping-up of the human species on the language side. Now, let’s also say that if people think that race is biological, this leads to some fucked up ethical and political shit (Not too wild of a thing to think.). Well, now as a philosopher, we have a duty to change what people think a word means and to defend that claim with evidence. Normative metaphysical retooling of words doesn’t seem so wacky now, right?

Anywho, I’ll give that more in-depth thought to that at another date, let me close out. It’s not that I am always in perfect agreement with Frankfurt. It’s that whenever I am disagreeing with him, I still feel like I’m on the same planet as him—which certainly doesn’t seem to be the case with some philosophers. You’ll never find yourself going, “Really? How the fuck could you think that?” when reading Frankfurt. So, if you want to direct someone who hates the grand and obscure bullshit side of philosophy to a good text, I suggest On Bullshit. I will take a look at “On Truth” next, and perhaps some of his other essays as well.

Thanks for reading (and happy election season),

Nicholas

The concrete, real-world philosophy club is carrying along in Lake Forest every Monday. I am not there. I wanted to try something out. I will follow along from afar, read the articles or excerpts, and share my thoughts. I will post them after the club has already happened. I will be doing this to minimize my influence on the goings-on at the act…

Read more

Max, my pal, once was describing the mythic monster and witch-like Baba Yaga from Slavic folklore over a giggly and teary-eyed night of boardgames. It was dim, in a lake house with just five of us. He was explaining it sincerely: all of the terror and darkness like a shroud, the munching on kids of it all! I rolled back and responded, “Max. No …

Read more

On Our Terms

What is it to understand something on its own terms? Or someone on their terms? What are we to make of an insistence on such an understanding? An insistence—often brutally and valiantly stubborn—that has understood its stakes under a startling motley of terms: the irr…

Read more

Read more

dog shit

or me

the fly doesn’t care

-Stanford M. Forrester

Hi everybody!1

I have a really, really, really exciting announcement.

MY FIRST BOOK OF POEMS IS PUBLISHED!!!!!

It is titled Dogshit! Find Dogshit here. Go to the Amazonian overlord, there it is!

Did I consider changing the title due to marketing purposes? No! Because getting to say, “I wrote Dogshit” or, “Oh look! Dogshit just came in the mail!” or, “Audrey. I dedicate Dogshit to you,” or “I got you a gift. It’s Dogshit!” is a pretty silly gag!

I was going to wait till Saturday to post it, because I thought it would go up for sale Friday night, but they got through the process quicker than expected, so surprise Thursday night post!

My girlfriend, Audrey Pauer, did the lovely cover. I am proud of this collection. All of the poems were written in the last 3-4 or so years, during college and a bit after. After many months of collating, cutting, revising, editing, and polishing, I’m really excited to show it to folks. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it! Here’s the description I came up with:

Nicholas Charles Urich's first collection of poems is Dogshit. In this book, you'll find poems treading through sex, death, and grief, and the tidefall of city skylines, emaciated trees, and empty fields. Yet, despite that, the surprising, resistant florescence of squirrels, crows, cocks and cows, and the perpetual spring of friendship and love blossoms in his lines. Nicholas draws on imagery ranging from cicadas to gentians and draws on sources ranging from Sophocles to Heidegger. These poems plumb the depths of nature, loneliness, relationships, work, faith, depression and suicide, all while prancing in prose at times humorous and always punchy. Raw and attacking but tender and tactile, Nicholas spins his way through college life, city crawls, late nights and early mornings and reaches from the Old Testament to The Reformation to Nietzsche to Napoleon to share the world as he sees it.

Here are three poems from the book:

graduation

the sweat from your fingers

leaves rust on the strings

and I hum along and nibble

at your knee

as the bouquets from celebrations

wilt.

leaving makes us want.

that is why my fantasies

are of you far away,

walking alone in a city.

because it makes me want to

be there with you.

it makes me hear your singing,

see the way you wince and scrunch

your eyes as you climb to higher

pitches.

I notice your subtle perfume, the spirals of

brown hair like staircases.

I taste your mouth, that loosens when

you sing low,

that loosens when I touch the

nape of your neck.

so I am finding ways to want you while

we are here before things change

and I won’t have any choice

but to want you.

Summer Rain

The worms have strung up

from the sky for the black birds,

for the branches, the grass,

and our weeds–its flowers–

are wet with the curious death

of the mysterious green

Pushing On.

take the jokers out

murder is like the color of  

planks under a bridge, 

you never know 

why you can  

see the things 

that you can.

you aren’t allowed

to see the end of

the tunnel.

and grief is popcorn 

in a microwave:

the paper and oil heating up, 

and always another pop.

I want to share each and every one. I am proud of each poem.

Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Lord Byron: pbbbbhht, they SUCK. "Uhhuhhuhh! The universal human condition! Oh Hamlet is just like when you go to Walmart!” No it isn’t! You’re stupid! Some folks say we oughta read Chaucer, Shakespeare, Lord Byron: to take the effort to adjust ourselves to the mores, the time period, the style and the language: I say, fuck that! Good Writing is, as Bukowski says, BIM-BIM-BIM, BIM-BIM-BIM, BIM-BIM-BIM! It is a full-throttle rocket up your ass! No dandy. No dream. All movement. All dance! So please. Don’t buy Shakespeare—he ain’t even gettin’ the proceeds, my brother in Christ. Go buy Nicholas—he gettin’ the proceeds, and he’s a better poet anyhow.

Thanks for reading,

GO GET DOGSHITTTTT!!! WHHAAAAAT!!!

—Nicholas

P.P.S (Poem Post-Script) (an extra one for the road)

no answer

some nights

a cloud of doubt

smears what might be,

leeching it of color.

i take my nails

and smudge my mind

in an empty room,

trying to peel off the used

sticker from the back of

my bargain bin skull.

on the walls and the

grass and the sidewalks,

and the newly vacant sign;

in the gas station bathroom

mirror; on the knuckles

of world leaders and under

the eyelids of friends turned

social worker, nurse, teacher;

in a cave and in a closet,

in a waiting room;

in the unused guitar slung against the wall,

and in between the lines of

an unread obituary,

and on the ads on the back

of a milk carton;

in the people replacing light fixtures or

packing objects—that other people

think they want—into boxes;

on the steering wheel, and

at the farmer’s market

underneath the

butternut squash,

and at the 5 o’clock meeting,

and in the small blue

moth in a pitcher of mud

there is the question:

Why try?

And it is nights like these

when i am stuck together,

like wax

slides, clumping

down the side of

a candle,

that no answer

offers itself

to me.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

The above image is a real-life gnome. So they are real.

Here is an image of the adorable homes they live in. This gnome’s home is no bigger than a mushroom. This is proof they exist because why would they have a house if they didn’t exist? You cannot have a house unless you are real. They are real and they live in cute little homes.

Gnomes are Important

Gnomes are very awesome. They are silly pranksters they throw pebbles at miners. They have magical powers and can move through solid objects. They are kind and will sometimes benefit miners with fresh veins of ore. They are hard workers, since they spend so long time in gardens, for real life—I swear. But, despite their magical powers, they eat and poop just like us. This makes them extremely relatable, unlike God, who is dead.

God is Dead

An important side-effect of gnome’s ontological veracity is that God is dead and we have killed him.

Why Philosophy of Religion Needs to Take Gnomes Seriously

A volume of essays edited by Steven M. Cahn, Philosophy of Religion, was published in 1970. There are four sections: “The Attributes of God,” “The Language of Religious Discourse,” “Religious Experience,” and “Faith and Reason.” The first section is about God. The section purports to be about religious discourse in general, but the majority of each essay is dedicated to God-Talk. The section of religious experience may as well be called the experience of God. And faith and reason—already a dichotomy derived from Christian history—is about faith in Christian tenets. This is highly usual for the 70’s in philosophy of religion.

Philosophy of Religion, a book by William J. Wainwright, published in 1988, “covers the major problems in philosophy of religion.” He admits in the preface that since “Western religions are theistic, philosophers of religion have usually equated religion with theism” (xi). There is more attention paid to Buddhism and Hinduism. Nonetheless, the first six chapters surround classical theistic topics: evil, free will, God’s existence, and so on.

Twenty Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy, edited by G. Lee Bowie and others, was published in 2007. The first section is called “Religion and the Meaning of Life.” It does a better job, starting off with an essay by Steven M. Cahn, “Religion Reconsidered" that argues that a religion does not have to be supernaturalistic, emphasizing rituals, noting naturalistic metaphysical systems like Spinoza’s, and realizing the possibility of natural, religious moral philosophies and ideals (6). The collection has short, sweet pieces on Buddhism, pluralism, feminist philosophies of religion, and Nietzsche’s critiques of religion.

Nonetheless, if one peruses for specific religions in the Philosophy of Religion section on philpapers.com—the largest, open-access, online archive of philosophy books, articles and the like—one finds 25,034 pieces indexed. 4,135 for Buddhism. 8,452 for Christianity. 4,715 for Islam. 5,636 for Judaism. And under 200 combined for the “Other Religions” and “Specific Religions, Misc.” section, and many of these pieces. There’s also a small section of 23 pieces dedicated to Chinese religions. Nothing about gnomes. Nothing!

Philosophical analysis of Christian and theistic topics is cool as hell, and I really like it. I’m not even saying that Christianity isn’t true, good, and whatnot—I don’t know, man. And people like Wainwright and editors of Twenty Questions, and probably many, many more folks today, are doing a good job expanding the field of philosophy of religion. And, of course, these are the dominant religions! It makes total sense that they make up the lion’s share of analysis. I’m saying, why aren’t we talking about gnomes? Nietzsche tells us that God is dead, but that God’s shadow will be cast over human thought for…well, God knows how long! A better image is that God’s body rots underneath the floorboards and gnomes now sprout up in his stead!

Besides analysis of Christian and Buddhist ideas, on occasion, there is a worry about the plurality of religions—or about the term “religion” itself (its history, its practical use and development). There is a piece by Ramakrishna (1836-1886) in Twenty Questions called Many Paths to the Same Summit, that starts like this: “God has made different religions to suit different aspirants, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a paths is by no means God Himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with wholehearted devotion” (16).

This type of thing frustrates me. It frustrates me because it makes God the hidden telos of all practical and theoretical religious activities. All that does not ultimately serve God is consigned to anthropology, to curiosity, to dust behind the museum glass: the blood of religion becomes a plaque or brochure, a non-consideration since we’re all being drawn back to God either way. Here “other religions” are collapsed under one label and are proven to be really—and, we know that “really”, “actually”, and “in the final analysis” are sanctimonious suspicions and metaphysical lobotomies whose real purpose is to make a monster of one’s own, to implant a new brain and a new nervous system into the murdered text—subservient and reacting to God. That this is nothing other than their personal religion painting each continent and horizon grey escapes them…

Philosophy of religion is often not philosophy of “religion” at all. But we can imagine a philosophy of religion that is more fearless, more open, far less beholden to the concerns of the last two millennia. One admires a startling, motley diversity of beliefs and practices for philosophical reflection: folk beliefs in healing spirits and sprites; pagan beliefs; ancestral worship; religious activity concerned primarily with nature, community, ethics, and rituals; the worship of many gods; New Age and Space-Age religions; cults and variegated sects and offshoots. And above all, these phenomenon do not derive their significance, internal cohesion, or veracity to their relatedness or subservience to God or the Buddha. And when one looks away from the Buddhist ideas of impermanence and emptiness, or on the Christian God’s admixture of perplexing attributes (Omnipresence yet transcendence! Omniscience yet his will for us to be free!), one sees GNOMES. As a gnome-believer, I am not climbing up the same summit Ramakrishna.

Hear, Hear!—Those who can that is…we fated ones! The time has come to move on: first from believer, to non-believer, to gnome-believer! Don’t set down your staff yet, climbing the mountain—up on this summit, we look around and don’t see God anywhere, nor do we swim in diaphonous rivers: yeah, yeah…we see solid caves and growing gardens! Us gnome-believers climb summits not to stay, but to climb down again for new veins to mine, new seedlings to sow...

Thanks for reading,

Nicholas, gnome-believer

This post was sponsored by the Gnome Gang, a real association of real gnomes. Because gnomes have an association, this is a sufficient condition that they are real. Something must exist to form an association.

P.S. Dogshit, my book of poems, will release next Saturday. Bigger post soon.

What is the seal of liberation?— No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Bleeding Heart

When I was a wee lad, I was towblonde.1

My parents came back from church the other day and recounted seeing a child that reminded them impeccably of me as a child. The kid was blonde and napped through the whole mass on his father’s shoulder.

I don’t remember all of my naps at church…because I was asleep. But the memories I do have of being awake on Sunday mornings are of rambunctious, rancorous, rebellious rage. It is hard to overstate the torrential energy my little body threw up into hapless fight each Lord’s day. I have many visions of kicking and screaming as my nails dug deep indents into the floor as my parents (the fuckers!) struggled to drag me into the car to go to mass. Needless to say, the whole Catholic gig did not jig well with young and sleepy Nicholas.

I would shake my lil’ booty, jump around the pews, and play Pokémon Red Mystery Dungeon on my Pikachu-styled Gameboy. One time, I did try and pay attention, to take the solemnity seriously. I kneeled in the cavernous, overarching, dark, wooden and gloomy church, dedicated to Padre Pio—a saint that conjured a glib image for he had the stigmata: puncture wounds administered by God to reflect where Christ was nailed through.2 (Seems like a rude miracle, God, but okay.) I pushed my palms together, digits straight, the tips of my fingers pressed together: the spiritual sign for “I mean business!”

I was silent. I felt as if I heard something. I even began to see in my mind’s eye a faint, ephemeral image of some stately and serene man. Then, it occurred to my little head—now with brown hair: the dimness of churches had drench-dyed the sunshine out of it—that I was making it up. And, in typical, young naivete, I immediately drew a general inference. No one was experiencing God. They were making him up too.

Between my revulsion for the midwestern, stuffy Catholic aesthetic and this atheistic epiphany—and a healthy dash of resentment and hatred of my father from years of fighting—preteen and tween Nicholas began to generate a stubbornness not yet beheld in the Urich household. As all of my three siblings and parents were walking into the Mass doors one day, I stopped moving. I stared at my Dad in his button-up. My heart was pounding. I felt little and was taking a stab that I knew was not going to end well, but I hated Mass so much I had to try something. A wave of scolding disappointment, stern and harsh remarks, disbelief and grimaces washed over me: my siblings looked terrified. Leveraging the fact that people were currently swarming in to find seats, and that it would be immensely awkward for my parents to start a big scene, I walked into a far-off hallway and plopped myself down, preferring staring at a wall to joining them.

In my early teenage years, beginning High School, I stopped going to Church altogether. The years of truly heart-wrenching battles and screaming matches took its toll on everybody’s nervous systems. This wasn’t an active peace, where everyone had made amends and accepted each other’s differences: an unstable and awkward, but real and effortful attempt. No, this was the peace of the Cold War, of the tense and still air of creeping through a minefield, an unholy silence and agreement to fuck off in opposite directions.

What about now? What about long, brown-haired, agnostic Nicholas with the Religion degree? Well. I love and respect my parents and I think Catholicism is a gorgeous religion and a rich repository of tradition, history and philosophy. I’m theologically about as close to Catholicism as I’ve ever been (Shoutout to Luther. You dumbass.), though I’m not much closer to having a Catholic faith, nor any other type of faith. Being a parent is impossible and my parents were not dastardly villains. Nonetheless, I think they should have spent some time explaining to me why they love their faith, why it’s important to them that I come with them3, and allow me to navigate that time with more freedom and flexibility. A heart wrapped in thorns can’t beat without bleeding. Something deeply different in me now is that I am proud of my ability to change so dramatically. But this was a hard-earned and ambiguous arrival.

This section of my life has always been an active construction site, the type that seems to carry on forever. Every time I pass it, I go, “Really? Still under construction! This city fucking stinks.” I’m working on it and it has gotten to a functional, if not yet beautiful and polished place. The reason I tell this story is that I’ve interpreted and re-interpreted this part of me so many times: charitably or uncharitably to all those involved (including myself). But one of the predominant emotions I’ve had to puzzle out is the deep resentment for my parents and for Catholicism at large. There was a time I scorned religiosity, flouted the sacred, and didn’t want to be Catholic (or be of any faith) simply because people who had wronged me were—not the least because I envied their security, and simultaneously since I supplicated to a personal shrine of sadness as if my stealing away from the world made me holy.

Security: Doing Your Own Thing

The most distinctive and ugly foible of the Nietzschean failure is that they define themselves in opposition to something or someone they hate. What is the solution to this barbed type of person? How does one overcome this type in oneself? As much of the failure’s faults stem from insecurity, the solution lies in being secure in oneself.

This is the fundamental condition to being a Nietzschean success: security. Comfort, cheerfulness, the pleasant charm and basking smile in one’s magnanimities and in the lies and truths that nourish who you are: this exudes from the Nietzschean success. It does not bother you when others are different, even radically so. Indeed, one finds it charming, necessary, and relieving. You have the firm foundation of yourself beneath you. When others inform you of their drastically different orientations, values, and worldview, you don’t cower, curl up, and careen in existential torpor: you are grateful. You find it an occasion to laugh at the life that put us here the way a child pokes its tongue out in jest.

I was once driving with one of my siblings a year or so ago, and I had mentioned how I was more open to becoming Catholic than ever before. Not in the sense that I was actively drawn to it, but in the sense that I felt neutral before the monolith: that my identity had a beginner’s suppleness such that Islam, Christianity, atheism, and the whole gamut of religions and non-religions, all laid out before me like smirks and small huts, light and possible and all alluring in their own way. My brother replied something to the effect of, “No, I could never be Catholic, I wouldn’t want to give that to Dad.” The fault is that one disallows the possibility of one’s life on the grounds of one’s resentment. It’s not that Catholicism would be right for you, I want to stress. It’s that, if it was, you would never know. You’ve yet to unmoor yourself, to feel real freedom.

The trick is how to affirm one’s self and identity—the history that led to you, the present that sustains you, and the future one wills—while acknowledging this difference. Nietzsche proclaimed in this vein:

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.4

One overcomes by looking, more than away, but elsewhere and to yourself. “One kills, not by anger but by laughter.”5 How do we love our fate, our self? To see all our past nay-saying and the various blemishes as beautiful and necessary? All the suffering that forged us as good and needed? One must love fate, love what is, and know that everything that was, even the ugliest things in your past, made you what you are. When one says “No” to life, one is saying “No” to yourself.6

One must love yourself and all of its conditions, even the nastiest of things. But one also must not ruminate, one must look forward: use memory for gratitude, then grow. In performing a dance you’ve practiced for months, there’s a sense in which your body remembers each and every failure, but there’s also a sense in which, to allow that beauty to come forth from the failure, one must forget with each step as well.

Sustainability and Overabundance: Acting as Overflowing

Before Thus Spoke Zarathustra even really begins, we learn that Zarathustra left his home, went to the mountains, and enjoyed “his spirit and his solitude and he did not weary of it for ten years.”7 He then speaks to the sun, the “superabundant star,” blessing it for its “superfluity” and its light, and that he has wearied of his wisdom, and he needs “hands outstretched to take it.” He praises the sun for it can “behold without envy even an excessive happiness” and he blesses the “cup that wants to overflow.” Thus, just as the sun goes down, he goes down to the people to share his wisdom.8

Before Zarathustra begins his journey, he praises the sun and grows in himself for ten years. Becoming who he is is the same thing as becoming excellent. Virtue just is being the best version of yourself overabundantly. The cycle of growth and generosity, of solitude and self-love that then flows out to others, is vital to the Nietzschean success’ outlook and behavior. The Nietzschean success acts as the sun does, they have an overabundance of lightness and virtue that naturally spills out of themselves.

Think about when you have a lot of energy and you play, you go be silly, you make art quick and with abandon, you’re foolish. Think about when you are talking about something you’ve studied for years that you love, something you are nerdy about: you gush, it pours out of you easily: you can hardly stop yourself! The Nietzschean failure’s generosity and charity usually stems from an asceticism, from a lack, from a gloomy and scratch-throated, “I must.” They give to others without first taking care of themselves. What they give is not what they love, but what a morality outside of themselves has commanded them that they should love. But the Nietzschean success gives what they love, freely and overabundantly.

The Nietzschean success, in their security, is sustainable. Wellbeing and living the life you want to live—the life that you know is good for you, and that you know is beautiful and worth sharing—is the refutation of failure’s ascetic, self-flagellating moralization of their own failure, a refutation that is laughter, looking away. If you are going to dig a harsh well of resentment to exert and expand yourself over the world and others, whatever success you find will be met with your depreciation, your health’s descendance. You can care about others, and even devote most of your time to others—either in toxically trying to change them or “beneficently” and compassionately trying to “help” them—before taking care of yourself. But it’s a game your bound to lose. Until you have the healthy reserve of yourself, your care and compassion will result in fatigue and weakness: love must stem from overabundance.

The Eternal Recurrence: Amor fati

Nietzsche poses a thought experiment, a test, to us. He asks:

What if a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you.’

It may be crushing. More fatefully, he asks, “how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”9 This is the test of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same.

Who would you have to be, how would you have to change, to react—not just intellectually, but from the pit of your stomach—with joy and gratitude to a world like this? The demon comes to you in your deepest loneliness and depression, when life is at its most distasteful and all the welling-up of rejection conquers your past, your today, your tomorrow. Life would seem to be a curse and flight from it the only cure.

Nietzsche suggests that the strong person, someone filled with security, humor, cheerfulness, honesty (the counter to the subterranean theatre), yes-saying, would be filled with gratitude at such a fate. They love themselves and the world so much: the real tragedy would be its closure. The Nietzschean success—even in their depression, even with the hammering knowledge of all the wrong turns and hard nights and ugly-eyed enemies—would stand up and rejoice.

If you pause and really let this test sink in, it’s a tall order. It reveals all to which you say “No” to in life and in yourself. For often what we are saying “No” to is the life that broke us. But to love even that, to be grateful even for your brokenness, is the key to joy. “Did you ever say Yes to one joy?” He asks. “O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well.” Joy at one thing spills over, “For all joy wants — eternity!”10

The test reveals who you are. Then, it orients you toward action and motivation. Nietzsche suggests that the motive of all revenge, indeed revenge itself, is “the will’s antipathy towards time and time’s ‘It was.’” To redeem our regret and revenge is to redeem “the past and to transform every ‘It was’ into an ‘I wanted it thus!’”11 If the life you are living were to recur exactly, would you be disgusted and repelled? Well, that’s one good reason to change things: to seek flourishing, happiness, joy, power, beauty, and goodness elsewhere.

To color one’s quotidian existence in the dramatic smears of eternity is not always appropriate. Perhaps it makes more sense at the level of one’s life as a whole rather than in one’s daily actions: a structure and ideal to shoot for, but not to obsess over. And as Nietzsche knows, though there’s time for seriousness, the Nietzschean success can dance and laugh over most things, so until the test becomes a cause for light joy, until one has overcome it, one has not passed.

In a vital passage, Zarathustra describes the spirit moving through three metamorphoses: a camel, a lion, and a child. The camel learns and grows weary with weight and knowledge, bearing the past on their shoulders. The lion destroys, vital and strong, present and ferocious, but it is not strong enough to create new values, only to get through obstacles. For life, for the future, for true freedom, one needs to be a child, for the child “is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a spot, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.”12 To do better than forgive, to forget! To be a spring to yourself each day, to look upon the old with a new eye, to be a child…

Love of Self

I once had a debate—a term I use with no connotation of inflammatory rhetoric or rosy-red cheeks flushed with heated anger—with my professor Roshni Patel after a sparse club meeting about Nietzsche’s ontology of flourishing and the valorization and exhortation of the self versus the Mahāyāna bodhisattva ideal of nonself and ever-expanding compassion.

In one type of meditation—loving-kindness or metta meditation—one contemplates with full sincerity and lucid awareness thoughts like “May I be safe from harm”, “May I be happy” , and “May I be strong.” Then, one gradually extends these intentions to other people: first to loved ones, then neighbors, then random people, and eventually even people you hate, your “enemies.” You can only move on to the next stage—fruitfully, honestly, and sustainably, that is—when you believe that each stage of person deserves this love and that you have resolved diligently to embody and enact this love. This is paired with practices that loosen one’s clinging to the “self” notion, allowing one to realize one’s interdependence with all beings and people: that the boundary between loving “me” and loving “you” becomes metaphysically untenable, petty, and useless.

The debate was about the merits of that position as opposed to the Zarathustran idea of working toward an ecological wellbeing of virtuous selves, wherein every being fulfills its purpose to the maximum extent, feeding into a positive feedback cycle of communal excellence—notably, of course, this has a similar ring to interdependence in Buddhism. But, one wants the betterment of others because it is tied up with the betterment of the self. One doesn’t let go of the self, but wills it to grow and expand overabundantly like a waterfall, and one loves even one’s “enemies” for they allow one to exercise one’s virtuous capacities.

There was a point in the discussion where there was a turn. Agnostic as to which ontology will result in the best ethical and political flourishing in the long run, I recounted a story. The Dalai Lama was once asked a question about self-hatred. He was confused. The question was asked again, and the translator tried many iterations and attempts to communicate the question, but The Dalai Lama could not seem to grasp what “self-hatred” meant, even saying “I feel quite ignorant.”13

It is possible that some of us—perhaps Westerners in general, especially of Christian heritage—have hatred of ourselves, self-depreciation, shame, regret, envy, resentment, and the whole weak assortment of ascetic descendance at our core. If the storehouses of Buddhism contain wisdom worth accessing—as surely it does—it remains inaccessible to those of us who deep down only want to see ourselves wither. In the loving-kindness meditation, one must truly feel as if the person you are sending this love to deserves the love. The meditative progression starts from love of self as if this is the easiest part. The ideal I’ve discussed is necessary precisely because we live in a time where it is the hardest part. Until we can overcome our hatred of ourselves and the regret of our past, we will only reach to others to hurt ourselves.

Take care,

Nicholas

P.S. Other cute photos of baby me, because ohhh look at that lil’ guy! What a Nietzschean success! The third Metamorphosis at work eating raisins!

Subscribe now

The Moldy Plank!

On our first day at the lake last summer, me and my friends—A.J., Max, Audrey, and Davis—walked down to the dock. It was a lovely, sunny day. We were in our swimsuits. We were going to go for a dip and then wait for my Aunt to swing by on her boat to pick us up and hurl us around on the inner-tube. Stepping out from the dusty and rocky area, Davis walked onto the main part of the dock, past the buoyed bridge. I followed. Before I could make it all the way across the bridge, a plank—flimsy from years of water damage—gave out. My leg shot through. Half of my body sank through the bridge, shooting down, disappearing in an instant, my toes grazing limply in the water. My shin rammed hard against a metal support.

Through my friends startled gasps and quick worry, I struggled to pull myself up from the newly-made gap in the bridge. The moldy plank, now in two, drifted off. I was helped under the shadow of the roof. Slowly, the pain became thinkable, and I could mentally assess the damage, then judge if I needed medical attention. There was a large scrape and a big patch of redness, but it didn’t appear that anything was broken.

My first and immediate thought was OW FUCK OW SHIT OW. But my second thought was, “I’m really glad it was me.” It was our first day there and I was so ready to share one of the only places on earth I’ve come close to feeling tranquil. So, I was glad my friends weren’t injured as I was. Secondly, the people who owned the dock—it wasn’t ours, my Aunt is friends with everyone and much is shared down there at Potato Lake—were older and much more frail than me, so it could’ve been very bad if they fell. The pain continued for a few days, but I managed and it slowly subsided. We all went on to have a beautiful time.

Anyhow, shortly after my fall the moldy wood, floating under the dock, appeared again. Someone pulled it from the water, placing it onto the deck. And I performed a monologue along these lines: “I hate you plank. You have injured me. I now define my identity in opposition to you. To be the opposite of a moldy plank, or to be injured by one, is to be good. However, to be a moldy plank, or anything like it, is to be evil. I will now base my identity on this injury as revenge and my hatred, envy, resentment for you moldy plank.”

The overelaborate, cheeky, ironic performance, in detail, of how not to handle a situation like this was a common joke in my friend group that I started. The bit is to pretend to be a Nietzschean failure.

How it Started

The fall of my Junior year, I took my college’s Hegel to Nietzsche class (now called THE OWL AND THE HAMMER, hoho!), taught by the brilliant Dr. Daw-Nay Evans. I read On the Genealogy of Morality. I hated it: I thought it was dangerous, irrational garbage, which disregarded basic values one should have for truth. But, I continued to ruminate on it. In the Spring Semester, the Philosophy Club voted to read Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I was happy to work through some of my initial prejudice. This cracked open my conception of Nietzsche even more. I had started to catch glimpses of Nietzsche’s overarching projects, where his deepest insights lay, and which of my prejudices were unfounded (and which were). Through a year-long meditation on two of his most important works, I began to feel the value of the way he saw things. So, that summer, I read Beyond Good and Evil and Antichrist. I started to ask Professor Evans for some suggestions and I read some scholarly articles (including most of Evans’ book!). By that point, I had moved through hatred, to ambivalence, to a settled incorporation of his best ideas. The notion of the Nietzschean failure largely grew out of On the Genealogy of Morality, and the birth of the Nietzschean success came from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Friedrich Nietzsche has many concepts that are anchors in his oeuvre. Concepts that, if you don’t understand them, you don’t understand Nietzsche. Some of these include Will to Power, The Eternal Recurrence, and Master/Slave Morality. Studying Nietzsche, I developed many obscure, arcane, esoteric bits between me and my friends that revolved around referencing these ideas. Making bits out of something is commonplace and vital in my learning process: whether I’m utilizing Wittgenstein’s spatial picture theory of meaning to describe me farting on the couch or noting that in Spinoza’s system, me peeing my pants on the church pulpit in 4th grade is part of God’s nature.

When friends would ask sincerely for advice, say, about how to deal with a dicey roommate situation, we would not infrequently reply something to the effect of, “Kill them. Will to power.” Indeed, I have a shirt that has the image of a stick-figure man blowing his brains out with the words, “Will to Power” written under it. This shirt is amazing. It is also impossible to wear anywhere. I once wore it to a Christian coffee shop down the street. I did not understand why I was getting dirty looks from the old ladies. I got home, looked down, and thought, “Yeah…that explains that.”

Another bit: My pal Davis would simply say “Eternal Recurrence” and nothing else and gesture as if he had made a brilliant point at times where it made no sense and had no application. For example, I’d say, “Yeah, I used to prefer cake cones, then I started liking waffle cones. But I’ve moved back to cake cones. I just like the sweetness more.” Davis’ astute response: “Yeah. Eternal Recurrence.”

Now these bits don’t actually have much to do with their actual conceptual corollaries. But one actually did. One could catch one of us—at dances amongst bodies sweating and flailing, in the lunchroom across uncooked broccoli and tomato basil soup, while studying in the library, or chilling in a dorm room—diagnosing someone as a Nietzschean failure. So, what is a Nietzschean failure?

The Nietzschean Failure

The Lamb and the Hawk

In section 13 of On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche offers a parable.

That the lambs feel anger toward the great birds of prey does not strike us as odd: but that is no reason for holding it against the great birds of prey that they snatch up little lambs for themselves. And when the lambs say among themselves ‘these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is as little as possible a bird of prey but rather its opposite, a lamb,—isn’t he good?’ there is nothing to criticize in this setting up of an ideal, even if the birds of prey should look on this a little mockingly and perhaps say to themselves: ‘we do not feel any anger towards them, these good lambs, as a matter of fact, we love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.’1

Here we have some lambs that are hunted by the birds of prey on occasion. The group of lambs are, indeed, losing. They are pissed off and powerless. But the birds of prey are just doing their thing, living their best life, winning! The lambs set up a moral story for themselves. They also set up their virtue: to be the opposite of the bird of prey. To be swept up and ate, to be powerless and weak, to be all the things that a lamb is, is to be good. And to sweep up lambs, to be powerful and strong, and all the things a hawk is, is to be evil.

The birds of prey somehow catch wind of this, perhaps the Lambs are subtweeting the Hawks. However the means, they learn of their little, moral story. No one can stop them from doing this, and, in and of itself, it isn’t really so bad, though it’s pretty pathetic. The birds of prey are quite grateful for the lambs: they have no petty, hidden resentment and vengeful feelings.

The birds of prey are like nobles and masters, whose values and ethics grow “out of a triumphant yes-saying” to themselves. The morality of the lambs is like the morality of those powerless against the nobles. They “recover their losses only through an imaginary revenge.” As he puts it, “from the outset slave morality [what Nietzsche calls the “lamb” morality] says ‘no’ to an ‘outside,’ to a ‘different,’ to a ‘not-self.’” The lambs need something outside of themselves to value at all: their actions are “from the ground up, reaction.”2 This is the reversion of the noble morality of “good and bad” to the slave morality of “good and evil.”

How this reversion happens is simple: take the “good” for the noble, this becomes the “evil” for the slave; and the good of the slave is the same thing as being not-evil, i.e. being not the noble.

There is an initial agent, like the bird of prey. They have their nature and do whatever it is they do. They do their thing, live their life, and love and celebrate who they are. They’re healthy and secure. The good is what is good for them. They are grateful for the lambs, for they help them be who they are, and want them to flourish as lambs. They realize that wellbeing is tied to an ecology of virtuous selves: every being reaching for its purpose, flourishing in its particular capacities. To the bird of prey, anything outside of that frame of reference is bad. But not bad in the sense of ugly, malfunctional, or deserving of disgust, destruction, and hatred. Bad, here, just meaning, not preferred, unchosen, and not thought about: indifference.

Professor Evans had a great way to think about the noble’s “bad.” Just think about going into buy some shampoo at a convenience store. You walk in and you know which shampoo is best for you, and which one you like the best. You navigate right to the shampoo aisle, see a different brand, walk past it, then come to your shampoo. You pick it up, buy it, and leave. The shampoo that you gave no thought to and all the other shampoos you didn’t even notice are “bad” in the noble sense. You don’t want to destroy them. Someone out there surely likes or needs those different types, but you don’t.

The reactionary agent, the lamb, detests the lambs nonchalance and sets themselves up entirely against the hawk.

Opposition: “I’m not like them…”

The fundamental feature of the Nietzschean failure is that they define themselves—determine their behavior, their qualities and virtues, their goals—in opposition to something or someone that they hate. Call this the reactive or oppositional method of building an identity. You look to something you hate and build your personality around being not that. This personal, reactive process should be quite familiar to us.

One of my favorite examples of oppositional identity-building are Christians that are obsessed with proofs of God and Atheists who are obsessed with disproving God and countering the Christians proffered proofs. For example, there is the Christian who is always seeking out articles and docuseries about, for example, how the Flood from Genesis really happened and geologists and paleontologists corroborate this fact3, or how the most recent research into quantum mechanics proves there to be a benevolent creator. This is the Christian who actively attacks scientific rationality because they feel threatened by developments like evolution or the age of the earth. And there is the Christian who seeks out atheists online or in the streets just to beef with them. And, of course, there are Atheists whose only prerogative is to defend scientific rationality, and justify why science proves that God is not real. They seek out Christians online and in-person just to shit on their belief system. The most blatant, ugly, and ridiculous examples of this are YouTube videos that have titles like this: “Christian Professors OWNS bamboozled, foolish, LGBT, atheist dum-dum!” or “Atheist Scientist DUNKS ON piece of shit, idiot, evangelical cuck!” You need not search far for this type of content and we are all familiar with it. This demonstrates one of the fundamental qualities of the Nietzschean failure: they are insecure.

One of the main things I want to point out about this is that instead of just doing your own thing the Nietzschean failure Christian or Atheist actively orients their life around refuting their enemy. So, instead of genuinely enjoying studying proofs or disproofs of God, they study arguments and rhetorical techniques specifically in preparation for countering their enemy.4 The Nietzschean failure makes their life worse through their resentment of their opposition: valuing making others unhappy rather than making themselves happy.

Another way to think about this is through picturing good and bad sportsmanship. A bad sport hates their enemy, taunts them, breaks the rules, jeers at them and tries to get under their skin. They don’t respect their opponent and are being dictated in all of their actions and feelings by reacting against their opponent. The opponent, on the other hand, simply is playing for the love of the game. They actually are grateful for their opponent because they are allowing them the opportunity to show their strength, their patience, and to express their joy and skill in the sport. If they think about the person’s bad sportsmanship at all, it is for brief moments of pity and humor, brushing it off, laughing. What is for Nietzschean failure an entire drama is for the Nietzschean success a shrug, a smile, and a graceful return to the fun.

Moralizing Vengeance: “I’m better than them…”

Not all virtues are moral virtues. Nietzschean failures are over-moral. They scorn luxury, enjoyment, and free time that is not spent barreling towards their moral goal. They funnel their excellences through the slim slot of morality. Shoulders tensed, worry on their brow, they need to avoid being evil. Instead of actively seeking positive virtues of their own, their behavior is dedicated to setting up mental guardrails, tiptoeing between them, and barking at those that don’t follow their projected, private roadblocks.

This person cannot stand that people get on with their days. They suffer for some private ideal and vilify anyone who doesn’t live up to it. You see this a lot with Instagram Activists. They torture themselves by consuming a great deal of horrifying footage and news. Privately, they have convinced themselves—as upset as this makes them—that it is a duty to stay informed (being “informed” here meaning “doom-scrolling through hours of violent, terrifying footage”). This “staying informed” often does not translate to efficacious, political action—sit-ins in the headquarters of powerful agencies, campaigning and volunteering, or charitable donations. Oftentimes, it translates to feeling really bad on the internet, convincing oneself that this obsessive self-harm is healthy, then feeling really bad around other people. Then, whenever you see people that seem unconcerned, indifferent, or simply focused on other goals, you become angry and insecure. Instead of acting on one’s anger, one focuses on moralizing against those around you who don’t share your suffering and ideals. In a shroud of resentment, when one could act to change, one rather remains in pain at the circumstances, reveling in one’s passive aggression.

In the Nietzschean failure there curdles the strong and shrill moral desire to not be like them. There is the overwhelmingly tendency to blame the majority of your pain on some other person. If they are happy, you envy their joy, and in an effort of revenge, try to tear them down. You insult them when they are themselves, and you (and here is huge part of it) try to bring them down to your unhappiness. They made you suffer (you think). They aren’t sharing your suffering. They should suffer too.

You don’t feel safe around them, like you are constantly walking on eggshells. There is no room for the slip-ups, the foibles, or the flaws, which are what make us funny, strange, individual and interesting. When someone does something that truly crosses a boundary or that is really upsetting, then of course one should have that discussion. But there’s a threshold of criticality and peering into the nooks, crannies and pores of everyone’s spirit that becomes unhealthy. Nietzschean failures are over this threshold. They are petty, picking people apart like scabs. In a mixture of envy and revenge, they want to tear people down: this is the aspect of over-moral vengeance.

The Subterranean Theatre: “I will change them…”

As will become clearer in the next post, a lot of the qualities of the Nietzschean failure stem from their insecurity. They are not content with difference. One point that is easy to miss in the parable is that in Nietzsche’s ontology everything just is the way it is.5 As in, one thing cannot will itself to be something that it isn’t. If you’re strong, you can’t will yourself to be weak: you, in a sense, necessarily express strength since you are naturally strong. And the weak can only express weakness.

The Nietzschean failure resents the fact that things are the way they are: that some people are different from them. One way this manifests is by building up a subterranean theatre, where all communication is underhanded, secretive, and dishonest. You’re never quite sure of how you stand with them, but you know it is isn’t good. They’re avoidant, but swaddling and overbearing. Being around them feels like being in a chamber with the air sucked out. “Can I breathe?” You think. “What the hell did I do wrong?”

This is another fundamental feature of the Nietzschean failure: they are dishonest and prefer to slowly build up an environment where they are never wrong, and to be anything other than their miserable self is to be evil. The more you know what you need to be happy, the more they envy and desire to bring you down. They do this with words. I’m not saying a Nietzschean failure ain’t gon’ throw hands. I am saying that it is more typical for them to attempt to control you by whittling away at your happiness, convincing you that the things that make you flourish are what make you evil.

The best person who exemplifies this quality of being a Nietzschean failure is the toxic partner. They make you guilty for not being under their thumb, for going out or partying. They want to know everything about you so they can push your buttons. Sapping joy isn’t a sucker punch, it’s surreptitious: it is the dismissive comment, the guilt-trip, and the insult. Most of their pity and snarkiness is subterranean, beneath the surface. And when it comes above ground, it is an earthshattering battle that leaves everyone feeling horrible and worse off.6

From Smog to Halcyon Heights

The Nietzschean failure defines themselves negatively. They are unhappy with their place in the world. And they are dissatisfied with how others don’t share their personal, moral stories. Insecurity, over-moral vengeance, and dishonest control are some of the primary aspects and behaviors of the Nietzschean failure.

In failure’s twilight there falls insecurity, envy, resentment, revenge, oppositional identification, weakness, and the curdled miasma of underhanded attempts to control others through torturing oneself. As success dawns, there rises security, strength, cheerfulness, confidence, and the attempt to grow and expand one’s own virtues gratefully and beautifully. In success, one realizes that others being the best versions of themselves can only make the world better. My next post will examine this success.

That is how to be the lamb: now, how to be the hawk?

Thanks for reading,

Nicholas

P.P.S (Poem Post-Script)

This is a poem that is coming out in my new book Dogshit very soon. Stay posted!

boy run rage

stave off your microscope eye

that hates risk and hates joy

and invites everyone to

passivity and coyness,

to be weak and inward and

tending to frills,

detesting play.

If this were Genesis,

I would beat your skull in with

a rock,

and a grin would form,

then my face would flatten

for real sin clears the air 

of heavy spirits, and I would rejoin the

dancers and wrestlers.

Share

Refer a friend

Subscribe now

Hold with the Maker, not the Made.

Sit with the Cause, or grim or glad.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hi. Welcome to the third and final post of my ineffability series. You can find the initial post here:

So far, in this series, I have explored Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his picture theory of meaning, and how he uses it to draw a boundary in language between the sayable, the showable, and what lay beyond both. The last post delved into Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. I looked at his methods for communicating what is essentially incommunicable, the subjective nature of faith. He utilizes pseudonymous authorship, irony, and theological acrobatics to catalyze an existential reorientation toward God.

Share

In this post, I am going to look at the thought of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius has many irons in the fire. Like early Wittgenstein, he has a theory of language sensitive to the limits of what can be said and thought. Like Kierkegaard, he’s concerned about the logic of transcendence and utilizes pseudonymity to convey his message. But he also has a robust, systematic theory of Scripture, the Church, angels, hierarchies, evil, causation, and much more. I will not touch on all of it, or tie it neatly together. So in this post, I will share a small piece of his most fundamental idea: how do we approach something like God?

Sculpting God

Apophatic theology stresses the negative, uses denials, and emphasizes the transcendence of God, just how dissimilar he is to our ordinary, creaturely world. Cataphatic theology delineates the positive attributions and qualifications we can make of God, usually coming to conclusions like: “God is Three Persons in one simple union” or “God is the Creator.” Dionysius utilizes both of these in tandem.

I discussed the metaphor of sculpting in the initial post on Ineffability, but it bears revisiting.

Dionysius says that what it would really be “to see and to know” God, who is so far beyond ordinary seeing and knowing, is to praise God “in a transcending way, namely through the denial of all beings.” He says that such a person would be like a sculptor for they “remove every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image, and simply by this act of clearing aside they show up the beauty which is hidden.” (138)1

Above is Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture Atlas Slave. The slave has been partially revealed. The marble stone out of which the slave emerges is like the stuff of our ordinary world in relation to God. It is the theologian’s job to respect that everything comes from God and is of God, but also to gesture towards the fact that God is far beyond anything of this world. This is where Michelangelo comes in, with his vision and his chisel, removing to reveal the form. And keep in mind that this apophatic movement is a way to approach God. The only way to know and speak of God—who so far beyond our human capacities of knowledge and speech—is to not know and not speak. God is here, but he is not here. I’ll let Dionysius speak his piece on this and provide a bit of commentary:

We therefore approach that which is beyond all as far as our capacities allow us and we pass by way of the denial and the transcendence of all things and by way of the cause of all things. God is therefore known in all things and as distinct from all things. He is known through knowledge and through unknowing…He is all things in all things and he is no thing among things. He is known to all from all things and he is known to no one from anything. (108 and 109)

What I want to stress is that God is “known” and is talked about. It is just in a way that is beyond ordinary human means: it is hyper-knowledge and hyper-speech facilitated and revealed by God. (Hyper being a Greek preposition that means, among many other things, beyond. It sounds silly to me. “Me? No, no, no. I don’t have regular, ol’ dusty knowledge. I have SUPER KNOWLEDGE!)

But how can God be present everywhere, in some sense, yet totally transcending reality as we know it? In other words, how can God be totally transcendent yet omnipresent? He has two helpful metaphors.

God is omnipresent in the way that every point on the circumference of a circle shares the same center point (62). The point right in the middle of the circle is, in one sense, completely removed from the perimeter of the circle, but it is also logically, necessarily, and eternally connected to each point on the perimeter.

The other metaphor he provides is of a seal. Every stamp of a seal bears a resemblance to the original insignia. The “same whole seal” is in each impression and none of the impressions only partake in a part: they are fully created and touched by the creator. The stamp’s insignia is differentiated based on the nature of the wax that it was pressed into. So, maybe the wax is red or blue, and perhaps it dries quickly, or distorts the insignia slightly, or maybe the whole process is completely botched due to the nature of what the stamp is pressed into (maybe it’s not even wax). There is a sense, then, in which every impression sent out relates back to the original creator, but no single stamp is that creator. It is a reference and a sign.2

God is beyond being, so the only way to speak of God would be to speak in a way beyond speech. And the only way to know God is in a knowing beyond knowing. And the only way for that idea to have reached us in the first place is if that transcendent creator made himself known. In Dionysius’ case, this was done through the incarnation of Christ and the revelations in Scripture that are contained in the tradition of the Church. But let’s talk a bit more about this chiseling away, and just what that looks like.

Well, it’s not not God…

Dionysius tells us that most of the time when he is negating something of God—a quality, predicate, object, what-have-you—he is not doing so in a privative matter. Negation as privation is a logical reversal; it signifies a lack. So, “I’m not tall” just means that I don’t have the quality tall, or to say the same thing in a clunkier way, I have the quality “not-tall.” I lack tallness.

Applying two of these negations in a row cancels them out. So, if I say that I am not-not tall, that means I am tall. But this is just within the confines of comfortable, Aristotelian logic. This is Dionysius. He’s got some fucked up logic for us.

We are well aware of what is meant when someone says, “Well, the party was not…not fun.” What do we mean by this? Well. What we don’t mean is that the party was fun. We don’t mean the double negation privatively.

What other ways do we negate things non-classically, that is, not just as a reversal signifying a lack? Well, there are a few ways, but I’m going to focus on the most important one for Dionysius: preeminent or superabundant negation.

Let’s say that there is a million bucks under a picnic blanket. I’m standing by and someone asks me, “Is there one penny’s worth of money under that picnic blanket?”3 Now, if I reply with a simple “yes” and don’t say anything else, there’s a sense in which that is misleading, like I’m leaving out the fact that there is much more than a penny, a superabundance comparatively. So, I might say, “No,” in an attempt to lead them to realize that there’s a lot of money under there, much more than a penny. I might also say, “Get away from the picnic blanket: this not-a-penny’s worth of money is mine. I have a preeminent Glock you might not want to meet.” But that’s neither here nor there.

Likewise, maybe it’s right to say, “God is wise” or “God is strong” or “God exists.” But we have a limited, human, and minimal conception of these words. Maybe it is true that God is wise, strong, and that he exists. But he has all of these qualities in a preeminent manner. As Dionysius puts it in The Divine Names, “we must interpret the things of God in a way that befits God, and when we talk of God as being without mind and without perception, this is to be taken in the sense of what he has in superabundance and not as a defect.” (107) So when someone like Dionysius denies wisdom of God, he is not saying that God is dumb. In this same vein, in The Mystical Theology, Dionysius warns that “we should not conclude that the negations [made of God] are simply the opposites of the affirmations, but rather that the cause of all is considerably prior to this, beyond privations, beyond every denial, beyond every assertion.” (136)

An extraordinary phenomenon like God requires an extraordinary method to explain, talk about, and to know. Dionysius advises us that we should not talk about the transcendent God using human means, rather we “should be taken wholly out of ourselves, and become wholly of God, since it is better to belong to God rather than to ourselves.” (106). By ourselves, we could not speak of God or know God, God reaches out to us, and he reveals certain things to us. It is the job of the theologian, then, to cling desperately to those revealed things as cataphatic anchors, and to apophatically peel anything else to respect the superabundant way that God contains all. This peeling away deifies us. The only real knowing one can have of God is the one where God raises you up to him and removes you out of yourself: ekstasis. Until then, while we wither away in our cataphatic coffins, we are consigned to ever-purify ourselves, constantly reaching with the means we have, knowing full well that neither the positive nor the negative will be sufficient. Nonetheless, we continue hymning and praising God’s transcendence, yearning for unification: yearning to hear our speech falter, then fail; to feel our knowing perish, then raise.

Hearing a Whisper, Not Hearing the Silence

Like I said, I am not going to touch on everything in this post. But, I would really like to stress one thing.

• The knowledge that is beyond ordinary knowledge of God’s existence and how he exists is divinely revealed in Scripture and hierarchically disseminated by the Church.

People tend to not be a fan of this point. Many post-modern theorists misread Dionysius as if he negates everything, asserts that God is absolutely and unqualifiedly ineffable, and thinks that the truth of religion is that all creaturely forms of religion are totally transcended.4 Dionysius does not think this. He thinks that mystical, apophatic practice is preparatory for the higher mysteries of the sacraments. This type of reading is often underwritten by a positive attitude toward religious pluralism—the view, roughly, that all religions point to, or are reacting to, the same underlying reality, usually called God—and a skepticism toward, or disdain for, authoritative, institutional forms of religion. Regardless of the independent merits of the position of religious pluralism or institutional skepticism, it is not Dionysius’ position at all. Their position seems to be one that endorses the chipping away of all of the marble, leaving not a single trace, pointing to the absence as a victory.

I invite you to consider this: what do we have indirect access to, but that is revealed? Shown but hidden? For Dionysius, it is God. Another answer is love. We may ask, with perfect justification, “How can I know you love me?” or “How can I know you trust me?” And they may wonder how they can know that you love and trust them. There are signs and affirmations. But the answer cannot be purely based in questions and answers, in systems and sciences. There is an irreducibility of the ethical and the personal. The last step in love and trust is made, not in the mind, but in the heart. There’s a reason we say that we fall in love, not that we earned or learned it. Learning must be part of it, but to know it fully, you must fall: or rather, be pulled up into union.

In this series on ineffability, we see many trying to listen to the meaning of silence. But what is a sound but that which is heard? What is silence but not hearing a thing? So, we can’t hear silence. But maybe, we may be wise and go without hearing. In our deafness, we fall silent: our silence, our hymn.

Thanks for reading,

Nicholas