Do Your Work and You Shall Reinforce Yourself

"I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions...If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers--under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are; and, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, the permitted side, not as a man but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right." Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance.

Fruitless Yet Flourishing

"I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that 'They asked a wise man, saying, Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this? He replied, Each has its appropriate produce and appointed season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents.--Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.'"

--Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "Economy."

The Wound and the Bow

Who but the inimitable Edmund Wilson--an American intellectual in a class by himself--could have turned to the legend of Philoctetes and the dramatic poetry that has coalesced about it and reminded us that, here, in this ancient tale, lies a mythos for our time?

In Wilson's famous essay "The Wound and the Bow" we see the themes of genius and injury interwoven in a way that reveals the psychological wellsprings of behavior--moral and immoral.

We are, all of us, in one way or another, "damaged goods." The first obligation of moral inquiry, then, is self-inventory (what Nietzsche termed "genealogy"). We are obliged to proceed in this fashion because it is incumbent upon us to learn "the fundamental law of the authentic self." Otherwise, we are liable to be false to our own "natures" and to behave in unbecoming ways (see Wilson's rendering of Sophocles' Greek in TWATB).

Wilson resurrected Sophocles's great insight that "superior strength" may manifest itself as "inseparable from disability" (ibid). The fundamental law of the authentic self may be a "decree" in the form of an incurable wound. The moral impulse may then be construed as behavior in accordance with (or in response to) that decree--and may present itself as a "reaction formation" in Freudian terms.

Origen's great insight, as we have seen (previous post), is that the source of such injury may prove to be "some dart and wound of love" (in the Islamic tradition, Ibn Hazm [d. 1064 CE] is the great psychologist of affaires d'amour). Nietzsche's question (in "Schopenhauer As Educator") acknowledges Origen's insight (presumably unawares): "What have you up to now truly loved, what attracted your soul, what dominated it while simultaneously making it happy?"

In Walden we bear witness to the ways in which the wound of Thoreau's love for truth prompted that New England Nietzsche, that New England Philoctetes, to nock his arrow.

"Some Dart and Wound of Love..."

Nietzsche's advice concerning "the fundamental law of the authentic self" echoes throughout a variety of religious writings, pre-modern and modern--and, in the latter category, I include Thoreau's Walden.

What distinguishes the two approaches (pre-modern and modern) are the assumptions that underlie them. For the pre-moderns, physics and metaphysics are intimately inter-related and irrevocably entwined; for the moderns, the Gordian knot of pre-modern assumptions has been severed.

Thoreau's assertion that "The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision" attempts to bridge the chasm between pre-modern and modern approaches by a kind of metaphorical asymptosis: an aspirantly post-modern achievement. In other words, the Thoreauvian mode is a true alternative to "metaphysical fundamentalism" (on the one hand) and modern estrangement (on the other), for Thoreau handled metaphysics as any other literary or rhetorical genre (a la Alfarabi).

As Thoreau understood, human beings of any epoch are after the same thing: contact with Truth or Reality. What most pre-modern approaches grant and many modern approaches deny (actual contact with capital "T" truth) post-modern approaches literalize. By that I mean they blur the distinctions between fact and fiction, life and literature (Alexander Nehamas's study of Nietzsche, Life As Literature, demonstrates the manner in which this move was anticipated by his subject). Like Nietzsche, Thoreau perceived that the quarrel between physics and metaphysics had grown stale--and in this he anticipated Wittgenstein's Tractarian observation that "even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer" (6.52).

Wittgenstein counseled silence on metaphysics and then changed the subject--becoming preoccupied with observations on language use (see his post-Tractatus writings). Thoreau, however, had already arrived at the place that Wittgenstein would eventually reach: the writing of the book. For Thoreau, this is Walden, or Life in the Woods (here one can re-trace the steps of Stanley Cavell); in Walden, what Origen (d. 254) had identified as a "heavenly love and desire" for "the beauty and glory of the Word" (for Origen, the Word of God) becomes the aspirantly post-modern "answer" to "the problems of life." Richard Rorty offered an elegant summation of this insight in his adoption of Gadamer's dictum: "Being that can be understood is language" (LRB, March 16, 2000, 23-25).

The lines from Origen's Prologue to the Commentary on the Song of Songs that supply the title to this post merit fuller quotation: "Indeed the soul is led by a heavenly love and desire when once the beauty and glory of the Word of God has been perceived; he falls in love with His splendor and by this receives from Him some dart and wound of love." It is that dart and wound of love that dared Thoreau to gaze upon the same glory as "the oldest Egyptian or Hindoo"; that "dart or wound" is the "I in him that was then so bold" and the "he in me that now reviews the vision."

Nietzschean Lectio Divina: On Finding the Fundamental Law of the Authentic Self

"But how can we find ourselves again? How can the human being get to know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing; and if the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times seventy skins and still not be able to say: 'This is really you, this is no longer outer shell.' Besides, it is an agonizing, dangerous undertaking to dig down into yourself in this way, to force your way by the shortest route down the shaft of your own being. How easy it is to do damage to yourself that no doctor can heal. And moreover, why should it be necessary, since everything--our friendships and enmities, our look and our handshake, our memory and what we forget, our books and our handwriting--bears witness to our being. But there is only one way in which this crucial inquiry can be carried out. Let the young soul look back on its life with the question: What have you up to now truly loved, what attracted your soul, what dominated it while simultaneously making it happy? Place this series of revered objects before you, and perhaps their nature and their sequence will reveal to you a law, the fundamental law of your authentic self. Compare these objects, observe how one completes, expands, surpasses, transfigures the others, how they form a stepladder on which until now you have climbed up to yourself, for your true being does not lie deeply hidden within you, but rather immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you commonly take to be your ego. Your true educators and cultivators reveal to you the true primordial sense and basic stuff of your being, something that is thoroughly incapable of being educated and cultivated, but something that in any event is bound, paralyzed, and difficult to gain access to. Your educators can be nothing other than your liberators...Certainly, there are other ways of finding oneself, of coming to oneself out of the stupor in which we usually float as in a dark cloud, but I know of no better way than to reflect on one's own educators and cultivators."

--Friedrich Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer As Educator," Unfashionable Observations, trans. by Richard T. Gray, Stanford University Press (1995), 174-175.

The Thoreauvian Substrate

"With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe: no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future." Henry David Thoreau, "Reading," Walden.

I first read these words at Swain's Pond, New Hampshire, sitting among the blueberry bushes of Hornpout Island, probably in the summer of 1973. I remember how I thrilled to them then; four decades later, I still thrill to them. Walden was my first extra-Biblical scripture; Thoreau's admonition to become "essentially" a student and observer my first extra-Biblical commandment. Walt Whitman boasted to contain multitudes, Thoreau's "ecstatic witness" contains even Whitman. He disciples me even as he discipled Tolstoy. Though he founded no school, I am of it. Wherever he would saunter, I would follow.

Chekhovian Piety

"In a letter of April 16, 1897, Chekhov rejected Tolstoy's idealist notion of immortality...'He recognizes immortality in its Kantian form, assuming that all of us (men and animals) will live on in some principle (such as reason or love), the essence of which is a mystery. But I can only imagine such a principle or force as a shapeless, gelatinous mass; my I, my individuality, my consciousness would merge with this mass--and I feel no need for this kind of immortality'" (quoted by Pevear in Stories by Anton Chekhov, "Introduction," xx).

Chekhovian piety takes Tolstoy's naturalism to its logical conclusion--banishing the ghosts of metaphysical speculation that Tolstoy had tried, without complete success, to jettison.

And yet, there is another side to Chekhov--one that prompted the critic Leonid Grossman to exclaim that "the atheist Chekhov is unquestionably one of the most Christian poets of world literature" (ibid., xxii)! Grossman was commenting on Chekhov's brief and (typically Chekhovian) enigmatic tale "The Student" (1894). There Chekhov recounts a conversation between a seminary student and two widows on Good Friday. The conversation revolved around Peter's denial of Christ prior to his crucifixion, and the tearful response of the women upon recollection of the story. Caught off guard by their emotional reactions, the seminarian reflected that "the past...is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other." Chekhov remarks: "And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain: he touched one end and the other moved" (ibid., 266).

Chekhovian piety--if piety is even the right word--shares something in common with Paterian piety as we encounter it in Walter Pater's 1885 novel Marius, the Epicurian. The common element in both is an aesthetic appreciation for the emotional power of myth, practice, and tradition--but with the ghosts of metaphysical speculation sent into their final exile.

Cornel West

Self-described Chekhovian Christian.

The Chekhovian Turn

Tolstoy is quoted as saying: "Chekhov is an incomparable artist, an artist of life...Chekhov has created new forms of writing, completely new, in my opinion, to the whole world, the like of which I have not encountered anywhere...Chekhov has hit his own special form, like the impressionists" from Richard Pevear's Introduction to Anton Chekhov: Stories (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), p. viii.

"In fact, just as Chekhov created a new kind of story, he also created a new image of the writer: the writer as detached observer, sober, restrained, modest, a craftsman shaping the material of prose under the demands of authenticity and precision, avoiding ideological excesses, the temptations of moral judgment, and the vainglory of great ideas" (ibid., xi).

Chekhov's style owed something to his medical training: he admired Goethe for his ability to combine in a single, integrated personality, both poet and naturalist (ibid., xvi).

"The critic Leonid Grossman has described him as 'a probing Darwinist with the love of St. Francis of Assisi for every living creature'" (ibid., xv).

Unlike Tolstoy, Chekhov saw no need to preserve theological language while rejecting its supernaturalist assumptions (ibid., xx). As a consequence, his work is frequently derided as hopelessly pessimistic (ibid., xxi). And there is plenty hopelessness to be found in Chekhov, but there is also something else: the grim resolve of resistance and revolt. And this resistance and revolt is what Albert Schweitzer termed ethics: "a constant, living, and practical dispute with reality...resulting from reverence for life" (see post of 12/10/12).

The Chekhovian turn is Tolstoyan, but in a minor key.

Goethe: Hypsistarian Morphologist

In a letter dated March 22, 1831, Goethe confided to Sulpiz Boisserée:

"...I have found no confession of faith to which I could ally myself without reservation. Now in my old age, however, I have learned of a sect, the Hypsistarians, who, hemmed in between heathens, Jews and Christians, declared that they would treasure, admire, and honour the best, the most perfect that might come to their knowledge, and inasmuch as it must have a close connection to the Godhead, pay it reverence. A joyous light thus beamed at me suddenly out of a dark age, for I had the feeling that all my life I had been aspiring to qualify as a Hypsistarian. That, however, is no small task, for how does one, in the limitations of one's individuality, come to know what is most excellent?" Peter Boerner, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1832/1982: A Biographical Essay, Bonn: Inter Nationes (1981), 82.

The Content of the Form

"...declaring the essence of the truth of this matter [i.e., the content of the form--in the Islamic tradition, the 99 most beautiful names of Allah] all but contradicts whatever the collectivity has hitherto believed. Now weaning creatures from their habits and familiar beliefs is difficult, and the threshold of truth is too exalted to be broached by all or to be sought after except by lone individuals. The nobler the thing sought after the less help there is. Whoever mixes with people is right to be cautious; but it is difficult for one who has seen the truth to pretend not to have seen it. For one who does not know God--great and glorious--silence is inevitable, while for one who knows God most high, silence is imposed. So it is said: 'for one who knows God, his tongue is dulled'" (Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, translated with notes by David B. Burrell and Nazih Daher, Cambridge, England: The Islamic Texts Society (1995), 2).

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Morphology

Traditional theological speculation (and the same may be said for metaphysics) is founded upon a singular confusion, a mistaken metaphor: the notion that the word "God" designates a substance. From the Tolstoyan perspective, if "God" designates anything, it is the assertion/perception of form. The disciplined study of form is called morphology.

Perhaps the ghost of Goethe whispered in Tolstoy's ear...