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dialogue

2010-12-26T08:51:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking lately about the nature of dialogue. I have in mind principally religious dialogue, but this extends to any and all groups or individuals who undertake to express themselves and to understand others. The only bottom line is that participants show respect for the other. As you can see, I have a very wide definition of 'dialogue'. 'Dialogue' for me includes talking with, being with, working for, listening to, and a number of other verbs followed by a preposition that reaches out to another individual. The key element is the reaching out to another to bring that 'other' into some type of relationship with yourself. This is what I take to be the essence of dialogue. From what follows below, it is clear that I want to combat a narrow sense of dialogue that sees it only consisting in 'negotiating' differences in propositional belief in order to try to eliminate those differences and find the 'truth'. This is very far from what I consider to be the purpose or spirit of dialogue. True, 'unity' is the key to my definition of dialogue, but it is not one that consists of doctrinal unity, but rather a unity of spirit and love that is strongest when it emerges out of diversity. I feel strongly about this because dialogue simply signifies the desire to have a relationship with someone or something. And, at least, on an ideal or institutional level, we should be constantly seeking relationships with others. The significance of the act of speaking, listening. or the act of being together, to me, lies more in the act itself than in anything exchanged or said.

I am a bit pre-occupied with this topic at the moment because I recently read some statements by an evangelical who decried the attempt at dialogue by a Utah pastor at a recent event at which Mormons and Evangelicals spoke about Christianity together. This particular evangelical felt that, above all, interaction with 'cults' like Mormons had to be centered on proclaiming their error and pointing out the difference between the 'truth' and Mormonism. He writes:

"I [intend] to address the way we approach others of different faiths with the gospel. What happened at this event is not about becoming friends and learning about other faiths or even understanding their worldviews; God is concerned that we could and ultimately will be influenced by another's religious beliefs if we get too close, even becoming completely deceived to the point of compromising the gospel of Christ."

We'll come back to this in a second.

So as not to appear unbalanced, I will relate a similar attitude displayed recently by a mormon towards another group. I recently attended an Anglican service with a few mormon friends. During the pastor's short sermon, one of my friends got my attention, gestured at the text of the sermon, and mouthed the word 'blasphemy!' very intensely. When I asked him why he felt it was important to see another's belief system in such evaluative terms, he explained that he is doing his own belief system and the Anglican system a service: he is taking them seriously and not trying to water down our differences. Whenever he is in a foreign worship service, he scans the service and only participates in that with which he could agree.

These two attitudes towards belief are admirable on one level: both of them have a healthy respect for difference that sees compromise on that difference as a false value. But I fear that, in the first case, this attitude can never lead to true 'togetherness', i.e. the understanding and love that comes from seeing theological difference as only one aspect of a much larger relationship. I feel his view egotistically focuses on getting across his pet project, beliefs, and concerns to the detriment of communication. I do not see how any relationship could be healthy on that basis. Both sides need to speak. Not even a relationship with God, in my view, can be one-sided. God does not force-feed us truth, but lets us grow independently and speak for ourselves. In other words, God and man should be constantly in 'dialogue' for the relationship to be healthy. As for the second attitude, it is an improvement, but, once again, I think it focuses too narrowly on what we think we 'know' as being the deciding factor in who we identify and commune with. I have a strong aversion to sharply dichotomous ways of viewing the world. In effect, I think it is dangerous to base one's actions and one's interaction with others on the basis of it only being this one way because, simply put, the world is rarely only that 'one' way. If we stake everything on it being that way, we may end up having a painful, conflict-ridden existence.

To both of these individuals, 'dialogue' in the sense of seeking some type of common ground in order to have a conversation and be together, threatens the integrity of theological differences between them. I don't think it has to be seen that way. I, of all people would hate to be caught defending a notion of dialogue that simply erased individuality or difference. To be honest, I see only one thing being lost in dialogue: pride. I think what we implicitly express by seeking to find commonality as opposed to trumpeting difference is that we are more interested in being together than in putting ourselves and our own beliefs above another. I doubt that anyone would claim that Christ was expressing moral relativity by associating with marginalized and traditionally unclean groups. Rather, what Christ expressed with all of his striving to enter into dialogue with diverse peoples, was that, even above belief and manner of life, love and respect should unite us. Recently, a friend of mine made the point that Christ left us, essentially, only two things: a community and a meal. I love this because these two things express 'togetherness' more than 'right thinking'.

2010-12-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

“Die Wahrheit ist also einem Saamenkorn gleich, dem der Mensch einen Leib giebt wie er will; und dieser Leib bekommt wiederum durch den Ausdruck ein Kleid nach eines jeden Geschmack, oder nach den Gesetzen der Mode.”

(The truth is like a grain to which man gives a form after his own preference; and this body receives again through that expression a dress after each one's tastes, or according to the laws of fashion.) (ZH I 335) Johann Georg Hamann

From Goethe's Faust:

GRETCHEN: ... Do you believe in God?
FAUST: My darling, who can (really) say:
I believe in God!
You may ask priests or wise men,
And their answer seems but a mockery
Of the questioner to be.
GRETCHEN: So you do not believe?
FAUST: Don't misunderstand me, you lovely sight!
Who may name Him,
And who declare:
I believe in Him.
Who can feel
And dare
To say: I do not believe in Him!
The all-embracing one,
The all-preserving one,
Does He not embrace and preserve
You, me, (and) Himself?
Does the sky not arch above us up there?
Does the earth not lie firm down here?
And do not with kind glance
The eternal stars rise?
Do I not look at you eye to eye,
And does not everything press
Upon your head and heart
And weave in eternal mystery
Invisible and visible around you?
Fill your heart, as big as it is, from that
And when you are completely blissful in the feeling,
Then call it what you like:
Call it happiness! Heart! Love! God!
I have no name
For it! Feeling is everything;
(The) name is sound and smoke,
Enshrouding heaven's glow.
GRETCHEN: That is all quite fine and good;
Much the same thing says the pastor, too
Only with slightly different words.
FAUST: It is said everywhere (by)
All hearts under the heavenly day,
Each in its own language:
Why not I in mine?

So here are two of my favorite quotes on the nature of transcendence. As with almost everything, I stop just short of saying that I take these ideas to be the "truth". I am more interested in the searching and in the striving to express what we understand and feel than in actually saying "I am certain". And maybe that is exactly what I like about these approaches to transcendence. They express the idea that the form in which we express our feelings will never perfectly approximate the nature of ultimate reality; or rather, that whatever form those expressions do take is ultimate reality. The truth can simply appear under an infinite number of names (God, spirit, love, heart) or a variety of images. So the question I want to ask is one that I've gone over with a lot of friends: how consistent is this approach? Does it do too much violence to the individual's experience? Or can we accept the individual's experience as valid, but simply recognize that the infinite is not limited to one form? But is this still inconsistent when we consider those whose experience "tells" them that there is only one form? One expression to truth? Am I really just being paradoxical in saying that I am sure that truth cannot be contained in only one word or image and then saying that I am sure of this? (You'll notice that I stopped short of being 'certain' though). Thoughts welcome

Transcendental Humanity

2010-11-14T06:58:00.000-08:00

Here is an real anecdote taken from my real life here at Oxford. I had an interesting lunch a few weeks ago and I wrote this down right after the lunch. I figured I'd make it a blog post since I am trying (and failing) to use my blog to keep people up to date on my life (not that I am necessarily important enough for people to keep tabs on me). So, here it is and apologies for the unedited/stream-of-consciousness style:

Oh my heck!!!! Transcendental humanity!!!!! So I'm still trying to find friends here, but today was really nice. Yesterday was particularly rough because I was sick and confined to my room. Today I felt a lot better and went to the library and one of the German girls in my program came up to me around lunch time and asked me if I wanted to go to lunch. I of course jumped at the opportunity to have human contact. Well, we sat down and started chatting about life and career and then it got really interesting. She said that she used to get all worried about her future, but she now does not worry so much about it now because of "Gottvertrauen" (which is German for "trusting in God", i.e. faith). I kind of had to do a double take because this is not normal--or at least being here at Oxford makes you think that bringing up faith in a conversation is not normal. Plus, we had spoken before and there was not necessarily any inkling that she was religious. You have to understand my surprise. It is just not selbstverständlich, (understood/expected/natural) that a German--especially at Oxford--would be religious. So I kind of stammered, "wait, are you religious?" And she said yes and I asked what religion. She said that she was "catholic/protestant". She was raised catholic, but she recently realized that she thinks more like a protestant (wait for this), but she still identifies herself as catholic because she realizes that growing up catholic has made it such that catholicism is her identity and she can't escape it. It makes no sense to her to "convert" to another religion. And besides, if she just jumps ship, how could she ever effect change in her tradition? I got really excited when she said this and stammered "me too!!!!" but it did not end there. She then said, "yeah, the main thing is the claim about being the only true church." I almost lost it at about this point. But then she started talking again without letting me catch my breath: "But I've been thinking a lot about pluralism lately." And then she started explaining an analogy that tries to capture a pluralistic worldview. We all are blind and are feeling different parts of an elephant and describing what we feel from our vantage point. What we say ends up being different even though the ultimate reality is the same. hahahaha. I thought I was watching myself in a mirror. I had been using that analogy for a while as well. We both have realized that we don't like the analogy though and that the arguments for pluralism are just as unsatisfactory and contradictory as are one tradition's claims to absolute truth. We both kind of just left it at the thought of having an epistemological ceiling when it comes to certain matters. Tradition is not rational and there may not be any easy way to harmonize them all into one meta-system. I thought the conversation was such a crazy coincidence though and kind of made my heart jump about the possibility of connecting with people and finding commonalities. You know those moments when someone says something that really speaks to your experiences and suddenly you feel like we are not all just trapped in some hermetically sealed jar not really able to communicate with one another? This lunch was one of those experiences. We then wandered back to the topic of Gottvertrauen and how we both have derived a lot of strength from the religious mindset and have noticed that religious people are often characterized by a calm approach to life.

Just the other night I had the same conversation with a Jewish girl who is trying to figure out her place in her tradition. She came to a similar conclusion as the one above. It is interesting to me how many young people at this place come from religious backgrounds and are having similar experiences relating to their traditions as me. I suppose it is one of the effects of being in an in-between world with faith on the one side and secular academia on the other. Anyways, it is interesting how so many people deal with the same issues and questions. I think being at a place like this is kind of deceptive. You get the idea that with so many people from different places and backgrounds and religions that there is little you have in common. It seems to me that you just have to scratch a little below the surface to find surprising commonalities in human experience.

2010-10-10T07:29:00.000-07:00

I'm on the train into London. 18:01. The indian man across from me eating tic-tacs for dinner. One after the other every minute or so. Can't blame him. I do the same sometimes. The well-dressed men all over the train give me new ideas on what accessories I'm lacking at the moment. Chatter in different languages. The 15 different conversations hitting my ears simultaneously, all at different pitches, different tempos, intensities and volumes. It's like putting ten different tapes on at once and the whole confusing buzz forms its own synthetic melody; like grasshoppers or birds all chirping forms a cacophony that is pleasant in its own right. But I notice more the silence of people not talking to each other. There are a lot of us on this train. Not enought seats for everyone. Some young boys sit on the luggage racks. Some passengers read, some sleep, some sit, blankly staring ahead or out the window. Some are in conversation. They all look different. We're all different but all together in the same hurtling tube going to one of the world's great metropolises. I'm thinking a lot about difference lately. All these people have different backgrounds, stories, values, hopes, beliefs, etc. I guess we all have a lot in common as well. We all must value practicality, efficiency, and order--getting along in order to make sure we can follow our different paths to the good life. But beyond that, we don't seem to want much to do with each other. We keep to ourselves. Train conversations with strangers are by no means rare, but they aren't exactly common either. I think this is because difference is uncomfortable and when forced to face it, we sit quietly or do our own thing until the train arrives. My brother calls me to tell me which restaurant I need to go to when I arrive in London...It's really rather just a coincidence that there are other people on the train with us. We tend to think of traveling as more about just getting to a destination than what the actual journey involves. Fair enough, but aren't we always kind of traveling from one place ot the next? Wouldn't it make sense to see the journey--and our fellow passengers as having more meaning than the buildings that wizz by the train?
I guess I'm people watching. It's rather fun. Well, I'm not doing a very good job of shaking this preoccupation with difference. I was thinking earlier today how silly my idealism upon coming to Oxford was. I was going to be friends with everyone. everyone. We were all going to be best friends and have very deep relationships. Ha! I've met a lot of nice people and had some very good conversations and with two people I felt a connection. We even set up lunch or dinner appointments to initiate our friendships. I was very excited. Then neither of them showed up! But it is just orientation week and that is understandable. I still felt really down though. I think I am really needing friendship at the moment. It's tough.
Another thing is tough. I noticed that without even dong anything I had become a curiosity for some people. "Are you really a mormon?" Their interest belied the fact that with the admission I had automatically become more of a joke--someone who believed in "gold plates" and "angels"--than someone to connect with or take seriously. The conversation was frustrating. They kept on asking "where did the gold plates go?" and "what about these magic underpants" in a very patronizing manner. That hurt. I think it hurt because I usually think of myself as a thinking, feeling, aware individual with a very thought-out relationship to his faith. Dismissal and being looked at askance is the worst. It is even worse because I know I do that sometime to others as well. Well, what I'm thinking now is that I may just have to accept that difference and other people's attitudes and even my own shortcomings (not to mention the constraints of space and time) may mean that I won't become friends with everyone. The train is coming into London. People are starting to get off at the stops. But now more people are getting on. It's gotten dark on the way in.
Come to think of it, I could very well comment on the uniformity of the people I see. All the guys basically wear the same thing: Jeans. Button-up shirt with a collar. And some type of jacket or blazer. Most have watches and there are about three types of cell-phones. I've been thinking about commonalities--and uniformity-- a lot lately as well. I feel an irresistible urge to look like everyone else in Oxford. I'm slowly being assimilated. I now just need a blazer, a scarf, and these boot-like shoes with fur around the top I keep seeing. Heaven forbid. What was Hayek saying again about the inability of central planning to figure out disparate tastes in a society...? I suppose uniformity is a also a necessary component of social life. I suppose as well that uniformity fits well with the idea of being uncomfortable with difference. As much as we can, we try to eliminate it. That's not really true. We try to be different as well. Why should difference be so scary or unbearable? I'm sure there are lots of reasons--our own way of being could feel threatened or because we depend so much on other people we need to be able to understand them. Would some of these barriers dissolve if I started talking to these people or would they become even more incomprehensible? Maybe it would work if we found some common interests and experiences. But there is a great chance that we would end up talking in generalities and things common to all humans--like the weather. Oh goodness no. The ultimate indicator of an impasse. Talking about the weather. But I've noticed old couples who know everything about each other also talk about the weather.
Arrived at Paddington. We all get off together. In a few minutes I'll be with some friends and feel at home for a little while.

oh, and I've posted some pictures of my new home and college.

My Thumb Hurts

2010-08-24T17:19:00.000-07:00

I was listening to a rather worthless song today (okay, I admit it, I like the song even though it is pop) and I was struck by one pathetic line in which the singer describes her thought process about her emotions upon being heartbroken. She states that "It's not as if New York City/Burnt to the Ground/the moment you drove away/". She appeared to me to be engaging in what many of us do whenever we experience strong (usually negative) feelings related to some personal occurrence. She is trying to understand why such a small event (so she thinks) should have such a great impact on her. She compares the cause of her emotional devastation to another event and intimates that her event should not be so powerful. After all, no one died in her case, no great losses of wealth or property were incurred, and finally, she is only one person. Why should she feel so bad? This mental process seems unhealthy and disingenuous to me. Her "rational" side is playing the role of the prompter who tells the audience when to laugh and when to cry during a show. The only thing that the prompter ends up doing, however, is turning the show into a stiff, heartless production that no one watches. The audience is not allowed to find its own meaning and enjoyment in the show. The fact is that it is as if New York City burnt to the ground when "he drove away".

Said another way, New York City burning to the ground might not mean a thing to us unless there is some connection to ourselves. I have often wondered at this same process in myself of trying to rationalize my feelings away by comparing them to some objective factors like life (in the abstract) and money. I suppose that this can be healthy on one level--trying to "get perspective" on things--but it also seems destructive and self-denying to me. We attach meaning and importance ourselves to things in life and without emotion in the first place, a lost life would not matter to us at all. What "reason" ends up doing in the end is robbing us of our precious subjectivity and continually reintroducing us into the "herd" by pointing us in the direction of "objective" values that dictate to us what has meaning and what does not have meaning. I admit it would be dangerous to let go of "reason" all together--and let the world go up in flames--but when reason is introduced to suffocate individuality and to inhibit coming to terms with our own emotions (however inconsequential they may seem), then we need to let go of what reason may say is unimportant.

I suppose I agree with Hume (with a modern pragmatic twist) that we are not merely rational creatures. It is more satisfying and important to us to scratch an itch on our thumb then to stop Rome burning to the ground. Grimly put, and even though I think that we are just as much rational creatures as emotional, I think Hume has a point. In an extreme case, what happens when we let society, church, or other people dictate our values and what we can feel good or bad about? We end up with a whole lot of discontent housewives and guilt-ridden young men.

Tuned-In

2010-08-19T18:18:00.000-07:00

What kind of change does being constantly connected through email, facebook, cell-phones, etc. cause in my daily life? Being face to face with other people--to me--involves several responses. The other is an attraction to be looked upon and spoken to as well as something that imposes duties on me; the duty to respond to them and pay attention to them. These interactions are necessary, exhilarating, addicting, but also taxing emotionally and time consuming. For all these reasons, we generally try to find a balance between time alone for ourselves and time in society.

Before, this balance was more or less easy to find as retiring to one's home meant moving beyond the reach of other people--at least to an extent. In order to connect with one another more energy needed to be expended such as writing a letter, visiting another house, or making a live phone call. These barriers to communication (and privacy and alone time) have now all been broken down. I find myself being bombarded with demands (each email, text-message, facebook post is a form of demand and attraction) from the other to which I feel a duty to respond. The computer is not a passive device for information or simply connecting with others; it is literally a gateway that allows people to shout at me 24/7 to which I must respond. I find this great on one level (as I am able to keep contact with loved ones), but for my particularly OCD personality, I find that a computer makes me less effective as my alone time is slowly whittled away. And I of course have not even mentioned the problem with the type of relationships that one forms in cyberspace, etc.

Fight The Methodology

2010-07-12T06:45:00.000-07:00

One of my friends mentioned one time that philosophy has only taught him that you cannot be sure of anything. I was reading something today that gave me somewhat of an insight into this. I have thought a bit about how different methodologies (history, hard sciences, philosophy) seem to condition a certain worldview for those who employ them. Could it be that "philosophy" is prone to teach that you cannot be sure of anything because of a methodological bias that one learns in philosophy? I am thinking of critical thinking here. You are "taught" to question assumptions, and to try to come up with arguments against those assumptions. It is even taught that one should do this as a pure intellectual exercise even if you agree with the premises in order to detect errors, i.e. make your position stronger.

It seems to me that there are several problems with this. The first problem brings to light a fundamental problem for the methodology of philosophy. Before we even get started in asking about assumptions and beginning the project of criticism, we have the problem of defining what philosophy is--i.e. are we going to critique things that make no rational sense, that do not seem to fit into our experience, or are we just going to be absurdists and play with language all day? It seems to me that the nature of modern philosophy and academia predisposes the "methodology" of philosophy to take on purely a form that is conducive to discursive, abstract, presentation. I heard a philosophy professor--Dr. Jensen--describe philosophy in these terms as he ridiculed those who believed that philosophy really was "the love of wisdom" and said that philosophy is a certain way of going about answering a question, i.e., questioning assumptions, etc. I believe it is structural problem. In other words, the academy is incapable of accommodating an endless variety of definitions of what philosophy is and must naturally lean to one way of doing things. It is therefore doomed to cause people like Alex to only learn to "doubt everything" because that is the natural outcome of the particular methodology of abstract, discursive reasoning.

So the first problem of defining what philosophy is leads to the next problem I see in that "philosophy" (as we've defined it) could lead to sidestepping the question of practical reason and living. If one is focused on whether something is consistent in a logical, discursive format, one neglects empirical realities or subjective positions. This means that philosophy could overemphasize the ethereal, abstract, nature of things as opposed to other approaches such as intuition, emotion, empirical models. In other words, I've noticed that philosophers do not necessarily base their arguments of what is true on empirical studies and surveys of what people think. Just because most people believe in God does not make it true for the philosopher or even an interesting question. I am kind of rambling here, but I feel that there is an important gap here between a practical reality and the philosopher's reality.

Ok. I am going to sum up. Because I do not believe that "truth" necessarily forces itself upon us when it is seen, I feel that the methodology of philosophy may not be necessarily conducive to finding truth, but rather conducive to finding error and only error. So it is similar to the agnostics dilemma in which he is sure that God cannot be proven, but he is also sure that God cannot be disproven. If the agnostic is speaking of what human reason can tell us, then it seems that philosophy only pronounces upon the limits of its own methodology. For those who believe in God, this may point to the fact that philosophy must be combined with other approaches with different premises for what can count as "truth".

Please discuss.

2010-06-06T13:27:00.000-07:00

I am currently reading a masterful biography on Johann Wolfgang Goethe. I am continuously shocked at the level of insight into the human condition of many of Goethe's statements, poems, and novels. After sampling even a small portion of his works, readers often grasp much better this statement of one of Goethe's contemporaries: "Most people have only one soul. Goethe has a hundred." Recently, one episode from Goethe's life and his biographer's paraphrase of its philosophical import struck my own experience regarding the nature of emotion. I quote a section from the biography:

"With his sudden insight into what he had done to Friederike, and the hideous caricature of its moral implications being daily impressed on him, there began for Goethe what his autobiography calls a period of 'sombre remorse'; 'here for the first time I was guilty'. With the admission of a guilt that could not be remedied, or even alleviated, Goethe entered territory hitherto unknown to the moral sensibility of the rationalist enlightenment, for which sensual desires were but an obscure form of rational desires, disappointment an obscure form of fulfilment, and the only ultimate evil temporary misunderstanding. This was not how love affairs ended for the Swedish Countess or MIss Sara Sampson. On the other hand, Goethe had now consciously detached himself from the Christian Savior who atoned for irremediable guilt of helpless men. Goethe was now alone, and in the darkness he had to find his own way." (Boyle 106)

To put simply the thought I have had recently, which the above quote puts so well, is that emotion defies reason and rational explanation. By 'reason' I mean that which is understandable, demonstrable, balanced, and proportionate to the goal or end we have in mind. In context, this passage is referring to Goethe's realization that the emotion aroused by his negligent comportment towards a woman caused pain that could not be explained away. More generally, the desires he also felt in this period for women who could never be his, did not lend themselves to being understood or being soothed by rational thought. Emotion suddenly presented itself as maniacal and irrational to Goethe. In The Sorrows of the Young Werther--the book that transformed him into a literary superstar almost overnight and which is loosely autobiographical in nature--Goethe tells the tale of a young man whose overly sentimental nature leads him to kill himself when his desires for a woman cannot be fulfilled as she is betrothed to another man. Irrational seems to be the perfect word to describe an overpowering impulse that disregards one's own life, others, and the means to achieve the end.

On one hand, when we use the word emotion, we imply exactly that side of us which is not rational. My entry may thus seem a bit banal in that I simply point this fact out. But, as Enlightenment philosophy demonstrates, people often conceptualize emotion in exactly rational terms. Our notion of morality often rests on this idea. It is very common since the Enlightenment to think of emotion as something God or nature endows us with in order to achieve its ends. Our sex drive, hunger, thirst, sociability, drive to compete. We may tend to think that our emotions work in harmony with very rational ends. If this were true, we would find that our desires tailor themselves to our needs: when we have satisfied ourselves or come up against a situation that is impossible or against "nature" then it should follow that our desires let up a bit. This is often true, but often not. First, the intensity and amount of emotion is often not commensurate with what any rational standard of what might be need to satisfy the desire. I just read a story in Ovid's Metamorphoses where a young boy, Cyparissus, accidentally kills his beloved fawn, and then desires to die as his grief is so great. The God Phoebus counsels him that "his grief should be moderate, in proportion to its cause". I am sure that others can identify with this, but I often find that my emotions/desires seem to go far beyond what is seemingly justified.

Second, I feel that emotion deserves the title of "irrational" as it often seems to not follow the course that nature has set out for it. One of the major themes in classical literature such as Euripides and Ovid is the notion of "pathological love" i.e., love for someone you should not love (siblings, parents, same-sex attraction) or love that seems to be overpowering where no will is involved. We often try to come up with words such as "aberration", "defect", etc. to explain those desires that go against nature, but we would do well to simply accept the notion that "aberration" and boundless emotion are just as "natural" (if we mean what spontaneously occurs) as those desires that have clear, beneficial ends.

I have a lot more thoughts on this topic such as the role of rationality, the attitude we should take toward emotion, and some thoughts on what ultimately determines action, but I believe I will save that for another post as this one is getting long.

The Word and History

2010-05-23T14:44:00.000-07:00

No matter how much I try, I tend to see life through the lenses of an historian. I am always drawn to the question of how context --whether that is geographical location, personal family history, or gender--conditions the beliefs I hold, the way I vote, or the food I eat. I am, as it happens, also very interested in languages. Far from being a rigorous linguist, I often find myself thinking about the relationship between language, society, and history. I have, as of late, been thinking about how words and their meaning arise from a historical context--a new invention ('google it'), an event (September 11), or a neologism to describe a new trend in society (globalisation). Languages seem to be built word by word as individuals and societies amass new experiences. Each national tradition and language has a distinctive flavor and way of understanding the world through their language because their experiences have been distinct from everyone other traditions', set apart as they are by geography, climate, wars, and events.

For the individual today, standing at the end of this long build-up of language, an interesting relationship exists between himself and his language. The words he uses have the interesting characteristic of having the potentiality to express almost an infinitely wide range of collective memories, individual experiences, but at the same time the word must be precise enough to function as a definite signifier for daily communication. As a historian, I am mostly interested in how the individual is more often than not completely oblivious to the cultural and historical meaning that the word and language contains. Apart from the historian who is able to methodically unpack the history of a word, we mostly concentrate on a standard (albeit subjective) understanding. But even as we use words to communicate something definite, the possibility of manifold meaning arising from the collective basis of the word is ever-present as Emile Durkheim points out:

"Now it is unquestionable that language, and consequently the system of concepts which it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it expresses is the manner in which society as a whole represents the facts of experience. The ideas which correspond to the diverse elements of language are thus collective representations. Even their contents bear witness to the same fact. In fact, there are scarcely any words among those which we usually employ whose meaning does not pass, to a greater or lesser extent, the limits of our personal experience. Very frequently a term expresses things which we have never perceived or experiences which we have never had or of which we have never been the witnesses. Even when we know some of the objects which it concerns, it is only as particular examples that they serve to illustrate the idea which they would never have been able to form by themselves. Thus there is a great deal of knowledge condensed in the word which I never collected, and which is not individual; it even surpasses me to such an extent that I cannot even completely appropriate all its results. Which of us knows all the words of the language he speaks and the entire signification of each?" (482-3)

Durkheim's quote about how words contain meanings that go beyond the individual evokes a thought I had recently. It has to do with the way our culture collectively understands (or misunderstands) the meaning of the words "Barack Obama". This "event" stands arguably as one of the most momentous events in American society in the previous decade. I must admit that I had a hard time grasping the full rationale behind the excitement in media broadcasts that used such a word as "historic" to describe the significance of a black president being elected to the White House. It struck me last week why I was experiencing this disconnect with the excitement surrounding the election of the first African-American to the presidency. I can best explain it in terms of a generation gap which highlights the underlying historical side of language. Being born in 1985, what I associate with the word "African-American" is radically different from what my parents or grandparents associate with the word. I only have second-hand knowledge of the civil rights movement, I have not felt the full range of emotions over lynchings, fire hoses, church-burnings, etc. that my parents (to speak nothing of middle-aged Africans-Americans) did growing up in the sixties. Partly as a result of growing up in Utah as well, the word "African-American" has been to a great degree discharged of any divisive, controversial content. I may understand it intellectually, but the chances were slim that Barack Obama's election would bring a tear to my eye conditioned as it is to see the world through the language of post-1985 culture. The advancing years and changing conditions shifted the meaning of a word. For the older generation, those memories of hate and race riots and an American seemingly eternally biased and broke still clung to the word "Barack Obama" and thus their experience of the event was powerful as it was symbolic of the exact cultural change that left me tearless.

I hope, however, that this post communicates one aspect of the value of studying history. Its value lies in understanding the historical context for the language we use and thus expanding our ability to sympathize with others as we expand our understanding of the meaning contained in the language we use.

collective effervescence

2010-05-16T07:27:00.001-07:00

I've just finished reading Emile Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms of the Religious". Durkheim--a pioneer in the field of sociology and anthropology--sets as his task in this book nothing less than the identification of the most basic (i.e. earliest, most fundamental) activity among civilizations that we can call "religious". His overall goal in this investigation is to identify how religious thinking and institutions arise in the first place and what aspects of religion are universal to all world religions. In what follows, I will try to explain the most striking evidence of Durkheim's thesis that "religion is inherently a social phenomenon" and its implications. That main piece of evidence is Durkheim's assertion that religion arises as a way to understand "collective effervescence", a phenomenon that occurs when individuals come together.

In order to understand what Durkheim means by this, we must summarize a portion of Durkheim's investigative process and findings. Durkheim spends most of his book exploring what he considers the most fundamental cult of the most primitive human civilization: the practice of totemism among the Australian aborigines. Durkheim describes totemism as the practice of a clan identifying itself with some object from the natural world (usually a plant or animal). In other words, a totem is a clan's flag. All societies seem to do this. We find symbols--often taken from the natural world--as stand ins for our community, nation, or group. Germany takes an eagle, the mormons take the beehive, and Japan takes the rising sun. Durkheim makes clear that what is important is not the real object itself, but the representation of the object. It is not the rabbit that is sacred, but the image of the rabbit. This is significant because what Durkheim argues is that the clan is in fact representing itself by means of the totem. When the clan reverences, worships, or in any way sets apart the totem as a sacred object, they are, in effect, simply reverencing the visual representation of their collective existence. The practices that spring up around the representation of the totem then become what we recognize as a "religion". Durkheim sees this process of taking outside objects as representative of oneself as a necessary means by which a community expresses and understands itself: "...collective sentiments can become conscious of themselves only by fixing themselves upon external objects..." (466)

Why do societies seek to represent and then revere themselves in this manner? This is where we approach Durkheim's fascinating notion of a "collective effervescence". People have wondered what it is exactly that gives rise to religion and the idea of an all-powerful being named God. Durkheim rejects the idea that the notion of "God" comes from feelings of fear, or weakness in the face of powerful natural forces. Rather, Durkheim sees the beginnings of the practice of totemism, which then develops into the notion of a spiritual being, as beginning with the experience of community. Durkheim states that "...collective life awakens religious thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity..." (469) This "religious thought" begins with the feeling of "reverence" for something outside of ourselves that seems to be all-powerful.

On some level, we all reverence society and recognize its claims upon us. Durkheim theorizes that this sense of respect for society comes from the physical power we feel when participating in any communal event. We seem to be lifted out of ourselves in the presence of large groups participating in some important communal act. Durkheim puts it so:

"There are occasions when this strengthening and vivifying action of society is especially apparent. In the midst of an assembly animated by a common passion, we become susceptible of acts and sentiments of which we are incapable when reduced to our own forces; and when the assembly is dissolved and when, finding ourselves alone again, we fall back to our ordinary level, we are then able to measure the height to which we have been raised above ourselves" (240)

This physical force emanating from community is what Durkheim terms "collective effervescence". We can perhaps best understand it by reflecting on the excitement we feel as we sing together in a church assembly, or experience the sensation of 30,000 individuals cheering for a school basketball team. There seems to be a force that exists in community.

The Aborigines--experiencing this phenomenon as they came together to celebrate a successful hunt or something of that sort--began the process of seeking to understand this force that seemed to alight upon their community. It eventually led to the totem. In a more general sense, it is not very hard to see the connection between God and society. God is to us--in basic form--"a being whom men think of as superior to themselves, and upon whom they feel that they depend" (237). Durkheim argues that God is (I've simplified this a little bit) the expression we use for the individual's relationship to society. Society appears to us as an invisible, yet all-powerful entity. Its can demand everything from us simply by being what it is: society. We all seem to perceive that the greatest end that exists is the good of society. Durkheim feels that this attitude seemingly innate in us arises from an immaterial power that comes with communal existence:

"We say that an object, whether individual or collective, inspires respect when the representation expressing it in the mind is gifted with such a force that it automatically causes or inhibits actions, without regard for any consideration relative to their useful or injurious effects" (237).

Thus, Durkheim's main thrust can be summed up in three words: "Society is God". By way of conclusion, what I find most applicative in this theory is what Durkheim concludes about the ultimate nature of religious claims about a spiritual realm and the ethical teachings attached to the religion. To be perfectly blunt, Durkheim saves religion from being simply interpreted as an illusion, but ultimately concludes that while arising from very real physical forces, the literal notions of a corporeal God and heaven cannot be accepted. In his words, "...the reality which religious thought expresses is society..." (480) Further, the ethical claims that religion makes on individuals can be understood as how a community expresses the "collective ideal" (470).

Ambiguity

2009-12-11T15:46:00.000-08:00

Ambiguity. What does this imply? I think for many of us this word immediately suggests a lack of clarity or resolution on an issue. I would like to explore this idea and how humans react to it.

I believe that it is hard for people to live with ambiguity. I believe it is a natural desire to want things concrete, clear. We want to know who is right and who is wrong or else we feel cheated. That is why American movies usually present a clear good and bad guy and that ends happily. The bad guy dies (after much mayhem to be sure) and the good guys win. Our aversion to ambiguity comes from a particularly moralist way of viewing the world. We believe that things are clear. People may argue about perspective, sure, but the only reason why they hold on to one perspective, we tell ourselves, is because they are either misinformed, stupid, or downright evil. Our religious thought, our national politics, and our personal relationships are all often marred by the belief that at any one moment one position is completely valid (which we take to be ours) and the other one is dangerously mistaken. This attitude is not specific to conservative or liberal circles, religious or irreligious groups. I believe that the assumption of right and wrong, absolute certainty, and demonization comes from a simple, but powerful emotion: fear. We fear ambiguity and uncertainty. We fear having to face the idea that things are just a lot more complex than we take them to be. We fear that if by giving in to the idea that from another person's perspective they just might be justified, that we give up everything that we have built our lives on. We fear having to face the realization that much of our emotional pain is self-inflicted through our insecurities and not the result of the malice of others. We keep ourselves in bondage, then, by holding too tightly to the chains of right and wrong. I often wonder if we can really say that anybody is truly evil.

Admitting that ambiguity in morality and right and wrong can exist in the world fills us with fear. But I think that this fear is often more the product of pride and self-righteousness than anything else. More often than not we are willing to look at other people who are in an argument and say how irrational they are acting. We tell them, if they would just think for a moment, they would see that both sides should let go of the matter and admit that both sides are a little bit right and a little bit wrong. This changes when we are involved in the argument. We immediately assume the position of victim and if reconciliation does take place it is only the result of us being gracious and forgiving; not admitting that we were a little bit wrong too. The aversion to ambiguity is strongest when it is personal.

Justification Through Faith

2009-11-29T09:17:00.000-08:00

I have been reading through the first few chapters of Romans with the motivation of trying to better understand the relationship between faith and works. Although I do not have, perhaps, the greatest hermeneutical skills, I see clearly how Paul is arguing for justification by faith alone. I find Paul's arguments convincing. He argues in Romans 2 that those who were not Jews could be found righteous by God without the works of the law if they believed in Christ. He asks then in Romans 3 whether it thus is any advantage to being a Jew with the law at all? If people do not need special ceremonies or an institution to be saved, why perform the ceremonies or belong to the institution at all? Paul believes there is a purpose to being a Jew, but it seems to not be an advantage that comes from having the correct ceremonies but rather further evidence for the supremacy of faith over human works. Paul argues that the advantage to being a Jew is that "unto them were committed the oracles of God" (3:2). In other words, God sent the prophets unto the Jews and not unto other peoples. He chose the Jews so that they would believe on him. This is important to Paul because it shows that it was God's will that the Jews were chosen and not the will of the Jews. God's 'faith'--his grace and mercy--is stronger than the Jews actions. He proves this seemingly by playing on the Jewish sentiment that even the worst Jew is better than a heathen since the Jew chosen by God must retain some merit despite his unworthiness. Paul asks "For what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect? (3:3). God's grace is greater than our works even to the point that once we are chosen, our works cannot overrule God's decision.

I find this very interesting from a historical point of view. Paul wrote in a context where the emphasis on the efficacy of the ceremonies and institution were being trumpeted against a more progressive approach where the old institutions of Judaism were being challenged by the newness of the Christian doctrine. Later groups, the Lutheran and Calvinist reformers, would make use of Paul's arguments as they found themselves in a similar situation opposing an institution that emphasized ceremony and exclusion for both dogmatic and political reasons. I accept both extremes--non-institutional salvation and ceremony--as necessary aspects of human nature.

Determinism, Freedom, and Psychology

2009-11-22T08:21:00.001-08:00

Lately, I have learned a bit about how psychology seeks to empower people. I have made several realizations about freedom as I have studied this. The beginning philosophical point for many psychologists seems actually to be an idea quite anti-thetical to the notion of freedom: environmental determinism. Along with rationalists like Spinoza, psychologists in the tradition of Freud see human behavior as a result of visceral, natural reactions to stimuli. Our feelings are determined by what seems to be a programmed response to certain situations over which it seems that we have little choice. When I see a bear on a jog in the mountains, I immediately get the sensation of fear and my next action--flight--follows naturally from this sensation. The decision time between this emotion and this action is very little. The same goes for anger and love; I act in a certain way when I encounter specific sets of stimuli. So, in general, psychologists posit that all human behavior in a sense comes from natural laws. We react in a determined way when we are stimulated in such and such a way. So how can we make free decisions or better choices other than just our natural instincts? Psychology suggests that freedom is possible in this model. The first key is recognizing that we do react most of the time automatically to certain situations with little reflection. You can come to this realization by trying to become more conscious of your emotional state through activities such as meditation, breathing exercises, etc. When you are feeling at any time a particularly strong emotion, one should stop and try to pinpoint what the emotion is that you are feeling. Stress? Depression? Anger? More often than not, these are emotions that at any other time we would not choose to feel. By stopping and realizing what we are feeling, we, in a sense, remove ourselves from the situation that gave rise to the emotion and we give ourselves a small window to make a decision. There is a window between stimuli and reaction in which free will exists. While we cannot choose to feel the stimuli and the accompanying emotion per se, we do choose how to react. By getting better at recognizing what emotions we feel, we in essence increase that short moment where all decisions are made. Most people don't make decisions because their actions have become programmed by habit.

The Limits of Art and Truth

2009-10-04T10:07:00.000-07:00

I am taking a course on the German playwright and aesthetic theorist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Our most recent discussion focused on Lessing's attempt to differentiate between the plastic arts (painting, sculpture, even film) and writing. Lessing argues--against the current of his time--that the two mediums are essentially different as each has a different goal and different manner of working upon the viewer or reader. Lessing proceeds to give his opinion on what these mediums should depict in order for them to conform to their respective ends and restrictions. Because the plastic arts are visual and give us an immediate depiction of reality, it is necessary that they choose the "most pregnant moment" of an event to paint. The 'most pregnant' moment is not the climactic moment, however. It is not the moment when the bullet strikes the body, when the car hits the individual, or worse, when the sexual act is performed. Lessing believes that the plastic medium must conform to the rules of beauty--and those rules tell us that beauty is moderate. Beauty suggests, it does not shock. If we were to see everything, the moment of greatest distress, or gore, or climax, it would arouse extremely powerful feelings in the viewer that would overpower every other sensation or reflection on the action. Beauty should communicate gentle emotions such as pity, admiration, slight sorrow, etc. Everything else is distasteful and sensationalism.

Lessing's logic here is interesting. To him, art, although imitative, does not have as its object, simply the honest depiction of nature. It should not just imitate what occurs in real life. Art can therefore be restricted as to what it can depict. Lessing believes that science is different. In an aside, he states that since science's goal is truth, it cannot be restricted in any way. This attitude reveals an important aspect of Enlightenment thought. Science is set apart as a thing unto itself, apart from any restraints imposed by culture. It underlines the disingenuous of enlighteners. On the one hand they could argue for the need for moderation and pragmatism in politics that allowed them to accommodate a monarchy and limitations on freedoms. On the other hand, their belief in science as an ultimate truth-producing entity reveals their essentially radical nature: whatever 'science'(or more properly, reason) may tell us, must be followed since it is necessarily true.

The Egalitarian Society

2009-09-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

We have been brainwashed by our time. Not that that is necessarily a negative thing. But it may help us to gain perspective and refrain from judging people who came before or other cultures today when they do not embody the same ideals as us.

An example of this is western civilization's belief in egalitarianism. Today, we operate under the paradigm that all government positions, job hirings, promotions, spots to study at a college, and judicial decisions should be decided on a merit basis and that every other way of choosing someone over another is ethically wrong. I am not disputing that this could be true, I just want to point out the fact that this is not the only approach that one can take. For most of human civilization, such decisions were based on relationship ties, not merit. Your fitness for a position was not a function of how good you could do a job but your identity, your membership in a group. This society has often been termed the corporate society. It is apparent in tribal societies, pre-modern European society, and is in fact alive today in western society even if we do not recognize it. Today we feel an aversion to a politician who advances a relative and immediately label it as nepotism and unfair. What we may not realize is that this was normal practice. It was expected that decisions should be made in this manner. On another level, society was understood to only be able to function on a class basis. One belongs to a certain class that has certain responsibilities. Society would not function if anybody could do whatever they wanted. Important responsibilities would be neglected since no one wants to do the bottom jobs.

Paradox

2009-09-12T06:38:00.000-07:00

"Je edler ein Ding in seiner Vollkommenheit", sagt ein hebräischer Schriftsteller, "desto gräßlicher in seiner Verwesung." Ein verfaultes Holz ist so scheußlich nicht als eine verwesete Blume; diese nicht so ekelhaft als ein verfaultes Tier; und dieses so gräßlich nicht als der Mensch in seiner Verwesung. So auch mit Kultur und Aufklärung. Je edler in ihrer Blüte; desto abscheulicher in ihrer Verwesung und Verderbtheit. Mißbrauch der Aufklärung schwächt das moralische Gefühl, führt zu Hartsinn, Egoismus, Irreligion und Anarchie. Misbrauch der Kultur erzeuget Üppigkeit, Gleisnerei, Weichlichkeit, Aberglauben, und Sklaverei."

(The more refined a thing is in its perfectness, says a Hebraic writer, the more gruesome it is in its decay. Rotting wood is not as disgusting as a withered flower, and a flower not as repulsive as decaying animal. An animal is finally less abhorrent than a rotting human. It is likewise with culture and enlightenment. The more noble it is in its blossom, the more abhorrent it is in its decay and decadence. Abuse of enlightenment weakens the moral sense, leads to obstinance, egotism, irreligion, and anarchy. Abuse of culture fosters luxury, mushiness, superstition, and slavery.)

There are many thoughts I have on this quote. Although it may be wrong to take Mendelssohn's discussion of a topic (enlightenment) that has a particular meaning to his period (critical thinking) I believe it is not too much of a stretch to apply it to myself. Francis Bacon said that "a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." I think that mankind is prone to excess. Once he gets it into his mind that he is capable of seeing contradictions in belief, how some things work, and so forth, he thinks that he can critique everything. He soon realizes (hopefully) that this is not the case and, in fact, such an attitude causes harm. Just as God's ways are not our ways, I think that even what humans think is comprehensible reality may not be so comprehensible and man may never truly be able to dispense with mystery, awe, and ignorance when it comes to existence.

Discussion topic

2009-09-05T14:15:00.000-07:00

Anger is merely a strategy to help us avoid sadness. Discuss.

Proofs of God's Existence

2009-08-30T08:34:00.001-07:00

I am going to try to start posting again on my blog after an absence of eight months.

For my first entry, I will just share something interesting that I read today. It concerns the different methods employed by people to prove that God exists. Philosophy has divided them into four different categories. There are probably more ways in which God's existence could be asserted, but these seem to be the most prevalent throughout history. They are, 1) the ontological proof, 2) the cosmological proof, 3) the teleological proof, and 4) the divine encounter.

First, let's take the ontological proof. Ontological is a Greek word with a root that connotes 'being'. Ontology thus refers to the study of the nature of existence and being or the study of what can be said to exist. An ontological proof of God's existence is called such because many thinkers (such as Rene Descartes) have argued that God must exist merely from the the fact that the idea of God exists. Something cannot come from nothing and since we have the idea of God, it must come from something that really exists, i.e. God. It is thus a proof for the existence of God based on the existence of the concept.

Second, Let's consider the cosmological argument. Cosmology is the study of the universe and how it works. A cosmological argument for God's existence goes something like this: the universe exists and since everything that exists must have a cause, their must exist a 'first cause' to the universe. This 'first cause' must be the creator of the universe and this is God.

Thirdly, we have the teleological argument. This argument may seem similar to the cosmology argument but there is a slight and important difference. Teleology is another Greek term whose root is 'end' or 'goal'. Teleology connotes the study of the end goal of all things. If I am presented with any object and I ask myself 'what is the purpose of this object?' I am engaging in a teleological consideration of the object. I want to know what the goal of the object is. In regards to how this could be used as a proof of God's existence, when we look at the world, we usually see a system that seems to function with goals in mind. The universe seems to be 'designed' to support life, especially human life. If we look at the universe from a teleological perspective, it seems natural to conclude that if something is designed to do something, that there must be an intelligence behind it. The clockmaker is an analogy that is essentially a teleological argument for God's existence. If we came across a clock on a beach we would naturally assume that there was a clockmaker. The same goes for the universe.

Finally, we have the divine-encounter. This proof is different than all the others. It does not appeal to logic but to experience. The other proofs focus on the outward expression of an idea that is supposedly objective, logical, and natural to all human beings. They strive for a universal proof of God's existence. The divine encounter, on the other hand, simply argues that the subject has experienced divinity and therefore has knowledge of its existence. It may very well desire to share this knowledge with others but its proof is not necessarily contingent on the experience being 'logical' to other individuals. I prefer this proof over all the others because I tend to distrust logical proofs since logic and abstract thought does not necessarily tell me about the world but rather about how my mind functions. Both logic and experience can make powerful impressions on the mind, and indeed, we can have an experience because of logic, but often what is impressed on us so strongly fails to be something that can be expressed in universal terms such as logic.

Postmodern Art

2008-12-07T08:09:00.000-08:00

My sister Sarah always wants me to do a blog post on something relating to my real life. Even though I maintain that all my previous posts perhaps have more application to real life than purely relating something that happened, I will reconcile the two approaches.

The last two months I have participated in something called "critical mass." It is a world-wide phenomenon (at least a western one) where a group of people gather to ride their bikes on a Friday evening through the busy streets of downtown London, New York, or...Provo. The group gathers rather abruptly and at the appointed time, floods the streets with their bicycles, taking up most, if not all of the lanes, and chokes traffic somewhat as they follow a route through downtown Provo. Here in Provo the group is quite tame and even though the procession goes through red lights, and makes left turns that stop oncoming traffic for several minutes, they try to leave a lane open so traffic can get by. The police are somewhat baffled as to how to react. They cannot really stop several hundred bicyclists who suddenly appear on the streets and can merely scatter when approached by a cop car. Plus, the biker has the legal status of a vehicle and has as much a right to the road as a car. They have resorted to merely trying to supervise, observe, and direct the flow of bicycles, despite being generally unsuccessful.

I find this phenomenon interesting in terms of postmodern art. It bears striking resemblance to other activities termed "flashes" I believe. A large group of individuals will be instructed to do something random in a public place at exactly the same instant. One instance was in a crowded square and at the given moment, half the people in the square froze for several minutes, to the shock, and consternation of those not in on the joke. Other examples include a large group of people suddenly running naked through a particular street and a lone photographer capturing the moment in a photo.

The reason why we could term these acts postmodern is their emphasis on immanence opposed to transcendence, and their pushing of what we term acceptable and lawful. That is, challenging authority.

Earlier art, in the form of a static painting, sculpture, photograph, or architecture, is long-lasting, and focuses on transcending the particular, and finite to access and project eternal, universal meaning and value. The beautiful sculptures of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy sought to project the ideal body of man and communicate excellence. Postmodernism prefers to see meaning and value as immanent--projecting from the inner life and limited to the individual. It is likewise not meant to last. It is as if they are saying, "this expression does not go beyond itself or this moment." Thus these spontaneous flashes can be understood as having their meaning rooted in non-permanence, the moment, the individual, etc.

As for pushing authority, the connection is clearer. Postmodernists generally see the world not built on rational, universal principles, but on the preferences and values of a particular group. For us that would be dead, white, western, rich, European males. Since roads are made for cars (which themselves have taken on a bad rap as of late) the postmodern would want to challenge this seemingly benign and functional fixture. The "bike" (insert female, minority, etc) has its right to the "road" (insert civil rights, institution, etc), even if it is not designed for the "bike."

The Fleur de Lis and Semiotics

2008-12-05T15:17:00.000-08:00

The Fleur de Lis traditionally symbolizes royalty, monarchy, and heraldry. Appropriated by the Frankish King Clovis in the 6th century as a sign of his Christianity, it was further appropriated by the French Kings to legitimize themselves through the connection with the first Frankish, Christian king, Clovis. From the end of the Middle Ages, throughout early and modern Europe, the Fleur de Lis was the symbol of the French Monarchy and by extension France. Later it specifically represented the house of Bourbon, and since Luxembourg and Spain are the last of the Bourbon monarchies, the Fleur de Lis remains their symbol.

It now is a disseminated symbol-as is the fate of all symbols-and we recognize it in connection with the Boy Scouts and Professional Sports teams. But the the history of this symbol reveals important discursive and rhetorical methods employed by different groups for creating and perpetuating an image, and therefore power.

I will not attempt to chronicle all the cycles of meaning that this symbol has been through (for that would be an infinite regression) but needless to say, the Fleur de Lis was at one point only a fleur de lis. Before man saw it and spoke of it, it was a Fleur de Lis. This changed at some point. It was appropriated by someone or some group to represent an idea greater than the object itself in order to enhance and project this idea. Scholars have shown it to be present in Indonesian, Sumerian, Mesopotamian, and Roman culture as a stylized symbol. As for the meanings it had in these cultures, there is little to go on. Before it became the symbol of French Royalty and heraldry, the Fleur de Lis was a Christian symbol. The three leaves interchangeably represented either the trinity, the virgin, or the dove.

The French Kings, beginning with Louis VII (1154-80)began putting the Fleur de lis on their seals and coat of arms to legitimize their claim to power and associate themselves with Christianity and piety since the legend was that Clovis had first received the Fleur de lis directly from heaven. It likewise came to mean Later, English kings who claimed the throne of France used the Fleur de lis to assert their right to the throne.

For medieval and early modern Europe the royal Fleur de lis meant perfection, light, and life.

For me, this example of how the Valois and Bourbon dynasties used an image to be a very powerful symbol of much larger ideas as power, legitimacy, royalty, and piety, reveals important functions that symbols have in socio-behavioral patterns. Scholars of Semiotics (the study of signs) posit that the way we communicate is purely through a system of signs. Words, body gestures, and the use of images understood to represent ideas is in fact how we communicate. If you think about it, these are indirect means of communicating. If the French King wanted to communicate that he was the legitimate king, why did he not merely say, "I am the legitimate King"? Why did he go outside himself, and appeal to an image? The image is an attempt at transcendence. To appeal to a higher source that everyone recognizes, or that we attempt to make everyone recognize as having a certain meaning and authority. Who controls that meaning could be reduced to physical power. But if they already have physical power, why do they appeal to symbolic power? Possibly because symbolic and physical power go hand in hand to perpetuate each other.

I think this has direct application to our everyday lifes and for cross-cultural understanding. Every position in society seems to have symbols connected with them, either in the form of images or linguistic. Our dress (suit, scruffy, doctor), our titles (Dr., Mr., Sir) or images such as the beehive, the eagle, and flags. We depend on other people understanding what all these symbols mean as they relate directly to identity and to the past to legitimize individuals or institutions. The founding fathers interest in using classical architecture depends on people understanding history and the fact that classical architecture symbolizes learning, power, stability, and early democracy.

So what happens when we encounter images from other cultures that we do not recognize? We will first have difficulty communicating and likewise assign our own meanings to the symbol. The rising sun of Japan in World War II is a good example. A symbol of Japan's divine birth was seen by Americans as obviously a sinister symbol.

It is interesting likewise how the same symbol is so differently used in different cultures. The Swastika, for example, is recognized by all westerners (and pretty much the whole world now) as symbolizing the Nazis, fascism, oppression, authoritarianism, racism, and mass murder. Ironically it traditionally meant (Buddhists still use the symbol extensively) life and good luck. The spoiling of an image has an important impact on the way we communicate. So the politicizing of images is problematic. It would be difficult now to invoke the imagery of a rainbow in a neutral manner. I would be communicating something very different, if unwillingly.

Hume and Experience Again

2008-12-03T20:05:00.000-08:00

"For me it seems evident, that the essence of the mind being equally unknown to us with that of external bodies, it must be equally impossible to form any notion of its powers and qualities otherwise than from careful and exact experiments, and the observation of those particular effects, which result from its different circumstances and situations. And tho' we must endeavor to render all our principles as universal as possible, by tracing up our experiments to the utmost and explaining all effects from the simplest and fewest causes, 'tis still certain that we cannot go beyond experience; and any hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical." (Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, xxi)

Beethoven vs. Mozart

2008-10-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

I think that a major difference between these two giants is that Mozart is inspiring aesthetically while Beethoven is inspiring ideologically. Of course Beethoven is inspiring aesthetically too, but his works such as "Ode to Joy", "Egmont", "Eroica" and "Wellingtons Sieg" have extreme ideological messages. I am not saying that Mozart's works were not ideological--The Magic Flute, the Marriage of Figaro, etc. preached the Gospel of the Enlightenment but they had to be somewhat masked still for the time whereas Beethoven's works could be more openly nationalistic and liberal due to the climate created by Napoleon.

2008-08-15T15:10:00.001-07:00

Guantanamo has to be shut down because it is a cancer in our relations with the world. It is much more than that, but because it exists, it is a constant reminder to the world of the new image that the United States has acquired since 9/11.
One may protest that torture does not take place there, prisoners are being released, and that terrorists are often tried in normal courts. This does not matter. When the French stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, they did not care that it no longer served the purpose of torturing the King's enemies by superceding the law and only had six prisoners in it. They only saw it as a symbol; a constant reminder of despotism. This reminder brought down Louis XVI and if we continue to disregard our standing in the world, we could find ourselves bereft of traditional allies.

2008-08-15T07:24:00.001-07:00

I am a bit concerned today after reading an article in Aftenposten, a Norwegian newspaper, that quotes a Russian, Sergei Markov, accusing Dick Cheney of a conspiracy to start the Georgian war in order to get McCain elected. I am no friend of Cheney's and such a theory might not be that shocking if it came from a random Russian citizen. The problem here is that Sergei Markov is the head of the Moscow Institute for Political Studies! That's right, the head of a supposedly respectable, academic institution is spouting off conspiracy theories. I know that the university of Moscow had come under suspicion lately of un-academic anti-semitism but delving into improbably conspiracy theories to bolster the regime's image is a new low.

Master Status

2008-07-22T16:59:00.001-07:00

This last summer I was introduced to the concept of 'master status'. I am no sociologist, but from what I understand of the concept, from all the different identities we possess--brother, sister, christian, parent, student, American, teenager, etc.--there seems to be one that rises to the top in our own view or in the view of others. Which master status rises to the top depends on surroundings and circumstances. For example, if an individual feels that one of their identities is persecuted by the majority, they will make that identity their 'master status.' This process comes about because of the individual and the majority. The majority sees what is different about others, and we try to differentiate ourselves from the majority.

This summer, I experienced this phenomenon in very stark terms. Emerging from almost two years at Brigham Young University where almost everyone is Mormon, I spent a few months in a small, medieval German town with students from all across the world, almost none of whom were religious. I found that all the Americans there knew readily that I was a Mormon as soon as I told them where I came from. My "mormonism" became my master status in their eyes immediately. In fact, "Mormon" became my name. This was mostly just amusing, but also somewhat frustrating because I did not see myself as just "Mormon." My environment at BYU possibly contributed to me trying to differentiate myself and view myself as a student of history, a young adult with a specific personality, etc. I was therefore frustrated when all that I was seen as was a "Mormon" with all my characteristics a priori thrust upon me.

Many observations could be made here about how we interact as human beings in terms of identity and stereotypes, especially in contrasting the way Americans viewed me as opposed to people from the rest of the world who did not know much about "Mormons." They definitely were intrigued by this aspect of my identity and we spoke much of it, but it was different in that their lack of knowledge automatically prevented them from stereotyping and they assumed a more understanding, curious attitude. Likewise, I spent most of my time with my non-American friends because they were also interested in my non-Mormon identities: American, student of History and German, young adult, etc. My one identity did not block out the others.

Objective

2008-03-24T06:44:00.000-07:00

"Pour découvrir les meilleures règles de société qui conviennent aux nations, il faudrait une intelligence supérieure, qui vît toutes les passions des hommes et qui n'en éprouvât aucune, qui n'eût aucun rapport avec notre nature et qui la connût à fond, dont le bonheur fût indépendant de nous et qui pourtant voulût bien s'occuper du nôtre; enfin qui, dans le progrès des temps se ménageant une gloire éloignée, pût travailler dans un siècle et jouir dans un autre. Il faudrait des dieux pour donner des lois aux hommes."
(Discovering the rules of society best suited to nations would require a superior intelligence that beheld all the passions of men without feeling any of them; who had no affinity with our nature, yet knew it through and through; whose happiness was independent of us, yet who nevertheless was willing to concern itself with ours; finally, who, in the passage of time, procures for himself a distant glory, being able to labor in one age and find enjoyment in another. Gods would be needed to give men laws.) (Rousseau, Du Contrat Social)

I've thought a bit about this idea lately. Not exactly in the same context as Rousseau but in regard to how actually feeling something changes the way we look at something. I can expound philosophical truths about ideals all day long--and I hope that I would have the strength to stick with them--but somehow actually experiencing and feeling the real thing makes it clear just how hard it is to apply theory to reality. Rousseau says here that because man is not detached from emotion and passions, it is difficult to create a leader or society that is perfect.

Conservative Circles

2008-03-22T16:08:00.000-07:00

"In any animal I see nothing but an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses in order for it to renew its strength and to protect itself, to a certain point, from all that tends to destrou or disturb it. I am aware of precisely the same things in the human machine, with the difference that nature alone does everything in the operations of an animal, whereas man contributes, as a free agent, to his own operations. The former chooses or rejects by instinct and the latter by an act of freedom. Hence an animal cannot deviate from the rule that is prescribed to it, even when it would be advantageous to do so, while man deviates from it, often to his own detriment. Thus a pigeon would die of hunger near a bowl filled with choice meats, and so would a cat perched atop a pile of fruit or grain, even though both could nourish themselves quite well with the food they disdain, if they were of a mind to try some. And thus dissolute men abandon themselves to excesses which cause them fever and death, because the mind perverts the senses and because the will still speaks when nature is silent." (Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality)

I thought this passage was extremely interesting. I see it as a common practice to extract examples from nature to prove a political/ideological point. Rousseau here is railing against the tendency of man to abandon his natural boundaries and thus become degenerate. Others might point to natural patterns of reproduction, assembly, government etc. to prove their point. To me, it is not always clear if one can use such comparisons as the basis of truth. I guess the question is to what extent are the patterns we find in nature supposed to serve as a model for what is right. There are surely many examples of things that happen in nature that we would reject as being moral.

Impressions

2008-03-18T20:24:00.000-07:00

"Impressions always actuate the soul, and that in the highest degree; but it is not every idea which has the same effect. Nature has proceeded with caution in this case, and seems to have carefully avoided the inconveniences of two extremes. Did impression alone influence the will, we should every moment of our lives be subject to the greatest calamities; because, though we foresaw their approach, we should not be provided by nature with any principle of action, which might impel us to avoid them. On the other hand, did every idea influence our actions, our condition would not be much mended. For such is the unsteadiness and activity of thought, that the images of everything, especially of good s and evils, are always wandering in the mind; and were it moved by every idle conception of this kind, it would never enjoy a moment's peace and tranquility... Nature has therefore chosen a medium, and has neither bestowed on every idea of good and evil the power of actuating the will, nor yet has entirely excluded them from this influence. Thought and idle fiction has no efficacy, yet we find by experience that the ideas of those objects which we believe either are or will be existent produce in a lesser degree the same effect with those impressions, which are immediately present to the senses and perception. The effect, then, or belief is to raise up a simple idea to an equality with our impressions, and bestow on it a like influence on the passions."(DAVID HUME from Treatise of Human Nature)

This has always been very interesting to me. I noticed that thoughts, while having the possibility to be powerful by themselves, are greatly accentuated when accompanied by a physical impression. I remember experiencing certain things as a missionary that I had read about a thousand times that made sense but made no great impression on me, but when the experience took place, it was as if thunder struck. The thought became a brand on my mind and heart when coupled with experience. I know that Hume is saying a lot more here, but this is just what I think of first when reading this.

People Movers

2008-03-13T23:33:00.001-07:00

The way we humans try to legitimize things we do through categorization and names has always intrigued me. For example, there is this neighborhood by my house which has a big stone sign saying that the neighborhood is called "Venetian Villas" or something to that effect. Looking past the fact that the neighborhood is actually located in the Western U.S.--Orem, Utah to be exact--one can ask why we would feel this impulse to "borrow" the Venetian heritage.
What was my surprise then, when, traveling for the first time to the great state of Alaska, I meet this phenomenon, but going in the opposite direction. I had just hopped off my flight from Seattle to Anchorage with my traveling companion Andrew Christensen, and, having a few hours before our flight to Fairbanks, we decided that we wanted to see downtown Anchorage. We approached a friendly-looking police officer directing traffic and asked him if he knew where the buses to downtown Anchorage were. He looked at us kind of puzzled for a second and replied, "Oh, you mean the people mover. It is right over there." After recovering from this perplexing response, we proceeded to the before-mentioned location and we awaited the "people mover." Unfortunately we did not get to utilize the "people mover" due to time constraints, but we did consider taking a "personal people mover" (taxi), but eventually we decided on staying at the airport and eating before getting on the "flying people mover" to Fairbanks.
So basically I didn't realize that the great post-modernist movement has found a state that is committed to applying its principles in everyday life. We surely can't avoid categorizing, but we can simplify and render harmless our classifications as the Alaskans are finding out with their "people movers" (unless you are an Alaskan caribou who is left out of the picture with 'people' being in the title).

Addendum to Camus' La Peste

2008-03-08T16:24:00.000-08:00

Concerning Jesuit missionary activities among the Indians of North America and their medical practices there:

"The Jesuits of New France knew nothing of germs, viruses, and immunity. Though knowledgeable by the standards of their day, they lived centuries before modern science systematically classified diseases, discovered how they spread, and developed preventive and curative drugs. they brought to New France various medicines, including sugar,, widely regarded as a cure-all in the seventeenth century, and they were eager to learn about native herbal remedies as well. They also had recourse to the surgeon's art in serious cases, bleeding their colleagues or prescribing purges, treatments based on the prevalent theory that illness resulted form an excess of fluids in the body. The Jesuits did not see themselves as doctors, however. Their priority was saving souls, and when epidemics struck, they put most of their efforts into baptizing the dying rather than relieving the suffering of the living--a strategy that did not make a favorable impression on their native hosts.
As the Jesuits struggled to explain to their readers, and to themselves, the terrible epidemics that devastated the nations of North America, they tended to focus more on the ultimate question of why, rather than on the immediate question of how, disease spread. Seeing individuals and whole nations struck low, they perceived signs of God's plan to punish the wicked, test the resolution of the virtuous or simply gather souls to heaven. Since God worked through nature, explanations could be found in both religion and science, just as relief could be sought through prayer and medicine." (Greer, Allen, "The Jesuit Relations")

I see this as a continuation of the struggle between the ideal and the materialistic view of human nature. Camus says that before one can philosophize on theological causes for the problems in the world, one has to do everything one can to alleviate those problems. Pretty similar to Voltaire's Candide. I have personally been obsessed with the championing of the ideal, the power of the mind over matter, and in decrying pragmatism, but I am slowly gaining a more nuanced approach to this. I guess that is what comes with experience. I don't want to lose idealism though!

Sorting things Out

2008-03-08T13:59:00.000-08:00

The Chinese Encyclopedia's Categories of Dogs, by Borges:

(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies."
“We order the world according to categories that we take for granted simply because they are given.”
“An enemy defined as less than human may be annihilated.”
”All social action flows through boundaries determined by classification schemes, whether or not they are elaborated as explicitly as library catalogues, organization charts, and university departments.” (Darnton, French Cultural Tales)

These thoughts come from a book that seeks to explain the mindsets of 18th century frenchman with people of today. The point is made that a big portion of the way we make sense of the world comes from the way we classify things. To be honest, I think this is a lot deeper than I am able to grasp right now. All I can really think of now is the danger of letting established ways of classifying things determine how we see and interact with the world. It limits what we might consider proper and those things we might engage ourselves in otherwise. For example, cultural norms in worship services or how we approach learning in different disciplines; "this belongs to mathematics, this belongs to literature, and this belongs to history," whereas learning is one.

Emotional Honesty

2008-03-06T19:05:00.000-08:00

From an article entitled Emotional Honesty. Concerning our penchant for hiding our true emotions:

"...in many ways, society teaches us to ignore, repress, deny and lie about our feelings. For example, when asked how we feel, most of us will reply "fine" or "good," even if that is not true. Often, people will also say that they are not angry or not defensive, when it is obvious that they are.

Children start out emotionally honest. They express their true feelings freely and spontaneously. But the training to be emotionally dishonest begins at an early age. Parents and teachers frequently encourage or even demand that children speak or act in ways which are inconsistent with the child's true feelings. The child is told to smile when actually she is sad. She is told to apologize when she feels no regret. She is told to say "thank you," when she feels no appreciation. She is told to "stop complaining" when she feels mistreated. She may be told to kiss people good night when she would never do so voluntarily. She may be told it is "rude" and "selfish" to protest being forced to act in ways which go against her feelings.

Also, children are told they can't use certain words to express themselves. I have seen more than one parent tell their child not to use the word "hate," for example. And of course, the use of profanity to express one's feelings is often punished, sometimes harshly. In some cases the parent never allows the children to explain why they feel so strongly....At the same time, I have no doubt that part of a highly developed EI is knowing when to be emotionally honest, when to remain silent and when to act in line with or counter to our true feelings. There is something of a continuum of emotional honesty which includes unintended repression, full disclosure, discretionary disclosure, and intentional manipulation and emotional fraud. Furthermore, there is a constant trade-off between our short term vs. long term interests, our needs vs. others' needs and our self-judgement vs. judgement by others. Because all of this is largely an emotional problem to be solved, and a complex one at that, I believe emotional intelligence is being used when we make our decisions about when and how much to be emotionally honest. In my experience, approaching full emotional honesty simplifies my life, helps me see who will accept me as I am -- which in itself is a freeing discovery -- and offers me the opportunity for a rare sense of integrity, closeness and fulfillment.

Nathaniel Branden writes:

"If communication is to be successful, if love is to be successful, if relationships are to be successful, we must give up the absurd notion that there is something "heroic" or "strong" about lying, about faking what we feel, about misrepresenting, by commission or omission, the reality of our experience or the truth of our being. We must learn that if heroism and strength mean anything, it is the willingness to face reality, to face truth, to respect facts, to accept that that which is, is."

This is now me speaking. As usual, I don't think I have any absolute answers. I am starting to doubt that things are that simple. These blog posts are mostly equivalent to indulging in thoughts, and since I am usually against most types of indulgences, this may be out of character. In any case, I have trouble with this concept of emotional honesty. Naturally I am too open with my feelings. I may end up telling a complete stranger how I am really feeling. I just assume that when someone casually says "how's it going?" that they actually mean it as a question and not just a greeting.
Despite this side to my nature, many things over the years have told me to suppress expressing my feelings freely. As a missionary I was convinced that I should basically let anything that bothered me just be ignored. It was my problem if I got annoyed or upset. I still am very persuaded by a talk from conference where a seventy talked about a wife that decided a good exercise would be to share five things that were bothering them each concerning their partner. She went first talking about small things like how he ate his food, etc. When it was his turn, he just said that he couldn't think of anything about her that bothered him. The talk's moral was to let little things like that slide. While I still think that this should often be the case, I am wondering if it isn't better to take the advice of this article and be more open. I agree that trust is probably best built in an atmosphere where one shares more than one conceals, but at the same time, how do create this atmosphere that encourages openness? Furthermore, this article says that "emotional intelligence" consists of being able to tell when one should be emotionally honest. She doesn't say more though. And neither do I.

2008-01-31T10:39:00.001-08:00

“There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.” (David Hume, "Of Miracles and the origin of religion.")

“the boundaries of what is possible in moral matters are less narrow than we think. It is our weaknesses, our vices and our prejudices that shrink them. Base souls do not believe in great men; vile slave smile with an air of mockery at the word liberty.” (Rousseau, Social Contract, 195)

I've become more and more convinced that the traits we have--our weaknesses, predilections, fears, and hopes--, we attribute to others. If we are unmerciful, we expect others to be unmerciful; if we are suspicious, we assume that others are too. It thus comes as a surprise to us when people do kind or generous things that we don't expect them to do, because maybe we would not have thought to do it ourselves. I like this quote by Rousseau for expressing how this human trait limits us. 'base souls do not believe in great men;' we have a hard time getting above our natures. At the same time, the power of example is inestimable. I guess the moral then is to be unassuming.

Prudence

2008-01-21T15:19:00.000-08:00

"...goodness of heart and openness of temper, though these may give (you) great comfort within, and administer to an honest pride in their own minds, will by no means, alas! do their business in the world. Prudence and circumspection are necessary even to the best of men. They are indeed, as it were, a guard to Virtue, without which she can never be safe. It is not enough that your designs, nay, that your actions, are intrinsically good; you must take care they shall appear so. If your inside be never so beautiful, you must preserve a fair outside also. This must be constantly looked to, or malice and enjy will take care to blacken it....Let this, my young readers, be your constant maxim, that no man can be good enough to enable him to neglect the rules of prudence; nor will virtue herself look beautiful unless she be bedecked with the outward ornaments of decency and decorum." (Henry Fielding, "Tom Jones")

I heard an argument the other day in favor of not rejecting the idea of watching explicit material just because it is explicit. You have to judge it for how it is presented and what the overall point is. Otherwise you are limiting yourself to important concepts and intimating that you do not have complete free agency in that you cannot control your actions after seeing explicit material, so the argument went. As much as I am partial to this way of thinking, and recognize its logic, I don't know how far I am willing to throw all caution to the wind and be so sure of myself that that which I view doesn't affect me. Sounds quite anti-humanistic, but I think this quote helps to illustrate an important consideration.

Conscience and Religion

2008-01-20T08:19:00.001-08:00

"For there can and must be no radical difference between morality and religion. If a conflict arises between them, if the testimony of the Bible contradicts the testimony of the moral conscience, this dispute should be settled in a way that respects the absolute primacy of the moral consciousness. For if we relinquish this primacy, we forego any criterion of religious truth; then we no longer have any standard by which to measure the claims to certainty of an alleged revelation or distinguish, within religion itself, between reality and deception. Every literal interpretation of the Bible must therefore be rejected which commands us to act contrary to the first principles of morality." (Ernst Cassirer paraphrasing Bayle's (17th century philosopher) philosophy on religion)

"Past times are is if they had never been. It is always necessary to start at the point at which one already stands, and at which nations have arrived." (Voltaire)

This is probably one of the most interesting questions I know of: When there is a conflict between what a convention that we recognize as authority prescribes, and what something inside us says. Bayle is saying that since all religious belief originates in conscience and feeling--a realm beyond physical senses and the basis for revelation--than if we were to relegate conscience to a secondary position when deciding the truth of something, we would negate religion's foundation. This has always been interesting for me even though I can't say that I have had great struggles between my conscience and what my traditional beliefs have prescribed; it has been more a matter of gaining knowledge and confirming that something was true. I am aware though that this can be an extremely real problem. I think that Voltaire's quote clears this up a bit though. One would do well to take everything presented to them as authority as new and to test it out against their conscience. We would have to remembe Kant's cautioning that we proceed this way without rejecting and disobeying it also. If we were to question everything and disobey everything until we received some type of inner feeling of it being in harmony with our morals, society would be a mess.

Shaftesbury and Beauty

2008-01-13T08:04:00.000-08:00

"All beauty is truth, just as all truth can be understood basically only through the meaning of form, that is, the meaning of beauty...Sense as such is not capable of perceiving this phenomenon, let alone understanding it in its ultimate origin. Where sense only is involved, where the relation we establish between ourselves and the world depends merely on our instincts and appetites, there is as yet no acces to the realm of form. The animal that is affected by the objects of its environment merely as stimuli which awaken its instincts and occasion certain reactions, is ignorant of all knowledge of the form of things. This knowledge does not spring from the force of desire as a direct sense reaction but from the force of pure contemplation, which is free of all desire for possession and of any act of direct seizure of the object. In this faculty of pure contemplation and of a pleasure which is not motivated by any 'interest' (is) the fundamental force behind all artistic enjoyment and all artistic creation." (Cassirir on Shaftesbury and Beauty)

I think Shaftesbury is making a very important point here. One understanding of beauty is often connected with the immediate effect on the eyes or senses. I think Shaftesbury points to animal instincts here and sees that such instincts correspond to an immediate action or desire to partake, touch, taste, or own the object. I think he is searching for a deeper understanding of beauty where contemplation is first required to appreciate what makes the object pleasing to the senses i.e. the process of creation and development and/or work involved to bring it to this point. He sees this undestanding as leading to the greatest possible aesthetic enjoyment. I see it as important because it removes the possibility of false motivations for considering beauty and instills a desire to acquire the traits of the beautiful object.

Seneca

2008-01-01T11:49:00.000-08:00

"'Why do many adversities come to good men?' No evil can befall a good man; opposites do not mingle. Just as the countless rivers, the vast fall of rain from the sky, and the huge volume of mineral springs do not change the taste of the sea, do not even modify it, so the assaults of adversity do not weaken the spirit of a brave man. It always maintains its poise, and it gives its own colour to everything that happens; for it is mightier than all external things. And yet I do not mean to say that the brave man is insensible to these, but that he overcomes them, and being in all else unmoved and calm rises to meet whatever assails him. All his adversities he counts mere training. Who, moreover, if he is a man and intent upon the right, is not eager for reasonable toil and ready for duties accompanied by danger? To what energetic man is not idleness a punishment? Wrestlers, who make strength of body their chief concern, we see pitting themselves against none but the strongest, and they require of those who are preparing them for the arena that they use against them all their strength; they submit to blows and hurts, and if they do not find their match in single opponents, they engage with several at a time. Without an adversary, prowess shrivels. We see how great and how efficient it really is, only when it shows by endurance what it is capable of. Be assured that good men ought to act likewise; they should not shrink from hardships and difficulties, nor complain against fate; they should take in good part whatever happens, and should turn it to good. Not what you endure, but how you endure, is important."

I think this fits in well with Emerson's "Compensation" and gives maybe a reason why all things end up returning to their natural order. Seneca says that "no evil can befall a good man"; not that seemingly difficult things do not happen to them but because of how good men react to something that may seem bad changes that adversity to a learning and growing experience. This really is common sense. We see this at work in nature and in society. The muscle is torn in order to grow stronger, seperation from loved ones makes the bonds of love tighter. At the same time a lack of judgmenet can turn even minor ordeals into crisis and weaken us if we are not strong.

Madame Bovary

2007-12-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

¨Avant qu'elle se mariat, elle avait cru avoir de l'amour; mais le bonheur qui aurait du resulter de cet amour n'étant pas venu, il fallait qu'elle se fut trompée, songeait-elle. Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l'on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d'ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres....et elle ne pouvait s'imaginer à présent que ce calme où ell vivait fût le bonheur qu'elle avait rêvé.¨
(Before she married, she had believed that she possessed love; but with the happiness that should have been the result, not arriving, it must have been that she was mistaken, she thought. And Emma sought to find out just what was meant in life by the words felicity, passion, and euphoria, that had appeared so beautifully in books....and she could not presently imagine that this calm in which she lived was the happiness of which she had dreamed.)

To me it seems pretty clear that Emma has formed one idea of what happiness is from things that she has read or heard about, but not experienced. I think it this is often the case as we expect certain experiences to be constant bliss but we find that the true nature of happiness is something quite different. Not that intense joy doesn't take place but that real happiness is probably something less high-charged and more stable than what movies and literature present it as. I think we probably arrive at happiness after processes that require a bit of effort such as developing sincere gratitude for blessings, developing virtues in dealing with family and friends, and achieving goals that were difficult. Blissful happiness, while maybe not really existing, surely doesn't come in any lasting form as a result of “falling” into something.

"The Countryside Saved Him"

2007-12-23T11:50:00.000-08:00

"Isak han forstod å arbeide, å drive sin håndtering. Nu var han blit en rik mand med en stor gård, men de mange kontanter som slumpen hadde ført indpå ham gjorde han dårlig bruk av: han gjæmte dem. Marken frelste ham. Hadde Isak levet nede i bygden vilde kanske den store verden ha indvirket litt endog på ham, der var så meget gildt, så fine forhold, han vilde ha kjøpt unødvendigheter og gåt med rød helgeskjorte til hverdag. Her i marken var han værnet mot alle overdrivelser, han levet i klar luft, han vasket sig søndag morgen og lauget sig når han var oppe ved fjældvandet." (Markens Grøde, Knut Hamsun)

(Isak understood how to work, to manage his affairs. He had now become a rich man with a large farm, but he managed poorly all the money that success had brought him: he hid it. The countryside saved him. If Isak had lived down in town the big world would probably have worked on him more, there was so much to consider, such fine conditions, he would have bought unecessary things and worn a red weekend shirt on weekdays. Here in the countryside he was protected from all exagerations, he lived in clear air, he bathed Sunday morning and when he was up by the mountain lake."

I am a city boy. I've been surrounded by civilization all my life. My perspective is probably affected by this but I find it incredibly interesting how our surroundings can influence us and get us to do things we normally would not do or even think about. This is not necessarily a negative thing for we enjoy many things from civilization. I think it is probably important though to be aware of motivations for actions so that we can constantly be aware of those things that have the most importance.

2007-12-06T19:40:00.001-08:00

"CEUX qui accusent les hommes d'aller tousjours beant apres les choses futures, et nous apprennent à nous saisir des biens presens, et nous rassoir en ceux-là : comme n'ayants aucune prise sur ce qui est à venir, voire assez moins que nous n'avons sur ce qui est passé, touchent la plus commune des humaines erreurs : s'ils osent appeller erreur, chose à quoy nature mesme nous achemine, pour le service de la continuation de son ouvrage, nous imprimant, comme assez d'autres, cette imagination fausse, plus jalouse de nostre action, que de nostre science. Nous ne sommes jamais chez nous, nous sommes tousjours au delà. La crainte, le desir, l'esperance, nous eslancent vers l'advenir : et nous desrobent le sentiment et la consideration de ce qui est, pour nous amuser à ce qui sera, voire quand nous ne serons plus. Calamitosus est animus futuri anxius.

Ce grand precepte est souvent allegué en Platon, « Fay ton faict, et te congnoy. » Chascun de ces deux membres enveloppe generallement tout nostre devoir : et semblablement enveloppe son compagnon. Qui auroit à faire son faict, verroit que sa premiere leçon, c'est cognoistre ce qu'il est, et ce qui luy est propre. Et qui se cognoist, ne prend plus l'estranger faict pour le sien : s'ayme, et se cultive avant toute autre chose : refuse les occupations superflues, et les pensees, et propositions inutiles. Comme la folie quand on luy octroyera ce qu'elle desire, ne sera pas contente : aussi est la sagesse contente de ce qui est present, ne se desplait jamais de soy.

Epicurus dispense son sage de la prevoyance et soucy de l'advenir." (Montaigne, "Nos affections s'emportent au delà de nous")

(THOSE which still accuse men for ever gaping after future things, and go about to teach us, to take hold of present fortunes, and settle our selves upon them, as having no hold of that which is to come; yea much lesse than we have of that which is already past, touch and are ever harping upon the commonest huma ne error, if they dare call that an error, to which Nature her selfe, for the service of the continuation of her worke, doth address us, imprinting (as it doth many others) this false imagination in us, as more jealous of our actions, than of our knowledg e. We are never in our selves, but beyond. Feare, desire, and hope, draw us ever towards that which is to come, and remove our sense and consideration from that which is, to amuse us on that which shall be, yea when we shall be no more. Calamitosus est animus futuri anxius.1 'A minde in suspense what is to come, is in a pittifull case.' This noble precept is often alleaged in Plato, 'Follow thy businesse and know thy selfe;' Each of these two members, doth generally imply all our duty; and likewise enfolds his companion. He that should doe his businesse might perceive that his first lesson is, to know what he is, and what is convenient for him. And he that knoweth himselfe, takes no more anothers matters for his owne, but above all other things, loveth and correcteth himselfe, rejecteth superfluous occupations, idle imaginations, and unprofitable propositions. As if you grant follie what it desireth, it will no-whit be satisfied; so is wisdome content with that which is present, and never displeased with it selfe. Epicurus doth dispense with his age touching the foresight and care of what shall insue.)

The point of Montaigne, if I understand it, is that many of the emotions we feel have to do with events that possibly, may, perhaps, will occur in the future. Often these emotions have positive results, such as hope, and often they have negative results such as fear. From my perspective, the measure of the emotions usefulness lies in its impetus to action in the present since it is clearly the present that decides the future. "Wisdom is content with that which is present, and never displeased with it selfe."

2007-12-06T14:43:00.000-08:00

"A study performed between 1907 and 1919 in 140,000 healthy adults applying for life insurance in the New York region suggested that a blood pressure of 140 (systolic)/90 (diastolic) mm Hg was abnormal because it reflected only 5-6% of the population in the United States (9); however, by nature, these early studies may not have been representative of the general population because they usually did not include subjects of lower socioeconomic status who could not afford insurance or patients who had been previously diagnosed with a disease. Nevertheless, on the basis of these early studies, a blood pressure of 140/90 mm Hg was adopted as the definition of hypertension."

I think that I'm seeing a pattern. How do we create a standard or definition of something? Often we have only that which is readily available or our experiences in order to understand things. In addition to the above example of creating a definition of "normality" in blood pressure, Milk has been used as the standard for substances containing calcium. For a long time nothing else was known to contain more calcium. Milk thus became the standard. It was a 10 and any other substance was given a ranking on this scale. I think this practice often applies to more abstract things like thinking patterns, conception of beauty, and cultural morals and norms. The French Academy of Arts for over a century had a very narrow definition of what was a beautiful painting. Those paintings which did not match this definition were rejected as was the case with the impressionist painters. The impressionists are now the recognized as beautiful while the old standard is almost forgotten.

Menteurs

2007-12-05T14:44:00.000-08:00

"Secondement qu'il me souvient moins des offences receuës, ainsi que disoit cet ancien. Il me faudroit un protocolle, comme Darius, pour n'oublier l'offense qu'il avoit receue des Atheniens, faisoit qu'un page à touts les coups qu'il se mettoit à table, luy vinst rechanter par trois fois à l'oreille, Sire, souvienne vous des Atheniens, et que les lieux et les livres que je revoy, me rient tousjours d'une fresche nouvelleté." (Montaigne, Les Menteurs)

(I find some consolation, also, in the reflection that I have, in the words of a certain ancient author, a short memory for the injuries I have received. Like Darius, I should need a prompter. Wishing not to forget the insult he had suffered from the Athenians, the Persian king made one of his pages come and repeat three times in his ear, each time he sat down to table: "Sire, remember the Athenians"; and it consoles me too that the places I revisit and the books I reread always smile upon me with the freshness of novelty.)

I think that "having a short memory" is one of the most important elements of Christ-like love. It is quite ugly and sad what happens to individuals who dwell on past offenses. They seem to always be the topic of discussion. I just read how a lady in Iraq killed 10 people as a suicide bomber to avenge her two sons' deaths. The pain she felt was surely great but how unfortunate is it to cause more pain because of it! Better yet, it would be best to not be offended in the first place; to assume that what people do is not mean-spirited, that they really don't mean it, or understand. As I like to think, being naive is sometimes good. It is not naivety though. It is "thinking no evil."

Being Seen

2007-11-28T11:29:00.000-08:00

Louis XIV felt a great responsibility to make the French royalty the model of grandeur and exactitude. The court rituals were elaborate and, to our removed perspective, quite ridiculous. Hundreds of courtiers lived at Versailles and were required to be present when the King arose and got dressed, when he ate, at mass, at performances, and all other court functions. The main purpose was that the king was to be seen. This was the key of Louis XIV's reign. To be seen was to be great.

Oscar Wilde said that "the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." I've been thinking about this desire, even need, that we all have to be seen and be judged by others. We work hard at presenting ourselves in the right way in order to meet an artificial standard. Our society is based on this idea as in the pressure to publish at universities, political campaigns, mayors cutting ribbons, business suits and the ostentatious display of wealth. I think we feel a need to "play the part" which our culture or surroundings prescribe.
I notice in myself that I always want all the good things that I do to be seen but of course not any of the bad things. I want people to see me playing the piano, doing this kind act, etc. Why? Does the pleasure that I derive from playing Chopin increase if others see it. I understand the value in sharing talents but I am just wondering at motivations for doing things. I'm guessing that the most important thing probably is how we act when we are not seen. This quote by Emerson seems to fit here:
"We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment." (Self-Reliance)

Experiences

2007-11-23T20:17:00.000-08:00

"In short, since true fortitude of understanding consists "in not letting what we know be embarrassed by what we do not know," we ought to secure those advantages which we can command, and not risk them by clutching after the airy and unattainable. Come, no chimeras! Let us go abroad; let us mix in affairs; let us learn and get and have and climb. "Men are a sort of moving plants, and, like trees, receive a great part of their nourishment from the air. If they keep too much at home, they pine." Let us have a robust, manly life; let us know what we know, for certain; what we have, let it be solid and seasonable and our own. A world in the hand is worth two in the bush. Let us have to do with real men and women, and not with skipping ghosts." (Emerson, "Montaigen: or a skeptic")

I do not want to turn this blog into some sort of shrine to Emerson but the man just speaks to me. When I read one of his essays he seems to hit on exactly what I'm thinking about at that time and express it in a very eloquent manner. This excerpt from an essay on the skepticism of Michel de Montaigne basically hits on exactly my feelings between thought and action. I've realized that a lot of the necessary things we need to learn in life must be obtained through doing. I believe that it is through mixing "in affairs" that we learn quickest. I love Utah and BYU but I am looking forward to following Emerson's advice and seeking to have "a world in the hand" and not "two in the bush."

Unmündigkeit

2007-11-17T10:03:00.000-08:00

"Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen."
(Immaturity is the inability to use one's own reason without the guidance of others)

"Satzungen und Formeln, diese mechanischen Werkzeuge eines vernünftigen Gebrauchs oder vielmehr Mißbrauchs seiner Naturgaben, sind die Fußschellen einer immerwährenden Unmündigkeit." (Kant, Was ist Aufklärung?)
(Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity.)

This essay, and especially these quotes hit me really hard. Many different applications came to mind, and although I know there is a specific historical context, I think it is important to apply truth to ourselves.
To me, these ideas are equivalent to what God says in Hebrews 8: 10-11:
"For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their chearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people:
And they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest."
When we are spiritually mature enough to rely on revelation and experience we become more independent and more mature. This does not mean prophets become obsolete; not at all. It means that we are better able to use the tools God has given us to make the decisions which will result in the greatest happiness. Personally, I see that I must improve greatly in this area for I often try to pry advice and guidance out of others when I myself am in the best position to make such decisions. There is a balance however. There are times when it is wisdom to listen to others who may know more than us. Ultimately, though, we are responsible.

Mauvaise foi

2007-11-15T15:53:00.001-08:00

We humans often, according to Sartre, deny an absolute freedom that we have by forcing ourselves into acting a certain way because of outside influences such as religion and culture. This to him is "bad faith."

I've always been fascinated by this idea. To what degree does my cultural background, religious or otherwise, determine the things I do. I remember that one of the most frustrating things to encounter as a missionary were people who dismissed you because they said you were brainwashed. It is such an unfair argument! I don't dismiss though the reality of letting ourselves kind of be moved along by predetermined patterns of thought and actions. While my belief and knowledge in my faith remain secure I find it refreshing sometimes to go back to square one and ask myself, "why do I believe this?" I often have the most uplifting scripture studies as I look at basic principles in this light.

Too Much Thought

2007-11-11T19:50:00.000-08:00

"Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness, —

'Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' "(Emerson, "The American Scholar")

While I echo Emerson in defending Introversion (being interested in one own's mental life) I have noticed, however, that sometimes thinking too hard can be detrimental to present peace and happiness. If "we cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists" then we miss out on the point of Introversion. As Elder Maxwell said concerning how we view our personal happiness "if we open the oven too often to see if the cake is done, it falls instead of rises." For example, I found myself today in church getting a bit anxious about possibly becoming less spiritual as my time is consumed with things such as school and other things. I realized quickly though that my worrying was irrational and self-centered. It would not solve the problem. Only engaging oneself in life and service solves the problem. So while I affirm the importance of pensiveness, I wish to be someone who is inspired by ideas but preoccupied with action.

Skepticism

2007-11-10T16:09:00.000-08:00

"We should never make any permanent commitment to any doctrines but instead assume a perpetual attitude of inquiry. Contentment, said Montaigne, is possible only when we achieve a tranquility of mind. What disturbs this tranquility is the attempt to go beyond our ordinary experiences and penetrate the inner nature of things. The saddest spectacle of all is to find people formulating final answers on questions that are far too subtle and variable for such treatment. The final folly of this attempt is the attitude of fanaticism and dogmatism." (Commentary on the Skepticism of the French political philosopher Montaigne)

I have always been troubled by the fact that I can never seem to arrive at, or adopt, absolute political or social conclusions. I consider myself somewhat engaged and well-informed (at least more than average) in such questions. Yet I find myself frequently dissatisfied with both sides of an argument or often persuaded easily by the latest argument I hear. Social Welfare States vs. Privatization for example is one question that seems to offer no final answer as to which one is more conducive to the production of wealth and security of the individual. Reading this quote made me feel better about not being able to claim clairvoyance and finality on such topics. I can continually seek answers and not necessarily have to come down on one side or the other. This attitude, however, cannot apply to spiritual matters where we affirm the ability to arrive at absolute truth. Not that we can't arrive at absolute truth in secular matters as well, just that our approach must be more open to changing knowledge.

2007-10-30T19:28:00.000-07:00

"When your longings center on things such
that sharing them apportions less to each [party],
then envy stirs the bellows of your sighs.

But if the love within the Highest Sphere
should turn your longings heavenward, the fear
inhabiting your breats would disappear;

for there, the more there are who would say 'ours,'
so much the greater is the good possessed
by each--so much more love burns in that cloister."

Purgatorio VI.49-57

I realized the other day that human happiness is not a commodity that decreases when others have it. I think that often we see other people who are happy and we might be tempted to think that we are missing out or that we somehow now are less happy because they are happy. I think everyone can be happy in their own way, with their own talents, and with their own futures that lie ahead of them. We have tough breaks for sure, but if we realize that we the reservoir of human happiness is bottomless, our feelings would be more in line with the above quote. A love that is turned "heavenward."

Kinetic Happiness

2007-10-28T07:40:00.000-07:00

Before I share this quote I have to explain a bit. Kinetic happiness, or pleasure, is the type of happiness that we get from a pleasurable change of state. Katastematic pleasure is thus pleasure from undergoing no-change, or being in a state of satisfaction. If I have a stomache ache, and then it subsides, that change is kinetic happiness. Soon thereafter I enter a state of Katastematic Happiness. Okay, the quote:

"We often do seek kinetic pleasures and katastematic satisfactions of the first sort. It seems to be a natural preoccupation with us, for we invent problems to solve; we play games. If there are no challenges, we quickly invent some. We enjoy the kinetic pleasures and the katastematic satisfactions of the first sort which accompany such activities. We even endure the pains of love because of the immense kinetic pleasures and first order katastematic satisfactions which great passions promise. Yet Epicureans 'do not believe that the wise man will fall in love...'" (David B. Suits)

I have to think more about this quote. I think it is significant though. I'll probaby edit this post later.

Beauty

2007-10-21T07:51:00.000-07:00

Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.
~ D. H. Lawrence~

I was at work the other day working on a spread sheet of addresses that needed to be organized. When I began it was a cluttered, unorganized mass of black letters and numbers on a white background. After working for an hour or two they were all arranged in nice rows. I said out loud "How beautiful!" I quickly realized that my perception of beauty might not be shared by a passerby. His first reaction to a few lines of letters and numbers on a computer screen might not be to praise the transcendant beauty of such a cyber sight. Nonetheless, to me it was beautiful. Why? I had seen the beginning and the end product. I had put effort into it. I realized that I had found an important element of humanity's perception of beauty: The difference between the beginning and the end. A possession in your home may be quite ugly but it may represent something to you. Something from your past, your life. Something that you have put effort into to. This gives the object a quality which the most dazzling aesthetics could never give. The couple, bent low by age, wrinkled beyond recognition after 50 years of marriage may not present a stereotypical view of aesthetic beauty, but to themselves, they who have endured together, lived together, worked together, raised children together, maybe even fought each other but still love. To them the beauty of their togetherness surpasses any and all beauty which dazzles the eye.

Coercion, Freedom, Absolute Truth

2007-08-15T09:21:00.000-07:00

So My brother and I were having this conversation with my uncle Dave about religion and the communities they create and the individuals relation to that community. Intermixed in this discussion were philosophical questions about positivism and objectivism. Basically we were trying to understand our views on what degree the religious individual is free to make decisions independent of communal pressure and coercion. My uncle felt that one is really not free unless he is completely free of those communal considerations. What I realize now is that there is a fundamental difference of what freedom means. He might define it as being free from outside influences in order to make an independent decision based on your own intellect. I think that that is a valuable thing. However, I believe freedom is actually having the knowledge necessary to make the right decision. This might underline another major difference; that being our views on whether or not absolute truth exists or whether each individuals reality is just as good. Interesting questions.

La Vertu d'Acceptation Totale

2007-08-09T14:33:00.000-07:00

"Certes, la souffrance d'un enfant etait humiliante pour l'esprit et le coeur. Mais c'est pourquoi il fallait y entrer. Mais c'est pourquoi, et Paneloux assura son auditoire que ce qu'il allait dire n'etait pas facile a dire, il fallait la vouloir parce que Dieu la voulait. Ainsi seulement le chretien n'epargnerait rien et, toutes issues fermees, irait au fond du choix essentiel. Il chosirait de tout croire pour ne pas etre reduit a tout nier. Et comme les braves femmes qui, dans les eglises en ce moment, ayant appris que les bubons qui se formaient etaient la voie naturelle par ou le corps rejetait son enfection, disaient: "Mon Dieu, donnez-lui des bubons", le chretien saurait s'abandonner a la volonte divine, meme incomprehensible. On ne pouvait dire: "cela je le comprends; mais ceci est inacceptable", il fallait sauter au coeur de cet inacceptable qui nous etait offert, justement pour que nous fissions notre choix. La souffrance des enfants etait notre pain amer, mais sans ce pain, notre ame perirait de sa faim spirituelle."(Paneloux en La Peste par Albert Camus, p. 248)

This reasoning by the priest in the The Plague that we must choose to accept completely the way of God despite difficulties in understanding why bad things happen for seemingly no reason is enlightening for me. I do not know exactly what Camus is trying to get across--if he is actually trying to discredit this reasoning--but it seems clear to me that we cannot pick and choose what we will believe in depending on our preferences. That would negate the good which comes only on the condition of complete submission. I do not mean that we must submit to what others believe is the correct way but what we know is right.

L'ignorance

2007-08-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

"Le mal qui est dans le monde vient presque toujours de l'ignorance, et la bonne volonté peut faire autant de dégâts que la méchanceté, si elle n'est pas éclairée. Les hommes sont plutôt bons que mauvais, et en vérité ce n'est pas la question. Mais ils ignorent plus ou moins, et c'est ce qu'on appelle vertu ou vice, le vice le plus désespérant, étant celui de l'ignorance qui croit tout savoir et qui s'autorise alors à tuer. L'âme du meurtrier est aveugle et il n'y a pas de vraie bonté ni de bel amour sans toute la clairvoyance possible."(La Peste, Albert Camus pg. 151)

This quote speaks for itself. Ignorance is the greatest vice.

La Misère

2007-08-05T15:47:00.000-07:00

"Mais le moindre prêtre de campagne qui administre ses paroissiens et qui a entendu la respiration d'un mourant pense comme moi. Il soignerait la misère avant de vouloir en démontrer l'excellence."(Rieux en La Peste par Albert Camus)

In this quote we have Rieux who is disagreeing with a priest who has given a sermon on how the plague which has come to their city is a punishment from God and can push the populace to repentance. Rieux who is a mild atheist reasons in this quote that one must first "treat misery before wanting to show its excellence." I believe this and should take care to follow such counsel. It does not change the fact, however, that "all these things shall give (us) experience and be for (our) good."

Friendship

2007-08-05T15:40:00.000-07:00

"Delicious is a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling. How beautiful, on their approach to the beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true! The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed: there is no winter and no night: all tragedies, all ennuis vanish--all duties even: nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should be rejoined its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years."(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friendship)

Le Père Goriot

2007-08-05T15:32:00.000-07:00

"Moi et la vie, nous sommes comme un jeune homme et sa fiançée." Le Père Goriot in Honoré de Balzac's Le Père Goriot.

What an attitude with which to approach each day of life! An enthusiasm, a feeling of good will and of boundless hope, and a love for life which characterizes newlyweds would surely be worthy sentiments to retain everyday.