Melville, Dreyfus, Christmas Cards, and Santa Claus

With December and its attendant madness fast approaching, I am compelled by the early receipt of a Christmas Card from my artist son, Clay, to hold forth on God (on whom we have modelled our conception of Santa Claus) and the deep.

For non-followers of my chain of bizarre and unsettling posts, let's do an introductory, tout court.

I have staked a position as a Christian Existentialist in a nebulous but defensible wavespace surrounding the teachings of Hubert Dreyfus. I believe Heidegger and Dreyfus leave room for this alternative grasp of what we face as late moderns and post-moderns, and I helpfully drew and then derided a structural chart showing the progression from Hebrew and Greek origins to a post-modern synthesis which allowed for my position, as well as the secular anti-religion so post-fashionable right now.

All this has garnered little debate: Not my strenuous exertions on behalf of Smerdyakov, the Dostoevskian anti-hero I claim points to the need for a Christ to visit Hell and reclaim those who choose in this life to turn their backs on the Onion Chain of salvation. (Dreyfus describes in loving detail, if I may put it that way, how this Onion Chain anchors Christian Existentialism. He would doubtless dismiss my mystical extrapolation.) Not my digression into the movie Groundhog Day and its redemptive current entwined with eternal, but condensable, motion perpendicular to time, a theme that amply grounds my religious theories of the importance of Christ's three days in Hell. Theologically, I'm posing it was/is as important for God to reside in a human corpse as to indwell a living human body.

My, my, my. These essays always turn on me, don't they? Maybe I'm just being brutally honest about how ideas get shared around - they have a subject thrown under them, and that's I.

Dreyfus and I have this asymmetrical dialogue in progress, and as Foucault might point out, Dreyfus is on the power side of the relationship - therefore he needn't, and shouldn't, even take notice. Everyone wants a gunfight with Dreyfus - why should he take heed? And of course, to add to the drama, I'm his greatest student, his most admiring acolyte. I'm in the process of tracking down about everything he has said on tape and written in print, and no doubt he will be honored on Page One when I someday write my final (syn)thesis.

But now with all this, these maudlin essays, I aim very specifically at the weak spot in his armor, which is simply this: Is Dreyfus teaching Christianity? If so, he is outed. If not: What are we to make of it when he says, while teaching the gospel of John, that he's "not a believer" and adds "I'm a Jew" then he self-identifies as a Kierkegaardian (not, interestingly, a Heideggerian - and he found Kierkegaard by tracing upstream from Heidegger's wrong turns). What are we to make of his assertion about the primacy of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky as the intellectual roots of existentialism, and his cautious attitude toward the fallout from that existential counterweight, Jesus-admirer but Christ-hater, Neitzsche? What are we to make of his claim that Jesus "reconfigured" the world and ushered in the Christian era, good and bad. Ah, all these strands point to a parallel interpretation of faith: Whatever Jesus was about, we better get a grip on it - perhaps he really does represent the end link in the Onion Chain.

But then there's Melville. If Dreyfus likes what he reads in Dostoevsky, he really likes what he reads in Melville, and the two more or less come to opposite conclusions about the possibility for engaging the world at a Christian level: Dostoevsky says yes, and Melville says no. It's clear that Melville is seeking to lay down a polytheistic religious framework as an alternative to a failed, monotheistic Christian one. Dreyfus exposits this framework remarkably well. As with Dostoevsky, his analysis of Melville is, I believe, incomparable. OK, enough with superlatives - if you haven't heard it, you simply must. Just download the two undergraduate lecture courses linked on the side panel, give up 80 hours or so, and think.

Clay's drawing of Santa Claus captures the meeting between Dostoevsky and Melville I have positioned above, so I will simply exposit his picture and then let it be:

The illustration has three characters and a message. The characters are Santa Claus, who represents God, the Squid, who represents the dark and unknown - read death - and the Yellow Submarine. Everyone who is not already humming that tune, just think modern technologically driven and chemically extended reality machine we all ride in these days - postmodernity. The message is clear enough. Wherever you are, may God find you at this time. Why do I say the Santa figure is God? Because the illustration does. Look closer.

Melville, in unfolding his extraordinarily keen polytheistic and relativistic vision, constantly makes reference to death, and the action of the novel follows suit. There is Queequeg's coffin. There is the temple house made of whale bones. There is the near-death vision of Pip. In the end there is death all around. Melville emplaces his solution to the problem of absolute truth (claimed by religion) in the arms of death. His problem is making that reality palatable, and he does this scrumptiously:

The sea had jeeringly kept [Pip's] finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. (from Moby Dick, The Castaway chapter)

For Melville, Moby Dick is a symbol for the Truth that blinds, fascinates, and horrifies those of us who, as Ahabs, seek resolution and certainty. Just as Melville's culture used religion as a prop for such certainty, we now have this ridiculous postmodern culture we must by default rely on as our vehicle - the Yellow Submarine cult, if you will. It says everything is OK, and that's for certain. If it's not OK, turn on the TV, pop some drugs, go take in a movie, or a megachurch, find some external or internal stimulation, bright lights, shiny surfaces: space out. Whatever you do, don't think about death - fear it, but don't consider it deeply. Melville takes us right there, to death's doorstep, and seems to say "Isn't this beautiful too? It may be all we really have."

(Because God is indifferent, or dead, and only the varying shapes of intertwined perceptual threads give rise to our many vaguely grasped and weirdly differing separate realities.)

An aside: The traditional explanation of Christ's death on the cross is that he thereby overcame death, a feat no other human before or after can do. This is great - for him. But how do we internalize a promise, central to the hawkers of Christianity but only hinted at by Jesus himself, that we can revivify ourselves like he does, when the defining moment comes touchingly close? This fundamental catching point of Christian doctrine stumps Dreyfus, who has called the problem of the efficacy of the crucifixion his greatest problem with Christianity. We (Christians) trust that somehow this resurrection will indeed happen (for us but not for the rest of you!). My protestation against this harsh theology is simple: in life Jesus taught us to worry about others before worrying about ourselves - should we not worry more about others-in-death than ourselves-in-death? He did. This is the importance of the Harrowing of Hell, that Jesus cared enough for dead souls to reclaim them.

Santa Claus is delivering the warmth of the season to the bottom of the sea. Will the Squid attack him, or embrace him? Is the Squid angry, or relieved? Will Santa Claus find some life-affirming gift to deliver, even here, even to the tentacled monster? What is God doing here, in the fearsome darkness? I believe that the Yellow Submarine (us and our comfortable, jazzy, brightly glowing culture-wagon) is being driven by Santa Claus (our God and savior) directly into the darkly spectacular tentacles of the Squid (death and destruction). And so it is, personally, because we all must die, and societally too because, let's face it, if we don't kill us, the universe will.

Now, if you can (the jpeg is grainy I know), look at the faces (not ours - we're the passengers). The face of God reflects in serene joy the face of death. Look at the two sets of eyes, closely. They don't meet - they don't have to. They are the same, God need not look at death, He knows death, is never surprised to bump into death while delivering packages. Of course our dance on Earth must end. But over all is the wisdom, and the care, and the joy of an everlasting cycle of repetition and condensation, life giving life, and life being taken away and reformed mysteriously. Each side knows the other intimately.

Another aside: This is all an in-joke. Dreyfus hates Christmas Cards. He uses them to demonstrate cultural inanity.

I think Melville was, and Dreyfus may be still, misled about the nature of the deadness at the heart of Christianity. Melville grasped the beauty of the Squid without having a love of his culture, his vehicle, and without the assurance of a steady, benevolent, and knowing driver.

A poem I wrote at this season, long ago...

November snow, a quilted white aphasia,
Scuttles past out-scoured features
and scattered faces in a man-made maze of
frozen glass and gritty concrete seizures.

Injected anasthesia grips the unreal city,
Smothers in a welcome chloroform of cold
My unanchored premonitions from a litany
Of autumn evils awkwardly foretold.

Wrapped in numb amnesia, snow, November's gift,
Soothes embattled senses, lures out illusion
To replace fragments of reality adrift,
As the intimacy of cold negates confusion

Gazing at the falling snow I am steeled
To weather now the world's insanity, congealed.

"Later Heidegger" podcast by Sean Kelly

Harvard Professor Sean Kelly has his 2008 course titled "Later Heidegger" available on audio. Kelly was a student of Dreyfus and gave a guest lecture for Dreyfus' "Merleau-Ponty" class.

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~sdkelly/SDK-4-PHI139.html

An interesting side-note is that Kelly is teaching the "Man, God,and Society" and "Existentialism in Literature and Film" courses at Harvard. Those are not currently available as podcasts.

Campbell, Dreyfus & Searle to mix it up in PodiCast Triple "Header"

Theory of Meaning[Campbell] http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2009-D-67289&semesterid=2009-D

Existentialism in Lit & Film [Dreyfus] http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2009-D-67124&semesterid=2009-D

Philosophy of Society [Searle] http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2009-D-67309&semesterid=2009-D

A letter to Dave

Dave wrote:

Karl, I am looking forward to reading the Heidegger essay. I have very mixed feelings about Hegel, only because of the ways that contrary philosophers such as Neitzche and Engels turned it upside down, and, borrowing from Kant, created the idea of the "Hegelian Dialectic," which has been used for nefarious purposes. Yet I value his position of the subjectivity of history, and the idea that out of thesis and antithesis comes synthesis. I shall try to be open minded as I read the work.

Hi Dave,

Well, so philosophy is sort of my refuge. I admit I don't know a lot about Hegel. I need to read some of his accessible work. What mainly interests me is the 19th century rupture in philosophy between two camps. The first camp consists of the mainstream of european philosophy devoted to understanding what is "real" while the second camp consists of those, like me, who cannot get far beyond the "is" of reality - who, what, how does the reality we experience get assigned this "is-ness" by philosophers.

Most prominent figureheads of the first camp are the rational dualists (like Descartes who founded the subject-object duality and then placed us as the observer-subject and reality as any object properly observed), the rational empiricists (like Hume, who didn't believe in anything he couldn't touch or measure) and the rational idealists (like Kant, who synthesized Descartes and Hume by turning every "thing" into a formalized idea-thing). These three strands of thought, among other varieties of rational philosophy, then influenced the rest of history down to today, decisively.

The second camp arose in the following generations and consisted of the earliest existentialists, the thinkers who questioned the primacy of rationality, and who have served to subtly bend our current reality, where absolute confidence in science and technology is coupled with the most bizarre forms of irrational entertainment as evidenced by TV shows and commercials, music, the internet, etc.

So the critical difference is one's faith in the rational faculty. The earlier thinkers (and the majority of ordinary people today, including most of the scientists who dominate our view of reality) believe that rationality is somehow the basis of truth. Ultimately, that boils down to the statement that all truth can be mathematically expressed. Stephen Wolfram says that the universe is "calculable". It's his faith statement.

Existentialists do not deny rationality as one of the many human faculties that become apparent to any observer. However, they would claim that there is something deeper and more fundamental than a sort of mathematical truth, or logical order, in the universe. They would say that us living in the world is the basis for everything else. That is, lived experience presupposes everything else. This seems trivial, but it becomes a powerful antidote for an unbalanced way of thinking, in which rationality becomes the ultimate end instead of an occasional means. So what exactly is this alternative state, "lived experience"? Think of everything you do without thinking (note the paradox - by thinking about it you destroy the unthinking thing you are trying to evaluate). Things like breathing, walking, eating, sleeping, dreaming, humming, doodling, glancing to and fro, and most work, once you get into a routine. What is foremost in all such activities is not discrete thoughts, but rather vague feelings, intuitions, instinct.

Let's assume for a moment that moods, emotions, hunches, and vague feelings are the opposite from what we mean by rational. Reductionists would simply dismiss this premise, saying that moods are chemical alignments in the body and brain, and therefore perfectly predictable and rational if we could only measure them well enough. But nevertheless, in the ordinary way we talk about them, moods are rarely rational. Now, do moods come before thinking rationally, or after? Which is a more fundamental aspect of human-ness? It seems a person has to "overcome" their moods and feelings in order to get into a rational frame of mind. But once there, that rational person likely says that rationality must be the fundamental aspect of reality, the raw truth about things. Feelings are merely the fog that obscures reason. We come from this tendency to say the universe is built on orderly laws - it is a rational universe. The laws of the universe must have been in place before humans ever existed. Many religious folks then deduce that God must be rational, despite His many seemingly irrational acts.

The existentialist turns it around and says that moods are the fundamental basis for everything else. They would say, more or less, that rationality is a certain kind of mood, or better yet, it is a mood wherein the natural flow of human action has broken down. This breakdown picture, to me, is the key observation of the existentialists, and the one thing most non-existentialist, rationalist outsiders simply cannot see, or cannot accept. In this picture, most "thinking" - including their own philosophical thinking on either side - must be labelled as abnormal, as suspect, as a sort of tool of last resort when all else fails. This is the opposite of everything we are taught by our culture and education system. We are taught that thinking is good, that it leads to truth, that it is a precondition of success. But existentialists think (note the paradox of thinking about thinking again) that thinking is often bad. This is Dostoevsky's key insight, and why he is considered one of the founders of existentialism. In his novels, every one of his characters who thinks more than he/she feels, ends up with far worse consequences than those who feel more than they think! He writes about evil, and he recognizes two kinds - brute evil, which is what animals do as well as humans, and intellectual evil, which is uniquely human, but often drives humans to behave worse than animals.

I am thoroughly Dostoevskian, at this point in my life. Love is not rational. Beauty cannot be adequately defined and calculated. Hope and faith utterly defy reason. The best in us, as humans, emerges when we have not broken down and fallen into a process of logical thought. Rationality is an emergency measure. We must accept it, carry it around with us like some societal life preserver, and deploy it when lived experience and the natural flow it adheres to have met some difficulty too great to live through alive. And given the violence and uncertainty we see in studying history, that is often enough. For the rest, we should concentrate on existing well.

Heidegger and Pilate

I could not sleep, so I read an essay by Martin Heidegger called "Hegel and the Greeks" which would be impossible to summarize and is near impossible to read. But I would urge you to try it anyway, like cliff diving, but with less adrenaline.

Heidegger has taken a lot of flak, from all sides, for smashing our comfortable notions of truth. Many mainstream philosophers discount him for ruining their party. Many thinkers find it impossible to forgive his German Nazi identity in the 1930's. Most Christians, especially those who need the idea of truth to stay put, find his existentialism much too relativistic for their taste.

This is perhaps the most comprehensible paragraph in the essay:

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history. Prior to a decision as to the historical correctness of the representation it is therefore necessary to consider if and how history is experienced, from whence does it determine its fundamental traits.

The above paragraph occurs 3/4 of the way through the essay, after he explains in painful detail what Hegel's philosophy of history consists of. At this point, he is getting ready to strongly, massively, disagree with Hegel. He does so in the following paragraph, which I apologize for in advance:

With regards to Hegel and the Greeks this means: all correct or incorrect historical statements presuppose that Hegel has experienced the essence of history out of the essence of being in the sense of absolute subjectivity. There is at this hour no experience of history that can, philosophically speaking, historically correspond to it. However, the speculative-dialectical determination of history brings with as consequence that it prohibits Hegel from regarding 'Aletheia' and its prevalence as the proper matter of thought, and this, precisely, in that philosophy that determines the "reign of truth" as the "purpose" of philosophy. Because Hegel experiences being, when he conceives it as the indeterminate immediate, as the determining and comprehending subject's posited. Consequently, he cannot disassociate being in the Greek sense, the 'einai', from its relation to the subject, and release it to its proper essence. This latter however is pre-sence [An-wesen], that which out of concealedness abides [vor-Wahren] in disclosedness. In pre-sence the unconcealed plays. It plays within 'en' and within 'logos', within the properly gathered bestowment [Vorliegen] - that which lets truth be [An-wahren-lassen]. 'Aletheia' plays within the 'idea' and within the 'choinomia' of the ideas, insofar as these mutually bring to appearance and so compose the existent being, the 'ontos on'. 'Aletheia' plays within 'Energeia' which has nothing in common with actuality, but only with the Greek experience of 'ergon' and its manner of being produced before us within pre-sence.

The passage above captures Heidegger's departure from the rest of philosophy. But it is essentially non-understandable without a whole lot of explanation. I can say that I just barely understand what he's doing. So here's the rundown on this bizarre paragraph:

1. One of the main ways Heidegger "does philosophy" is by picking apart the meaning of words (usually Greek, Latin and German words that ground the language used by philosophers). He does this with hundreds of words in hundreds of contexts all through his writings. In this paragraph he chooses the following words to pick apart:

1a. Aletheia is Greek and usually translated as "truth" - a pretty important word. But it is formed from the root parts "a-" meaning not or opposite from, and "letheia" meaning hidden. So the root meaning is "not hidden" or "unconcealed" and Heidegger makes much of this meaning. Our ordinary sense of truth is that truth is truth whether it is hidden or not - it stays the same before and after we discover it. Heidegger disagrees. He says truth is properly that which is disclosed, not that from which it emerges (hiddenness). This alone is a huge philosophical leap. It suggests that the only things we can say anything meaningful (or truthful) about are the things we have "brought out" of concealment - mainly by seeing them, and thinking about them.

1b. einai is Greek for being, that is, just being there - "is-ness" if you will. Heidegger extends this with the Latin word "presence" and characteristically splits it up for emphasis. The derivation of presence implies it is before (pre) perceptions come into us (sence). Something similar is behind German An-wesen but I can't figure out what. The basic idea is that there is something that comes before our awareness of something. Hegel thinks that thing is truth. Heidegger thinks that thing is more or less "hidden" until it hits us - then it becomes "disclosed" and is true. The rest of the word analysis seems somewhat less important, and the "choinomia" Greek word is a total mystery - even Google can't find it anywhere other than in this essay. Maybe it's a typo.

2. Heidegger saw himself as going against the entire train of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. In attempting to overturn this locomotive, he had earlier help from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who also called a lot of the standard philosophical assumptions into question. The way Heidegger proceeds is to point out ways in which the basic assumptions everyone took for granted were subtly flawed. In this paragraph, he is attempting to shift the focus from logic, which is the ultimate outcome and triumph of Greek philosophy, made much more powerful by modern science, to that which is non-logical. That which is hidden cannot be made logical. In a sense, it is pre-rational. The logical and rational is what most certainly is not hidden. It may be difficult, but it's clear when you study it how logic works. Heidegger does not question that. He questions whether it is the foundational tool needed for understanding the truth. He suggests that we cannot understand the (disclosed) truth without looking at the (hidden) un-truth that lies behind it. This essentially boils down to mysticism.

Heidegger is following in the footsteps of Pontius Pilate, who when questioning Jesus at trial asked him if he was guilty of the obvious crime of proclaiming himself a king in rebellion to Rome's rule. Jesus answered that Pilate was correct, that he was a king. But then he extended this comment with a comment about truth, saying that he had come to demonstrate the truth, and that those who know or want truth should pay attention. So, his life is on the line, and he starts a philosophical discussion with the judge! We can imagine Pilate's snort, as he answers that bizarre statement with the rhetorical question "what is truth?"

I feel more like Pilate than Jesus. Pilate knew that truth was up for grabs. Jesus had an immense certainty that truth was in him, in his words and deeds. Pilate knew that given power, the governor of a Roman province could, in effect, fabricate the truth and make it stick. He could have, he tried to, let Jesus off alive. There is a real question whether if Jesus had responded "of course I'm not a king - anyone can see that!" he would never have been crucified under Roman edict. Pilate was fishing for something he could work with.

I also am fishing for something I can work with. The truth that Jesus represents feels much more like a Heideggerian un-truth, a truth that is not yet discernible, than the truth we associate so readily with scientific logic. Pilate, like so many spin-meisters of our own time, knew that logical truth was subject to manipulation. Pilate wanted an appearance of truth (for instance, Jesus did not appear to be a rebel king to him). Jesus testified to an as yet undisclosed truth (that his lived-out ethics of kindness, caring and self-abnegation would come to dominate the lived experience of the next two millenia in western history).

A new B&T Heidegger Blog at The Guardian.co.uk

Being and Time, part 1: Why Heidegger matters
a blog that showed up this week at the Guardian
Hosted by Simon Critchley

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/05/heidegger-philosophy