It’s a sign I really like a pastor very much when he brings brain chemistry into a discussion of prayer and I still can’t find anything to complain about. In any event, I found three things interesting from this morning’s Jesus Prayer book study: Fr John’s statement that in respect to Protestantism (and even sometimes atheism) he almost never disagrees with what they affirm, only with what they deny; that the nous turns toward the senses in the form of the imaginative faculty and also toward God, like a double sided lens, and finds numinous qualities in the composite knowledge of the two; and that the body and soul are integrated in such a way that it’s worth taking neural chemistry into account when trying to understand human spirituality. I didn’t put any of those very well, because they’re not things I’m used to having to express, but nevertheless seem helpful. I’ll try to figure out the last one here.

First, I was thinking of something that Pastor Miller said one year about New Year’s resolutions: we probably shouldn’t make them, because we’re not likely to keep them. And the lifehacker people: it’s good to make goals and resolutions, but only if we’re really committed to whatever it is, and never more than three at a time; preferably one a month or so. And C S Lewis: it’s not so much that when a miracle occurs the natural is abolished or even suspended by spirit, but rather that something from beyond physical nature comes into contact with nature, and proceeds to act according to natural laws thereafter, as when bread and fish are miraculously multiplied, but then go on to be digested in an ordinary fashion. And my dad’s thinking as a youth “I’m saved! Why isn’t grace preventing my from chewing tobacco?” And Aristotle’s insistence that the key to maintaining the moral virtues lies in good habits.

From the Orthodox perspective, Protestantism has a gnostic tendency: it tends toward disembodied spirituality. The analytic genius of the West also produces binary oppositions where they needn’t exist. So the backlash of “the body is unimportant” people is “the body is all there is” people; there come to be two opposing camps, the one saying that neural chemistry is really just incidental, and the other that it’s the only thing at work in what we consider the be mind. The former point of view is not uncommon among Christians of various kinds, and is the source of metaphors like that the human person is a ship, where Sin used to be captain, but is now tied to the mast; you are on this ship, and are free to steer it as you will, but tend to listen to the tied-up passions anyway, just because we’re dumb… or something. Well, that’s not a terrible metaphor, but it can’t be taken too literally, either. Because the relationship of soul and body isn’t much like that between helmsman and ship. We’d have to balance that with Jesus’ saying that sin gets worked in like yeast in bread. The metaphor of a person as a driver and his thoughts and actions as a car has the same difficulty. We say: God doesn’t ride shotgun! Or the one where a person is like a house, with all these rooms God has to come in and sanctify, and you’re in there showing him around. It’s not wrong, or bad, or anything like that, but it’s not complete.

Something that science can help us to understand, and which we don’t always give enough weight to is that the relationship between body and soul is not one-way only. It’s not only true that the immaterial reality of love, gratitude, convictions, and so on make a person behave in a certain way; it’s also true that behaving in a certain way will change the internal composition of a person. We know and acknowledge this to be true in a number of ways: exercise reduces stress, lack of sleep makes us feel stupid, absence of sunlight makes us sleepy and depressed, spring makes us want to compose poetry, hunger makes us cranky, laughter makes us happy, and so on. Well, Christianity posits, and it seems true, that, first, these relationships between mind and body are not merely incidental to us as persons, and that, furthermore, there are many cases where it’s perfectly legitimate to cross oneself, make a prostration, fast, and the like from hope and conviction, without any prior feeling or desire of which said action is an expression. Monasteries tend toward experimentation in these things: what would happen if we had a 40 day fast with only bread and water? What is we prayed 4 hours a day? What if we took Communion every day? What is we did 1000 prostrations? What do these things do to the soul?

Here in America Christmas has become “so commercial!” and we seem intent on spreading the gluttonous cheer wherever possible. In order to prevent such a state of affairs, the Church of old instituted an Advent fast of 25 days in the West and 40 days in the East. This fast lacks the intensity of Lent: in general terms Lent is the fast of repentance, whereas Advent is the fast of joyful expectation. The feast falls on and after Christmas day — the two weeks from Christmas to Theophany. So we Orthodox are already in the season of Advent as of Sunday, but there wasn’t any big production as there is on Forgiveness Sunday to mark the beginning of Lent. To be honest, I don’t especially like Nativity; it represents the absence of eggnog and smoked turkey cheese balls without the presence of Presanctified Liturgies, processions, prostrations, and so on. Fortunately, its efficacy is not dependent on my feelings toward it, and kept rightly it is affective at preserving the gladness and newness of Christmas itself. For that reason, I would like to propose that my Protestant brothers and sisters consider keeping Advent as itself this year, rather than as an extension of Christmas.

I find Advent more difficult to navigate than Lent, because it is not as absolute; even now it isn’t, but it certainly can’t be for families with children. A fast generally encompasses more than just food, but also includes “the distractions of the world” in a more general sense. If I’m not eating meat, but am playing World of Warcraft four hours a day, I’m not really keeping the fast. So the ideal thing would be for all the Christmas carols, lights, trees, plays, ornaments, presents, and so on to show themselves starting the week before Christmas, and ending two weeks afterwards. But that’s just not gonna happen. So the navigation part consists in a question of the extent to which we try to make Advent an altogether separate and austere season, and to what extent we indulge in all the ‘Holiday” entertainments, music, outings, and so on.

Suggestions: turn off the TV and video games, eat less, put out an advent wreath, buy less elaborate gifts… what else?

Ungh! I can’t write coherently about Kant! Here’s my paper… such as it is… 

The Practical Imperative will be as follows: So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in any case as an end withal, and never as a means only. (Kant, p 46)

It seems crucial to Kant’s Metaphysic of Morals that beings, insofar as they are rational, exist as ends in themselves. While the idea of taking that as a fundamental principle of morality is quite appealing, neither how Kant arrives at it, nor the connection between rational beings as ends and the universally legislative will, which seems essential for the possibility of a kingdom of ends, is readily apparent to me. That’s what I would like to examine in this essay.

Every rational being is an end in itself, and this hinges somehow on having a capacity towards exercising a universally legislative will. Only when these persons come together in the recognition of their respective dignity and legislative capacity can there be a moral society; a kingdom of ends. How is that the case? There seems, first, to be a stark line drawn between that which is objectively good and subjectively good: that which is good for me or for a particular purpose vs. that which is good in itself. Most things fall into the category of that which is good for a particular purpose or the use of a particular person, and therefore is not good in itself. For reasons that remain unclear to me, but which seem to involve being able to maintain a possibility of non-arbitrary freedom, a good will is good in itself, objectively, and that all and only rational beings (persons) are capable of developing such a will.

“That which serves the will as the objective ground of its self-determination is called the end” (p 44). And apparently the end of that which is good in itself is an end in itself, while everything else is only a means which may or may not fulfill that end. It must be the case that “the objective ground of the self-determination of the will” is a person, but what does that mean? Perhaps that thing which holds in itself the possibility of forming or possessing or otherwise allowing for the existence of a will? If there were no such being then morality would have no categorical imperative, but only hypothetical imperatives, for there would be nothing objective to tether our judgment to, but only its relation to various subjective ends. But rational beings are ends in themselves, by virtue of their capacity to will in accordance with universal laws, and therefore it is possible to posit a universally applicable moral principle, or perhaps two related principles: that we should only will universal laws, and that in so willing we should never treat rational beings as means only, but also as ends.

On the one hand, that seems to  be a useful distinction, in that it is not in the same way immoral to cut down a tree in order to make a piece of furniture as it would be to cut off the head of a person to make a political statement. Several times Kant mentions that the reason why suicide is wrong is that people themselves are ends, and not some particular human state, such as happiness. It likewise seems helpful that treating other people as ends is described as not merely refraining from acting for their harm, but also attempting to ensure their good. So to pass by someone who is starving is to treat him not as an end, but simply as a potential means who is not presently useful. Even in cases like the discussion of whether it’s a good idea to make educational requirements primarily statistical it would be interesting to consider to what degree that leads to looking at students as means. But if being an end is contingent upon a potential for a universally legislative will, it would seem to follow that non-rational beings, or beings in which we cannot establish rationality are only means and in no way ends. It is uncertain to what extent Kant sees the ability to will rationally as something that is either wholly present or wholly absent, or as a spectrum, and if the latter what status partially rational beings that cannot universally legislate have in respect to being ends in themselves. 

After setting out four moral principles that follow from the practical imperative, Kant argues that the principle that rational beings are ends in themselves is a principle of pure reason because, first, it is universal and only reason can create universal principles, rather than ones that apply only to the rational beings that we happen to know, and, second, because it speaks of men as being ends in themselves, and not only ends for us (p 48). That seems fairly straightforward: from observation and experience we can know only that we or those we know do or do not treat others as ends in themselves, but not whether they are in fact ends regardless of how we treat them, simply by virtue of their status as rational beings, and so such a statement cannot be based upon experience.  But then it seems a bit of a stretch to say that because a statement is not entirely based upon sense, and is also reasonable, it is therefore a statement of pure reason. Is there a third thing being left out of the same sort as Aristotle’s intuitive intelligence, which is neither wholly practical, nor synonymous with reason? Apparently not in Kant’s metaphysic. In any event, there is an immediate turn that results in the universally legislative will:

“The objective principle of all practical legislation lies (according to the first principle) in the rule and its form of universality which makes it capable of being a law (say, for example, a law of nature); but the subjective principle is in the end; now by the second principle, the subject of all ends is each rational being insomuch as it is an end in itself. Hence follows the practical principle of the will, which is the ultimate condition with the universal practical reason, viz., the idea that the will of every rational being is a universally legislative will.”

So then the ability to have a universally legislative will is essential because as an end each person must not only be an object of action, but also a subject and originator of moral action that offers the same respect to other persons: thus its universality?

_________________________________

 

* Kant, Immanuel. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals. Translated by Abbot, Thomas K. (1949). Macmillian Publishing Company, New York.

Nikolai Rostov  has gotten himself deeply into debt from gambling in a stupid fashion, and has to go ask his father for help. While he’s waiting for his father’s return his sister and friend are singing, and inadvertently he joins them in harmony:

Oh, how that third had vibrated, and how touched was something that was best in Rostov’s soul. And that something was independent of anything in the world and higher than anything in the world. What are gambling losses, and Dolokhovs, and words of honor!… It’s all nonsense! One can kill, and steal, and still be happy… (War and Peace p 343)

Of course, Nikolai couldn’t actually be happy if he were to kill and steal, and if he were being reasonable he would admit that to be the case, but that’s immaterial to what he’s feeling.

I haven’t read very many Russian stories, just some Dostoyevsky, a couple of Chekhov short stories, and now War and Peace, but there’s a quality that has been present in every one of them that is more or less absent from all the English novels I’ve read, of which there are many. It’s a kind of spontaneous elation only tangentially related to what’s otherwise going on either externally or mentally. At the end of Chekhov’s very short story The Student, the protagonist, a seminary student who has been considering the chill, his hunger (it’s Good Friday), the poverty of his village, Peter’s betrayal, and has just made an old woman cry, has a little epiphany:

Now the student was thinking about Vasilisa: since she had shed tears all that had happened to Peter the night before the Crucifixion must have some relation to her. . . .

He looked round. The solitary light was still gleaming in the darkness and no figures could be seen near it now. The student thought again that if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter had been troubled, it was evident that what he had just been telling them about, which had happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present–to both women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people. The old woman had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was near to her, because her whole being was interested in what was passing in Peter’s soul.

And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. “The past,” he thought, “is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.” And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.

When he crossed the river by the ferryboat and afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigor–he was only twenty-two–and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvellous, and full of lofty meaning.

In most of the situations like this I’ve encountered in Russian literature, the reason for an upwelling of joy and love is just a pretext: they’re young, strong, there are sticky green leaves on the trees in Spring; the sky is so lofty, still and beautiful; there’s golden sunlight reflecting off the water, somebody is dancing… in a word, the character has had an experience of Beauty, or gotten swept out of himself. Bullets whiz past, the troops charge, and Andrei is very happy. Alyosha leaves the body of the beloved elder Zosima and kisses the ground in rapture. Natasha is in love with everybody and everything at her first ball. It’s not even causally related to what follows: Nikolai behaves like a wretch before his father, Andrei becomes depressed and nihilistic for a time, perhaps the student goes home and moans about the cold to his parents. That’s more or less inconsequential: now there’s this memory of joy in the person’s soul, proving to him that life isn’t all what it seems, and perhaps it will come back later and confirm that perhaps life is worth it after all. Tolstoy is very good at working in these moments, and seems uniquely unconcerned with making any kind of neat lesson out of them. One’s soul touches the divine: what now? nothing in particular, just keep living and remember and sometimes look at the sky and ponder its beauty, but everything is a little different now, only one doesn’t know exactly how.

There’s a question wending its way through philosophy: what is the relationship between reason and truth? What, for that matter, is the relationship between the senses and truth? Do we know truth directly, through reason, through sense, or not at all? Heidegger, who I haven’t read, but have heard interesting things about from a classmate, apparently says that truth is unconcealment, and talks about the essences of things concealing and unconcealing themselves on a metaphysical plane. That’s cool and suggestive, but I don’t very well know what it means. Kant, as far as I can tell, thinks that we cannot know the truth of things in themselves – their essence – even in our own selves, for we have no unmediated experience of the intelligible world, but we nevertheless partake in Reason, and therefore participate in the intelligible world, from whence comes our capacity for freedom. But those aren’t his words; I think they’re a hybrid of Kant’s words and theological words – things like partake of and participate in. Aquinas says that reason is how we know truth, but our reason has been darkened on account of sin, and thus we reason imperfectly and cannot know the truth very well without revelation and grace. For Plato we have some sort off capacity to see into the realm of forms which must be trained by increasingly abstract uses of reason, like the prisoner being dragged around so he’s facing the light. Apparently Reason sort of sees or recollects Truth. For Aristotle we have a capacity for seeing first principles (nous) and we take those principles and apply reason to attain scientific wisdom. But it’s really more like mathematical wisdom, because it doesn’t involve much observation or testing; there’s no scientific method, just reason and first principles. Modern science, on the other hand, seems much more concerned with the sensory world, however mediated it may be by sense and various instruments of measurement.

But at some point the philosophers must have pushed the Truth by Reason Project too far, and something broke. What has broken seems to be the connection between the noetic and the emperical. Perhaps there’s no such thing as a that which perceives the immaterial; perhaps even those senses that perceive the material realm access reality through too many veils of conditioning and neurology and who knows what else; perhaps we’re just brains being stimulated in particular ways to think we perceive actual things; perhaps we can’t really know anything absolutely; perhaps Truth is Subjectivity; perhaps it’s just subjective; perhaps it’s unconcealment; perhaps we don’t actually partake in the intelligible world after all. So now non-philosophers who wish to maintain that, yes, through sense and reason and spirit we can know Truth, at least partially, feel forced to talk about objective, inerrant, really, truly, certainly true truth.

There’s a paragraph I unfortunately couldn’t find again from The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin where he talks about Tolstoy leveling his “devastatingly destructive genius” against all the theories of life and history of his day in a desperate attempt to find something that could stand up to his criticism, but everything crumbled before his stunning grasp of particulars  – for nothing could explain all of them, and he would accept nothing less. So in the end he supposed that the best thing was not to be so very rational; to be like the peasants with their possibility of intuitive understanding, unmediated by rationalization – but could not be so himself and it tormented him to the end of his life. (that’s the fuzzy version of Berlin’s take on things, anyway) It does seem to be the case that reason left to itself is way better at finding cause for doubt than for belief. We find that there are hallucinations and doubt that what we sense in true; we find that peoples differ in what it acceptable behavior and doubt that there is morality; even in mathematics we cannot find a complete system to satisfy our rationality entirely (something about the set that contains every set?); untempered rationality becomes the god who binds his own parents and the monster who eats her children.

The hope of objectivity is that there can be something sure, certain, and consistent that everyone can agree on. The fear is that if there isn’t everything will shatter and we will become isolated individuals uncertain of everything outside our own minds; and even much within us. In a word, that we’ll swing from Modern rationality to Postmodern nihilism. The danger is more convincing than the hope: human experience cannot be reduced to axioms and worked out logically. To call a truth objective is to set it up like a scientific theory, where it cannot be absolutely proven, but it can be disproved by any exception. If it is true that Reason is always better at disproving than at proving, Truth by Reason is bound to fail eventually.

This doesn’t mean I consider truth to be unknowable; but that’s a comment for another time.

For tomorrow’s Preceptorial we read The Fox and the Hedgehog, an essay on Tolstoy (especially This philosophy of history) by Isaiah Berlin. It begins:

There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defense. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yeild a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and it may be, human beings in general. There exists a great chasm between those who, on the one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent and articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel — a single, universal organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they say and are has significance — and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.

 Among Russian writers, for instance, Dostoyevsky is an archetypal hedgehog, and Pushkin is very much a fox. Likewise Berlin calls Plato a hedgehog and Aristotle a fox. Tolstoy is a brilliant fox desperately intent on seeing like a hedgehog. When Dostoyevsky wrote about Pushkin and made him out to be a prophet of a great cause, nobody could take it seriously as an account of Pushkin, who was nothing of the sort, but the account was appreciated as illuminating D. himself – for that really was D’s primary concern.

It’s a fairly interesting classification in general, and the essay is quite good. Someone should probably make this into a personality test – perhaps for Facebook or an ice-breaker for youth events. I’m not certain if it’s primarily a philosophical outlook or a temperament – in the case of Tolstoy it’s portrayed as both, since he was temperamentally a fox and philosophically a hedgehog (to which Berlin attributes no small part of T’s philosophical angst). I get a distinct impression that both Evangelicalism and Orthodoxy like hedgehogs; Fr. John certainly is one – everything is about the Incarnation. Really, everything. Chaos theory? Yeah, that’s about the Incarnation too (he just gave a homily on that very possibility; he hears “strange attractor” and thinks “the Holy Spirit!”).I’m not sure what an Orthodox fox would be like. Probably I wouldn’t label him specifically “Orthodox” simply because he didn’t relate pretty much everything to theology – even if he was sincerely orthodox in belief. I say that Evangelicalism tends to be hedgehog-centric because most preachers say outright that everything should be about salvation all the time if at all possible.

On the other hand, perhaps the school system is fox-centric. An intractable grasp of some Big Idea organizing all of one’s thoughts isn’t necessarily helpful; sometimes it can be a hinderance. I remember as a junior in college trying to organize all my thoughts for all my classes into one cohesive whole, failing, and as I was complaining that my teachers didn’t especially care if everything could be integrated into one beautiful whole – even in a single class, a friend pointed out that not everyone cares that much about the coherent whole. Public schooling, especially in America, tends to resist hedgehog-thinking because, first, the organizing principle would have to be non-religious and as neutral as possible in order to be acceptable – and most principles that are large enough to organize must be religious or philosophic in a way that may as well be religious – and because of the way subjects are split up. For all the attempts at imposing some possibility of coherence upon schooling, if a person doesn’t have an invincible desire to impose, find, and keep coherence, it’s not going to happen in our succession of “subjects.” 

It’s that time of year again: National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWrMo) – when a bunch of writing enthusiasts try to churn out unedited novels of 50,000 words each during the course of 30 days. Preferably appallingly rushed novels. Preferably in blissful unconcern for any kind of quality or meaning. Despite not particularly wanting to write a novel at this point, I find the project strangely appealing. The phrase that most comes to mind for the kinds of novels this project is set on promoting is “penny dreadfuls;” so named because they used to sell in England for a penny. There’s something to be said for that. Rousseau is nostalgic for a time when people sung their stories as poetry; I suppose this is more evidence for English being a language more given to writing than speech – I know plenty of people who might aspire to write a novel, and nobody at all who aspires to sing bardic epics in the plaza. Things like The Canterbury Tales are both odd and difficult to us because they’re meant to be read aloud; not something much encouraged. So we write mounds of prose stories – novels – with as much gusto as the Miller lent to his tale, but a good deal less rhythm and rhyme; things meant to please the ear. It seems likely that if we moderns were to have a contest a la Canterbury Tales it would be conducted like a writing workshop: everyone sits down during the breaks in travel and writes a story; then they either exchange stories and read them, with everyone giving each story a rating, or perhaps each person would read his story aloud (in prose, of course) to the company. Probably the former; I agree with R. that most of us moderns don’t have an ear for oral discourse, or even stories; if there aren’t images to go with it we tend to have to take notes to figure out what’s being said. R. mentioned French preachers shouting and being very animated, but people still hardly understanding them; perhaps that’s because they hadn’t yet started adapting sermons to written culture with bulletins featuring outlines and partially written notes, handing out Bibles at the beginning of service, and displaying quotes by Power-point.

Something that I haven’t quite figured out about NaNoWriMo is whether these stories are actually meant to be read, as travelers’ tales were meant to be heard. As far as I can tell they aren’t. I have an acquaintance who has participated for the past few years, for instance, and she has a blog about her NaNoWriMo experience. It’s all meta-story stuff; no actual story, or characters, or excerpts, or anything with any actual story content. That seems common: on the NaNoWriMo message board there’s a lot of buzz about meta-story stuff; name generators, styles, word counts, dealing with writing block and writing stress, encouragement, complaint, and mutual support in general – I’ve failed to find an actual story or piece of a story or anything resembling a story, however. That, I think, must be an oddity of print culture. Because the novel itself is a physical object more than an oral story (an immaterial thing that must be told to have form), there’s a much greater possibility of private stories, where the mere fact that they’ve been written is sufficient, regardless of whether they affect any other human being. It takes us a step more away from Canterbury Tales, to a group of people who hang out together writing stories, but instead of then reading each-other’s stories and laughing about them, they refuse to give the stories out, and instead compare from a distance how long the stories are, and what structure they adhere to, what genera they’re in, how they came up with names for the characters, etc. I’m not certain why this is. It seems related to a culture and economic system that presses us to try to make money off of absolutely everything and be highly self-conscious of our written conventions. Every story is a potential publication. But the whole charm of NaNoWriMo is that it’s a bunch of amateurs who just want to write stories, even if they’re pretty bad – because it’s a human thing to tell stories, and we’re educated in such a way that it’s more natural for us to write stories than to tell them (unless they’re very short). Perhaps there’s something much more deeply personal and in need of protection, editing; much more like real labor in our narrative than in our opinion essays – though stories are by nature more like schole (leisure, study, contemplation) than labor. Is it because most of us have so much less practice at story telling than other forms of writing? Or because a novel is such a long story? Hmm.

I’m not sure yet how I feel about War and Peace; it’s been nearly 150 pages and there’s no coherent plot in sight. On the other hand, Tolstoy has very good descriptions of his characters (which he then, alack, expects the reader to remember until the fellow shows up again a hundred pages later), and beautiful passages like this:

“One step beyond that line [between the armies], reminiscent of the line separating the living from the dead, and it’s unknown, suffering, and death. And what is there? who is there? there, beyond this field, and the tree, and the roof lit by the sun? No one knows, and you would like to know; and you’re afraid to cross that line, and would like to cross it; and you know that sooner or later you will have to cross it and find out what is there on the other side of the line, as you will inevitably find out what is on the other side of death. And you’re strong, healthy, cheerful, and excited, and surrounded by people just as strong and excitedly animated.” So, if he does not think it, every man feels who finds himself within sight of an enemy, and this feeling gives particular brilliance and joyful sharpness of impression to everything that happens in those moments.

Tolstoy; War and Peace; Trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky. p 143

Speech distinguishes man among the animals; language distinguishes nations from each other; one does not know where a man comes from until he has spoken. –Rousseau

NOTE: In this post I’m entertaining the possibility that Rousseau is right in his theory of the origin of languages. That’s not necessarily the case, but it seemed worth considering anyway. I’m not going to examine its’ truth, because even R. doesn’t want to do that. He says in The Origins of Inequality that he thinks it’s a worthwhile story even if it’s not true historically.

For War and Peace class we discussed Rousseau’s essay on the Origin of Language yesterday. It was fairly interesting, though I’m not entirely certain how it helps us to understand Tolstoy better – something about the French vs. the Russian languages. There’s also an interesting theory of early languages (at least in the South) being primarily poetic and tonal so that they were very close to song, and that it is only with writing and commerce that they had need of analytical vocabulary and grammar structures. He’s quite wistful about the thought of some great rhetorician standing in a plaza, and delivering a poetic, melodic, emotionally compelling address that the average citizens could both understand and find beautiful. I’ll admit it to be charming, but R. very often paints charming scenes that in the end are only that – things which may or not have happened somewhere, but are unlikely to happen now no matter how much we might wish things otherwise – and many of us would not even wish them.

Anyway, I wish to entertain the possibility, suggested by R., that knowing a particular language radically alters how we relate to the world, and is more or less the embodiment of culture. It’s obvious that some languages are better at expressing certain things than others; that they have different sounds, assumptions about the world, and kinds of musicality available to them. Some of the broad distinctions R. makes is between Southern and Northern languages – the former he sees as being more musical, passionate, emotive, and oratorical; the latter as more practical, harsh, a-tonal, and analytical. As a result, the Southern languages are better for creating moving speeches and poetry, and the Northern ones to either getting practical things accomplished and delineating ideas precisely. He further differentiates languages that primarily written vs. spoken. Spoken language will be more dependent on tone, and very often sound will take precedence of precision of meaning, because the speaker will be sure to communicate his meaning with tone and expression. Written languages, on the other hand, must have a very precise series of definitions and a complex grammar, because everything that would normally be communicated with expression and tone must now be shown with punctuation, structure, and word choice. So as the language becomes more precise it also becomes cooler and less able to convey feelings directly. So the circumstances of the people forms the language, and the language forms to dispositions of the people, very broadly speaking. In case you haven’t noticed, R. is not in the least afraid of stereotypes.

I want to take this toward the realm of education, and how American education in particular treats culture. English is a language as much written as spoken, and according to R. is therefore more fitted to precision than feeling, and indeed must be very precise to convey not only information but the intended meaning, like voice and expression. It has been commented upon in Education, and seems true, that to the extent you train young people to habitually express things in a way that would be appropriate written down (“academic English”), to a similar extent we become constrained in our use of tone and expression – we can say more things in a less lively fashion (we acquire an “internal editor,” as it were). Poetry and music become more and more separated from regular speech.

Where I’m trying to go with this is, to R., nothing that uses language, or music, or anything else besides very basic physical actions like eating and sleeping (and even those, when done in company) – can ever possibly be culturally neutral. Regardless of Kant’s possibility of Pure Reason, even mathematics is not culturally neutral, because while right and wrong sums may be the same in every culture, the desire to form minds that think with mathematical precision is specific to certain cultures. Language is no more culturally neutral than religion is: perhaps less so. And when it comes to forming, preserving, and teaching our culture, we in America seem to have no idea what we’re doing. Especially in the schools. Teaching a student to read and write is not a culturally neutral act. It is in fact, an audacious act: if successful in more than a superficial way, it will likely change more about a person and culture that we could possibly predict. Someone taught a wandering poet to write (or wrote for him), and we have as a result the Iliad and Odyssey, monuments of Western Civilization. But we also have a great many novelists, but no oral epic poets. Of course, none of this is absolute, and I’m still only entertaining a notion. While we, with Rousseau, way be wistful for those poets who would sing or chant or whatever they did for hours on end before the assembled polis, there are reasons why writing has won. It’s an excellent invention. If it weren’t for writing I not only would not be communicating these thoughts, but would not even be having these thoughts, since I’m currently thinking about Rousseau who was thinking about the ancient Mediterranean, and I have no reason to suppose I would know about either in an oral culture. But he’s right in pointing out that something has been lost: that something is always lost, whether it be primal freedom and innocence, or public song and dance as natural as walking or speaking, or particularities of culture and language. But something that also seems true is that we’re never in a position to judge until it’s too late. In the case of language, it requires analytical language and experience to compare the desirability of an oral or written language, or even to know that it’s a question. And analytical language is the mark of a culture that uses written language. Certainly complaining about writing is a mark of a written language. And no culture has ever chosen to go back.

Something that’s been hovering around the edges of my thought is Fr. Oleska’s talks on culture along with my own experiences at TLT. What we really want is to offer equality in the discussion of how education should be handled, and a choice. But the only way to articulate the question: is it good and fitting that we divide up subjects this way, that we divide up time this way, that we do Western academics, which must needs be read and written – even if they’re read aloud, they’re not really told as a thing belonging to us all, rather than to Rousseau – is like that, in somewhat complicated rational form. The crux of the problem lies in this: that if it is true that languages and therefore a medium in which to apply reason differ to the extent that R. suggests they do: that his primitives would not and cannot discuss (and presumably construct) rational arguments of the kind modern Westerners are used to, then no wonder we’re frustrated, because it is not even possible for a person to ask whether the oral culture is better and worth keeping, or to know what the stakes are, until he is already mostly outside it. Thus, not only is there an inequality of power, but of understanding and words as well. So we either forge ahead, come what may, or do like the Federation in Star Trek, and institute a Prime Directive of non-interference, or muddle along somewhere in-between. Usually the latter, and not very reflectively, either.

We’re continuing with Kant’s Fundamental Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals in Tutorial, and I think Kant is the only person we’ve read besides Marx that I simply don’t comprehend. He keeps talking about a priori pure reason, abstracted from all contingency. Probably I don’t understand because I’ve never read his prior work, the Critique of Pure Reason, but I’m left wondering what on earth is meant by “pure” reason, and why anyone would want to abstract it from all sensory or other non-rational experience. It seems to have something to do with figuring out hypothetical principles that can be agreed on by all rational beings, human or not. Why would we care about the thought processes of non-human rational beings? Why would we suppose it to be possible? That seems more the realm of imagination than reason. It’s kind of frustrating. What I mean by reason and Kant means by reason appear to be two different things, and I feel toward Kant’s ability to find universal imperatives in Pure Reason the way atheists must feel about people who talk about God speaking to them. In that respect Aristotle makes a good deal more sense to me: we have ends we wish to achieve that we perceive as good – usually because they create eudimonea (happiness in A’s sense). Never mind where the desired ends come from – they aren’t the realm so much of deliberation or reason, but of nous. We can sort of see them – or if we can’t, we can see good men and watch what they do. You’d have to be pretty depraved not to even be able to know that good men do goo things and their ends should probably be ours as well. Then reason deliberates on how to achieve possible ends. Or it engages in theoretical science, which is its’ more natural realm.

Some of that was not Aristotelian, but what I’m trying to get at here is… why would anyone want to come up with a metaphysic of morals? If someone didn’t want to try to do good because it is good, why would we suppose him to do it because it is rational? Or if this whole project is so theoretical that it’s not about convincing anyone to do anything, then why is it something anyone, including Kant, would want to think about? As far as I can tell the idea itself offers no incentive – pure reason is about as intrinsically attractive as being locked in a sensory deprivation chamber. Arg.