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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: Søren Kierkegaard

Repentance Belongs to the Eternal in a Man

22 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ Comments Off on Repentance Belongs to the Eternal in a Man

Tags

Christianity, Faith, forgiveness, God, Guilt, Motivation, Purity, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, religion, Remorse, Repentance, Søren Kierkegaard, sin, Theology

Søren Kierkegaard

“When remorse calls to a man it is always late. The call to find the way again by seeking out God in the confession of sins is always at the eleventh hour. Whether you are young or old, whether you have sinned much or little, whether you have offended much or neglected much, the guilt makes this call come at the eleventh hour. The inner agitation of the heart understands what remorse insists upon, that the eleventh hour has come. For in the sense of time, the old man’s age is the eleventh hour; and the instant of death, the final moment in the eleventh hour. The indolent youth speaks of a long life that lies before him. The indolent old man hopes that his death is still a long way off. But repentance and remorse belong to the eternal in a man.”

__________

Pulled from the opening of Søren Kierkegaard’s deep meditation on faith and motivation Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (1847).

There’s more to it:

  • ‘I’d read Plato, and listen to Sly Stone’: Cornel West’s testimony
  • Kierkegaard distills the one fact at the root of life’s tragedies
  • Probably my favorite paragraphs on the redemptive power of forgiveness

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Either/Or

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on Either/Or

Tags

Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, Journals and Papers, Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard

“Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause—that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take a stance—backward.”

“If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both… This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom.”

__________

Parallel excerpts pulled from two different works from Kierkegaard: first from his Journals and Papers and second from Either/Or: A Fragment of Life.

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John Updike on Falling Airplanes and His Faith in a Fallen World

21 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Archimedes, Autobiography, Biography, Christianity, Church Going, Donna Tartt, Ernest Hemingway, Experience, Faith, G.K. Chesterton, Hitch-22, John Updike, Joseph Conrad, Julian Barnes, Karl Barth, Life, memoir, Miguel de Unamuno, Mortality, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Philip Larkin, Proof of God, religion, Rudyard Kipling, Søren Kierkegaard, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Speak Memory, T.S. Eliot, The Secret History

John Updike

“Early in my adolescence, trapped within the airtight case for atheism, I made this logical formulation:

1. If God does not exist, the world is a horror-show.
2. The world is not a horror-show.
3. Therefore, God exists.

The second premise, of course, is the weaker; newspapers and biology lessons daily suggest that it is a horror show, of landslides and plagues and massacres and falling airplanes and incessant carnivorousness… Yet this and all bad news merits reporting because our general expectation is for good: an instinctive vision of health and peace underlies our horror stories. Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we only have to be still to experience. Habit and accustomedness have painted over pure gold with a dull paint that can, however, be scratched away, to reveal the shining under-base. The world is good, our intuition is, confirming its Creator’s appraisal as reported in the first chapter of Genesis.

During that same adolescence, I reluctantly perceived of the Christian religion I had been born into that almost no one believed it, believed it really — not its ministers, nor its pillars like my father and his father before him. Though signs of belief (churches, public prayers, mottos on coins) existed everywhere, when you moved toward Christianity it disappeared, as fog solidly opaque in the distance thins to transparency when you walk into it. I decided I nevertheless would believe. I found a few authors, a very few — Chesterton, Eliot, Unamuno, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth — who helped me believe. Under the shelter that I improvised from their pages I have lived my life. I rarely read them now; my life is mostly lived. God is the God of the living, though His priests and executors, to keep order and to force the world into a convenient mould, will always want to make Him the God of the dead, the God who chastises life and forbids and says No. What I felt, in that basement Sunday school of Grace Lutheran Church in Shillington, was a clumsy attempt to extend a Yes, a blessing, and I accepted that blessing, offering in return only a nickel a week and my art, my poor little art…

My writing here about my religion feels forced — done at the behest of others, of hypothetical ‘autobiography’ readers. Done, I believe, in an attempt to comfort some younger reader as once I was comforted by Chesterton and Unamuno… But there seems, my having gone this unfortunately far, still this to say: One believes not merely to dismiss from one’s life a degrading and immobilizing fear of death but to possess that Archimedean point outside the world from which to move the world. The world cannot provide its own measure and standards; these must come, strangely, from outside, or a sorry hedonism and brute opportunism result — a greedy panicked heart and substance abuse. The world punishes us for taking it too seriously as well as for not taking it seriously enough.”

__________

From John Updike’s magisterial Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

Well, it’s beautifully written. That’ll be your initial reaction to Self-Consciousness. No, let me rephrase: Wow, it’s beautifully written. Updike is a writer who pulls the sublime from effortless, conversational sentences, affirming his reflection that “to give the mundane its beautiful due” was the purpose of his writing style. And man, do you feel the power of that impulse in these memoirs.

Typically, a writer’s memoir is not really about his or her lived-life. Writers are not boring people, but they often do, when viewed from the outside, lead boring lives. Sure Conrad manned a steamer in the Congo and Kipling was deployed with a battalion in India and Hemingway drank his way through every bullring in Cuba. But that was a century ago. Nowadays, as writing has become largely professionalized, the pulse of a writer’s life has slowed significantly. A writer’s craft is a solitary and silent one, done with a pen and a pad, at the desk, day after day. So his memoir must concern matters beyond the workaday. Just to stick to some covered on this blog: Martin Amis’s memoir is about family; Christopher Hitchens’s is about friendship; Nabokov’s is about education. John Updike’s is about faith (and sex, as he could never avoid the subject).

At the conclusion of one of the finest contemporary novels I’ve read, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the young protagonist Richard Papen wonders if he possesses a singular fatal flaw. “I have always mistaken beautiful or intelligent people for good” is his paragraph-long confession paraphrased, an admission which, upon reading, spurred within me a pang of recognition (“I’m busted”). And so too it is with writers. Beautiful prose can hide myriad sins of logic. So it’s essential when reading excerpts like the one above (found on pages 230-235) that you do not fall lazily into the ease of the prose, surrendering the critical faculties that such dense epistemology demands.

There is more to say here, but I will leave it for another day. Perhaps for when I post another section from Self-Consciousness. Still, there are two relevant sources concerning Updike’s final point about seriousness which may add some flavor to the discussion:

From Nothing to Be Frightened, Julian Barnes’s memoir about mortality (see: there’s always one unifying theme).

But if life is viewed as… something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgement that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral’s bell… On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism. [emphasis mine]

There is also Philip Larkin’s exquisite poem “Church Going,” where the writer wanders into a church and in the final stanza muses on its perennial significance:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious

Not to put too fine a point on the issue, but I think the contemporary American Church, with its Hollywood aesthetic and prosperity gospel, has lost much of that crucial, validating seriousness.

Updike, who died in 2009, would have been 82 this week.

Read on:

  • G.K. Chesterton’s defends his faith from cynics
  • Updike and a host of other thinkers reflect on whether we can simply assume God’s existence
  • Philosopher Alvin Plantinga dissects how evolutionary psychology intersects with Christian docrine

John Updike and Family

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‘I’d Read Plato, and Listen to Sly Stone’: Cornel West’s Testimony

28 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Philosophy, Religion, Speeches

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

belief, Christianity, Cornell West, Curtis Mayfield, Faith, forgiveness, General Philosophy, Plato, religion, Søren Kierkegaard, sin, slavery, Sly Stone, testimony

Cornel West“I’m a Jesus-loving blues man in the life of the mind.

I’m a Christ-centered Jazz man, which means that I do try to take, quite seriously, the endless quest for unarmed truth, understanding that a condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. So I don’t even think about trying to be true unless I’ve tried to enact and embody a sensitivity, even a hyper-sensitivity to the pain, the suffering, the hurts, the wounds, the scars, the bruises of people.

That deep compassion that you not only talk about, but that you embody…

Just. Bear. Witness. Be a sermon rather than give one. You don’t even need to talk about humility; just be humble. You know, a couple of months ago in the States, we had a sustained discourse on civility; and you know, I thought – why don’t you just be civil? Why do you have to have this sustained discourse? Just be respectful, that’s all.

It’s like the conclusion of a practical Aristotelian syllogism.

It’s action.

It’s not just a proposition. It’s not a sentence. It’s not a theory. It’s a mode of being in the world; it’s a way of life to be embodied, enacted.

But since I was young, I have been shaped by the legacy of Athens, by Socrates’s preoccupation with questioning: the unexamined life is not worth living.

That meant much to me as I was growing up on the chocolate side of Sacramento, going to the book mobile, and reading Plato and Kierkegaard for the first time.

I’d read Kierkegaard, put on some more Curtis Mayfield. I’d read Plato, and listen to Sly Stone — who actually did play organ in my church, Shiloh Baptist Church, every first Sunday. Northern California Mass choir. He grew up in Vallejo. Slyvester. Stewart. Genius that he was, and he could play that organ before he became Sly Stone.

But also the legacy of Jerusalem. And of course we want to acknowledge our precious Jewish brothers and sisters – it’s Passover tonight, the first night.

And there is for me no Christian faith, there’s no Jesus, without that prophetic Judaic tradition that deeply shaped me in a fundamental way.

The idea that each and every person has a sanctity. Not just a dignity the way the Stoics talked about, but a sanctity, a value that’s priceless. There’s actually a value that has no price — no market price…

There must be some standard that gets beyond the everyday culture, the everyday life, civilization, fleeting empires, changing regimes, to keep track of that sanctity, which is the ground of our equality… Our notions of equality somehow have to be anchored in that which cuts across the grain deeper than fleeting cultures and changing nation states and contingent civilizations and empires.

And these legacies of Athens and Jerusalem, for me have been brought together best in the black cultural expressions – the best of the black cultural expressions – that said, in the face of 244 years of white supremacist slavery, that somehow, we were going to love our way through that darkness, and not succumb to a hatred of the slave master even as we loathe the barbarity and the bestiality of slavery itself.

And that’s what those negro spirituals are about; I come from persecuted Christians in the land of religious liberty…

How do you look terror in the face, and still muster the courage to love?

Refuse to succumb to revenge, and drink from the cup of bitterness, and say, somehow, we’re going to hold on to love and justice, and not revenge and hatred. We’ve always known that hatred is the coward’s revenge against those who intimidate you. Always cowardly.

How do you learn to be courageous – and love wisdom, love justice, love neighbor, and love enemy?

And I am that kind of Christian.

I really do try to love my enemy. Not of course try to do it on my own, at home. A little too difficult, I need grace for that. It doesn’t make any sense – whatsoever – of talking about loving your enemy if you don’t have some connection to a power greater than you.

It’s the most absurd thing in the world, given the fact that our world is shot through with hatred, envy, player hating, backstabbing, domination, subjugation. These are the cycles of history –

And how, somehow do you break it? Even if you only break it in one life, in one community!

It’s got to be through love…

I was at the prison this morning, at Wagner. A brother asked me a question, it moved me so deeply. He said, “Brother West, I’m locked into bad habits, and I can’t break loose.”

And I said, “Brother, you’re not the only one. All of us are wrestling with that in some way.”

He said, “Oh not you… I saw you on television, looks like you got it together–”

I said, “No, no.”

I told you I’m a Christian. That means I’m a sinner, I’m just a redeemed sinner. I’m just trying to love my crooked neighbor with my crooked heart. That’s the best I’mma to do.

It’s true that I’ve been transformed. I was a gangster.

And after my transformation, I still have gangster proclivities, to this day. Wrestling with it all the time…

And I live in despair. Not every day, but I wrestle with it.

It’s like the 32nd chapter of Genesis. Jacob wrestling at night with the angel of death. He emerges with a new name, wounded though. God wrestler.

And a blues man and a jazz man is always a god wrestler. And I’ve got some questions that I don’t fully… grasp.

In terms of the depth of the suffering in this world.

But the fundamental ground of my life is to be faithful unto death, and to attempt to live a life of love and compassion to the best of my ability.

Cornel West

__________

Dr. Cornel West’s impromptu testimony, given at Princeton University, where he is a professor of philosophy and African American studies.

To really get the full force of West’s testimony, you really have to watch him speak —

— it’s one of the most captivating monlogues of this sort that I’ve ever seen.

The entire exchange between Dr. West and Radhanath Swami is fascinating. This is part two — West’s testimony and a Q&A — but Radhanath’s part (linked here) is worth watching as well.

This exchange was titled “East Meets West: A Dialogue Between Cornel West and Radhanath Swami,” and though I have never, ever seen an inter-faith exchange that was ever worth anything, this is an exception — and better than that: it’s brimming with mutual respect, intellect, engagement with the world, and humor.

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This Planet and All the Stars Were Once Bounded in a Point the Size of a Period

26 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion, Science

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Aristotle, belief, Freeman Dyson, G.K. Chesterton, God, Jim Holt, John Updike, Karl Barth, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, natural theology, Oscar Wilde, Rabbit Run, Roger's Version, Søren Kierkegaard, the big bang, the universe, Thomas Aquinas, Why Does the World Exist?, William James

John Updike

I began by asking [John] Updike whether the theology of Karl Barth had really sustained him through a difficult time in his life.

“I’ve certainly said that and it did seem to be true,” he said. “I fell upon Barth having exhausted Kierkegaard as a consoler, and having previously resorted to Chesterton. I discovered Barth through a series of addresses and lectures called The Word of God and the Word of Man. He didn’t attempt to play anybody’s game as far as looking at the Gospels as historic documents or anything. He just said, essentially, that this is a faith—take it or leave it. So yes, I did find Barth comforting, and a couple of my early novels—not so early, actually—are sort of Barthian. Rabbit Run certainly presents a Barthian point of view, from the standpoint of a Lutheran minister. And in Roger’s Version, Barthianism is about the only refuge for Roger from all the besieging elements that would deprive one of one’s faith—both science, which Dale tries to use on behalf of the theist point of view, and the watering down of theology with liberal values.”

“It’s interesting,” I said, “that some philosophers are so astonished and awed that anything at all should exist—like Wittgenstein, who said in the Tractatus that it’s not how the world is that is mystical, but that it is. And Heidegger, of course, made heavy weather of this too. He claimed that even people who never thought about why there is something rather than nothing were still ‘grazed’ by the question whether they realized it or not—say, in moments of boredom, when they’d just as soon that nothing at all existed, or in states of joy when everything is transfigured and they see the world anew, as if for the first time. Yet I’ve run into philosophers who don’t see anything very astonishing about existence. And in some moods I agree with them. The question Why is there something rather than nothing? sometimes seems vacuous to me. But in other moods it seems very very profound. How does it strike you? Have you ever spent much time brooding over it?”

“Well, to call it ‘brooding’ would be to dignify it,” Updike said. “But I am of the party that thinks that the existence of the world is a kind of miracle. It’s the last resort, really, of naturalistic theology. So many other props have been knocked out from under naturalistic theology—the first principle argument that Aristotle set forth, Aquinas’s prime mover … they’re all gone, but the riddle does remain: why is there something instead of nothing?”

I told Updike that I admired the way he had a character in Roger’s Version explain how the universe might have arisen from nothingness via a quantum-mechanical fluctuation. In the decades since he wrote the book, I added, physicists had come up with some very neat scenarios that would allow something to emerge spontaneously out of nothing in accordance with quantum laws. But then, of course, you’re faced with the mystery: Where are these laws written? And what gives them the power to command the void?

“Also, the laws amount to a funny way of saying, ‘Nothing equals something,’ ” Updike said, bursting into laughter. “QED! One opinion I’ve encountered is that, since getting from nothing to something involves time, and time didn’t exist before there was something, the whole question is a meaningless one that we should stop asking ourselves. It’s beyond our intellectual limits as a species. Put yourself into the position of a dog. A dog is responsive, shows intuition, looks at us with eyes behind which there is intelligence of a sort, and yet a dog must not understand most of the things it sees people doing. It must have no idea how they invented, say, the internal-combustion engine. So maybe what we need to do is imagine that we’re dogs and that there are realms that go beyond our understanding. I’m not sure I buy that view, but it is a way of saying that the mystery of being is a permanent mystery, at least given the present state of the human brain. I have trouble even believing—and this will offend you—the standard scientific explanation of how the universe rapidly grew from nearly nothing. Just think of it. The notion that this planet and all the stars we see, and many thousands of times more than those we see—that all this was once bounded in a point with the size of, what, a period or a grape? How, I ask myself, could that possibly be? And, that said, I sort of move on.”

Updike chuckled softly. His mood appeared to lighten.

“When you think about it,” he continued, “we rationalists—and we’re all, to an extent, rationalist—we accept propositions about the early universe which boggle the mind more than any of the biblical miracles do. Your mind can intuitively grasp the notion of a dead man coming back again to life, as people in deep comas do, and as we do when we wake up every morning out of a sound sleep. But to believe that the universe, immeasurably vast as it appears to be, was once compressed into a tiny space—into a tiny point—is in truth very hard to believe. I’m not saying I can disprove the equations that back it up. I’m just saying that it’s as much a matter of faith to accept that.”

Here I was moved to demur. The theories that imply this picture of the early universe—general relativity, the standard model of particle physics, and so forth—work beautifully at predicting our present-day observations. Even the theory of cosmic inflation, which admittedly is a bit conjectural, has been confirmed by the shape of the cosmic background radiation, as measured by the Hubble space telescope. If these theories are so good at accounting for the evidence we see at present, why shouldn’t we trust them as we extrapolate backward in time toward the beginning of the universe?

“I’m just saying I can’t trust them,” Updike replied. “My reptile brain won’t let me. It’s impossible to imagine that even the Earth was once compressed to the size of a pea, let alone the whole universe.”

Some things that are impossible to imagine, I pointed out, are quite easy to describe mathematically.

“Still,” Updike said, warming to the argument, “there have been other intricate systems in the history of mankind. The scholastics in the Middle Ages had a lot of intricacy in their intellectual constructions, and even the Ptolemaic epicycles or whatever were … Well, all of this showed a lot of intelligence, and theoretical consistency even, but in the end they collapsed. But, as you say, the evidence piles up. It’s been decades and decades since the standard model of physics was proposed, and it checks out to the twelfth decimal point. But this whole string theory business … There’s never any evidence, just mathematical formulas, right? There are men spending their whole careers working on a theory of something that might not even exist.”

Even so, I said, they’re doing some beautiful pure mathematics in the process.

“Beautiful in a vacuum!” Updike exclaimed. “What’s beauty if it’s not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.”

I asked Updike if his own attitude toward natural theology was as contemptuous as Barth’s was. Some people think there’s a God because they have a religious experience. Some think there’s a God because they believe the priest. But others want evidence, evidence that will appeal to reason. And those are the people that natural theology, by showing how observations of the world around us might support the conclusion that there is a God, has the power to reach. Is Updike really willing to leave those people out in the cold just because he doesn’t like the idea of a God who lets himself be “intellectually trapped”?

Updike paused for a moment or two, then said, “I was once asked to be on a radio program called This I Believe. As a fiction writer, I really don’t like to formulate what I believe because, like a quantum phenomenon, it varies from day to day, and anyway there’s a sort of bad luck attached to expressing yourself too clearly. On this radio program I conceded that ruling out natural theology does leave too much of humanity and human experience behind. I suppose even a hardened Barthian might cling to at least one piece of natural theology, Christ’s saying, ‘By their fruits shall ye know them’—that so much of what we construe as virtue and heroism seems to come from faith. But to make faith into an abstract scientific proposition is to please no one, least of all the believers. There’s no intellectual exertion in accepting it. Faith is like being in love. As Barth put it, God is reached by the shortest ladder, not by the longest ladder. Barth’s constant point was that it is God’s movement that bridges the distance, not human effort.”

And why should God make that movement? Why should he have created a universe at all? I remembered Updike saying somewhere that God may have brought the world into being out of spiritual fatigue—that reality was a product of “divine acedia.” What, I asked him, could this possibly mean?

“Did I say that? God created the world out of boredom? Well, Aquinas said that God made the world ‘in play.’ In play. In a playful spirit he made the world. That, to me, seems closer to the truth.”

He was silent again for a moment, then continued. “Some scientists who are believers, like Freeman Dyson, have actually tackled the ultimate end of the universe. They’ve tried to describe a universe where entropy is almost total and individual particles are separated by distances that are greater than the dimensions of the present observable universe … an unthinkably dreary and pointless vacuum. I admire their scientific imagination, but I just can’t make myself go there. And a space like that is the space in which God existed and nothing else. Could God then have suffered boredom to the point that he made the universe? That makes reality seem almost a piece of light verse.”

What a lovely conceit! Reality is not a “blot on nothingness,” as Updike’s character Henry Bech had once, in a bilious moment, decided. It is a piece of light verse.

__________

From the chapter “The World as a Bit of Light Verse” in Jim Holt’s new book Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story.

To anyone with an interest in this stuff, I’d urge you go pick up a copy of Holt’s book. As a complete scientific and philosophic diletente, I found it to be as readable and as luminous as any comparable text I’ve encountered.

In the book, Holt talks with philosophers, cosmologists, physicists, novelists, and other thinkers, confronting each with the question of Why? and receiving a slew of compelling conjectures in return. The overwhelming conclusion to be drawn, however, is that there is no discrete answer to that question; rational inquiry can run the gambit of inquiring words — Who, What, When, Where, How — but can do very little to demystify that monolithic query Why. We can lower our scientific and philosophical shoulders into that word all we want, but the universe doesn’t even bother to whisper back to us Why not?

Yet this fact is a great intellectual equalizer and the reason a book like this is intelligible to people like me. It’s also the reason why the conjectures of laymen like us are not that far off from the suppositions of esteemed intellectuals. As Holt says in one chapter:

“When you listen to such thinkers feel their way around the question of why there is a world at all, you begin to realize that your own thoughts on the matter are not quite so nugatory as you had imagined. No one can confidently claim intellectual superiority in the face of the mystery of existence. For, as William James observed, ‘All of us are beggars here.’”

To James’s observation I’d add the one enshrined as Oscar Wilde’s epitaph, “We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” a favorite quote of mine and an uncharacteristically tentative utterance from a man so noted for his florid, grandiose phrase-making.

Furthermore, to Updike’s analogy of the dog, I would add the more elegant image proposed by Einstein:

“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”

This metaphor is at once superior and inferior to that of Updike. It’s superior because a dog — like everything else we know of in the universe — does not possess reflexive self-awareness, at least not in any robust sense.

However, as Holt’s book lays out, the universe is not arranged like a library wherein we effortlessly extract particular quantities to isolate and examine. Instead, the scientific method approaches the universe at its corners and wrinkles, gleaning what limited information we can from a cosmos shrouded in shady Higgs bosons, almost-invisible neutrinos, and inconsistent classes of elementary particles.

In this sense, we are more like canines ogling at an internal combustion engine, given that the object we are investigating (the universe) is not laid out to be reverse-engineered. It is not designed, as a book is, to easily reveal its secrets to us.

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You Can Never Tell the Good Thing from the Bad

21 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Film, Interview, Journalism

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Abigail Pogrebin, C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Jewishness, Kierkegaard, Mike Nichols, Søren Kierkegaard

Mike Nichols

From the conclusion of Abigail Pogrebin’s interview with acclaimed filmmaker Mike Nichols:

“I find myself looking at this famous director, who dines regularly with Spielberg and ‘Harrison’ [Ford], who has a staff at home, and a pool outside, and an equally accomplished wife upstairs on a conference call, and I find myself asking the old chestnut: Does he ever think about how far he’s come from that seven-year-old on a boat from Berlin? Nichols pauses. “I do think about that. What I think mainly is that I’m ridiculously lucky. I mean, indescribably lucky. Frighteningly lucky. Sometimes I think, ‘Oh please, don’t let some spiritual bill be piling up somewhere.’ And I’m relieved to remember that the first part of my life (as a German Jew escaping the Nazi regime) was not wonderful by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe, maybe, maybe I’ve paid my dues in that tough, painful first part, which was, after all, very long. We’ll see. If not, then I’ll be sorry. Of course the gag is that the luck was there to begin with. As I’m always telling my children and they’re now always telling it back to me: ‘You can never tell the good thing from the bad thing. Sometimes not for years, and sometimes never, because they become each other.’

__________

From Abigail Pogrebin’s Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish.

This quote comes at the end of Pogrebin’s profile of Nichols, the comedian and director of The Graduate, Angels in America, and several other cinematic masterpieces. I read this for the first time in eighth grade, and it was my introduction to an idea that I still consider perhaps the deepest bit of philosophy I’ve yet read; namely, the notion that life is inherently tragic because we have to go about experiencing it in one direction while understanding it in the other.

Two great thinkers recognized and wrote about this idea before Nichols could have known. They are, first, Clive Staples Lewis, who, in reflecting on the tragic and abrupt passage of his wife, said, “The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.” In other words, if it weren’t for the sublime moments in the presence of his former wife, the time in her absence wouldn’t be so painful.

We all understand this intuitively. The horrendous moment sometimes becomes the happy joke with the help of time, and the golden, shining instance often turns into a point of particular melancholy, and longing, and loneliness once it becomes a mere memory. You cannot tell the good from the bad: they become each other. Lewis spent several books — Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, The Problem of Pain — trying manfully to work this out.

Yet the original and best distillation of this idea was made by Søren Kierkegaard in his journals. He recognized the tragic and unavoidable truth that life can only be understood retrospectively. So you don’t know the mistake until you’ve made it, and you cannot truly know the beautiful moment until it has already passed you by. Kierkegaard wrote:

“It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards. Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be understood precisely because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt a position: backwards.”

Now reflect back on Nichols’s words.

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