The Edge Of The Horizon by Antonio Tabucchi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Tragedy Of/In Self-Discovery

What are we but the intersection and connection of an infinite number of random things? Events, energy, primal matter, possessions, relations, ideas. And when we are no longer, don’t many of these things persist, vagrant parts of us? These are then discoverable by someone else who becomes part of them as they of him. And if that is so, how could the fate of anyone of us be separate from that of all others? Their lives are ours, particularly their tragedy, for which we have a right as well as duty to weep. A right because we were never separate. A duty because they may have wept for us.

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Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Literature For Religionists

Like de Botton, I am an admirer of religion and a despiser of religious organisations. For me, religion is a primary motivator and source of ontological poetry, that is, language which seeks to relativise language by pointing out that language does not capture what is not-language. Religious poetry in all its forms - speech, liturgy, architecture, music, and literature - makes a consistent point regardless of sect, culture, or epoch: Reality, whatever it is, is not contained in words. There are things beyond what can be talked about; and what can be talked isn’t easily connected to anything else.

Therein lies the paradox of religion: religion contradicts itself as soon as it is expressed in words, musical notes, or bricks and mortar. What lies beyond expression, which is actually all experience, eludes any attempt to bring it into language of any sort. This contradiction in no way reduces the beauty of the words, notes or buildings but it does reveal these for what they are, the apparently universal aspiration of human beings to transcend our own limitations. The artefacts we produce in our transcendental quest are, like all poetry, literally useless.

Religious organisation arises from the attempt to establish that religion is useful, that it is somehow necessary for spiritual survival, for moral living, for ultimate salvation. This attempt at justification then typically ramifies into education, physical health care, and other practical social goods. Religious organisation thus seems not just beneficial but also necessary to society. It, of course, is not as demonstrated by the progressive and very successful secularisation of these institutions.

And this is where I part company with de Botton’s appreciation of religion. He believes religion is and should be useful. Religion, he says, creates necessary social bonds; it gives comfort to those in pain; it makes sense of an otherwise confusing and chaotic existence; it changes people for the better. Whether or not these claims for religion are true, they are effects not of religion but of religious organisation in its pursuit of usefulness.

Literature has many of the same effects for many people through its own, generally non-religious, organisation. In literary organisation, however, such activity is known for what it is: commercialisation, that is, the selling of a commodity on the basis of its usefulness, or at least a claim to its usefulness. Literary organisation, like its religious counterparts, absorbs the talents of individuals and directs those talents to promote organisational advantage. Aesthetics are treated as a branch of economics.*

Implicitly de Botton approves of this subservience of beauty to profit. Beauty has no uses. And like real religion, it emerges from its organisational matrix largely by chance and only through struggle. Most literature, like most religious expression, is idolatrous, that is, it inhibits the impulse to go beyond language in the search for reality. They confirm the familiar and the conventional.

Real religion, as real literature, is iconic rather than idolatrous. It points elsewhere, past whatever uses, purposes, and intentions we have adopted. It disconcerts, discomforts, and undermines our certainties, particularly our certainties about language. To paraphrase some of the most important Christian theologians: ‘Whatever we think about God, He is not that.’ Substituting the concept of Reality for God, one can say the equivalent about literature.

I am reminded of Adam Levin’s observation in his novel Instructions: “ ..it is good to do justice because God will kill you and your family whether you do justice or not." So, Alain, neither God nor Reality have any use whatsoever... except perhaps in shaping what usefulness means at all.

*What is actually being sold is often the aesthetic criterion which is then ‘incidentally’ met by the commodity. For example “Buy DAZ because it makes clothes whiter” is an attempt to establish whiteness as the criterion of choice for washing powders, largely because DAZ is very good at that. It may also be terrible for the fabrics, fade colours, and pollute the environment. So the commercial imperative is to dominate the choice of criterion; sales will then follow inevitably. So books are sold variously on the basis of pace, innovation, celebrity recommendation, etc. And religious organisation is ‘sold’ on the various goods it provides to society, ranging from ‘truth’ to ‘mental health.’ Real religion, however, according to Karl Barth, the most important theologian of the 20th century, is its own criterion and has no other uses than itself. According to Barth the sale of religion based on its usefulness is idolatry. De Botton may know something about books. He may also be familiar with religious organisation. But he knows very little about religion.

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The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism 
by 

Cornel West

 

American Jihad

Cornel West conceives of the philosophy of Pragmatism as the American Mind trying to make sense of itself. This is a productive perspective, among other reasons because it helps to explain both the sources and historical trajectory of American philosophy. It is also a perspective which reveals the intellectual and moral perils of self-analysis. In particular the rationalisation of one’s interests becomes inevitable; and one’s actions, no matter how cruel or absurd, are justified.

West places the origin of Pragmatism with Emerson. This is reasonable. But of course Emerson is in turn the product of an established culture which is unique and contains its own embedded contradictions. The most profound of these is found in Emerson’s brand of New England Unitarianism, a theism which bizarrely emerged from the strict Calvinism of its 17th century immigrants. Barely Christian in its theology, this Universalism was not a religion of passivity but of what Emerson called ‘conversion.’ We know this better as Jihad, the struggle to overcome moral corruption in both America and the world.

Emerson’s Pelagian theology of conversion is the foundation of Pragmatism: “... that the only sin is limitation, [i.e., constraints on power] that sin is overcomable; and that it is beautiful and good that sin should exist to be overcome.” This is the modern good news that America is meant to proclaim throughout the world, if necessary through violence. In West’s judgment: “Conversion of the world and moral regeneration for individuals are related to conquest and violence not solely because Emerson devalues those peoples associated with virgin lands, cheap labor, and the wilderness-e.g., Indians, Negroes, women-but also because for Emerson land, labor, and the wilderness signify unlimited possibilities and unprecedented opportunities for moral development.”

Importantly sin, for Emerson, is the intellectual conceit that anyone could know the truth: “There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid... People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” But such relativism does not imply a hopeless epistemology for Emerson. There is a fixed point for him: “We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that what-ever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy.”

In short, what Emerson promotes is a militant faith with which any radical Islamist as well as St. Paul might identify. This militancy is directed not toward any specified evil but rather toward the way things are in general. Emerson’s is a philosophy of continuous disruption, a call for contrarianism by individuals who refuse to conform. The primary target of such disruption is the state itself: “Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?” The real nation, therefore, is that collective of individuals which mistrusts and harasses the political entity in which it finds itself.

The line between what might be called ‘continuous reform’ in Emerson and outright nihilism is paper thin. West cites Henry James Sr. about his effect on American thought: “He was an American John the Baptist, proclaiming tidings of great joy to the American Israel; but, like John the Baptist, he could so little foretell the form in which the predicted good was to appear, that when you went to him he was always uncertain whether you were he who should come, or another.” What has come is not a nation of self-sacrificing people building a city on the hill but “... the concrete nihilism in working-class and underclass American communities-the pervasive drug addiction, suicides, alcoholism, male violence against women, white violence against black, yellow, and brown people, and the black criminality against others, especially other black people.”And, of course, Donald Trump and his evangelical enablers.

I was brought up in the traditions of Pragmatism. Emerson is part of my intellectual DNA. Charles Sanders Peirce has been my hero of thought for half a century. I have attempted to live my professional life according to the principles of increasing inclusion of interests and points of view. So it comes as a great shock to read West’s deconstruction of the framework of my thought-world. I would like to call my experience enlightening, but for the moment I am in a place of almost complete darkness. This is not a bad thing.