mills

Erwin Schrödinger, in the absolutely wonderful What is Life? (which you can read online). He argues that the only logical conclusion one can draw from the statistical facticity of determinism, given our structure, size, and subjugation to the laws of science, is that consciousness is not individual but universal and -so to speak- at the base of all things; in the words of the Upanishads, which he cites, Atman is Brahman.

The book is fascinating, and the co-discoverer of DNA’s nature claims it anticipated and sped his research: significant praise for a work by a physicist. Beyond its discussion of the basis of life in a physical sense, it contains Schrödinger’s thoughts on mind, a phenomenon of special complexity and meaning that is taken for granted despite being scarcely understood. In “The Mystic Vision,” he wrote:

“Knowledge, feeling, and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense — that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it… For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceiveable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence, this life of yours… is, in a certain sense, the whole… This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula… ’Tat tvam asi’ — this is you. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.’ Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you … For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”

I find the insistence of a Nobel laureate such as Schrödinger that these ideas are to be taken as literal descriptions of the world, not as metaphors in any sense, to be extraordinarily interesting.

Franz Kafka, to Oskar Baum. Kafka doesn’t mean that Kierkegaard illuminates a Christian world which is alien to his Judiasm; he elsewhere wrote that Kierkegaard “is on the same side of the world. He bears me out like a friend.”

Indeed, Kafka’s Judiasm had as its greatest effect his preoccupation with gnosis and textual indeterminacy, with an endless exegetical pursuit of truth long since vanished from the word and the world. To a lesser extent, it provided an atmosphere and some iconography for his mind, and no German-speaking Jewish man living in Prague in the early 20th century could escape the relentless othering that so dislocated and alienated him.

But reductive analyses fail clumsily with Kafka, who was a modernist writer more than a Jew or a neurotic or a Czech or a European or a mystic. It is in his modernism, which we largely share -post merely being a prefix- that we find what put the Kierkegaardian territory “almost” beyond reach:

For Kierkegaard the absurd -the suprarational- remained an alternative to the world of reductive, superficial reason; for Kafka, the absurd -the irrational- had become the world of superficial contemporaneity. What was transcendence for Kierkegaard was, in distorted form, a reality for Kafka: the senseless world of anti-rational, post-human social derangement.

The territory of religious commitment as a turning-against-the-world was almost inaccessible to Kafka, who saw the world turning against itself; Kierkegaard drew inspiration from Abraham’s irrational willingness to murder his son, while Kafka saw that soon, functionaries would commit atrocities by the millions without asking for a rationale.

This is why Kierkegaard is timeless -Wittgenstein said: “Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.” Kafka, on the other hand, wasn’t a saint but a prophet: he saw as early as anyone what modernism meant: reason run amok and no solace beyond reason, no leap permitted.

(Note: the awesome Greg Brown and I have been arguing over whether fiction or non-fiction is superior, is more real, in Meaghano’s comments; I think Kafka’s prescience is a good example of why the novel will always illuminate more than the essay: we must imagine before we describe).

Xenophanes, quoted by Karl Popper in “The Beginnings of Rationalism” and cited by the excellent Matt Young (who, along with Superfluidity, will surely have wiser commentary on Popper than I ever did).

The quote in full:

The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black while the the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw and could sculpture like men, then horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and each would then shape bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of its own.

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us; but in the course of time, through seeking, men find that which is better…

These things are, we conjecture, like the truth.

But as for certain truth, no man has known it, nor will he know it; neither of the gods, nor yet of all the things of which I speak. And even if by chance he were to utter the final truth, he would himself not know it: for all is but a woven web of guesses.

In anticipating Popper’s brilliant description of how we know what we know, presented alongside his solution to the problem of induction, Xenophanes demonstrates again: “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Clive James. I tend to think that only a religion which stands apart from society can meaningfully refer to the proposed eternal world which is its proper concern; excessive preoccupation with the minutiae of contemporaneity degrades any faith.

Like most of Cultural Amnesia, the essay offers aphorism after aphorism, the elegance of its insights demanding multiple quotations. I apologize for the length of the following, but given James’ status as an agnostic (if not atheist) cultural critic and historian par excellence, I feel his view is fascinating. Speaking of how translations of the Bible erode credulity, James notes that:

“The King James Bible is a prose masterpiece… The modern versions, done in the name of comprehension, add up to an assault on readability. Eliot said that the Revised Standard Version was the work of men who did not realize that they were atheists. The New English Bible was worse than that… For those of us unable to accept that the Bible is God’s living word, but who believe that the living word is God, the successful reduction of once-vital language to a compendium of banalities was bound to look like blasphemy… For me, the scriptures had provided a standard of authenticity against the pervasive falsehoods of advertising, social engineering, moral uplift, demagogic politics -all the verbal corruptions of democracy, the language of illusion… I don’t want the teachings of Jesus taken from me… If I no longer know that my redeemer liveth, I know that he speaketh not like Tony Blair. It is true that Jesus never spoke the language of the King James Version… But the language of the King James Version is of a poetic intensity congruent with the impact Jesus must once have had on simple souls, of whom I am still one: simple enough, anyway, to need my sins forgiven. Now that there is nobody to do that for me, I must try to do it myself. Like most men with a conscience, I find that very hard, and spend much time feeling absurd. But without the scriptures we poor wretches would be lost indeed, because without them, conscience itself would become just another disturbance of the personality, to be cured by counseling.”

While I think substantial exceptions can be taken to some of his points, James routinely delights me by his serious and apolitical engagement with the sources of culture; he is never facile because his subject -the world of meaning- never is either.

Cricket posted an essay from John C. Wright on his conversion to Christianity which I found fascinating; the quote above was particularly striking, and might be said to apply to many forms of irrational thought, such as love.

Although I’m an atheist, I’ve long defended religion on the grounds of its personal utility and thought it notable that a believer admitted that whether a given religious experience was real or not was less important to him than how “useful” the experience was in providing him with meaning and directing his life.

That’s very human, I think, and something I do all the time: favor what brings joy or depth over what is rationally correct.

Jorge Luis Borges, quoted by Alphabet Pony, via Greg Brown. This is even more profound, in my view, than this earlier quote, and between the two of them I think one is given a fairly good sense of why religions of all forms (including credulous movements not explicitly supernatural in their claims) exist.

1. All sorrows can be borne if part of a story, a narrative that transcends any given catastrophe (and doesn’t this idea echo the much-reblogged Nietzsche quote about a “strong enough why” enabling the survival of any “how”?).
2. Love is problematized by the fallibility of the human world (and doesn’t this remind one of Gauntlet’s excellent de Botton quote concerning the end of our romanticism about what’s possible in marriage?).

Nothing in our world can be infallible, so if one is to escape Borges’ quandary one must have a god -or an object of love and trust- specifically not of this world; whether this god is created or creator is not relevant to this discussion. Anything not of this world is by its nature unimpeachable by truth claims of this world (although of course texts and mythical assertions and histories are impeachable). It is also unsupportable by truth claims of this world, incidentally.

Any story which can absorb all sorrows must be a story which includes the whole of the world and encloses it within something larger, something integrative. It must be able to narratize -to assemble into a broadly meaningful myth- the loss of a dog, the death of a child, the genocide of a people.

Religions are those systems which attempt, however successfully or unsuccessfully, to accomplish these tasks: to unfold stories into which your private tragedies and joys, and those of larger human groups, may be written as part of a narrative with sufficient scope to make them bearable, and to provide an infallible purposive deity in whom you can believe, whatever the phenomena of the natural and human worlds.

In our era, many other credulous movements have attempted to do the same with a lesser reliance on the supernatural, but equivalent use of myth and the aura of infallibility. What makes religion more durable is its explicit exemption from natural inquiry; whereas few Christians mind that there is no trace of the miraculous in our world, it is problematic for Marxists that some of the iron-laws of history predicted by their founder have not come to fruition (yet!).

I know I said I’d not mention this again, but I was struck by the synchronicity of these quotes.