mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

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Posts tagged soren kierkegaard.
The wonderful Enormous Air posted Soren Kierkegaard in the Coffee-House, a sketch in oils by Christian Olavious, 1843. Raynor wants to know why all Bakers have the same hairstyle. Raynor likes to ask questions. Raynor ought to be careful what questions he asks about the Order of Bakers unless he wants to wind up “rotto dal mento infin dove si trulla.” But this is scarcely a secret: we’ve modeled our haircuts on the style made famous by the dashing Søren Kierkegaard, whose contemporaries were as smitten with him as ours are with us; said one Hans Brøchner: “My only definite impression was of [Kierkegaard’s] appearance, which I found almost comical. He was then twenty-three years old; he had something quite irregular in his entire form and had a strange coiffure. His hair rose almost six inches above his forehead into a tousled crest that gave him a strange, bewildered look.” Thus is this instantiation edition of GPOYW dedicated to Herr Ganan, who asks but never answers.

The wonderful Enormous Air posted Soren Kierkegaard in the Coffee-House, a sketch in oils by Christian Olavious, 1843.

Raynor wants to know why all Bakers have the same hairstyle. Raynor likes to ask questions. Raynor ought to be careful what questions he asks about the Order of Bakers unless he wants to wind up “rotto dal mento infin dove si trulla.”

But this is scarcely a secret: we’ve modeled our haircuts on the style made famous by the dashing Søren Kierkegaard, whose contemporaries were as smitten with him as ours are with us; said one Hans Brøchner:

“My only definite impression was of [Kierkegaard’s] appearance, which I found almost comical. He was then twenty-three years old; he had something quite irregular in his entire form and had a strange coiffure. His hair rose almost six inches above his forehead into a tousled crest that gave him a strange, bewildered look.”

Thus is this instantiation edition of GPOYW dedicated to Herr Ganan, who asks but never answers.

Tags: gpoyw soren kierkegaard dante
“Kierkegaard is a star, although he shines over territory that is almost inaccessible to me.”

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).

Tags: franz kafka history philosophy politics religion soren kierkegaard ludwig wittgenstein religion judaism
“Kierkegaard had no easy idea of what ‘health’ is. But he knew what it was not: it was not normal adjustment –anything but that, as he has taken excruciating analytical pains to show us. To be a ‘normal cultural man’ is, for Kierkegaard, to be sick –whether one knows it or not: ‘There is such a thing as fictitious health.’ Nietzsche later put the same thought: ‘Are there perhaps…neuroses of health?’”

Earnest Becker, in one of my favorite books. The answer to Nietzsche’s question is clear: yes, there are neuroses of health. The acquisitive and organizational urge run amok that defines consumerism, for example; or the preoccupation with a plastic aesthetic over the corporeal, with its attendant concealment of pores, sweat, hair, anything organic and unruly; or the obsession with cheeriness that makes self-esteem, a low sort of self-satisfaction, into a virtue without which one might as well be naked.

There are as many neuroses of health as there are neuroses of illness. What we must use, then, to define real mental illness, as opposed to simply characteristics that are socially undesirable, is this question: does the quality or behavior interfere with the individual’s ability to freely self-determine, to create himself as he wishes?

Tags: philosophy psychology soren kierkegaard earnest becker mental illness

Morality

Although I am an atheist, I am very fond of religions and respect belief in them completely (for reasons I’ve discussed previously). Much, though not all, religious tradition is codified morality of a very fine sort, the sort imbued with an otherworldly detachment from ends. While the practitioners of religious morality -being human- have often been deviously barbaric, the ideas themselves and their interwoven mythical justifications can be both beautiful and transformative.

Ordinary morality, concerned with praxis and outcomes, is problematized by subjectivity as well as human nature; as Nietzsche noted, “All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” From the start, any individual or collective assessments of reality and their according moral deliberations are debatable, endlessly so. This does not mean that nothing is good or that nothing is evil, but it does multiply the gradations of gray between those poles. And since “error is the central feature of human existence,” the most important moral decisions about when we may kill, when we should die, how many civilians we may incinerate incidentally and for what ends, are in my view fundamentally indecent to make. We are too likely to be wrong to take life. As J.U. Neuf put it in 1950, “The total wars of our time have been the result of a series of intellectual mistakes.”

When I say pure morality is unconcerned with ends, I mean it is concerned only with means, with the conduct of the individual. The state of the world is never within your control; only your behavior is. A pure moral system -which arbitrates your relationship with the world- cannot depend at all on variables beyond your control or it is worthless, contingent, ungoverning. Thus pure morality has little to say about justice or peace or other political concepts involving the group; rather, justice and peace emerge from aggregated individual morality.

(This is why efforts to “legislate morality” are deeply problematic. As social morality is an emergent phenomenon, it is not within our capacity to lead the horse with the cart by enforcing ends; we must be and inspire moral individuals, a process nearly impossible except on the interpersonal scale).

Long ago, I asked my father what was extraordinary about Jesus’ willingness to be crucified. After all, I asked: if I proposed to him that he might die painfully but would in doing so give eternal and blissful life to every human being who wanted it, wouldn’t he say yes? Given the context of the Gospels, wouldn’t he be elated to save sinful humanity? I ask this of parents: wouldn’t you die to give your child infinite life without suffering? Wouldn’t we all love to have this: a chance to sacrifice for the good of all humanity, a chance to redeem the world? And to know while doing so that an afterlife awaited you?

If we posit that there was a heroic and incontestably valuable end, we reduce the power of his self-sacrifice, though not completely. (My father proposed that Christians assume Jesus was so fully human that he didn’t know or couldn’t believe in those aspects of his mission, particularly while on the cross; if that is the case, I regret proposing my analysis).

In World War II, Gandhi advised Jews threatened by Nazism that they “…should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife… They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs… Collective suicide would have been heroism.” We shudder at his morality, but that is purity: the “hatred of the world” Kierkegaard spoke of, the refusal to engage in any defense of self, family, or friend at the expense of another life. Gandhi will not defend Indians; Jesus will not save the crucified thieves. (This is why the Buddha felt that children were chains: they bind you in love to the world your status in it; you cannot, for example, martyr yourself resisting the SS if you have a family who will suffer for your deed).

This morality is difficult if one hopes to improve the world-which I why I would never engage in political action- and I admit that in any material sense it is indefensible. Civilization is the result of ever-improving efforts at implementing broader moral systems (efforts with fits and starts, to be sure), which is another reason why moral teachers and prophets are typically renunciatory: they have no business in society.

The world cannot and perhaps should not be composed of such people: pure in moral austerity, willing to die, willing to let kin die, willing to let the world do whatever it may without ever resisting, mindful of the fact that to fight for is always to fight against and disinclined therefore to fight at all. In extremity, morality becomes unacceptable to us; Gandhi’s ahimsa seems loathsome when we think of Hitler. And indeed, what would we say now to Jesus, who would not kill Bin Laden, or even assassinate Hitler himself?

This morality seems inhuman, practically, but it is in this morality that I am most interested, in how it problematizes the affairs of state, the laws we enact, the deeds we condone, and most of all in how in emulating the exemplars of this morality we achieve the very ends we’ve turned away from in doing so: justice and peace.

Hence Gandhi’s wonderful quote: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Do not seek it; do not legislate it; do not fight for it. Be it.

Tags: morality politics religion friedrich nietzsche errol morris gandhi soren kierkegaard

Sterling Powers:

“The private life is dead…” from Doctor Zhivago

I have been trying to explain for some time to Bunnynico and others why it is, precisely, that I loathe everything political; many of the reasons are immediately evident: no matter whom you like, after a few cycles of slip-up and fake indignation, everything is a talking point and all sides are “playing the game,” for example.

But it’s not simply disgust with the practice of politics that bothers me; nothing could be more naive than hoping for a politics without points-scoring and petty posturing. In a democracy, where popularity is power, all the worst elements of social interaction and media refraction are inevitable, for Obama as much as for, say, Nixon (however better the former may be than the latter).

No, what I hate about politics is that it is antithetical to the personal: to the local arena of human compassion and action that has actual transformative power. In massing humans, politics reduces their humanity and transforms them into expressions of ideologies and systems. It takes what is real and makes it facile, reductive, and subordinate.

Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, in talking about Hegel, touched on this rather well: the articulation of systems -of class relations, power dynamics, historical dialectics, political theologies- is inevitably false, as it obfuscates the only reality: that of the human. It is a falsity of scale, of scope, and of specificity.

I love this scene in Doctor Zhivago, because the Communists were right within their framework of analysis, as are all intellectuals, from Marxists to Neocons: the personal is not important when we discuss politics, so forget about poetry and casualties. For the sake of victory in class struggle, some innocents must die, they say; for the sake of security against Islamofascism, some civilians must be incinerated accidentally, others add.

You have no doubt heard of the question posed to Republicans: “Whom would Jesus bomb?” I like this question, though -as I note often- I am not religious. I also like this question: “Do you wish George Bush had been assassinated before assuming office?”

If you do, know that you -as they- believe that some political platforms justify violence, perhaps even the platform of non-violence, and thus are in my mind distinguishable from those you oppose only in degree, not in kind. But what about Hitler, you might ask? Do you oppose his assassination, too?

I do not deny that some wars are just and some are not, and that perhaps sometimes ends justify means; but isn’t the entire problem of humanity and power a problem of ends and means?  Isn’t ethical idealism preferable to what we wreak when we rule?

I am aware that in the politics of the United States, rarely are deaths the consequence of elections (at least domestically). But the principle that unites all political movements -that there are right ideas, and that those who oppose them are imbeciles and ought to be killed, disenfranchised, or at least shouted down- is a principle to which there are few rebuttals.

I do not like the world of intellectuals or the world of power. I like the world of the personal, the individual. I like the small world. My favorite bumper sticker: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” If you mourn the dearth of compassion in our society, be compassionate and inspire by example. If you hate injustice, be just in all your ways.

I admit: this is a sentimental and perhaps incoherent argument. Nevertheless, the one truth to which I subscribe is that pronounced by Errol Morris: “Error is the central feature of human existence.” The accumulation of power for the enactment of “correct” political ideas terrifies and upsets me because I don’t believe humans are capable of more than error, and the best I can say about one political party or another is that fewer will die by their mistakes.

I believe this to be true of Obama, which is why I favor his election; but it is hardly enthusing for me, and I would much rather see scores of articles every day about personal acts of decency than about how stupid and awful Republicans are.

Moreover, I believe that only though ethically decent behavior on the individual level does society improve; in the end, I think, politics is -from a moral perspective- a distraction, more often about identity-association than about actual compassion.

I apologize if this offends anyone, sincerely; after all, we’re all just doing what we think best.

Tags: film love morality politics dr zhivago friedrich nietzsche soren kierkegaard
“And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”

Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, via Bunnynico, who added some interesting commentary.

One notable resonance to this thought comes from Kierkegaard’s description of how “rotation” and “repetition” are the strategies used by the smartest of the superficial, how we return to hobbies, abandon them, call exes, go back to visited cities, travel away from youth, regress to youth, etc. We devise ways to rotate and repeat our pleasures so we don’t wear them out.

Hence the various “life crises” one reads about: forever the “longing for repetition” in a universe where it isn’t truly possible. I often think the cruelest aspect of the world is the diminishment of all experience -love, drugs, pain, happiness- with repetition.

Tags: milan kundera. soren kierkegaard
“The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”

Friedrich Nietzsche. When I tell people that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard share more than you might think (and with Wittgenstein, too), it is their anti-Hegelianism that I am recalling. Intellectualizing, as in the post below (which is both true and bullshit), relies on systematization of thought; systematization is falsification inasmuch as it reduces the individual to an iteration of theory.

I dislike the “will to a system,” the construction of subordinating frameworks of theory and values which subsume the individual beneath logical forms. Systems of thought are alienating and dry because they ignore us, our hope and pain and love and fear and courage. This is why novels are better than books of philosophy, in my view.

Tags: philosophy friedrich nietzsche soren kierkegaard hegel
“Philosophy is an unworldly, abstruse, often egomaniacal obsession. The body is an enemy to absolute logic or metaphysical speculation. The thinker inhabits fictions of purity, of reasoned propositions as sharp as white light. Marriage is about roughage, bills, garbage disposal, and noise. There is something vulgar, almost absurd, in the notion of a Mrs. Plato or a Mme. Descartes, or of Wittgenstein on a honeymoon.”

George Steiner, via New English Review. Matt Langer has posted many excellent quotes recently, too many to reblog. Regarding the above: one needs only investigate the catastrophic domestic and romantic lives of Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche to substantiate the thesis.

(Note: my own pitiful domestic and romantic life has less to do with philosophy as an “unworldly, abstruse, often egomaniacal obsession” than with ordinary weirdness. However, the fact that “the body is an enemy to absolute logic or metaphysical speculation” is indeed related to what an awkward male I can be).

Tags: philosophy ludwig wittgenstein friedrich nietzsche soren kierkegaard