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After the Future

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Irony and Decadence

From a piece worth reading in its entirety in Salon article today: Percy Shelley famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” For Shelley, great art had the…

From a piece worth reading in its entirety in Salon article today:

Percy Shelley famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” For Shelley, great art had the potential to make a new world through the depth of its vision and the properties of its creation. Today, Shelley would be laughed out of the room. Lazy cynicism has replaced thoughtful conviction as the mark of an educated worldview. Indeed, cynicism saturates popular culture, and it has afflicted contemporary art by way of postmodernism and irony. Perhaps no recent figure dealt with this problem more explicitly than David Foster Wallace. One of his central artistic projects remains a vital question for artists today: How does art progress from irony and cynicism to something sincere and redeeming?

Or put another way: Why did the avante-garde lead to nowhere?

I'm working on an essay tentatively titled "1848" in which I try to understand (think out loud about) the impact of what I called in a recent post the Flood and what Eric Hobsbawm calls the "dual revolutions"–i.e., the French and Industrial Revolutions–on European and by extension world culture. It's also an attempt to explore further a question I address in my essay "Metaxis": Why did Romanticism die?

Why did its intoxicating spiritual aspirations, aspirations that dominated the cultural elite of the first half of the 19th century, from Schiller and Beethoven to Shelly and Wordsworth, become something about which the cultural elite of subsequent generations could only talk about ironically? Why did their imagination of the world lose and a soul-shriveling bourgeois materialism win? Why was the last great Romantic, Friederich Nietzsche, the first great postmodernist in the nihilist key? Why did David Foster Wallace, an achingly honest, good man, commit suicide? Why will his Bizarro doppelganger, Don Draper, probably do the same? What options, what life possibilities are open to talented, imaginative men and women such as these?

***

An afterthought: Later in the article the authors talk about the spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" as pointing to the antidote:

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Professor James Cone of Union Theological Seminary explains the seeming contradiction between the grief of the refrain and the promise of the closing exaltation.

"And you sort of say, sure, nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Nobody knows my sorrow. Sure, there is slavery. Sure, there is lynching, segregation. But, Glory Hallelujah. Now, the Glory Hallelujah is the fact that there is a humanity and a spirit nobody can kill."

One can hear that abiding spirit in the voice of Sam Cooke in his pop adaptation of the song, and in renditions by others like Louis Armstrong and Marian Anderson. Cornel West elaborates on the contradiction between the refrain and rejoinder.

"Glory Hallelujah is a tragicomic moment. Going to struggle anyway. Cut against the grain anyway. Never view oneself as a spectator but always a participant. Never view oneself as somehow outside the struggle but always meshed in it."

Both West and Wallace call for participation over spectatorship. We must move toward the Glory Hallelujah, toward the possibility of something greater. The best art can inspire us and push us closer.

Watch Fellini's "Nights with Cabiria" with this in mind. I just saw it for the first time over the weekend. Its last scene is a perfect example of what the writers are pointing to. It was one of the most deeply moving moments I've experienced from a film in a long time. Cabiria's look into the camera breaks the fourth wall in a way that breaks your heart most unironically. But then Fellini is a great Romantic.

"Even though he slay me, yet will I trust him," says Job–and says the Negro spiritual singer. False consciousness? Or one that has made a discovery?

Comments

43 responses

  1. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    David Foster Wallace wanted to become Catholic but was actually dissuaded from doing so by the priest he’d been inquiring with. The priest said he still retained too many doubts. That has to have been one of the greatest pastoral failures of all time.

    Reply
  2. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    “Why?” It’s nothing instrinsic to the internal logic of “philosophy” if that’s what you think.
    Industrialization inevitably, through its production, produced more and more, led to technological advancement and a certain critical mass of civilizational infrastructure, which led to changes in the class structure, social relations, and hence culture and philosophy.
    There’s no mystery to it. Romanticism ended because technical knowledge (which is cumulative) and ability (likewise) reached the critical mass where we could lay a transatlantic telegraph cable (not specifically, mind you; I’m just using that as a convenient example of the accumulation of capital). The cultural and philosophical changes have only been emanations from that.

    Reply
  3. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Jack, I’m eagerly anticipating your “1848” so I don’t want to say too much. But I’m wondering at this point why you counterpoise contemporary irony with early 19th century Romanticism. It doesn’t seem obvious to me that the opposite of irony, so to speak, is Romanticism. There are other modes of sincerity, which is the opposite of irony. One of those modes was the utopianism that began to take form in the later 19th century and reached its catastrophic apex in the autocratic regimes of the mid 20th century. There was nothing ironic about Nazism. A lot of cultural critics would say that it was the atrocious failure of 20th C. utopianism that’s responsible in large part for the cynicism and irony of the present. If the avant-garde led nowhere, it took them 150 years to get there.

    Reply
  4. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    I’ll keep those questions in mind when I post the essay, but the quick answer is that I’d argue Romanticism was the last truly great burst of unselfconscious, spiritual creativity from a fairly large group of people who were considered the cultural cutting edge. There was something going on there that was very interesting, and rather than develop and flourish, it withered and decayed.
    Someone called it spilt religion, and I think that’s a good description. It was a mixed bag to be sure, but nothing since has equaled it. It paralleled the first Industrial and French revolutions, and offered another option, which lost to secular materialism which dominated the thinking of both the cultural left and right in the period following 1848.
    There were individuals, like Wagner, of course, whom I’ve heard described as the last mushroom on the dunghill of Romanticism. But it’s just that attitude, the scorn, that I wonder about. Attitudes had changes so dramatically toward it. Why? Was it because the Romantic impulse decayed into romance novels, nature sentimentality, late 19th century spiritism, mesmerism, and an odd assortment of cults? Maybe. But you judge a movement by its best not its worst, and earlier it was very good, and later it just wasn’t. it had lost its energy. Why?
    I contrast it with today’s cynicism and irony because the earnestness of Romanticism is not the only alternative to it, but certainly its most extreme opposite as a positive, life-affirming cultural mood.

    Reply
  5. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    I don’t know who said that about Wagner. It makes no sense to me. After him you still have the second flowering of Romanticism in music, Mahler and Strauss. . . In terms of performance style in the classical tradition, Romanticism was alive and well past the middle of the 20th century, when it was long gone from the trends in composing. I’ve always been fascinated by the later and much longer career of Romanticism in music.

    Reply
  6. JP Avatar
    JP

    “David Foster Wallace wanted to become Catholic but was actually dissuaded from doing so by the priest he’d been inquiring with. The priest said he still retained too many doubts. That has to have been one of the greatest pastoral failures of all time.”
    Lots of priests/pastors have no idea what they are doing.
    It’s the same with lots of roles people take on in life.

    Reply
  7. JP Avatar
    JP

    “”Why?” It’s nothing instrinsic to the internal logic of “philosophy” if that’s what you think.
    Industrialization inevitably, through its production, produced more and more, led to technological advancement and a certain critical mass of civilizational infrastructure, which led to changes in the class structure, social relations, and hence culture and philosophy.
    There’s no mystery to it. Romanticism ended because technical knowledge (which is cumulative) and ability (likewise) reached the critical mass where we could lay a transatlantic telegraph cable (not specifically, mind you; I’m just using that as a convenient example of the accumulation of capital). The cultural and philosophical changes have only been emanations from that.”
    A metahistorian, you are most certainly not.

    Reply
  8. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    A movement corresponds with a set of (material) life conditions that exist in one form of civilizational organization, or at one stage of technological advancement. As things change (or, often now, KEEP changing) the culture changes too. Romanticism was the product of a certain mode of subjectivity born of a certain type of city landscape, a certain type of empire, the availability of certain modes of transportation and communication, and of the scripts of social relations inevitably implied by all that. Recreate those exact same conditions, and something like romanticism’s mode of consciousness would inevitably reemerge. It’s exact contours might be different on account of the dynamic being “path dependent” (and, thus, dependent not just on the conditions themselves but on how they arrived there: ie, what preceded them and how people were processing that change), but I’m absolutely convinced that culture isn’t some sort of “gathering snowball of words” but rather emanates from the social conditions that arise from certain material possibilities.
    Industrial cities emitted smog and romanticism. It’s that simple.

    Reply
  9. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Your chronology is off. Romanticism was in the works before there were any giant industrial cities in Europe. Scholars who actually study the period in detail will tell you that if there was a changing set of material conditions that was responsible for the Romanic movement in its origins (mid-18th century), it would be the agricultural, not the industrial revolution. You can’t build factories until you have displaced peasants to work in them. Beginning in the late 16th century and continuing into the late 18th, land ownership and use underwent a profound transformation in Britain.
    The foundational work of literary criticism that holds to your historical materialism is Raymond Williams’ the Country and the City.
    For a more Romantic take on Romanticism, the foundational text is still The Mirror and the Lamp, by M H Abrams.
    Both these texts are pretty dated according to the tastes of contemporary scholarship, but there have yet to emerge, to my knowledge, any better large-scale theorizations of the cultural movement in question. Musicologists paint a very different picture of Romanticism and their dates are shifted way forward.

    Reply
  10. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Sure. But I don’t want to blame the priest. For one thing, I don’t know all the details of DFW’s brush with Catholicism. For another, I don’t know what all goes on in seminaries (and I’m not sure I want to know), but I doubt priests have ever been trained to deal with inquirers like DFW. I don’t know how you could train somebody to be that kind of resource. In this case, I can’t help but wonder what DFW’s life would have been like if he’d had a different kind of encounter with Christianity. It’s something that if I had the time I’d look into fully. Conversion fascinates me. There was a wave of it in Britain and France in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, when the RCC was no less antiquated and medieval than it is now (more so, I would say), and yet you have people like Edith Stein, the Maritains, Chesterton, Merton, Gabriel Marcel and Elizabeth Anscombe just to name a few joining and flourishing in the Church. There have hardly been any high-profile conversions among the intellectuals and artists for 40 years. Alasdair MacIntyre is almost the only person I can think of off the top of my head. I’d like to know why that is. I refuse to blame Vatican II like the reactionaries who use it as a scapegoat. If someone like DFW almost joined the Church and clearly wanted to, saw a vision of full life in it, then that means something that I think needs to be urgently researched. DFW was a frighteningly smart dude and clinical depression aside, his interest in the Church does not seem to have been a matter of flailing about desperately in a fit of angst. The thing that failed to happen at that moment was murkier than what I called it before, a pastoral problem, though it must have been that too.

    Reply
  11. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Jack,
    Adorno’s PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN MUSIC may be helpful to you. Even if you just search through for context every time he mentions Beethoven. I don’t have time to make an argument, but the general idea is that the formal elements of Romanticism (whether in music or poetry or painting or whatever) are not at all “unselfconscious,” but are rather self-conscious in a unique way that cannot be repeated. Adorno says something along the lines of this, that (and I paraphrase) “bourgeois high culture exhausted itself with Beethoven. I’ll return to this when I can.

    Reply
  12. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    As far as I know, the major luminaries were not peasants, they lived in cities (“industrial” or otherwise).
    Culture emerges from how humans symbolically process time and space, ultimately (perhaps, it might be important to say specifically: how our relationship to time and space structure our social relations).
    Technology changes our relationship to time and space. Subjectivity is very different when you can call someone up right now, versus when you have to wait weeks for letters. Very different when I can be in India tomorrow versus in over a week on a steamer versus weeks or months overland. Very different when I live in a hut with all my family in an expansive countryside, versus a tiny apartment cramped in a bustling city, versus lost in a cavernous mansion on an estate, versus in a condo in the suburbs. Very different when hot and cold, light and dark, are a matter of flipping switches versus lighting a dangerous fire versus being at the mercy of the weather. Very different when the past is preserved in photos and sound recordings versus video versus books versus forgotten entirely. Very different when food spoils in days versus with refrigeration. Very different when machines can do work versus manual labor. Very different when you’d die from a small infection versus when you can survive cancer. All of these, as you see, are differing relations to space (most especially) time, as modified by technology.
    This in turn leads, of course, to differences in economic relations inasmuch as the infrastructure can bear it: free farmer who owns his own land, the wage slave in a city, the rural serf, the artisan or merchant, etc, depending on the needs of that economy to produce those products. Products which mainly serve, in the end, to manipulate our relationship to time and to space. You’re at one point when cities are full of displaced peasants to work factories because you need fewer farms to sustain a higher population but more labor in factories. You’re at another when we’ve built enough by way of efficient production that those workers themselves can move out to the suburbs.
    Different modes of relating to time and space, different modes of subjectivity. And while several modes might be present in a given society based on class and personality, the culture as a whole results from the sum or interaction of all those present in their relative proportions.
    I do not believe culture evolves in a manner analogous to how a conversation between individuals evolves. I think that’s an extremely misleading analogy.

    Reply
  13. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    If we’re recommending tough books, let me chime in with a vote for Paul de Man’s Rhetoric of Romanticism. I think in that book you’ll see why Romanticism is met with skepticism in contemporary American intellectual circles.

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  14. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Oh, and one more, this one very different. Jack, have you ever read Thomas Mann’s first (1901) novel Buddenbrooks? It chronicles a northern German family through several generations, between about 1830 and 1880 I think. The transformation it documents is, I think, part of the phenomenon you’re looking into. And it is a great novel. It shows what a Romantic perspective felt like to Mann in 1901, by which time it had been displaced from the position of prestige it enjoyed in the period just before the book’s story begins and had become the bohemian thing. If you’ve never read it I think you’d enjoy it now, even if you can’t work it into the essay. A bit of a whopper though, I think the Everyman edition runs to over 700 pages.

    Reply
  15. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Exhausted or was suffocated? I am not interested in coming up with a definitive answer for what happened to Romanticism. I think that the reasons are very complex and in the end unfathomable. And a part me thinks its extinction was probably a necessary and good thing. I am more interested in the larger question about what happened in the West since the 1780s. I just want to understand it better, at least better than I do now. I understand the sweep of it; I want to get more into the weeds of it.
    My choice of the word ‘unselfconscious’ was clumsy. I meant to say that the Romantic Period was the last time when mainstream cultural elites could use spiritual language and develop spiritual themes without being embarrassed about it. For instance, I think that late, late Romantic Richard Wagner’s Parsifal is wonderful, but Nietzsche hated it and was embarrassed by it, and it led to his break with Wagner. My guess is that de Man and Adorno would be embarrassed by it too. Should I be then? Does that make me uncool? I’m not saying that de Man and Adorno don’t have interesting things to say, but I’m trying to develop a perspective that isn’t circumscribed by that Frankfurt School/Postmodern mafia.
    The point I was trying to make is that it’s interesting that things could have changed so quickly and dramatically from one half of the century to the next. I want to understand better what was going on.

    Reply
  16. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Good suggestion. I’ll look into it. The Germans are the key in some way I don’t quite grasp yet.

    Reply
  17. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    “I’m trying to develop a perspective that isn’t circumscribed by that Frankfurt School/Postmodern mafia.”
    Amen to that. I don’t know which is harder, playing Beethoven’s last quartets or trying to understand what Adorno heard in them. Maybe if I could do the latter I’d be better at the former. But I doubt it.

    Reply
  18. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Technology is critical, but in what way. Everything you say is true, but it’s missing the secret sauce, which is the way changes in technology change consciousness. McLuhan was a little daft, and some of his ideas are pure overreach or convoluted to the point of nonsense, but his core insight about how technology changes consciousness is central to my thinking. I’m posting today an essay I wrote in the early ’00s entitled the “Hypertrophied Eye” that was going to be part of a book I was writing. I think that a possible answer to my own question lies there, which is that the Romantic period was one in which literate cultural elites types still had their feet rooted in an orally shaped culture world. There were possibilities for them that withered as the culture industrialized, as the culture of the heath was destroyed, and as almost everyone became literate.

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  19. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    See, I can get on board with that description much more agreeably.
    What bothers me is when people speak as if “if only Descartes hadn’t said such-and-such, we wouldn’t have gotten off on this tangent in the great conversation and we wouldn’t be in this mess today.” I don’t buy that at all; Descartes was inevitable, if he hadn’t said those things, other people would have said similar things under the similar material conditions.
    Likewise, I don’t like Hegelianism at all, this idea that ideas have some inherent inner logic of “unfolding” and that philosophy “unfolds” according to some self-contained dynamic that is independent of the material conditions and the evolution of technology and production and civilizational infrastructure.
    I absolutely lose my mind when people say something like “the Franciscan turn towards Christ’s humanity in the 13th century eventually led to Calvinist prosperity Gospel” as if these ideas are all some sort actual motive force in society that push us (collectively and over many generations) towards inevitable tangents or conclusions, as if history is unfolding like a conversation unfolds among individuals in real time.
    To me that’s absurd. If ideas have these “unfolding” consequences, why does it take generations and generations? Surely people are not so slow. No, to me individual cognition or dialogue is a poor analogy for the mechanism of cultural/social evolution.
    Now that doesn’t mean connections can’t be found. 13th century Passion mysticism might be correlated with later Calvinism inasmuch as both were the emanations of different stages in a single material/economic accumulation or reorganization. But the idea that ideas themselves are the motive cause in history just always seems like a conspiracy theory to me whenever I read academics who propose it, ala things like “he didn’t even know it, but John Calvin was borrowing and building on themes only made possible by the Franciscans of the 13th-century…” I just have to roll my eyes. Humans speak in the language available to us, of course, but that doesn’t mean that people are being moved by philosophical causes they aren’t even conscious of, or that the invention of the printing press and move towards a mercantile culture wouldn’t have produced something like Calvinism if those darn Franciscans had just chosen to meditate on Christus Victor rather than the Virum Dolorum…
    I tend to assume that culture is generally a sort of epiphenomenon. If there’s an internal continuity, we read it in hindsight, but if material culture had gone another way, so would symbolic culture. And I’m sure there’d be academics looking back and interpreting it all as a causal independent internal unfolding of ideas in that timeline too.

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  20. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Adorno loved Beethoven; he probably heard the same things as you, only filtered through one of the finest (if idiosyncratic) musicological intellects of his time. (I hope that doesn’t sound insulting–to me it’s like saying that Da Vinci is a better sketch artist than someone. In a lot of ways Beethoven is for Adorno what Shakespeare is for Bloom. Even in principle his greatness cannot be rivaled.

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  21. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    This is dialectical materialism, right? That’s not a slander–I think DM is correct, just incomplete.

    Reply
  22. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    I would never presume to debate Adorno’s brilliance. It just doesn’t do much for me. I was always more concerned with being able to play late Beethoven than with articulating what I thought was going on in that music. I am — or was — more of a musician than a musicologist.

    Reply
  23. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    I don’t think I’m a historical materialist in the Marxist sense, because I’m not a Marxist. I believe in social credit, which I think is compatible with a lot of “Marxian” critique, but believes he located the theft of surplus value incorrectly (it happens in the form of financial mechanisms it’s not even clear Marx understood). As such, all sorts of things change that follow, and social credit winds up actually a Christian and “democratic” vision, not an atheist communist one.
    My ideas on history are broadly within the same school as whatever you’d call Jack’s most recent post on the “hypertrophied eye.” McLuhan’s reading apparently. Having discovered that, I think it makes a good fit for social credit’s vision of history, analogous to how communism and dialectical materialism go hand in hand.

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  24. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    The basic problem with materialism, whatever its qualifier, is that it isolates symbolic culture from material culture in its effort to prioritize the material. No one would deny that material conditions are just that: conditioning. The problem is they don’t condition a blank slate. The human being is born into material conditions but also into a language community. Culture doesn’t rise from the symbolic processing of time and space, it is that processing. Culture is symbolism in the basic sense of joining the visible and the invisible. Causation goes both ways between matter and idea and as a result history is overdetermined.
    My problem is with any approach that produces statements like “Industrial cities emitted smog and romanticism. It’s that simple.” It just isn’t that simple. I agree with Patrick, materialism is right, but it’s incomplete.

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  25. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    We’re born into language communities but I don’t think they actually change much. Yes we have to work with the symbolic soup we’re born into but I think that’s largely accidental. A German and a Greek and a Chinese will wind up creating “equivalent” ideas in similar material circumstances, it’s just one will be in German, one will be in Greek, and one will be in Chinese. Under similar circumstances you can create “Protestant Buddhism” etc; sure it uses Buddhism as it’s language of expression, it’s starting point, but the effect will be largely the same as a Protestantism crafted out of Christian symbolism, etc in terms of the actual life-patterns and programs of behavior those cultures encode.

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  26. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    I agree. Descartes was more a mouthpiece for the zeitgeist rather than someone who played a significant role in shaping it. It’s silly to say that he was wrong or right, just as it is silly to say that Bentham was or Machiavelli were wrong or right. They are, as they must be incomplete. (But some are more incomplete than others. Bentham for one.) The point is to understand and value the critically timely insight that spoke to the best minds of their and later generations.
    I guess the question for me is whether we understand all the factors that contribute to the zeitgeist. Some of what you write suggest to me a worldview that is closed and deterministic. is there room in it for the x factor, the secret sauce, the fire from heaven?

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  27. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    I think that my view of history is entirely suffused with it, actually. I’d say my view of history is the “Providential” view of history. It might be summed up something like “our objective is God’s subjective,” which is to say I would view that “given” element of experience that precedes our constructions and cannot be ignored or explained away by them…as God’s part of the equation. He’s the one doing that “giving” of the “given” experience. It is in those elements that our subjectivity is constrained by a higher subjectivity, that our constructive freedom is limited by a constructive freedom greater than our own. “Man’s determinism is God’s freedom” as it were, which fits entirely with a Thomistic view of predestination.

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  28. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    But can you understand why what you write comes off as mechanically deterministic?

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  29. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    I know lots of heavy hitters embrace it, but I have to say that I have never understood why predestination–whether in the Augustinian, Thomistic, or Calvinistic mode–is compatible with Christian revelation. I think it comes from an overemphasis on God’s omnipotence and omniscience.
    For me the Cabbalistic idea of the Tsimtsum gets you out of the logical necessity of predestination if that logic carries a lot of weight for you. The idea is that God created an emptiness within himself, a nothing in which creation came into being. I see that emptiness as a No-God zone, except what he in his freedom chooses to set up as the rules that govern its operation, and I see no reason why he couldn’t set things up in such a way that he couldn’t be surprised by how things turned out. That’s the point of creating out of nothing–to allow for a possibility that is outside his power. And within this No-God zone, nothing, absolutely nothing, is predetermined. All we have is the Logos deeply embedded in our souls, and helpful interventions from time to time. The incarnation in this account was not a necessity, but an adjustment necessitated by a surprise,
    So while there is help, it’s basically all on us, not on God. That’s the part of the death of God theology that I think is right on. When Christ died on the cross, he died into humanity. He lives, but lives in us and depends on our freedom. There is a radically transcendent God, but he’s not someone that controls things from his heavenly HQ–not at least where humans are concerned.

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  30. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Well because it’s De Fide dogma (see Ott, etc) that:
    God, by His Eternal Resolve of Will, has predetermined certain men to eternal blessedness. (De fide.)
    God, by an Eternal Resolve of His Will, predestines certain men, on account of their foreseen sins, to eternal rejection. (De fide.)
    I’m not entirely a Thomist on predestination, actually, though I’m certainly not a Molinist. I prefer Fr William Most’s “new answers to old questions.”
    Unconditional positive predestination (ie, of the Calvinist variety) I certainly reject. But predestination of some sort I can’t see a way around.

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  31. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    As for “why” I must believe this: because if I drop an apple it falls down, and even if man redefines apple as orange and up as down, this essentially “given” and unchangeable aspect of experience in the form of physical laws remains. I don’t believe in absolute freedom because I can’t jump off a cliff and fly; even the existentialists recognized this and called it “facticity.” God is absolutely sovereign over history because all the thought and word games in the world won’t change a whit of the cold hard tyrannical facts of bodily existence in the physical plane. They can try to spin it all they like, but the speed of light is the speed of light regardless of whether we construct it in meters or in feet. Were free inside ourselves, but helpless with regards to the external world which just…happens. When it’s time for the sun to blow up, all your philosophy won’t stop it.

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  32. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    I think the idea of the all knowing and all powerful God has never made sense to me because then he really is to blame for evil. I can’t see how predestinarians can get around that. I’m ok with a God that sets things up for us to make the bed we lie in and deal with the consequences when we screw up. I’m not ok with a God that knew all along that there’d be Auschwitz and slavery and Hiroshima. It’s one thing for him to know it as a disappointing possibility; it’s another for him to have planned it all along.
    The great thing about Christianity is that this God was willing to take on some of the responsibility for the mess we humans created. He isn’t going to fix it for us, but if the story of Genesis is the story of the installation of Logos.1, the story told in the gospels is of the installation of Logos.2.Good Friday was when it was installed; Easter Sunday is when it was booted up. It’s a new operating system, and it gives us renewed capabilities, but it’s up to us to learn how to work with and realize its potentiality. Supposedly it has the power to move mountains when fully activated.

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  33. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Another thought on freedom: in his book “A New Kind of Science,” Stephen Wolfram points out that freedom and determinism are not at all logically incompatible, inasmuch as some systems are “computationally irreducible.” Which is to say, they progress according to deterministic rules BUT they are of a level of complexity such that there is NO simpler way to model their behavior (and thus no way to PREDICT their outcome) other than just running them and letting them “play out” their consequences, even though those consequences were inevitable given the initial conditions and rules. That’s one way I might be inclined to view human freedom too: as a computationally irreducible system whose outcome is only determinable by actually running it through.

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  34. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    I see that I emphasize material causes over the “power of ideas.”
    But then, I’m not sure where “human freedom” comes into either materialism OR idealism. Idealism can be just as deterministic as materialism.
    The debate here hasn’t been about whether there is some degree of human freedom in history (that’s another whole question, and would require a long discussion on what “freedom” actually means). The question is whether the order of causation of change in human societies is from the material to the cultural, or from the cultural to the material.
    But it is not at all evident to me that the latter (saying that ideas themselves are a motive force in history) would be any less “deterministic”…you could just have a sort of Hegelian “unfolding” that itself was entirely predetermined from the tensions in ideas from the start, with no more nor less “freedom” than a view that emphasizes material conditions as the driving force in history (with culture and philosophy as epiphenomenon of symbolically processing those conditions).
    A history driven primarily by an unfolding of symbolic processing could be just as deterministic as one driven by an accumulation of material infrastructure…so I don’t think the question here is one of freedom vs determinism, but of economic causation versus “idea” causation. Between an analogy of history as unfolding like individual cognition and dialogue, and one which rejects such an analogy on the mass level.

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  35. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    More specifically, this might be a good example:
    Do we “think first” as a society and then implement a social order based on that? Or are “social thoughts” (ie, culture and philosophy) simply a REACTION to socio-economic conditions that precede them?
    On the individual level, it’s clear that we often think first and THEN act. We develop beliefs first and THEN act on them, structure our lives around them, etc. And indeed, the evolution of our life could be seen as the product of our conversations with friends etc.
    But society I don’t think functions like an individual. Society, I think, is almost entirely “reacting.” Why? Because “social thought” is not at all like individual thought. The social organism doesn’t really have cognitions in the sense the individual does. Ideas can really affect an individual’s actions, because an individual is a unitary person. But that makes a bad analogy for how society “thinks.” Society is a sort of colonial organism whose collective ideological products are almost entirely BYproducts of environment.
    Why? Because social thought is a sort of natural selection. Individuals can choose ideas, and choose to act in response to ideas, etc. But there is no “collective will” or “collective choice.” Therefore, which ideas “succeed” or “catch on” in society cannot be explained by appealing to some sort of DECISION because “society” cannot make decisions like that. What a social “decisions” mean is that circumstances favored the spread of a given idea by a sort of selection.

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  36. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Nowadays I’m probably closer to Mark on this one.
    On your framework, God could still intervene to stop Auschwitz, right? But He didn’t. How is that okay?

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  37. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    But–by the way–I should add that I find the symmetry between the tsimtsum and Christ’s self-emptying aesthetically compelling in a very powerful way.

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  38. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Yeah I’m really more inclined to view God as an author writing a book. We’re free relative to the internal logic of the story. But just because Alyosha is a free subject relative to the internal reality or universe of the Bros Karamazov, doesn’t mean that Dostoevsky wasn’t still absolutely sovereign over the entire story.
    And sometimes art demands that characters suffer or be wicked and damned. Sometimes an Auschwitz is just better literature. I don’t blame God for suffering anymore than Voldemort can blame JK Rowling for his ultimate damnation in THAT universe. Our reality is only analogous to the Author’s, after all.

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  39. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Mark, theologically I agree with you here and find your statement very clear. However, you write:
    “just because Alyosha is a free subject relative to the internal reality or universe of the Bros Karamazov, doesn’t mean that Dostoevsky wasn’t still absolutely sovereign over the entire story.”
    Clearly, you have never written a novel or had to work with an editor.

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  40. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Lol! Point taken.
    Still, I think my point stands; Id rather be a bad character in a great novel, then a good character in some crappy pulp tripe. I’m not going to be angry (from a meta-perspective) if I’m Reprobate, if that’s really artistically necessary and contributes to a really compelling work. I would be mad at the Author, however, if it turned out His-story was a really shoddy piece by artistic standards.
    However, I will add that our world is a bit different from most works (though not all) inasmuch as the Author has inscribed Himself as a character even withIN the work. I’m not just talking about Christ and the incarnation, but even just about God the “narrator-voice character” WITHIN our reality.
    One thing they warned us in high school was “don’t confuse the narrator with the author” even in a work of vaguely autobiographical fiction. In this sense, then, I would probably like Eckhart (and Eastern Orthodox theologians) make a “distinction” between God and Godhead, between God as a character or narrator IN our reality, and the Author utterly inaccessible to us except inasmuch as we trust his self-representation in His own personal avatar within the story.
    The “nesting layers” here get very complex and postmodern, as the very fact that we’re having this conversation within our reality proves how fourth-wall-breaking and “meta” this whole story is. Let’s hope it resolves in a way that justifies such a conceit as more than a gimmick!

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  41. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Again, I think this is well put and I think I agree. The ambiguity in that last clause is my problem, not your theology’s.
    “I would be mad at the Author, however, if it turned out His-story was a really shoddy piece by artistic standards.”
    Luckily that’s something we don’t have to worry about. It’s hard enough being the villain who gets killed off before the end. Or here’s a bit of young T S Eliot, thinking along these lines in “Prufrock”:
    No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
    Am an attendant lord, one that will do
    To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
    Advise the Prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
    Deferential, glad to be of use,
    Politic, cautious, meticulous;
    Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
    At times, indeed, almost ridiculous —
    Almost, at times, the Fool.

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  42. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Patrick said: On your framework, God could still intervene to stop Auschwitz, right? But He didn’t. How is that okay?
    My point is that since the incarnation, there are no more interventions. It’s all on us. The last intervention 2000 years ago gave us the capability to redeem the world as Logos bearers, but that’s all the help we get. The earth and everything on it is ours to save or destroy. The story is now ours to write, not God’s. God is in this sense, except for the unfolding presence of the Logos in the depth of our souls, a deus otiosus.There is no script except the one we write. It’s in that sense Nietzsche’s intuition was correct. The problem with N. was that he thought his uebermensch and the will to power provided a better script than the Logos and the way of the cross.

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  43. Jack W Avatar
    Jack W

    I was just rereading the comments here, and since I wrote this post I’ve read McGilchrist’s ‘The Master and the Emissary’, and in it he makes the point I was trying to make about “unselfconsciousness”:
    There is a lack of self-consciousness to Wordsworth that is essential to his genius, and which enabled him to write his greatest as well as his worst lines. This is a characteristic he shares with both Blake and Keats (and later with Hopkins and Hardy). These three Romantic geniuses, very different, highly individual poets as they are, share what John Bayley, in describing Keats, refers to as his ‘unmisgiving’ quality, a point later taken up by Christopher Ricks in Keats and Embarrassment . 98 The lack of misgiving explains their combination of greatness and at times insouciant foolishness: they make themselves vulnerable in order to become the conduit of something greater than themselves. The explicit, self-conscious workings of the left hemisphere constantly oppose this condition, and therefore need to be stilled.
    McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 10001-10007). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

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