A Note on Anselm

In my last post I quoted part of St. Anselm's ontological proof for the existence of God, his definition of God as “that, than which nothing greater can be conceived.”¹ I think this is a great definition of God, in part because it provides us with an ideal goal and in part because it seems to imply that God is a concept. It's quite clear that the human concept of God has evolved over generations,² even just the Judeo-Christian concept of God. The vengeful Yahweh of parts of the Old Testament is certainly not the loving and forgiving Father of most of the New Testament. Culturally, we have become more refined, and as we have so our God also has become more refined. It was once the greatest we could conceive that we should use violence to spread Christianity; it is now for many of us the greatest that we can conceive that we use generosity and compassion towards each other, Christian or not, based on Christ's teachings. In this sense, God and the church have provided ideal guidance for us via the latest conception of God. It seems right that God should evolve as we do. Do we still want an authority figure telling us to kill our children when they curse at us? Thus, God is a concept—our concept of what is best under current circumstances.

But Anselm doesn't leave it there. He is writing an ontological proof for the existence of God, not just a definition of God. Here's how he continues in his “Proslogion”:

“And certainly that than which nothing greater can be thought cannot exist only in the understanding. For if it exists only in the understanding, it is possible to think of it existing also in reality, and that is greater. If that than which nothing greater can be thought exists in the understanding alone, then this thing than which nothing greater can be thought is something than which a greater can be thought. And this is clearly impossible. Therefore there can be no doubt at all that something than which a greater cannot be thought exists both in the understanding and in reality.” (245)

OK! I am not a theologian, by a long shot, but I know enough of the logical arguments of philosophy that I can question this reasoning. Let me just focus in on the word “reality.” Anselm leaves it undefined, and I find little reference to it in the rest of this work, other than the acknowledgment of this fallen world we inhabit. But Anselm wrote the “Proslogion” in Latin. In English, our word “real” comes from the Latin “res,” meaning “thing” or “fact” (among other definitions). So, when Anselm refers to reality, presumably he is referring to the objective world of things we know through our senses—and to Anselm, this world was a fallen world, a world of sin. In Christian teaching, we struggle through this fallen world as best we can in order that we can someday exist in heaven, that ideal realm. In this struggle it is helpful to have a concept of “that, than which nothing greater can be conceived.” But does Anselm really mean to imply that God exists (has being) in our fallen, real world?

The other thing that confuses me in Anselm's argument is that he is presenting God as metaphorical—as existing both as idea and thing. But surely this is Christ's role in Christianity! Jesus Christ, as his name shows us, is undoubtedly metaphorical—part spirit, part body; part divine, part human. The whole point about Christ, it seems to me, is that he is God made manifest, God incarnated, God in a body. If God was already such a metaphorical being, why would we need Christ? If we had access to God as Adam did in the Garden of Eden, to walk with and to speak to, why would we need Jesus? 

Apparently Anselm means to argue that God exists in some abstract way, not in the reality of this world. I guess to Anselm he exists in heaven. But we cannot know God or heaven directly, since we are creatures of this fallen world. We need(ed) Christ or Mary or some other quasi-human, quasi-divine being as teacher and intermediary. (Thus was Mary granted an immaculate conception herself.)

To me, Anselm's attempted ontological proof of God's existence is simply a paradox. If God is “that, than which nothing greater can be conceived,” then he cannot exist in this fallen reality. In Anselm's definition, God makes more sense as one of Plato's ideals than as a being that can exist in reality. If God could exist in our reality, then he (as I'm sure Anselm conceived of him) would be just one more entity in our fallen world, nothing particularly special. To me, the greatest I can conceive is definitely NOT real in any common sense of that term. I absolutely look outside this world for my ideals (to literature, philosophy, etc.) because I know I cannot find them in this world. That makes a thought greatest—the fact that it is an aspiration and an ideal, separate from this fallen world.

There's still a metaphorical relationship here—between us humans and the ideals we aspire toward (i.e., God). Many of us admire and emulate Jesus: WWJD? We can, in a sense, lift ourselves up by our moral bootstraps that way, aspiring towards God. But this only works if we accept that God is our conception of the best and greatest, the most ideal--not that he is a Father that in any way exists in this world and can save us from it. Then we are responsible for our own ideals and our attempts to live up to them, and then God can continue to evolve, leading and inspiring us along the way. Anselm says later in “Proslogion”:

“Lord, you are then not only that than which nothing greater can be thought; you are something greater than it is possible to think about. For since it is possible to think that this could exist, if you are not that thing, then a greater than you can be thought; and that will not do.” (257)

If God exists in reality, then he must have some stable form, which limits him. But if God is the greatest we can conceive, then he can evolve infinitely—and mentally so can we. “What is now proved was once only imagined.” “Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.”³

1This is the most common translation of Anselm's words and the one I prefer. However, following quotes from Anselm's “Proslogion” (from which his definition is taken) are from the translation by Sister Benedicta Ward, SLG, in The Prayers and Meditiations of Saint Anselm with the Proslogion (Penguin Books, 1973). The wording of Anselm's definition of God in this translation is: “We believe that you are that thing than which nothing greater can be thought” (pg 244). To me, the connotations of the word “conceive” are more fitting to Anselm's definition than the connotations of the word “thought.” But this is the book I have, so this is the book I'll work from.

2See Robert Wright, The Evolution of God (2009).

3William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”

What Good Is God?

Another good “Stone” column in the NY Times: a discussion between Gary Gutting, moderator of the series on philosophy, and Keith DeRose, professor of philosophy at Yale.¹ The discussion centers on the possibilities of “proving” that God does or does not exist and how that influences the positions we might take as believer, atheist, or agnostic. Indirectly, it seems to me the discussion deals with the issue of what good God is to us now. 

At times I like to imagine what going to church might have meant to a medieval peasant—it must have been a sensory feast! There may well have been beautiful music and incense, as well as the bread, the building itself and the decorations within it, the magic of the foreign language, the stories: what a pleasurable experience it must have been for people who had little else of sensory pleasure in their lives! The priests also would confirm that the world was ordered by a great being who would ultimately take care of us. It was another version of the feudal world in which most people lived—the lord of the manor or the leader of a religious organization giving purpose and structure to the lives of the many.

But it's also important to think about what God does for us today. After I read the Stone column I made two lists: one of positive things God does for us, and one of negative things God does for us. Before I go on, I need to say that I think God is entirely an abstract concept. As they say, the age of miracles is past. Certainly some people think they have physical experiences as a result of God's intervention into their lives, but the interpretation of these experiences is purely mental—a matter of belief and faith. Another person of another faith or of no faith could easily interpret such experiences quite differently. So, I see God as purely a concept, but the churches that celebrate God are of course quite real and tangible. It's the actual celebration of God in a physical church, with all the sensory beauty available there, that is the metaphorical experience of God. Let me widen my question, then--what good to us is God and church today?

In a parochial sense, God and church still seem to offer a lot. Yes, there is that beauty, and there is the consolation of tradition that the repetition in liturgy brings, and the greater ease that assurance from a religious figure brings to a person's life. For many, the church educates their children, marries them when they are mature, and buries them when they die. A church marks the importance of an individual life. A secular world doesn't offer us so much in the way of ritual to console us or help us celebrate at the significant moments in our lives. And for people who don't have the time or desire or ability to think for themselves, the church offers cradle to grave guidance, which many people appreciate. It offers a philosophy that helps individuals to deal with (or ignore) large philosophical questions. I don't see any reason why churches and the varieties of gods they espouse cannot continue at the parochial level to help people in their communities, even in our multicultural age.

On a wider, more philosophical level, I think a concept of a deity is necessary. Anselm's definition of God as “that, than which nothing greater can be conceived” seems to me to offer great value and meaning, philosophically. We humans are thinkers and wonderers; it is inevitable that we would want a high water mark, so to speak, to define for us what is best or most good. Many of us want such a figure to help us move closer toward that goodness in ourselves or in our communities. But in our increasingly multicultural era, we cannot ignore that people around the world have developed many different versions of this moral high water mark—and that those versions work for them, just as our version works for us. It seems clear to me, given the world knowledge we have now, that religion can be successful on a parochial level but no particular religion can be successful on a universal level. 

A Jesuit priest of the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, struggled with this question for much of his life. (I am going to write more on his thoughts and writings in a later post.) Obviously, if a religion is going to be lasting, it has to aspire towards universality. Teilhard believed that all humans were in the process of evolving toward a unity of spiritual consciousness that he called the “omega point.” In a sense, he foresaw a spiritual version of the internet. But even he felt the need to root this universal consciousness in a particular religion—in Jesus Christ himself, in fact. In the end, what Teilhard saw was a unification of people in love for and aspiration toward Christ—in the end, not a universal vision.²

 

What do we see of religion today on a global (as opposed to parochial) scale? Here's where we run into problems. If particular religions are to maintain their identities, then they have to distinguish themselves from other religions via doctrine and liturgy—via their own sense of God. The result is that we suffer greatly from sectarianism on a global scale. Islamic militants are perhaps the most obvious and appalling version of sectarian religion right now, but even the very admirable Pope Francis has to insist that gays and women have no place in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. No one religion can embrace or speak for all people precisely because religion is necessarily sectarian.

I find it helpful to think of spirituality as a stream of water running through time and place and the different religious sects as cups that are dipped into the water and presented to the people. Some religions, such as the Society of Friends (Quakers) are very simple and try to offer the water (the spirit) to people with very little mediation--in a simple clear cup, so to speak. Other religions, like the Roman Catholic Church, scoop up the water in cups made of precious metals encrusted with many jewels—cups that are kept under lock and key when not in use because they are so precious and must be protected from the masses. To my mind, a lot of spirituality is lost in that effort because all we can see is the surface, the doctrine and the liturgy; the water inside, the spirituality, is virtually lost. (I am employing a metaphor here, of course.)

Globally, it often seems as if each religion is insisting “Our cup is the one true cup!” with the result that what we share in common (the water, the spirituality) is practically forgotten. Religion on a global scale thus often perpetuates hatred, violence, war, a divisive mentality in general—us vs. them thinking that simply cannot result in a conscious or spiritual unity of people. Science can unite people, because we are all creatures of this earth and this universe, and that is what science studies. Religion can not unite us, because it arises from and reflects deep cultural differences. Even more now than earlier in human history, religion is necessarily divisive. Many medieval European peasants didn't know there was more than one God or one religion in human cultures, other than the religion Christianity developed from; they probably knew little of the world beyond their own parish. They knew there was “one true faith” and had little reason to doubt it, because their knowledge of the world was so limited.

Now we have a vast knowledge of the world and the many religions that have developed within it. The use of God and religion to people has changed as a result, necessarily. Islamic terrorists can have and have had a great impact on us, even though their lands of cultural origin and their religion are so different from ours. We have to pay attention to them, even if only defensively. The emerging great populations of the world, in India and China, have very different religious beliefs (or nonbeliefs) from us, but they will greatly affect the economy of the world that we live in. We have to pay attention to them and respect them as they are. God and religion are still important to individuals and communities, sometimes even to nations that know little of multiculturalism. But God and religion cannot be deciding factors globally—except to the extent that we accept the God and religions (or the lack thereof) of other people to be as valid to them as ours is to us. As William Carlos Williams reminds us, we can come to know and sympathize with each other based on a respect for the importance of the local to all of us, even though the local is not the same for all of us.³ Our respect for the local wherever it may be found can become universal, but any particular manifestation of the local cannot become universal—that would simply be an imposition on others, not respect. (We tried that during the colonial period, and the result was great pain and suffering.)  The universal has to be an acceptance of and respect for the equal value of local customs and beliefs throughout the world.

Metaphorically, the abstract concept of God has to be rooted in the physical reality of a church—and as long as there is balance between the abstract and the concrete (or local), that experience is metaphorically healthy. But when any one church, any one physical reality attempts to claim a perfect understanding of the abstract concept of God, the healthy metaphorical balance is lost. Religion is necessarily parochial. Once we accept that, we can accept that there are many ways of understanding whatever God means to people, that there are many different kinds of cups being dipped into the stream of spirituality. Then we can live together and maybe make some progress toward unity.

1http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/18/why-take-a-stance-on-god/?emc=eta1

2Some will argue that the Roman Catholic (ie, universal) Church is essentially universal in its outlook, given that people around the world subscribe to its doctrines. But one need only think of all the Protestant sects that have broken from the Roman church, not to mention the orthodox and entirely non-Christian religions, in order to appreciate the impossibility of true universality. Even now, with Pope Francis working toward a more open and inviting church, many of the more conservative Catholics are concerned about the future of the church. Some are protesting that Francis does not mean what he says. If Francis persists, will the more conservative Catholics break away?

3 “If I succeed in keeping myself objective enough, sensual enough, I can produce the factors, the concretions of materials by which others shall understand and so be led to use—that they may the better see, touch, taste, enjoy--their own world differing as it may from mine. By mine, they, different, can be discovered to be the same as I, and, thrown into contrast, will see the implications of a general enjoyment through me. That is what is meant by the universality of the local. From me where I stand to them where they stand in their here and now—where I cannot be—I do in spite of that arrive! through their work which complements my own, each sensually local.” From William Carlos Williams, “Against the Weather,” in Selected Essays (NY: New Directions, 1969), pp. 197-98.

On Arrogance & Evangelism

I'd like to respond to a very thoughtful article by Kristin Dombek, “Swimming Against the Rising Tide: Secular Climate-Change Activists Can Learn from Evangelical Christians.”¹ Despite the rather specific subtitle, the essay is really about the nature of belief and understanding—and on how those of us of different beliefs read arrogance into each other's positions. I have never been able to understand what seems to me the self-willed ignorance and blind literalism of many religious people, evangelical Christians certainly included. But Dombek's discussion of why such people think secular, science-oriented people are arrogant helps me to understand what's going on here.

I am a secular, metaphorical thinker—in no way a dogmatic literalist, as so many religious people are. And I fully believe that secular, metaphorical thought is much more inclusive and universal than dogmatic literal thought. So, when I read Dombek's assertion that evangelicals think of the likes of me as “arrogant,” I was amazed. How could that label be applied to a way of thinking that is open to even evangelicals, whereas they are closed to my way of thinking—almost militantly so. Who, I had to wonder, is really arrogant?

Here's how Dombek describes her feelings as an evangelical Christian:
“My belief . . . was the bridge between my otherwise insignificant life and the universe: I was not my own, but belonged to something bigger. But it also meant I was scared a lot. Atheists, evolutionary biologists, abortionists and climate scientists wanted to tear down that bridge — or so I’d heard — by denying that the history of the planet was God’s story, not ours.
It was hard to understand who would want to do this — only arrogant people, people who presumed they could comprehend the world with merely human minds, who wanted to put their concerns at the center of the world, no matter the cost.”

This passage characterizes nicely much of the misunderstanding between secular and religious people, I believe. All human beings, I would assert, need to feel a part of something larger than themselves, to different degrees. Personally, I find great peace and consolation in the understanding that I come from and will return to the natural world, which I often think of in its wholeness as Gaia. Even though the natural world is, to a great degree, under assault from human culture, it is still a whole entity, struggling to maintain its integrity, and I am part of that process and that whole. That's enough for me, whereas human culture, which is so diverse and fragmented, cannot do a lot to console me or help me feel I belong—the arts, yes, but not much else.

Here's Dombek after losing her faith and beginning to understand a more scientific sense of the world: “You have to trust that your individual life is linked to something bigger: that you belong, body and soul, to a larger story for which you are responsible.” Again, there is language here that helps to explain differences between secular and religious modes of thought. We all want to feel part of something larger. The difference is in what we choose to be the something larger. As the evangelical Dombek noted, religious people tend to think secular people are arrogant because they replace “God's story” with “merely human minds.” This is, on the surface, true, but let's think a bit about what “God's story” is. There is, in fact, no one story from God. There are many, many, many, many. Even if you accept from your own culture that God's story is the Judeo-Christian story, as enshrined in the Bible, you are eliminating the beliefs and stories of the majority of people on this earth, who are not Jewish or Christian. And even if you add in the other religion of the book, Islam, you are still talking about only half or a little more than half the people on earth.² Buddhists and Hindus, for example, do not on the whole believe that there is a single divine figure who is ordering the natural world and guiding the progress of the human race. 

Isn't there indeed some arrogance here in assuming that ONE mode of religious thinking must supersede science in order to maintain the humility of the human race? I'm all for keeping humans humble, but when we're talking about global warming, for instance, which will affect all humanity eventually, the Judeo-Christian viewpoint has no more importance than any other way of thinking; in fact, if we go just by numbers of people in the world, it is a minority viewpoint. Why should Judeo-Christians have the right to willfully dismiss other ways of thinking about the world, when we will all be affected by the results? Again, this position is, simply, arrogant.³

 

And here I come back to Dombek's language. “God's story” is precisely that—a story put together by people to make some sense of their place in the world and to give themselves some hope and guidance. The problem is, there are many stories of God and gods, and also secular stories. The secular stories at least have the strength of not rejecting the values of other peoples, which are different from our own. The secular story of science is the most neutral and the most universal, since it is built on nature and the elements of nature that all of us in this world are made of and live within.  Culture is divisive; the natural world is our one common experience and inheritance.

Science is, in fact, the least arrogant of stories, because it is available to the understanding of all humans; it is an international language. Anyone in any country or culture can look into a microscope or telescope and see the same stuff. Science doesn't deal in preconceptions that rule what we can believe or cannot believe, as virtually any religion does. In fact, science cannot be science without challenging and testing any preconceptions that limit understanding. This takes us to Dombek's phrase “a larger story for which you are responsible.” Many religious people, in rejecting human understanding and defending the story of God as always central to understanding, are in fact turning away from responsibility. It's nice to think that an all-powerful, paternal God will always keep the world just the right temperature for human beings, but in fact such a supposed being has never done so in the past and will very likely not do so in the future. The only way we can help save the world for our descendents is to use science to understand what we can do to mitigate global warming. Sitting on our hands and waiting for God to do something will not help.

The religious might answer: if the world becomes too hot and wet for most humans, then that was God's will. OK--or nature's response to human activity run amok. But I really doubt that many evangelicals in the southern US, which will be greatly affected by global warming, accept that God may be allowing the world to become unlivable for their grandchildren or great-grandchildren. And if they don't like that scenario, then they are indeed being irresponsible in denying global warming just because it does not fit nicely with their picture of God. On the other hand, secular thinkers and scientists are doing what they can to overcome the irresponsibility of the religious deniers, for the good of everyone—not just for the good of people who think the way they do. Again, where is the arrogance? Where is the irresponsibility?

Let me finally anchor this discussion in metaphor. Scientific thinking is, essentially, metaphorical thinking, since it looks at real, concrete things in the natural world and derives abstract ideas from them. Religious thinking, on the other hand, CAN be metaphorical thinking, to the extent that religious people can understand their religious texts as metaphorical—as story, not fact. But literal and dogmatic religious thinkers are quite limited in their understandings of the world. Here's an example. I recently had to deal with a bout of poison ivy, and a phrase from the Bible kept popping into my head: “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” I thought it must be from the Old Testament, which does often seem to mean such things literally. But I looked it up, and it's from Matthew in the New Testament, King James Version. The New Revised Standard Version of this passage is also telling: “If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. . . . And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out and throw it away” (Matthew 18:8-9). (I have to wonder how many people who read the Bible literally actually obey this injunction?) 

I read the New Testament metaphorically, and when I thought about a metaphorical reading of this passage, I understood why it popped into my mind in reference to poison ivy. The great itching of the rash was causing me to suffer and taking up a great part of my conscious awareness. (This might be a narcissistic in-dwelling contingent to sin? At least it is true that the rash was offending me and causing me to stumble, psychologically.) Then I thought, if your leg (site of the rash) offend thee, banish it to the far reaches of consciousness; better yet, cut it off from consciousness! This is not easy, but it is possible—we all practice psychological distancing from hurtful situations at times. One might even say that many evangelical Christians are engaging in a kind of dissociation from scientific truths in order to reduce the challenge those truths present to their version of the God story.

There's a modern rejoinder to this advice: “An eye for an eye till everyone is blind.”⁴ This actually refers to the Old Testament attitude: “If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Exodus 21:23-25, NRSV).⁵ If we think literally, we are bound to end up with such blindness; such rejection of difference hurts ourselves as much as others. If we can think metaphorically, there can be unity and healing. I can banish my itching to the outer limits of consciousness and focus on something more constructive, and human beings from a wide range of cultural and religious backgrounds can work together on the universal problem that is global warming.

1Published in the NY Times on 9 August 2014: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/opinion/sunday/secular-climate-change-activists-can-learn-from-evangelical-christians.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C{%221%22%3A%22RI%3A9%22}

2See rough estimates of religious populations at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations

3Webster's definition of “arrogant”: “a feeling of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or presumptuous claims.”

4Variations on this saying have been attributed to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King; they also show up in songs and poems about the Troubles in Ireland, and in many other cultural sources.

5Curiously, this is all in regard to physical harm to a pregnant woman, causing a miscarriage.

Chicken Guts

A couple of reviews of Elizabeth Pisani's Indonesia Etc. have remarked on the complex mix of Christianity and paganism on the Indonesian island of Sumba. As Pisani puts it, “The people of Sumba are nominally Christian, though . . . many still cleaved to the ancient Marapu religion, guided more by what they read in the entrails of a chicken than by what they read in the Bible.”¹

Traditionally, sophisticated Christians see such acts as reading entrails (or tea leaves, etc.) as a superstition rooted in the physical world that is demeaning to the spirituality of religion. They would prefer to understand the physical world via the guidance of the abstract ideas of their religion. I was thinking of such practices and their relation to metaphor as I was later reading an essay on Hinduism in the New York Times.² In this essay Jonardon Ganeri, a scholar in Indian philosophy, explains why Hinduism tends to be tolerant of other other religious beliefs:

“[In Hinduism] religious texts are often not viewed as making truth claims, which might then easily contradict one another. Instead, they are seen as devices through which one achieves self-transformation. Reading a religious text, taking it to heart, appreciating it, is a transformative experience, and in the transformed state one might well become aware that the claims of the text would, were they taken literally, be false. So religious texts are seen in Hinduism as 'Trojan texts'. . . . Such texts enter the mind of the reader and help constitute the self.”

In reading, there is a meeting of the ideas presented in the text and the self of the reader. In part, yes, the ideas of the text “enter the mind of the reader and help constitute the self.” But reading also involves the opposite process—the pre-existing self of the reader making sense of the ideas of the text, projecting his own understandings and expectations onto the text. That's why one person can read the same text several times during a lifetime and understand it somewhat differently each time—a somewhat different self is reading it each time. In literary texts in particular, several readers can understand one text in several different ways, and that reality enriches the text rather than diminishing it. We too often forget what the mind brings to the text. 
 
So, when a shaman is looking at chicken entrails or tea leaves or any other external object that is supposed to reveal some truth or prophecy, what happens might be a case of the thing itself giving meaning to the mind, as it seems to be in Sumba, according to Pisani: if the fatty tissue of the chicken is “thick and yellow, the owner has a marvellous year ahead”; if it is “thin and whitish, . . . the owner leaves in tears.” But what if the shaman is dealing with tea leaves or patterns of smoke, manifestations that don't assume an either/or form? And what if, as is likely, the shaman knows the people of his village well? Is it not likely that the shaman's conscious or unconscious understanding of a person's or a people's abilities and disabilities might be projected upon the external image? I would think so.

We really should not scorn such pagan practices as reading chicken entrails, since it is really just another form of metaphorical thinking. The concrete object functions as the image, the vehicle that is used to carry and present the more abstract thoughts and perceptions of the shaman. This seems to me a very efficient way to transfer wisdom. The entrails operate essentially like a book; the shaman attaches certain ideas to the chicken, and the “reader” takes in those ideas.

Think of the image of the U.S. flag; think of what different thoughts and feelings patriotic Americans and extremist Muslims project upon that same concrete object. So much of meaning is what we project onto a text or an object. As long as we don't read literary or religious texts literally—so long as we don't abandon our own knowledge in the face of what we see in the text, then certainly reading helps us to create a self. And reading is, essentially, a metaphorical process—the meeting of marks on a page with the abstract capacities of the individual mind.

1Elizabeth Pisani, Indonesia Etc. (NY: Norton, 2014), pg. 57. Also see pg. 64.

2http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/what-would-krishna-do-or-shiva-or-vishnu/?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw

Misleading Metaphors

I'd like to point out a great essay on how things get messy in society when metaphors are misused or outright abused: John Lanchester's “Money Talks,” New Yorker online, 4 August 1914.¹ Lanchester discusses a process he calls “reversification” in the “language of money”--the tendency of financial terms to come to mean the opposite of what they seem to mean in ordinary language. He illustrates his argument with a discussion of the term “hedge fund.”

“The idea is that, by putting a hedge around a bet, clever gamblers can delimit the size of their potential losses, just as a real hedge delimits the size of a field. . . . A hedge is a physical thing. It turned into a metaphor; then into a technique; then the technique became more sophisticated and more and more complicated; then it turned into something that can't be understood by the ordinary referents of ordinary language. And that is the story of how a hedge, setting a limit to a field, became what it is today: a largely unregulated pool of private capital. . . . This is reversification in its full glory.”

Lanchester also discusses the misuse in financial circles of the terms “securitization” and “austere.” Those terms are, of course, not metaphors, because they are not based on concrete images. When Lanchester refers to “a real hedge” as being part of “the ordinary referents of ordinary language,” he is obliquely referring to the hedge as an image, as when he more clearly describes a hedge as “setting a limit to a field.” I want to stick in this discussion to the misuse of this metaphor and not get into the misuse of abstract terms like security and austerity—because we can do something to monitor the misuse of metaphors.

What Lanchester says happens in financial language is a removal of the meaning of words from ordinary people—when we can't correctly understand what a hedge fund is, we need an interpreter to guide us—a “priest” of financial mysteries. And as soon as we do that, we tend to enrich the priests and impoverish ourselves, in several different ways. As Lanchester says about the misuse of the word “austerity,” “The word 'austerity' reflects an attempt to make something moral-sounding and value-based out of specific reductions in government spending that result in specific losses to specific people. For people who don't use any of the affected services—for the rich, that is—these cuts may have no downside. They're a case of you lose, we win.”

But back to the hedge. The reason that speaking and thinking in real metaphors can protect us from such avaricious financial priests is that we can relate to an objective thing, an image, with our senses within our imagination. In other words, the basis for understanding reality is within ourselves and not vested in outside authority when we use metaphors. The deception comes when people in power (often politicians and financial experts) move language away from the images we can easily relate to and understand. A “hedge fund” is still based on an image, but it deceives us in that, as Lanchester explains, it is really the opposite of a carefully hedged bet. 

When we allow authorities to misuse metaphors (or to use too much abstract language, lacking imagery), we give up our own power to judge for ourselves and we place our futures in the hands of people who wish mostly just to enhance their own power—the very people who brought about the recent financial crisis that affected so many of us! Our language is literally our power; to let some people redefine or obscure what words mean is to yield our power. We need to use language that we can think with and understand—and, even more importantly, we need to insist that others do that also when talking to us.

When I taught literature in college, I came to feel that the literary theory that was taking over basically all English departments was seriously disadvantaging students. Their professors became a kind of priesthood that could decipher the very abstract thinking of literary theory, and this put an unnecessary step between the student and the literary work. Literature is based on metaphor; theory is based on abstract ideas. I sought to return students to the literary text in front of them by getting them to respond sensually, imaginatively to the images and metaphors within it. 
 
Lanchester believes that the misuse of language by financial experts is “not a process intended to deceive,” but in fact it does deceive—and, personally, I cannot see how the financial experts can be not aware of that. Results in a case like this matter more than intentions, which are always slippery. (You can never really know an author's intention, but you can know how his language affects you—and that's what matters most. The author is not in your head; her words are.) But Lanchester calls for a new insistence on honesty in language.

“The language of money is a powerful tool, and it is also a tool of power. Incomprehension is a form of consent. If we allow ourselves not to understand this language, we are signing off on the way the world works today—in particular, we are signing off on the prospect of an ever-widening gap between the rich and everyone else, a world in which everything about your life is determined by the accident of who your parents are.”

Education should be the process of achieving equality, since in part education guides us toward metaphorical thinking (as long as we are studying the liberal arts, anyway). Personally, I think private schools and charter schools and religious schools and home schooling are a really bad idea, because they lead to impoverishment of the public schools and to our children growing up without a common cultural language, in effect. But I can't do anything about that. What I can do is insist that the people I talk to use language I can relate to, so that we are sharing an idea and so that I am not wholly dependent on the other person to guide me toward a decision that would be in my best interest. As someone said of World War I, war is too horrible to leave to the generals. Any process that removes the power of metaphorical thinking from us disempowers us. We need to insist on the integrity of our own language.

Bravo, Mr. Lanchester!

1http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/money-talks-6?utm_source=tny&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyemail&mbid=nl_Daily%20%28226%29&spMailingID=6827528&spUserID=MjQ4NTYwMzUwNzIS1&spJobID=482987526&spReportId=NDgyOTg3NTI2S0

Metaphor War

I've been following the New York Times's admirable series on the Civil War, harking back to events of 150 years ago. Recently I also began to read Adam Phillips's wonderful quasi-biography of Sigmund Freud, which begins with this quote from Freud: “. . . these psychoanalytical matters are intelligible only if presented in pretty full and complete detail, just as an analysis really gets going only when the patient descends to minute details from the abstractions which are their surrogate.”¹ This quote certainly explains the attraction of the Disunion series² in the Times. We all learn the basic outline of the Civil War in school, but not always the kind of details from particular soldiers and about particular battles that we get in Disunion.
We all learn that the Civil War was fought to preserve the Union, to achieve equality among its peoples, to achieve the abolition of slavery, to secure states rights—and these are all abstract ideas, even ideals, that drove the soldiers through the war. But after reading the Freud quote, I began to think about how the North and the South used these abstract ideas differently. Most Northerners fought for (along with preserving the union) ideals that in many ways did not benefit themselves, but other people. Thus, they were not hiding behind ideals but seeking to root them in the reality of people in need. Undoubtedly, many Northerners were racists, but many also set up underground railroads to help slaves escape from the South into the North, despite the fact that many of those slaves would one day be competing with the Northerners economically. The Union army also harbored escaped slaves and helped them to freedom, even though this action sometimes reduced the resources available to the soldiers themselves. In other words, the Northerners joined ideals to concrete reality, a metaphorical way of being in the world.
The Southerners wanted to preserve slavery, under the guise of states' rights. Certainly slavery was an institution very beneficial to their economy. Also, many Southerners seemed to accept that the black people who were their slaves were subhuman, an inferior race that needed guidance from whites to know how to handle themselves in the world. Some Southerners thought of their slaves as children, whom they were protecting and nurturing. But they also, of course, often treated their slaves like animals, or worse—certainly not as equal human beings. So, white Southerners fought against a federal government that would tell them how to think, how to live, especially in regards to their treatment of slaves.
Where Northerners held ideals of abolition and equality, they also saw the Southern black slaves as people (“created equal”), who had the right to determine the courses of their own lives. Southerners, largely out of self-interest, saw their slaves as not being capable of equality or freedom; thus they could justify slavery and treat these people like property. Where the Northerners were able to root their ideals in the wellbeing of actual people, the Southerners neglected and abused actual beings in order to uphold their ideas. Here's another way to see it: the Northerners were able to think and act metaphorically, while the Southerners upheld ideas without rooting them in reality. Can an idea like states' rights be an ideal when it involves the sufferings of others? The South never honestly linked their abstract ideas to reality—such abuses as separating families and rape were overlooked in the effort of Southerners to see themselves as benefactors of their slaves. Many white Southerners never sought to benefit anyone other than themselves via their participation in the Civil War. Most white Northerners pursued an ideal and acted on it for the benefit of people other than themselves.
So, I guess you could say that the metaphorical way of thinking (joining ideals to reality) won the Civil War, but the South's desire to hide behind abstract ideas that deny reality is still a great threat to equality and democracy today—not just in the South, but anywhere people embrace abstract ideas that benefit themselves but also cause the sufferings of others.

1Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud (New Haven: Yale UP, 2014). The quote is from the book's epigram, taken from a letter from Freud to Oscar Pfister, 5 June 1910.

2The Disunion series is easily found at NYTimes.com or on Facebook. I will not cite particular essays in the series, but the instances of actions by Northerners and Southerners that I cite in this post can be found in the series.

Unreal Abstractions

I've been thinking more about the dangers of abstractions that are not tested against individual realities lately, after reading a few essays in the press that have taken up this issue. 
 
In a very interesting retrospective review of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Le Petit Prince,¹ Adam Gopnik reads that twentieth-century fable from the perspective of the French experience of occupation by Germany in World War II and the phenomenon of Vichy.  Apparently, many French intellectuals were quite shaken by the quickness of France's fall and sought in their writings to understand it. As Gopnik puts it:
“Exupery's sense of shame and confusion at the devastation led him to make a fable of abstract ideas set against specific loves. . . . [similar to] his contemporary Albert Camus, who also took from the war the need to engage in a perpetual battle 'between each man's happiness and the illness of abstraction,' meaning the act of distancing real emotion from normal life.”

I find this so interesting because I feel that I have witnessed a similar phenomenon on a much smaller scale. I taught in university English departments for about thirty years, beginning in 1980. During that time, the focus of the English department evolved from teaching literature to teaching critical theory primarily and then literature in the light of theory secondarily. Many of the theorists were French intellectuals. Toward the end of my career in the department in which I spent the great majority of my teaching time, there was only one course required of all English majors, and it was a critical theory course, not a literature course. A graduate-level course in Shakespeare was taught without any readings of Shakespeare, only of theoretical writings that could be applied to Shakespeare.  I was a reader on one PhD dissertation in which the student really did not engage with the text from her own perspective at all, but simply took certain ideas from a famous French critic and showed how aspects of certain modern novels fit those ideas. This was not unusual—this was how many in the faculty were teaching students to think: not about the specifics of literature or their own individual responses to it but about the abstract ideas of thinkers who were not even an important part of our culture.

I eventually left that university in part because I could not in all conscience tow that line. The great strength of literature to me is that it brings us to consider very important human ideas and emotions, but through the very particular feelings and experiences of specific characters or through concrete imagery that ties us to the reality of earthly existence. Abstract ideas hold us in thrall; concrete experiences free us to know the world and know others without blending all into one grand generalization. As the poet William Carlos Williams has said:
“Being an artist I can produce, if I am able, universals of general applicability. If I succeed in keeping myself objective enough, sensual enough, I can produce the factors, the concretions of materials by which others shall understand and so be led to use—that they may the better see, touch, taste, enjoy--their own world differing as it may from mine. By mine, they, different, can be discovered to be the same as I, and, thrown into contrast, will see the implications of a general enjoyment through me. That is what is meant by the universality of the local. From me where I stand to them where they stand in their here and now—where I cannot be—I do in spite of that arrive! through their work which complements my own, each sensually local.”²

The relationship between writer and reader is at the primary level intimate—a sharing between two consciousnesses of thoughts, experiences, emotions. Theory, abstraction leaps over this intimacy so that idea is more important than being, experiencing, feeling. Gopnik describes the “French habit of abstraction” as coming from “the French tradition that moved, and still moves, pragmatic questions about specific instances into a parallel paper universe in which the general theoretical question—the model—is what matters most.” Thus the reader is enthralled by/to the ideas and loses her grounding in individual consciousness of experience. When people are not grounded in their own experiences, atrocities can happen, as we have seen repeatedly in human history. Gopnik refers to “those abstractions that keep us from life itself” and urges, “The world conspires to make us blind to its own workings; our real work is to see the world again.” I would add two words to that statement, two very important modifiers: “The [human] world conspires to make us blind to its own workings; our real work is to see the [natural] world again.” Thus, as Gopnik roots this in Le Petit Prince, “You can't love roses. You can only love a rose.” Really, we often think that we love roses in the abstract, but this is an idea, separate from a real relationship with a real plant, separate from our own experiences and feelings. It's like saying “I love humanity but hate particular people.” Baloney!—humanity is an abstract idea that exists only in our heads. It's much more sanitary to love an ideal, but real love is given to real individuals, if at all.

Abstract thought of any sort is dangerous if not tied to specific realities—thus the importance of metaphorical thinking. In the ongoing Stone series of interviews with philosophers on religion, Gary Gutting (the series moderator) recently spoke with Philip Kitcher, who advocates a “soft atheism” and what he calls “refined religion.”³ Kitcher is wary of religious doctrine, to the degree that worshipers take it literally and thus subordinate their own experience of the world to it—that dangerous ascendency of the abstract over the concrete. But Kitcher argues that if we can see doctrine as metaphor, rather than literal truth, then religion still has something constructive to offer the world:
“'Refined religion' sees the fundamental religious attitude not as belief in a doctrine but as a commitment to promoting the most enduring values. . . . doctrines are interpreted nonliterally, seen as apt metaphors or parables for informing our understanding of ourselves and our world and for seeing how we might improve both.” Eventually, says Kitcher, we will not need religious doctrine anymore, as secular humanism more and more absorbs the most important values. “I see refined religion as a halfway house. In the end, a thoroughly secular perspective, one that doesn't suppose there to be some 'higher' aspect of reality to serve as the ground of values, . . . can do everything refined religion can do without becoming entangled in mysteries and difficult problems. Most important, this positive secular humanism focusses directly on the needs of others, treating people as valuable, without supposing the value derives from some allegedly higher source.”
 
I have been for some time reading through the historical novels of Sharon Kay Penman, which focus on the impact of the Norman French on medieval England. Characters in these novels are constantly assuming God's approval and then questioning why, if God favors them, they suffer misfortunes and defeat. Because they presuppose the existence of God and their own favor in his eyes, they cannot see the reality of their situation—or even truly take responsibility for their actions and the consequences of their actions. Because all believe God is on their side, they proceed almost unceasingly to slaughter each other, as well as innocent civilians on their way to each other. The abstract in the absence of respect for reality enthralls and degrades, as the histories of the three major monotheistic religions have shown—and continue to show. The secular humanism that Kitcher depicts celebrates individual human existence and moral coexistence over any abstract idea, which seems to me much more like Christ's golden rule than any truly dogmatic religion can manage.

As a long-term teacher I know that students wed to abstract ideas cannot easily learn; their minds are closed. In a private religious university I heard students spout such ideas as there is no unconscious mind and secular humanism is evil. In a public university I had students who could not read classical texts with open minds because they were sure they knew how people really thought in those times, based on their previous readings in history. Abstract ideas close the mind unless accompanied by individual realities of text or experience. An Episcopal priest once said to me that many theology students reach a crisis of faith when they come to the point of understanding that biblical texts cannot be read literally, must be read metaphorically, which is surely what Christ meant by his parable of the seeds falling on different soils.⁴ In another interview by Gary Gutting of Jay L. Garfield, Garfield says quite as a matter of fact, “In Buddhism, as in Christianity, for many lay people the religion is about daily rituals and practices, and doctrine is left to scholars and clerics. And ideas that are complex metaphors to the erudite are literal for the laity.”⁵

My whole effort in teaching literature to college students was focused on getting them to respond directly to the text before bringing in abstract ideas—in other words, to get them to think metaphorically. I fully believe that the more people can think metaphorically the more empowered they are in a world rampant with abstractions, the more they can think for themselves. There will always be people who choose to shelter behind doctrine and authority rather than think for themselves and take personal responsibility for their actions. I fear this tendency is increasing, as we are more and more pressured by the social media to share all our experiences and ideas and feelings with others and get approval and recognition from them. But hopefully we can get to the point where metaphorical thinking and understanding is not just left to the authorities. Think of the Grand Inquisitor section of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, in which a priest turns a newly present Christ away because he (the priest) knows that the people cannot deal with the reality Christ represents (in part, individual free will) and must be protected by priestly authorities keeping them in ignorance of what Christ really represents. Symbolically, is this what we want for ourselves?

I would hope the point of education would be to help people think for themselves and not shelter behind authorities and abstract ideas. But I am fully retired now, and this is an issue to be carried on by others, in a world in which administrators are cutting out courses and tenured faculty and reaping the highest pay for themselves.⁶
 

1http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/04/the-strange-triumph-of-the-little-prince.html?utm_source=tny

2From “Against the Weather,” rpt in William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays (New Directions, 1969), pp. 197-98.

3http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/15/the-case-for-soft-atheism/?emc=eta1

4Matthew 13:3-9.

5http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/what-does-buddhism-require/?emc=eta1

6http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/opinion/fat-cat-administrators-at-the-top-25.html?emc=edit_th_20140524&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=52614392