Roethke at the Root of Things

When Theodore Roethke died in 1963, he left behind 277 notebooks of poetic and prose fragments. His student the poet David Wagoner eventually gathered selections from this material and published them in 1973 under the title Straw for the Fire. It’s a wonderfully wrenching volume.

Roethke is congenial for many reasons: his poetics of the soil and its slow, slimy things; his engagement with western mysticism; his fanatical respect for words—finally, his self-effacing clownishness. High dedication for Roethke never meant he couldn’t laugh at himself. He knew what he was. Or perhaps: he was troubled to no end that he couldn’t quite figure out what he was. Which points up his work’s philosophical burden, everywhere evident in these notebooks.

Reading Straw for the Fire, I found myself taken up with the problem of which texts were crucial, which were at the core of Roethke and what he was up to. Yes, this inevitably meant crucial for me, or in terms of my own priorities. But I started marking these core texts, and now I’ve typed them out. In document form, the selection comes to around 7 pages. Just about right.

In my choices, I neglect certain of his themes. I ignore the fragments about the women in his life, his wrestlings with memories of his father, and his many really brilliant insights (mostly short prose) on teaching. (Roethke was widely recognized as one of the great poetry teachers of the century, and the notebooks convey much about his classroom approach: his dedication, his provocations, his antics.)

Straw for the Fire gathers more than 250 pages of fragments. My choices are those of one reader, trying to distill a certain approach to writing and a certain being in the world: Roethke's. There are many places in his thought I wouldn’t follow him, but his notion of what the blank page is for—that’s a different matter. He was writerly in the most important way.

At the end I place his villanelle, “The Waking”, not included in Straw for the Fire.

E.M.

From Straw for the Fire

What dies before me is myself alone:
What lives again? Only a man of straw—
Yet straw can feed a fire to melt down stone.

*

I always wonder, when I’m on the podium, why I am there:
      I really belong in some dingy poolhall under the table.

*

I don’t know a thing except what I try to do.

*

In the very real and final sense, don’t know anything. That is what saves me—from you, dear class, and from ultimate madness.
      In every man there is a little woman.
      A teacher needs his students to stay human.
      Suppose you master one cliché—
      You’re a step beyond a horse: a horse’s A.

*

A breath is but a breath
And the smallest of our ties
With the long eternities,
And some men lie like trees,
The last to go is the bark,
The weathered, tough outside.

*

What words have good manners? None.

*

Dear God: I want it all. The depths and the heights.

*

Give me the pure mouth of a worm;
I’ll feed on leaves; I’m a knob waiting for the opening squeak.

*

Who else caught the burning bush?
I’m blistered from insights.
Several times I’ve heard the slow sigh of what is,
The moaning under the stones,
And the flames flashing off wings, burning but not consuming.

*

I must be more than what I see. O Jesus,
Save this roaring boy riding the Devil’s blast.

*

An intense terrifying man: eating himself up with rage.

Such a one as never milked a mother.

I practice at walking the void.

*

Shine forth, you idiot forms,
With what I cannot see.
Essentiality
Of all ground-seeking worms.

*

I have no native shape.

*

I am by way of becoming
No more or less than I am.

*

I knew a fool for luck
Who never changed his ways
Until his own soul’s lack
Disturbed his later days.

*

I slept with Yes, but woke to No.

Show me what rest I have, and I’ll become restless.

I ate the Lord, and choked.

I ate myself to live, and woke a fiend.

The familiar longing to be ill.

My babbling’s nearer; I will feed the moth.

*

To possess or be possessed by one’s own identity?

The self, the anti-self in dire embrace. Instead of embracing God, he hugs himself.

I spent myself in mirrors, like a whore.

The mirrors laughing with their dreadful eyes.

*

I can become what I will,
He cried, and grew a tail.

Can I become that philosophic man
Without the sanction of philosophy?
One thinks too long in terms of what to be—
That grandeur of the crazy man alone
Who thinks imagination is the Soul
And that its motion is perpetual.

*

Acting one’s age is just a form.

*

I sing other wonders
Than my heart’s slowness:
In the inner eye
A bird quivers
Throbbing my heels
With a throat’s shimmer.

*

Five songs away, a whistler by himself
Stayed to his branch, a working fellow too,
And gave against the wind his throaty throb.

*

Granite on granite pressing the earth down,
Each singing thing straining to come to form,
Made one by light on dark, stark in the sun.

*

That question cries again—
What is the least we know?
I call the slug my kin,
And move with those born slow.

*

By singing we defend ourselves from what we are.

*

I see what I believe.

*

Between the soul and flesh
What war? I never heard:
I know a singing fish,
A silent bird.

*

Things dance in a young mind
Until the soul is blind.

Sometimes it’s well to leave things in the air.
Let me remember me: not my despair.

*

Am I a vanished type, a mastodon
Lunging this way and that in the great damp?

*

She. Woman’s the noble word for the bright soul.
He. Things as they are beat at me like a flail.
She. Deep dreamless sleep is true beatitude.
He. Or frenzy called up by a gush of blood.

*

My soul shrinks to a bird;
I am less than a child,
A vein beating, unheard,
In the close, in the coming dark,
My spirit turns to its work.

*

That ultimate seed, the soul,
Growing between two stones,
Heard a mandrake’s groans,
A sound altering all
Bird-songs and bird-bones.

*

I ask a question of the supernatural.
At what point does the self become a soul
When it deserts this clumsy animal,
This bear-like shape that lumbers down a hall
Or clambers up a hill?

*

I went into a flame,
A priest of kingdom come,
The false light cried my name,
“You are no one.”

I saw a shape in a crowd,
Grisly, amorphous, lewd;
I cried, and loud,
“Here! Here is our God!”

A pure light came;
And stole me away
From time.

*

In the hot sweat of why not,
In the cold dark of who did,
In the battered dish of she dares
In the absolute dead middle of all-around
—I dug my flesh until I was a wound
     And the day sighed out its light, and the white kingdom came.

*

Long, fruitless introspection, characteristic of the German, relieved by occasional dim flickers of light.

Teetering precariously on the brink of the navel.

Many meditations destroy.

A love for the bottoms, the fell last roots of things.

*

Body drags soul into the changeable.

I am the edge of an important shadow.

Lord of Laughter and Light, attend me.

God robbed poets of their minds that they might be made expressions of his own.

*

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

*

Observe, random energist, the bear’s placidity.

*

There is no end to what should be known about words.

*

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.

*

THE WAKING

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

***

QED: Idiocy, Ltd.

Chinese edition / 中文版 : Idiocy, Ltd.

RICHARD DAWKINS SMART, NEW BOOK SHOW AGAIN

Review of Richard Dawkins: Outgrowing God
Random House, 284 pp.

Dawkins very smart. Have new book. For teens. Teens read then they smart too. 

Dawkins book have neat Idea: “Let Teens Decide For Themselves”. Teens decide. Then join Dawkins defeat dumb Christians. 

Because Christians DUMB.

So I read the Dawkins new book. It come out last Fall. But I finally read now. 

I see book give classic arguments EVER. They same arguments in GOD DELUSION book. Oh classic!

Here my keen summarize of CLASSIC ARGUMENTS:

     If God real, why many other gods?
     If God real, why bad thing happen?
     If God real, why atheist good?
     If God real, why universe so big?
     If God real, why Jesus not teach science?
     If God real, why monkey?
     If God real, why He no have own God?
     If God real, why bad thing feel good?
     If God real, why I do bad thing go to Hell?

You see now. The Dawkins very smart. And he NOT EVEN READ philosophers he refute. It AMAZING. 

So YOU. Get copy Dawkins Book and be REALLY SMART and SCIENTIFIC. DO this NOW, then you be BRIGHT.

Eric Mader

Have some deadpan with your coffee. Check out Idiocy, Ltd. Dryest humor in the west.

With special thanks to Another Aquinas Avi.

Lovecraft's Chinese Disciple

If these fragments were as ancient as Zhang claimed, then the piece was an equal—perhaps a usurper—of the masterpiece at Altamira. The pottery was curved slightly, making it trickier than a flat surface to grasp, and far trickier to paint upon. Yet the artisan had ingeniously exploited the natural contours of the material—the pottery, the snake thereon, twisted as one. However, during my study of the fragment, I was compelled to an emotion I could not name. Distraught, anxious thoughts bubbled to the surface of my mind. I eventually noticed that the pottery shard leached a noisome ichthyoid scent, which I instinctively loathed. –Oobmab, “The Flock of Ba-Hui”




Review of:
The Flock of Ba-Hui
Camphor Press Ltd., 2020, 254 pp.

When I heard late 2019 that this book would soon be out, I imagined I’d eventually review it under the title “The Horror Out of China”. But history scooped me on that one. With the subsequent chaos caused by the COVID pandemic, the review copy sent me never arrived. Then an Amazon order I placed (on another book) never arrived. Finally, not trusting the mails, I downloaded The Flock of Ba-Hui on Kindle.

The book is an exercise in developing the Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), the reclusive and politically obscurantist New Englander whose work launched what we now call “weird fiction”. It’s an impressive collection, showing a real mastery of the Lovecraftian gamut: the style, the pacing, the protagonists, the weird metaphysics. Though I know nothing about the Chinese author Oobmab, who initially posted these stories online, I can say one thing for sure: he’s earned inclusion with distinction in that fevered clutch of horror writers who continue to mine Lovecraft’s vision. 



I. Lovecraft’s Perversities



I've not read all of Lovecraft, but know the “great texts” quite well. Though I wouldn't say I'm dismissive of Lovecraft, I find there are things incompletely thought out in his project. There's an intellectual sham of sorts at work. Already at my first reading many years ago, I was struck by a fascinating paradox in his idiom. Though an avowed materialist, Lovecraft’s vocabulary of horror leans heavily on what can only be called religious terminology: the words “blasphemy”, “blasphemous”, and “abomination”, among others, appear repeatedly to describe the cosmic horrors that menace his protagonists. And so, reading along, one is led to ask: Blasphemy against what? Or: If indeed there is no God, nothing beyond the material, who or what is there to “blaspheme”? Or again: In relation to what moral system can anything be an “abomination”? 



For Lovecraft, it’s clear the “blasphemy” in question is usually a matter of the appearance of phenomena that shouldn’t be possible according to our normal understanding of 1) human history, 2) the laws of nature, 3) the universe. What Lovecraft depicts as “abominable”, then, are not offenses against God, but rather offenses against what his characters previously assumed the universe to be. Things appear that shouldn’t, or mustn’t—but appear they do. This suggests we’ve been living in a naively coddled state, an everyday blindness that refuses to see the horror that lies behind the veil we’ve put up.

Is that it then? I believe that’s the gist. Lovecraft sees any Western humanist or merely “banal materialist” understanding of our condition as naïve. He would insist—or at least he would dream—that there is more to the picture; that there huddles around us a Horrible Truth that some must finally glimpse.

What would prod Lovecraft, or anyone, to keep insisting on this, to keep dreaming it? I don’t intend to take up the question. It’s clear by the very popularity of Lovecraft’s work that there are many such dreamers. Nightmare enthusiasts. But is this supposed insight into a fundamental Horror that lurks any more “scientific” than, say, the Catholic and Thomistic insight into a fundamental Good that lurks? I would say No, it isn’t—in fact it's arguably less scientific. But that's another topic altogether. (Any who want to see what I’m getting at might start cutting their teeth here. Not the familiar fluff you might expect, reader.)

As literary phenomenon, Lovecraft’s work is a belated and oddly science-infused iteration of the Romantic sublime. It’s just that the mind-bending cascades here are not in the Swiss Alps, and the ruins are not those of the painter Hubert Robert. Rather, the cascades boast tentacles, make eerie whistling sounds, and the ruins are underground and “cyclopean”. Ultimately Lovecraft is one development of what European writers were up to already in the late 18th century. His stories would not be possible without European Romanticism.

In a way this is to say that Lovecraft, like nearly all noteworthy writers, is not so much forging an entirely new kind of literature as putting a strong new twist on what he has inherited. But is Lovecraft in fact a “strong writer”? One might say this: he’s been too denigrated by some (Edmund Wilson back in the day) and is now too worshiped by others.

One of this worshipful handful is the celebrated French cynic Michel Houellebecq. Everybody reads Houellebecq’s novels now, which are in many ways rightly dubbed prophetic, but few read the Parisian bad boy’s early book on Lovecraft. The book offers a fine introduction (perhaps telling us as much about Houellebecq as Lovecraft, but still). The Guardian posted a good selection of extracts back in 2005, which I’ll link below.

Another, more recent admirer is the philosopher Graham Harman, whose book on Lovecraft comes to the conclusion that the writer “writes stories about the essence of philosophy”. Perhaps that is a workable claim in relation to Harman’s own philosophy, speculative realism, but it doesn’t seem to make much sense otherwise. Still, I’m in no place to criticize, as I haven’t read this book, and by all accounts of it I know, Harman does offer a painstaking literary analysis of passages from the tales, showing what Lovecraftian language does. I’m confident Harman can pull this off. I have great respect for him in any case, as writer of the best introduction to Heidegger’s philosophy in English. 


II. Oobmab’s Tales

The Flock of Ba-Hui offers four Lovecraftian tales translated from Chinese by the expat Arthur Meursault (author of the must-read black comedy on Chinese Communist bureaucracy Party Members) and Akira, who initially discovered the tales.

As I’ve said, Oobmab has the ethos down pat. One is thrown immediately into the Lovecraftian dilemma: researcher encounters an artefact that can’t be classified, begins to pursue answers, tantalizing clues prod him toward obsession, the site of origin is finally discovered, and the Horror slowly manifests itself. Oobmab also learns from Lovecraft the writerly insight that horror is not merely a matter of the visual. Like the master, the disciple here plays on all the senses, most notably and effectively smell, in narrating what his protagonists experience. His use of the gamut of senses is in fact part of what makes him so successful at recreating the Lovecraft ethos.

The striking difference from Lovecraft here is the milieu. Rather than New England, Oobmab’s main tales unfold in Chinese locales (Sichuan, Qingdao) or Tibet. The long history of China and the Tibetan plateau provide a thick archeological texture to the characters’ quests—and no, one doesn’t have to be well read in Asian history to enter these plots; the writer sketches in his researchers’ hypotheses with a deft hand, allowing any sharp reader to follow. I’m guessing Oobmab himself is a long-time student or professor of religious or cultural history.

The title tale is the strongest of the four, with its subtle integration of folklore especially impressive. I found the third tale “Black Taisui” a close second. In all the tales but one, a similar topographical progression unfolds. So as not to be a spoiler, I won’t elaborate. Still, interestingly, the one outlier of the four tales manages to exactly reverse the topography. (This outlier also happens to be the shortest and clumsiest of the tales, giving a dashed off feel in comparison to the others. Though set in an alternate fictional geography, mention is made of the Greek philosopher Ptolemy, the painter-protagonist sports a biblical-historical name, and at one point he and his friends get high off the smoke of burning "peyote wood". But peyote is in face a squat, rubbery cactus. It has no wood. Luckily, this piece is an exception.)

What is the vision of the universe revealed in these four tales? Of course it is in large measure classically Lovecraftian. To the extent the tales represent his thought, Oobmab’s notion of the metaphysical limits we may touch is mainly a matter of swirling chaos and vast stretches of time, which render our human historical framework almost null. This again is a version of the sublime, of course, and although these tales work well as tales, I don’t myself find it exactly profound as metaphysics. One wonders what this writer may go on to, if he continues to write. I think more interesting philosophical tales might be forged under the tutelage of another Lovecraft disciple, Philip K. Dick.

I don’t mean to presume. Still, it would be fascinating to see what a writer with Oobmab’s talents might do by attempting philosophical tales under the tutelage of the best Chinese philosophy. There is, oddly, an almost unavoidable Western-metaphysical bent to both science fiction and Lovecraftian horror. Is it because Western thought, starting with the Greeks, has gotten at certain things the ancient Chinese didn’t? Or is there something else at play here, a mere matter of intellectual colonization? Certainly literary genre is a massively important vehicle of cultural influence. One may even wonder whether strictly delineated literary genres can ever move between cultures without powerfully imparting the original culture’s metaphysical presuppositions.

Tough questions.

Though the editing shows slips here and there, the translators have done a great job turning Chinese Lovecraftian prose into suitably purple English. The book’s retro pulp cover (which I will be able to see in the flesh when I buy a print copy) warns you of the milieu you are entering. And Meursault and Akira do deliver. At first the frame tale, which the two translators provide for Oobmab’s stories, irked me with the overly arch tone of its narrator (imagine Dan Brown narrating a meeting of the Illuminati) but given where the frame tale led, I ended up convinced. Which is to say: it gave me a good laugh. Congrats on a fine conceit.

The translators also provide notes, for any who want to further pursue Chinese arcana.

All in all, The Flock of Ba-Hui is a deeply entertaining collection of eldritch mishaps and mayhem. 



Eric Mader 



Links:

Check The Flock of Ba-Hui on Amazon.

Excerpts from Michel Houellebecq’s H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life.

Check my novel A Taipei Mutt, now in second edition. The Asian capital unmuzzled. More bark, nastier bite. 



 



Steven Pinker Steps in it Again

Steven the PowerPoint Messiah
Look at a handful of the online photos of Harvard’s Steven Pinker, watch any of his lectures, and you will be struck by the feeling that this is a man suffering from mania. A gleam of self-confidence, a twinkle of avid flippancy emanates from this face.

In fact sometimes one can judge a book by its cover.

Pinker has done important work in cognitive linguistics. Yes, he’s clearly a very smart man. Unfortunately, like not a few others who’ve done serious work in science (think Richard Dawkins) Pinker imagines this automatically makes him a sage in political matters too.

The results, as with Dawkins, are embarrassing. Though cases like Pinker’s and Dawkins’ do make for interesting lessons on the vanity of the scientific mind (or at least some scientific minds) they mostly serve to make one depressed. It would be better, one feels, if intelligent people didn’t make fools of themselves in the public arena.

A handful of years back, Pinker published his tome The Better Angels of Our Nature, which argued, in a nutshell, that modernity had made humanity less violent, and suggested that we needed just continue on the modern, secular path and we’d eventually eradicate human evil. He managed to make this argument with a straight face (he’s a man of great straightness of face) just a few years after the end of the most horrific and systematically murderous century in human history. Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism--these were, as serious political philosophers recognize, all deeply modern projects, possible only after the triumph of our secular "Enlightenment". It’s a conundrum many modern thinkers wrestle with, one that puts in question all our claims to civilizational progress.

Not Professor Pinker. No, he has read a few things and has all kinds of (suspect) data to buttress his case. Thus Better Angels.

Now Pinker is at the podium once more, again outside his field of expertise, again showing the world that one can be a major tenured researcher at Harvard and at the same time lack even an inch of philosophical depth.

I spent a few hours with Pinker’s book, but couldn’t finish it. It is typing rather than writing; typing rather than thinking; typing rather than history. Ultimately it represents a monomaniacal hubris, a mere keyboard mania, curls and graphs flying in all directions.

All to prove a rather banal and circular thesis. Something along the lines of: Reason as I, Steven Pinker, understand and define it, will save the world.

As Peter Harrison wrote in his well deserved review of the book:

For the sceptical reader the whole strategy of the book looks like this. Take a highly selective, historically contentious and anachronistic view of the Enlightenment. Don't be too scrupulous in surveying the range of positions held by Enlightenment thinkers--just attribute your own views to them all. Find a great many things that happened after the Enlightenment that you really like. Illustrate these with graphs. Repeat. Attribute all these good things your version of the Enlightenment. Conclude that we should emulate this Enlightenment if we want the trend lines to keep heading in the right direction. If challenged at any point, do not mount a counter-argument that appeals to actual history, but choose one of the following labels for your critic: religious reactionary, delusional romantic, relativist, postmodernist, paid up member of the Foucault fan club.

What's obvious is that Pinker doesn’t take his go-to Enlightenment philosophers seriously enough to actually read them. His summary of the ethical thought of the figures he cites is so shoddy as to make one suspect he didn’t even bother to check, say, the relevant articles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. That encyclopedia is online, Steven.

The trend among prominent scientists not to take philosophy seriously (Pinker, Dawkins again, the late Stephen Hawking) is ultimately dangerous. Science discovers much about the universe, of course, but philosophy is needed to think the relevance of those discoveries for human being. Scientists like Pinker don’t care to think that relevance at any depth, any philosophical depth, because in fact they aren’t interested in human being. They’re not interested because, in a gesture of amazing naiveté, they assume they already know what human being is. They assume that the meaning of the human is somehow evident, or obvious.

Philosophy is prior to whatever science does. Philosophers of science understand this. Glib practitioners of scientism do not.

I’m not going to bother further with Pinker’s silliness. It’s true I used to be more interested in following intellectual zombies, if only to keep tabs on them. But recently, well, there are so many actual thinkers at work, and we have too much to benefit from them to give over precious reading time to books like Enlightenment Now.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

What is the past tense of fire? George Steiner on the Poetry of Thought

Ancient bust of Parmenides,
5th century BC founder of the Eleatic school
On another tour to the center with George Steiner as intrepid guide. This time it’s his 2014 book The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan. Some paragraphs:

The definition of men and women as “language animals” put forward by the ancient Greeks, the nomination of language and linguistic communication as the defining attribute of what is human, are no arbitrary tropes. Sentences, oral and written (the mute can be taught to read and write), are the enabling organ of our being, of that dialogue with the self and with others which assembles and stabilizes our identity. Words, imprecise, time-bound as they are, construct remembrance and articulate futurity. Hope is the future tense. Even when naively figurative and unexamined, the substantives we attach to concepts such as life and death, to the ego and the other are bred of words. Hamlet to Polonius. The force of silence is that of a denying echo of language. It is possible to love silently, but perhaps only up to a point. Authentic speechlessness comes with death. To die is to stop chattering. I have tried to show that the incident at Babel was a blessing. Each and every language maps a possible world, a possible calendar and landscape. To learn a language is to expand incommensurably the parochialism of the self. . . .

I have suggested that the “discovery” of metaphor ignited abstract, disinterested thought. Does any animal metaphorize? It is not only language which is saturated with metaphor. It is our compulsion, our capacity to devise and examine alternative worlds, to construe logical and narrative possibilities beyond any empirical constraints. Metaphor defies, surmounts death--as in the tale of Orpheus out of Thrace--even as it transcends time and space. . . .

It is out of a metaphoric magma that Pre-Socratic philosophy seems to erupt (the volcanic is not far off). Once a traveler in Argos had perceived the shepherds on the stony hills as “herdsmen of the winds,” once a mariner out of the Piraeus had sensed that his keel was “plowing the sea,” the road to Plato and to Immanuel Kant lay open. It began in poetry and has never been far from it.

Natural language is the ineluctable medium of philosophy. . . [I]n essence and, as we have seen, barring the symbolism of formal logic, language must do. As R.G. Collingwood puts it in his Essay on Philosophic Method (1933): “If language cannot explain itself, nothing else can.” Thus the language of philosophy is “as every careful reader of the great philosophers already knows, a literary language and not a technical.”

From his first chapter treating the Pre-Socratics:

“The power of Heraclitus’s thought and style is so overwhelming that it is apt to carry away the imagination of his readers . . . beyond the limits of sober interpretation.” So remarked Hermann Fränkel, soberest of scholars. . . . For Nietzsche [Heraclitus’s] “legacy will never age.” Together with Pindar, rules Heidegger, Heraclitus commands an idiom which exhibits the matchless “nobility of the beginning.” Meaning at dawn.

. . . Heraclitus’s dicta are arcs of compressed voltage setting alight the space between words and things. His metaphoric concision suggests immediacies of existential encounter, primacies of experience largely unrecapturable to rationalities and sequential logic after Aristotle. The Logos is at once performative enunciation and a principle inherent in that which it signifies. Thus enunciation, the decoding of thought, takes on a substantive reality somehow external to the speaker (Heidegger’s die Sprache spricht). In some respects, Heraclitus bears witness to the origins of intelligible consciousness (Bruno Snell). Thus Heraclitus both celebrates and wrestles with--all celebration is agonistic--the terrible power of language to deceive, to demean, to mock, to plunge deserved renown into the dark of oblivion. Dialectically, the capacity of language to ornament and enshrine memory also entails its faculties of forgetting, of ostracism from recall.

Heraclitus “works in original manner with the raw material of human speech, where ‘original’ signifies both the initial and the singular” (Clémence Ramnoux, one of the most insightful commentators). He quarries language before it weakens into imagery, into eroded abstraction. His abstractions are radically sensory and concrete, but not in the opportunistic mode of allegory. They enact, they perform thought where it is still, as it were, incandescent--the trope of fire is unavoidable. Where it follows on a shock of discovery, of naked confrontation with its own dynamism, at once limited and bounded. Heraclitus does not narrate. To him things are with an evidence and enigma of total presence like that of lightning (his own simile). What would be the past tense of fire?

. . . Already to the ancients Heraclitus was proverbially obscure. A proponent of dark riddles . . . [As for us, we] know next to nothing of Heraclitus’s idiom and terrain of allusion. We cannot “look things up.” . . . We simply do not know enough about oracular, mantic and Orphic conventions to assess their influence on Heraclitus. Famously, Fragment XXXIII professes that Apollo “whose oracle is in Delphi neither declares nor conceals, but gives a sign” (a Wittgensteinian move). Contrary to an Adamic nomination, Heraclitus does not label or define substance but infers its contradictory essence. Semantic ambiguities, a second order of difficulty, both relate the internal to the external and signal their dissociation.

. . . .

[In Heraclitus we recognize] the fundamental, generative collision between the elusive opacity of the word and the equally elusive but compelling clarity and evidence of things. Immediate or hurried apprehension, the colloquial, misses this decisive tension, that, in Heraclitus’s celebrated duality, of the bow and the lyre. To listen closely--Nietzsche defined philology as “reading slowly”--is to experience, always imperfectly, the possibility that the order of words, notably in metrics and the metrical nerve-structure within good prose, reflects, perhaps sustains the hidden yet manifest coherence of the cosmos.

. . . .

As do poets, Heraclitus follows language where it leads him, where he is receptive to its inward and autonomous authority, with somnambular yet acutely lucid trust.

. . . .

When Beckett bids us fail, fail again but “fail better,” he locates the synapse at which thought and poetry, doxa and literature mesh. “It’s the start that’s difficult.”

That inception, that tenor of thought at dawn, is emphasized by Heidegger in his lectures on Parmenides of 1942-43. Editorial, exegetic attempts to discriminate between poem and cosmology in Parmenides are anachronistic. No such dissociation is valid. Instead of Lehrgedicht or didactic verse, Heidegger proposes sagen, a “Totality of the enunciated,” as the only category appropriate to what we can make out of Parmenides’ vision and intent.

. . . .

The mythological lineaments of [Parmenides’] poem are not vestment or masque in the baroque sense. The mythological embodies, allows, the only direct access to the invocation and articulation of the abstract where language, prior to Aristotle, has not yet evolved key modes of logical predication. . . . For Parmenides, the world is nothing but the mirror of my thought--a proposal whose enormity across the millennia should never escape us. Thus poetic form becomes the natural configuration for the most radical, overwhelming yet also strange and perhaps counterintuitive of assertions: that of the identity of thought and being. This existential identity will be a determinant in the genesis and pilgrimage of western consciousness. In a sense, Descartes and Hegel are footnotes.

Steiner the polymath has often been accused of losing his footing on this or that path, but he is an excellent guide for this kind of tour. Reading for those who want “to go toward the beginning.”

Eric Mader

Check The Poetry of Thought at Amazon.

Do you know where your you is? The Mystery of Consciousness and the “Hard Problem”

1619 representation of consciousness, Robert Fludd

"But even if one were willing to accept the perplexing claim that a smartphone could be conscious, could you ever know that it was true? Surely only the smartphone itself could ever know that." --Oliver Burkeman

In recent decades philosophers and scientists have been engaged in an ongoing and often bitter agon over the nature of consciousness, and there is no end in sight. At issue are some of the most tantalizing and potentially fruitful intellectual conundrums we face: a complex of philosophical/scientific problems that some hope will eventually erase the borders between philosophy and science. I’m not among these latter, but wherever one stands in this debate it’s clear that it delineate the border between philosophy and science in fascinating ways.

Last week The Guardian published one of the best introductory articles I’ve seen on the subject (Oliver Burkeman: “Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?”). Without trying to summarize the ground Burkeman covers (go read the article yourself: it’s well worth it) I might minimally say that two rough positions taken up by recent contenders are: 1) We are in some way fundamentally different from robots or zombies (David Chalmers); 2) There is no fundamental difference between us and robots, only differences of degree or sort (Daniel Dennett).

I’m with Chalmers in this spat, though as yet there’s no scientific route to decide who is more likely right. Which is little surprise: there’s no scientific route to deciding many things.

One of the problems with Dennett’s position (and that of others) is that it establishes too low a threshold for what counts as consciousness. In my own lexicon (which I’m sure Chalmers would have problems with too) consciousness is not necessarily present with the mere feeling of pain (as is suggested in the article) but rather arises with the capability of knowing “I feel pain”--the I here being in part a product of my own pained being’s recognition that there are other beings in existence.

In other words, for myself the problem of consciousness immediately raises the thorny problem of I-ness, how we experience that I-ness which then in turn experiences what are called qualia. Qualia (singular quale) are basic irreducible perceptions like the color green, the taste of a certain chocolate, or the pain of a crushed finger. It is, after all, our experience of qualia that poses what Chalmers has famously called “the hard problem of consciousness”. The hard problem is hard because--and this is difficult to phrase clearly--although there “is something that it is like” to experience a particular color, or a particular chocolate, that consciousness experience, that somethingness, cannot be reduced to a mechanistic explanation. Or: Though neuroscience might be able to explain how the brain stores and accesses memories, and might be able to explain a host of other brain functions as well, there remain irreducible qualia that are not subject to such explanation, nor are they subject to comparison between conscious beings (there will never be any way of knowing if my red looks like your red).

Some scientists (Dennett again) insist that there is no hard problem of consciousness to begin with, or that if there are hard problems they are elsewhere--precisely where Chalmers sees the “easy problems”.

Without being able to elaborate much here, my own interest in this debate relates to the question of the degree to which consciousness entails subjectivity, and how consciousness itself, and qualia themselves, might be related to language or semiotics. I’d tentatively argue that full consciousness is only possible on a ground of something like an experience of selfhood.

Many have theorized that human selfhood, a person’s feeling of I-ness, arises initially through interaction with others (usually beginning with the recognition that one is a distinct being from one’s mother) and is then further established through the acquisition of language--that I-ness is, in large part, attendant on one’s learning and living within language. Your sense that you are you, then, that you are one being possessed of selfhood, arose not only via your physical singularity as an independent body, but also via a kind of dialectical back and forth with language. You are an individual physical Homo sapiens (a brain and body separate from others) that has been infected by language, which created means of a more complete parcelling out of the areas of your individual self as well as of your perceptions of the world. It is on this double ground that you slowly developed the innerness that characterizes full human consciousness.

One may grasp the crux of the issue of what I mean by “full human consciousness” by considering an experiment that should never be done. As follows: Were it possible for a Homo sapiens to be raised in an environment with no other humans or animals (fed and protected within such an artificially limited environment) we’ve really no way of knowing if full consciousness (or even what sort of consciousness) would develop. Certainly language would not develop. Would loneliness? Very likely not. Nonetheless, were the hand burnt on this same Homo sapiens, he/she would jerk it back in reaction. But such pulling back in pain would not, in my view at least, constitute full consciousness. The feeling of pain (or hunger, or satiation) is different from the experience of full consciousness.

This problem I pose here of full human consciousness is not exactly the same as the problem of consciousness per se, but it does at least clarify things by getting at what we humans experience as consciousness. It is this base state, after all, from which we always begin; it is from this ground that we always ask our questions, always approach more general problems in the field. And I’m convinced it is highly doubtful we will ever escape this base state to attain an objective perspective on the other problems of consciousness we might raise--such as, for instance, the question of animal consciousness. This is the kind of philosophical issue I believe the likes of Daniel Dennett don’t take seriously enough.

The problem of consciousness is important for a host of reasons. Many ethical problems are implicated in how one approaches it. For one: If our humanity lies in our conscious selfhood, our ability to experience I-ness, does this mean that those who have not yet attained consciousness (say, the unborn or the severely retarded) or those who have lost consciousness (say, those in coma) are not truly human? As a Catholic, I would insist that No, in fact these are all humans, because humans are in any case endowed with a soul. Of course I’m well aware that this Catholic position is not at present scientifically provable (although research of NDEs continues to provide “troubling” data supporting the possibility of an identity principle independent of the body), and so cannot be part of this particular scientific debate. But the Catholic position is worth raising here if only because it underlines the hard questions remaining for secular ethicists. Namely: If our humanity lies in our conscious selfhood, can those who lack consciousness have any rights? And on what grounds?

Posing the problem of consciousness also leads inevitably to speculation as to the consciousness of animals and machines--a realm of inquiry fraught with both a troubling history (speculations that animals are mere automata) and a troubling future (cf. the possible threat posed by artificial intelligence).

What sense of I-ness do animals have? It is hard to know, though everyone sees that animals can interact with others as others. Does such interaction imply consciousness? If so, to what degree or of what kind?

Apart from I-ness, what is it like to be, for instance, a bat? This is the question posed in a classic paper by philosopher Thomas Nagel. Part of the upshot of the question is that regardless of advances in science, we will never be able to know. No amount of neurological understanding of how a bat’s brain works will ever tell us what it is like to be one. And that problem, again, relates to Chalmers’ posing of the hard problem.

Most scientists now agree that many species of animals have consciousness. I would argue, again, that for animal consciousness to be real it must relate to a kind of self against which perceptions can be experienced. Insects, then, very likely lack consciousness because the insect brain is merely a neural center for managing response to different kinds of stimuli. Here already, however, I run into the challenge that certain thinkers would pose: “On what grounds do you say, Eric, that your human brain is not itself merely a neural center for managing response to stimuli?” Or again: “Is not your laptop likewise a kind of digital center for managing response to stimuli? On what grounds do you know your laptop isn’t conscious?”

My answer to both these questions would again relate to I-ness or selfhood. When Nagel asked what it was like to be a bat, that was a fruitful question, but I don’t think it would be fruitful to ask what it is like to be a butterfly or an iPhone 6. Because there is likely no consciousness present in a butterfly to experience being a butterfly, the question of what it is like to be one approaches the question of what it is like to be a mushroom. Neither the butterfly nor the mushroom has a self to experience its being, and the same goes for an iPhone.

Though many creatures doubtless attain rudimentary consciousness, there are myriad remarkably complex creature that very likely do not. The interesting question is why some creatures do have consciousness, and how they have it.

Will machines ever really attain consciousness? In fact, as my above remarks hint, some theorists in the field are trying to pre-empt the question by insisting that machines already do have consciousness--that your television, for instance, is conscious. I would say this claim (which I find ultimately flippant) merely erases the the problem of consciousness. Which is perhaps the point such thinkers are trying to make. They seek to invalidate the problem from the get-go. Indeed, some theorists insist that many of the “mysteries of consciousness” don’t constitute valid problems in any case (cf. again Dennett). I think they are wrong.

As to the questions of whether machines can think, we of course have the test Alan Turing proposed in a 1950 paper--what has come to be called the Turing test. This question as to whether machines “can think” is not quite the same as the question of whether machines may ever be conscious, but it is definitely strongly related.

One of the best answers to those who are existentially enthusiastic about AI (those who believe we are on the verge of having real and authentic one-to-one relations with machines) is still to be found in John Searle’s Chinese room challenge, where he clarified the difference between thinking machines, which merely simulate thinking, and real thinking. Searle’s general argument is that thought means being able to understand and experience, as a self, the meaning of what is being communicated. Again, for Searle, I-ness is the question, or: What is the nature of that entity that understands its responses (rather than merely computes “correct” responses)?

A being may claim consciousness, and mimic it quite convincingly, without actually possessing it, but any being that thinks it is conscious is necessarily so. The takeaway? Verifying consciousness from outside is well nigh impossible.

In general, the crux in these debates tends to reside in the contrasting definitions of consciousness being put forward. If there is a “problem” of consciousness or not, and where the hard and easy problems lie, largely depends on how consciousness is defined. Which is why the participants are so often speaking past each other. Whereas for me those who say my cell phone is conscious are merely ignoring the problem, for them I am talking about a problem that doesn’t properly exist.

There are no clear answers to many of these questions. I stick with my position that consciousness is grounded in an identity--or, more minimally, that some experience of selfhood must exist for anything like true consciousness (at whatever level, including the level of qualia) to be present. The fully conscious being is a being that knows itself as an I (with the attendant awareness of others this implies), experiences itself in an innerness which necessarily has access to an outerness (both the outerness of the world and that of other selves). Animals are very likely participants in consciousness, though I believe the human experience of self grounded in language is of a quite different order from that which animals experience. The question of whether computers may ever attain consciousness seems to me as yet entirely open, and it seems very possible that it will always remain open regardless of how artificial intelligence may advance.

A final question: If animals participate in some way in consciousness and we participate more fully in it, is it likely that an even fuller participation in consciousness is possible in the universe? As a Catholic, I believe the answer is Yes--and that the endpoint of full consciousness is God. In a scientific register, I believe the answer is also Yes: there seems no reason to assume that consciousness may not be deepened or enhanced, and of course consciousness may very well exist elsewhere in the universe, at whatever degree of complexity.

There are many issues I’ve left out here (I haven’t discussed philosophical zombies, for instance) and I’ve perhaps been amiss in not more directly addressing certain challenges that might be made to my assertions regarding how the consciousness debate relates to the different problems of I-ness or selfhood. Further, I’m aware my depiction of Chalmers especially is lacking or maybe misleading (for one, in recent years is not exactly a skeptic regarding the possibility of machine consciousness). But I’ve tried to keep things at a basic level, and so have had to leave out much.

Eric Mader
Taipei

Resistance to Heidegger: Reading Graham Harman’s Heidegger Explained

Philosopher Graham Harman
It’s a simple enough question, but perhaps difficult of answer: If Martin Heidegger was the major philosopher of the twentieth century, as Graham Harman argues, why has he not become a more central guide to philosophers since? And why has Heidegger’s work not had an impact on the West even remotely similar to that of thinkers like Freud or Marx, or even Nietzsche?

Harman is one of the key philosophers working in the rising Speculative Realist movement. Much of Harman’s project emerges from his reading of Heidegger, particularly Heidegger’s brilliant tool analysis, which makes his 2007 book length portrait of the great philosopher, Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Tool, doubly interesting.

I’ve been an occasional student of Heidegger since my university years in the 1980s. As it’s been a while since I’ve seriously engaged the philosopher’s texts, I decided to read Harman’s book to re-enter the realm. I couldn’t have chosen better. Harman has written what is certainly the clearest, most comprehensive introduction to Heidegger yet published in English. He covers the whole scope of Heidegger’s career, addresses the dismal turn of the war years, and, for me at least, clarifies things that had previously been murky, specifically Heidegger’s later writing on the fourfold.

But Harman’s work also led me to ask, given my own political concerns, if it is really worth seriously re-engaging Heidegger’s thought. Can Heidegger stand as a guide or teacher to those struggling with the demands of the present?

Heidegger insists that the history of metaphysics has come to an end and that we await a new beginning in philosophy. One of the main problems facing this "new beginning", at least in terms of its calling to those like me who might (modestly) engage it, is that based on Heidegger’s own work we sense that it will prove insular, self-enclosed, ultimately unproductive. One suspects that any such philosophical beginning could not actually change the facts of the political world in the ways that seem necessary--given our ever graver ecological/technological predicament. Such a beginning would be, rather, a local philosophical shift; it would be yet another philosophical school easily ignored by the machine now running roughshod over us, just as it ignored the philosopher’s work during his lifetime and after.

I’m aware of the irony of criticizing Heidegger’s new beginning as “unproductive”. One of the salient problems of the old metaphysics of presence is, certainly, its very productiveness. But even so, I suspect that many thinkers continue to neglect the Heideggerian path because they sense, quite simply, that it would not catch--it would gain no hold on the forces now rushing us toward annihilation.

Thus the conundrum facing thinkers tempted by Heidegger’s formidable project. We still hope to change or help rescue the world; we still hope to harness some of the power of metaphysics, even if at the same time undermining its totalizing power. Is this hope at all valid? I'm not certain. But next to this hope, the philosophy that begins with the “revealing/self-concealing event” seems to lead fatally to a kind of quietism. Or at least it did so in Heidegger's case.

Explicating the Heideggerian prognosis, Harman argues that all attempts to manage technology through technical means (which here would include everything from statistical analysis to environmental protection committees to land use laws) are doomed to failure from the start, as they still function within the metaphysics of presence that fosters technology's rampant growth. But is this prognosticated failure really so absolute? Might not such "technical means" be at least preliminary to, or attendant upon, a developing awareness of the crisis, which awareness, which danger, might then prepare the ground for the more fundamental "turn" Heidegger envisions?

One could argue that with these comments I’m putting too much of a political or practical burden on philosophy. One does not take up philosophy in order to accomplish certain goals with it. Asked the question of what one can do with philosophy, Heidegger once answered that the point is not what we do with philosophy, but what philosophy does with us.

But what is the place of philosophy once those political ills become potentially synonymous with our self-induced extinction as a species? Does the Heideggarian argue that we do not fundamentally exist as "a species”, but always rather as individual Dasein? If Dasein always means my ownmost, historically grounded existence, how do we think our ownmost historically grounded existence as species? Is such a thought possible in Heideggerian terms?

Harman's last three titled sections before his conclusion are "Heidegger's Vices", "First Objection to Heidegger" and "Second Objection to Heidegger". On Heidegger's vices, Harman doesn't merely restate his earlier points regarding the philosopher's disastrous failure of judgment during the war years, but, rightly I think, traces this failure to a more fundamental one: the lack of any true political philosophy in Heidegger's work.

Of course this lack is apposite to the questions I pose above. My own sense is that it stemmed from a certain fatality in the periodization of Heidegger's career. First, before the war, Heidegger was grappling with the questions that culminated in Being and Time. Subsequent to the war, and more problematically, his avoidance of writing directly on the political had more personal causes. The philosopher was no doubt aware that any attempt to weigh in directly on questions of the West's "political order" would only serve to re-ignite the question of the war years. It would provide an easy pretext for his philosophical foes to repeat: "Who are you to philosophize on these questions? Haven't we already heard enough in your Rector's Address?" In short, had Heidegger not made the mistakes he did during the war, he may have been emboldened over the following decades to develop his philosophy in ways more directly challenging to Anglo-American capitalism on the one hand and Soviet communism on the other. As is, he shrewdly (and perhaps inevitably) avoided political philosophy altogether.

Which leads readers of Heidegger like myself to ask: What would a true Heideggerian political philosophy look like? It is clear to me that the stances he took during the war in no way represented a rigorous development of his thought. They represented rather a poorly thought out attempt to paste his thought onto a political movement whose deeper meaning offended against that thought. Heidegger himself, though a supremely powerful thinker, was too immature politically to recognize this.

This leads me to wonder if Harman's section "Heidegger's Vices" wouldn't better be titled "First Objection to Heidegger", as it is in his lack of political philosophy, I suspect, that we should approach both his fall into Nazism and the problem of his incongruously small impact on the contemporary West. Heidegger insisted that thinkers are to be the "shepherd's of being", but apparently viewed the shepherd only as one who watches and waits. In fact, to develop the metaphor, shepherds must also at times ward off wolves and seek out new pasture.

In the two "Objections" to Heidegger with which Harman closes his book, he raises important challenges to Heidegger's thinking on the status of things and the interrelations of entities in the world. Each of these challenges lead into Harman's own work in what he calls "object-oriented ontology". Not familiar with Harman's work, I'd mainly be curious to know how he might address this question of what a Heideggerian political philosophy would consist in. Perhaps he's already taken up this question somewhere in his work. Or it may be another Heideggerian path which he may some day be interested to develop.

And of course: If Prof. Harman himself can spare time to answer an amateur, I’d be very curious to know how he might address these questions. I’ll be sending this link to him and will post any reply.

In any case, Harman’s book should be on the shelf of anyone engaged in the strenuous but always rewarding work of reading Martin Heidegger. Explanations of difficult philosophical arguments don’t get better than this.

Eric Mader
Taipei

Updated:

Graham Harman kindly responded to my brief review with some remarks on Heideggerian politics.

Important in Harman’s thinking on Heidegger is the recognition that whereas the the philosopher himself fell for fascism, his philosophy is of a different order. Its basic gestures and modalities, the approach to truth it sketches out, would on more careful consideration lead to a different politics.

In his book, as I've said, Harman argues that one of Heidegger's main flaws was his clear lack of a developed political philosophy. Which left him easy prey to the allure of the rising fascist movement.

First, Harman writes me that “the easy guess is that [Heidegger’s politics, made explicit,] would be like the politics of Carl Schmitt”--i.e., they'd be a product of where Heidegger was already headed under Hitler: “At a certain point rational negotiation disappears and there is simply an existential struggle with the enemy, who need only be defeated rather than wiped out completely. This would appear to fit very well with Heidegger's decision-based model of human action in Being and Time.”

This is an assessment of how Heidegger himself likely would have characterized his political stance had he been asked to declare it during those years.

Harman, however, sees a different politics implicit in Heidegger’s more rigorous side (that side where he actually wrestled):

But I think Heidegger's philosophy actually leads us in a different direction politically, if he had thought it through more carefully. Since Being is that which withdraws, this means that political decision always excludes an outside and focuses on what is present. I've written a whole book on Bruno Latour's politics that ends where I wish Heidegger could have ended politically, which is by saying that politics is based neither on truth or sheer decision, but on a collective dealing with issues whose solution is never fully known. Even Latour drifts a bit in Schmitt's direction in his recent work on ecology, but the Latour of the early 2000s was really onto something politically, I think.

To further the questions implicit in Harman's monograph on Heidegger, then--or at least the questions that most nagged me--one might move on to Harman’s book on Latour.

A.C. Grayling's False Dichotomies

Last week a writer friend tried halfheartedly to convert me to atheism by sending me a link to a 2011 talk by British philosopher AC Grayling. The friend in question is not so much strongly anti-religious as incredulous that Christianity or any particular religion can address the complexity of the universe.

Grayling spoke in Sydney to promote his compendium of secular wisdom The Good Book. I'd willingly read into Grayling's book, but was not much impressed by the talk. It's the old "new Atheist" tendency to set up straw men. I replied to my friend:

[for the Grayling talk, search YouTube "A.C. Grayling the Good Book 2011". LeCaNANDian posted it]

Dear ----:

I watched the Grayling talk, and found him obviously very learned and eloquent, but didn't come away much changed by anything he said. For one, I feel he posits too strong a divide being between traditions that are "secular" and those that are "religious." This is something I find true of most figures in the "New Atheism" movement: they assume a strict divide where often there isn't one. Here the issue becomes more salient because Grayling is concerned to valorize ancient thinkers like Aristotle or Socrates as against the "religious tradition."

The problem is that one can't set up a clear border between religious/secular and then put Socrates on one side and, say, ancient "religious" thinkers on the other. Yes, there is a real thing called philosophy, and Socrates fits the definition: "thinking for oneself," weighing and sifting and proceeding by dialectic, etc. But still the Greek philosophers had a very strong sense of the divine--Socrates had his daimon, and Plato certainly conceived the realm of Pure Forms as both transcendent and existent--while much of the ancient Christian tradition, even books in the biblical canon, engage in dialectics similar to those we find in the Greeks. Not to mention what happens when we reach the third and fourth century (cf. Augustine). So, on the one hand, the biblical canon contains masterpieces of skeptical reason (Ecclesiastes, for one); on the other, the Greek and Roman philosophical writers contain religious enthusiasm (as the Platonic tradition develops, for instance). A similar kind of overlap can be seen in the Renaissance and Enlightenment--though it's true that a stronger secular tradition breaks away in the latter period.

Grayling posited another suspect dichotomy when he addressed how we create ethical systems. So: Either 1) the ethical is a response to a requirement from some transcendent source, or 2) it is developed from human reason based on human experience. Again, talking of ethics, I don't think the dichotomy holds up. Or: It holds up only at a very "popular" level, such as when you put a Texas fundamentalist with scant education face to face with a young atheist with scant education. In this kind of debate thinking is scarcely approached by either side. Thinking, so prized by Grayling, only begins once discourse develops beyond a certain level (particularly: once discourse begins to put itself in question). When that happens, the two kinds of ethical "ground," as Grayling might say, often start overlapping. Secular ethics begins positing metaphysical entities that can't be proven to exist, while, in return, religious ethics begins talking about human experience.

Grayling remarked about Buddhism that it was originally a philosophical movement, not a religion: "The Buddha didn't intend to be a god." This is certainly correct, and it led me to think again of a very interesting Christian tradition, namely that represented by the Gospel of Thomas, an ancient Christian text only recently rediscovered during the last century. I'm sure you've heard of Thomas, but don't know if you've read into it (read the text, I mean, or read any commentary). The Thomas tradition does not present Jesus as a god, but more as a charismatic teacher seeking to lead disciples to an awareness of "the kingdom," which is understood as present already but unrealized. The true disciple in this tradition isn't saved by Jesus, as by some divine being of a different essence, but rather awakened by him, whose "twin" he or she is called to become. In Thomas' understanding of Jesus (as is also often true for writers in the Gnostic tradition) you get a kind of deconstruction of Grayling's ethical dichotomy. Because the point for the Thomas tradition is that the "divine source" from which we might get ethical insight is already part of us: it is inside us to be discovered and developed. I.e., to use Grayling's terms, we see in Thomas a "religious ethics" which also depends on a keen awareness and study of the true nature of the "human self in the world." But this latter, according to Grayling's dichotomy, is precisely what a "secular ethics" is supposed to do; it is precisely not what a "religious" ethics does. Does this make Thomas less "religious" and more "humanistic" than the canonical gospels? One might argue so. But my point here should be clear: the divide Grayling seems to want to hold up proves unstable once one gets closer to actual religious, or indeed ancient "secular," traditions.

Further, I believe Grayling's "secular" ethical systems, those created mainly by human reason, are liable to the same kinds of gross superstition and abuse we find in the "religious" ethical systems. Look what happened with Marxism in the last century. And look how our own secular liberalism has become merely a kind of catechism upholding the religion of consumerism and unregulated capitalism. I find similar kinds of fetishization and superstition in popular medieval Christianity as I find in Stalinism. Certainly each had its priesthood and its Inquisition. We in neoliberal society fall prey to like kinds of fetishization, only being lucky in that our own Inquisition hasn't quite developed yet (although I note various trends that way).

I'd really be interested to know your reaction to some of the Thomas-related writing out there. I don't agree with Ron Miller on much as regards his theology, but his book on Thomas is quite good; he gets at an authentic core in Thomas. What's more, you might agree with him:

Ron Miller: The Gospel of Thomas: A Guidebook for Spiritual Practice

Best,

Eric