Canadian Mennonite’s blog

For better or worse I find myself continually interested in knowing, not so much knowledge, or perhaps more specifically I guess I am interested in knowledge about knowing (epistemology to drop the 10 dollar term). Just how is it that we know something to be true, or come to any sort of knowledge for that matter. Listening to a church Christmas concert this year two lines suddenly entered my mind as though encountering them for the first time,

Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king,

Do you know what I know?

The words rushed through me leaving in their wake wave after wave of emotion. Or maybe they dropped on me like stone, like a living stone on my stagnant sense of knowledge and drove the waves outward, out to the ends, to surface of my body that I trust to sense and know the world around me. When waves first peaked they were numbing leaving room for no other thoughts or thinking and as the waves ebbed my returned feelings kept telling me, “But the king has access to knowledge.” What can be known the king is able to know. Now I may not be an explicit fan of the king but if there is something to be known the king can extend the reach of his hand to grasp and acquire it. And what of the rhetorical flaunt that the shepherd boy adds,

In your palace walls mighty king,

Do you know what I know?

No I try not to fly the banner of the king but the truth is that I am on the side of the king. Perhaps I position myself as the king or prostrate myself before kings. This is true because of how these lines offended me deeply, unconsciously. I have been building palace walls in my days even in my sleep.  God forgive me.

There is more than one knowing. There are thrones of knowledge. But there is also knowing that is no knowledge.

And the shepherd boy did not create his own knowing. His knowing was born of seeing and hearing.

Do you see what I see?

Do you hear what I hear?

In this already established new year may we be granted eyes to see and ears to hear a knowledge drifting sometimes rushing low to the ground stealing past palace walls filling the hearts and minds of those without king or country. For the Gospel is a refugee knowledge or maybe a refugee of knowledge tented under the stars and in touch with the wind.

Part I; Part II; Part III

Alright, now I admit that my multi-part series on MacIntyre’s After Virtue has not exactly been the most riveting work and I suspect that wading into any of the post has given some of you bad college flashbacks but I maintain the importance of what M. is trying to communicate.  We do not function with a coherent sense of ethical decision making.  Now I am not fully convinced of M.’s response to this situation but understanding our situation is pretty important.  So read on to hear about M.’s positive contribution to ethics.

Continue reading ‘After Virtue Part IV – What is a Virtue?’

Part I

Part II

Sorry I have been a little slack on following through with my discussion of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.  I mentioned in the previous post that M. uses three main characters to describe contemporary discourse on ethics, which he calls emotivist (based on subjective feeling or will).

There is the Rich Aesthete who is supplied with ample means but no particular end to direct them and so lives with a sense of experimentation and exploration. There is the Bureaucratic Manager who views all of life including humanity as means to be ordered in the most effective manner towards the predetermined ends of production. Then there is the Therapist who cannot speak of larger human ends but only of human individuals as ends unto themselves. These characters reflect the modern West’s detachment to the larger moral framework of understanding humanity’s telos or goal. MacIntyre identifies this concept of telos as crucial in recovering a coherent moral framework.

MacIntyre offers a clearly negative evaluation of the Enlightenment that produced these characters. The Enlightenment is characterized as an attempt to liberate society from the restrictions of divine moral law imposed by the church. Having declared the church unfit to regulate moral discourse philosophers began the task of establishing a rational basis for morality. What followed is described by MacIntyre as almost a comedy of errors in the developments from David Hume to Immanual Kant to Soren Kierkegaard. This progression is summarized clearly in the following,

Just as Hume seeks to found morality on the passions because his arguments have excluded the possibility of founding it on reason, so Kant founds it on reason because his arguments have excluded the possibility of founding it on the passions, and Kierkegaard on criterionless fundamental choice because of what he takes to be the compelling nature of the considerations which exclude both reason and passions… . Thus the vindication of each position was made to rest in crucial part upon the failure of the other two, and the sum total of the effective criticism of each position by the others turned out to be the failure of all (pg. 49-50).

What is missing from all these models and what is necessary for morality according to MacIntyre is an understanding of humanity as it could be, or humanity’s telos. Without this any moral content loses its relationship to those who practice it. The consequences of this failed project is a society run primarily by Bureaucratic Managers who order things according to effectiveness and production and not the moral ends of humanity.

MacIntyre argues that nearly all contemporary expressions of ethics are best exemplified in the work of Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche who argued most clearly that what passes for moral objectivity is in fact the expression of subjective will. This leads MacIntyre to the pivotal chapter Nietzsche or Aristotle?. It is these two figures who are viewed as offering the only true alternatives in moral discourse. Aristotle was the framework of premodern ethics and Nietzsche is viewed as the culmination of modern ethics. MacIntyre then poses his critical question, “was it right in the first place to reject Aristotle?” (pg. 117). It is in the following chapters that MacIntyre then begins to articulate a concept of virtues as it was expressed not only by Aristotle but also in early heroic literature, in Athens, in the medieval period, as well as certain modern expressions.

I have begun reading Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. From the first pages of this journal-like ‘factless autobiography’ something was stirred in me. Suddenly the simple and heretical phrase emerged from within me claiming, “This book will be my salvation.” I have never had that sensation before in reading. I began to feel like the text itself, with or without my permission, was beginning to search me. It was beginning to read me aloud back to me. The text was keeping in step with me. As I thought it too was thinking. As I thought it was already thinking ahead of me. At every possible turn it opened paths that I did not know existed. And then it became clearer. I cannot anticipate its goal, its destination, and so I must humbly follow it. So I must decide if its is a saviour or a false messiah. I cannot know this ahead of time because I cannot assume to know where I will end up if I continue to follow. As of now I am reading in faith. But then I ask myself what this means for the church, for my faith in God. Have I not already determined the end of my faith, its goal and destination? Is not the church just a well-rehearsed construct that offers no real surprise or alternative? Could this text actually demand more faith than my church? Forgive my heresy for the moment. And as though my textual companion was already anticipating all this I read the simple and revelatory phrase, “I read and am liberated.” I have already found myself in the text. The text can allow me to be more of myself than I am. I read on … for who I can still become? The author makes no claims as a messiah in fact I found out that this manuscript was found in a trunk after his death. The text is making no claims to power or control. And still I read on and so I read the cry, “Do my words ring in anyone else’s soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?” Forgive my heresy but tonight … I will read on.

Wandering the Ethical Wilderness with Alasdair MacIntytre
Part I

After sketching a landscape in which our moral framework has been greatly disfigured and fragmented over time MacIntyre proceeds with the observation that most moral or ethical debates have no real end.  War is wrong, war can establish peace, war can be just.  Abortion is unjust, abortion can be a necessary evil, women deserve to have rights over their bodies.  These debates continue on through the years over kitchen tables, newspaper editorials, academic periodicals and government debates.  Ethical debates get reduced to issues which produce opposing parties (and therefore battles of will) which in turn accept no common criteria for decision making even though we may evoke larger paradigms such as justice or duty or dignity.  M. asserts that we have all but lost connection to the original formation of these larger moral categories and so there can be no decision making when it comes to ethics because the only thing in play is “expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling,” which he labels as emotivism.  With emotivism there can be no appeal to something shared and agreed upon unless it so happens that a culture’s preferences happen to align.  What emerged then as moral standards came from those with the greatest influence and abilities of persuasion.

However we might agree or disagree with this theoretical understanding of moral thinking M. asserts that western morality has simply embodied this approach as true.

This chapter resounded so clearly in my mind as I raced through the endless debates and conversations I have carried on with friends, family and strangers only to come out either exhausted or frustrated or most likely both.  We have lost a common tradition of moral thinking and replaced it with competing wills to power (M. sees Nietzsche’s characterization as essentially correct).  So what do the moral characters of M.’s modern emotivist morality look like?  He turns to this in subsequent chapters as he explores the Rich Aesthete, the Bureaucratic Manager and the Therapist.

I came across the name Alasdair MacIntyre as I am sure many others have in the work of Stanley Hauerwas.  And as you read more Hauerwas you encounter again and again MacIntyre.  I am currently taking a course in professional ethics in counselling and was given the opportunity to choose a text to read and review.  I immediately took the opportunity to finally crack open MacIntyre’s After Virtue.  I am, so far, quite intrigued and hope to share a bit of my journey into the text with you.

MacIntyre begins his work by asking the reader to imagine.  Imagine that there were a disaster in the field of natural science.  “Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed.”  And finally a political power comes into place and bans science from being taught or practiced.  In time though there is a movement to revive this ancient practice and a new generation learns piecemeal from the scraps that remain.  A new expression of science emerges but it remains arbitrary based on partial and random bits of knowledge that have survived.  No one realizes the inaccuracy of what they are doing because they have no memory or recorded history of science as it was in its totality.  MacIntyre suggests that this imagined state of affairs for the natural sciences is analogous to the current state ethics.  Their remains scraps and fragments of ethical language and reasoning but they no longer fit into the coherent whole from which these concepts and practices emerged.

This was an unexpected but helpful framework by MacIntyre to introduce his exploration and retrieval of particular moral traditions.  I think the image by and large holds.  We continue to preserve a particular vocabulary around ethics.  We speak of justice, honesty, commitment, integrity, intention, respect, values, etc. and yet these terms tend to be stretched and shifted with an elasticity that makes us wonder where and how they can gain positive and ethical traction in our age.  MacIntyre seems to suggest that there is indeed a way forward in ethics that is, well, ethical.  Let’s see where it goes.

Now I suspect these few seconds of video elicited at least a few adjectives, interrogatives and maybe even some expletives.  I hope some of you asked the simple question ‘Why?’.  I also imagine that many of you actually, at least implicitly, already know why.  Why is it that you can submit some basic searches on YouTube and find scores of people doing things that strike us as almost unbearably stupid?

Heck for your viewing pleasure here is another pole walking attempt.

You may also notice that this phenomenon is practically the exclusive domain of young men.  Coincidence … I think not.  Coming across this video reminded me of two things.  The first is a short story I am working on that reflects on my experience of raising beef cattle in southern Manitoba.  What stood out to me as this piece progressed was the role of castrating and de-horning the young bulls stripping them, perhaps, of some primal layer of wild and reckless masculinity.  I will leave that thought to develop another time.

Second, this video reminded me of Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Underground (bear with me).  The Underground Man says, “So this is it – this is it at last – a head-on clash with real life!”  And so we have what comes to close to how I would characterize Dostoevsky’s work.  In each work it seems that D is willing to walk out from pole to pole knowing the crossing or crashing will, hopefully, bring an encounter with ‘real life’.

Dostoevsky will take any step and make any turn necessary so that there will be a possibility for the real.  The Underground Man both despises and feels despised by his anonymous audience.  He attempts to recount his life with brutal honesty which means being honestly deceptive at times.  He throws any notion of consistency out into the street for it is being tossed on your head into the street that one might actually learn something about one’s self.  The Underground Man concludes spitefully that he was sorry for ever starting this account of his life recognizing that is was a pursuit in vanity and has moved away from literature.  For, “[a] novel must have a hero, and here I seemed to have deliberately gathered together all the characteristics of an anti-hero, and, above all, all this is certain to produce a most unpleasant impression because we have all lost touch with life, we are all cripples, every one of us – more or less.”  We all began on pole and fallen so we may as well try and walk them again.  He goes on to tell us that because of our disability with are left with a disgust for any encounter, any taste with ‘real life.’ In response to any rejections his audience might raise for this view the writer continues by saying that, “for my part, I have merely carried to extremes in my life what you have not dared to carry even half-way, and, in addition, you have mistaken your cowardice for common sense and have found comfort in that, deceiving yourselves.”  You have seen the poles, thought of venturing out onto them but said to yourself it would not be prudent and thought yourself the wiser.  And even after this the Underground Man is not finished.

My opening quotation from this short story came about half-way through the narrative and immediately guided me the rest of the way.  It has crystallized for me what is clear to all of us.  As humans we act out and articulate the desire for something ‘real’.  Though I don’t think we do this for all of our life.  Realness in childhood is knowing that the world is more than it is.  Realness is creative and unstable.  Realness becomes in young adulthood more concrete as we begin to pursue tangible goals in love and vocation.  Because the real was always more and bigger than ourselves it was never captured or tamed and so in time most of us began to simply give up on the real and sought the comfortable and stable.  And so from below the ordered streets and time-conscious pedestrians the Underground Man emerges not with a challenge but with an assertion and a condemnation.  I have followed through and looked around the corners of the dark corridors of the real.  I have said yes to all of life.  The pitch of the Underground Man rises in its crescendo.  In deceiving yourselves “as a matter fact, I seem to be much more alive than you.  Come, look into it more closely!  Why, we do not even know where we are to find real life, or what it is, or what it is called… . We even find it hard to be men, men of real flesh and blood, our own flesh and blood.  We are ashamed of it.  We think it a disgrace.”  The Underground Man includes himself in this condemnation.  I think gender in this language should remain specific.  I hope to develop this more in Part II.

I came across this great article on the life and faith(?) of David Bazan.  Here is a post I wrote for my old blog on my own experience with this great performer in relation to my own ministry experience.  The post was originally titled ‘Ministers of Death’

I suspect you can guess who I am (with my star struck eyes) and who Bazan is (apparently chewing tobacco or something).

I have been listening to Bazan’s music for some ten years now. His music has always represented a brave and engaged criticism of Christian religion. What sets his approach apart from more reactionary criticism is how honest he remains in his own sense of hopefulness to the spirit of faith. After the show I talked with him and asked if he kept any personal ties to the church. He said that his wife and daughter attend church but that he had ‘made his exit’ (adding a comment of it being a hopeful exit; I think is how he put it). Having grown up as a pastor’s kid he has tried to distance himself from the institution with an attempt to suspend his received assumptions. What remains is still a sense of God’s existence, which in his words has created a strong dissonance to where he thought he was going (atheism). He admits that this could simply be the result of such an entrenched world view that he received growing up. I would have liked to talk longer.
David Bazan remains for me a of minister of death. A minister in the truest sense (though prophet may be a more appropriate term) in that his engagement with the social implications of faith and religion remain significant in his work. The role of death functions prominently in much of his lyrics whether it is physical death, the death of a relationship or the death certain beliefs. To those in the church who will listen this ministry of death injects needed perspective and the possibility of change and movement.  I believe it was Flannery O’Connor (or someone speaking about her work) who said that the reason an artist focuses on death is because death is ‘gettgin somewhere’.  In transition to the second significant event of the week (when this post was written) here are his lyrics to “Priest and Paramedics” (see below for video).

Paramedics brave and strong
Up before the break of dawn
Putting poker faces on
Broken bodies all day long
The neighbors heard a fight
Someone had a knife
It must have have been the wife
Husband’s lost a lot of blood
He wakes up screaming, “Oh my God
Am I going to die?
Am I going to die?”
As they strapped his arms down to his sides
At times like these they’d been taught to lie
“Buddy, just calm down, you’ll be all right”

Several friends came to his grave
His children were so well-behaved
As the priest got up to speak
The assembly craved relief
But he himself had given up
So instead he offered them this bitter cup
“You’re going to die
We’re all going to die
Could be twenty years, could be tonight
Lately I have been wondering why
We go to so much trouble
To postpone the unavoidable
And prolong the pain of being alive”

I performed my second funeral yesterday and the first on my own. I had never met the man who passed away. He was 48 and died of a heart attack in his sleep with no warning (a husband and father of two). As a minister of death who works firmly within the institutional church my work stands in some contrast to David Bazan’s. I hope to make death a little more palatable so that its hemorrhaging force move through the system with less resistance. In relation to death I often recall the words at the close of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Marlow is trying to recount the words of judgment at Kurtz’s death to Kurtz’s wife. He fails in transmitting this message of death, instead he says that Kurtz uttered her name at his death. Marlow says this in response to his action,

It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall on my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he only wanted justice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark - too dark altogether . . .

David Bazan appears liberated to speak some of those dark words, but what is his community that needs to hear the dark words of faith if he remains largely unheard outside the church walls? My speech is modified within these walls and not all for bad. Some things are too crushing and need mediating, but the right mediator is crucial. I wrestle between the ministries of death. I hope to continue in both, in some way.

This is the final paragraph in the last letter that Rilke wrote to Franz Kappus,

Art too is only a way of living, and, however one lives, one can, unwittingly, prepare oneself for it; in all that is real one is closer to it and more nearly neighbored than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend proximity to some art, in practice belie and assail the existence of all art, as for instance the whole of journalism does and almost all criticism and three-quarters of what is called and wants to be called literature. I am glad, in a word, that you have surmounted the danger of falling into this sort of thing and are somewhere in a rough reality being solitary and courageous. May the year that is at hand uphold and strengthen you in that.

I suspect that most of us with some appreciation towards the arts feel a little sting in Rilke’s parting words. I also suspect that Rilke is not interested in criticizing professions as such but in criticizing those who “pretend proximity”. Nature, reality and truth will not be fooled. Rilke believes that they can be trusted, but this in turn means that they must be trusted. We cannot fool or manipulate art and beauty. Proximity and presence is key both to the formation of identity and to the healthy relationships with others. Rilke’s call inward demands that we begin analyzing or most primal walls, those interior walls that divide our passions, goals and compulsions. What have we ghettoized in our self? What is it in us that remains hermetically sealed? This movement is necessary first because it in turn affects our external sensual reality. In greater self-understanding we develop courage and stability to allow ourselves to “presence” reality and not pretend proximity. There is no peer review here that can validate our interior and the movement is not natural. Much of Rilke’s admonishing focuses around receiving the difficult. This can of course be reduced to pathology and veiled masochism, but this is not truly difficult. The relationship between presence and difficulty is key here. To experience presence we need identify particular dividing walls and either dismantle or at least gate them. Walls, however, are the very essence of our grasp for control and power. To take down a wall is contrary to the nature individual self-preservation, or at the very least it is an act of trust beyond one’s self. The movement of difficulty is the movement of de-centralizing a personal position of power. This however, is also the movement and possibility of presence, even communion.

With respect to our place in the future Rilke says,

The future stands firm, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.

In an attempt to get my own head around Rilke’s thought in the following paragraphs I will quote in full with perhaps some brief comments clarifying what I am focusing on or perceiving.

And to speak of solitude again, it becomes always clearer that this is at bottom not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then; for all points upon which our eye has been accustomed to rest are taken from us, there is nothing near any more and everything far is infinitely far. A person removed from his own room, almost without preparation and transition, and set upon the height of a great mountain range, would feel something of the sort: an unparalleled insecurity, an abandonment to something inexpressible would almost annihilate him. He would think himself falling or hurled into space, or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a monstrous lie his brain would have to invent to catch up with and explain the state of his senses!

Why is it that the movement towards the solitary is so disorientating? I have written elsewhere that I cannot conceive of a non-relational reality, which seems to make this idea of primal solitude a problem.  While that may be true I wonder if what Rilke is getting at is that our notion of connection or relationship is more often the connection to ourselves which we see in others. We love in others what we love in ourselves and therefore do not love others at all.  We hate (or create) in others what we also hate. We are disorientated in solitude because we have lost the self-perceived affirmation we find in others.

So for him who becomes solitary all distances, all measures change; of these changes many take place suddenly, and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, extraordinary imaginings and singular sensations arise that seem to grow out beyond all bearing. But is necessary for us to experience that too. We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it.

This is where my sense of Rilke’s transcendence emerges. By transcendence I mean openness.

That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called “visions,” the whole so-called “spirit-world,” death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. [emphasis mine]

Then he writes this in connection to human relationships.

For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed; it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own experience.  [emphasis mine]

Rilke goes on to encourage Mr. Kappus to explore the contours of his world criticizing humanity for becoming to accommodating to their environment. He continues,

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Far from being an attempt to view the world through rose colored glasses Rilke here advocates a “narrow path” recognizing that we cannot trust the smooth and the easy. This path is both unstable and promises no fruit. Rather, this perspective opens wide the embrace of terror and abyss with the knowledge that they are not embedded or foundational in the created order. They too will be dissolved or as Rilke sees it transformed as we approach them in beauty and bravery.