Whatever Works?
In the current issue of Commonweal, Fr. Robert E. Lauder writes about his interview with Woody Allen, which is available here on our Web site. “As a long-time admirer of [Allen's] work I was already familiar with his general outlook, but I was still surprised at the extreme language he used to describe the pointlessness of human existence,” Fr. Lauder writes. The extremity of Allen’s pessimism is evident throughout the interview. For example, here:
Human existence is a brutal experience to me…it’s a brutal, meaningless experience—an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, brutal, terrible experience, and so it’s what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most.
And here:
[T]here are these oases, and life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…. I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of Deconstructing Harry: we all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.
In Allen’s version of nihilism, works of imagination provide a temporary refuge from the bleakness of the human condition. For another kind of nihilist, though, it is precisely the meagerness of the human imagination, the naturally narrow limits of human consciousness, that shelter us from the bleakness. In John Banville’s new novel The Infinities, an Olympian narrator says it is the ignorance of mortals that makes their existence bearable, if not blissful:
The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world’s totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot, like a whiff of the most lethal sewer gass.
In both of these accounts, the imagination is understood in pragmatic terms, under the sign of Darwin: What is the survival value of our capacity for amusement and distraction, or our incapacity for compassion? One recent answer to the New Atheists’ hatred for religion — an answer typically offered by an older breed of atheists and agnostics — is that religion, like art, is to be valued for its social function rather than as a rival to science. According to the Simon Blackburn (writing in the New Republic), this was the view of the philosopher R. G. Collingwood:
Although art as magic is not art proper, Collingwood accords it the greatest respect. He dismisses more brutally and contemptuously even than Wittgenstein the patronizing view, held by Frazer, Lévy-Bruhl, and other anthropologists of his time, that religion and magic simply amount to bad science, so that the “savage mind” is one lacking the most elementary knowledge of cause and effect. He also dismisses the ludicrous Freudian view that magic is a kind of neurosis in which the patient supposes that by wishing for a thing he can bring it about. Instead, Collingwood insists, surely correctly, that the end of magic is the raising and channeling of emotion: “magical activity is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanism of practical life with the current that drives it.” Its true purpose is not, say, to avert natural catastrophes, but to “produce in men an emotional state of willingness to bear them with fortitude and hope.”
This attitude gave Collingwood an uncommon sympathy with religious ritual and practice, and a much more realistic understanding of its ongoing place in human life. He also enables us to see why the majority of people, including those like myself who have no religious attachments, are nevertheless embarrassed at the dogmatic contempt poured on religious practice by our more militant atheists. Every sane person recognizes at some level that dance, music, poetry, and ritual may be just what you need as you prepare to face a battle, or desolation, failure, grief, or death.
On this view, religion is essentially about ritual, and ritual provides motivation. This is very close to what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas now seems to be saying. Famous as a contemporary exponent of neo-Kantian universalism, Habermas now concedes that the more modern societies scrub themselves clean of all religious commitments, the more trouble they have ginning up solidarity. Liberal secularism provides a good engine for progress, but it doesn’t supply its own fuel. (Stanley Fish succintly describes Habermas’s new position in this online New York Times column.) But even if it’s increasingly clear to Habermas that religion has something to offer secular society, it is not yet clear what secular society can afford to offer religion, save a grudging acknowledgment of its usefulness in providing citizens with a reason for égalité and fraternité. (Secular society has the liberté covered.) In a newly translated book titled An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age, Habermas says:
[T]he religious side must accept the authority of ‘natural’ reason as the fallible results of the institutionalized sciences and the basic principles of universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality. Conversely, secular reason may not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith, even though in the end it can accept as reasonable only what it can translate into its own, in principle universally accessible, discourses.
Habermas thinks that European secularism needs to be reminded of its historical roots in Christianity; it did not spring fully formed from Kant’s brow. Stanley Fish doesn’t see how such a reminder can provide secularism with what Habermas thinks it lacks. Fish writes:
Habermas gives us no reason (if you will pardon the word) to believe that such a reminder would be heeded and lead to reason’s being furnished with the motivation-for-solidarity it lacks. Why would secular reason, asked only to acknowledge a genealogical kinship with a form of thought it still compartmentalizes and condescends to, pay serious attention to what that form of thought has to offer? By Habermas’s own account the two great worldviews still remain far apart. Religions resist becoming happy participants in a companionable pluralism and insist on the rightness, for everyone, of their doctrines. Liberal rationality is committed to pluralism and cannot affirm the absolute rightness of anything except its own (empty) proceduralism.The borrowings and one-way concessions Habermas urges seem insufficient to effect a true and fruitful rapprochment. Nothing he proposes would remove the deficiency he acknowledges when he says that the “humanist self-confidence of a philosophical reason which thinks that it is capable of determining what is true and false” has been “shaken” by “the catastrophes of the twentieth century.” The edifice is not going to be propped up and made strong by something so weak as a reminder, and it is not clear at the end of a volume chock-full of rigorous and impassioned deliberations that secular reason can be saved. There is still something missing.
One problem with Habermas’s position, as Fish and others have pointed out, is that religion’s instrumental value may not survive its instrumentalization. It only works as a crutch so long as people believe it is more than a crutch. Even Woody Allen acknowledges that religious people may be happier than he is, on the condition that they are truly self-deceived. In his interview with Fr. Lauder, he recalls an encounter with Billy Graham:
Some people cope better than others. I was with Billy Graham once, and he said that even if it turned out in the end that there is no God and the universe is empty, he would still have had a better life than me. I understand that. If you can delude yourself by believing that there is some kind of Santa Claus out there who is going to bail you out in the end, then it will help you get through. Even if you are proven wrong in the end, you would have had a better life.
“If you can delude yourself…” Self-deception is not the same thing as pretending; to make oneself believe in something, it is not enough to make believe. Playacting won’t provide the social force that compensates for secularism’s inertia — but, as Fish argues, neither will a sincere faith that always yields to secular society whenever the two are in conflict. Pets rarely make good pack animals.
I doubt very much that Billy Graham said anything close to what he quoted. I suggest he be kept away from guns, rope, cliffs and pills. so sad.. too bad..
If I ate at Elaine’s every week, I’d be a nihilist too.
Thanks, be here all week.
Do points of view such as Allen’s ring true to folks here?
Do most people share this view of life and reality? I really doubt it. I think this is one of the reasons that contemporary art, music and literature don’t have a massive popular following. How long has it been since Allen has had a bona fide hit? Istm that hope and romance are still what sell at the box office. The masses deluding themselves, or elitists out of touch with reality?
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” Thoreau.
Jesus explained this dilemna a long time ago when he said that life is more important than posessions. Unhappiness comes with the belief that money or posessions are most desirable. Others base happiness on what others believe about them. All doomed to fail. It is in dying that we live the gospel teaches. Unless the seed die it will not become a tree.
Allen clearly bases his life on self gratification. When he decided to marry his adopted daughter he said: “The heart wants what the heart wants.” We can see where that went—to misery.
It is not always a good idea to associate happiness with religion. The Vatican really concentrates on building empire. This is building power and wealth under the guise of religion. Jesus taught humility and seeking the last place. A place where God comes to fill.
JIm P. –
Why would Allen make up such world-view? Yes, there are others like him. When Jacques and Raissa Maritain were young they decided that if they didn’t find ‘the meaning of life” within a year they would kill themselves. Fortunately, they found Leon Bloy and Thomas Aquinas. As Maritain put it later, there were young French men of his day who “killed themselves with some regularity” because they could not find meaning. I have no reason to doubt what he said. I knew a man, a very fine teacher, who seems to have drunk himself to death over existential questions, and I don’t doubt that these existential ills contribute a great deal of misuse of alcohol and drugs by some people. Most of the rest of the other nihilists seem emotionally better able to be distracted by the good things of life, but when there aren’t many good things in their lives they, it seems to me, are quite self-destructive in one way or another.
But I don’t think that most artists are nihilists. Art has intrinsic, real value that gives some meaning. But there are exceptions. Perhaps the greatest of the abstract expressionists, Mark Rothko, did kill himself. On the other hand, there was Wallace Stevens, perhaps the greatest American poet of the 20th century. He also found reality meaningless, but he was rich enough to buy beautiful things, and he purposely invented a new world, so to speak, of poetic meaning, ≈ Yes, I think he was fooling himself and suspect he realized it eventually. Some say he converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, but his daughter denies it. I find it credible. but who knows.
One does have to wonder however, whether people like Allen are simply suffering from depression. I doubt it because extreme depressives find it extremely difficult to get even the simplist things done. Some can’t even get out of bed. Allen, however, is prolific, so I don’t think he is simply suffering from a chemical imbalance in the brain.
Do points of view such as Allen’s ring true to folks here?
I am not convinced that Woody Allen is wrong, although I am not convinced he is right, either. Many of us are very lucky, but many people are not. Go here and watch One Child’s Story. One of the things I am most proud of doing is sponsoring a child through the Cambodian Children’s Fund, but Tate’s mother (in the video) must certainly have had a wretched life, and she was saved from a wretched death only because Scott Neeson founded the CCF and came along at the right time.
About magic –
New Orleans used to be well-known for voodoo. Well, I’ve got news — it’s still here. There is a voodoo shop within walking distance of my house. (It seems odd to me that the voodoo stuff is sold. The commercialization of the spiritual?)
From what I’ve always heard people go to voodoo practitioners to get some one special thing or have some one special event happen. But there does seem to be a sort of impetus towards the spiritual world. That particular spirit world is sort of transcendent, sort of not. It is certainly more powerful than this one. HIstorical note: white people also went to the black voodoo practitioners sometimes, Catholics included, The thing about voodoo is that sometimes it works. If you *believe* a hex will work it just might. Mind over matter can be extremely powerful, and don’t you forget it.
Well, if God didn’t exist, then I would find life pretty bleak and somewhat absurd. It’s a weak point in my faith: that there is no alternative that I can seriously consider without risk of despair, and in that sense, I don’t really have a choice but to believe.
Similarly I have never believed in the resurrection of the dead as strongly as since my mother died. Now it is obvious to me that I will see her again one day. I know it sounds exactly like I’m deluding myself, yet I cannot shake that certain hope.
Needless to say, that makes my evangelization of atheists uncertain at best!
So, yes, Woody Allen’s view rings true to me. How else is a non-believer supposed to make sense of the world?
The thing about voodoo is that sometimes it works.
Someone noticed that Einstein (or was it one of the other giants of 20th-century physics?) had a horseshoe hanging upside down over a doorway. They said, “You don’t believe in that stuff, do you?” And he responded, “They say it works even if you don’t believe in it.” :-)
Claire, I think Ernesto Buonaiuti also said that we come closest to a vision of the communion of saints when our mother dies (as I also felt).
Woody is like Beckett (though more enjoyable) — he is between the high spiritual sensitivity to suffering that fuels Buddhism and the Book of Job and just everyday bilious nihilism. Artists don’t need to sort out their theology, and it is probably true that the greatest comedy comes from quiet desperation.
I don’t really like Wood Allen much, but I agree with his general notion that life is a relentless parade of horrors and burdens, and it doesn’t improve with age. I don’t think it’s meaningless, though.
“… or you can watch the Marx Brothers.” Amen to that. A finely tuned sense of the absurd helps.
“yet I cannot shake that certain hope.”
Beautifully said/written. Love it.
Whether God exists or not, in the end, we’ll all be together and that’s really all we ever wanted anyways.
As far as personal existential, metaphysical melancholy goes, I find the question, “What is the meaning of life?” far more benign than the vastly more ruthless, “What is meaning?”
In Thomas Metzinger’s ‘Being No One’, he begins a theory of consciousness and the self with the stipulation that we should only hold as valid a theory of consciousness that can explain disorders of consciousness, i.e. neuropsychiatric disorders.
The processes of our consciousness give things meaning, e.g. is that branch shaking from the wind or from a hungry wolf? The self, which is that feeling of self-ownership, “mine-ness or me-ness” is a process that allows us to attend to our bodies, e.g. injuries. Essentially, the self is as much a product of evolution as our legs (for mobility) and our hearts (for circulation).
Just as our legs and hearts can suffer damage and malfunction, so can our self-generating processes inside our brains. We’ve all heard of amputees with phantom limbs, their brains still establish their selves as having the missing limb. Those with Anosognosia have a similar problem: they have been blinded but their brains still establish their selves to include the power of sight, even though they don’t have it anymore. Consequently, they walk around and bump into walls and things, all the while making excuses, because they really do believe that they still have the power or sight. You can’t logically convince them otherwise (at first) because the self is established prior to judgments of truth or falsehood.
Likewise, those with Cotard’s Syndrome often believe that they are dead. The facial recognition processes of their brains have most likely been damaged and when they look in a mirror, they do not recognize their own face and believe that they are either a ghost or shade in hell or a robot or something horrific and meaningless.
Considering how consciousness is utterly chained to the material world, Metzinger proposes that consciousness is probably not the best vehicle for our metaphysical hopes and desires. There is no immutable self; the ego dissolves. This, of course, is nothing mystics haven’t been saying for maybe 2500 years. In Christianity too, I believe there’s a tradition that says the cloud on Mt. Sinai was not a cloud of knowledge, but an utterly dark cloud of unknowing. Maybe the Kingdom of God is only reached by cutting out the middle man, the self.
Metzinger, UC Berkley 2005 Forester Lecture on the Immortality of the Soul (via youtube): http://tinyurl.com/ygchyth
radio interview transcript: http://tinyurl.com/2axm9rq
“If you can delude yourself by believing that there is some kind of Santa Claus out there who is going to bail you out in the end, then it will help you get through. Even if you are proven wrong in the end, you would have had a better life.”
Yes, as Matt suggests, Allen doesn’t understand the nature of faith, and I think that’s why, though I subscribe to his world view, I don’t really like his films. He makes people who are generally pessimistic look selfish and petulant. Allen seems, ultimately, resentful because there are not more “oases” in the mess of life.
A pessimistic person of faith is able to feel gratitude for those oases, perhaps finds them all the sweeter because they are such a surprise.
Do points of view such as Allen’s ring true to folks here?
There really is a lot of suffering in the world and even some Christians (and believers of other religions) have trouble expalining it away or finding meaning in it. Many people distract themselves or anesthetize themselves to this, and some do themselves in. I used to feel this way and still do sometimes.
Playacting won’t provide the social force that compensates for secularism’s inertia — but, as Fish argues, neither will a sincere faith that always yields to secular society whenever the two are in conflict.
Maybe a healthy, sincere faith and a modified secular reason—one that is broader than scientism but still remains reason and not faith—would never conflict, and we could live happily ever after.
Which if any secularism v religion conflicts would occur in a society composed of two kinds of people: Catholic Jacques Maritains and non-Catholic Jacques Maritains?
I hope I’m not missing the point of this thread in suggesting that, among other things, some of the ideas set forth here (Woody Allen and others) suggest the need a genuine and respectful dialogue between the secular and the religious, rather than simply the encounter of two armed camps talking past one another as if the Other were the enemy. A first step here would be an honest reckoning by each side on what it owes the other, a reckoning that each side seems reluctant to make.
Two examples (among countless others). Slavery — defined by JPII as an “intrinsically evil act,” but accepted by church and society for almost two millenia as part of the natural order, came to an end in the West largely because of the Enlightenment, though even that would not have been sufficient without a strong push from a particular kind of Evangelical Christianity (which included neither Roman Catholicism nor standard Anglicanism, Methodism, Lutheranism, etc. etc.) Yet JPII made no reference to the church’s enormous debt here to secular (and Protestant) society and values.
Second, the debate of a few years back over the question of whether to include a reference to Christianity as part of Europe’s inheritance in the new constitution of the EU. There was furious opposition to this on the part of several countries, because of the alleged divisiveness of such a reference. In the end (I think) a mere vague mention of Europe’s “religious heritage” was included, leaving rather the sense that between the decline of ancient Athens and Rome and the Enlightenment of the xviii century, nothing really happened that was important to the European heritage.
This struck me at the time (maybe I’m wrong) as really bad history at best, and thoroughly dishonest history at worst. Rather like writing the history of the US with no reference to slavery and war, or (let’s say) the writing of the history of modern Germany without reference to you know what.
PS I’ve never really liked much Woody Allen (though there are exceptions); his movies start strongly for the first half hour or so and then settle back into the same old story. Tales of Love and War, with its hilarious potboiler view of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, et al., is a splendid exception.
I have always found this little bit from Sleeper hilarious. For those who don’t know the plot, Miles Monroe (Woody Allen), who was the proprietor of the Happy Carrot Health Food Store in our present, has been cryogenically frozen and is thawed 200 years in the future.
Ed,
What Graham is supposed to have said is very much like what Pascal said. What makes you doubt Graham said it?
Jim,
If you read the whole interview, you’ll see that Allen agrees with you about the appeal of hope and romance in film. Only, for him, they appeal because they have so little to do with the rest of life. You ask: Are “the masses deluding themselves, or [are] elitists out of touch with reality?” My guess is that Allen would say that, yes, the nihilists whom you call elitists are in better touch with reality but need to delude or distract themselves as much as anyone else if they are to survive. The distinction is not between the elites and the masses, but between those who knowingly delude themselves with enabling lies or pleasant trivialities and those who sincerely believe in a meaning that doesn’t exist. Or, as a more stringent nihilist might put it, between cowards and fools. I think Allen’s wrong (he’d think I’m a fool), but the fact that few people share his view is surely irrelevant.
David,
It was Neils Bohr.
Brian:
Thanks for the pointer to the Metzinger talk. Well worth watching.
Matthew:
As Camus osaid:
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is.
David:
The scientist was the quantum physicist Neils Bohr, who told the story as an anecdote. Its paradoxical flavor suits quantum physics quite well. In a similar vein, Wolfgang Pauli, another quantum physicist said of his colleague, Paul Dirac, a militant atheist, “There is no God and Dirac is His prophet”.
Brian:
I think you are on the right track. There certainly is a lot of truth to the Buddhist notion of self/no self as there is the apophatic, slightly neo-Platonic Christian tradition of God beyond God.
I do think that hope is a mysterious thing and I posted before a you tube video interpretation of Emily Dickinson’s famous “Hope it the Thing with Feathers”.
I find some of Woody Allen’s films humorous but not overly insightful. And as for his personal angst, I think it is a form of egotistical pride and narcissism that does not, in my view, qualify as art.
That he is hailed as an artist by popular culture says more about our popular culture than it does him.
Sorry folks. But I find extremely esoteric and improbable this mumbo jumbo about self. Certainly those dumb disciples and Apostles did not have a clue. I believe we should be vibrant and whole hearted with the life God gave us through Jesus. We just have to remember to give God all the credit and serve rather than dominate others.
Bill,
Not every metaphysical question can be answered with an ethical injunction.
And as for his personal angst, I think it is a form of egotistical pride and narcissism that does not, in my view, qualify as art.
George D,
There are some interesting reflections in the string titled “Fool Me Once . . . ” about the meaning of “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”
The Purple Rose of Cairo is another film that captures Allen’s world outlook perfectly. The movie begins with Mia Farrow as the Depression era waitress seeking to escape her miserable life for a few minutes at the movies. The handome actor (played by Jeff Daniels) steps down from the screen and, for a time, she enjoys a fanciful, imaginary romance with him. The movie ends just as it began — with Mia Farrow in the movie theatre crying. For Allen, art is just a momentary distraction from the meaninglessness and cruelty of existence.
David:
I do not believe my statement is inappropriate. Woody Allen himself has forwarded his own experience as an exemplar of his world view. His experience, can and should be critiqued. If someone has psychological problems and projects them on to the world and then suggests that that particular wordview is normative for human experience, why is it not fair game to suggest that, in point of fact, the problem lies with him and his perception and not the world. His perception which is certainly NOT a normative nor is it accurate for many people who have different kinds of experience.
According to the interview, his films are autobiographical:
His very personal films deal with ultimate questions, and they often include a character who is a spokesperson for Allen’s own bleak outlook.
Allen’s alter ego, Boris (Larry David), periodically addresses the viewer to explain that when you look at the big picture you see clearly that human reason is inadequate, that life is meaningless, and that all we can do is rely on “whatever works”—whatever helps us survive.
And here is Allen describing himself:
I have said this before in a facetious way, but it is not so facetious: I am a whiner. I do get a certain amount of solace from whining.
And I am somehow being unChristian or uncharitable by not joining him on his self-pity party.
And here is his assessment of believers:
If you can delude yourself by believing that there is some kind of Santa Claus out there who is going to bail you out in the end, then it will help you get through.
Ummmmm…….well I am a believer but do not believe in a Santa Claus in the sky. He has not interest in meaningful dialogue.
He has arrived at his judgement and I at mine.
So be it.
No judgement on his soul or character just a judgement on his particular world view which is, in my opinion, based on psychological issues which he has selected not to address appropriately. That is fine. Just don’t make your whining normative for human experience – it isn’t.
Rather than self-delusion aimed at mitigating meaninglessness, I believe Huizinga’s notion of deep play better captures the process by which we invest reality with meaning.
PS
But in the interest of fairness….
I will agree on one point that he made. Shane is truly a very good movie and I certainly agree that the character of Shane is a heroic and noble one.
George,
You write: “And I am somehow being unChristian or uncharitable by not joining him on his self-pity party.”
I’m not sure about un-Christian, but there is something non-Christian about the shape of your critique. First, there’s a reason why self-pity, as such, is not counted by traditional moral theology as one of the vices. It is pragmatic optimism that counts self-pity as a vice, primarily because it is supposed to be a waste of time and ineffectual. Insofar as what we call self-pity often involves a refusal to acknowledge one’s own fault, the real vice is pride. Insofar as one recognizes that one has been made “pitiable” by one’s own sin, the problem is that one needs God’s pity, not one’s own: Mercy is relational. Finally, insofar as what we call self-pity leads to self-destruction, the real sin is despair.
I think some people end up pitying themselves because they can find no one else to pity them; and when we rebuke them for self-pity what we really mean is that we’d rather they did a better job of concealing their unhappiness.
I also think it is unwise, if not un-Christian, to pathologize beliefs and attitudes we reject — to treat despair, for example, as if it were always only a chemical imbalance in the brain. That’s too easy. The question here is how the world is. Some studies suggest that the clinically depressed are more reliable judges of themselves than the psychologically normal. Of course, it would be impossible for any study to demonstrate that the clinically depressed were also more clear-eyed about the world around them as it really is, since “the world as it really is” is not a clinical category. But you seem to think that the existential judgments of someone who is depressed must be less reliable precisely because they come from someone who is depressed, depression being implicitly defined as the condition that leads one to arrive at bleak existential judgments. I believe the clinical term for that kind of argument is “circular.”
I have said this before in a facetious way, but it is not so facetious: I am a whiner. I do get a certain amount of solace from whining.
A typical Woody Allen paradox. As he also said, “Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.”
I think Commonweal ought to carry more interviews with atheists and agnostics as an antidote for complacency.
Matthew:
I think we should clarify terms. Self pity is connected to sloth, obstinancy in “sin”, and impugning the known truth. All of these are traditional, classical categories of vices in Catholic theology.
I am not advocating a pull yourself by the bootstraps mentality but I am very much advocating the Anthony Demello school of Awareness that says that if you are suffering the problem is in YOU not reality. Demello says, life is easy, it is only hard on our illusions. Drop your illusions and things will be clear. Sure life is suffering – no great insight there. The insight and enlightenment happens when you can transcend that. There is a great scene with the Buddha when the dark spirit says to the Buddha that you have now achieved enlightenment and may flee the world, and the Buddha instead taps the ground (there are statues that represent that moment). The Buddha reveals that enlightenment means engagement with the suffering of the world but in an enlightened way.
All I am trying to say is that the problem that I see with Woody Allen’s depiction is that he has not woken up. Waking up is unpleasant. It feels hard. It’s a drag. But he is too old to still be asleep.
I think that despair is simply an unwillingness to see things the way they are and to reconcile oneself to that reality while teking the responsibility to live a happy and full life (hich involves acting justly)
PS
For a fill that confronts the pain and grittiness of poverty and pain, see Precious
Note also how it ends on an upbeat not but is not filled with sentimentality but there is still hope.
For me, a film like Precious capture in far greater relief suffering, despair, grace and hope.
Anthony:
I agree. Everyone experiences doubt. Even the atheist should experience doubt – “What if it is true”. Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity has a very interesting first chapter on this very issue.
Foxes have holes, birds of the air have nests but the sone of Man has nowhere to lay his head.
And atheists too can be dogmatic.
Atheism is not the default existential postion.
Everyone experiences doubt. Even the atheist should experience doubt – “What if it is true”.
But doubt that it all might be true after all is not necessarily troubling or a cause for fear.
Atheists, like Compte-Sponville, would like there to be an infinitely just and merciful God, who judges each of us after death and doles out punishments and rewards — even if it meant that they themselves are found wanting. After all, such a judgment would make up for the manifest injustice and suffering in this world.
As Albert Camus said, “The world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.” Thus, such a final judgment would provide that clarity. In any event, I don’t think any God worthy of belief would condemn disbelief.
George,
I think we can agree that there’s a rich Buddhist tradition behind your view. Whether there’s a Christian tradition behind it is another matter. Sloth, or acedia, just isn’t the same thing as self-pity. And invoking the “known truth” begs the question.
A woman is abandoned by her husband. She expresses profound, paralyzing sorrow. After a while, someone tells her, “Get over it. This is no longer grief; it’s self-pity.” Someone else says, “No, it’s still grief.” And how will a third person say which of them is right?
You say, “If you are suffering the problem is in YOU not reality.” So a Buddhist or a Christian Scientist might say, but I don’t think there’s any warrant for such a judgment in the Christian tradition, according to which this world is a veil of tears.
When your man de Mello says, “Life is easy, it is only hard on our illusions,” he is speaking to the self-involved denizens of the self-help section; he is not speaking to the woman in Africa whose child just starved to death — or if he is, someone needs to tell him to keep his mouth shut.
Antonio:
But doubt that it all might be true after all is not necessarily troubling or a cause for fear.
Let me share with you a true anecdote from an older man I know.
I had the acquaitance of an older man who was raised in Serbia. He is quite the character – very cynical, very Russian. At any rate, when he was in school as a young boy he said that he would insist that there is a God. As a result he had to attend re-education seminars in the summer where he could be taught atheistic materialsm and learn to be a good Communist.
At the end of the seminar, he said that he approached the teacher and admitted that he could agreed that there was indeed no God. However, he asked the teacher a question. He asked him, tell me why do you fear such a non-existent being?
He said the teacher smiled and laughed and said that he had stumbled upon the one question that stumped him.
Of course it goes without saying that he was not an atheist strictly speaking.
And invoking the “known truth” begs the question.
Actually, Pilate famously asked that very question with the Truth standing right in front of him.
Then, as now, there can be no reply.
Matthew –
Rome did tell deMello to keep his mouth shut. He was an Indian Jesuit priest who was censured by the CDF, and in his case, I think the Vatican was right. (God help me, but I have to admit it.) He was wise in many ways, I think, but he wasn’t much of a Christian theologian.
(I’m not at all sure, however, about the Vatican’s censure happening in a Christian way.)
George –
Self-pity not a virtue? How can that be when pity (misericordia) is a virtue.
Woody once saved my life. Stranded for hours in Swansea, Wales, a town then occupied by soccer hooligans banging dustbin lids and intoning a warlike chant, I took refuge in a cinema and watched “Crimes and Misdeameanors” — pseudo-profound escapism no doubt — till the delayed boat was ready to set sail. Two hours of misery were replaced by two hours of magic. What more should we ask from our movie directors?
Of course Anthony de Mello was a psychologist and not a theologian. And one should review his entire book, there is an entire process that one goes through in terms of heightening awareness.
All I can say, is that when I did enter into it a few years ago, it enhanced my prayer life and demeanour. I was more relaxed and present. Not that I am enlightened by any stretch but I tend to be a a fan of his psychology.
I didn’t agree with the posthumous warning given by Rome to de Mello and I hope that like Teillhard, he will be vindicated in time. But I digress.
Misericordia is usually associated with mercy which is different than pity.
deMello’s works I have read (none of them on psychology) are full of theological assumptions and explicit statements, and in my opinion they are clearly not consistent with Catholic teachings. I don’t have any of his books handy, but as I remember he clearly accepted the sort of identification of self and God that is what the West calls pantheistic. Specifically it is of the the-whole-is-the-part-and-the-part-is-the-whole variety of pantheism.. No wonder he was censured.
As to “misericordia” my Cassell’s Latin dictionary gives “pity” as the first translation. In any event, I”ll just recommend Job as an example of a man who pitied himself and complained to God. He was then rewarded by Jahweh because Job told the truth: that it seems that God had been unjust to Job, that his suffering was not dserved. Job’s “friends” were censured by God for telling Job that his suffering was his own fault.
Well, anyway I miss the Woody Allen of the early films and the 1971 Dick Cavett interview. Angst-ridden or not, he was a lot more fun to watch back then when he could make fun of his neuroses. For film buffs, I recommend “When the Shooting Stops, the Cutting Begins”, written by film editor Ralph Rosenblum, In it, Rosenblum describes working with Allen to create “Annie Hall” from what started out as a series of disconnected comedy vignettes.
Bill,
Not every metaphysical question can be answered with an ethical injunction.”
Mathew,
True but in this subject it can. Spiritual progress and a joyful attitude are intrinsically related to one’s ethical and generous actions toward others. There is no more surefire way of getting out of depression than extending oneself to others. By reaching out and helping others we not only obey the injunction love thy neighbor but are richly rewarded for it. This is what Jesus meant when he said: “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
George,
An old joke: Once upon a time a proper Boston lady, who was a Christian Scientist, went to pay a visit to one of her friends. A housekeeper came to the door. “Is the lady of the house in?” asked the Christian Scientist. The housekeeper answered that her employer was ill and in bed. “Oh, she’s not ill,” the Christian Scientist replied, “she thinks she’s ill.” A few days later she returned to her friend’s house. The housekeeper met her at the door. “Is the lady of the house available today?” the Christian Scientist asked. The housekeeper answer, “The lady of the house thinks she’s dead.”
Spiritual progress and a joyful attitude are intrinsically related to one’s ethical and generous actions toward others.
The metaphysical issues are not resolved by acts of selflessness.
The mother who rescues her child or the soldier who sacrifices his life to save his comrades may not be not thinking of or motivated by the metaphysical implications of their acts. One’s atheism or theism is not necessarily the driving factor behind such acts of human solidarity. They can, of course, also motivate acts of barbaric cruelty.
[T]ell me why do you fear such a non-existent being?
Because fear of such a punitive God is instilled in childhood. Such fear is fully expressed in Jonathen Edwards’ famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. Also, the one thing that may be worse than a punitive God is the thought of an indifferent, meaningless universe.
Let me offer a few comments on the Habermas-Fish part of this thread.
First, in any non-tyrannical, non-totalitarian political society, there are several distinct domains of activity, e.g., political, economic, artistic, religious, technological activity, each of which has distinctive norms, aspirations, vulnerabilities. These domains overlap inasmuch as most, if not all members of the society take part in the activities of several of these domains. A distinguishing characteristic of modern democratic regimes is that part of the activity of the political domain is both to respect the integrity of each of these other domains and to prevent any of the other domains from improperly encroaching on one another. This political task in never finally complete. No less fundamental to some of these domains, especially the political domain and the religious domain, is the preservation of its own distinct status.
Now, Habermas and Fish apparently agree that modern liberal, “procedural” democratic regimes lack sufficient resources to promote or preserve solidarity. So Habermas suggests that the resources of the religious domain might well be able to supply the needed resources. Fish and the two critics of Habermas that Fish cites claim that Habermas’s proposal cannot succeed because it would require the “instrumentalization” of religion, something that religious people could not in good conscience accept.
Notice though that the solidarity in question here is civil or political solidarity. Because the political domain is necessarily concerned with the preservation of the body politic, it will always ask whether the activity in other domains is consistent with its own objectives. In that sense, it always “instrumentalizes” these other sorts of activity.
Hence, I would argue (1) that Habermas has indeed identified a major problem that confronts mainline liberal democratic politics, (2) that the criticism offered by Fish et al is misplaced, and (3) that there is no definitive resolution to the problem Habermas, along with such other thinkers as Michael Walzer, has identified, but nonetheless, Habermas has performed a very valuable service in giving this problem the attention it deserves.
I would offer in partial support of my claims the historical record of the legal interpretation of the establishment and free exercise clauses of the U. S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
If there is any merit to what i say here, then, in the “court of the Gentiles,” we should welcome Habermas’s contribution without unduly criticizing him for its limits. Fish et al show us that Habermas does not solve the problem he identifies, but neither do they. If they make any positive contribution, I’ve missed it.
Bernard,
A few comments about your very shrewd comments. First, I don’t think it was Fish’s purpose to knock Habermas down a notch. The main point of that post, as I read it, was that Habermas’s new-found respect for the ethical resources of religion was a welcome turn. Yes, Fish questions the stability of the balance Habermas wants to strike between religious belief and liberal democracy; and Fish does not try, here or elsewhere, to strike a better balance, preferring to emphasize the incommensurability of religious commitments with those of secular pluralism. Maybe you’re right: maybe that’s fishy. It’s certainly Fish. But I do think Fish is right to say that the social benefits of religious belief are hard to peel away from other features of religion that most secular liberals are bound to view as unwelcome constraints. It’s not just a question of keeping the distinct domains from encroaching on one another; it’s also about integrating the several priorities within these separate domains into the ethos of a single society. Like the political task of protecting the ingegrity of each of the domains themselves, the cultural task of integrating the domains into a single society is “never complete.” Maybe all the secular state can say to religion is “Thank you for making our citizens decent,” but the culture of secular liberalism may need to say more if it expects to rely on virtues associated with religious belief.
Ann Olivier, I haven’t read De Mello, but he may be someone like Eckhart, censured for reasons that sound similar. Of course Eckhart is revered as a great spiritual master today.
And looming in the background is the sublime Sankara and the Upanishadic tat twam asi — nto to be scoffed at even in the name of Catholic orthodoxy. Rudolf Otto compared Sankara and Eckhart in Mysticism East and West (which I have not yet read).
I have yet to read of any scientist suffering from Woody Allen’s sense of existential despair.
Scientists, who find order and beauty coexisting with mystery, don’t seem to attach much significance to the issue of meaninglessness. Also — I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the symptoms are not found among the adherents of Eastern religions either.
Fr. O’Leary –
I’m not surprised you haven’t read deMello. He wrote popular self-help books of a spiritual nature, but nothing profound. I only read some because many, many years ago, when meditation was not yet popularly accepted, I started to do a little book about mainly non-religious types of meditation, and deMello wrote about some methods.
Not all mystics reach the same object, Otto to the contrary not withstanding. I started but didnt finish “Mysticism East and West”. That book has done a great deal of harm, I think. The evidence is against it. I go with R.C. Zaehner’s ‘Mysticism: Sacred and Profane’, in which he distinguished several types of basically different mystical experiences with different objects, and in only one of them does the mystic meet God. I agree that Shankara and deMello are talking about the same sort of experience, but not Eckhardt, though I suspect, in fact, that Eckhardt might have had more than one kind. But all that’s a whole different thread or a whole dozen different threads.
Interesting observation, Antonio. Alfred North Whitehead, the great mathematician/logician/philosopher(?) was a depressive. At times his wife and his friend Bertrand Russell were afraid he’d kill himself. But mathematicians aren’t scientists in the ordinary sense of the term. Allan Turing did kill himself, and Wittgenstein often wanted to. But the latter seems to have sufferd from depression too.
Do you know of any scientists who simply suffered from depression? It would be extremely interesting in none did.
Oops — should be “if none did”.
Thanks, Matthew, for your kind reply to my comments. Let me just add one more consideration. Religious communities, e.g., Catholics, also have a concern about solidarity among their members. Let’s call this “credal solidarity.” In democratic political societies there is likely to be tension between those charged with promoting political solidarity and those charged with promoting credal solidarity. Hence the “Church-State issues.” So far as I can see, this tension is something that cannot be definitively resolved. Rather, it is something that needs to be managed, something that calls for practical wisdom from both sides.
Ann:
Allan Turing did kill himself.
Allan Turing’s suicide was believed to be a consequence of his being ‘outed’ and criminally prosecuted for homosexuality.
Antonio –
Turing was such a strange man I don’t know if anyone can safely say why he killed himself. He was quite unbalanced. As I remember his psychiatrist was appalled by what Turing wrote about his mother in his journals. Apparently he was quite violently inclined towards her. Did he suffer from depression? Did he suffer from existential despair? Or both? There’s a fascinating biography of him, “Allan Turing: The Enigma”. As I remember the author doesn’t go into those questions. He does say that Turing killed himself by eating a poisoned apple. He apparently identified with Snow While. What a tragic figure.
From the UK Daily Mail ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212910/How-Britain-drove-greatest-genius-Alan-Turing-suicide–just-gay.html )
The London-born mathematician was convicted of ‘gross indecency with a male’ in March 1952. Instead of prison, he was sentenced to chemical castration – injections of the female hormone oestrogen, designed to suppress his homosexuality.
The injections destroyed Turing’s athletic frame (he would have run the marathon for Britain at the 1948 London Olympics if it hadn’t been for an injury) and turned him into a bloated monster.
In the words of one of his biographers, it also set the diffident genius on a ‘slow, sad descent into grief and madness’.
As a consequence, on June 7, 1954, just two weeks before his 42nd birthday, the softly-spoken genius killed himself by taking a bite out of an apple that he had dipped in cyanide.