Mystics, scholastics, Ferengi…

We’re zipping along in Co-Phi (in the course formerly known as Intro), trying to get a rough feel for the wide historical landscape of philosophy before returning to double down on many of the same figures and topics through the lens of Doubt. The Big Picture offers needed perspective, the more the better.

Today we’re leaping first to mysticism and zen. In the process we skip a bit of theology, but let’s not overshoot Philo (whose name is too perfect, for his discipline– kind of like Osopher). He “reinterpreted Biblical tales as mythic statements about the nature of the human condition and humanity’s relationship to the divine.” That can still get you in trouble, where I live, and he did it back in the day when Jesus was still walking the earth.

“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” And what is the point of that question? I think you have to listen very intently (or with very specific intent), to hear the right answer: things are what they are through their significant relations, and through nothing else. (Or is it just Nothing?) So, the sound of one hand clapping must be something like Pythagoras‘s harmonious music of the spheres… but you won’t hear it so long as you think of yourself as separate from all the notes that create the sound. It’s a sound indistinguishable, to the external ear, from silence. The point of asking the question is to get you to notice the sound of silence, and the resonance of it. Paul Simon is not a Buddhist, is he? “Hello darkness, my old friend…”

Speaking (as we started to, a paragraph ago) of “walking the earth”: Peripatetics are after my own cardiovascular system, with their incessant discursive rambling. 3 mph is a pretty good speed for thinking.

I don’t know if Moses Maimonides was a walker, but he is one of the more intriguing figures in this period with his refusal to choose between science and religion.

Scholastics didn’t quite choose either, though they definitely leaned. Anselm thought he could have his rigorous logical analysis and his God too. The ontological argument, most think, is either brilliant or moronic. I just think it’s interesting to ponder.

More theology: Luther and  Calvin. The latter thought newborns deserved eternal damnation. As JMH might say, that’s going a bit far. I might say something less guarded. Calvinists tend to push my buttons, so if any of you are in class today I’ll just forewarn you not to take anything I might say personally. If you’re right I’ll pay for my intemperance in the long run. Or not.

Tom Perrotta’s new novel The Leftovers [excerpt] strikes a Calvinist note: the Rapture comes, and the elect & damned seem to be chosen or left behind in a purely arbitrary and random fashion. The gift of grace seems undeserved, indeed.

I’m afraid I just can’t get behind any theology that claims kids enter the world in a state of depravity, or that we all  deserve eternal damnation and unrelenting torment for expressing the very nature we supposedly were endowed with by our creator, or that the original “sinfulness” of long-gone ancestors is an ineradicable and permanent stain. I prefer a different Calvin. And a different Hobbes.

But, the original Hobbes is an interesting philosopher, a materialist and (probably) an atheist, in an age when you really couldn’t say so. I never think of him without recalling the student who got the famous quote slightly askew: people in the state of nature, he said Hobbes said, were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. I picture the Ferengi, galactic entrepreneurs (read “swindlers”) extraordinaire. Their golden rule is called the First Law of Acquisition.

My  un-remunerated research assistant, DH, sends along this timely and relevant book notice:

For Lawrence Keeley in War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, the study of prehistory (a period which, for some peoples, ended only a few dozen years ago) has been torn between two paradigms: the Hobbesian and the Rousseauian. According to the former, primitives are warlike, and need the institution of the state to put an end to the nastiness and brutishness of their lives. According to the latter, civilization is the corrupter, subverting the harmony and peacefulness of primitive life with overpopulation, greed and the encouragement of exploitative behavior.

What I found interesting about the Hobbesian v. Rousseauian divide is–what Christopher Hitchens  succinctly pointed out as a conundrum of Divinity–how God made us sick and ordered us well. It also would seem to be the starting-point of one’s worldview. Do we, as a society, think people generally good or bad and how does that shape our worldview and the development of moral codes?

Darned good questions. Your thoughts, anyone?

NOTE TO STUDENTS: We have plenty of interesting stuff on tap for Monday and Tuesday… but I’m still seeing too many “0 comments” on recent posts. Let’s fix that, please. Once more: everybody should be posting something before every class, ASAP.

M 19 PW 59-72. Mysticism & Zen, Reason & Faith, Peripatetics & Scholastics, Renaissance & Reformation, Hobbes & Macchiavelli.

Medievals & Scholastics…words…back in the saddle…J&M ineffable…Phil Dicy “ineffable“…