Tag Archives: Philosophy

Kuyper, Common Grace 1.23 (the power of choice)

10 Thursday Jun 2021

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Sartre, choosing to look like a philosopher.

“THE BASIS FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENT”

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

Genesis 3:6

Although created good, with wisdom, holiness, righteousness given God, the human beings in the Garden were yet capable of further development. That development was possible in two different directions: development which takes place in accordance with the instruction given by God, or “development” in contravention of that ordinance. Kuyper explains this in terms of development consistent with the “position of image-bearer” or not. 

To think this through, the instruction of God was to lay out the manner in which the humans would work-out their status and obligation to image God in the creation. This is a different matter than the capacity of the humans to act as image bearer. If we think of image bearer as a sort of mirror, the instruction would be as to how to keep the mirror directed toward God as the original (or conversely to turn away). 

A separate issue would be the functionality of the mirror as a mirror (is the mirror cracked, dirty, cleansed, et cetera).

Kuyper speaks of this functionally as a mirror-original relationship (although he does not use the precise word “mirror”): “Anyone called to resemble another’s image should, in order to keep bearing that image, want to turn toward him. By turning away from him the image is lost.” 

I do not think we have (or can) fully realize the profound effect which takes place to a human being when we – as mirrors (those who are to bear a particular image) – turn away from that which we are to re-present. The Paul, in particular, notes that is by gazing upon Christ that we are conformed to his image (2 Cor. 3:18; Col. 3:10) The change which is wrought in us by this work is the renewing of our mind. (Eph. 4:23; Rom. 12:2)

We were created to exhibit this image, but we can only do so in a dependency relationship. We do not have this image as a matter of sovereignty, but as a creature assigned a position. Kuyper notices something extremely interesting here: The image we are to project is one of sovereignty, but we have that image by derivation of another. We are not inherently sovereign, in the sense that we can exercise some sovereignty in an independent manner. We are certainly not autonomous, a law to ourselves. 

And yet we have to misuse our capacity to dependently exhibit that sovereignty: “. In that contradictory notion of a dependent trait of sovereignty lies the whole mystery of our religious moral being: created in the image of God, consequently possessing the moral choice of our will. This moral choice of will as a trait of the image of God, and therefore dependent.”

In thinking through this moral capacity, Kuyper comes to a concept which was made much of by existential philosophers: the determining nature of our choice: “Sartre’s slogan—“existence precedes essence”—may serve to introduce what is most distinctive of existentialism, namely, the idea that no general, non-formal account of what it means to be human can be given, since that meaning is decided in and through existing itself. Existence is “self-making-in-a-situation” (Fackenheim 1961: 37). Webber (2018: 14) puts the point this way: “Classical existentialism is … the theory that existence precedes essence,” that is, “there is no such thing as human nature” in an Aristotelian sense. A “person does not have an inbuilt set of values that they are inherently structured to pursue. Rather, the values that shape a person’s behavior result from the choices they have made” (2018: 4). In contrast to other entities, whose essential properties are fixed by the kind of entities they are, what is essential to a human being—what makes her who she is—is not fixed by her type but by what she makes of herself, who she becomes.”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Existentialism. 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

By now means do I see a straight equivalence between Kuyper and Sartre. Rather, I note that they both see an importance in the act of choice (albeit from quite different perspectives and for quite different ends) than is recognized by others: “Everything of God that is reflected in us is so incomparably glorious, but also so fearfully terrible. We make a choice without fully thinking it through and that choice determines our whole existence. And yet, we cannot do otherwise. It must be so.” Sartre would not grant God in the manner voiced by Kuyper, but both would agree that a choice has “terrible” effects. 

Kuyper says that this power is “frightening”. 

Adam created with this “terrible” power of choice could not a creature whose end point was reached at creation. Rather, the placement in the Garden, the receipt of counsel from God, were the bare starting place for his development. It could not have been otherwise when Adam was armed with such an extraordinary moral power: choice.

Kuyper then answers the objection: Why didn’t God just make human beings good – morally perfect without the ability to fall, and in so doing save us the terror of Hell? 

This is the cost of being created in the image of God. Were we created without this power to choose, we have been something else. 

Without this power of choice, we would not be those who preserved. He does not use this analogy, but perhaps it is apt. Imagine to men aged 25 and alive. One man went through a war and lived. The only merely lived. We could not say they were identical. There are aspects of the man who lived through the war which could not exist for the other. They are both alive at 25, but there lives are very different.

And so, God places in the Garden two trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (which Kuyper also calls the Tree of Conscience). The Tree of Life will be in Paradise. The Tree of Conscience will not be seen again; it has done its complete work.

How then does this Tree of Conscience produce an effect upon the soul of Adam? It is merely by eating as if the fruit eaten transversed the body and enter the soul directly. The power in the fruit came from the command of God prohibiting the eating coupled to the choice of eating. The Tree of Life need “merely” keep one alive. But the effect of conscience requires something greater than the bare fruit to achieve its end. 

. 

Schopenhauer on Happiness.15

16 Thursday Apr 2020

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The previous post in this series may be found here: 

He now begins to present his arguments for solitude:

Solitude is doubly advantageous to such a man. Firstly, it allows him to be with himself, and, secondly, it prevents him being with others–an advantage of great moment; for how much constraint, annoyance, and even danger there is in all intercourse with the world.

This is partially an argument from definition: to be solitary is to be with oneself; and to be solitary is to be apart from others.

Why is this good? Because being others can lead to:

much constraint: by this he apparently means that you can’t really “be yourself” if someone else is around. This leads me to wonder what exactly did Schopenhauer like to do?

Annoyance:  Other people bug me.

Danger: I’m not certain what he means by danger, unless it was mere rhetorical flare. While danger could obviously result from meeting a murderer, is that danger inherent in all interaction?

He then moves one to a matter of assertion:

Rascals are always sociable–more’s the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others’ company.

One does not necessarily follow from the other: there have been dreadful people who loved company. But then I think of the sorry case of the Unibomber, who lived quite alone for many years, shunning most all company. He was a very intelligent and well educated man. And he was also at the very least a “rascal”. The man was a cold-blooded murderer, quite certain he was doing the greatest good:

Men of great intellect live in the world without really belonging to it; and so, from their earliest years, they feel that there is a perceptible difference between them and other people.

There is a transparent bitterness in such sentences. Perhaps this section from the a brief history of his life on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy might give some background:

After a year’s vacation in Italy and with The World as Will and Representation in hand, Schopenhauer applied for the opportunity to lecture at the University of Berlin, the institution at which he had formerly studied, and where two years earlier (1818), Hegel had arrived to assume Fichte’s prestigious philosophical chair. His experiences in Berlin were less than professionally fruitful, however, for in March of 1820, Schopenhauer self-assuredly scheduled his class at a time that was simultaneous with Hegel’s popular lectures, and few students chose to hear Schopenhauer.

Sometimes even great philosophers engage in self-justification.

Schopenhauer on Happiness.14

16 Thursday Apr 2020

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Schopenhauer here offers a wholly negative argument concerning human interaction:

As boredom seems to be an evil of this kind, people band together to offer it a common resistance. The love of life is at bottom only the fear of death; and, in the same way, the social impulse does not rest directly upon the love of society, but upon the fear of solitude; it is not alone the charm of being in others’ company that people seek, it is the dreary oppression of being alone–the monotony of their own consciousness–that they would avoid.

Here is the argument broken down:

Proposition one: Boredom is an evil.

Proposition two: Solitude leads to boredom.

Conclusion: One fears solitude, because solitude will lead to boredom.

Proof of the propositions:  Why is there boredom: (a) it is “dreary oppression;” and (b) one could become bored with one’s own thought, “the monotony of their consciousness”.

Proof of point: Therefore, we “band together” for the purpose of avoiding solitude (and thus, by extension, boredom).

Proof of point:  Analogy to life: One seeks life only due to the fear of death.

Corollary: The benefit of “society” is of margin value.

Having seen the argument in its parts, we can consider the elements severally.

Boredom: While it is unpleasant, it is not an unmitigated evil. For instance, boredom often provokes one to more useful endeavors.  This is related to the nature of solitude.

Solitude: He pick up on this point below in the form of an argument that for the “great”, solitude is not a burden but a benefit because I am alone with my own contemplation.

This leads to a subtle element of this argument: solitude leads to boredom for you lesser sorts; but for me!

Again, there is the irony of writing a book: the book is a social act. It is communication from the author to the reader. And so his solitude argument is not nearly as strong as it may seem.

But there is more. In solitary contemplation, one thinks about not merely raw nature without any social content. If one thinks in a language, that internal language is a matter of social content. No one looks upon the world as complete innocent. When Schopenhauer looked at the physical world without any human present, he still took to it the volume of human learning he had obtained from social content.

And so one person may be more or less solitary than others, but it is always relative.  A person who rejects all time alone or all time with others would limited in some ways.

But since it is Schopenhauer in the dock, let’s consider a truly solitary figure. Let us suppose this man thought the grandest and most valuable thoughts. What could would his contemplations be? What is the value of a human thought never communicated?

Arthur Schopenhauer on happiness.1

10 Friday Jan 2020

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If we are to be happy, we must first know what happiness means, in what does consistence? Schopenhauer begins with Aristotle’s definition happiness consistency in the avoidance of pain rather than in some pleasure, “The first and foremost rule for the wise conduct of life seems to me to be contained in a view to which Aristotle …. not pleasure, but freedom from pain, is what the wise man will aim at.”

Aristotle works through a number of options concerning the nature of happiness becomes to his consideration of happiness as the avoidance of pain. Schopenhauer comes about the matter in a fundamentally different manner than Aristotle. Rather than reason to a conclusion, he begins with the conclusion and justifies that conclusion.

First, he takes over the observation of Aristotle, “It is clear, therefore, that Moral Goodness has to do with pleasures and pains.” Thus, the only axis upon which to measure happiness is a matter of relative pleasure or pain. Having laid out the axis, he then proceeds to make his justification: “Happiness is but a dream and sorrow is real, would be as false as it is, in fact, true.”

It is a curious argument concerning happiness to begin by rejecting even the potential for happiness, but this is where Schopenhauer begins:

A man who desires to make up the book of his life and determine where the balance of happiness lies, must put down in his accounts, not the pleasures which he has enjoyed, but the evils which he has escaped. That is the true method of eudaemonology [the study of happiness]; for all eudaemonology must begin by recognizing that its very name is a euphemism, and that to live happily only means to live less unhappily–to live a tolerable life. There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome–to be got over.…The happiest lot is not to have experienced the keenest delights or the greatest pleasures, but to have brought life to a close without any very great pain, bodily or mental.

He does not make an actual argument on this point, rather he makes the assertion as an axiom and rejects all other positions as “chimerical”:

To measure the happiness of a life by its delights or pleasures, is to apply a false standard. For pleasures are and remain something negative; that they produce happiness is a delusion, cherished by envy to its own punishment. Pain is felt to be something positive, and hence its absence is the true standard of happiness. And if, over and above freedom from pain, there is also an absence of boredom, the essential conditions of earthly happiness are attained; for all else is chimerical.

His argument is grounded in the understanding that the world is cursed and cannot be redeemed. There is and can be no escape from sorrow. I was told once that all the winners in Las Vegas have their names in lights: the casinos. The house has unbeatable odds; no matter how well you may bet in the short term, in the long term, probability will win. The downward curve is built into the nature of the world:

While it is a complete inversion of the natural order to try and turn this scene of misery into a garden of pleasure, to aim at joy and pleasure rather than at the greatest possible freedom from pain–and yet how many do it!–there is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one’s efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire. The fool rushes after the pleasures of life and finds himself their dupe; the wise man avoids its evils; and even if, notwithstanding his precautions, he falls into misfortunes, that is the fault of fate, not of his own folly. As far as he is successful in his endeavors, he cannot be said to have lived a life of illusion; for the evils which he shuns are very real. …The failure to recognize this truth–a failure promoted by optimistic ideas–is the source of much unhappiness. … To desire to get rid of an evil is a definite object, but to desire a better fortune than one has is blind folly.

If the greatest unhappiness comes from loss of expectation, then, “[T]he safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.”

Arthur Schopenhauer on happiness.1

10 Friday Jan 2020

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If we are to be happy, we must first know what happiness means, in what does consistence? Schopenhauer begins with Aristotle’s definition happiness consistency in the avoidance of pain rather than in some pleasure, “The first and foremost rule for the wise conduct of life seems to me to be contained in a view to which Aristotle …. not pleasure, but freedom from pain, is what the wise man will aim at.”

Aristotle works through a number of options concerning the nature of happiness becomes to his consideration of happiness as the avoidance of pain. Schopenhauer comes about the matter in a fundamentally different manner than Aristotle. Rather than reason to a conclusion, he begins with the conclusion and justifies that conclusion.

First, he takes over the observation of Aristotle, “It is clear, therefore, that Moral Goodness has to do with pleasures and pains.” Thus, the only axis upon which to measure happiness is a matter of relative pleasure or pain. Having laid out the axis, he then proceeds to make his justification: “Happiness is but a dream and sorrow is real, would be as false as it is, in fact, true.”

It is a curious argument concerning happiness to begin by rejecting even the potential for happiness, but this is where Schopenhauer begins:

A man who desires to make up the book of his life and determine where the balance of happiness lies, must put down in his accounts, not the pleasures which he has enjoyed, but the evils which he has escaped. That is the true method of eudaemonology [the study of happiness]; for all eudaemonology must begin by recognizing that its very name is a euphemism, and that to live happily only means to live less unhappily–to live a tolerable life. There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome–to be got over.…The happiest lot is not to have experienced the keenest delights or the greatest pleasures, but to have brought life to a close without any very great pain, bodily or mental.

He does not make an actual argument on this point, rather he makes the assertion as an axiom and rejects all other positions as “chimerical”:

To measure the happiness of a life by its delights or pleasures, is to apply a false standard. For pleasures are and remain something negative; that they produce happiness is a delusion, cherished by envy to its own punishment. Pain is felt to be something positive, and hence its absence is the true standard of happiness. And if, over and above freedom from pain, there is also an absence of boredom, the essential conditions of earthly happiness are attained; for all else is chimerical.

His argument is grounded in the understanding that the world is cursed and cannot be redeemed. There is and can be no escape from sorrow. I was told once that all the winners in Las Vegas have their names in lights: the casinos. The house has unbeatable odds; no matter how well you may bet in the short term, in the long term, probability will win. The downward curve is built into the nature of the world:

While it is a complete inversion of the natural order to try and turn this scene of misery into a garden of pleasure, to aim at joy and pleasure rather than at the greatest possible freedom from pain–and yet how many do it!–there is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one’s efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire. The fool rushes after the pleasures of life and finds himself their dupe; the wise man avoids its evils; and even if, notwithstanding his precautions, he falls into misfortunes, that is the fault of fate, not of his own folly. As far as he is successful in his endeavors, he cannot be said to have lived a life of illusion; for the evils which he shuns are very real. …The failure to recognize this truth–a failure promoted by optimistic ideas–is the source of much unhappiness. … To desire to get rid of an evil is a definite object, but to desire a better fortune than one has is blind folly.

If the greatest unhappiness comes from loss of expectation, then, “[T]he safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.”

Kierkegaard on the Impossibility of a Secular Morality

27 Monday Mar 2017

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His own own experience, rather than any theoretical requirements, convinced Kierkegaard that man’s real predicament is to be placed between a thoroughly esthetic way of living and a thoroughly religious one. No permanent footing can be maintained on a purely ethical basis, and in this respect Kierkegaard stands opposed to all efforts to make morality self-sufficient. Ethical principles are intrinsically ordained to the religious outlook, and a secular morality is either unaware of its religious significance our only esthetic discourse about being moral. The genuine alternatives are still the world and the cloister, the esthetic and the religious kinds of existing. Recollecting his own battle at playing the Romantic genius and also the tremendous upheaval involved in his return to Faith, Kierkegaard was inclined to state the contrast is being between “perdition and salvation”–between which there can be no compromise for reconciliation.

James Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard (London: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1954) 46-47.

An easy illustration of this can be found when one tries to establish even the most “self-evident” forms of ethics: Why is murder wrong? If you say, Because killing is wrong? The next step is “Why?” Because you killed a person. “Why is it wrong to kill a person?” Where does one stop searching for an answer to the “why”? Wherever one stops implies a religious position (to use Kierkegaard’s term) or an ethical (I simply find this distasteful).

The implicit esthetic morality of many people is apparent in the tremendous transformation taking place in ethics (particularly sexual ethics) in the West — and the speed in which it has happened. It seems that a great deal of public ethics was merely a matter of taste. Indeed, the “religious” positions of many people seem to be little more than taste and convenience.

The Seducer’s Diary (Kierkegaard, Either/Or)

10 Friday Feb 2017

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(Renoir, Girl Looking Into Mirror, 1912)

She has not even seen me. I am standing at the far end of the counter by myself. A mirror hangs on the opposite wall; she does not reflect it, but the mirror reflects her. How faithfully it has caught her picture, like a humble slave who show his devotion by his faithfulness, a slave for whom she indeed has significance, but who means nothing to her, who indeed dares to catch her, but not to embrace her. Unhappy mirror, the can indeed seize her image, but not herself! Happy mirror, which cannot hide her image in its secret depths, hide it from the whole world, but on the contrary must betray it to other, as now to me. What agony, if men were like that! And are there not many people who are like that, who own nothing except in the moment when they show it to others, who grasp only the surface, not the essence, who lose everything if this appears, just as this mirror would lose her image were they by a single breath to betray her heart to it?

Kierkegaard, The Diary of the Seducer.2

27 Friday Jan 2017

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The “editor” of the “diary” — the whole thing a fiction on a fiction — asks the question of why this “factual” diary had such a “poetical” aspect. The aesthetic aspect of the diary derived from the fact that the “seducer” had such a temperament,

The was the more he himself brought with him. This more was the poetical he enjoyed in the poetic situation of reality; he withdrew this agin in the form poetic reflection. This afforded him a second enjoyment, and his whole life was motived by enjoyment.

This is the “first stage” of human development: the aesthetic, which the first volume of Either/Or seeks to develop and display. This was the whole purpose of the “seduction”. It was the tantalization of desire, not possession of a body, which drove the man, “for he was far to intellectually inclined to be a seducer in the ordinary sense of the world.”

For his part, having brought the girl to the point where “she was read to sacrifice everything”, he broke off the relationship. He did not want her, he wanted the sensation of wanting her. This is what was described in the Immediate Stages of the Erotic, “the erotic here is seduction.”

Thus, the delight derives in the sensation which the seducer manages to derive from the relationship to the other person — the other person is reduced to the object of desire, but has no independent merit as a person. The value of the other is in the sensation they produce in the subject.

This reduction of the other to object, to the sensation they produce does not necessarily mean a pleasant sensation — this is a matter of averting boredom. When we think of this process in such a manner, we can quickly see that the greatest part of our public life and media is built up with human beings who reduce all others into objects to reduce boredom — and, since we are on the other side of Sartre — to create “meaning” (as paltry as it is).

Think of political rallies, demonstrations, riots, demands for “justice” and such in terms of boredom aversion and the creation of “meaning” and they will become instantly more comprehensible. That is why such events and people are not susceptible to reasoned discourse or moral suasion: they are not operating at that “stage” (to use Kierkegaard’s term) of life.  Even the other speaking to them exists for the purpose of averting boredom (and creating meaning).  This throws an interesting light on apologetics.

Kierkegaard, Diary of a Seducer.1, Either/Or

24 Tuesday Jan 2017

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The first thing to realize is that “seducer” does not entail anything lurid. The seducer seeks the affection, not the virginity, of his conquest.

The diary is presented as a “rough copy” of some material he had stolen me another’s desk– although he tries to justify his behavior (“but it is futile for me to try to extenuate my behavior by reminding myself that I did not open the drawer.”).

He wrestles with the “temptation” to go through the materials, which he describes as, “artistically perfected, calculated carelessness.” This “diary” is “neither historically exact, or simply fiction, not indicative but subjunctive.”

There is a great irony in the one who has obtained the diary describes the moment of illicit reading,

When now after having looked into the scheming mind of this depraved personality, I recall my situation; when, with my eye alert for every subtlety, I in thought approached that drawer, it makes the same impression upon me as it must make upon a police officer as he enters the room of a forger, opens his belongs, ….

But the man who is stealing another’s papers and passing them along is himself “depraved” — he admits to falling to temptation, to be drawn and then representing something which is not his.

The irony is heightened because Kierkegaard is pretending that he is someone else presenting someone else’s diary. The final irony is that it is believed that the seducer is a vague autobiography of Kierkegaard himself and a veiled letter to Regine Olson (he wrote this after breaking off his engagement with her as a bizarre defense and explanation).

 

Kierkegaard, “The Rotation Method” Part 4 (Either/Or)

11 Wednesday Jan 2017

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The remainder of the essay is how to engage in the “rotation method”: how to live in this world without becoming bored. First, there is the matter of what boredom is. Some just acquire boredom, but he spends more concern about boredom as “the result of a mistake effort to find diversion.”

He then makes this fascinating observation:

Boredom depends on the nothingness which pervades reality; it causes a dizziness like that produced by looking down into a yawning chasm, and this dizziness is absolute.

There is a pointlessness to existence. There is a grinding similarity. The endless emptiness produces boredom.

When I read that I think, Jesus could have not been bored. We see how people seek to invest trivial things which great importance (think of entertainers who often do little else than divert us).

The solution to this endlessly pointless world is treat the world even more pointlessness. I cannot help but read this and think of Oscar Wilde and “all art is useless.” To avoid the endless similarity of existence, we need diversion.

But, to obtain diversion we need two things (1) forgetfulness, and (2) a lack of commitment to anything.

He calls forgetfulness “an art”. It’s first element is how one remembers. We must experience an event as an experience, it is never quite clear, but there cannot be no more or spiritual reflection. An event exists merely as an experience to be enjoyed: “Enjoying an experience to its full intensity to the last minute will make it impossible either to remember or to forget.”

Forgetfulness is more than simply not being able to recall some detail, it is to not be bound by any event. Hence, “”Nature is great because it has forgotten that it was a chaos; but this thought is subject to revival at anytime.”

Hence forgetfulness permits one to obtain “freedom”:

The art of remembering and forgetting will also insure against sticking fast in some relationship of life, and make possible the realization of complete freedom.

Hence one must avoid friendship (“The essential thing is to never stick fast, and for this it is necessary to have oblivion back of one.”), marriage  (“Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.”), official positions.

This of course is a position which has risen to a level of moral permission, even obligation in the contemporary world. Appropriate psychological counsel for one in an unhappy marriage is often to not be bound by custom and tradition, but rather to “forget” vows, obligations and constriction and seek happiness.

I recently saw the truly wonderful movie Fences (it is well worth your time to watch). In that movie, the main character “forgets” his marriage because he desires some happiness from what this essayist would call boredom. But unlike our unattached essayist created by Kierkegaard, the character in Fences brings much suffering upon himself and others (interesting, I imagine this essayist would find that an acceptable cost because at least misery is not necessarily boring).

One must be “arbitrary”: “You go to see the middle of a play, you read the third part of a book….Arbitrariness in oneself corresponds to the accidental in the external world.” This reminds me of Cage’s attempt to make accidental music.