So, first I said I thought Americans need to think about imagination more, and think about it seriously, as a tool (but certainly not the tool) for addressing the most pressing problems in contemporary society: traffic congestion, housing shortages, healthcare costs, and mass-shootings––perhaps even the malaise of a lot of contemporary American (particularly Texan) art and literature.
Still, it feels wrong to remain inert. My mind remains restless, as if I’ve woken up gasping not for air but for fresher thoughts.
So I continue my studies of imagination, and there I find that poet-polemicist-philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) more than once referred to the imagination as a “restless faculty” of the mind, endowed by “Nature,” and made for “noble” ends (or goals).
Let therefore my “lofty ambition,” my “high hopes” be thus: that we may learn to cultivate (bildung) an “enthusiastic imagination,” one “vivid” and containing civic “reveries” not without spiritual “passion.” Though in this advocacy, I feel as if I’m Dr. Frankenstein wanting to create a new and improved civic American (or Texan):
Clerval! Beloved friend! Even now it delights me to record your words and to dwell on the praise of which you are so eminently deserving. He was a being formed in the “very poetry of nature.” His wild and enthusiastic imagination was chastened by the sensibility of his heart. His soul overflowed with ardent affections, and his friendship was of that devoted and wondrous nature that the world-minded teach us to look for only in the imagination.
My imagination was vivid, yet my powers of analysis and application were intense; by the union of these qualities I conceived the idea and executed the creation of a man. Even now I cannot recollect without passion my reveries while the work was incomplete. I trod heaven in my thoughts, now exulting in my powers, now burning with the idea of their effects. From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition; but how am I sunk! Oh! My friend, if you had known me as I once was, you would not recognize me in this state of degradation. (“Ch. XXIV”)
Twenty-nine years after Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855), in her novel Jayne Eyre (1847) mentions “the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of imagination,” (Ch. XXI).
Seventy-seven years after Eyre––but very early in the text of the Manifeste du surréalisme (Manifesto of Surrealism) (1924)––André Breton (1896–1966) describes “this imagination which knows no bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance with the laws of an arbitrary utility.”
Language has both strengthened imagination and been freed by it. Who shall say whether the free adjective has created images bizarre and beautiful, or the adjective been freed by strange and beautiful pictures in the mind?
After Tolkien, in one his early studies called The Death of Tragedy (1963), Franco-American critic George Steiner (1929–2020) noted of the English poet Robert Graves (1895–1985):“Graves says, the imagination has extra-territorial rights, and these are guarded by poetry.”
Even so, poetry is not policy.
As Owen Barfield (1898–1997) once put it, “if law is the point where life and logic meet, perception is the point where life and imagination meet.” So even political and societal perceptions (and the political and societal problems we perceive) inevitably contain a substantial component called imagination.
Moreover, as British philosopher Gertrude Anscombe (1919–2001) reminds us that “what is institutional must exclude all that is personal, casual or sporadic.” I think she means that imagination and institution rarely go hand-in-hand. (One might dare argue that anything “institutional” can never be “imaginative.”)
When faced with a dilemma between the institutional and the imaginative, Tolkien, as a young student, chose the latter path:
I was eager to study Nature, actually more eager than I was to read most fairy-stories; but I did not want to be quibbled into Science and cheated out of Faerie by people who seemed to assume that by some kind of original sin I should prefer fairy-tales, but according to some kind of new religion I ought to be induced to like science. (“On Fairy Stories”)
In a similar vein, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), someone of a quite different British disposition that that of Tolkien, nonetheless once pointed out that philosophy too has a greater need for imaginative thinking than brute science requires:
[In Voltaire’s novel Candide] Dr. Pangloss’s in his study can ascertain what soil of universe would, to his way of thinking, be the best possible; he can also convince himself, so long as he stays in his study, that the universe means to satisfy his ethical demands [that “we live in the best of all possible worlds”].
Bernard Bosanquet, until his death one of the recognized leaders of British philosophy, maintained in his Logic, ostensibly on logical grounds, that “it would be hard to believe, for example, in the likelihood of a catastrophe which should overwhelm a progressive civilization like that of modem Europe and its colonies.”
Capacity to believe that the “laws of thought” have comforting political consequences is, a mark of the philosophic bias.
Philosophy, as opposed to science, springs from a kind of self-assertion: a belief that our purposes have an important relation to the purposes of the universe, and that, in the long run, the course of events is bound to be, on the whole, such as we should wish.
Science abandoned this kind of optimism, but is being led towards another: that we, by our intelligence, can make the world such as to satisfy a large proportion of our desires.
This is a practical, as opposed to a metaphysical, optimism. I hope it will not seem to future generations as foolish as that of Dr. Pangloss.
So how do we sort the philosophy from the fairy story, the institutional science from an unbound civic imagination? Is democracy the best of all possible governance? We might ought to follow the method given by the narrator of Stephen King’s novel Revival (2014):
We debated the validity of each (first in my living room, later in this same bed), eventually putting them into four categories: utter bullshit, probable bullshit, impossible to be sure, and hard not to believe. (p. 239)
Some Notes to Some of the Above
Gertrude E. M. Anscombe, “On the Source of the Authority of the State” (1978) The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe. Vol. III: Ethics, Religionand Politics, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 131.
Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: a Study in Meaning (1928), (Middleton, CN: Wesleyan UP, 1973; Third Edition), p. 29.
Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge, (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 159.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Lecture on the Slave Trade,” June 16, 1795, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. I Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, eds. Lewis Paton and Peter Mann, (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1971),pp. 235–36; Coleridge, Watchman No. 4. March 35, 1796. Coleridge Works Vol. II, p. 131.
Bertrand Russell, “Philosophy’s Ulterior Motives,” Unpopular Essays, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950, 1969), pp. 56–57.
George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy,(New York, Hill & Wang, 1963), p. 240.
Reading About Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option (Part II)
After a careful first reading of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option (2017), I find its central thesis to be found on page 83:
The real question facing us is not whether to quit politics entirely, but how to exercise political power prudently, especially in an unstable political culture. When is it cowardly not to cooperate with secular politicians out of an exaggerated fear of impurity–and when is it corrupting to be complicit?
It is indeed one of the troubles about government, that it is difficult to specify the ‘things that are Caesar’s.’[1]
This is the same question that confronts Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1966). Its historical inaccuracies aside, it develops the question of whether the King or the Church would rule England.
It is the same question the butler Stephens refuses to face in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day (1989) with regard to whether his employer was a Nazi sympathizer and if Stephens “did his duty” by never questioning his employer’s requests.
And what is the answer to Dreher’s and Anscombe’s and Bolt’s and Ishiguro’s dilemma? I suggested last time that it might involve Emersonian compensation. But now C. S. Peirce is nagging me, and I’m afraid he re-articulates the whole problem when he says:
Unless we make ourselves hermits, we shall necessarily influence each other’s opinions; so that the problem becomes how to fix [stabilize] belief, not in the individual merely, but in the community.[2]
[1] “On the Source of the Authority of the State.†From Ratio 20 (1), 1978. The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe. Vol. III: Ethics, Religionand Politics. Blackwell: Oxford. 1981. p. 132.
“Because I’m not embarrassed of it like you are, son.”
“I only got embarrassed once I realized I’d been ignoring it.”
“Ignoring it since when?”
“Since I started being me.”
“And what have you stopped being since then?”
“Satisfied.”
“Possibility is the deconstruction of contentment.â€[1]
NOTES
[1]Anscombe, G. E. M. “You Can have Sex without Children: Christianity and the New Offer.†From Renewal of Religious Structures: Proceedings of the Canadian Centenary Theological Congress. Toronto. 1968. The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe Vol. III: Ethics, Religionand Politics. Blackwell: Oxford. 1981. p. 82.
Brainstorming Ideas about Institutions, Communities, & Citizens
For G. E. M. Ascombe: “What is institutional must exclude all that is personal, casual or sporadic.â€[1] This is because institutions:
erode individuals,
corrode their creativity,
and commode only resentment.
Despite our institutions, we must strive to be good citizens, right? Why not ask Goethe?
“Well,†said Lothario, “I hope to be able to make a good patriot out of you. A good father is one who at mealtimes serves his children first; and a good citizen is one who pays what he owes the state before dealing with everything else.â€[2]
Examples:
The dutiful citizen pays the police before going out to buy his own gun.
The sincere confessor gives consent before receiving his reward.
The merciful cop shoots the criminal before turning the gun on herself.
And while Trump has paid few taxes and given little to charities, he now must serve the community. For what is a community but a collection of institutions?
NOTES
[1] Anscombe, G. E. M. “On the Source of the Authority of the State.†From Ratio 20 (1), 1978. The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe Vol. III: Ethics, Religionand Politics. Blackwell: Oxford. 1981. p. 131.
[2]  Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.) VIII, ii, 311.
When Monotheism Succeeds Too Much: Winning Versus Wincing
A PERPLEXITY OF JUDAIC SUCCESS
For Maimonides, “The convert is blameless—but the natural-born Jew is suspect of ‘going through the motions’.†In this case monotheism is better adopted than inherited; new originals are better than old replicas:
The natural-born Jew’s faith is always suspect since one can never be certain whether adherence to the faith is not somehow motivated by national memory, shared history, and familial allegiances. The convert’s intentions, however, like those of his or her archetypical predecessor, Abraham, are not subject to challenge since the convert arrived at the essential truths of Judaism by reason….[1]
A PERPLEXITY OF CHRISTIAN SUCCESS
Life under Christendom often made for lazy Christians, because the dominance of Christianity unintentionally encouraged the laity to be lax:
The great change in the world means that there must be a great change in the attitudes and thoughts of the great mass of believing and practicing lay people. For centuries past, the laity could be passive, except for the rare individual and except for each one’s secret spiritual life. The reason was the existence of ‘Christendom’. Under Christendom, it no longer took special energy to be a Christian, as in the early centuries; in most places in Christian countries, people did not have to choose a form of life. There just was a basic form of life there: lay people—especially laywomen—either were its victims or, favoured by fortune, were happy in it. Goodness or badness of life was a specification within the basic form. Someone who wanted to lead a holy life would often, if the thought came to him in time, not marry but enter religion.[2]
A PERPLEXITY OF ISLAMIC SUCCESS
For Islam, too many conversions means not enough folks to pay high taxes; here, monotheism becomes a victim of its own success:
The Arabs, already subsidized by the decree of the Caliph Omar, lived apart at first, as a military aristocracy, holding aloof from trade, farming, or manual crafts. Far from pressing their faith on the Christians or Jews around them, they preferred to leave them outside the Muslim community so that they might get enough money from them, by way of tribute, to keep the state treasury well replenished and help to pay their own fixed stipends. The Muslims themselves had to pay certain taxes, but these were considerably lower than those required from non-Muslims. This fact, together with the prestige of belonging to the religion of the ruling caste, rather than any active proselytizing on the part of the Arabs, caused increasing numbers of Christians and Jews to embrace Islam. [3]
NOTES
[1] Diamond, James A. Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon. Cambridge UP. 2014. p. 85. More from Diamond:
Considering that existence of God and His unity are his primary concerns, one could characterize the Guide, as well as the Mishneh Torah,* as a treatise on divine names whose understanding is essential to preserve the ideas of existence and unity.
*See the beginning of the MT and, for example, MT, Forbidden Intercourse 14:2, where Maimonides directs that the prospective convert be introduced to Judaism first and foremost with the principles of divine unity and prohibition against idolatry. Only these philosophical teachings are conveyed to him “at length.†Everything else, including familiarizing him with the details of the mitzvoth, are really the framework for inculcating and preserving these two beliefs. (Diamond 19–20)
A representation, taken as a literal presentation, an “ultimate,†is no longer a representation but an idol, i.e., mistaking the map for the territory it marks (Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances: a Study in Idolatry. 1957. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan UP. 1988. pp. 62–64, 157–61).
[2] Anscombe, “You Can have Sex without Children: Christianity and the New Offer.†From Renewal of Religious Structures: Proceedings of the Canadian Centenary Theological Congress. Toronto. 1968. Anscombe Vol. III: Ethics, Religionand Politics p. 83.
[3] Atiyah, Edward. The Arabs: the Origins, Present Conditions, and Prospects of the Arab World. Edinburgh: Penguin. 1958. pp. 38–39.
In a democracy, the prisoners pick their wardens. While we are told this is an important election for Americans, the old standbys of political philosophy appear to not be as effective as once before. For example, Texas, recently voted for a multiple-alleged criminal to oversee and uphold the laws of the state.
Perhaps we should turn away (at least temporarily) from the usual suspects, away from Philadelphia 1787, away from the idolatry of forefathers and their slave exemptions. But then who will counsel meager citizen me? Who can help me choose the best politician—the best person to make me do what I don’t want to do?
I will try to find my answer by listening to a fugue, that is, “the orderly and varied reiteration of the same ‘subject’.â€[1] I will harken to points and counterpoints.
ITALIAN CANZONI
Caesar: “All folks strive toward freedom while despising all forms of slavery.â€[2]
Machiavelli: “Citizens of a republic want only not to be oppressed … only its nobles want to oppress others.â€[3]
Vico: “If people were left to pursue their private interests, they would live in solitude like wild beasts….  We defend our natural liberty most fiercely to preserve the goods most essential to our survival. By contrast, we submit to the chains of civil servitude to obtain external goods which are not necessary to life. [4]
ANGLO–IRISH BALLADS
Burke: “Liberty, when men [and women] act in bodies, is power…. In all bodies, those who will lead must also, in a considerable degree, follow… In this political traffic, the leaders will be obliged to bow to the ignorance of their followers, and the followers to become subservient to the worst designs of their leaders.â€[5]
Anscombe: “What is institutional must exclude all that is personal, casual or sporadic.[6] This is why ‘possibility is the deconstruction of contentment.’[7] So to attain your goal, you’ve got to give up what you’ve already got.â€
AMERICAN JAZZ
Rawls: “To be at liberty and free from oppression is, in some sense, to be disinterested, and therefore detached, as it is written: ‘one feature of justice as fairness is to think of the parties in the initial situation as rational and mutually disinterested’.â€[8]
Searle: “Roughly speaking, power is the ability to make people do something whether they want to do it or not.â€[9]
Wilkerson: “The friend showed him what to do, and Pershing worked beside him. He looked up and saw the foreman watching him. Pershing pretended not to see him, worked even harder. The foreman left, and, when he came back, Pershing was still at work. At the end of the day, the foreman hired him. Pershing finished out the summer stacking staves, not minding the hard work and not finding it demeaning. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘You have to stoop to conquer’.†[10]
NOTES
[1] Lewis, C. S. “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages.†Chapter 3 from The Discarded Image: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge UP. 1966. Originally delivered in 1956 as a pair of lectures to an audience of scientists in Cambridge. Reprinted in Chaucer and His Contemporaries: Essays on Medieval Literature and Thought. Edited and Introduced by Helaine Newstead. NY: Fawcet. 1968. 46–66 at 61. Compare Lewis later: “The motions of the universe are to be conceived not as those of a machine or even an army, but rather as a dance, a festival, a symphony, a ritual, a carnival, or all these in one,†(64). And compare C. S. Peirce:
Every thought, however artificial and complex, is, so far as it is immediately present, a mere sensation without parts, and therefore, in itself, without similarity to any other, but incomparable with any other and absolutely sui generis [its own kind]. Whatever is wholly incomparable with anything else is wholly inexplicable, because explanation consists in bringing things under general laws or under natural classes. (“Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.†Journal of Speculative Philosophy. No. 2. 1868. 140–57.)
[4] Vico, The Third New Science, “Idea of the Work†[¶ 2] 2 and I, § 2, xciv, [¶ 290], p. 109.
[5] Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France.
[6] Anscombe, G. E. M. “On the Source of the Authority of the State.†From Ratio 20 (1), 1978. Anscombe Vol. III: Ethics, Religionand Politics. Oxford: Blackwell. 1981. p. 131.
[7] Anscombe, “You Can have Sex without Children: Christianity and the New Offer.†From Renewal of Religious Structures: Proceedings of the Canadian Centenary Theological Congress. Toronto. 1968. Anscombe Vol. III: Ethics, Religionand Politics p. 82.
[8] Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. (Revised Edition.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 1999. § 3, p. 12.
[9] Searle, John. Freedom and Neurobiology. NY: Columbia UP. 2007. p.104.
[10] Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns. NY: Random House/Vintage Books. 2010. p. 117.
Both of Rod Dreher’s books The Little Way of Ruthie Leming(2013) and How Dante Can Save Your Life (2015) deal with, in his words: “my disordered relationship with family and place,†or, as he tells a new friend upon his arrival to their rural Louisiana community:
“Yea, it’s like the family and place thing cast a spell over all of us,†I said. “It’s helpful for me to see them as good people who are just as captive to that false image as I was…. The real religion of our parish is ancestor worship.” [1]
Things like having a family, maintaining sacredness of a local place, even being a secular fan who has a favorite sports team are all means to various ends. Now folks can argue which ends should be prioritized over others like: the Platonic good, self-examined life, or the Christian holy, sanctified life, or the secular American Dream of a house and healthcare insurance, or the quaint life of liberation from illusions. But whatever the end is, it cannot be achieved by substituting the means toward that end for that end. In other words, winning the game isn’t the same as receiving the trophy.
Mistaking means for ends is like mixing up the difference between icons and idols. Whenever means to ends are mistaken for the ends themselves, those means corrupt the progress and corrode access to the particular ends sought. Dreher quotes from Dante translator Andrew Frisardi, who explains the distinction between icons and idols:
[Frisardi writes:] An icon is an image for contemplating a reality that transcends the specific image; the image leads the mind, through the senses, to direct communion with the unintelligibles. An idol is an image to which we are attached for the sake of the image per se. Obviously one and the same object can be an idol or an icon—our approach to it is what makes the difference.
Then Dreher adds:
This insight had clarified earlier to me the nature of my disordered relationship with family and place. Now it expanded my understanding of my basic condition. It wasn’t simply that I saw a family, place, and religion as idols—that is, as ends in themselves—but that my distorted vision prevented me from seeing them as they really were: as icons, damaged, though they may be, through which the light of God shone. They were not ends, but imperfect means to the perfect end: God. [2]
This distinction between idols and icons may sound a bit too abstract to the ears of the non-religious. Another way to think of it is:
The map is not the territory it marks. [3]
Whether secular or religious, mistaking the map for the land it represents is quite common in twenty-first century America. This is why it’s easier to cheer for a football match from afar than to play the game on a field.
But the act of mistaking the map for the territory it marks is not limited to contemporary Christian contexts. In his Autobiography the Jewish thinker Salomon Maimon (1753–1800) explained how many Jewish traditions, particularly Kabbalah—originally just a word for “traditionâ€â€”were just as susceptible to corruption.
As Maimon puts it:
Originally the Cabbalah was nothing but psychology, physics, morals, politics, and such sciences, represented by means of symbols and hieroglyphs in fables and allegories, the occult meaning of which was disclosed only to those who were competent to understand it. By and by, however, perhaps as the result of many revolutions, this occult meaning was lost, and the signs were taken for the things signified. But as it was easy to perceive that these signs necessarily had meant something, it was left to the imagination to invent an occult meaning which had long been lost. The remotest analogies between signs and things were seized, till at last the Cabbalah degenerated into an art of madness according to method, or a systematic science resting on conceits. [4]
I wonder about the significance of Maimon pointing out that the result of the corruption of Kabballah in eighteenth century rural Poland occurred, in his view, “as the result of many revolutionsâ€â€”not just a single, drastic change, not an isolated pogrom—implying it takes more than a single catastrophe for a community to forget its sacred stories [5] and thereafter begin mistaking idols for icons and means for ends.
FINAL THOUGHTS
An icon is like a map, and idolatry is like mistaking the map for the territory it marks.
No doubt folks, whether religious or otherwise, sometimes need maps and icons.
Whether one believes they are lost or not, maps offer possibilities—they let us go to new places and become more familiar with places we already know.
I know some folks who use maps, some who know the way without a map, some content with being lost, and some content with never knowing they were lost.
“Possibility is the deconstruction of contentment.†––Elizabeth Anscombe [6]
Dreher mentions damaged icons—but a damaged treasure map is much more mysterious than one in mint condition.
It is a very different experience reading or using a map when one has already visited a territory and reading/using a map when one has never before visited a particular place.
A map never contains 100% information.
(To be continued….)
NOTES
[1] Dreher, Rod. How Dante Can Save Your Life: the Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem. NY: Regan Arts. 2015. pp. 172, 200.
[2] Ibid, 175–76.
[3] Bateson, Gregory and Mary Catherine Bateson. Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press Inc. 2005. p. 21; Capra, Fritijof. The Tao of Physics. Boston: Shambhala. Third Edition. 1991. p. 28; Korzybski, Alfred. “A Non-Aristotelian System and its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physicsâ€, paper presented before the American Mathematical Society at the New Orleans, Louisiana, meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, December 28, 1931. Reprinted in Science and Sanity. 1933. pp. 747–61.
[4] Maimon, Solomon. Autobiography. Translated from the German, with Additions and Notes, by J. Clark Murray. Boston: Cupples & Hurd. 1888. p. 94.
[5] As Dreher puts it:
“When a community loses its memory, its member no longer know one another,†writes the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry. “How can they know one another if they have forgotten or have never learned one another’s stories? If they do not know one another’s stories, how can they now whether or not to trust one another? People who do not trust one another do not help one another, and moreover they fear one another. And this is our predicament now.†(The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life. NY: Grand Central Publishing. 2013. p. 208)
[6] Anscombe, G.E.M. “You Can have Sex without Children: Christianity and the New Offer.†From Renewal of Religious Structures: Proceedings of the Canadian Centenary Theological Congress. Toronto. 1968. The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe. Vol. III: Ethics, Religionand Politics. Oxford UP. 1982. p. 82.
