Additional Bloggage

Nathan and I are trying a new blogger blog for our discussions, which used to be buried in Xanga comments. Here it is, with its very own Prufrockian title:

question on your plate

You should subscribe to it and come poke at philosophy with us there.

Poem Intersections

I like it when poems come together (accidentally or on purpose). So I think I shall post poetry quotes that seem to intersect; perhaps it'll become a frequent feature on this blog.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
- Eliot

A Wounded Deer -- leaps highest --
I've heard the Hunter tell --
Tis but the Ecstasy of death --
And then the Brake is still!

. . .

Mirth is the Mail of Anguish --
In which it Cautious Arm,
Lest anybody spy the blood
And "you're hurt" exclaim!
- Dickinson

Dazzling and Tremendous

"Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me."
- Whitman

I love those lines very much indeed. But I think I may disagree with what Whitman is saying (if I've understood it). I don't think the sunrise would be a mortal danger if he couldn't send sunrise out of himself. Rocks or animals aren't in danger of being killed by dazzling tremendousness, but people are -- because they have the capacity to respond to dazzling tremendousness in its own terms.

Our weakness, our capacity to be injured by our surroundings, comes from a strength, our capacity to respond deeply to our surroundings.

(To go back to Whitman, though, perhaps he's saying he'd be overcome if he only responded internally and lacked the power to express his encounters -- and the context (section 25 of "Song of Myself") suggests that that might be on track.)

God and Pain

How God could create a world knowing there would be suffering and not intervene is one of the fundamental questions theists have to confront. A pretty intellectual answer is definitely not going to make it all better, but here's something I've been thinking about that I haven't heard before.

Suppose existence itself is a positive good, and a very big one. If that were true, the suffering in the world -- even the real evil in the world -- wouldn't be able to make creation a bad deal.

We often tend to think of existence as sort of a neutral state, not really worth much unless something ostensibly good happens to it but not harmful unless something bad happens. But God creates things. (I'm working with the assumption that God is good and wise here.) God creates things that don't experience pleasure or pain, so far as we know. God creates things that will probably never touch the experience of humans. The universe is huge, maybe infinite. Creating things seems to be a positive expression of God's energy good in itself, not a good subordinate to that of generating happiness among created things. Creating is God's happiness, it's not just used as a means to human happiness.

The point of that isn't, "Suck it up, the music of the spheres doesn't care about your drama." (Though I suppose that's probably true.) God can create because creating is good and still care about the human condition. But if creating is good -- if it's just fundamentally better for things to be than for them not to be (exit Hamlet) -- then that gives a different perspective to the way we see our condition and make sense of suffering.

If existence itself is an intrinsically good thing, then it could outweigh a lot of bad things. If it's very good to be, then maybe the things we see as bad aren't bad enough to make the answer come out negative. Maybe a person could be starving and still be blessed to be at all. Saints and martyrs have believed that God and God-given existence are still richly good even in painful circumstances, and maybe that applies to the whole world even if we don't recognize it. Perhaps being, and with it the potential for infinite quality of life and fulfillment in God, itself is stronger than the evils that often seem to encumber it.

Disclaimers: The maybes and perhapses above are not rhetorical -- I'm speculating and I know it. Also, I understand if my dear readers (all 4 of you) wish to smack me for propounding such a sanguine philosophy of life at this time in the semester. ;)

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Ok, here's the further digression. I saved it as a draft and didn't come back to finish it.

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older	5
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:	10
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

-- G.M. Hopkins

Margaret is crying about leaves, but she's also crying about mortality. We as people channel the emotional force of abstract and general situations into specific symbols. That's one reason that poetry matters. Specific words, syntax, sound touch a reader because they aren't just words -- they evoke things that matter deeply that we can't access without words. Or maybe we do access them internally, but the words help us to commune with other people about them and be pierced or comforted by the understanding that someone else also knows about this. Poetry channels forces that are too big or too confusing for us to confront without it.

Columbus

In American lit, we've been talking about the early interactions between Europe and America, and I've always found it interesting that Columbus bumped into our continent accidentally when he was looking for something else. He was trying to get to spices and silk in China, and his theory of going around the earth was sound -- except for the obstructing landmass.

I think we often do that same thing. We have some goals in mind and some good theories -- even brilliance and courage, on occasion. But things work out completely and disorientingly different from what we intended, because the earth (or life, or God, as the case may be) is bigger than we thought. And the continents that come between us and our goals can be wonderful, if we accept and use them for what they are and snap out of the idea that they're a shortcut to what we wanted in the first place.

(This thought may eventually try to become articulate and profound and turn into a poem, or it may accept its humble status as a cheesy devo blog.)

When Theological Arguments Aren't

I've noticed recently that supposedly theological arguments are often really more based in aesthetics or mental comfort than in theology. People don't connect on the issue because they really disagree about a framework of aesthetics or mental comfort rather than about things derivable from the tangible evidence.

For example, responses to the question, "Does God cause suffering or just allow it?" are based on the concepts of God seen in each option and how mentally comfortable or irksome those concepts are to people. Most people I know want to say God allows suffering but doesn't cause it, and (I think) this is because they can't stand the idea of God as some kind of sadist or experimenter poking at humanity, even if it's for our own good. But other people say God causes whatever happens, (I think) because they want the reassurance that suffering, coming from God, is good and is under control, not just something random that happens while God stands there and declines to intervene. The groups both want to see God as good, but they have different aesthetic (that's not quite the right term, but it'll do) frameworks, and so they end up in very passionate opposition, both trying to defend the goodness of God from repulsive dishonor (as they see it). The first group of people will promptly direct us to the book of Job, where God allows Satan to cause Job suffering. The second group will also go to Job and quote, "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." Elsewhere in scripture too, there's evidence for both takes on the issue -- but people are selective and dogmatic because they're violently repelled by some images of God. (That was a long example; I hope it made the intended concept clear and wasn't just distracting in itself.)

But very often, people's supposedly theological arguments really get their bitterness and immobility from underlying problems of aesthetics or mental comfort rather than from any evidence that surfaces in the discussion. I was reading a little from John Calvin recently for a class, and he thinks that believing predestination allows people to appreciate God's undeserved bounty much better; he gets a more satisfying God image from predestination. Other people, of course, think the God image you get from Calvinistic predestination is disgusting. But presumably, Calvin doesn't get the same image of God from his views as those of us who react indignantly.
(Any alarmed modernists still with me should take a deep breath here and try not to panic. I'm not saying it's all subjective and all views are equally valid. I do believe that many of the issues are real issues, and it's possible to be wrong on them, and the objective evidence matters. But I am saying that there's a lot below the surface that we usually don't address, and what is subjective is not therefore irrelevant.)

So the main point is, we could improve communication if we better addressed the underlying aesthetic frameworks to theological questions. Often, we get an image that's repellent to us, and we say "Eww" (or perhaps some expression that sounds more like a mature indignation than that but signifies the same thing) and then try to find evidence for our own position under the impression that we know the other one is wrong, because God isn't icky like that. But I think it would be better if we took more time to understand other people's aesthetic frameworks so that we could approach the evidence more cooperatively and with less emotional volatility. And if the aesthetic framework is what's flawed, we could try to reason about that directly instead of dragging theological issues down with it. This method sounds a lot harder than what we normally do, but I think the attempt would be worthwhile.

Thoughts?