Imperfection

Imperfection

Cultural Dialectics

Series editor: Raphael Foshay

The difference between subject and object slices through subject as well as through object.

—Theodor Adorno

Cultural Dialectics provides an open arena in which to debate questions of culture and dialectic — their practices, their theoretical forms, and their relations to one another and to other spheres and modes of inquiry. Approaches that draw on any of the following are especially encouraged: continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools of cultural theory, deconstruction, gender theory, postcoloniality, and interdisciplinarity.

SERIES TITLES

Northern Love: An Exploration of Canadian Masculinity

Paul Nonnekes

Making Game: An Essay on Hunting, Familiar Things, and the Strangeness of Being Who One Is

Peter L. Atkinson

Valences of Interdisciplinarity: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy

Edited by Raphael Foshay

Imperfection

Patrick Grant

IMPERFECTION

Patrick Grant

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Grant

Published by AU Press, Athabasca University

1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8

ISBN 978-1-926836-75-1 (print) 978-1-926836-76-8 (PDF) 978-1-926836-77-5 (epub)

A volume in the Cultural Dialectics series

ISSN 1915-836X (print) 1915-8378 (digital)

Cover and interior design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design.

Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printers.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Grant, Patrick

Imperfection / Patrick Grant.

(Cultural dialectics, 1915-836x)

Includes bibliographical references.

Issued also in electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-926836-75-1

1. Philosophy — History. 2. Criticism. 3. Imperfection. 4. Self.

5. Philosophical theology. 6. Ethnic conflict — Religious aspects. I. Title.

II. Series: Cultural dialectics

BD450.G73 2012    128    C2012-901432-X

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through

the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

Assistance provided by the Government of Alberta, Alberta Multimedia Development Fund.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Please contact AU Press, Athabasca University at [email protected] for permissions and copyright information.

For Larry

Imperfect and full of faults as we are,

we’re never justified in stifling the ideal,

and what extends into the infinite as

if it were no concern of ours.

VINCENT VAN GOGH, May 1883

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

FRANCIS BACON, Of Beauty

Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

PART I Imperfection

1 Plato and the Limits of Idealism

2 The Van Gogh Letters: The Art of the Unfinished

3 The Trouble with Visions

4 Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, and Regressive Inversion

5 Osama, Theo, and the Burnt Fool’s Bandaged Finger

6 What the Buddha Didn’t Say

7 Not So Good News: The Gospel According to Mark

PART II Self

8 Immortal Souls and State Executions

9 The Eyes Have It: Seeing One’s Self and Others

10 The God of Battles and the Irish Dimension of Shakespeare’s Henry V

11 Crucifying Harry: Victims, Scapegoats, and the Northern Ireland Troubles

12 Talking to the Cyclops: On Violence and Self-Destruction

13 Doing Nothing About It: Taoism, Selflessness, and Non-Action

14 Cliff Jumpers and Delta Dwellers: On Religious Language and Commitment

PART III Freedom

15 Dr. Johnson, Freedom, and the Book of Psalms

16 Sex, Society, and Romeo and Juliet

17 Cartoons from Denmark and the March of the Zombies

18 Vergil and the Almighty Dollar

19 Endgame in Sri Lanka: Dharmapala’s Legacy and Rajapaksa’s War

20 Jung and The Secret of the Golden Flower

21 Kieslowski’s Red: Fraternity in the Making

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Preface

This book has developed partly from a retrospective view of other books I have happened to write over the course of an academic career. On the face of it, these books are an eclectic mix, beginning with studies of Renaissance English literature and proceeding by way of inquiries into the scientific revolution, Christian mysticism, literary modernism, the New Testament, the idea of the person, ethnic conflict in Northern Ireland, and Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Although I was aware that these projects were interconnected, I would have been hard pressed to set out explicitly the key values that were (more or less) tacitly at work in the project as a whole. In the following chapters, I revisit several questions raised by these earlier studies, but I do so mainly to clarify what I take to be the key guiding principles and ideas that have been at work throughout and which in turn underpin a certain view, or assessment, of the human predicament that, for better or worse, we find ourselves sharing.

In a nutshell, this view, or assessment, can be summarized by the observation that people are imperfect but they have ideas about perfection, and the most interesting and creative things that people do are produced from within this opposition between the ideal and the actual. In itself, this claim is straightforward, but its implications are less so, and are explored in a series of essay-like chapters which have a bearing especially on the present state of the God debate, on modern ethnic conflicts in which religion is a marker of identity, and on the idea of freedom in relation to the uncertainties of personal identity and self-determination.

Acknowledgements should go all the way back, but the list would be all but endless. Nonetheless, I would like to single out one particular lodestar that has been there from the beginning. From the first undergraduate essay almost exactly a half-century ago, down to the present volume, Laurence Lerner has, with unfailing goodwill and almost terrifying endurance, been engaged, vigorous, testing, humane, insightful, and difficult to please. It has been a long conversation; I am the better for it, and, with gratitude, I look forward to keeping it going.

Earlier versions of chapters 5, 10, 11, 12, and 14 appeared in Fortnight magazine in February 2005 (no. 433), December 2003 (no. 420), October 2004 (no. 429), December 2002 (no. 409), and September 2004 (no. 415). Chapter 9 draws on materials published in Personalism and the Politics of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1996), chap. 4; the remarks on Dharmapala in chapter 19 draw on materials published in Buddhism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka (New York: State University of New York Press, 2009), chap. 4.

Introduction

Only madmen and fools are pleased with themselves: no wise man is good enough for his own satisfaction. I’m not sure that I entirely agree with this statement by the seventeenth-century philosopher-theologian Benjamin Whichcote, but he puts his finger on a fact about human experience with which I am mainly concerned in the following pages. That is, human beings are distinctive among the creatures because humans can conceive of and aspire to a perfect or ideal good even though they themselves remain imperfect. Whichcote’s wise man understands this and accepts the disparity. By contrast, the madmen and fools suffer from a deluded self-satisfaction that, we can assume, might make them dangerous.

As Whichcote’s aphorism suggests, ideas about perfection and about the self are closely bound up with one another. That is, the notion that we are autonomous moral agents develops alongside our acceptance of ideals. Thus, an individual who is committed to a moral ideal and who fails to live up to it is likely to experience guilt and feel irresponsible. For such a person, the enduring identity of the self over time as the bearer of responsibilities is assumed as self-evident.

Whichcote doesn’t mention whether or not guilt and responsibility accompany the wise man’s dissatisfaction with himself, but instead he warns against what for him is a bigger problem: the madness and folly of those who don’t feel dissatisfaction at all because they are sufficiently good already. One step further and we find the madmen and fools entertaining delusions of grandeur — the idea that they are perfect already and can treat others accordingly, playing God.

Historically, religion has done much to explain and manage relationships between the self and the ideas about perfection to which it aspires and by which it is simultaneously shaped and rebuked. Especially in the main monotheistic traditions emergent from the Middle East, God, who alone is perfect, creates and oversees the human drama, and religion focuses on human experiences of imperfection, responsibility, guilt, and aspiration — experiences within which the sense of individual, autonomous personhood is shaped. But during the past century, globalization has rapidly made accessible the diversity and sophistication of other world religions, and (at least in some quarters) secularism has enabled a powerful critique of the truth claims of religion in general.

For instance, the recent flurry of attacks on religion, largely in response to dangerous kinds of fundamentalism emergent especially from the Abrahamic faith traditions, East and West, has given short shrift to the explanatory power of religion in enabling any humane understanding at all of the wretched creature who can apprehend perfection, as T.E. Hulme says (reproducing Whichcote’s idea, but with an additional acerbic edge). Certainly, the strenuous atheism of the recent anti-religious vanguard is welcome at least for its insistence on the right of unbelief and its attack on the follies, cruelties, and superstitions that can and ought to be laid at religion’s door. And the polemicists are right: the fact is, we don’t know what happens after we die, we don’t know why we or the universe are here, and the mystery of existence remains as impenetrable as it is self-evident. If asserting such things makes me an atheist along with those others, then I am pleased to be one.

Yet for a Buddhist (the many varieties of Buddhism notwithstanding) these assertions would not be as troubling as they are for many, perhaps most, Christians. Buddhism is sometimes described as atheist, though in fact the Buddha — in the Pali Canon, for instance — neither affirms nor denies God’s existence. It is not an important question for him, and he feels that without having to bother about it we can attend better to the suffering world around us. For the Buddha, the mystery of origins remains just that, a mystery. Life in the present is sufficient, and is affirmed by the attempt to liberate ourselves and others from suffering. Also, corresponding to this lack of concern about a creator God, Buddhism has a highly provisional sense of the self. Individual selfhood is a loose aggregate of feelings, thoughts, sensations, memories, and is not a substantive unity. Perfection consists in being liberated not only from suffering but also from the self, and we are responsible for the patient work of bringing this about, discarding our illusions in the process.

Still, perhaps surprisingly, Buddhist non-theism is less exclusive of, say, Jesus’s preaching about the Kingdom of Heaven than we might at first think. The Cross also is a protest against suffering in the world, and liberation depends on us understanding its critical force, for if we don’t treat our neighbour justly in the here and now we don’t love God. Even such an arcane doctrine as the Trinity can make sense in this context, if understood from the perspective of philosophical theology. That is, God the Father represents the unfathomable mystery of origins; the Son is the mediator of that mystery specifically to us humans; the Spirit is the keeping alive of the Son’s historical mission. These three elements are interdependent and cannot be adequately understood separately. To unbelievers, the Trinity can easily seem a nonsense, but some co-operation with its symbolic language can discover how it addresses the irreducible mystery of origins and the tragedy of suffering with which people contend throughout history, seeking to realize the joy of life within the harmonious interrelationship of community (the three persons as one).

Christianity and Buddhism are therefore not so far apart in how they attempt to involve believers in immediate and practical ways in the quest for liberation, an ideal in contrast to which the problem of imperfection — that is, suffering and injustice — is itself discovered and confronted. In this quest, Jesus and the Buddha agree that mere self-concern (egotism, selfishness, and the like) is an impediment to the freedom we seek. Transcendence of the ego and ego-inflation are opposites — just as are heaven and hell, sanctity and megalomania, community and tyranny. There is no disputing that in the history of religions, the megalomania-hell-tyranny trinity has often trumped sanctity-community-heaven. But many believers understand this without losing faith in religion’s better side, and on the reverse of the coin, there are plenty of megalomaniac, infernal secularists about as well.

In short, religions are human constructs, and their fundamental metaphysical assertions are a symbolic reckoning of our human predicament, wherein we find ourselves confronted by the scandal of suffering and imperfection while aspiring nonetheless to ideals marked by the absence of such things. But religious people don’t know any more than the rest of us about the overarching mysteries of existence and consciousness. Nor does it help to conflate religions (as I have just been doing with Buddhism and Christianity) to a degree that obscures their differences. Nonetheless, for many practical and moral purposes, complex allegiances do exist beyond the lines drawn by dogma, and there is a broad spectrum of understanding and commitment among the religions themselves. Dogma alone doesn’t tell us anything about the spirit in which it is understood, or whether or not it is a vehicle for promoting justice and compassion. As the theologian Jürgen Moltmann says, the problem of suffering (imperfection) cannot be answered, nor can righteousness (the ideal) be surrendered. That is the basic contradiction within which the humanum, the human thing itself, is shaped, and careful discernment is required to untangle the truth claims of religion and of other kinds of discourse without oversimplifying how they engage the core contradiction Moltmann describes.

All of which brings me back to the idea with which I began, namely that aspirations to perfection awaken us to our actual imperfection. Some implications of this idea can now be stated in the form of a small number of assertions, as follows.

A sense of the self as an autonomous agent and the bearer of responsibilities develops in the gap between people’s actual imperfections and the ideals to which they aspire. The notion that we have a single, unitary self is yet another ideal that we do not (and cannot) live up to; rather, personal identity is provisional, emerging from the body’s inarticulate skills and preconscious knowing. A sufficiently stable sense of self can be nurtured within the family and its extensions (clan, tribe, nation), but conflicts perennially arise between passionate group (family) loyalties and an individual’s adherence to a transcendent principle or idea. Such conflicts are central to how autonomous moral agency is discovered, through which, in turn, a community might be freely shaped in contradistinction to the constraints of group loyalties and obligations. Freedom in this sense entails some degree of individual responsibility, but (if it exists at all) freedom is limited, and it is useful to acknowledge this as a way of avoiding the twin perils of ego-inflation and self-hatred. Finally, the right to unbelief should be valued and defended, not least because principled secular unbelief shows that people don’t have to be religious to be moral, and in so doing encourages religious people to behave morally as an affirmation that their religious claims are, at least, not egregiously harmful.

My title, Imperfection, addresses this set of concerns, and the book is divided into three main sections reflecting the main topics I have outlined above: imperfection, the self, and freedom. I do not so much present a systematic argument as a set of interlinked sorties, as it were (essais in the basic sense), each pertaining to the topic in hand. Also, I attempt to address the book to non-specialized readers and to avoid as much as possible the formal apparatus of academic discourse. Each chapter can be read independently, and there is no special reason to proceed sequentially (browsers are welcome). For those who might prefer to read straight through, the sections and chapters are interconnected in ways that I describe as the argument proceeds.

PART I Imperfection

1

Plato and the Limits of Idealism

It makes good sense to start with Plato (428–348 BCE), the first Western philosopher whose writings survive in more than fragmentary form, and at the heart of whose thinking is a preoccupation with the fact that ideas are real and perfect in a way that material things are not. In short, Plato is the first Idealist, and his thinking is usually described in a manner that focuses on this point. Yet Plato’s Dialogues are bewilderingly complex and all-but-endlessly engaging, not least because his idealism led him simultaneously to discover the pervasiveness and significance of human imperfection, and that suffering and injustice are problems that the salve of reason does not entirely cure. Plato’s most enduring achievement remains in how he wrestles with this set of issues, but to provide some further sense of how he discovered them in the first place, let us turn briefly to his predecessors in ancient Greece during the sixth and fifth centuries BCE.

Like all geniuses, Plato chose the right time to be born — a time, that is, when his extraordinary talents were fitted to produce a new understanding of ideas explored, but not consolidated, by a wide range of earlier thinkers. These early philosophers had struggled to understand the world as Homer described it in the fabulous, brightly contoured narratives of his great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. That is, the philosophers wanted to learn about the principles by which Homer’s gods kept order in the cosmos, given that the gods behaved erratically and were often at odds with one another. Likewise, the philosophers wanted to know what principles could best regulate human behaviour, which was itself as changeable as the cosmos and the gods and, as Homer shows, is frequently influenced by both.

Thales, Anaximander, Anaximines, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Democritus, and the Pythagoreans offered explanations focused on the cosmic aspects of the question, speculating about laws and principles that provide stability in a constantly shifting material world. Plato’s great teacher, Socrates, began also by seeking to understand change in nature, but, like his main antagonists, the Sophists, he decided to switch his attention to the changeableness of human behaviour. That is, Socrates wanted to know what principles should guide us so that we might better bring to order our frequent unruliness and moral confusion.

Instructed by his predecessors, Plato sought to investigate both of these large issues and to understand the ordered dance of the heavenly bodies as well as the moral behaviour of human beings. Moreover, he thought that the answer to the first question (prompted by the cosmological theorists) would be the same kind of answer as would explain the second (prompted by Socrates). What holds for the universe at large holds for ourselves within the universe, and also for the good society should we be able to construct it. In short, Plato believed in the inherent rationality of the cosmos, and in our minds being so ordered as to mirror and understand its workings. For this reason, he is usually described as an idealist. That is, he is convinced that ideas are real because they don’t change, and he believed that reason gives reliable access to the unchanging laws that govern the universe, including the moral behaviour of human beings.

In short, Plato happened along when the time was ripe for gathering and sorting the rich harvest of poetry, philosophy, and ethical and political theory that had been produced so abundantly by the remarkable phase of Greek culture directly preceding him. He would make a banquet out of this abundance, transforming, rearranging, and re-presenting it by way of his own personal alchemy, leaving us with his great collection, the Dialogues. Yet he does not provide us with a clearly worked-out system, and his dialogues are more like a smorgasbord than a formal banquet. Everything is there, but it can be confusing to know where to begin, and, when you have had enough, how exactly to describe what you have taken in. Although the idealizing thrust of Plato’s main arguments remains clear, he is everywhere aware also of the resistance offered to his theories by the sheer, confusing weight of experience. Why, for instance, do people so often act in ways that flagrantly contradict what their reason clearly tells them is best to do?

When Plato wrote, the