Two years ago around this time I met weekly with a former professor
of psychology from UPenn who, because of his age and ailments, attended a
nursing home. To put it abruptly, my job was to baby sit him with the probing
questions of an enthusiastic grad student. He was bored and desperate to feel
engaged, just like the good ol’ days, and I was happy to meet with him.
I liked the idea then as much as I do now. Who in their
right mind would pass up speaking with a highly-educated Third Reich atheist
about religious experience?
Because as a rule old
people nearing death no longer give a damn. They are candid. They have either abandoned formalities and
niceties because they’re out of time or because they’re out of their minds. Both
are excellent.
Sure you have some who are shy about their last vestiges of
consciousness, but the honest ones know they don’t have time for that. Whether
someone is religious or not, death is a practical matter. The epitaph must be
decided upon, the will and testament drafted. The aged know this best of all. Even
before then, in youth, measures are taken to prolong physical well-being,
thought is given to how or even if to live a good life while death looms (somewhere)
on the horizon.
As such, I have not forgotten the old professor’s words to
me. “It may be,” he said
contemplatively, “that I need God in my
dying moments. I do not know. But I don’t think I will. I can live with the
fact of dying.”
Immediately upon hearing this, a Faulkner quote passed
through my mind. “It’s not when you realize nothing can help you,” says
Quentin, “—religion, pride, anything. It’s when you realize you don’t need any
aid.”
For the brief moments I walked this earth as an atheist I
had to mark with honesty that both Quentin’s and the professor’s words, and
that my similar position, was an instance of atheistic psycho-linguistic
therapy disguised as bravery and strength. Fascinatingly, the very act of naming
or categorizing the event gave me control over my ominous future by giving me a
designator inadvertently designed to stifle anxiety.
That is, the “rage against the dying of light” ceased when I compacted all my premonitions of death into a designator whose grammatical function was to enact acquiescence—which is to say emotional passivity.[1] It was not Christian hope and therefore not Christian therapy, but it was atheistic passivity and therefore atheistic therapy. It's not totally unlike Buddhism, really. Different method and emotions, same result--though not in degree.
What I thought was that I was being brave by shedding the hope associated to Christianity and simply ‘facing the fact of death.’ But in reality each time I spoke or thought about my death as something I had ‘accepted,’ I blindly drank the very cup I accused the Christians of drinking.
That is, the “rage against the dying of light” ceased when I compacted all my premonitions of death into a designator whose grammatical function was to enact acquiescence—which is to say emotional passivity.[1] It was not Christian hope and therefore not Christian therapy, but it was atheistic passivity and therefore atheistic therapy. It's not totally unlike Buddhism, really. Different method and emotions, same result--though not in degree.
What I thought was that I was being brave by shedding the hope associated to Christianity and simply ‘facing the fact of death.’ But in reality each time I spoke or thought about my death as something I had ‘accepted,’ I blindly drank the very cup I accused the Christians of drinking.
For all my
admiration of Sisyphus, I could not help but wonder what attracted him to
pushing the boulder in the first place. What function did it serve him if
not a therapeutic function? Why not roller-skate instead or get high? Why not
wallow or, for me, believe in better/more effective therapeutic measures? For
if both we atheists and Christians are unconsciously seeking therapeutic
measures, and the absurd problem still faces us, why opt for the lousier of the two? Such were my thoughts at the time.
What I realized was
that all the mental toughness self-attributed by (certain) atheists to
themselves can be reduced to mental
tenderness in light of the fact that they still seek or simply find themselves with therapeutic counter-measures.
My omnipresent brain editor William James likewise accuses
atheists of being intellectually tender for merely ‘facing the fact of death’
because it is symptomatic of the need to satisfy the demands of Western man’s
obsession with the ultima ratio, the
total ‘filling in’ of one’s worldview (a
point Heidegger would like, too). According
to James, to quantify death fits neatly into the modern rationalist’s tendency
to ‘need an answer’ and ignores any degree of mental discomfort over the
possibility for alternative explanation—which here means incomplete
explanation and for James means pluralistic explanation. To put it differently,
it’s the comfort epistemology well known to religious enterprises manifesting
in an atheistic way through atheistic language (a point which amounts to a very
Eliadaian extrapolation, I’m proud to say).
In the history of my life, I’ve supported any number of
versions and competing therapeutic narratives. The more popular Protestant version of it here
in America appears in conservative comfort theology, where foreign
philosophizing and theologizing are simply ignored for the fear of paradigm
shifting. Above all my ideologies hovers
the eternal cloud (smog?) of this fundamentalism. I shall forever be haunted by it. I
supported it in my youth and abandoned it in adulthood. Most of my family still
operates inside of it. In most cases,
this tough-faith approach is mental tenderness manifesting as mental stupidity. The methods used by this class are so dubious that even those within the Christian tradition recognize it as mental tenderness.
The other and less popular version (in America) of Protestant
mental toughness is more sophisticated, and usually appears as an argument from
authority based on faith—which is to say an argument for Catholicism without the Pope. I myself currently belong somewhere between this class and a religious pluralist. They/we believe in such and such based on the legitimacy of these traditions: insert
list here with accompanying propositional, historiological, metaphysical and
other such reasoned paraphernalia. To this class, one can market the advances
of philosophy and science with much less push back. For Protestants in this set, mental toughness means not breaking at
each newly learned or refined philosophy, but instead a steady metamorphosis toward more
complete faith. Even doubt works within the mechanism, and oddly becomes a
garment of faith itself. So tough are the Christians in this set that they’ll
listen to pretty much anything without dropping their belief.
In the case of Christianity—not to mention religious systems
like it—the popular criticism against it is obvious. Death is so horrifying that people are willing to believe crazy shit to
circumvent the void. Religion is by many estimations (which is to say
Atheist/Agnostic) the tender-est of the bunch simply in virtue of being the most
obnoxious relative to the wisdom of the scientific era and Ockham’s razor—a
point that standing by itself is pretty naïve but is often rhetorically convincing.
Every system, I imagine, has their ‘death solution.’ Buddhism solves
the death problem simply by never letting anyone die. Atheism plays dodge ball.
Islam, if I understand it right, solves the problem in much the same way as Protestantism.
Agnosticism, to oversimplify, doesn’t have a fucking clue what to do with any of it so it finds
distractions (of a Pascalian sort) or despairs (of Kierkegaardian sort) and is thus restless (of
an Augustinian sort). Catholicism and Dante toss you purgatory and time to work
out the kinks. And early rabbinical Judaism contribute retribution theory to
the mix after simply neglecting the possibility for an afterlife. I suspect
that with a little work you might locate the “tenderness” in any tradition.
Because what is meant
by tenderness of mind, I’m sure you’ve noticed, is relative and informed by someone’s
weltanschauung. James thinks
dogmatist (of any degree and of any worldview) are tender because they need to feel complete, where James is
satisfied being tough in the open-endedness of pragmatism/pluralism. Atheists (and
sometimes agnostics) think James and religious folk are tender because they
can’t face the misery of ‘shuffling off this mortal coil.’ And Christians (probably
other religions as well) find James tender for lacking the requisite faith to
be dogmatic and the atheists tender for lacking the requisite faith to have
hope. It’s a rough summary, but with a little gerrymandering, I think you can
see the truth in it. Or, at least, I’ve bought into something like this story
for the time being.
In the end, we are, I
am, at my core, deeply concerned with dying, my own death and other’s. In
my mind, Heidegger was right to locate the human problem as the ‘throwness’
problem, the inevitability of death problem, and wrong to depend on that finitude to enable Dasien to ‘care.’ But I certainly understand the appeal.
It's true; they don't teach us this in our temples; they teach the opposite.
And the “one short sleep past we wake eternally” is the answer par excellence to Christianity. Probably in large part due to my background it remains the par excellence narrative to me. So powerful was Paul's "death has lost its sting" revelation that many early Christians were signing up to become martyrs, and I have always been attracted to it.
Even still, Christianity by and large has neglected the value space of the finite, either subjecting the finite to an Augustinian critique and devaluation, or, more regularly, being totally oblivious to its existence. Both are probably atrocious underestimations of its importance. Chesterton is about the only Christian I've ever noted to have noted it on its own terms. His model is essentially Humean, though I have no space/time to deal with it here.
Ah well, I'll have to write another blog. I'm afraid 3 pages is already too much. Kevin out.
[1] I think of Freudian psycho-therapy
as an example. In Freud the utterable or
at least conscious retrieval of the traumatic memory supplies
the patient with a designator or a pointer to a designator—be it an image,
phrase, word, or all of the above—with which they can quantify and measure that
event. You might call the quantifying act a naming act. Once it’s named it can
be manipulated and either purposively shoved forever back into the subconscious
(whatever that is) or placed ‘out in the open’ for further repairs to the
psyche. Once the cause is diagnosed, which is to say identified and named, the
effect no longer permeates because the cause is no longer a cause; it’s just another
designator in an ever evolving idiolect.
As such, the
cause designator gives the patient the equipment for accepting, combating, or
revalorizing his/her present experience in, quite literally, new terms. More
often than not, what was originally a cause becomes a designator designed
(consciously or unconsciously) by the agent to be therapeutic. (The same thing,
by the way, occurs when husbands and wives come home from work and ‘get things
off their chest’ through ‘talking it out.’)
