The Voice (from The Second Naivety)

The Voice

I saw a little girl in the wood
a crown of clover flowers in her hair
sweet girl apocalyptic girl
chewing on locust wings and honey sickles
chewing on god
she danced around an oak tree stump
with a cricket in her hand
and a voice like a waterfall saying
‘prepare a way for the cricket king
make ready the silence for he who chirps’
and she baptized the cricket with twigs
and stones and a smattering of leaves
and whispered to that heap
and then to heaven
spreading her arms to invite the
quite of the wood
so that there was no wind
or field mice treading through the dirt
or falling leaflets to the earth
until a profound stillness rapt the girl
in anticipation of the coming

but there was nothing
no chirp to fill the void
though she waded through twilight
and tired arms and successive hopes
the cricket remained hidden and mute
even as the sun edged over the horizon  
so that she wondered whether it had died
or whether the darkness
now made her a liberal and a skeptic
and because she could not hear or see
she spat the locust wings and the honey
and cast the garland from her hair
asking a question to end the silence
‘if a cricket makes no chirp
and all are trying to hear it
does it make a sound
does god love us as much as we love him’

The Short and Sloppy Version of My Thesis

So I spent more time on my thesis than I was supposed to. It sat in my mind for about two years, and in rough paragraphs on paper for about one year. In reality, the total work probably amounted to two months worth of actual effort. 

The rest was the result of being out of school due to the clowns in UPenn's financial department, procrastination, marriage, and accelerated fatherhood classes called "living with three children immediately after bachelorhood."

But based on conversations I've had with those who know better, I do think I managed to come up with something original and, at least in my view, interesting. 

This is the history: Husserl's reputed influence on the religious experience theory tradition produced much by way of discovery and thought. A century's worth, in fact. Two schools arose: the perennialists (who hold that religious experiences share the same essence) and the constructivists (who hold that religious experiences are constituted by social, linguistic, and physiological causes and conditions). 

Here's the original part: Heidegger's absence from these conversations has rendered much of the discussion naive to its own self-understanding. To do theory on religious experiences and exclude a factical account is to forget that both religious experience and theoretical conversations about them (theologies about religious experiences or even the religious experience theory tradition itself) happen in concreto. By filtering a discussion of religious experience through the factical categories of Dasein, I suspect (and only suspect), that we might deepen our understanding of religious experience and our way of talking about them.   

For my part, I don't know which school strikes me as more attractive. My own sense is that there is much more to reality than human categories (the five senses, cultural/linguistic influences, our factical modalities, etc.). On that front alone the perennialists perspective is very attractive. They are at least willing to entertain the possibility of transcendence. On the other hand, the constructivist position simply can't be ignored. There are definitely physiological conditions necessary for any human experience (Physicalism is the extreme version of this idea). But it's also hard to argue (though not impossible) that cultural and linguistic influences are both causes and conditions for certain types of religious experience. 

For example, when I had a religious experience (age 15, I think) it was stereotypically Protestant. I was in awestruck wonder of God and could feel, as it were, waves of ecstasy racing over my body. What I thought was four hours turned out to be about 20 minutes. But it's peculiar character resided in the fact that God was wholly Other and that I, in contrast, was insignificant and merely a recipient of his 'glory'--or so I termed it at the time. This experience (I've had others), is in principle indistinguishable from the famous example of Stephen Bradley as outlined in James' The Varieties of Religious Experience. The similarity rests in this: the subject-to-object character of the experience: God is the object, I am the subject. 

This description is fundamentally different from, for example, an experience of nirvana, which is understood in terms of egolessness: where the "All" and the "self" merge together. There is no wholly Other and there is no 'self.' They are one and the same--whatever the deuce that means. 

Both the Protestant and the nirvana experience are said (and I can confirm) to be unlike any other human experience, at least in terms of intensity. In fact, one of the debatable questions is whether these experience are, in fact, sui generis. I'm tempted to think as much--along with the perennialist tradition.

In any case, my paper is fairly simple at bottom: It functions as a formal indication for the direction of a new field of research--a factical one--one that moves beyond the current philosophical categories utilized by religious experience theorists in the perennialists and constructivists traditions: specifically the Husserlian categories.

In Being and Time Heidegger 'destructs' the history of western metaphysics--understood as a positive task, not a negative task. Part of that destruction includes the 'working through' and 'explication of' the factical categories of Dasein (e.g., historicity and temporality, care and existence, etc.). This is the well documented (and I'm not always certain well-understood) existential analytic of Dasein. The function of its explication in Being and Time is, in the spirit of Husserl, one of epoche, or bracketing. Heidegger mentions it in order to get at what strikes him as the real problematic: the question of the meaning of Being.

In other words, the existential analytic of Dasein is one of the primary stages in the destruction of the history western metaphysics. 

The interesting part for my paper is that Heidegger hints at the existential analytic about 5 or 6 years earlier during religious lecture courses, now posthumously published as The Phenomenology of Religious Life. While most of his lectures focus on the destruction of onto-theology, there are two very small (and sloppy) passages directly aimed at Rudolf Otto, religious experience theory's poster-child and favorite Piñata.

In those passages Heidegger provides both a criticism and a positive task. The criticism is that the rational, theoretical comportment in Otto makes him naive to his own self-understanding. Excluding a factical account of religious experience renders his rational theory "indeterminate." Thus, the positive task is, as my paper suggests, the explication of the relationship of religious experiences to factical life. Specifically, 'the holy' should be made into a problem 'as correlate of the act character of faith, which is to be interpreted only from the fundamentally essential context of historical consciousness." 

What the heck this means is well beyond my knowledge of Heidegger. I know that 'historical consciousness' refers to Dasein's recognition not only that it comes from a community but also that there are other Dasein from other communities that live in history. I also know that the act-character of faith here refers to the noetic/thetic character of intentional acts (noema=content of an intentional act, noesis= the act character of the act [e.g. perceiving], thetic character=the type of perceiving [e.g. touching, seeing]).

What I'm not sure about is pretty much everything else as it relates to numinous-like religious experience.

But that's the point. Nobody does.

And it's about high time we do.

In Response to Matt Walsh

I have no idea who Matt is, and I have never read anything else he has written. But I did stumble across this link while browsing the internet on Robin William’s recent death http://themattwalshblog.com/2014/08/12/robin-williams-didnt-die-disease-died-choice/, and felt, if only for my own sake, that it needed to be addressed.

Matt makes two primary contentions:

1.       Suicide is a moral failure in virtue of being a choice.

2.       Spiritual emptiness is an essential cause for depression and spiritual health is the best cure for depression.

As disagreements often go, it isn’t so much that I think Matt is wrong so much as I think his thought is imbalanced, and, at times, naïve. My main beef lies with Matt’s criticism of phrases that people make of Robin while they're grieving. Many of them say that Robin is now “free” or “at peace.”

Matt writes:

“It is not freeing. In suicide you obliterate yourself and shackle your loved ones with guilt and grief. There is no freedom in it. There is no peace. How can I free myself by attempting to annihilate myself? How can I free something by destroying it? Chesterton said, “The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.” Where is the freedom in that?”

I hate that Matt quotes Chesterton here both because the quote does not follow from Matt's claim (which opportunistically abuses the word ‘free’)[1]--probably Matt is just being incoherent--and because I think that Chesterton, for all his insight on gratitude and joy, was far too predisposed to glee to understand much about a lifetime of despair. (Is it any wonder that Chesterton’s sentiments and rational in “Orthodoxy” lead him to eventually commit to the Catholic Church—whose own staunch position on suicide is well-known?) That is, I think Chesterton is the doctor with (part of) an elixir, not the patient in need of it. He knows no more of the hauntings of despair than a life-long healthy doctor knows of what it is to live with chronic cancer. He may be right, but he is naïve. He prescribe the pills, he doesn't know what it is to force oneself to take them over and over.

There is no denying that suicide is a type of selfishness, if not, in certain scenarios, a very selfish brand of selfishness. There is also no denying that a choice is involved. But to concentrate one’s interpretation of Robin’s death around Robin’s selfishness is…. what? 

Ill-timed? Insensitive? Misguided? Conveniently reminiscent of Matt’s religious convictions? 

While I think Matt is sincere—and even judicious—I also think he talks about people’s false senses of security and their sloppy sentimentality toward Robin in order to promote his religious convictions. What, after all, is the function of his entire blog other than to promote his brand of belief? In the same vein, what is the function behind nit-picking at a few therapeutic colloquialisms if not to advocate his ‘nuanced’ position over those who are colloquializing?[2]

 

That's the reason people are upset at Matt, including myself. It’s not necessarily because he's wrong;[3]it’s because he's being an asshole. No one cares about the ‘finer’ theologies driving one's interpretation of Robin’s death right now, let alone a theology that convicts Robin. 

People are just sad. Let them be. 

They might even be misguided in their sadness. So what?

Is it really appropriate to focus on Robin’s moral culpability a day or so after he passes? Not only that, but on a public venue?

---

[1] All people mean when they say that Robin is free is that he is not haunted by depression or its symptoms—which in this case includes thoughts of suicide. A good night’s sleep or drugs can be just as freeing; they’re just not permanently freeing. The function behind killing oneself is permanent freedom from depression. Matt, upon my research, might be hinting at (however unclearly) his view that Robin’s consciousness lingers on post mortem and is still not free.

[2] Of course, like many, he is probably naïve to the fact that it is, in fact, a brand.

[3]  I think Matt has some of this right, but I also think he's to unclear to really say anything too meaningful.