Thoughts After Theory

Last Thursday night Dr. Dunning brought forth the rather ironic difficulty of theorizing about methods of theorizing. William James' typology of religious experience provoked the topic, leaving us questioning the legitimacy of typologizing itself. The catch word here is obviously 'legitimacy.' What can we possibly mean by it other than: to what degree does this method provide us with the means for knowing truth? Does typology provide us with truth? But even still, Dr. Dunning's question was more hermeneutical, i.e. how can we know that the interpretation of the presented data (that we typologize in order to find truth) is the right interpretation?

The trouble, he was pained to express, is that we cannot look at data qua data where it is not already interpreted. In phenomenological terms, objects (mental or not) are presented to us, and such as they are, they are already interpreted. Such is the problem of the hermeneutic circle: the transcendental subject 'perceiving' the immanent object (to use Husserl's terminology), and thereafter, the inability to 'step outside' to objectively view the immanent object without interpreting the interpretation. All immanent objects are necessarily and already interpreted, including the one perceived while stepping outside. To try to view the method of typologizing from the outside is really just another way of saying theorizing about theorizing where the neither theorizing possesses and objective point of view. Hence the circle.

To proceed down irony road, Dr. Dunning went on to produce a typology of modes for how people tend to interpret the data. There are, on his model, paradoxical thinkers and clear thinkers (and some others which i don't discuss here). Both James and I easily fit into the paradoxical category. Add nearly every poet since the beginning of time, a few of my favorites like Chesterton, Lewis, Tolkien, the majority of religious people, and a slew of Continental philosophers, and you'll have a picture of the paradoxical type. Life as it appears to us is a symphony of suggestions. The platitudes of 'clear' thinkers have little effect on us because we constantly feel that propositions set forth by the clear type are, well, either of little pragmatic consequence or boring.

I say this not to discount the clear thinkers. In the first place they are the last people on earth you want to make your enemy. They tend to be argumentative and, God help them, unconsciously sentimental. In the second place i have been too close to too many of them not to find it a credible modus operadni. They are unhesitatingly obsessed with the truth. Unfortunately, however, they also tend to think that their mode of obsession the only kind. Their criteria, of course, is that the truth, whatever it is, be clearly understood. Those who do not express or discover truth this way are not interested in it in the right kind of way. Many of them probably go so far as to say that if you do not express or discover truth this way, you do not express or discover it.

Thus you will find our analytic philosophers squabbling over the minutia of some minutia. It is a tactful and impressive exercise, really. Only someone with a certain temperament and mental constitution can do it. But it is tragically naive of those of them who think that they possess the modus operandi par excellence. I ask, "par excellence in virtue of what"? How can someone say their mode of interpreting the data is the better mode without invoking an objective principle--out of thin air-- for which mode is best ? Brake it down in layman's terms and you have, "i see the world this way and so should you."

I am beginning to think modes of interpretation have their corresponding psychological temperaments. It is very William James of me, i must confess, and i haven't yet worked out the details. The fear of consigning oneself to a false conclusion determines the insistence of our analytic types toward a modus operandi which fosters clarity. Given the true premises, we attain, however in-often, a certain answer. On the other hand hope as a temperamental disposition fits closer with the paradoxical type: truth, however incomplete or stretched, is attained en route, almost accidentally one might say. Additionally, it is almost always evolving. Of course, like every typology, there is not a one to one correspondence, not to mention it is an oversimplification. Any given human psyche is a bit more complex than that.

But what i like best about both approaches is their humility. Our clear types are O.K. with saying "i am only right about a very few number of things." Our paradoxical types are O.K. with saying "i am wrong about a great number of things."

Odysseus

A poem is never finished, it is only abandoned. For now, i abandon Odysseus to the backwaters of my consciousness only to return to him a year or so from now. I am not unaware of the audacity of taking on such a project. Tennyson's Ulysses is without question one of the greatest lyrical poems in the English language. I am not trying to copy Tennyson. Nor am i copying him in writing yet another poem whose title is the same: Tiresias. My project is much larger overall, and will thus inevitably consists of unoriginal parts. But to my knowledge, the whole is entirely original. It just so happened that Odysseus came easiest to me after i'd already written Diomedes, and Diomedes so happened to come easiest after writing Helen--a poem which is not, in the same sort of way, a recreation of Sarah Teasdale's masterpiece. Yet again, it just so happened that Helen came easiest after writing Menelaus, a character who, if my research is right, no one has written a poem about--save a small piece by Rupert Brooke. Thus some parts are original and some not. Both Tiresias and Priam are on their way, and Achilles has at least one stanza nearly complete. Still many more will are to be added to the saga. If i were to rank the four i have Helen remains the best piece, if not my Magnum Opus. Diomedes and Odysseus are about the same in ranking, though for different reasons, and Menelaus is last, though, ironically, i think one of his stanzas is the best i've ever written. In any event, i hope you enjoy, i know i did.

Odysseus

Perhaps I’ll cast my spell on you,

Dangle some luck or slow down time,

Or strike a chime, or throw the die,

Or better still I'll sing a rhyme.

Takes some talent to make believable

Make believe, but pretend is what i do.

So what if i tell a half truth or the whole,

It matters little what’s actually true.

For have we not known gods in better moods,

Tinkering our way back to the shipyards?

Say Muse, say we were to harmonize with a

Dripping of blood drops, not some cacophonous bards:

Who’d believe wondering and wandering were the same,

Or home is the cause of home ‘cause my mother said so?

That happiness is a kind of growing used to death,

And death caused by the hoping come off the alpenglow?

I wade the threshold between shoal

And crowd—where waters tease the sand.

Between pallor and pith, sea and seeing,

And what no dull mortal can understand.

To play at theologian with the gods;

Esteem them rightly but know them wrongly,

Aghast at the words and sacred songs,

At last to feel what’s been felt strongly.

That they are a sham,

And that so am I,

And that still we count the bodies with same

Poise, the same pace, with which we stack them high.

That my life and the sunrise circuit strive on ‘mongst,

The spangled and glittering cadavers deranged,

And this ditty is but the pause between the first

And second twitching of a leg half rearranged.

Farewell! And farewell again!

The battle’s won a retreat!

Now beauty’s out there, lost in twilight,

Among the councils of stars replete.

The current of this man concurrent

With fickle winds and fickle kings.

The reckless oceans and the wide azure,

Is quiet, is home, is the thing of things.

Religious and Non-Religious Sentiments

It's strange to be the only religious person in a religious theories class. This weeks reading of Rudolf Otto's "The Idea of the Holy" proved particularly odd. Studying atheist after atheist eventually turns into good fun for we Christians immersed in the laicized community. In a way we are used to trying to strap on the consciousness of people whose ideologies and temperaments are fundamentally different from our own. We are the minority, and as such must adapt to the academic milieu. I think if one succeeds at true charity, he ends up being able to defend Freud's position better than Freud did. On my definition, charity not only thinks what they have thought and thinks beyond them, it feels what they have felt. Aristotle says that the mature mind can coherently manipulate ideas which are not its own. I think the same principle holds within the psychological realm. A mature psychology can feel sentiments which are not its own. A psychology which empathizes with the sentiments associated with atheism has succeeded not only in understanding atheistic propositions but the allure of those propositions. Everything else follows suit. The intuitions of the atheist, the creative relationship between fact and theory begin to have meaning. The positive or negative impressions toward religion--any religion--begin to have valence. When someone religious says something overtly religious, a Christian well versed in the sentiments of atheism can feel the anti-sentiments pique.

Whether this model demonstrates just how shaky my view of identity is, is another question--and one that needs answering. For now i'm curious about the blatant sentimental ignorance demonstrated to me during this week's class. Otto is explicitly clear: "The reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no father; for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say, social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feeling. " Otto goes on to give his famous account of the numinous. To my knowledge there is no greater account of it. Otto at times is so penetratingly accurate concerning it that i wonder how often he must have felt it. Much could be added and subtracted from his account, modified and what not, but it is an empirical/psychological observation unlike any other i've encountered. (I will not go into the details.)

What struck me in class, however, was the antagonism, the misunderstanding, the pure naivety concerning the subject. I sat dumbfounded at the inability of both the professor's and student's inability to access the content of the numinous. Some suggested that Otto didn't really think that the numinous was qualitatively different from normal sentimental experience. Some suggested that Otto did actually think that non-religious people could access the content of the numinous--why else would he write about it. Some simply threw their hands up in bewilderment.

In truth, it was only with the third type of person that i had any sympathy. It echoes Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak one must be silent." They at least recognized a category with which they had no familiarity nor possible access. It was like listening to a group of people talk about the experience of reading poetry who had never had the experience of reading poetry. They spoke of iambic pentameter and prosody where only reading a line of Thomas Hardy does the experiential knowledge justice. One does not explain Samuel Barber's Adagio for String with musical notes. You cannot abstract signifiers out of sounds. The only option is to press the play button or go to the concert hall. (Otto by the way uses the feeling of the sublime as one of his arguments from analogy. The experience of the Mysterium Tremendum is analogous to the experience of the sublime.)

It reminds me of Lewis' essay Transposition where "lower" feelings cannot attain to "higher" emotions. The meaning gets muddled. I do not doubt that there are atheistic sentiments with which i am unfamiliar. Likewise with agnostic. But it does not seem to me that they are qualitatively different from any other normal emotional state. They are accessible conceptually without actually having experienced the emotion itself. Additionally, they are, for me, easily experienced. "It's not" says Quentin from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Furry, "It's not when you realize that nothing can help you--religion, pride, anything--it's when you realize that you don't need any aid." All too true given naturalism; all too akin to Nietzsche's passive nihilistic attitude. And all very accurate to the sentiments i've felt myself acting as a quasi-atheist.

But where the essence of a certain feeling lies in its very inexplicability, where only arguments from analogy suffice, where ideograms are substituted for abstractions, the atheist and agnostic--without religious experience--simply have nothing to say. Otto and I may assume the phenomenological possibility of inter-subjectivity to do it (and who doesn't assume the possibility of inter-subjectivity?), but Christian camaraderie, heck, Christian and Buddhist camaraderie often derives from mutual experience of the numinous object--whatever it may be. It is curious that here, in the realm of phenomenological experience, that the religious category of "Spirit" attains the superior conceptual status.

Sometimes a Man Just Needs to Write About What's on His Mind

Religious theorists like to answer questions surrounding the origins of religion. More often than not, it's in an non-falsifiable way. Freud makes the rather bold move of positing a pre-historical narrative. A group of sons killed their father, and, due to a sense of unconscious remorse, displaced that guilt of murder onto a Totem animal of some kind. The role of the father--protection-- thus became the occupation of the Totem. Sate the needs of the totem and the totem will sate the needs of the people. Later on within the evolution of this religious attitude, animism found the old Totem guilt re-displaced onto some kind of ghostly chimera. Mythological gods followed--slightly more abstract in nature--,and eventually the Immanent highly rationalized Yahweh (originally Jehovah) appears in the Semitic mythos. Add Christianity, Islam, and a tinge of Scholasticism, and what you have is a theologized, rationalization of a Deity figure, abstracted even beyond the capabilities of semantics (the negative differentia of Divine Simplicity). God is something so other He is not really something about which we can speak.

Nevertheless, for Freud, God still functions as a thing which cares for and protects, satisfies needs, and helps repress the original guilt, somehow sociologically (or physiologically?--Freud is never clear) latent within the collective mind. But even though religion or, later on, theodicy is therapeutic, they are incomplete therapy. In the way that a neurotic patient may hold some of his symptoms in abeyance via medicine, religions act as ephemeral cures. (Freud has a tendency to argue from the ontogenetic to phylogenetic analogy.) The disease remains, and only the only therapy is a recognition of, a naming of, a return and remembrance of the original event: the killing of the father. Once the causal event has meaning to the patient, healing follows via a proper ordering of the Id, Ego, and Superego. Once we, societies, know why and what we are repressing, we can begin to repress through the right modes viz. the scientific attitude. It's blatantly, and perhaps embarrassingly, akin to Plato's proper ordering of the desiderative, sentimental, and rational classifications of the soul found in The Republic. Health and happiness are caused through a rationalization of the internal man.

I could offer similar accounts from Weber, James, Jung, Eliade, Otto, Burkertt, Levi-Strauss etc. But my point for explicating Freud's account for the origin of religion is merely to demonstrate what sort of hoola-hoops thinkers are willing to go through to make sense of religious experience (at the personal level) and religious institutions (at the public level).

I find this need to construct a Weltanschauung a fascinating one. It fits, i think, into an impulsive category. It manifests itself as a need, a desire to be sated with "the thing which is the case." When we put the impulse into words, it comes out in conceptual form: but the event itself is not a concept. The phenomenon appears, furthermore, to be universal. I have never met nor heard of someone who does not desire to know--not necessarily even "the truth of truths", but any truth. If a disinterest in "what is the case" ever manifested itself in someone, i think i would be highly skeptical concerning the claim.

This impulse fits within the psychology of religion, or maybe more accurately, the psychology of Weltanschauung. We find ourselves with a need. From whence comes it? Christianity, of course, supplies a narrative to account for the impulse--not to mention that both Eliade and Otto (and even James) add their own religious models.

I don't know. Something about exploring these models feels--for me-- akin to the pleasure deriving from reading a poem or listening to a song. I wade in them like a man in an ocean, satisfied simply to explore the realms the current may take me. I realized upon reflection that this is the mode through which i construct my Weltanschauung. My methodology may appear a bit haphazard, and, i suspect, it is. Our current analytic tradition leaves us with the impression that schemas alone, logical validity, following premises to sound conclusions provide truths we may fearlessly adopt. Though in a sense i think this is right, i do not think it necessary to come vis-a-vis with truth. Too many people, normal people who don't blog about the Freudian fixations, construct worldviews on propositions they were told are true. Most people exist in a world argued from authority. To the degree that they adhere to truths, they do so because someone told them it was true. They arrive at truth by accident.

In the same sort of way, i have the impression that my methodological approach will place me in the position to acquire truth by accident. Coherency aside [or bracketed] and charity given, i think that to dabble is to know. More importantly it is to know a certain sort of thing. A long lost friend of mine once accused me of what he called "Tensionism." He was right then, and he is right now. The tendency to synthesize, to willingly suspend belief, the wish to eat a little bit of everything off of the buffet is really, in another sort of way, a construction of a Weltanschuanng. One object is to be full, the other object is to know "what is the case." I shall taste from the cornucopia of knowledge and be filled. The psychological dangers of such an approach take the form of dissonance and terror. The psychological advantages take the form of knowing a piece of truth in a way concurrent with the way someone else, fully engrossed in it, knows it completely. It is somehow, though not yet clear to me, related to Murdoch's definition of love--the extremely difficult realization that someone, other than oneself, is real. Additionally, it is related to James' account of hope standing in opposition to fear in "The Will To Believe." It is all a muddle, as one might expect from someone like myself. But i did not choose to see the world the way that i do; it feels, rather, like it chose me.

A Little Sometin Sometin

Here is a sampling of a much larger body of work. I hope you enjoy.

The Collapse of Metaphor

“As though the Muse preferred her half-wit sons” --Auden

A metaphor is a word or phrase which means something it does not mean. We owe to the metaphor the all the pleasures associated with pushing our elderly over the edge, without the terrors associated with killing them. When, for example, grandchildren and children “push grandpa over the edge”, it only means that they have said or done something irritating enough to exhaust his patients. It does not mean they have tossed him somersaulting over a precipice. Metaphors are not literal.

If we liked we could invent a metaphor for pushing grandpa into the street. We could say that when Johnny pushed grandpa into the street it meant that he taught the old man French as a second language. We could just as well say that it refers to the French street named Grandpa at the cross section of second Johnny. Unfortunately, however, we are left with no such fun. Pushing our elderly into the street remains literal and unexciting.

What has been called inauthentic by our generation emerges no more clearly than when viewing the way American Christians use metaphors. Unlike my attempt at the two metaphors above, our metaphors are often not even attempted. Phrases are regurgitated over and over, or worse still, so poorly conceived that the only credible responses are to roll one’s eyes or roll over in laughter. When i originally noticed the problem, i located its cause in Christianity's over-attachment to medieval phraseology. When our pastors pray, for example, they refer to Jesus as King or Lord, as our strong tower or shepherd. The trouble, of course, is that kings and lords, towers and shepherds, appear in our daily life as often as leprechauns do, and the analogy lacks a concrete association. The image is not immediately accessible.

But this seemed too harsh. After all, if we are to read scripture with any interest, these old analogies will need defending. Nevertheless, the problem, I felt, did not stop here. Christianisms in general seemed to nurture a kind of indefinite blank stare. Every off-handed “to the glory of God” or “I’ll pray for you brother” turned my stomach. Parts of our verbal tradition seemed contrived and half-baked; they derived, i believed, from truisms or overused images. They derived, in a word, from dead metaphors. Either our words were so old their meaning had been muddled or so new and poorly wrought they lacked depth.

I hasten to clarify that i do not believe 'to the glory of God' or 'what a blessing' or phrases as such are in their very essence evil things. Neither objective claims nor universal proclamations concern me just yet. My point is an psychological one.

It is difficult to communicate the seriousness of a cheeseburger to a fat man while he is in the midst of eating one. It is not something he does not already know; it is something he has already accepted. He knows it so intimately that he has forgotten it, like one forgets the route they take to get home. It is so familiar that it is barely happening at the conscious level. He is further along psychologically than any repeated cliché concerning the dangers of overeating can help.

The inauthenticity and shallowness of our metaphors are symptomatic in the same sort of way. The problem is not one particular cheeseburger or any particular cheeseburger, and the problem is not any particular metaphor. The problem is the state of mind which cultivates damaging habits. I myself have traveled the continents of this created earth, and found no greater cuisine than the cheeseburger. Neither Indian curry nor Italian wine hold sway. I can understand with fear and trembling the comforts of eating cheeseburgers until I have amassed the whole lot of them or the whole lot of me is a mass. But somehow American Christianity has avoided the same consternation concerning the degradation of how they speak about their God.

Yet if the changes in 20th century philosophy have illuminated one aspect of Christian doctrine, they have illuminated the verse which says “in the beginning was the Word.” They have been just as revolutionary concerning “and God ‘said’ let there be light.” They have shown us that coming into being and coming into meaning are very nearly the same thing. The first action of the mother with her new born baby is to christen her child with a name. Existence coincides with naming, naming with existence. It is impossible to conceive the one without the other. For example, you were not aware of the existence of the capitol “F” at the beginning of this sentence in the same sense as you will be by the time you finish this sentence. Naming the “F” took it from merely existing to existing as a piece of data within your consciousness. In philosophical terms, it went from the ontological into the phenomenological. Very often, philosophers prefer to talk the other way around.

Top 10 Books of the Past 6 Months

10. Lemoney Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events"
O'Conner insists that our best fiction is void of the author's voice and character. O'Conner, though penetratingly accurate in most areas, is uncharacteristically facile in this regard. The quality of a story is often enhanced by the interruptions of its teller. Such is the case with The Chronicles of Narnia; and such is the case with A Series of Unfortunate Events. Lemoney, whoever he may be, is hilarious and charming.

9. Paul Ricoeur, "The Symbolism of Evil"
Ricoeur's second naivety provided me with the vocabulary to make sense of my own journey. I cannot say just yet how influential he will be to my future, but i can say that i need to reread this book to find out.











8. Harold Bloom, "The Best Poems of the English Language"
Bloom is a pedant and self-appointed authority of everything. He is also a brilliant poetry critic. I've read the majority of the poems in this collection, and found only a few insights with which i disagreed. He rightly titles Shakespeare as our greatest poet and Poe as our most atrocious. Everyone in between receives a succinct, perspicacious analysis. I suggest it to any and all who love poetry.

7. Cervantes, "Don Quixote"
This book is silly. This book is fabulous. Somehow amidst madness and frivolity, Cervantes touches on all the greatest parts of narrative: inevitability, mystery, soliloquy, tragedy, morality, and individuality. It is supposedly the first modern novel. Whatever the case, it recapitulates the old hero epic. It is the story of Odysseus without his wits. It is a man in search of something he has already found.

6. Nietzsche, "The Will to Power"
Normally, reading Nietzsche is like reading the ravings of a flabbergasted whoopee-cushion. Until now, I have never read a work of his which made coherent sense, or for that matter, demonstrated intellectual honesty. Perhaps the Nietzsch simply lacked the time to edit (and therefore ruin) his magnum opus. For my part, i am glad to see him abandon the project. It now turns out to be more than tolerable. His prophetic analysis and diagnoses of Western nihilism seems to me his greatest achievement. Whatever the milieu of the 21st century, Nietzsche is the premier philosopher to help us understand the current decline in our culture.

5. William Faulkner, "The Sounds and the Fury"
This book is about as unilateral as a roller coaster traveling through the mountains of Switzerland. Chronology has nothing to do with it. It is a book filled with characters and poetry. Even though at times it proves excruciatingly difficult to read, it remains, without question, the par excellence and sui generis of all Southern Literature. I have read and recited quotes which will haunt me the rest of my life. Faulkner once again revives my hope for American literature.










4. Iris Murdoch, "Existentialists and Mystics"
Whatever i know of Plato, i have learned either from the horses mouth or from Murdoch. Whatever i believe concerning a theory of art, i have had Murdoch to teach it to me. I have read "The Sublime and the Good" at least ten times, gleaning more each run through. "The Fire and the Sun" summarizes everything i have adopted for myself from the works of Plato. Though Murdoch's affection for Freud sometimes limits her perspective, her knowledge of Kant and Wittgenstein illuminate Plato in light of the changes in philosophy. She is also, hands down, the easiest philosopher i have ever read.












3. Augustine, "Confessions:
I have read the first half of this book at least 20 times, and only this go around did i discover the richness of Augustine's discussion of moral psychology. Whatever i think of ordinate and inordinate emotions i have derived directly from the passages concerning the deaths of Nebridius and Monica. Augustine remains the most influential thinker in my life.

2. Jung/Segal "Jung on Mythology"
I thought i'd love reading Jung simply from what i heard others say about him. I was right. Both he and Freud have the tendency to generalize. The difference is that Jung is better at it. My intuitions have, as long as i remember, always been in line with his. Archetype, however unclear a word, carries something profound in its implications. Myth (whatever that thing is) is rightly treated as a positive, instead of a negative force in human culture. Jung takes Freud's discovery of the unconscious and puts it to proper use.

1. Mircea Eliade, "The Sacred and the Profane"
No scholar has influenced me as much as Eliade. Concepts like: nostalgia for paradise, axis mundi, in illo tempore, threshold, and Sacred and Profane space and time have already and shall forever alter my view of religious phenomenon. He comes from a Greek Orthodox background, yet writes with as unbiased, though still a religious, point of view one can possibly expect from a man. He has a classic case of thoroughgoing universalism, which, according to me, adds to his credit. He rightly points out the phenomenological consistencies amongst variegated religious communities, and systematizes them into a coherent and provocatively insightful whole.

On the Philosophical Implications Surrounding the Non-Existence of Unicorns

I have not read all the books, but i've learned enough to know that the single most important topic in the world is unicorns. Against nihilism, against the dogmatic utilitarianism of science, against the atheistic existentialism of Camus stands the unicorn, proud and prostrate in the unbending conviction that he does not exist. If a woman were to hoist herself up an American flagpole upside-down every Tuesday morning instead of eating breakfast, it would in no essential way differ from the action of that blessed sage who first conceived of the unicorn while sitting by some medieval (and doubtless enchanted) fireside.

The unicorn represents best of all that superlative value we call superfluity. He is as superfluous as a child playing hopscotch; he is as superfluous as a giraffe playing hopscotch. We do not need him, though we invent him. We do not use him, though we adore him. It is a remarkable paradox that the very non-existence of the unicorn is a celebration of being. The very fact that he does not exist in the physical universe (that we know of) excites us to the more appealing fact that he could have existed. In philosophy classes, this celebration of being might be humorously referred to as the celebration of "is-ness." As one poet says, "that you are here, that life exists, and identity."

Creative superfluity, as in the instance of the unicorn, is not the capricious act of combining arbitrary objects. One does not add a horn to a horse and deduce a unicorn. The unicorn stands logically prior to both the horn and the horse. No (real) creator aims to make a bricolage, though every creation is a bricolage. Given this, I can think of no other human act which imitates our Lord more intimately than the one to create or restore being.

And this--to abuse you with an oversimplification--is yet another region where our protean culture lacks in virility. Nihilism doesn't care about you let alone unicorns; utilitarianism thinks it reasonable to ride one unicorn toward a stable occupied by more unicorns only so that they may ride one of them (ad infinitum); and atheistic existentialist dislike unicorns as much as they ethics if they eat a bad tuna fish sandwich for lunch. It seems to me, then, that we can only experience an authentic celebration of being where we already have an authentic value of being.

Superfluous creation, being invented simply to love that being, offers the only satisfying model on which to appreciate the non-existence of the unicorn. By the same principle, and of infinitely greater importance, it is the only model on which to celebrate the existence of Venice square, of cheeseburgers, or of loved ones. It is, in a sweeping phrase, the only way to authentically celebrate myself.