Maybe our life is not that personal...

Posted by Tessa den Uyl

 We think, act and feel without understanding precisely what it is that makes us act, feel or think the way we do. It is difficult to understand why we became accustomed to our visions of, and opinions about, life. We find ourselves into narratives others have created for us and have to find ourselves within these accustomed stories that maybe are not as familiar as we would like to believe. To extract ‘the impersonal’ out of this familiarity and bring it towards the narrative we identify with is difficult. 

As physical beings, we become a person and during life we try to keep up with that conception. We are conceived to then conceive ourselves. When we are born, someone else has already imagined us. This pre-imagination initiates a life to become your life to then be re-imagined as a life somehow different from that one. The better the ‘proper’ narrative fits, the less conflict will occur; the idea of exclusion fits an idea of inclusion in safeguarding experiences of certain values and goals.

In the routine of daily life rarely attention focuses on the premises that gave raise to those values. We might say that the value doesn’t remember where it came from and neither can it be understood why it is believed, though those values seem to constitute a rather important playground for our narratives. Previous ideas are exactly those we use to inhabit our narratives and comprehend the narratives of others - the abstract building blocks we identify with.

Strangely, we are tempted to identify with something we didn’t imagine ourselves but are willing to see ourselves, and others, in that picture. The picture is to always have a picture: without a picture we fall out of identification, one of the greatest human fears. In the absorption of many narratives deposited into many values, a person has to find, create and become in a universe. In such situations we start to understand the difficulty involved in coming to ones senses. ‘We are born as a person but it is difficult to die as a person.’

Changing your personal narrative means taking considerable responsibility while undertaking a flight into the unknown. A change of narrative doesn’t solely involve doubt and questioning life as a whole; it means searching to apply those doubts into a life for which there are no alternatives at hand. Altering ones narrative is a struggle with estrangement. Somehow the narrative is pulled into a need to not safeguard former descriptions; it is a profound surrender towards the unknown. This is why such change provokes perplexity, a state of being that is needed to avoid ending thinking (too quickly). Perplexity indicates a pause to identify things and put them into the proper narrative, inevitably postponing the identification of those narratives thought by others.

Imagining narratives is our tool to relate ourselves in a world; our capability to weave things together. It is the human way to give a sense to Life. Now if this weaving is used to confirm the best copy of what we think is a good picture, we are not truly weaving the relations ourselves but only those that serve a particular purpose: the picture orders the weaving. Any perplexity that arises during this kind of weaving is due to estrangement from that picture; it cannot but pull the proper confusion back into that picture.

Yet you cannot simultaneously weave a picture while not affirming it, even though you’re still weaving. Such weaving is of changing phenomena and every confusion that arises cannot be drawn back into the picture but only into the weaving. When you no longer work with static images, you are forced to dismantle the rigidity of your perception. This is the moment that imagination can truly break loose.

Long ago, we identified with the mammoth we killed to provide shelter, clothes, food and sacrifice: however the mammoth was standing next to us. Our relation was then rather direct. Today, when we’re asked to give opinions about world politics and economics, we witness visions from others all over the globe; but this is an abstraction of which our lives have become another instantiation. It seems awfully frightening to become aware of this picture; the awareness involves envisioning your proper narrative placed onto those ‘impersonal’ building blocks that have become more abstract then ever before and of which it seems we don’t want to separate ourselves. What tricks us is that the picture enigmatically provides an idea for the worthiness of our life. But upon what exactly have we placed that worthiness?

An important question to pose might be whether we are capable to keep track with those narratives that gave raise to our visions about life? We identify with those abstractions, we have feelings, opinions about, one might say, almost everything. Maybe we overestimate what we know in those narratives and lack humility in recognising what we can know.

Is the vision of our lives in which we overcome (and thus embrace) insecurity something too abstract to be imagined? Must we accept to live lives based on an abstraction that is far beyond our own imagination? Or dare we enter into a deep crisis of the kind hinted at by Nietzsche when he has the madman warn:

 “ ...what did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun?”

The challenge, as Zarathustra might have expressed it, is to try to relate our own, proper narratives to our suns.

Picture Post No. 5 Tabernacle Reflections

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they becme what they might appear to become.'

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Piazza Vetra, Milan, November 2014
Picture credit: Antonio Borrani

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl

The expressive imagery necessary to bring some kind of sense to our lives is compromised by the production of other, competing images. This neutralisation of the grace of the image brings with it some transformations in our perception.

If we can say that every image offers us various possibilities for interpretation, placing itself before our thinking, then we can see images as providing a kind of balancing pole for our lives. This balancing element is rightly placed between the image and the viewer - like a bridge where imagination is free to flourish, for the bridge is the space of the unforeseen.

We might say that the very instability of the bridge provides the movement for our imagination. It is by using such bridges that human beings can deal with their existential selves.

Yet what happens when the unforeseen becomes foreseen?

When things are taken away from their natural environment and placed somewhere else, change occurs. When change occurs by a manipulative act, it is very much possible that the next act upon that will function to enforce that first one.

An image that originally handed to us a multiplicity of possible interpretations, offering to give sense to our lives, becomes meaningless. The image is placed behind the thought.

The Foundations of Spirituality

The oldest known portrait of St. Francis.

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

An Exploration of the Thought of Fr. Cornelis (Kees) Thönissen.

“A thought theory that never comes to grips with intuition, hallucination, spirituality or dreaming cannot possibly be a serious account of cognition.” —David Gelernter.

The entire discipline of spirituality – insofar as one may call it a discipline – is unstable. It is pluriform, fragmented, free-floating, subjective, without firm ground and without accepted categories, lacking cohesion. In a word, it is ramshackle.

However, spirituality is where we must begin, if we desire true religion. All religious dogma, without spirituality, is hollow at best. In Fr. Kees' Roman Catholic tradition, a vital spirituality has been neglected in favour of the laborious effort of straining to God through a metaphysics which St. Thomas Aquinas built on a rediscovered Aristotle. It is an impressive yet static edifice, employing (to most) unfathomable language: being, substance, essence, accidence, and so on.

The existing traditional edifice, on its own, is ill equipped to respond to the most pressing challenge of the Roman Catholic Church, which was identified by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI as the spiritual reform of faith. Here is the classic predicament which both Catholic and Protestant traditions still properly need to resolve: faith remains weak (fundamentalist) without reason, while rationalism is uninspiring and incomplete (Descartes, for instance, or Kant). There is a pressing need for a vital spirituality.

But then, how should one derive a living spirituality from that which is sterile? How should one ground it? And how should one unite it with a theology of truth? How may one even – to be yet more bold – universalise it? Answering the call of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, these questions became Fr. Kees' journey of fifteen years of doctoral research.




Conservatively, four-fifths of our world believes in God. This includes the Christian tradition, which is formed and sustained by faith in a Triune God. Therefore we may begin with the simple assumption of God's existence, as the foundation of faith and spirituality. Given such belief, there are then three radical, foundational statements which follow. They have foundational worth – in fact general application – because they are indispensable spiritual categories:

• Unless we can experience God, He will be distant and powerless, and may as well not exist.
• Unless we have the spiritual intuition of God, He remains an unsatisfying idea, and inaccessible. And
• Unless we can have a relationship with God, He does not love us, and is irrelevant to us.

These foundational statements, in turn, may be turned into challenging questions about the faith which is the practice of spirituality: in service and in care, in adult formation, seminary training, youth work, catechesis, in worship and in sacraments, and in our personal walk of faith.

• Is there a real experience of God?
• Are we able to receive this through spiritual intuition, so that it is maximally fruitful? And
• Does it bring about a relational change with God, and a form of growth?

With these three foundational categories, we have, further, the example of the saints, which itself is foundational. In Fr. Kees' Roman Catholic tradition (the Order of Capuchin Franciscans), one looks to the example of St. Francis – a man uncontaminated by Medieval theology, yet who uniquely and directly experienced God, mystically intuiting a relational intimacy with Him. Through his spiritual vigour, St. Francis transformed the Roman Catholic Church, and became a significant revolutionary force for change in Medieval times. 

Thus spirituality may be grounded, and foregrounded, on the foundations here described. It may further be rehabilitated, which is the point of it after all. However, the details of its outworking are, needless to say, too expansive a subject for a mere introductory post such as this.

The full 702-page dissertation by Fr. Cornelis (Kees) Thönissen on the Foundations of Spirituality has now been published and can be read at:  Thönissen C.J. 2005. Foundations for Spirituality: A 'Hermeneutic of Reform' for a Church Facing Crises Inspired by St. Francis of Assisi. Pretoria: UNISA.

The Foundations of Spirituality

The oldest known portrait of St. Francis.

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

An Exploration of the Thought of Fr. Cornelis (Kees) Thönissen.

“A thought theory that never comes to grips with intuition, hallucination, spirituality or dreaming cannot possibly be a serious account of cognition.” —David Gelernter.

The entire discipline of spirituality – insofar as one may call it a discipline – is unstable. It is pluriform, fragmented, free-floating, subjective, without firm ground and without accepted categories, lacking cohesion. In a word, it is ramshackle.

However, spirituality is where we must begin, if we desire true religion. All religious dogma, without spirituality, is hollow at best. In Fr. Kees' Roman Catholic tradition, a vital spirituality has been neglected in favour of the laborious effort of straining to God through a metaphysics which St. Thomas Aquinas built on a rediscovered Aristotle. It is an impressive yet static edifice, employing (to most) unfathomable language: being, substance, essence, accidence, and so on.

The existing traditional edifice, on its own, is ill equipped to respond to the most pressing challenge of the Roman Catholic Church, which was identified by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI as the spiritual reform of faith. Here is the classic predicament which both Catholic and Protestant traditions still properly need to resolve: faith remains weak (fundamentalist) without reason, while rationalism is uninspiring and incomplete (Descartes, for instance, or Kant). There is a pressing need for a vital spirituality.

But then, how should one derive a living spirituality from that which is sterile? How should one ground it? And how should one unite it with a theology of truth? How may one even – to be yet more bold – universalise it? Answering the call of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, these questions became Fr. Kees' journey of fifteen years of doctoral research.

Conservatively, four-fifths of our world believes in God. This includes the Christian tradition, which is formed and sustained by faith in a Triune God. Therefore we may begin with the simple assumption of God's existence, as the foundation of faith and spirituality. Given such belief, there are then three radical, foundational statements which follow. They have foundational worth – in fact general application – because they are indispensable spiritual categories:

• Unless we can experience God, He will be distant and powerless, and may as well not exist.
• Unless we have the spiritual intuition of God, He remains an unsatisfying idea, and inaccessible. And
• Unless we can have a relationship with God, He does not love us, and is irrelevant to us.

These foundational statements, in turn, may be turned into challenging questions about the faith which is the practice of spirituality: in service and in care, in adult formation, seminary training, youth work, catechesis, in worship and in sacraments, and in our personal walk of faith.

• Is there a real experience of God?
• Are we able to receive this through spiritual intuition, so that it is maximally fruitful? And
• Does it bring about a relational change with God, and a form of growth?

With these three foundational categories, we have, further, the example of the saints, which itself is foundational. In Fr. Kees' Roman Catholic tradition (the Order of Capuchin Franciscans), one looks to the example of St. Francis – a man uncontaminated by Medieval theology, yet who uniquely and directly experienced God, mystically intuiting a relational intimacy with Him. Through his spiritual vigour, St. Francis transformed the Roman Catholic Church, and became a significant revolutionary force for change in Medieval times. 

Thus spirituality may be grounded, and foregrounded, on the foundations here described. It may further be rehabilitated, which is the point of it after all. However, the details of its outworking are, needless to say, too expansive a subject for a mere introductory post such as this.

The full 702-page dissertation by Fr. Cornelis (Kees) Thönissen on the Foundations of Spirituality has now been published and can be read at:  Thönissen C.J. 2005. Foundations for Spirituality: A 'Hermeneutic of Reform' for a Church Facing Crises Inspired by St. Francis of Assisi. Pretoria: UNISA.

Reason and Contradiction

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

“Beginning to think is beginning to

be undermined.”  –Albert Camus.

What is reason? Like an axe in our hands, we use it, we don't contemplate it. But we do know that we use it to make sense of things. We do know that we (puzzlingly) apply it to a variety of seemingly disconnected fields: science, ethics, and art, among others. And then, perhaps most importantly, we know that reason is a conscious activity.

One of the most important characteristics of our consciousness is that it kicks in where contradiction arises. Imagine a pendulum, swinging, swinging, swinging. So little contradiction does this present that, rather than producing consciousness, people use pendulums to induce hypnosis. But let the pendulum suddenly drop, and we quickly jump forward to examine what has happened to it -- for then it has contradicted our expectations. 

Things like this happen all the time, in many different ways. A shadow passes over my table in a restaurant. I feel a sudden pain under my foot. Or there is a strange taste in my coffee. These all contradict what I expect – and immediately I want to know: What is it? Why? Where did this come from?

 

Instinctively, we think of reason as a constructive enterprise. We use it to build houses, design computers, plan conferences, or construct theories. Yet when we examine it more closely, it seems that all such activities are in some way rooted in some kind of contradiction – or perhaps rather, in setting contradictions aside:

We build a house because we don't have a roof over our heads. We design a computer because we lack the power of thought. We call a conference because we need to connect. Or we construct a new theory because the old one won't work. Jean van Heijenoort, the historian of mathematical logic, wrote, “The ordinary notion of consistency involves that of contradiction, which again involves negation.” To put it simply, reason is the innate sense of contradiction. Call it our sixth sense.

This is not a new idea. Bernard Bosanquet suggested that reason kicks in where we have two competing explanations for the same thing in our minds. In fact no less a luminary than Immanuel Kant considered that reason is the power of synthesizing into unity (from disunity, we presume) the concepts which are provided by the intellect. By way of example, Galileo reconciled the sub-lunar and the supra-lunar worlds. James Maxwell united electricity and magnetism. And Albert Einstein melded space and time.

Many would object. The truth is in our first guess, they would say: namely, that reason is a constructive enterprise. In fact reason, they remind us, is a magnificent builder of things, both abstract and real: quantum theory, for instance, or the Golden Gate bridge. And yet, even the things which we construct may be viewed as reverse processes, launched from needs and contradictions.

Take the simple example of a house. A house is needed. Therefore a roof is needed – and walls and foundations. We know then that we cannot purchase a roof as a roof. But this contradicts our need – for a roof. The best we can do is timbers and tiles. But tiles must be secured. Now we need nails. And so on. In fact the best of minds know how to anticipate all contradiction. Thus through the application of reason, we solve a great complex of needs, then paradoxically claim that we have “constructed” something.

In fact the entire scientific enterprise, according to Karl Popper, is an exercise in what he called falsification. Reason may reveal that a theory is wrong, but it can never prove that it is right. 

More broadly. Wherever contradiction melts away, there we find that the holistic qualities of life emerge, which we so greatly value and desire: among them love, beauty, and grace. But apply reason to them, and they disappear. In fact, even the scientific quest is described as a search for beauty. We are able to appreciate the “beauty” of simple equations because they are about reduction and reconciliation – just as we desire any kind of simplicity, simplification, even simplistic-ness. “You can recognize truth,” wrote Richard Feynman, “by its beauty and simplicity.”

What then is reason? We may now summarise it like this: reason “flags” contradictions. Wherever we find a contradiction – or perhaps rather, wherever there arises a contradiction for me (sight, smell, touch, and all), reason pays attention. In this way, reason helps us to create a world without contradiction – a conceptual arrangement of the world which is “one”.

Stay with this idea. It further helps us to resolve the age old conflict between reason and passion:

Long has it been debated whether reason is our most basic driving force, or passion. It is reason, wrote John Locke. It is passion, countered David Hume. Which, then, is it to be? We know from recent empirical advances that it is our conceptual arrangement of the world which feeds our visceral (“gut”) feelings. That is, when my view of the world is held up against the world itself – specifically, where I encounter novelty, discrepancy, or interruption in the world around me – this leads to motivation. Even a dog, when faced with food which it does not expect to see in its bowl, is visibly affected.

In sum, what reason does is to modify our conceptual arrangement of the world. Our conceptual arrangement of the world, in turn, produces passion, whenever it contradicts the world. In this way, reason and passion are both masters and slaves. Reason does not directly control our passions, yet we may trace our passions back to reason.

Simply put: reason in, passion out.

Doublethink 8 - The Interway

 

Index: 198

Doublethink 16 - The Interway

Index: 198

Poetry: A Royal Question

Editorial note: In this poem, Chengde talks at one level about the Queen of England, a topic of perennial interest to the English and the social media - but evidently of rather limited 'philosophical' interest. However, we feel he uses the theme to explore deeper and and more subtle issues. Is he making a very contemporary point about the relationship of parents and children – and how economic power can lie (stay) with the parents even in old age?

---

A poem by Chengde Chen 

A Royal Question

With Her Majesty’s 90th birthday approaching,
Britain can’t help asking an inconvenient question:
why still no sign of abdication?
Apart from anything else, won’t the 68-year-old future king
become too old for his future?
It is said that there are two reasons for her persisting.

One, it’s a British tradition that the monarch doesn’t retire.
Two, she made her vow in her coronation to serve for life.
Yet, how does she see her heir apparent’s situation?
Isn’t a mother’s devotion an instinctive “tradition” and “vow”?
If a ceremonial title weighs more than her son’s happiness,
hasn’t wearing the crown exhausted her motherhood?

To succeed to the throne is a prince’s natural desire,
much as students want to graduate or fledglings want to fly.
The humiliation of the long wait, the grey hair from restraint:
wouldn’t the mother have seen and understood?
She can pretend not to have, or choose to ignore them, but
can she ignore the resentment growing in his heart?

If he is waiting for, or even longing for, his mother’s…,
what would this mean to her?
The soul-stirring succession stories that happened in history
–the internal strife, the murderous fighting with drawn swords–
are the logical development of prince psychology.
To keep the throne, or the son, that is the question.



 

---

Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today: philosophical poems. Readers can find out more about Chengde and his poems here

Doublethink 15 - The Duplicator

Picture Post No. 4 The Dan Dare Badge

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

---

Posted by Martin Cohen and Ken Sequin

 

Team affiliations: Interplanetary Space Fleet

Hey, have you got Dan Dare's cap badge?

Alas, no, sigh...  yet another aspirational challenge failed... this one long ago from the small ads in boys magazines in the 1950s along with other, pointed advice about beach physiques and stamp collecting. Dan's 'authentic' cap badge in brilliant red, black and yellow, that is, with its steel torpedo shaped spaceship at the centre? Surely everyone would want such a badge - but there was a catch. You had to be a member of the Horlicks Spacemen's Club to get one. Not an insurmountable obstacle to be sure, but money was involved.

Dan, or to give him his full title, Colonel Daniel McGregor Dare, was a very British hero, with very British values, such as all parents might hope their boys would aspire to. Throughout the 1950s he rocketed around the Solar System pulling off incredible feats of piloting skills and facing up to the most awful predicaments with a stiff jaw and those famous way eyebrows. Curiously, his spaceship, Anastasia, was named after his Aunt.

There was of course a serious side too to the strip (and the popular radio serialisation) because Dan was in fact involved in fighting evil, personified in the scheming Venusian dictator, the Mekon. Not that they went on about it much, the founder of the Eagle (the comic Dan appeared in), the Rev. Marcus Morris, was vicar of the Southport church of St James at the time, and another clergyman, Rev. Dr. Chad Varah, wrote key scripts in the early years. Of more pressing import to badge wearers, was to be involved in battling the fiendishly cunning oppressor of the the reptilian inhabitants of that watery planet known as 'the Treens'. Unfortunately, for all Dan's policeman-like efforts, the Mekon escaped at the end of each story ready to return with an even more inventive scheme for the conquest of Earth…

More affiliations…

The Eagle  folded long ago (in 1969) but Dan still jets around from time to time. As well as several new comic incarnations, there have been more radio serialisations, and some musical appreciations too. Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett wrote Dan Dare into his song 'Astronomy Domine', from the band's debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, with the line 'Stairway scare, Dan Dare, who's there?' Elton John recorded 'Dan Dare (Pilot Of The Future)' for his 1975 album Rock Of The Westies and the British punk rock group The Mekons included a song 'Dan Dare' on their album The Quality of Mercy is not Strnen (sic).

As to the badges, well, its not too late, you can buy brand new ones plated in 24 carat gold for the surprisingly modest price of about £10. But the 'authentic' badge, was not made of metal, but of plastic.That's the space age!

Things you don’t want anyone to know when wearing the badge

Colonel Dan Dare was originally 'Chaplain' Dan Dare of Space Fleet, with rather dull pastoral duties. Only at the very last minute did he swap hats to become the dashing space pilot that boys and girls might really aspire to follow.