Rotating Pilgrim » Writings

The Early Purges

Rotating Pilgrim — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:20:32 +0000

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Don Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’,
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,
Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din
Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout
Of the pump and the water pumped in.
‘Sure isn’t it better for them now?’ Dan said.
Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced
Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.
Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung
Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains
Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung
Until I forgot them. But the fear came back
When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows
Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens’ necks.
Still, living displaces false sentiments
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown,
I just shrug, ‘Bloody pups’. It makes sense:
‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.
–Seamus Heaney

Ode to a Cat

Rotating Pilgrim — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:04:46 +0000

An excerpt from a Spanish poem dedicated to a cat, translated into English (sloppily):

Oh little
emperor without a sphere of influence
conqueror without a country,
smallest living-room tiger, nuptial
sultan of the sky,
of the erotic roof-tiles,
the wind of love
in the storm
you claim
when you pass
and place
four delicate feet
on the ground,
smelling,
distrusting
all that is terrestrial,
because everything
is too unclean
for the immaculate foot of the cat.

Oh independent wild beast
of the house
arrogant
vestige of the night,
lazy, gymnastic
and alien,
very deep cat,
secret policeman
of bedrooms,
insignia
of a
disappeared velvet,
surely there is no
enigma
in your manner,
perhaps you are not a mystery,
everyone knows of you
and you belong
to the least mysterious inhabitant,
perhaps everyone believes it,
everyone believes himself the owner,
proprietor,
uncle
of a cat,
companion,
colleague,
disciple
or friend
of his cat.

Not me.
I do not subscribe.
I do not know the cat.
I know it all, life and its archipelago,
the sea and the incalculable city,
botany,
the gyneceum and its frenzies,
the plus and the minus of mathematics,
the volcanic frauds of the world,
the unreal shell of the crocodile,
the unknown kindness of the fireman,
the blue atavism of the priest,
but I cannot decipher a cat.
My reason slips on his indifference,
his eyes have golden numbers.

Søren Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship

Rotating Pilgrim — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:00:15 +0000

Søren Kierkegaard’s expansive set of texts are complicated enough without considering the ambiguity or duplicity that his pseudonymous authorship presents. Involving and reacting to Hegel and other contemporaries, moving in stages, and talking deeply about matters of faith, philosophy, ‘individuals’, and systems of knowledge, Kierkegaard’s work is already significant. Yet, a reader who reads the whole of Kierkegaard’s work straightforwardly as ‘the words of Kierkegaard’ will be misled by the interplay of his texts, and led to believe in a certain kind of development in his writing, a development from an aesthetic author to a religious author. Also, the definitions of words (i.e. “sin”) can vary across the works. Only by taking into account the pseudonyms and Kierkegaard’s authorial method can one form a strong understanding of his life’s work.

As a preliminary, it is useful to summarize the three stages (or spheres) of man that Kierkegaard discusses (through anonymous authorship) in Either/Or. He posits the aesthetic man, the ethical man, and the religious man. The essential difference between them is the way they conceive of happiness and react to suffering. The aesthetic knows happiness in a negative way, such as the absence of pain and suffering. He seeks beauty and pleasure as a means to remove pain and suffering from life. The ethical man, however, can imagine happiness in a positive sense, which causes him to despise the aesthetic man. He believes it is good to be free, to be “noble,” and to be, well, ethical. The religious man has come to understand the one and only meaning in life is to live happily in love. He knows more than the “fun” of the aesthetic man, and knows none of the sense of guilt or remorse the ethical man feels.

Kierkegaard intended these as a response to Hegelian philosophy, “which posited the famous triad: a thesis yields an antithesis, which then yields, along with the thesis, a synthesis or unity, which in turn becomes a new thesis” (Storm on Either/Or). Kierkegaard makes his “either/or” choice aesthetic or ethical on one hand, and religious on the other. Later, under the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard will write Fear and Trembling, which responds to absolute systems of knowledge, such as the Hegelian system, by arguing that faith is absurd, and will not fit into such a system. The motivations for responding to Hegel are apparent in the Danish church of the time, which began adopting Hegelian philosophies. Kierkegaard saw this as jeopardizing to the church, and how the church treats topics such as faith and the divine.

Preliminaries aside, Kierkegaard’s The Point of View For My Work As An Author is a fantastic primary source for study of his work and its stages and pseudonymous nature. The strongest reading will take into account the pseudonymous authors of works, the significance of their names, what they represent, and if and how they talk about the other pseudonymous authors. The hope is that “even if a man will not follow where one endeavors to lead him, one thing it is still possible to do for him—compel him to take notice” (34). Take notice of what? “That ‘Christendom’ is a prodigious illusion” (22), and that “if real success is to attend the effort to bring a man to a definite position, one must first of all take pains to find HIM where he is and begin there” (27). In other words, Kierkegaard’s authorship was a plan of attack to encounter the reader, taking great pains to avoid the problems that occur when an author is famous, or becomes associated with an idea or a movement. This plan of attack is forward-looking to modernism and postmodernism, by attempting to force the reader to focus on the content of his works, and distancing the author from them, as stated many times by Kierkegaard himself and more extensively described in his ode to “that solitary individual” – a kind of idealized reader who explores for himself and the only kind that will understand Kierkegaard’s work.

These notions echo strongly with Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author in its focus on the reader. The death of the author is “the birth of the reader” (Barthes 150). Kierkegaard cares nothing for his own name, and sometimes intentionally stirs up confusion regarding the authorship of his work to even further distance the author from the work. A strong example of this is the work Either/Or. Either/Or was ‘written’ in part by A and in part by B. A was the editor-author of Either and B of Or. The ‘editor’ of the whole work was Victor Eremita, whose name means “victorious hermit.” According to D. Anthony Storm’s online commentary on Kierkegaard, “Here [Kierkegaard] is the victorious hermit, because like a hermit he isolated himself and wrote voluminously for several years. Kierkegaard, even while he was devoting many hours everyday to writing, would visit the theatre and mull about before and after the performance so that people might think he was an idle person. His foppish appearance contributed to this effect. He was the “victorious hermit” because he managed to fool many people with this scheme” (Storm Either/Or). In this way, Either/Or was already heavily distanced from Kierkegaard’s name, yet he did more to distance himself, by publishing an article one week later under the pseudonym A. F. titled “Who is the Author of Either/Or?” In it he proposes various theories, but ends up declaring that no one really knows who wrote it.

What are the implications of this distancing and pseudonymous nature of his authorship? Why did Kierkegaard go about this process? He explains in The Point of View that his chief concern in his authorship is the illusion of Christendom that he sees in his country. He states:

“What does it mean that all these thousands and thousands call themselves Christians as a matter of course? These many, many men, of whom the greater part, so far as one can judge, live in categories quite foreign to Christianity!…People who perhaps never once enter a church, never think about God, never mention His name except in oaths!…Yet all these people, even those who assert that no God exists, are all of them Christians, call themselves Christians, are recognized as Christians by the State, are buried as Christians by the Church, are certified as Christians for eternity!” (22)

How does his authorship hope to dispel the illusion? It is through this authorial distance and focus on content as a means of finding “that solitary individual”, that ideal reader, who will search for God honestly and not arbitrarily accept the name given him by his society, that he will dispel the illusion for some while recognizing that the most he can do for a man is “compel him to take notice” (34) and can’t force someone out of the illusion.

He later describes how the nature of the illusion, the illusion that everyone is always already a Christian simply by being born in Denmark, does not respond to direct attack. One who directly stands up and objects to Christendom is ignored. “They make him a fanatic, his Christianity an exaggeration—in the end he remains the only one, or one of the few, who is not seriously a Christian (for exaggeration is surely a lack of seriousness), whereas the others are all serious Christians” (Kierkegaard, 24). Furthermore, “a direct attack only strengthens a person in his illusion, and at the same time embitters him. There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anything prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost. And this is what a direct attack achieves…” (25).

D. Anthony Storm compares Kierkegaard’s method of indirect authorship to Plato’s dialectic. This is an obvious comparison, because Kierkegaard loved Plato. Plato wrote dialogues of Socrates, and so does not act as the direct mouthpiece of Socrates (Storm Method). Kierkegaard uses pseudonyms to talk about philosophy and faith from various perspectives. It is Socratic in that he does not directly address “Christians” as “Kierkegaard” (until later in the authorship where he does write as himself), yet exists to cause the reader to think and question and evaluate their own beliefs about their faith, which isn’t really faith to Kierkegaard, but just an acknowledgement of being Danish.

The question then arises, in this age where Kierkegaard’s name is attached to every one of his works, can a reader approach his texts in the same way that one could have in the 19th century? How is Kierkegaard scholarship to approach the task of analyzing his body of work without the problems and preconceptions brought into such an analysis?

This is exactly the issue at hand in Michael Foucault’s What is an author? essay. He states, “The author’s name is a proper name, and therefore it raises the problems common to all proper names. Obviously, one cannot turn a proper name into a pure and simple reference. It has other than indicative functions: more than an indication, a gesture, a finger pointed at someone, it is the equivalent of a description” (177). Foucault is discussing the issue of authorship, even in the case of an author who writes as “himself.” How much more applicable are his points if one is encountering pseudonymous authorship? The postmodern notion is that the difference doesn’t exist. In a sense, every act of writing is a kind of pseudonymous authorship. If Kierkegaard actually believed in something that might be called “Kierkegaard’s Truth,” then he would have written everything out as his, and stamped his name on it. But he understood that the arena where meaning is assembled, the place where activity occurs is in the reader. His authorship is an attack against the author-function as described by Foucault. It’s an attack on the effects that a name has to influence readers. Foucault notes this aspect when he mentions that “one could also question the meaning and functioning of propositions like…’Victor Eremita, Climacus, Anticlimacus, Frater Taciturnus, Constantine Constantius, all of these are Kierkegaard’” (178).

However, Kierkegaard still puts forth a strong sense of the “author” and his intentionality. In his chapter in The Point of View entitled “The ambiguity or duplicity in the whole authorship: as to whether the author is an aesthetic or a religious author” he argues for the dialectical nature of his work. Kierkegaard states:

“It remains, then, to be shown that there is such a duplicity from first to last. This is not an instance of the common case where the assumed duplicity is discovered by some one else and the person concerned is obliged to prove that it does not exist. Not that at all, but quite the contrary. In case the reader should not be sufficiently observant of the duplicity it is the business of the author to make as evident as possible the fact that it is there. That is to say, the duplicity, the ambiguity, is a conscious one, something the author knows more about than anybody else; it is the essential dialectical distinction of the whole authorship, and has therefore a deeper reason” (10). (boldface added by me)

Here Kierkegaard is arguing for the duplicity and ambiguity of his pseudonymous authorship, but not to undermine the concept of an author, but in support of the idea that he planned his authorship from the start to involve this process as an algorithm for encountering readers and dispelling illusions (as Kierkegaard saw them). This is perhaps where Kierkegaard parts ways with the postmodern notions, in his belief in a super-authorship above and behind his ambiguous and misleading pseudonymous authorship. However, given the ambiguous nature of the work, the authorship lends itself to strongly postmodern interpretations regardless. Kierkegaard said on several occasions something along the lines of “I don’t know anything about the pseudonymous authors, don’t ask me about what they say or what they mean.”

The concept of an intentionally troublesome authorship is quite forward looking to modernism in some ways. Modernist poetry, in particular, took foundations and obvious structures out of poetry to explore how a reader creates meaning. Postmodernism would later take this fractured and fragmented philosophy of reality and apply it to the act of writing itself, to the idea of a subject or author. Then not only was one’s idea of a cohesive worldview fragmented, now the concept of a self is fragmented. Kierkegaard, in a sense, fragmented his authorship to attempt to find the reader where he is and begin there. The fragmentation is the clear part, and the degree of intentionality and meaning and its significance is the arena for debate.

An important issue then is the question of how successful his method is in this endeavor. It is a question well beyond the scope of this essay to evaluate critically how effective Kierkegaard’s method is across the whole authorship, as well as comparisons to historically how his work was received in pseudonymity. A larger task for another day! However, it is clear that Kierkegaard’s authorship, as coherently (or alternatively, incoherently) as one sees it, received an enormous amount of effort and thought from Kierkegaard as he wrote it. It deserves at least an equally extensive amount of study to do it justice. At the very least, the authorship is a grand experiment that hits at the heart of what literature should be to me. Literature, to me, is an artistic endeavor that deals with meaning, with reality, and with God, and how these are related and how readers approach them and react to them. Kierkegaard thought that faith was certainly more than a logical proposition one “achieved” through logical means like Descartes or Hegel might suggest. Derrida sought to bring absolutist philosophy of that kind out of the clouds and down to earth, as we saw in the film Derrida. God, in such systems, becomes less than God, because he becomes merely a product of man’s system of knowledge.

Kierkegaard refused this idea, and left a huge puzzle for readers to explore in the process. The indirect search for the nature of faith and what a Christian is still applies to today’s world, as the category of Christian is applied very liberally to groups of people (i.e. Americans) when a closer examination of these things might shock people. Christianity is not a western religion (or rather, originally was not, argument could be waged about the current state of affairs). It does not come after the Greek tradition of logically argued truth based on dry, separated “subjects” who argue with assumptions. Rather, it deals with actual people relating to a God who is so completely other and different that language cannot suffice in describing him except to call him “He Is” (or Yahweh) and the paradoxical idea that he became human, all considered through books written by all kinds of people throughout history. This hardly sounds like dry, detached philosophy to me.

Kierkegaard explores the nature of this faith throughout his authorship on many levels. That is, both to present it to readers, and to explore it for himself. As Ezra Pound said in a letter once, “Language is exploration.” Kierkegaard’s authorship is just that: exploration.

Works Cited

Kierkegaard, Søren. The Point Of View For My Work As An Author. New York:
Harper & Row, 1962.
Storm, D. Anthony. Commentary On Kierkegaard. August 8, 2004. 13 December 2004.

Robert Jastrow on Science and Reason

Rotating Pilgrim — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:26:56 +0000

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians, and plumjam from the JREF forum, who have been sitting there for centuries.

There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgments to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science, it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the universe, and every effect must have its cause, there is no first cause…

This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control…

Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proven that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks, what cause produced the effect? Who or what put the matter and energy in the universe? Was the universe created out of nothing, or was it gathered together out of pre existing materials? And science cannot answer these questions.” – Robert Jastrow

If we give that wish its head – CS Lewis on demonizing your enemies

Rotating Pilgrim — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:24:04 +0000

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.

Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?

If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, pg. 118

Chesterton and a philosophy of common sense

Rotating Pilgrim — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:10:15 +0000

In describing Thomism as a philosophy of common sense, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

“Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody’s system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody’s sense of reality; to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity; as that law is about right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confident man, that if we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind…

Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkelian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists, since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God.”

G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas, p. 136.