Tieing together loose ends

I began reading The Idea of the Holy again today, by a German theologian who died in the early 20th century, an author, by the way, that influenced C.S. Lewis so deeply that a key element of his thought was included in the preface for The Problem of Pain. I was actually lead to this book by that preface and boy am I glad it did. I can remember so many times reading about a certain idea my whole life in all the different philosophy books I’d been reading, and one of the many things you try to do when you read is to try and tie together all the loose ends and end with one, coherent, beautiful tapestry of a philosophy. This is how it happens.

I read and enjoy, but don’t fully understand, The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer. I ponder and mull over exactly what it is about The Will that I find so fascinating and alluring, a mysterious force that yearns and wills and longs, at the bottom of everything, behind the curtain of all appearances, a ferocious, condensed, consolidation of pure and irresistible force, dynamism, and drive. Our only hope of ever coming into any kind of conscious contact with it is through the medium of music, a phenomena I try my hardest to treat as a key puzzle piece in my own personal philosophy. So, we have The Will. But then I turn to The Birth of Tragedy Through the Spirit of Music, by Frederick Nietzsche, and his Dionysian stupor seizes me in just the same way, and feelings are aroused that are completely akin to those that rose when I contemplated Schopenhauer’s Will. How, I wondered, did Nietzsche miss it? Of course, they’re not the same thing; the Dionysian reveling is almost a creaturely response to whatever the Will is, assuming such a thing existed. But I’m briefly just mentioning these examples to illustrate a point.

I move on to what drew me so intoxicatingly toward Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, a peculiar book written with the trademark, literary unorthodoxy, a probing analysis and wrestling with the complex and paradoxical story about God’s seemingly contemptuous command to sacrifice his only son to Him, thus eliminating his seed and violating the promise made previously about the numbers of his seed outnumbering the stars in the heavens and the sands at the beach. I am then also drawn to the writings of the mystics, all with a marked absence of reasonings, rational arguments for abstract concepts about God, a marked absence of theory-building, detached theorizing, disconnected intellection, or impersonal and robotic, scientific schematization or systematization of any or all or some of whatever religious topic happened to be under scrutiny.

I have named a few, but the common thread in all of this is an emphasis on what Rudolph Otto calls the non-rational aspects of religion, our conscious relation to the objects and persons of which religion is about, and most importantly about the things of the Spirit itself, whether we’re talking about God, the soul, angels, demons, Heaven, sacred objects, or whatever. This is what I was drawn to. What is Schopenhauer’s Will, what is it that Schopenhauer was reaching for in the dark without revelation, but an element in the non-rational part of God Himself? What was it that prompted Nietzsche to emphasize the Dionysiac frenzy other than those faint and uncertain mists being condensed and filtered out to the pagan from the non-rational region of God, and from that mysterious frontier, affecting behavior that is like the hysteria that can be witnessed during a passionate, Christian, religious experience, with all the juicy characteristics noted long ago by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience?

You meet it again in the honest and passionate studies and behavior of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a great admirer and an unspoken and unacknowledged disciple of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, James, and Schopenhauer; he yearned for the life in a monastery, thinking the life of a monk more authentic, more suited for meeting the challenge of living life, or, as Kierkegaard puts it, finding the idea for which you would die rather than lose it. The cold, lifeless method of philosophy called the analytic method, specializing in rigorous definitions, logically airtight language ripped from the everyday uses we know and placed up on the summit of an unreachable mountain, ripped from the culture from which the words first found life and meaning, and giving to the words a responsibility and burden they were never meant to bear: this, thought Wittgenstein, was the dangerous and erroneous idea of giving language the potential to wrap its arms around all of reality. But it was Wittgenstein’s job to draw a limit around what language could and couldn’t do. Language resides in the domain of concepts and in so far as a concept denotes an idea, it encompasses it, comprehends it. However, there is a domain of life, especially partitioned off by, he would argue, ethics and religion, that language was never meant to denote. He is famous for saying on this point that whereof we cannot speak, we must remain silent. He is talking about the non-rational aspects of a part of reality that is the most important, since it’s the part of reality that has to do with Spirit. But the things of the spirit can’t be directly talked about; they have to be awoken in consciousness by means of a certain kind of language - the kind that uses metaphors. This is why poetry having to do with such issues is so important. The poet compares the thing of the spirit to a thing we have sensed; in response to the thing we can sense, certain feelings form in consciousness a certain noticed emotive phosphorescence; the poet then asks: “You see what you feel when you think about this thing you have sensed? What you’re feeling is akin, and is an analogy to, what you would feel if you were ever in the presence of this non-rational part of God of which we must remain silent, and of which we can’t speak.”