Friday, September 6, 2019
Reading about Hemingway’s (and the Spanish people’s) attitude toward life and death again makes me wonder, it seems so out of proportion. You live, you die, so what? Why is something which is universal treated as if it were something to be dreaded, or ignored, or enshrined? It doesn’t make sense to me. Why is life a tragedy because it ends? Why is it unendurable unless one shuts out of awareness the fact that it is going to end? Both attitudes are so strange. It is as if you were to say that the meaning of life is only Friday, say, or 3 p.m., or the color orange, or the smell of citron, or the taste of ashes. It is like looking at a train ride without reference to the place left or the place arrived at.
Guys, you care to help me explain this? (Not that I don’t feel you prodding me anyway.)
What was called Western Civilization began with the Greeks and Romans and their gods and their understandings of the way things are. Christianity supplanted that with a new sense of meaning. As things do, it grew, flourished, produced fruit, and declined. The civilization that could produce the Gothic cathedral is not related to your civilization except as ancestry. The Renaissance was a searching for a more permanent footing, a realer reality, than what the European civilization had declined to. The Renaissance was naturally followed by the Reformation, and a century of intense warfare centered on the question of the human relationship to the divine.
The Catholic theology and organization had become too one-sided. The various Protestant revolutions were counter-balancing that one-sidedness, and by their nature could not come to any pretense of universality. Understand, we are not talking about politics or even theology. We are centered on a civilization’s understanding of the meaning of life and death.
After the religious wars subsided into an uneasy grumbling stalemate, the natural result of the warfare plus the Renaissance was the gradual destruction of faith in the Christian scheme itself. Indeed, you could argue that the religious wars were a matter of “protesting too much” – and we don’t mean that as a play on words, we mean the fanaticism on all sides was partly refusal to see that they themselves didn’t quite believe in the way that, say, medieval man had believed. Hence, an age of skepticism. But people can’t really live without belief, so when they cannot believe one thing, they grasp at something else. Thus came the ages of science, of economics, of social-engineering, of endless tinkering, of what is called science but is more like science-in-the-service-of-unbridled-technological-experimentation.
Capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism, scientific materialism, and on and on – what do they have in common but this? They all try to make sense of life by considering only what shows. The coming of psychology came as an awful shock; so did the coming of scientific theories based on new but not-to-be-ignored data showing that time, space, causality, material, energy – name it – are not what they had appeared to be.
So here you are. Religion is again having a last semi-hysterical upwelling, rooted in fear and even panic, but it is not rooted in the deepest reality. “Science,” so called, is more runaway than ever, and more enslaved to utility and less open to actual free inquiry than ever in its history. Politics, economic theory, ideology are wilder and more frantic than ever, and inspire ever less widespread conviction. Philosophy has become a university major and a profession disputing fine points in learned journals, and is taken seriously nowhere but in its own closed circle.
Can you see that this is all one phenomenon? What is fueling it all is your need for a more profound and satisfying sense of the meaning of life and death. Meaning cannot be imposed by political force. It can only be recognized.
There was a time when you lived appalled at the meaninglessness of a life that would be blotted out by death, destroying anything but whatever you might leave as artifact.
I wouldn’t have thought to put it together, but it’s obvious at the moment. This is why I am immune to political or ideological panaceas, or religious certainties, or any of the things people grab onto. I do not have the need to fill an empty center.
Yes. Exactly that. The unfilled emptiness drives people to find something to fill it, and it is no laughing matter to people who are desperately in need. Rather than provide examples of inadequate solutions, let us say this about the adequate solution (which, of course, will not be adequate forever): It will take account of life and death as parts of one reality. It will not concentrate on the things of life and consign “the afterlife” to the realm of the unimportant or the unfathomable. Neither will it pretend to know that there is no such thing. Neither will it say that “the afterlife” is all that matters, and 3D life is a dream or nightmare. It will deal with everything as if everything matters!
When you live in the knowledge that All is well, that Man is the measure of all things, that to understand it all, you need to remember As above, so below, that All are one, many things sundered will be seen in their interconnection, and you will be able to live without having to fight a continual background sense of despair. You cannot expect to live without problems; life is problems. But you need not live as if there were no underlying sense and meaning.