Tag: philosophy

Emmanuel Levinas, The Proximity of the Other, 98

“All encounter begins with a benediction, contained in the word ‘hello’; that ‘hello’ that all cogito, all reflection on oneself already presupposes and that would be a first transcendence. This greeting addressed to the other man is an invocation. I therefore insist on the primacy of the well-intentioned relation toward the other. Even when there may be ill will on the other’s part, the attention, the receiving of the other, like his recognition, mark the priority of good in relation to evil.”

“In Saïs, the statue of Athena, whom they equate with Isis, bore the inscription: ‘I am all that has been, and is, and shall be; no mortal has yet raised my veil.’

—Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris, § 9 (354 C).

“Christ did not hide truths in order to prevent them from being communicated, but in order to provoke desire for them by this very concealment.”

—Saint Augustine: Sermons, 51, 4, 5.

“The more these things seem to be obscured by figurative words, the sweeter they become when they are explained.”

—Saint Augustine: On Christian Doctrine, iv, vii, 15.

“But in order that manifest truths should not become tiring, they have been covered with a veil, while remaining unchanged, and thus they become the object of desire; being desired, they are in a way made young again; with their youth restored, they enter the spirit gently.”

—Saint Augustine: Letters, 137, V, 18.

“The plain fact is that not
all facts are plain…’The Lord whose oracle is at Delphi,’ said Heraclitus referring to Apollo the god
and symbol of wisdom, ‘neither speaks nor conceals but gives signs.’… There are
meanings of high, sometimes of very high importance, which cannot be stated in
terms strictly defined….Plain speech may sometimes have conceptual exactitude,
but it will be inaccurate with respect to the new thing that one wants to say, the
freshly imagined experience that one wants to describe and communicate.”

— Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 86.

“These things are veiled in figures, in garments as it were, in order that they may exercise the mind of the pious inquirer, and not become cheap for being bare and obvious … For being remote, they are more ardently desired, and for being desired they are more joyfully discovered.”

—Saint Augustine: Against Lying, X, 24.

“Vielleicht ist nie etwas Erhabeneres gesagt oder eine Gedanke erhabener ausgedrückt worden als in jener Aufschrift über dem Tempel der Isis (der Mutter Natur): ‘Ich bin alles was da ist, was da war und was da sein wird, und meinen Schleier hat kein Sterblicher aufgedeckt.’”

“[Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said or a thought has been expressed more sublimely, than in that inscription on the temple of Isis (Mother Nature): ‘I am all that is, that has been, and that shall be, and no mortal has raised my veil.’]”

—Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790. (§ 49, footnote.)

I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure, which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which is independently of me. Attention is rewarded by knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something that my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal 

—Iris Murdoch 1997, 373

Iris Murduch, “The Sublime and the Good”

From the point of view of this theory we can offer a pocket history of literature, establishing an order of merit. This pocket history
works through the idea of freedom as this idea has been treated at
different times. The history of the treatment of freedom falls into
five phases. These phases can be taken as roughly chronological, and  can also be used independently of chronology. They are as follows.
(1) Tragic freedom. This is the concept of freedom which I have
related to the concept of love: freedom as an exercise of the imagination in an unreconciled conflict of dissimilar beings. It belongs
especially to, was perhaps invented by, the Greeks. The literary
form is tragic drama. (2) Mediaeval freedom. Here the individual
is seen as a creature within a partly described hierarchy of theological reality. The literary forms are religious tales, allegories, morality
plays. (3) Kantian freedom. This belongs to the Enlightenment. The
individual is seen as a non-historical rational being moving towards
complete agreement with other rational beings. The literary forms
are rationalistic tales and allegories and novels of ideas. (4) Hegelian
freedom. This belongs mainly to the nineteenth century. The individual is now thought of as a part of a total historical society and
takes his importance from his role in that society. The literary form
is the true novel (Balzac, George Eliot, Dickens). (5) Romantic
freedom. This belongs mainly to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though it has its roots earlier. The individual is seen as solitary and as having importance in and by himself. Both Hegelian and
Romantic freedom are of course developments of Kantian freedom.
Hegel makes the Kingdom of Ends into a historical society; while
the Romantic concludes from the unhistorical emptiness of Kant’s
other rational beings that in fact one may as well assume that one is
alone. (This is one line of thought leading to existentialism. Angst
is the modern version of Achtung; we now fear, not the law itself,
but its absence). The literary form is the neurotic modern novel.
This pocket history is of course only a toy, but it does I think
suggest some things which are true. It does not work altogether
chronologically for obvious reasons, since Shakespeare was not a
Greek. We may also note, and this perhaps is one of its perceptions,
that this history seems to condemn the novel to fall below the level
of tragedy. The novel fails to be tragic because, in almost every
case, it succumbs to one of the two great enemies of Love, convention and neurosis. The nineteenth century novel succumbed to convention, the modern novel succumbs to neurosis. The nineteenth
century novel is better than the twentieth century novel because
convention is the less deadly of the two; and given a society which
is in a dramatic phase of its being the mere exploration of that society will take you very far indeed. It will not however take you all
the way. We can understand Tolstoy when he says, “strip the best novels of our time of their details and what will remain?” Yet Tolstoy himself also proves that the novel can be tragic, it can rise to
that level. A recent novel which also proves it, though it is well be
low Tolstoy’s achievement, is Dr. Zhivago. In the case of Tolstoy
and Pasternak, it is, I think, not difficult to see that the quality of
their greatness should be called compassion, love: the non-violent
apprehension of difference. And with what exhilaration do we experience the absence of self in the work of Shakespeare. That is the true sublime.

“Let me now briefly and dogmatically state what I take to be, in opposition to Kant’s view, the true view of the matter. Art and morals are, with certain provisos which I shall mention in a moment, one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. What stuns us into a realisation of our suprasensible destiny is not, as Kant imagined, the formlessness of nature, but rather its unutterable particularity; and most particular and individual of all natural things is the mind of man. That is incidentally why tragedy is the highest art, because it is most intensely concerned with the most individual thing. Here is the true sense of that exhilaration of freedom which attends art and which has its more rarely achieved counterparts in morals. It is the apprehension of something else, something particular, as existing outside us. The enemies of art and morals, the enemies that is of love, are the same: social convention and neurosis. One may fail to see the individual because of Hegel’s totality, because we are ourselves sunk in a social whole which we allow uncritically to determine our reactions, or because we see each other exclusively as so determined. Or we fail to see the individual because we are completely enclosed in a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream objects of our own. Fantasy, the enemy of art, is the enemy of true imagination: Love, an exercise of the imagination. This is what Shelley meant when he said that egotism was the great enemy of poetry. This is so whether we are writing it or reading it. The exercise of overcoming one’s self, the expulsion of fantasy and convention, which attends for instance the reading  of King Lear is indeed exhilarating. It is also, if we perform it properly
which we hardly ever do, painful. It is very like Achtung. Kant was
marvellously near the mark. But he thought of freedom as the aspiration to a universal order consisting of a pre-fabricated harmony.
It was not a tragic freedom. The tragic freedom implied by love is
this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine
the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves. Nor is there any social totality within which
we can come to comprehend differences as placed and reconciled.
We have only a segment of the circle. Freedom is exercised in the
confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this difference.”

—from “The Sublime and the Good” by Iris Murdoch