Still Point

Care, Identity and (mis)Recogition 4

2012-05-25T15:10:00.002+01:00

7. The Darkness at the Heart of Humanity – Modern Malaises

One could argue that the present world economic crisis is the direct result of the pull to selfishness within both individuals and nations. While individualism is “the jewel in the crown” of the achievements of modern civilisation, it is also in another sense its “feet of clay,” to mix metaphors rather crudely. A virtual tsunami of greed and selfishness has swept over the modern world, leaving most of us in a state of dependence on richer, more powerful and even sinister forces. In a sense, we have reaped the whirlwind of our greed both as individuals and nations. We are finding out to our cost that our political and social structures are intrinsically flawed and unjust and that our economic structures, with all their linked technologies, are rooted in domination, patriarchy, capitalism and racism. This is a hard lesson to learn, and it was one predicted by many feminists, ecologists and more liberal scientists like Capra just cited above.

Taylor (1991) rightly scorns this dark side of modernity – its greed and selfishness and its blindness to the wisdom of the past. Modernity has brought with it, as well asthe malaise of individualism which we have just described, what he terms two other malaises, those of “instrumental reasoning” and “soft despotism.” Our much maligned modern economists and other state functionaries, who delight in heartless accounting and the balancing of books, are the “instrumental reasoners.” They seek the most economic means to a given end and are quite thoughtless of and insensitive to the suffering of the poor and vulnerable in budgets enacted to please the paymasters of the IMF and the ECB. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing as Oscar Wilde once put it. Their catch cry is “maximum efficiency” or “maximum output.”

It is interesting to note, is it not, that most economists and most politicians are men and that some few women who do make it in politics have in Jungian terms an overly masculine or macho, even alpha-male animus? A second point worth noting is that the demands of economic growth are often inimical to ecology and insensitive to the environment. Our instrumental reasoners are more prone also to talk about “medical problems” or “bed blockers” rather than talk about real people who are suffering. Statistics are their weapons and they use them liberally.

The final malaise that Taylor notes is what he terms “soft despotism,” after Alexis de Tocqueville, by which he means the “atomism of self-absorbed individuals;” a sort of indifference to everything that goes on about us; a phenomenon that renders us into a “stay at home” people who could not be bothered going out to protest for any cause; a sort of happy-with-my-lot syndrome with a “don’t rock the boat” mentality.

In all of this, there has been nothing short of a loss of soul and a deadening of the senses. The modern world is one which hypnotises us into an unknowing stupor, and in so doing it can never be the “vale of soul-making” alluded to by John Keats.[1]

8. Who are the Carers?: A Sociological Framework

Self with Kelvin McMahon and his mother at Kelvin's garduation, May 23, 2012

We would all like to assume that the answer to this question is every human being worth his/her salt, but even a cursory glance at history and recent solid research soon disabuses our mind of such a simplistic assumption. Lynch, K., Baker, J., and Lyons, M. (2009) speak of love as action rather than solely emotion and argue that caring is essentially love labour. Caring is essentially about the work we do for our survival and for our individual, familial and communitarian human development. The authors cut to the chase immediately with their assessment that “[c]aring is low status work generally undertaken by low status people...” (p. 36)

Who are these low status people? The answer is all too clear – mostly women - and the number of migratory workers in their ranks is considerable. Low status work also attracts modest to low remuneration. Kittay (1999) talks about “love’s labour” and argues cogently about its being assigned by gender and uses a useful description of there being a “gender asymmetry” in this most necessary and essential aspect of human work.

Lynch et al (2009) offer an interesting framework by which we can analyse the essential nature of care and by so doing avoid poor decisions in our social, economical and political policies when dealing with the subject. They offer a diagram with three concentric circles where Primary Care is the central core, Secondary Care the middle circle and Tertiary Care the outer ring. Now the movement is essentially from the centre outwards. In other words, the nature of care springs from the well of Primary Care (say mother caring for her children or for a sick parent – real love labour) and radiates out to Secondary Care (say nurse or special needs teacher or SNA caring for a SEN pupil) and thence to Tertiary (say a volunteer with the Simon Community doing the soup run). Indeed, it would be hard to engage in the outer two circles without having been nourished at the central core.[2]

The same authors go on to underline the fact that care has essentially four interlocking elements: (i) cognitive work, (ii) emotional engagement, (iii) commitment and responsibility and (iv) a moral imperative. Obviously these four interlocking qualities result in sheer physical work, too. Cognitively, we have to plan what we want to do with the cared-for person as well as knowing how to use our own caring skills. Emotional engagement lessens as we go from inner to outer circles, but for the mature and enlightened carer s/he can bring much empathy learned at life’s core, i.e., in the inner circle out into those outer realms of care. However, it is to the fourth of the above interlocking elements, viz., the moral imperative of care that I wish to turn my attention now as it interlinks nicely with the philosophy of care espoused by Charles Taylor.

9. The Moral Imperative

Taylor’s (1989) basic argument is that the concept of the self, in other word’s our very identity, is linked to morality. Now, this moral sense which we acquire as we grow as human beings means not simply a set of claims about what we ought to do or not to do to be moral. Rather, it means what we ought to be or not to be. In other words, I believe that Taylor is arguing that morality is essentially concerned with the self or related to our being. Again it is more ontologically than cognitively or epistemologically rooted. He also argues that morality is related to the self by what he calls a framework. How we think about the self depends (1) on what we consider to be the Good and (2) how we relate to that Good. In short, if you wish, I can only think of my self as I think of that same self in relation to what is most important for me in life, that is, in relation to what “makes me tick,” or “what keeps me going” or what “draws me on in life” to use colloquial but real phrases.

Taylor’s philosophy of identity or of self is far-ranging and erudite, and it covers virtually the whole sweep of Western philosophy from Plato to Augustine, from Descartes to Locke and onwards through history from the Protestant Reformers to the great philosophers of the Enlightenment and Counter Enlightenment periods. He ends, needless to say, with more modern voices. However, fortunately for the present writer, I do not have to delay by looking at any of these scholars in depth – an impossible task – as such is beyond the scope and purview of this essay.

The bulk of the book, then, is spent on a sweeping exposition of the changes in the self over the course of the history of Western philosophy. In sum, I believe that the transition that Taylor outlines over the course of that history right up into modern times is one best described by a trajectory (uneven though it be) from an external sense of the self to an interior sense of the self. It is also a transition from finding meaning in extraordinary deeds to one that finds meaning in everyday actions.[3] Taylor, then, provides a fairly compelling narrative of the differences in the self over time. Now, this turn inwards (or sense of interiority), then, serves as a starting point for a renewed understanding of modernity. Taylor argues that modern subjectivity has its roots in ideas of human good, and is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and attain that good over the course of human history and, I believe, over the course of our own individual little lives. This modern turn inwards is far from being a disastrous rejection of rationality, as many of its critics would contend, and it has at its heart what Taylor calls the affirmation of ordinary life.

Again we may argue on the positive side that Taylor’s stress on the link between our ethical evaluation of a situation and our essential human identity allows us to understand the connection between who we are and our real core values. In other words, having an identity at all involves following a course of values in the world, and, vice versa, committing ourselves to a set of values also entails our adoption of a particular identity. As someone once remarked to this writer as regards strongly held personal values and concerns: “If you have nothing to stand for, you will fall for anything.”

[1] In the era of Freud, sex was the great repression, but with Yalom and others, I believe that death and suffering are the modern repressions. Modern society wishes to cover these sufferings up, ignore them, and deny them to its cost, indeed. For John Keats, suffering was to be experienced. with all the good things in life “on our very pulses,” and thereby they worked to make this oftentimes sad world into “a vale of soul-making.” ( See Gittings, 1987, 93)

[2] Indeed any good theory of human development from which any enlightened theory of care must spring must be cognisant of the work of the great psychologist Abraham Maslow, especially his "hierarchy of needs" theory that is a staple of Psychology 101 courses worldwide and which he famously articulated in 1954. It breaks down the path to happiness in an easy-to-digest list: Earthly needs, such as food and safety, are considered essential, since they act as the groundwork that makes it possible to pursue loftier desires, such as love, respect, and self-actualization (the realization of one's full potential). My argument here is that, like Maslow’s pyramid, the outer two rings stand on the solidity of the central core circle with respect to the nature of care.

[3] This, of course, is not to say that that trajectory has been continuous or even, insofar as St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the greatest philosophers of early Christian times was well aware of what he termed interiority, that God (or meaning, in more modern terms) could be encountered deep within the human heart or soul. In The Confessions, 10.27 we read “I have learnt to love You late, beauty at once so ancient and so new! I have learnt to love You Late! You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself. I searched for You outside myself...” and so on. For St Augustine it was clear that not everyone was yet aware of the fact that every human being is capable of God (Capax Dei) and thus can reach God (or meaning). In order to overcome this unawareness, Augustine proposed the way of interiority, that is the turning away from the physical to the spiritual world, from the outer world to the inner self (Confessions 10,6).

Care, Identity and (mis)Recognition 3

2012-05-24T22:23:00.000+01:00

5. Frameworks and Horizons

Giraffes, Dublin Zoo, May 15, 2012

Taylor (1989, 27) argues that my identity is defined by “the commitments and identifications” that I make (also on a daily basis) over the course of my life. Those “commitments and identifications” provide “the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I can endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.” These are ethical questions about the meaning and value of life in general and of my life in particular. Again, these are questions which every individual has to answer for themselves. Consequently, they are intensely personal, subjective questions, wholly distinct from questions of social category. One takes a stand, then, on a particular issue within one’s particular set of “commitments and identification,” within the framework of one’s unique set of values. For instance the father and mother of a special needs child both fight “tooth and nail” to get the best education for their son or daughter. They fight within a framework of values – the universal right to an education – which itself is set within a greater moral or ethical horizon which some would place ultimately within a religious or at least a spiritual one. Once again, the “commitments and identifications” people make and the identities they form are shaped within the contexts of communities. Obviously religious beliefs would exercise a not too negligible influence on such communities.[1]

6. The Desire to Connect: Towards another Framework: Systems Thinking

We have already discussed in detail above Gilligan’s (1995) assessment that there has been a paradigm shift in recent years from patriarchy to connection. If there is one thing that describes the modern thrust in the sciences - both natural and social - it is the gravitation towards interconnectedness. Capra (1996) argues that there are three strands in ecology, viz., deep ecology, social ecology and feminist ecology (or ecofeminism), each of which "does what it says on the tin." These schools of thought don't conflict at all - rather they complement one another to give an overall comprehensive vision. When one looks at social ecology, Capra argues, and he is correct in this assertion, one finds that many of our social and economic structures, and indeed their linked technologies, are rooted in domination, patriarchy, capitalism and racism.

Ecofeminists point out that the exploitation of nature, in particular, has gone hand in hand with that of women, who have been identified with nature throughout the ages. This ancient association of woman and nature links women's history and the history of the environment, and is the source of a natural kinship between feminism and ecology.

Capra, in the same work, traces what we know as Systems Thinking today all the way from William Blake through the Romantic Movement, both in England and in Germany, where Immanuel Kant argued that organisms, in contrast to machines, are self-reproducing and self-organizing wholes. Basically, our author argues that systems thinking is all about connectedness, relationships and contexts. According to this type of thinking, the essential properties of any living system or organism are properties which belong to the whole and not to any individual parts as such. In the systems approach, the properties of the parts can be understood only from the organization of the whole. A good illustration would be, say how a team plays a soccer match – the whole team is more than simply the sum of the skills of individual players. Systems thinking is contextual, which is the opposite to analytical thinking. Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of the larger whole.

It is my contention here that our feminist theorists of care and our Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor are essential systems thinkers. For them “the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts.” Caring simply cannot be done in bits and pieces – it’s a holistic enterprise. To this extent real caring will rule out such travesties of caring like a “packaged curriculum” or throwing money at a problem instead of approaching it in a holistic manner. Likewise, in valuing the concept of interconnectedness of things, Lynch, K., Baker, J., and Lyons, M. (2009) advance an ethic which condemns any notions of “fast care” and “care as profit.”

Bubeck (1995, 135) warns us that we must not confuse care with service. Care is a far more holistic reality. Her definition of care is more precise than that advanced by Gilligan as outlined above as she insists that it is “an activity that meets needs that the cared for cannot possibly meet.” (132) However, she also adds interesting considerations such as the fact that care is a subset of human needs. (133) Also, Bubeck’s concern with caring as an attitude complements its nature as an activity and is steeped in the framework of connectivity, relationality and holism. In so being, the ethic of care is at once both psychological (attitude) and moral (leads to the action of caring). The present author was much taken with her assertion that a caring attitude involves what she terms “engrossment,” a term she borrows from Noddings, and which is a movement from the inside of the carer as s/he is “tuned into” and “face-to-face” with the cared-for person. Noddings' term engrossment refers to thinking about someone in order to gain a greater understanding of him or her. Engrossment is necessary for caring because an individual's personal and physical situation must be understood before the one-caring can determine the appropriateness of any action. However, while 'engrossment' need not entail, as the term seems to suggest, a deep fixation on the other, it was intended to reflect the dual nature of care, namely caring as an emotional state and an activity at one and the same time.

Further, Bubeck notes that caring as an activity possesses “an irreducible social nature.” (138) and that as such it is practically never mutually beneficial. In fact, it is an “asymmetrical transaction,” (139) balanced firmly in the cared-for person’s direction and against the carer. While caring can certainly be empowering, it can often be a burden that crushes the carer as we witness in these financially-straitened times. Care is often unremunerated and unreciprocated, and falls all too frequently to the woman’s lot. Consequently, it is hard to dismiss Bubeck’s claim that the most pressing question with respect to care is why it is mostly women who do this very necessary task. (147)

Lynch, K., Baker, J., and Lyons, M. (2009) argue that our morals begin in everyday life, in the life that we all share, with all its vicissitudes or “ups and downs.” This is the only place or locus where any morals worth their salt are discovered. This ethic of care corresponds nicely to the definition of care given by the moral philosopher Agnes Keller (1990, p. 4): “Care for other human beings, this is the universal orientative principle of morals.”

In the midst of everyday life, we encounter then, the moral call. However, there is also a fundamental twist or darkness in the human soul as we are creatures who are prone to the pull of selfishness as well as the pull to altruism. It is to that theme we shall now turn briefly.

[1] Alan Ryan, writing on political philosophy in a recent general philosophy compendium edited by A.C. Grayling (1998, 413) situates Charles Taylor within a group of communitarian philosophers who stress that “we can make sense of our lives only with the aid and reassurance of others who share our view of the world and our goals along with it. Some writers, Charles Taylor perhaps the most prominent of them treat this as something close to a metaphysical claim.” One might heartily agree with the tenor of this comment, but one intuits a certain negative attitude to metaphysics here. Also, it is a comment just left hanging without any proper teasing out of the question.

Care, Identity and (mis)Recognition 2

2012-05-24T01:24:00.003+01:00

3. Recognition, Identity and Care

Dublin Zoo, May 15, 2012

It practically goes without saying that identity and recognition are, as it were, two sides of the one coin. One simply cannot forge or create one’s identity as a separate and unique self without being recognised by another as worthy of respect. Charles Taylor is arguably one of the most important contemporary philosophers of modern identity, and he offers us an interesting analysis of modern identity in his various books.[1] Other people, he argues (Taylor, 1994), act as a mirror of our selfhood and reflect back to us a positive or negative image of ourselves. He gives his reader the example of the negative recognition (or misrecognition) of Black Southerns by their White Southern counterparts in pre-Civil Rights days in the United States. We Irish could allude to the misrecognition of the Irish Gaelic peasantry over hundreds of years by its colonial masters. The one time professor of history at U.C.G., Professor P.L. Henry (1978, 21) argued some years back that the constantly diminishing number of native speakers of the Irish language learned from 1795 onwards that “they and all they represented were inferior, unfashionable and gross; moreover, they were impoverished.”[2] Taylor (1994, 23 ff.) argues that the people around the Black Southerns, or indeed, we may argue, those around the Irish Gaelic peasantry just mentioned, mirrored back to these groups respectively what he terms “a confining or demeaning or contemptible” picture of themselves. Such negative recognition or misrecognition, or even non-recognition, can and does inflict great harm on a person or on a group of people.

One need not travel too far to meet contemporary examples of such misrecognition. Indeed, we might have personally experienced such in our own lives. How many teachers over the years have intentionally, or unintentionally, or in sheer desperation, called any of the pupils in their care “stupid” or “foolish”? One can only be at one with Taylor where he argues cogently and passionately that due recognition is never a courtesy, but always a human right, indeed a basic human need. Those that do not acknowledge this right or need, diminish not alone others but also themselves.

Taylor (1994, 26 ff.) argues that a politics of equal recognition was ushered in with the growth of democracy from the eighteenth century onwards. Gradually individuals realised that they had a unique or “individualised identity”, particular to themselves alone. This unique identity particular to the individual is his/her authenticity. He goes on to stress that each individual’s unique identity is “inwardly generated” rather than “socially derived.” Any identity defined by the latter is the result of misrecognition because it is based on the framework of patriarchal values inherent in all traditional hierarchical societies, societies which recognise one’s dignity in virtue alone of the role one is assigned by society at large.

We have seen above that identity and recognition are two sides of the one coin. I now intend to examine how identity and recognition interact with the presence or absence of care in any individual’s life. Building on the work of Kathleen Lynch (2007) – whose three concentric circles of care relations are discussed below [3] - Feeley (2008, 2011) proposes a model of what she terms “literacy learning care.” She found in her study of 28 adults engaged in a literacy programme (a group of these respondents were survivors of industrial schools) that learning has a strong “emancipatory potential” when it takes place in a caring environment, but that when it occurs in an uncaring or even hostile and frightening one, it has the opposite effect of being oppressive and disempowering. Feeley coined a powerful term, building on Lynch’s research, viz., “learning care.” Indeed, she proposed and analysed three aspects of such learning care, viz., primary, secondary, and solidary, again basing her research on the findings of the same scholar. Feeley argues convincingly that affective dimensions of equality are pivotal in establishing more just literacy outcomes. She found from her research that these literacy outcomes mirrored the levels of care in the lives of her respondents.

Feeley’s work is good solid research which supports the anecdotal contentions of some teachers of long standing known to this present author, views that argue that when a teacher cares for his/her students only then can real learning take place. Further, using the framework offered us by Taylor we may say that once the teacher recognises the student in his/her uniqueness, authenticity and, indeed in his/her fragility and vulnerability, s/he will grow in positive self-esteem and identity as a learner. In so doing the teacher is engaging in true care for his/her pupil. This also ties in nicely with Carol Gilligan’s (1982) psychology of care as relational and as connecting with the other. Likewise this study confirms in practice the philosophies of education offered by two major twentieth century writers on education, namely Martin Buber and Paulo Friere.[4]

4. Who are we in terms of our relationships and care?

We are relational beings. We find our identity somewhere in the nexus of our relationships with others, which began with our early interactions with the significant others in our lives, especially mother and father and other close family members. Indeed, we literally learnt to care at our mother’s knee. Psychologically, I may say that my identity relates to my self-image (my personal mental model or image of myself), my self-esteem and indeed my individuality. An important element of my psychological identity is my gender, as this dictates to a significant degree how I view myself both as a person in my own right and how I relate that personhood to other people.

Taylor (1989) focuses on the first-person, subjective and affirmed identity (one affirmed by self and others) of the human person. He is not describing a social identity or any identity limited by category. In fact, he is talking about the existential subject. That is the subject who asks such questions as ‘Who am I?’ ‘What matters to me?’ ‘Why am I suffering mental or physical pain?’ or ‘What is my goal in life?’ or ‘What is it all about?’ These are far from being category questions. We are here asking deep existential questions about our desires, our ideals and the very meaning of life. What does answer these questions for us is an understanding of what is of crucial importance to us. Where do I stand on the question of how my father or mother or son or daughter is cared for or treated in hospital or nursing home or at school? Where do I stand on issues of justice in my everyday life? These moral questions are encountered practically on a daily basis. In a similar vein the great contemporary Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski (1980, 7), who experienced at first hand the Nazi occupation of his country and the evils of communism, opines that “we learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.”

Bronson (2004), in a remarkable work of social significance, undertook some hundred or more interviews with people from all walks of life on the biggest question any of us has to face in our lives namely, “what should I do with my life?” I hasten to add here that while this is a work by a journalist rather than by a professional sociologist or social psychologist, his findings are nonetheless revealing as they allow us to read the stories of real people in real situations. He reports that his interviewees spoke of fulfilment rather than happiness. Also, and Taylor would agree here as we outline below when we describe what he means by the “moral imperative,” [5] Bronson’s respondents found fulfilment in living up to their moral responsibility in society, that is when they found that they were of help to others, or at least when they felt they were genuinely connecting with others. In other words, our identity is deeply linked in with our capacity to care and with our mutual recognition of one another in such caring situations.

Phillips (2004, 171), in commenting on the thoughts of writer Primo Levi, the great Italian concentration camp survivor, points out that the latter believed fervently, after his horrific experiences, that “the characteristic nature of any set of ordinary virtues is permeated by the dynamics of human acknowledgement.” In short, this is another way of understanding what Charles Taylor means by recognition and Gilligan by “a relational psychology” and “connecting” with others.

Speaking in general about normal human relationships even, sometimes we can become enmeshed or fused with another person to the point that it is difficult to maintain a separate identity. Such encounters, needless to say, are unhealthy relationships as one person is totally dependent on the other. Now bring such a fused or enmeshed relationship into the carer/cared-for context and one gets trouble of equal proportions. If we base our identity on our partner, there is danger because it limits the extent to which we can authentically experience life. A lot of women, argues Bubeck (1995), have fused their identity with the act of caring to such an extent that caring becomes their sole way of being in the world. There is a singular lack of congruence or authenticity or real self-knowledge in such a rigid and narrow identification.

[1] In Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity, Taylor attempts ‘to articulate and write a history of the modern identity’ (Taylor, 1989: ix). Interestingly, Alison Weir argues that Michel Foucault and Taylor are two of the most important contemporary philosophers of modern identity, and says that they offer us two very different descriptions and analyses of modern identities. See Weir (2009, 534)

[2] See “Anglo-Irish And Its Irish Background” in The English Language in Ireland, (Mercier, 1978), edited by D.Ó Muirithe, for an extensive account of the fortunes of the Irish language and how its decline led to a sort of “inferiority complex” on the part of Gaelic speakers. It could equally be argued that the Irish in general have a sort of national inferiority complex due to hundreds of years of occupation by an outside power. Kiberd (1995, 6) argues similarly that colonialism took various forms in Ireland over the centuries, forms that were accompanied by a “psychology of self-doubt and dependency among the Irish, linked to the loss of economic and political power but also to the decline of the native language and culture.”

[3] See pages 17 and following of this essay under the subheading “Who are the Carers?”

[4]Buber's focus on dialogue and community would mark him out as an important thinker for educators. But when this is added to his fundamental concern with encounter and how we are with each other (and the world) his contribution is unique and yet often unrecognized. For him the teacher encounters the pupil in an I-thou reciprocal relationship which is a real recognition of unique identity. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Freire, reprising the oppressors-oppressed distinction, differentiates between the two positions in an unjust society, the oppressor and the oppressed. He makes no direct reference to his most direct influence for the distinction, which stems back at least as far as Hegel’s master and slave dichotomy.

[5] See page 19 below of the present essay.

Care, Identity and (mis)Recognition 1

2012-05-22T17:58:00.001+01:00

Once again I include here an essay I wrote for my M.A. in Human Development. The essay is an interdisciplinary one which straddles the areas of philosophy (that of the contemporary Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor) and sociology (theories of care and the new feminisms).

1. Introduction

Peacock, Dublin Zoo, May 15th, 2012

We moderns assume that the search for personal identity is a perennial one that stretches out into the future from time immemorial, though with a little study we soon find that it is a relatively recent quest spawned by the growing awareness of what it means to be an individual in those years in the wake of the Enlightenment. The quest for identity and belonging is universal for us moderns as we seek to live authentic lives amidst the plethora of confusing choices of lifestyle offered us today. It was surely much easier for pre-modern humans to define themselves, as their personal identity was very much assigned to them by their traditional roles within society.

This paper seeks to explore our quest for personal identity from the dual perspectives of philosophy and sociology. In particular, these explorations will attempt to explicate on the one hand the approach to this question by the contemporary Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor as it encounters and dialogues with the theories and practices of care as elucidated by modern feminist scholars and writers on the other. In so doing, it will, moreover, explore the frameworks offered by these various scholars, frameworks which essentially give shape and meaning to the human enterprise of authentic living. It will also contextualise this quest for meaning within the dynamic of the human thrust to recognise the other as other, and in turn be recognised by the other as truly unique. In so doing it will essentially argue the case that care and identity are the core considerations of a just and enlightened society.

2. Defining Care:

Firstly we will turn our attention to the theory of care advanced by Professor Carol Gilligan who is world-renowned for her book written against the male-centred personality psychology of Freud and Erickson, and the equally male-centred developmental psychology of Lawrence Kohlberg.[1] Her complaint was not that it was solely unjust to leave women out of psychology but that it simply was not good psychology in the first place if it left out half of the human race. Gilligan offered a new and fresh perspective on the moral development of the human being to that advanced by Kohlberg (with whom she had studied and worked) which was essentially male-oriented. Her perspective suggests that men and women have tendencies to view morality in different terms, with women emphasizing empathy and compassion rather than the mere following of rules and choosing to act based on abstract principles, both of which are seen as more male preoccupations.

Gilligan (1995) argues that recent years have seen a “paradigm shift” in society from patriarchy to connection or connectedness as a way of operating in a more just and enlightened way. Traditional male-oriented society highlighted separation (analysis of parts) rather than connection (networks and wholes) as do feminist theories of care. In the patriarchal framework, women simply were sidelined, if not included at all in some cases. It is important here to state clearly that Gilligan’s feminism is inclusive, and in so being embraces also the concerns of men in startling contrast to patriarchy which is practically exclusive of the woman's voice by definition.

Gilligan’s psychology of care is relational, a psychology of connecting with the other who is being cared for. She hastens to inform us that this is a feminist psychology of care and never a feminine one, because the latter is a mere subset of patriarchal concerns where women are simply filling roles laid out for them by society. A feminine ethic of care is “an ethic of special obligations” where “selflessness or self-sacrifice is built into the very definition of care...” Consequently, a feminist ethic of care, which aims at connecting with the other, will never be self-diminishing in such a way. It will, rather, be self-enhancing and self-affirming. To this extent we can understand how Gilligan argues, after Brennan (1993), that the notion of a separate self, which she traces back to Descartes, is “a foundational fantasy” of more modern patriarchy.

We can also understand, when talking about such relational psychology, the concern the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has with the priority of recognition in our everyday lives as well as the dire consequences of the failure of such recognition, a failure he terms simply and obviously misrecognition. It is to this overlapping concept we now turn our attention.

3. Recognition, Identity and Care

Scimitar Oryx, Dublin Zoo, May 15, 2012

It practically goes without saying that identity and recognition are, as it were, two sides of the one coin. One simply cannot forge or create one’s identity as a separate and unique self without being recognised by another as worthy of respect. Charles Taylor is arguably one of the most important contemporary philosophers of modern identity, and he offers us an interesting analysis of modern identity in his various books.[2] Other people, he argues (Taylor, 1994), act as a mirror of our selfhood and reflect back to us a positive or negative image of ourselves. He gives his reader the example of the negative recognition (or misrecognition) of Black Southerns by their White Southern counterparts in pre-Civil Rights days in the United States. We Irish could allude to the misrecognition of the Irish Gaelic peasantry over hundreds of years by its colonial masters. The one time professor of history at U.C.G., Professor P.L. Henry (1978, 21) argued some years back that the constantly diminishing number of native speakers of the Irish language learned from 1795 onwards that “they and all they represented were inferior, unfashionable and gross; moreover, they were impoverished.”[3] Taylor (1994, 23 ff.) argues that the people around the Black Southerns, or indeed, we may argue, those around the Irish Gaelic peasantry just mentioned, mirrored back to these groups respectively what he terms “a confining or demeaning or contemptible” picture of themselves. Such negative recognition or misrecognition, or even non-recognition, can and does inflict great harm on a person or on a group of people.

One need not travel too far to meet contemporary examples of such misrecognition. Indeed, we might have personally experienced such in our own lives. How many teachers over the years have intentionally, or unintentionally, or in sheer desperation, called any of the pupils in their care “stupid” or “foolish”? One can only be at one with Taylor where he argues cogently and passionately that due recognition is never a courtesy, but always a human right, indeed a basic human need. Those that do not acknowledge this right or need, diminish not alone others but also themselves.

Taylor (1994, 26 ff.) argues that a politics of equal recognition was ushered in with the growth of democracy from the eighteenth century onwards. Gradually individuals realised that they had a unique or “individualised identity”, particular to themselves alone. This unique identity particular to the individual is his/her authenticity. He goes on to stress that each individual’s unique identity is “inwardly generated” rather than “socially derived.” Any identity defined by the latter is the result of misrecognition because it is based on the framework of patriarchal values inherent in all traditional hierarchical societies, societies which recognise one’s dignity in virtue alone of the role one is assigned by society at large.

We have seen above that identity and recognition are two sides of the one coin. I now intend to examine how identity and recognition interact with the presence or absence of care in any individual’s life. Building on the work of Kathleen Lynch (2007) – whose three concentric circles of care relations are discussed below [4] - Feeley (2008, 2011) proposes a model of what she terms “literacy learning care.” She found in her study of 28 adults engaged in a literacy programme (a group of these respondents were survivors of industrial schools) that learning has a strong “emancipatory potential” when it takes place in a caring environment, but that when it occurs in an uncaring or even hostile and frightening one, it has the opposite effect of being oppressive and disempowering. Feeley coined a powerful term, building on Lynch’s research, viz., “learning care.” Indeed, she proposed and analysed three aspects of such learning care, viz., primary, secondary, and solidary, again basing her research on the findings of the same scholar. Feeley argues convincingly that affective dimensions of equality are pivotal in establishing more just literacy outcomes. She found from her research that these literacy outcomes mirrored the levels of care in the lives of her respondents.

Feeley’s work is good solid research which supports the anecdotal contentions of some teachers of long standing known to this present author, views that argue that when a teacher cares for his/her students only then can real learning take place. Further, using the framework offered us by Taylor we may say that once the teacher recognises the student in his/her uniqueness, authenticity and, indeed in his/her fragility and vulnerability, s/he will grow in positive self-esteem and identity as a learner. In so doing the teacher is engaging in true care for his/her pupil. This also ties in nicely with Carol Gilligan’s (1982) psychology of care as relational and as connecting with the other. Likewise this study confirms in practice the philosophies of education offered by two major twentieth century writers on education, namely Martin Buber and Paulo Friere.[5]

[1]The book in question here is In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development , Harvard University Press, (1982)

[2] In Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity, Taylor attempts ‘to articulate and write a history of the modern identity’ (Taylor, 1989: ix). Interestingly, Alison Weir argues that Michel Foucault and Taylor are two of the most important contemporary philosophers of modern identity, and says that they offer us two very different descriptions and analyses of modern identities. See Weir (2009, 534)

[3] See “Anglo-Irish And Its Irish Background” in The English Language in Ireland, (Mercier, 1978), edited by D.Ó Muirithe, for an extensive account of the fortunes of the Irish language and how its decline led to a sort of “inferiority complex” on the part of Gaelic speakers. It could equally be argued that the Irish in general have a sort of national inferiority complex due to hundreds of years of occupation by an outside power. Kiberd (1995, 6) argues similarly that colonialism took various forms in Ireland over the centuries, forms that were accompanied by a “psychology of self-doubt and dependency among the Irish, linked to the loss of economic and political power but also to the decline of the native language and culture.”

[4] See pages 17 and following of this essay under the subheading “Who are the Carers?”

[5]Buber's focus on dialogue and community would mark him out as an important thinker for educators. But when this is added to his fundamental concern with encounter and how we are with each other (and the world) his contribution is unique and yet often unrecognized. For him the teacher encounters the pupil in an I-thou reciprocal relationship which is a real recognition of unique identity. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Freire, reprising the oppressors-oppressed distinction, differentiates between the two positions in an unjust society, the oppressor and the oppressed. He makes no direct reference to his most direct influence for the distinction, which stems back at least as far as Hegel’s master and slave dichotomy.

Narrative Practice 5

2012-05-21T19:52:00.001+01:00

Outsider Witness Practice

Every single person has unique values, dreams, hopes and commitments. Narrative Practice attempts to help everyone realise and articulate these ideals in their lives. In the task of excavating these values for the individual, White has found that bringing witnesses in to validate these values, expressed through newly constructed stories, is very helpful. However, I would be very careful in trying this myself, unless the proposed witnesses were used to listening to and sharing with others, and were somewhat familiar with the central points of Narrative Practice I have outlined above – like externalising conversations, re-authoring conversations and re-membering conversations. White (2007, p. 215) realises this problem all too well, and he stresses that these outsider witnesses must be able to express their “insider knowledge” in ways that contribute to “rich story development” and that will “be powerfully resonant for and healing of others.”

The scimitar oryx - What a beautiful animal. Dublin Zoo, May 15, 2012

Bearing this in mind, I have been able to use aspects of “Outsider Witness Practice” in my fifth year Social/Anger-Management Group. These I used quite successfully by inviting one of boys’ SNAs (three of them have an assigned SNA) in to act as “Outsider Witness.” This young man (the SNA) has some counselling experience and is quite comfortable with sharing. We discussed beforehand what he and Seán might be discussing in the group. In fact the incident Séan recounted to the group was his walking away when being taunted. The group listened attentively, while I asked Declan (the SNA) some few of the questions we practised in our course. In fact, we decided on three only: (i) “As you listened to Seán, what did you hear that stood out for you or that struck a chord?” (ii) “Was any image suggested to you of Seán’s life, of his life or identity more generally?” (iii) “What did the story suggest to you about what might be important values, or beliefs or hopes for Seán?” The answers Declan gave were briefly: (i) courage, (ii) the image of the fighter who knew when it was appropriate NOT to fight back physically – that you can fight back morally, too and (iii) courage is one of Seán’s main values, as well as openness to learn from his elders, teachers and SNAs. This led to a good group sharing where all the boys, after Declan had made his contribution, proceeded to acknowledge that Seán indeed was a very courageous boy, and that often it took way more courage to back down than to begin fighting with your fists. We also had an interesting discussion on why we should listen to our elders and how hard this was, in fact, for many young people.

Conclusion

In conclusion, then, with White and others, we may argue that when we manage to enable either ourselves or others to separate out on the one hand the problem-saturated descriptions (i.e., negative identities) we receive of ourselves primarily from society from, on the other hand, the empowering fact that our identity is chiefly shaped by narratives or stories that are uniquely personal, we are well on the road to self-realization and personal well-being. Also people will “experience a sense of personal agency” and “a capacity to intervene in their own lives and relationships,” to construct alternatives that re-author, re-construct or “re-narrativise” their own lives (White & Epston 1990, p 16).

In short, then, through giving us the gift of “personal agency,” will help us to liberate ourselves from the “problem-saturated stories” and “normalizing judgements of society” which oppress us especially now in the confusion of the twenty-first century. This assertion of agency in our lives with regard to our identity is surely ultimately what freedom is all about – the freedom to authentically choose who we are.

Bibliography

Bata, K. (2006). Ethical Curiosity and Poststructuralism. The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, No. 1.

Bourke, A. (1997). Language, Stories, Healing. Arguing at the Crossroads, ed. Brennan, P & de Sainte Phalle, C., New Island Books, Dublin.

Cashin, A. (2008). Narrative Therapy: A Psychotherapeutic Approach in the Treatment of Adolescents with Asperger’s Disorder. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, Vol. 21, No. 1.

Freedman, J. and Combs, G. (1996), Relationships and Ethics. Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities, Norton, New York.

Gaddis, S. (2004). Re-positioning traditional research. The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, No. 2.

Grant, L. and Usher, R. (2011). The Whiteboard as a co-therapist: narrative conversations in a generalist counselling session. The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, No 4.

Kearney, R. (2002). On Stories, Routledge, Oxford.

Monk, G and Winslade, J. (1999) What is Narrative Counselling All About? Narrative Counselling in Schools, Corwin Press, New Zealand.

Myerhoff, B. (1986), “Life Not Death in Venice”: Its Second Life. The Anthropology of Experience, eds. Turner, V. & Bruner, E., University of Illinois.

Ncube, N. (2006), The Tree of Life Project: Using narrative ideas in work with vulnerable children in Southern Africa. The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, No. 1.

Oulton, K et al., (2003), The Same Difference: The Work of Peer Counsellors of the Irish Wheelchair Association and the National Council of the Blind. The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, No. 2

Robinson, M. (1990), Inauguration Speech, http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/robinson/inaugural.html , accessed 05/04/12.

Russell, S and Carey, M. (2004). What is Externalizing?” Narrative Therapy: Responding to your Questions, Dulwich Centre Publications, Adelaide.

White, M. and Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Narrative Ends, Dulwich Centre Publications, Adelaide

White, M. (2000). Re-engaging with History: The absent but implicit, Reflections on Narrative Practice, Dulwich Centre Publications, Adelaide.

White, M. (2003). Community Assignments. The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work. No. 2.

White, M. (2004). Narrative practice and exotic lives: resurrecting diversity in everyday life, Dulwich Centre Publications, Adelaide.

White, M. (2007), Maps of Narrative Practice, W.W. Norton & Co., New York.

Narrative Practice 4

2012-05-20T18:27:00.002+01:00

Here below I continue these posts on Narrative Therapy. Each post is a section of an essay by the same title which I wrote recently for an M.A. in Human Development.

A Note on the use of the Whiteboard

Delphi Adventure centre: student on High Ropes - 2007

I have also drawn diagrams on the whiteboard to illustrate what we mean by (i) internalizing and externalizing a problem and (ii) re-authoring conversations. When dealing with the fist of these two tasks I have asked, for example, obviously leading questions like “Is Tommy merely his ADHD?” I found that the boys understood these two concepts quite quickly. Next, I got them all to draw a cartoon of themselves and their individual animal to reinforce the idea that “the problem is the problem, not the person.” (White, 2007, p. 1)

Another image I have used to reinforce the idea of externalizing conversations is that of being “a puppet on strings.” I have asked them questions like “Is your ADHD or depression (or any presenting problem) pulling your strings?” Again I have used the white board and interactive white board successfully here.

With regard to re-authoring conversations, I have done my utmost to facilitate the development of alternative storylines for pupils like Tommy and Tony, whom I have referred to above, by introducing questions that encourage them to use their lived experience and to combine this with their imaginative powers to come up with other stories and to re-author old ones. However, I have not as yet charted a re-authoring conversation along the lines recommended by White (2007) on the whiteboard using the parallel lines of Landscape of Action (the baseline which is basically a time line indicating the sequence of events or experiences in the persons story or stories – a storyline so) and the Landscape of Identity (the upper parallel line which indicates new learning, discovered knowledge, awakening awareness of values and gifts sparked by the events recorded on the lower line. However, I do intend to use this technique when the opportunity arises and when I feel confident and competent enough to use it. [1]

It will surprise very few teachers that recent research has shown that the use of the whiteboard enhances the effectiveness of narrative practice in general. Grant and Usher (2011, p. 11), on foot of their studies, conclude that “(w)hiteboarding offers transparency to the therapeutic process and in particular the narrative process... It demonstrates in a visual and creative way the influence that language and stories have on people’s lives. It opens up the dominant story and its effects, then a preferred story and how that may be imagined, and the migration of identity that is often taking place before our very eyes.”

Re-Membering Conversations

Students after surfing the Wild Atlantic - Mayo, 2007. Neither of these is mentioned in the text

I have already stated above that narrative approaches to therapy hold that identity is chiefly shaped by narratives or stories, whether uniquely personal to us or culturally general. Also I have already indicated there are multiple identities and hence multiple stories. However, identity conclusions can become problematic for people if they identity wholly with one negative story. This, then, will grow into an identity crisis simply because the person over-identifies with a problem-saturated story.

It is also interesting to note, that unlike Carl Rogers[2] who would have seen the person as shaped essentially by a core or real self, White (2007, p. 129) states that “identity is founded upon an ‘association of life’ rather than a core self.” It is on this firm conviction that White bases his concept of “re-membering conversations.” What, then, is this so-called ‘association of life’? Basically it is an association or grouping formed by all the significant figures of not alone a person’s past and present, but also of the person’s “projected future.” Indeed, it is also interesting to note that the founder of Narrative Practice also sees this ‘association of life’ as having a ‘membership’ which can comprise all the significant figures not alone from a person’s actual life but also from the life of the person’s imagination as encountered in the authors of books and plays or even characters from these books, plays or musicals who can and do have a profound influence of the person. Strangely enough also, White allows for the possibility that these significant figures could be “the stuffed toys of a person’s childhood or a favourite pet.”

On a personal level, several significant others form the members of my “association of life” – one a teacher whom I was lucky to have had in third and fourth classes primary who, in hindsight, literally was “the making of me” not alone academically but also personally. It was my early identification with this person that inspired me to take up teaching as a profession and vocation. Luckily enough I also got great encouragement from home. However, answering a couple of White’s (2007, see pp. 130-132) questions have been quite enriching and rewarding: “What could it be that he appreciated about you that your parents also appreciated? Do you know what he valued in you that was overlooked by others?”

In like manner I have used two similar questions with the student Tommy (pseudonym) whom I have mentioned above. In a one-to-one session with Tommy, I learned that his foster grandfather played a most significant role in his life story up until his recent death. This elderly gentleman had always lived in the foster family house where Tommy has been since he was a three year old boy. The questions I posed for Tommy were (and still are, as I hope to help this student further in dealing with his grief at this sad loss): “What could it be that your grandfather appreciated about you that your foster mum and dad don’t seem to?” “Do you know what he valued in you that was overlooked by others?” Unfortunately, we did not get time to tease out these questions in full and these were the two questions I gave him to mull over as an exercise during the Easter break. It will serve as our starting point for our next session.

My hope is that these conversation with Tommy will act as an antidote to what White (2007, p.162) calls “the powerfully isolating understandings of identity that are pervasive in contemporary Western culture.” Most well-informed and mature adults will realise all too well that Jamie is more than just a terribly disruptive and immature boy labelled with ADHD. From White, we adults can learn the powerfully healing message that the life of every human being, not least Tommy, is filled with important significant others, not alone from their past and present, but also from their imagination and that by re-membering conversations with these others, they will learn to reject delimiting labels that restrict their identity to something very negative indeed.

[1] The example of the re-authoring conversation chart done in class was extremely helpful here, and its visual impact was stunningly powerful and its pedagogical usefulness apparent.

[2] See footnote 3 above, p. 7 of this present paper.

Narrative Practice 3

2012-05-20T16:23:00.000+01:00

Here below I continue these posts on Narrative Therapy. Each post is a section of an essay by the same title which I wrote recently for an M.A. in Human Development.

Externalizing Conversations

Our Asperger's Class visits the Zoo, Dublin, May 2012

White (2007, p. 1) asserts that externalizing conversations are conversations engaged in by the narrative practitioner and the client which attempt to deconstruct the false belief that “the problems of their lives are a reflection of their own identity, or the identity of others, or a reflection of the identity of their relationships.” He goes on to stress that often many people come to believe that “their problems are internal to their self or the selves of others – that they or others are, in fact, the problem.” Hence, to overcome this almost automatic or unconscious internalizing of the problem, White came up with the method of “externalizing conversations.” Another term for “externalizing” would be “objectifying.” Through engaging in “externalizing conversations” narrative practitioners seek to break this destructive “internalizing” of the problem by objectifying it or externalizing it. In this way, they break the over-identification of the person with the presenting problem. It is best described by an actual real example of an externalizing conversation.

Above, I mentioned one of my students by pseudonym. Tommy is a 17 year old student diagnosed with ADHD. He has been assigned a fulltime SNA because of his problematic behaviour in almost all classes. He is a fostered boy who meets his birth mother, who suffers from clinical depression, every two weeks. Around Christmas time he had a row in his foster home with one of his foster brothers where he drew a knife on one of them. Needless to say, things got to crisis point where the family in which he is fostered were thinking of ending the arrangement. Thankfully, after several team meetings in the school, things have settled down since. Anyway, I meet Tommy twice a week in an anger management group comprising some six male students – all fifth years, either 16 or 17 years old. I believe I have successfully used “externalizing conversations” with two of the group who have ADHD. One of these is Tommy, and his foster mother and SNA believe that our group work has gone some way in helping to decrease his problematic behaviour.

One of the most interesting sessions we had was where I asked each boy to describe their presenting problem with an image. As this group has been in place for most of the academic year, with confidentiality being one of its central conditions, the boys trust one another and share quite easily. Tommy described his own ADHD as a “puppy on E” while the second boy described his as “an angry terrier.” Another boy in the group described himself as a “sloth” because he was so lazy. However, this individual suffers from clinical depression and his medication causes a certain amount of sleepiness. Three of the six boys in this group have SNAs who have since followed up on this session by reinforcing this imagery with the boys by asking such questions as: “Have you managed at all to get a lead around your puppy yet?” etc. I have found humour essential here also, as the boys quite liked the idea of the animal images

As a Resource and Learning Support Teacher who spends a little more than half my time teaching adolescent boys with Asperger’s Syndrome, I have also found the technique of externalization very useful indeed. Asperger’s disorder represents a different way of being in the world that is associated with a higher frequency of anxiety disorders and depression than experienced by neurotypical counterparts. At least four out of twenty boys in our school unit suffer from some kind of depression while they all suffer from anxiety to a greater or lesser extent. Cassin (2008, p. 48) argues that “(t)he inherent concretization in the externalization techniques in narrative therapy provide a novelly successful approach to psychotherapy with people with Asperger’s disorder and in many cases resolution of the conundrum.” Now, I hasten to stress the point that I and other teachers are no therapists, but these Narrative Practice techniques can be safely and profitably used in group situations like the classroom by responsible and mature adults.

For example, one of the Asperger boys, Tony (pseudonym), who is eighteen, is still prone to throwing tantrums when he does not get his way. I have asked Tony to describe his tantrum or rage and to give it a name. He has named it the “tornado.” Over a period of four weeks I got him, with the help of his SNA, to keep a diary in which to log his “tornadoes” and in our weekly meeting (Tony, his SNA and I) to describe how the tornado behaved and worked. I told him that he would be a sort of spy who would observe it as objectively as he could. Tony was able to identify that confusion over getting too many instructions at the one time and his anxiety over change caused a number of his explosions. Then he, his SNA and I were able to write a Social Story[1] about each of these issues.

Re-authoring Conversations

Everyone has many stories to tell about their lives. The young men in the above group are no different. They readily share with the group the history of their problems,[2] predicaments or dilemmas. White (2007, p. 61) tells us that in doing this sharing “people link the events of their lives in sequences that unfold through time according to a theme or plot.” They will talk about the losses, failures and disappointments in their lives quite readily and will mention the significant others in their lives who have been involved in these stories. It is in listening to these shared stories that the therapist, teacher, group leader or facilitator can avail profitably from a technique White calls “re-authoring conversations.”

Using this technique, we can invite our clients or pupils or friends, or whoever comes to us looking for help to continue to tell stories about their lives. In the above group we found that Tommy was very caring of his grandfather, with whom he had many long conversations. He was able to tell the members of the group about how he used go for walks with him on occasion and about various conversations they had together. He was also able to tell them about how he felt when the old man died. There are other stories about Tommy that can be told outside the fact that he has ADHD and is assigned an SNA. White (2007, p. 61) puts it thus: “Re-authoring conversations invite people to continue to develop and tell stories about their lives, but they also help people to include some of the more neglected but potentially significant events and experiences that are ‘out of phase’ with the dominant storylines. These events and experiences can be considered ‘unique outcomes’ or ‘exceptions.’ ” It is these unique outcomes or exceptions that the facilitator, teacher or counsellor can use profitably to their advantage to find “a starting point for re-authoring conversations.”

Sometimes, also, I have been able to develop on what White (2007, 219)) calls “unique outcomes” or “exceptions” as starting points for re-authoring conversations: “The identification of such out-of-phase aspects of lived experience can provide a point of entry for the development of alternative storylines of people’s lives.” For example, another seventeen year old student, Seán (pseudonym) one day, instead of reacting to the taunts of other boys, chose to walk away instead. His SNA brought this fact to my notice and we both used this “unique outcome” for a good conversation with him on his ability to control his temper and not to always re-act when others were deliberately “pulling his strings.”

[1] Social Stories were developed by Carol Gray specifically for use with students on the ASD spectrum. Each story is designed to describe a situation, skill, or concept in terms of relevant social cues and perspectives in a specifically defined style and format. The goal is to share accurate social information in a patient and reassuring manner that is easily understood by its audience. It is recommended that at least half of all Social Stories developed should affirm something that an individual does well. Gray is a consultant teacher in the area of ASDs and runs her own consultancy company.

[2] Before we began this “social/ anger-management” group we worked out the ground rules among which were confidentiality, not to feel forced into sharing when they do not wish to, and that some issues may be too sensitive or personal to share in a group setting.

Narrative Practice 2

2012-05-19T14:28:00.000+01:00

Here below I continue these posts on Narrative Therapy. Each post is a section of an essay by the same title which I wrote recently for an M.A. in Human Development.

Knowledge and Power

Self recently in the classroom

It is also significant that Foucault always spoke about knowledge and power as being inextricably linked. The teacher at classroom level has power as has the doctor has in his or her surgery. With the knowledge of pedagogy or medicine comes power. The same argument can be made for every trade and profession under the sun. However, all power can be abused, especially what White (1990, pp. 23-24) calls, after Foucault, “a descending analysis of power” and he recommends an “ascending” one. In other words, White is here arguing for an analysis of power that begins with the ordinary person in his/her community, an analysis that stretches out from there up to the top of the pyramid where the more expert echelons live. Social and political control comes from above whereas social and political empowerment comes from below. Unfortunately, today we have merely substituted one form of political and social control from above by another form, namely “the normalizing judgement of society” which convinces some young girls that they are “too fat” (anorexia) and some young boys that they are “too weak/too feminine.” Indeed, Foucault (1965, 1973) referred to how society ascribed “a spoiled identity to the homeless, poor, mad and infirm from the general population.” (White, 2007, p. 25)

We are all wielders of power and possessors of knowledge and the therapist, like any teacher or doctor or specialist of any kind, must realise this and be a questioner of his/her own motivation at all times so as to empower the clients in discovering their own potential.

As we shall see below in this paper, re-authoring our stories is an example of this ‘power from below’ or ‘ascending analysis of power’ as it is effective self-fashioning. If traditional power is about control, modern power, according to Foucault, is about taking control of one’s own life. The former will lead to nothing short of paralysis and stagnation, while the latter will lead to ultimate freedom of choice, where one can choose one’s own authentic identity in freedom. No longer will received, or even imposed, ideas be in charge of the person, rather the person is empowered to choose and to mould his/her own ideas not alone of things but of himself and others, too. Received and imposed ideas would be those of “body beautiful” at all costs, “the macho man,” and indeed “Celtic Tiger” and “Post-Celtic Tiger” Ireland and “Ireland as an economy not a society” etc. All therapies, not just Narrative Practice, seek to disabuse the mind of these reductive images and ideas.

We’ve already stressed that knowledge and power are inseparable, and no one realizes this more than the medical and legal professions who know how to charge for that privileged power, and who will go to all lengths to preserve it. However, I mention this only to highlight the fact that even counsellors and teachers must ask themselves how much and how far do their counselling and teaching incorporate aspects of power and control. Are, we too, replicating old power structures like the doctors and lawyers? Is education itself another site of social control? Do we privilege the cognitive above the affective and conative (action for change, the will) aspects in education?

The call of Michael White, following Foucault, is to all of us to step out of ascribed or imposed identities and to start literally “self-fashioning.” This, then, is the powerful basis for Narrative Practice, which as we will see below, will enable people to step out of this or that negative story and write a new and empowering one.

Multiple Stories

Firstly, I should like to differentiate between “identity” and the “self” here. We may say that each of us has multiple identities, for example, the present author is (i) a teacher, (ii) a night-student at college pursuing a further degree, (iii) a son, (iv) a brother, (v) a lover, (vi) a beloved, (vii) a hill walker etc. Now each of these is an identity that goes to make up one face only of the diamond that is the “real me” or “real self” as Carl Rogers calls it.[1] No one of them in itself is the real me. Indeed no one can really ever grasp “the real me” in its fullness. However, problems will emerge if I equate one identity with the “real self.” One might end up in a dependent relationship or even become a careerist who identifies himself with efficiency or promotion at work at all costs depending on the over-identity I make.

Briefly, narrative approaches to therapy hold that identity is chiefly shaped by narratives or stories, whether uniquely personal to us or culturally general. As I have already indicated there are multiple identities and hence multiple stories. However, identity conclusions can become problematic for people if they identity wholly with one negative story. This, then, will grow into an identity crisis simply because the person over-identifies with a problem-saturated story. As a teacher I am very aware of such negative stories and such negative over-identifications. Problem students present with labels such as “ADHD,” “ODD,” “weak” (“stupid” or “thick” in their vocabulary), “difficult,” “depressed,” “alienated,” “odd” and so on and so forth.

Narrative Practice argues soundly and practically that problem-saturated stories gain their dominance at the expense of preferred, alternative and positive stories that often are located in past experiences and forgotten. In other words Tommy (pseudonym) is not just “the boy with ADHD.” He has some other good qualities not often acknowledged by others, or more importantly not acknowledged by himself. That others over-identify him with his ADHD only confirms his own internalised over-identification with this label or problem or, more aptly, his problem-saturated story in our present context.

Further, these other stories that Tommy can tell about himself are ones which the teacher, facilitator or group leader attempts to elicit during his/her meetings with him. These could be called marginalized stories which will be placed out in mid-field, as it were, as the narrative practice advances. The culture of any school will have certain rules and regulations which have been built into a guiding “cultural narrative” that says that all boys like Tommy have to be controlled at all costs.

[1] The self is the humanistic term for who we really are as a person. The self is our inner personality, and can be likened to the soul, or Freud's “psyche.” It is influenced by all the experiences a person has in their life, and our interpretations of those experiences. Two primary sources that influence our self-concept are childhood experiences and evaluation by others. Rogers believed that self-actualization occurs when a person’s “ideal self” (i.e. who they would like to be) is congruent with their actual behavior (“self-image” or “real self”). This gap between the real self and the ideal self, the “I am” and the “I should” is called incongruity. The greater the gap, the more incongruity there is. The more incongruity, the more suffering there will be. In fact, incongruity is essentially what Rogers means by neurosis: being out of synch with your own self. Rogers describes an individual who is actualizing as a fully functioning person.

Narrative Practice 1

2012-05-18T22:29:00.000+01:00

The following sequence of posts are sections of an essay I wrote recently for an M.A. in Human Development.

Introduction

Michael White (1948-2008)

Our first woman president Mary Robinson pledged herself to listening to the stories of others in her inauguration in 1990.[1] To tell a story, to listen to a story, to share a story is such a profoundly human thing. To listen to the real life story of another human being is a privilege. To tell your story to another human being is to reach out to the other, to say this is me, this is what I am about, this is where I came from, these are the ways I got here and there is where I am going. Richard Kearney (2002, p. 2) puts it succinctly that when you tell your story you get “a sense of yourself as a narrative identity that perdures and coheres over a lifetime… In this way storytelling may be said to humanise time by transforming it from an impersonal passing of fragmented moments into a pattern, a plot, a mythos.” Stories are also essentially about healing as many scholars from various disciplines attest to.[2]

Describing Narrative Practice

In short, then, we may say that Narrative Therapy is a form of psychotherapy using narrative. It was initially developed during the 1970s and 1980s, largely by Australian Michael White and his friend and colleague, David Epston, of New Zealand. Winslade and Monk (1999, pp. 2-3) describe Narrative Practice by referring to the fact that we all tell stories both to ourselves and to others so as “to make sense of ourselves and of the circumstances of our lives.” In short, then, stories provide us with a framework by which we can make sense of what it means to be a living being. In the following several posts, I will outline the main ideas behind Narrative Practice with particular attention to the work of Michael White and will indicate how I have attempted to implement these ideas both in my professional and personal life.

Philosophical Basis of Narrative Therapy

Michael White (1990, 1-3), one of the founders of the Narrative Practice school of psychotherapy, emphasizes the fact that he found the writings of Michel Foucault on power and knowledge a solid foundation on which to lay the theoretical base for his practice. He also adverts to the fact that he also borrowed the idea of the “interpretative method” from Bateson (1972, 1979) and hastens to define this method as comprising “those processes by which we make sense of the world.” In other words, none of us, he argues, can objectively describe the world in itself, and so each of us must make sense of the world for ourselves in “an act of interpretation.” Now in Narrative Practice the clients are encouraged not only to tell their various stories but to engage upon re-authoring negative ones, and philosophically this is, therefore, legitimate because it is such “an act of interpretation” which gives meaning to the person’s life. Unlike positivism, which argues that we can have objective knowledge of the world as it really is, this type of therapy works on the assumption that everything we know is personally interpreted in our own “lived experience.”

Further, we order our personal experiences in a certain sequence to give continuity and meaning to our lives. Hence, we can tell our own stories with a beginning, a middle and an end, or, in other words, with a past, a present or a future. White (1990, p. 12) argues that this process of making meaning through stories can be called “storying our experience,” and further points out that when noticeable gaps appear in these stories that the task of Narrative Practice is to encourage the client to fill them in so that the story may be performed. He continues to argue (White, 1990, pp. 17-18) that “the re-storying of experience necessitates the active involvement of persons in the re-organization of their experience.”

Michel Foucault had a significant influence on the thought and practice of Michael White and Michael Epston, his friend and colleague, with whom he founded this way of therapy. All our stories are framed by the contexts within which we are reared and within which we grow to maturation. These contexts, whether we like it or not, exercise a power upon us. White (1990, 19-20) argues that according to Foucault we are subject to this power through “normalizing truths” that shape our lives and our relationships. Some of these “truths” we accept unconsciously, though we can be encouraged to question them and re-construct our lives through various forms of therapy, most notably Narrative Practice. Foucault advances the history of sexual desire, which from Victorian times was presented as dangerous in the extreme especially for children, as a powerful example of a “normalizing truth” that resulted in considerable sexual repression. Ironically in this way, while supposedly consigning sex to the periphery of life, they ended up “speaking of it ad infinitum” in their various manuals on education and sexual conduct.

[1]‘I want this Presidency to promote the telling of stories — stories of celebration through the arts and stories of conscience and of social justice. As a woman, I want women who have felt themselves outside history to be written back into history, in the words of Eavan Boland, “finding a voice where they found a vision.” ‘ (Robinson, 1990)

[2] See Bourke, A (1997)., Language, Stories, Healing in Arguing at the Crossroads, pp. 58-76 which gives the insight of a Celtic Studies’ scholar into stories. Storytelling has been used for healing in many traditional cultures and it is also a valuable device when utilised in therapy by qualified therapists.

The Illusion of Power - It's Time to Step Aside

2012-05-07T19:20:00.000+01:00

Big Egos and all of that

We have all come across those individuals in our lives who would literally walk on others to get to the top. We all know only too well how certain careerists work. They court success at all costs and are somewhat sycophantic to those in authority. They know how to sing the correct tune at public occasions, the right person to praise, the correct committee of which to be a member, what function to attend and so on and so forth. I worked with one such gentleman once who always wanted to be seen to be involved in all committees, to be acknowledged as the initiator of this or that, and also indeed to be thanked profusely for his contributions. Now, he was and is extremely generous, but always by way of being acknowledged for being so.

Questioning our Motivation

I think here of those famous words which the modernist poet T.S.Eliot puts in the mouth of Thomas a Becket in his famous play Murder in the Cathedral that it is better by far to do the right thing for the right reason rather than the right thing for the wrong reason. On checking, I see that the actual couplet runs: "The last temptation is the greatest treason://To do the right deed for the wrong reason."

In other words, what T.S.Eliot is on about here is our motivation. This, in turn, reminds me of the old Jewish Rabbinical story where the disciples gather around the deathbed of the dying Rabbi and ask him for his last words of wisdom, and they are "always question your own motivation." Do I do what I do from self-interest or do I do it because it is the right thing to do? Do you? Do any of us?

The Conscience of the Cardinal

Here I am alluding doubtless to the refusal (or maybe just delay) in Cardinal Daly's stepping down as Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland. I am also reminded of a more famous Cardinal from Victorian times, namely John Henry Newman (1801-1890) who said wisely that he'd toast his own conscience first before he'd toast any Pope. The actual words he said run thus: "I shall drink to the Pope, if you please – still, to conscience first and to the Pope afterwards." Now, there is a lot of wisdom in that quotation. Would that the Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh would toast his conscience first before bowing the knee before the Throne of Peter. The assumption I am making here is one which I first heard adumbrated on the national airwaves here in Dublin, namely that Cardinal Seán Brady had wanted to step down some two years ago but that it seems the Vatican did not so wished him to do.

The Nature of Careerists

In an effort to understand Cardinal Brady's motivation in staying on, I come back to this yet again. In all walks of life I have encountered careerists who are quite often people who tow the line, or as we more colloquially put it "brown nose" or still more coarsely render it "lick arse" all those in authority above them. These people would certainly defer to the immediate authority above them and leave whatever the case is or was fully in their hands. Then, we have to remember, what obedience to authority was in the 1960s and indeed 1970s in these islands (this most likely did not obtain to such an extent in either the USA or certain countries in Continental Europe who were possibly more come of age). I remember the attitude well as a boy - you simply did not question authority. Even when I had begun to teach school in 1980 no teacher presumed that it was his (our staff was almost fully male) right or duty even to contact a parent. That was left to the good offices of either Principal or Vice-Principal. Likewise, I knew Rev Donal Murray, who later became Bishop of Limerick, as a young and brilliant lecturer and a man of very high moral fibre. He too passed on files to his immediate superior believing that it was their duty alone to follow up on those files. I believe that their natural belief and trust in authority led them to believe that their superiors would take action. Now here, I am not excusing either gentlemen at all. I am merely attempting to explain their state of mind and conscience at the time of the incidents they were called upon to investigate and their later motivations for their wishing to stay on. Obviously, in their mindset they can absolutely see no fault. However, they did and do fail at a most profoundly human level, and it is to this I will address my thoughts in the next paragraph.

The System is Never greater than the Person

Ah the ego, the ego, the ego. As Qoheleth or Ecclesiastes so well puts it: "Vanity of vanities," says the Preacher, "Vanity of vanities! All is vanity." (New American Standard Bible, 1995). Or as a more trenchant version puts it: "Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless." (New International Version, 1984) (Eccles 1:2)

This book of the Bible shares a similar philosophy with that of Stoicism and Epicureanism, argues Michael V. Fox, a contemporary Biblical scholar, and may have been influenced by them as "The boldest, most radical notion in the book is [...] the belief that the individual can and should proceed toward truth by means of his own powers of perception and reasoning; and that he can in this way discover truths previously unknown. [...] This is the approach of philosophy, and its appearance in Ecclesiastes probably reflects a Jewish awareness of this type of thinking among foreign intellectuals..." (However other scholars point to the lack of use of certain Greek words which show that it was written earlier, and therefore could not have come under such influence).

Now, my reason for quoting Ecclesiastes is precisely this philosophical turn or edge we find in this wonderfully "modern" book, i.e., that the individual should follow where the lights of his own conscience and mind lead him or her, that this existential truth is personal and authentic and more authentic indeed than any truth purveyed by any system. This is the mistake made by both gentleman referred to by name above, and by many other "dignitaries" of both Church and State. The individual is always and everywhere more important that the system.

Too Easy to Point the Finger

I am conscious of how easy it is to blame others and to find a scapegoat. It is somehow part of human nature to do so. As a teacher in quite a small school, I often find it hard to go against the prevailing culture of our little organisation. Have you ever tried to run counter to any culture at either your place of work or place of leisure? If, like me, you have now and then - all too infrequently, I admit to my shame - you will have had your head shot off or at least been wounded. It is indeed hard to become counter-cultural. However, if you are a Christian or a Buddhist or even an agnostic or atheistic conscientious objector you will have stood up and have counted the cost. What I am humbly saying here is don't point the finger too readily, because more often than not three point back at you. However, that is not to say that the two leaders above have not failed and failed badly - as indeed most of us poor weak humans will do - along with many other leaders in the Church, the Medical, the Legal and Teaching professions have to our disgrace. We as a society have failed our children.

Yes, I have written this piece with a passionate conviction that no man (indeed it's mostly men!) can stay in a position of authority when his moral judgement has been found so wanting. For this reason alone, any leader worth his salt must resign. And so, Cardinal Brady, it is time to stand aside. As Shakespeare so well put it, "Stand not on the order of your going. But go at once!" Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, Act 3, Scene IV).

Anders Behring Breivik. Does he deserve the death penalty?

2012-04-22T17:13:00.000+01:00

Anders Behring Breivik at court two days ago

In a post dated July 23rd. 2011, I wrote the following: "That individuals can come to believe that they should have power over others, and arrogate to themselves such power over the lives of others without the democratic authority of anyone, save their own deluded will, is in itself one of the greatest wrongs any of us can commit. That a lone gunman and bomber can decide that he has the right to exercise the power of life and death through bomb and bullet over anyone is delusion in the extreme." (See here for the full post).

Arguments against the Death Penalty

The following are some of the arguments against the death penalty that I have both heard and used over the years: (i) We are reducing ourselves (through the State) to the level of the murderer, and this in itself is contradictory. Afterall, human life is precious and we are about to take away another human life. (ii) There are documented cases of people, wrongly accused and convicted of murder, who have paid the ultimate price only to be proved innocent many years after they had forfeited their lives. (iii) The fact that capital punishment is on the statute books does not in itself bring down the numbers of murderous crimes. (iv) Carrying out capital punishment with premeditation and with great cerermony is in itself somewhat warped.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) clarifies the following points with respect to Capital Punishment:

The ACLU’s opposition to capital punishment incorporates the following fundamental concerns:

The death penalty system in the US is applied in an unfair and unjust manner against people,largely dependent on how much money they have, the skill of their attorneys, race of the victim and where the crime took place. People of color are far more likely to be executed than white people, especially if thevictim is white

The death penalty is a waste of taxpayers money and has no public safety benefit. The vast majority of law enforcement professionals surveyed agree that capital punishment does not deter violent crime; a survey of police chiefs nationwide found they rank the death penalty lowest among ways to reduce violent crime. They ranked increasing the number of police officers, reducing drug abuse, and creating a better economy with more jobs higher than the death penalty as the best ways to reduce violence. The FBI has found the states with the death penalty have the highest murder rates.

Innocent people are too often sentenced to death. Since 1973, over 138 people have been released from death rows in 26 states because of innocence. Nationally, at least one person is exonerated for every 10 that are executed.

(See here for the ACLU webpage)

However, Anders Behring Breivik is no ordinary murderer, he is a cold-blooded mass-muderer who shows not even one whit of regret, never mind guilt or remorse. The newpaper columns reporting his current trial in Oslo are chilling to say the least. David Blair, Chief Foreign Correspondent, The Daily Telegraph, who is present in the court to witness the sheer calculated indifference of this mass murderer, has this to say:

For six hours of testimony, day after day, his tone of voice scarcely altered. Whether Anders Behring Breivik was describing how he shot a teenage girl through the head, or disclosing that he named his rifle “Gungnir” after the magical spear of Odin, he addressed the court in the flat monotone of the failed telephone salesman he once was...

In the space of an hour and a half, he murdered 67 with a semi-automatic rifle and a handgun, 33 of whom were under the age of 18. The youngest was a girl of only 14. Another two youthful campers drowned when they fled, panic-stricken, into the sea.

Breivik spoke about this for 90 uninterrupted minutes, piling detail on detail: among other things, he described exactly what happens when a high-velocity round strikes the human cranium. As he spoke, a handful of survivors quietly stood up and left the court. A few others wept silent tears. Norwegian television pulled the plug on his more disturbing testimony. (see here for the full chilling account).

The restraint of the Norwegian people is impressive. We get the impression of a very cultured, humane and liberal people. I remember one of our own cultured and humane politicians, one Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien once saying that "I may not agree with your viewpoint, but I would argue for your right to express it." However, I'm sure, indeed very certain, that Dr. O' Brien never had such fascist views as those of Anders Behring Breivik in mind.

The American political and moral philosopher John Bordley Rawls (1921 - 2002) wrote the classic and influential A Theory of Justice in 1971. It is now a primary text in practically all politcal philosophy courses worldwide. His work in political philosophy, dubbed Rawlsianism, takes as its starting point the argument that "most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position."

Another quotation from Rawls which I like is: “[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.”

That Breitvik has broken every basic right human and civil right in his mass murder goes without question. Then, returning to David Blair's reporting of the current case, one gets an insight into the mind of a very cold and calculating mass-murderer (obviously sane in this matter-of-factness of his account of his murdering spree):

“The objective was not to kill 69 people on Utoya island, the objective was to kill all of them,” he told the court in flat, unemotional tones. The aim of the gun attack was to “detonate” panic that would cause all his targets to flee into the sea and drown. “The water was the weapon of mass destruction,” he added.

And remorse? Breivik made clear that he felt none. “I stand by what I have done, and I would have done it again,” he said emphatically. The teenagers on the island had been attending a summer camp organised by the Norwegian Labour party. As such, they were “not innocent” but “political activists” and “supporters of multiculturalism”. In his mind, that was enough to make them “legitimate targets”. (See above linkarticle)

No regret about the murder of all these innocent people at all is shown in the above. In fact, these poor people were but "political activists," "Marxists" and "supporteres of multiculturalism."

Conclusion

How, in the name of any principles of right acting and right thinking, can one allow such sheer hatred of all that humanity represents at its best; such sheer indifference to the wrongful taking of innocent life; such lack of guilt and such determination to stick by his misguided beliefs - even to the extent of admitting that his only regret was not to have killed everyone on the island on that fateful day; to go unpunished by the only reasonable punishment, namely that of execution? Notwitstanding the fact that I am a committed pacifist, and also a subscriber to Amnesty International and also to the abolition of the death penalty in general, I believe, like other rational human beings, that this case is so horrendous that the only one possible answer is capital punishment in this case. How one could argue differently, I fail to comprehend at this moment in time.

Diving Deeper 16 - War and Peace 12

2012-04-21T22:33:00.000+01:00

Those Mind-Enlightening Metaphors

As I type these words I am listening to Andy O'Mahony's wonderful programme Off The Shelf which is discussing Rev Dr. Brendan Purcell's recent book From Big Bang to Big Mystery (see Here for a brief description, not a review of this book) which is a 366-page book that deals with that big mystery – where did human beings come from? David McConnell, atheist and Professor of Biology in TCD and and the philosopher Dr. Paul O'Grady, also of TCD are discussing this book with the erudite O'Mahony. Once again, I am entranced with the breath of knowledge shown by both the presenter and his guests. None of them is arguing for the Christian perspective on the origins of the universe as both O'Grady and O'Mahony approach the question of origins from an agnostic and open attitude. See Here for podcast of the show. There is so much that scientists and philosophers don't know, like exactly what the mind and consciousness actually are, or how either comes about, or why there is something rather than nothing? Is there such a thing as creation out of nothing - or as we learnt it many years ago, creatio ex nihilo?

In the end, we are often left somewhat confused as there is so much which we simply do not know. And yet we are knowledge-seeking and meaning-seeking creatures who both want to expand the boundaries of our knowledge of the universe and the frontiers of our own self-knowledge respectively. In this task of seeking knowledge and meaning we are literal forced to stretch our language and invent metaphor, which essentially is a way of doing that stretching. And so we forge metaphors like the following on our quest to grapple with these questions: (i) plumbing the depths and scaling the heights of the Self, (ii) getting to the heart of the matter, (iii) marrying heart and head, (iv) the longest journey is from the head to the heart, (v) diving down is a metaphor obviously, (vi) there is need to have a strong foundation on which to build any good theory of X, Y or Z, (vii) the world is a hospital (St Augustine), (viii) an archaeology of the mind (Freud), (ix) getting one's act together and (x) struggling with one's demons and so on and on and on. We are constantly minting metaphors in attempting to come to grips with what life means for us. It is in this way that I as a reader engage with War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. This will be my last post in this sequence here on this particular book. What I have been about in these posts is to show how literature can help us engage with the big questions in life, grapple and struggle with them, to speak more metaphorically. We do not just need religion to do it for us, though for some it may help, as Tolstoy is also keen to argue for some of his characters.

Prince Andrei's thoughts on dying:

Prince Andrei could could no longer restrain himself, and wept tender compassionate tears for his fellow men, for himself, and for their errors and for his own. "Sympathy, love for our brothers, for those who love us and for those who hate us, love of our enemies - yes the love which God preached on earth, that Princess Maria tried to teach me and I did not understand - that is what made me sorry to part with life, that is what remained for me had I lived. But now it is too late.!" (War and Peace, p. 968)

The Mystery of Motion/Physics:

It is impossible for the human intellect to grasp the idea of absolute continuity of motion. Laws of motion of any kind only become comprehensible to man when he can examine arbitrarily selected units of that motion. But at the same time, it is this arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous units which give rise to a large proportion of human error. (Ibid., p. 974)

Philosophy of History:

The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century in Europe present an extraordinary movement of millions of people. Men leave their customary pursuits, tear from one end of Europe to the other, plunder and slaughter one another, triumph and despair, and for some years the whole flow of life is transformed into a powerful current which at first runs higher and higher and then subsides. What was the cause of this activity, by what laws was it governed? asks the human intellect.

The historians, replying to these question, lay before us the sayings and doings of a few dozen men in a building in the city of Paris, calling these sayings and doings "the Revolution." Then they gave us an elaborate biography of Napoleon.... and say: "That is what was at the back of this movement and those are the laws it follows." ....

But the human intellect not only refuses to believe in their explanation, but flatly declares that this method of interpreting is not sound, because in it a smaller phenomenon is taken as a cause of a greater one. The sum of men's individual wills produced both the Revolution and Napoleon, and only the sum of those wills first tolerated and then destroyed them. (Ibid., p. 976)

The Futility of War:

On the faces of all the Russians, on the faces of the French soldiers and officers, without exception, he read the same dismay, horror and conflict that he felt in his own heart. "But, who, after all, is doing this? They are all as much sickened as I am. Whose doing is this, then? Whose? flashed for a second through his mind. (Ibid., p. 1143)

The Example of the Ideal Peasant of Faith:

One notion one comes across in much of nineteenth century Russian literature is the romanticisation of the peasant, especially the romanticisation of brave, courageous and spiritual peasants like Platon Karatayev. Here is Pierre (Tolstoy) singing encomiums to this ideal human being:

Pierre remembered them afterwards as misty figures, except Platon Karatayev, who forever remained in his mind as a most vivid and precious memory, and the very personification of all that was Russian, warm-hearted and round... Karatayev had no attachments, friendships or loves, Pierre understood them, but he felt affection for and lived on sympathetic terms with every creature with whom life brought him in contact... He loved his dog, loved his comrades, and the French, loved Pierre, who was his neighbour; but Pierre felt for all Karatayev's warm-heartedness towards him (thus involuntarily paying tribute to Pierre's spiritual life) he would not suffer a pang if they were parted. And Pierre began to feel the same way about Karatayev. (Ibid., p. 1150-1152)

The Question of Love: A Eulogy to Love on the Brink of Death

Love hinders death. Love is life. Anything at all that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists because I love. All is bound up in love alone. Love is God, and that I, a tiny particle of love shall return to the universal and eternal source....

He dreamed that he was lying in the room in which he was actually lying... Gradually, imperceptibly, all these persons begin to disappear, to be replaced by a single question, that of the closed door. He gets up and goes towards the door in order to shoot the bolt and lock it. Everything depends on whether he can lock it quick enough. He starts, tries to hurry, but his legs refuse to move and he knows he will not be in time to lock the door, yet he still frenziedly strains every effort to get there. Agonising fear seizes him. And this fear is the fear of death: It stands behind the door. But while he is helplessly and clumsily stumbling towards the door that dreadful something is already pushing against it on the other side and forcing its way in. Something not human - death - is breaking in through the door a hold the door to. He grapples with the door, straining every ounce of his strength - to lock it is no longer possible - but feeble and awkward...

It comes in, and it is death. And Prince Andrei died. (Ibid., p. 1165-6)

Happiness: Peace of Mind

He had spent long years in the search for that tranquillity of mind, that inner harmony, which had so impressed him in the men at the Battle of Borodino. He had sought it in philanthropy, in Freemasonry, in the dissipations of society life, in wine, in heroic feats of self-sacrifice, in romantic love for Natasha; he had sought it by the path of intellectual reasoning, and all these efforts and failed him. And now, without any thought on his part, he had found that peace and that inner harmony simply through the horrors of death, through privation, and through what he had seen in Karatayev....

He often recalled now his conversation with Prince Andrei, and fully agreed with his friend, except that he interpreted Prince Andrei's idea rather differently. Prince Andrei had been wont to reflect that happiness was purely negative - but he had said so with a shade of bitterness and irony - as though he was really saying that all our cravings for positive happiness were implanted in us merely for our torment, since they could never be satisfied. But Pierre acknowledged the truth of this without qualification. The absence of suffering, the satisfaction of elementary needs and consequent freedom in one's choice of occupation - that is in one's mode of one's living - seemed to Pierre the sure height of human happiness. Here and now for the first time in his life Pierre fully appreciated the enjoyment of eating because he was hungry, of drinking because he was thirsty, of sleep because he was sleepy, of warmth because he was cold, of talking to a fellow creature because he felt like talking and wanted to hear a human voice. (Ibid., p. 1198)

A Further Insight into Happiness:

Again Pierre is musing on what happiness and peace of mind really are:

While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned, not through his intellect but through his whole being, through life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness lies within himself, in the satisfaction of simple human needs; and that all unhappiness is due, not to privation but to superfluity. But now, during these last three weeks of the march, he had learned still another new and comforting truth - that there is nothing in the world to be dreaded. He had learned that just as there is no condition in which man can be happy and absolutely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and not free. He had learned that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and that these limits are not far away... (Ibid., p. 1255)

The two passages above are startlingly modern in their sophistication. They smack of good psychology. They are even suffused with what we would now call a sort of Buddhist wisdom. I doubt, or at least I do not know, if Tolstoy had ever read any Buddhist philosophy. Indeed, Pierre is repeating the wisdom of one who has gone through the suffering and come safely and wholly out the other side. Here, I am reminded of the profound wisdom of Victor Frankl, who came through the horrors of Auschwitz, and who said that the oppressor could take away everything but never one's choice of how to take that suffering: "Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

Diving Deeper 15 - War and Peace 11

2012-04-14T15:01:00.000+01:00

Returning to Fatalism

Tolstoy returns several times to his belief that all things in life, or in history, are fated to happen.

We are forced to fall back on fatalism to explain the irrational events of history (that is to say, events the intelligence of which we do not see). The more we try to account for such events in history rationally, the more irrational and complicated do they become to us. (War and Peace, p. 717).

God's Folk

There was a custom in Irish speaking areas, certainly when I was growing up, to call simple, uneducated, innocent and somewhat slow people "daoine Le Dia," that is "people with God." It would seem that Tolstoy has a similar understanding with respect to what he calls "God's Folk." And Princess Maria, Prince Andrei's sister looks after these special people on their large estate. (See, ibid., p. 816 ff.)

The Battle of Borodino

"Battle of Borodino, 7th September 1812", 1822 by Louis Lejeune

The Battle of Borodino was fought on September 7, 1812, and it was the largest and bloodiest single-day action of the French invasion of Russia and of all the Napoleonic Wars. It involved more than 250,000 troops and resulted in at least 70,000 casualties. The French Grande Armée, under Emperor Napoleon I, attacked the Imperial Russian Army of General Mikhail Kutuzov near the village of Borodino, west of the town of Mozhaysk, and eventually captured the main positions on the battlefield, but failed to destroy the Russian army despite heavy losses. About a third of Napoleon's soldiers were killed or wounded; Russian losses were also heavy, but her casualties could be compensated since large forces of militia were already with the Russian Army and replacement depots which were close by had already been gathering and training troops. Although the Battle of Borodino can be seen as a victory for Napoleon, some scholars and contemporaries described Borodino as a Pyrrhic victory. Russian historian Oleg Sokolov agrees that Borodino ultimately constituted a Pyrrhic victory for the French, which would ultimately cost Napoleon the war and his crown, although at the time none of this was apparent to either side.

Anyway, once again, there is nothing as good as the threat of one's extinction in war to concentrate the mind before battle. Here are some of the reflections, yet again of Prince Andrei, before this particular battle:

He gazed at the row of birch-trees with their motionless green and yellow foliage, and the white bark shining in the sun. "To die, to be killed tomorrow.... to be no more .... and that all this shall still be but no me..." He pictured the world without himself, and the birches with their light and shade, the curly clouds and the smoke of the camp-fires - everything around him suddenly underwent a transformation into something sinister and threatening. A cold shiver ran down his spine.... (Ibid., p. 915)

"Tens of thousands of men meet - as they will tomorrow - to massacre one another, to kill and maim, and then they will offer up thanksgiving ceremonies for having slain such vast numbers (they even exaggerate the number) and proclaim a victory, supposing that the more men they have slaughtered the more credit to them. Think of God looking down and listening to them!" cried Prince Andrei in a shrill piercing voice. "Ah, my friend, life has become a burden to me of late. I see that I have begun to see and understand too much. And it doesn't do for a man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.... ah well, it's not for long," he added.... (Ibid., p. 922)

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Introduction

It is interesting to note that Tolstoy himself, somewhat enigmatically, said of War and Peace that it was "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle." As we have seen large sections of the work, especially in the later chapters, are philosophical discussion rather than narrative. This, I argue, was a characteristic of nineteenth century Russian literature.He went on to elaborate that the best Russian literature does not conform to standard norms, and certainly War and Peace does not. Tolstoy regarded Anna Karenina as the first of his novels.

Library and Reading

Tolstoy in his study

Tolstoy was a prodigious reader. In fact that library at his estate Yasnaya Polyana, long since his memorial museum, contained some 20,000 volumes. So the following extract does not surprise us as it pertains to reading and study (as well as to alcoholic drinking - a common concern in Ireland as in Russia), and the character in question is Pierre, whom I have adjudged to show characteristics of Tolstoy himself along with Prince Andrei:

He read and read everything that came to his hand. Returning home at night he would pick up a book and begin to read even while his valets were taking off his things... Drinking became more and more a physical and moral necessity alike.... Only after emptying a bottle or two did he feel vaguely that the terribly tangled skein of life which had appalled him before was not so dreadful as he had fancied. He was always conscious of some aspect of that skein and with a buzzing in his ears he chatted or listened to conversation, or read his books after dinner or supper. But it was only under the influence of wine that he could say to himself: "Never mind. I'll disentangle it..."...

In the morning on an empty stomach all the old questions looked as insoluble and as fearful as ever, and Pierre hastily picked up a book, and was delighted if anyone called to see him. Sometimes he remembered having heard how soldiers, under fire in the trenches, and having nothing to do, try hard to find some occupation the more easily to bear the danger. And it seemed to Pierre that all men were like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in playthings, some in horses, some some in politics, some in sport, some in wine and some in government service. "Nothing is without consequence and nothing is important. It's all the same in the end. The thing to do is to save myself from it all as best I can, " thought Pierre. "Not to see it, that terrible it." (War and Peace, p. 636)

Engaging the Reader

All good literature, no matter what its provenance, engages the reader. Novelists, if I may generalise here, are those lucky writers who manage to engage readers the most. It is the literary genre most popular worldwide. Novelists are lucky souls in my book, and to a great extent I envy them their success, not least their talent. Now, what I love about good novelists like Tolstoy is that they engage the reader at the level of the soul. That's why I say Tolstoy was a great existentialist writer, and I place him in the company of his fellow Russian writer Fydor Dostoyevsky, of whom I have written many times in these pages before, for their ability to engage the reader at a deep existential level. In the above passage, it is very easy for the flesh and blood reader (if I may be somewhat ridiculously tautological here to emphasise my point) to identify with the thoughts and feelings of Pierre in the above quotation. In other words, I have found with all the works of both these Russian authors that they have hooked me by these completely existentialist passages. Indeed, we Irish are wont to sit in our public houses, and indeed at home more frequently these days, quaffing our alcoholic beverages while philosophising, theologising, sociologising or politicking or whatever.

Here endeth, dear reader, today's or tonight's meandering thoughts on Tolstoy's wonderful epic. One could do worse than reading the above passage several times by way of a simple contemplation.

Diving Deeper 13 - War and Peace 9

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Everyday Life

Tolstoy's concern was the life of the ordinary person - the human being as an existential entity. The lives of the great and the good really did not infringe on the concerns of ordinary human beings for our author:

In the year 1808 the Emperor Alexander went to Erfurt for another interview with the Emperor Napoleon, and in the upper circles of Petersburg society there was much talk of the magnificence of this occasion... Meanwhile life - actual everyday life with its essential concerns of health and sickness, work and recreation and its intellectual preoccupations with philosophy, science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, passion - ran its regular course, independent and heedless of political alliance or enmity with Napoleon Bonaparte and of all potential reforms. (War and Peace, p. 490)

The Concept of Self

The concept of the self is a very recent one indeed. There have been wonderful books written on its emergence from ancient to more modern times, e.g., Charles Taylor's magnum opus - The Sources of Self. Authors like Taylor and others can trace its emergence back to ancient Greece and find rich sources of selfhood there. However, here I am referring to the concern with self as individual who owns and possesses things and objects and power and prestige as a result of industrialization. Humankind is now the owner of property, and with ownership comes a new sense of the self, a new sense of the individual. Indeed, one could argue strongly that the emergence of this self was strongly middle class and corresponded not alone to having wealth, but also to being educated.

Anyway, Tolstoy is essentially a psychologist and an existentialist. He, too, as an aristocrat is interested in self-development. I have already indicated that our Russian author walks through his novels, and in that the two central characters - Pierre and Prince Andrei - in their struggles to get to know themselves are essentially he. Here is Pierre engaged in self-reflection, and we can rest assured that this is Tolstoy reflecting on his own sense of self:

In the eyes of the world Pierre was a fine gentlemen, the rather blind and ridiculous husband of a distinguished wife, a clever eccentric who did nothing but was no trouble to anyone, a capital fellow - while at the same time in the depths of Pierre's soul a complex and arduous process of inner development was going on, revealing much to him and bringing him many spiritual doubts and joys. (Ibid., p. 517)

And so, after this, Tolstoy writes five or six pages of Pierre's entries in his diary - here we have the character engaged in his "complex and arduous inner development."

Later, we are also brought into Prince Andrei's mind as he listens to Natasha play the clavichord and sing. Here the music moves the prince to commune with something eternal, with the true meaning of life: The sense of the divine is here linked with music and music appreciation:

After dinner Natasha, at the Prince Andrei's request, went to the clavichord and began singing. Prince Andrei stood at the window talking to the ladies, and listened to her. Suddenly in the middle of a sentence he fell silent, feeling a lump in his throat from tears, a thing he would not have believed possible for him. He looked at Natasha as she sang, and something new and blissful stirred in his soul. He felt happy and at the same time sad. He had absolutely nothing to weep about, and yet he was ready to weep. For what? For his past love? For the little princess? For his lost illusions? Or his hopes for the future? Yes and no. The chief reason for his wanting to weep was his sudden acute sense of the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable living within him now and the narrow material something which he, and even she, was. The contrast made his heart ache, and rejoiced him while she sang. (Ibid., p. 548)

Happiness

And then we return to the old chestnut as to what happiness is at all. Prince Andrei continues to ruminate on what's happening within his soul:

Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in tyhe possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and now I do believe in it. Let the dead bury their dead; but while one has life one must live and be happy. (Ibid., p. 549)

Diving Deeper 12 - War and Peace 8

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Tolstoy and the Unconscious

The unconscious is as old as humankind itself, though its official acknowledgement and popularization lay with the founding father of all psychotherapy (in the form of psychoanalysis), namely one Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). It goes without saying that all creative artists used their dreamworld, to a greater or lesser extent, by way of inspiration in their works of art, no matter what genre their work was in. They may not have explicitly called it by the term "unconscious." They would have used a plethora of other words like unintentional, automatic, mechanical, instinctive, involuntary, reflex, or intuitive. What drives the great Empires to war against one another? What drives humans to hate other humans? In short, what drives humankind to evil in all its multifarious forms. It is obviously the unconscious whose drives and instincts have us in their grip. It is these unconscious urges that drives humankind to war.

Fatalism versus Free Will

Tolstoy's attitude to history is the exact opposite of Thomas Carlyle's (1795 – 1881) hero-worship. For Carlyle, chaotic events demanded that those whom he called 'heroes' take control over the competing forces erupting within society. While not denying the importance of economic and practical explanations for events, he saw these forces as 'spiritual' – the hopes and aspirations of people that took the form of ideas, and were often ossified into ideologies ("formulas" or "isms", as he called them). In Carlyle's view, only dynamic individuals could master events and direct these spiritual energies effectively: as soon as ideological 'formulas' replaced heroic human action, society became dehumanised. (Note that by "spiritual" Carlyle means something more akin to an energy, as he was a committed atheist who had been reared a Calvinist. Even though he had turned from his Calvinist faith, he still retained many of its forbidding characteristics.

Tolstoy sees the unconscious urges of mankind as the only agents of history, and applies to events the law of necessity that he observes operating in the lives of individuals. In other words, what we see here in Tolstoy is a philosophical fatalism. Things are ordained to be as they are. One can hear his characters echo this philosophy throughout this epic novel. Almost like Luther each of them seems to be saying "I can do no other" - "Ich kann nicht anders."

All of nature is working towards an eventual triumph of truth, and that truth is the driving force of necessity, against which it is stupid for humankind to resist or oppose. To this extent, then, the second part of the Epilogue of War and Peace is entirely devoted to the problem of freewill versus this driving force of necessity. I will discuss this in a later post.

Tsar Alexander I of Russia

Tolstoy shows us the futility of war as presented by the three warring Emperors - Emperor Napoléon of France, Emperor Francis II of Austria and Tsar Alexander I of Russia. Against this backdrop, he paints the lives of his five great families. Tolstoy is arguing that before the beauty and truth of Russia that whole might of the Napoleonic Great Army crumbled away to nothing. The spirit of simplicity, goodness and truth, which lies at the heart of the Russian nation, Tolstoy argues, overcame the brutal power of Napoleon. This brutal power of conquest and oppression ignored simplicity, and because it ignored simplicity, it was essentially rooted in evil. This would seem to be what War and Peace is all about.

The Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, General Kutuzov, according to Prince Andrei, "knows that there is something stronger and more important than his own will - the inevitable march of events, and he has the brains to see them and grasp their significance, and seeing that significance can abstain from meddling, from following his personal desires and aiming at something else."

And yet, there is someone even nobler and purer than Kutuzov, and that is Karatayev who is only an ordinary foot-soldier, but he is one who knows his place in the scheme of things: "qui accepte sa place dans la vie et dans la mort," and is the very incarnation of wisdom according to Pierre: "His life, as he looked at it, held no meaning as a separate entity. It had meaning only as part of a whole of which he was at all times conscious."

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Rosemary Edmonds, the translator of my edition of War and Peace writes a wonderful introduction to this epic story. We learn many interesting facts, for example, that his wife was his amanuensis during the writing of the novel, and that he re-wrote sections of the manuscript seven times. It would appear that the Countess, his wife, spent considerable time making what they then called a "fair copy" of the manuscript for the publisher. Also this magnum opus - "il lungo studio e il grande amore" as he called it - took five years in the making.

The Countess even reported that her husband Leo Tolstoy (Liovna) used to often cry during his writing of this work, and one isn't surprised as it is such a passionate work. Let's listen now to some sentences from the pen of Rosemary Edmonds:

Tolstoy's subject is humanity - people moving in the strange delirium of war and war's chaos... In the way Tolstoy has of walking through all his books, in War and Peace he may be identified with the two heroes, Pierre and Prince Andrei, in their passionate, unremitting strivings towards "the infinite, the eternal and the absolute." (He even anticipates his own maturer views when Pierre comes to the conclusion that "to live with the sole object of avoiding doing evil so as not to repent is not enough. I used to do that - I lived for myself and I spoilt my life. And only now, when I am living for others - or, at least trying to - only now do I realize all the happiness life holds.")

(War and Peace, Introduction, no page given.)

Authenticity

I have already stated that, like Dostoyevsky, that Tolstoy is an existentialist through and through - a Christian existentialist. He is interested in humanity in all its gamut of experiences from happiness to suffering; from the light to the dark and the myriad of colours in between. He wants to paint life as it really is. Authenticity would be something high on Tolstoy's list of values though he would not use that (for him) anachronistic term. He would also, I believe, be interested in psychotherapy had he been born fifty years later. Here, I will quote a most appropriate sentence from Tolstoy: "The one thing necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth." Indeed, his whole life was bound up with this mission to tell the truth about all things, both outward and inward. He saw this search for truthfulness, both outward and inward, as being the basis of reality.

Mysticism or Realism

The Reiki Tree: rooted in the mystic traditions of ancient Japan

I disagree with the brilliant translator, Rosemary Edmonds, that Leo Tolstoy was not a mystic. I believe he was. I also believe that being a mystic does not rule out necessarily being a realist to my understanding. I suppose it depends on what one means by the real in the end. Anyway, I shan't delay here on this metaphysical point (See Mysticism Examined: Philosophical Inquiries Into Mysticism by Richard H. Jones, State University of New York, 1983)

I am reminded here of a quotation from the Victorian writer Rev. Frederick Langbridge

English poet and religious writer (1849 - 1923):"Two men looked out from prison bars, one saw the mud, the other saw the stars." What puts that famous quotation in my mind this night is the following quotation from Tolstoy, encapsulating the same sentiment entirely: "In the gutter I see the image of the sky." With such a philosophy, one can understand that it is never events themselves, however important and far-reaching, which interests Tolstoy but rather the effect of the event on the individual and the latter's contribution to the event. In short, he is interested in psychology - even in the psychology of religion - in what makes the human person tick. In my book his realism always leads to an interest in transcendence and hence his is a mysticism with its roots in reality.

He is interested in what motivates heroes, what inspires them. What is the human soul at base? What is it seeking? What is the meaning of life. For him the soul is on the quest for the Kingdom of God, which really the peasants understood more truly and authentically than the rich.

I thoroughly agree with Rosemary Edmonds that Tolstoy was preoccupied with the ethical domain of living. However, his ethical vision is always associated with, indeed secondary to, his artistic or aesthetic vision (indeed the two are inextricably linked when one comes to think about it! That's worth exploring for another blog entry!) Here's a quotation from Tolstoy on the artistic vision of the novelist:

My aim as an artist is not to resolve a question irrefutably but to compel one to love life in all its manifestations, and these are inexhaustible. If I were told that I could write a novel in which I could indisputably establish as true my point of view on all social questions, I would not dedicate two hours to such a work; but if I were told that what I wrote would be read twenty years from now by those who are children today, and that they would read and laugh over it and fall in love with the life in it, then I would dedicate all my existence to it.

War and Peace is a hymn to life in all its beauty and pain, in all its happiness and fret, in all its vicissitudes. It is Tolstoy's masterpiece of the human soul in search of authenticity. For a nineteenth century Russian, very close to his serfs, and much read in philosophy, literature in Russian and French, and in theology, his search for authenticity was essentially religious, or spiritual. For him, "To love life is to love God" is a philosophy that he places in the mouth (of babes) of Prince Andrei's fifteen year old son at the end o the novel.

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The Symbol of Atheism

Tolstoy, like Dostoyevsky, likes to give both sides of every argument. That's what I like about this late nineteenth century literature. I have already indicated that they are both existentialist writers who present their characters as flesh and blood human beings struggling to make sense of life and what it means to live. I have described in detail already Prince Andrei's scepticism or atheism and his friend Pierre's despairing atheism until his conversion and joining of the Freemasons. Now, in book two the two friends meet after two years.

In fact the two begin to argue about the meaning of life and what happiness is. Here the strong believer (reformed atheist) meets the committed sceptic. Their argument is worth reading in full. I shall confine myself to just a few brief snippets here.

Pierre informs Prince Andrei that

'the great thing is... I know, and know for certain, that the enjoyment of doing this good is the only sure happiness in life...'

Pierre had just informed Andrei of all the good things he was doing for his serfs on his estates since his newly found faith in God. Here is the sceptical Prince Andrei's response to his friend's newly found concern for the poor:

'Come, let's argue the matter,' said Prince Andrei. 'You talk of schools,' he went on, crooking a finger, 'education and so forth. In other words you want to lift him' (he pointed to a peasant who passed by them taking off his cap) 'out of his animal existence and awaken in him spiritual needs, when in my opinion animal happiness is the only happiness possible, and you want to deprive him of it. I envy him while you are trying to make him what I am, without providing him with a mind or feelings like mine, or with my means... I go to bed after two in the morning, thoughts come into my mind and I can't sleep but toss about till dawn, because I think and cannot help thinking, just a she can't help ploughing and mowing... 'O, yes. Hospitals and medicine. Our peasant has a stroke and is dying, but you have him bled and patched up. He will drag about, a cripple, for another ten years, a burden to everybody. It would be far easier and simpler for him to die. Plenty of others are born to take his place...

(War and Peace, pp. 450-451)

The extreme scepticism spewed forth by Prince Andrei unsettles Pierre who is simply brow-beaten into silence and merely listens to this very negative individual that Prince Andrei has become. Pierre realises that his friend is very unhappy, has gone astray in his life and does not see the true light. Pierre is forced then to expound his new faith in Freemasonry to Prince Andrei. But the sceptic, nay nihilist almost, in the prince will have nothing of Pierre's arguments for belief in God.

However, here I am reminded of John Henry Cardinal Newman's perspicacious and wise remarks that unbelief or atheism is essentially a fault of the heart and not of the mind, and that it is as useless to attempt to beat a man physically into believing as it is to arguing him into so doing. There is much wisdom in both these remarks. As Andrei's and Pierre's arguments progress we realise that the prince's heart has been not only broken but actually crushed with grief, and that it is this unresolved grief that has added bitterness and passion to his unbelief. Here are the words of a crushed human soul:

'... life and death are what convince. What convinces is when you see a being dear to you, whose existence is bound up with yours, to whom you have done wrong that you had hoped to put right... and all at once that being is seized and racked with pain, and ceases to exist...Why? There must be an answer. And I believe there is... That is what can convince a man, that is what convinced me... I only mean that one is not persuaded by argument that there must be a future life: it is when you are journeying through life hand in hand with someone, and suddenly your companion vanishes there, into nowhere, and you are left standing on the edge of an abyss, and you look down into it. As I have... (Ibid., p. 456)

Then we get the inklings of Prince Andrei's openness to the religious dimension of life in his final thoughts on his meeting with his friend Pierre:

...and stepping off the ferry he looked up into the sky to which Pierre had pointed, and for the first time since Austerlitz saw those lofty eternal heavens he had watched while lying on the battlefield; and something long dormant, something better that had been in him, suddenly awoke with new and joyful life in his soul. The feeling vanished as soon as Prince Andrei fell back again into the ordinary conditions of life, but he knew that this feeling, which he was ignorant how to develop, lived within him. Pierre's visit marked an epoch in Prince Andrei's life. Though outwardly he continued to live in the same way, inwardly he began a new existence. (Ibid., p. 456)

The above quotations illustrate the depths of understanding that Leo Tolstoy had for his characters. They illustrate how great a psychologist he is also. He is able, like Dostoyevsky, to literally get into the mind, the heart and the soul of his characters. He is able to portray both characters of great intellectual sophistication like Pierre and Andrei on the one hand and the minds and hearts of ordinary soldiers and simple peasants on the other. When reading these Russian authors I am overcome with the passion with which they write, with the sheer conviction with which they paint their pen pictures of what happens in the course of their novels. That these two novelists were great human beings with a deep empathy for others goes almost without saying.

Diving Deeper 9 - War and Peace 5

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We now begin a short perusal of Book 2 of War and Peace. Much of Book Two concerns Pierre's (Pyotr Kirilovich) Bezukhov struggles with his passions and his spiritual conflicts to be a better man. Now a rich aristocrat, he abandons his former carefree behavior and enters upon a philosophical quest particular to Tolstoy: how should one live a moral life in an ethically imperfect world? The question continually baffles and confuses Pierre.

Somewhat near the beginning of this section we are invited into Pierre's thoughts on ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology:

'What is wrong? What is rights? What should one love and what hate? What is life for and what am I? What is life? What is death? What is the power that controls it all?' he asked himself. And there was no answer to any of these questions, except the one illogical reply that in no way answered them. This reply was: 'One dies and it's all over. One dies and either finds out about everything or ceases asking.' But dying, too, was dreadful.' (War and Peace, p. 407)

Then, looking at the poor pedlar-woman seeking to sell him goat-skin slippers, he muses to himself:

'And what does she want the money for? As if it could add a hair's breadth to her happiness or peace of mind. Can anything in the world make her or me less enslaved to evil and death? Death which is the end of all things and must come today or tomorrow - at any rate in an instant of time as compared with eternity.' And again he twisted the screw with the stripped thread, and the screw still went on turning in the same place. (Ibid., p. 407)

'And all we can know is that we know nothing . And that is the sum total of human wisdom.' (Ibid., p. 408).

Then he meets a freemason and he debates the existence or non-existence of God with him. This debate is pure theology:

'I should never be so bold as to assert that I know the truth', said the mason, impressing Pierre more and more with the precision and assurance of his speech. 'No one can attain the truth by himself. Only by laying stone upon stone with the co-operation of all, through millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own day is the temple raised which is to be a worthy dwelling place for the Most High God,' said the freemason and closed his eyes.

'I ought to tell you that I don't believe... I don't believe in God,' said Pierre regretfully and with an effort, feeling it essential to confess the whole truth.' The mason looked at him and smiled...

'Yes, you do not know Him, my dear sir,' said the freemason. 'You cannot know Him. You do not know Him, that is just why you are unhappy.'

'Yes, yes, I am unhappy,' assented Pierre; 'but what am I to do? (Ibid., p. 410)

Freemason Symbols

From there on over some five or six pages the two men proceed with a dialogue about belief and unbelief with the freemason presenting the Christian viewpoint. The freemason proffers strong faith-based arguments to meet Pierre's objections and then states, with respect to belief in God:

'... but in our lack of understanding we see only our own weakness and His greatness.' (Ibid., p. 411)

'It is not the mind that comprehends Him; it is life that makes us understand,' said the mason. (Ibid., p. 412)

And then he proceeds to talk about "the science of all" which is a deep piece of wisdom as he is explaining faith as a way of embracing the mystery of all in a oneness of apprehension or a oneness of grasping what the mystery of life may be. His argumentation here is somewhat akin to the arguments for the existence of God put forward by John Henry Cardinal Newman in Victorian times in his extremely closely argued and complex book The Grammar of Assent. In other words, it's the whole person in the totality of his/her being - not just with the intellect which is just one part of that being - who answers the "yes" of faith to the revelation of God:

'Supreme wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those worldly sciences of physics, history, chemistry and the like, into which intellectual knowledge is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom has but one science - the science of the All, the science which explains all creation and man's place in it. In order to absorb this science it is absolutely essential to purify and regenerate one's inner self, and so, before one can know, it is necessary to have faith and be made perfect. And for this purpose we have the divine light we call conscience, which God implanted into our souls. (Ibid., p.412)

William Blake's Ancient of Days: God the Creator

We are not too surprised either, that like Newman, this man of faith, this anonymous freemason finally appeals to the argument from conscience as one of the arguments as to why God exists. Anyway, this man goes on to lecture Pierre on his indolent and carefree life and on how he has wasted his gifts. He tells him to examine his life and to have faith and to repent and turn back to God. This is presented in a very dialogical rather than a hectoring way where the freemason sets out his stall with strong logical argument that breaks Pierre down. The upturn of these five or six pages of argumentation about the existence of God is that Pierre repents and joins the freemasons. He now, obviously, has renounced his former opinions and has declared his belief in the existence of God.

Pierre has to go through an induction ceremony to become a freemason and has to be instructed in the seven virtues corresponding to the seven steps up to Solomon's Temple. These virtues were: (i) discretion = secrecy about their Order, (ii) obedience to those of higher rank, (iii) morality, (iv) love for mankind, (v) courage, (vi) generosity and (vii) love of death.

This last one is interesting and ties in with what I have already written many time sin these posts about the meditation on our own death recommended in Buddhism of all strands and indeed in most religions.

Diving Deeper 8 - War and Peace 4

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Napoléon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

Tolstoy in this masterpiece has time to allow us into the mind of the wounded hero Prince Andrei. We are well aware of the confusion of the Battle of Austerlitz and of all the regiments in the various armies that were embroiled in it: La Grande Armée de Napoléon with all its various corps and regiments on the French side and then the armies of the Third Coalition, comprising the Russian Imperial Guard and other Russian brigades as well as the Austrian Calvary Brigades under the command of Karl Wilhelm von Stutterheim, and and so on, which makes this one of the great battles of history. He describes this battle with consummate skill and knowledge, and yet he has time to slow things down, to change the focus like a good film director to be somewhat anachronistic in my commentary here. Indeed, as I mentioned in a previous post this anachronistic cinematographic technique actually describes well what our author Tolstoy is doing in this great novel. Firstly we have the wide angled view of the battle as the narrator pans over the expanse of the scene of the military encounter and then we have the narrow focusing in on the wounded Prince Andrei as I described in the last post. I want to continue now with the observations on life made by the badly wounded Prince Andrei. As I have already said, Tolstoy's writing is sheer existentialism through and through. Nor is the pain and suffering of the wounded forgotten by our author.

Further observations of Prince Andrei:

1. "That's a fine death," said Napoleon, looking down at Bolkonsky. Prince Andrei grasped that this was said of him, and that it was Napoleon saying it. He heard the speaker addressed as Sire. But he heard the words as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly. Not only did they not interest him - they made no impression upon him, and were immediately forgotten. There was a burning pain in his head; he felt that his life-blood was ebbing away, and he saw far above him the remote and eternal heavens. He knew it was Napoleon, his hero, but at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small, insignificant creature compared with what was passing now between his own soul and that lofty, limitless firmament with the clouds flying over it. It meant nothing to him at that moment who might be standing over him; he was only glad that people were standing near, and his only desire was that these people should help him and bring him back to life, which seemed to him so beautiful now that he had learned to see it differently. He made a supreme effort to stir and utter some sound. He moved his leg feebly and gave sickly groan which aroused his own pity. (War and Peace, p. 338-339)

Here we have a wonderful scene. If one were directing this for a film one would have the camera at ground level pointing up at the Emperor on horseback and the remoter sky above him. Everything around Bolkonsky would be magnified, the dirt, the blood and the gore and the bloodied instruments of war. Then there is the wonderful sentence about the insignificance of the Emperor's words which are from the Prince's perspective as insignificant as the life of a fly. Now this analogy has other references in literature, notably Shakespeare:

Gloucester:

I' th' last night's storm I such a fellow saw,
Which made me think a man a worm. My son
Came then into my mind, and yet my mind
Was then scarce friends with him. I have heard more
since.
As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,
They kill us for their sport.

(See King Lear Act 4, scene 1, 32–37)

Again, we get the mystical experience of the man near death. He is tasting of something sublime, something beautiful and ever so meaningful beyond him. One might today call this a "near-death experience." Or again moments of transcendence - when, in the muddle of existence, we somehow manage to break through everything to engage with each other, and with higher values, or some personal ground of our being, which some call God. This is captured in the following sentence above: He knew it was Napoleon, his hero, but at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small, insignificant creature compared with what was passing now between his own soul and that lofty, limitless firmament with the clouds flying over it.

2. Everything did indeed seem so futile and insignificant in comparison with the stern and solemn train of thought induced in him by his lapsing consciousness, as his life-blood ebbed away, by his suffering and the nearness of death. Gazing into Napoleon's eyes, Prince Andrei mused on the unimportance of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain. (Ibid., p340)

The above is indeed existentialism at its best. Indeed, one could even go so far as to say it is absurdity at is best. Here we have one of our would-be heroes realising the sheer vanity and futility of the whole project which life is. He realises the unimportance of everything - especially of greatness, even the unimportance of life and death. There is also the futility of even trying to understand these mysteries. In other words we have had in quotation 1 above the mystical experience and then, out of the blue almost, the juxtaposition of futility and absurdity with it. Here we are reminded of other pieces of literature: Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Samuel Becket

And indeed, I am reminded also of that great play, even non-play by our own inimitable Samuel Becket - Waiting for Godot - the sheer absurdity and insignificance of our little lives which are snuffed out no matter what our achievements are. On a personal note I think of Gerard Smith who died far too young, around 30 years of age, from a congenital heart defect and who once asked me, referring to life, "What's it all about at all?" Or again, the time when I and my friend Kevin drank a bottle of good Irish whiskey - Jameson - between us in an attempt to answer the same question when we were philosophy students in the Augustinian Order many years ago in another life.

The Leap of Faith

In this context, then, it would seem that the leap of faith as it is called makes some existential sense, if it cannot make any rational sense at all. Are we, or at least are some of us driven to make that leap in faith when we crash into the sheer futility and absurdity of that which we experience as life.The phrase is commonly attributed to Søren Kierkegaard; however, he himself never used the term, as he referred to a leap as a leap to faith. Here below Prince Andrei toys with the idea of simple faith, of believing. Is he about to leap to that faith?:

3. "How good it would be," thought Prince Andrei, letting his eyes rest on the icon which his sister had hung round his neck with such emotion and reverence, "how good it would be if everything were as clear and simple as it appeared to Marie. How good it would be to know where to seek help in this life, and what to expect after it, beyond the grave! How happy and at peace I should be if I could say now: 'Lord, have mercy on me!...' But to whom am I to say that? Is it to the great Power, indefinable, incomprehensible, which I not only cannot turn to, but which I cannot even express in words - the great All or Nothing, " said he to himself, "or is it to God who has been sewn into this amulet, nothing is certain, except the unimportance of everything within my comprehension and the grandeur of something incomprehensible but all important. (Ibid., p. 341)

Albert Camus 1913 – 4 January 1960

This last piece is shot through with the confusion of a very sick man in pain and suffering, who wants some clarity of thought. I am reminded here of Albert Camus' introductory words to The Myth of Sisyphus that what he desired above all was clarity, clarity at all costs. Camus introduces his philosophy of the absurd in that great book: man's futile search for meaning, unity and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world, devoid of God and eternal truths or values. Such looking for clarity may indeed be the philospher's downfall or the believer's leap to faith. Each of us must make our own choice.

Diving Deeper 7 - War and Peace 3

2012-04-04T02:30:00.000+01:00

After leading his valiant but futile charge against the French Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky is wounded badly, and his thoughts are almost a stream of consciousness, prefiguring in a embryonic way the method of our own James Joyce. The prince is lying on his back, wounded on the battlefield:

"What's this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way," he thought, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle between the Frenchmen and the gunners ended, anxious to know whether the red-haired artilleryman was killed, whether the cannon had been captured or saved. But he saw nothing. Above him there was now only sky - the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty grey clouds creeping softly across it. "How quiet, peaceful and solemn! Quite different from when I was running," thought Prince Andrei. "Quite different from us running and shouting and fighting. Not at all like the gunner and the Frenchman dragging the mop from one another with frightened, frantic faces. How differently do these clouds float across that lofty, limitless sky! How was it I did not see that sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes, all is vanity, all is delusion, except these infinite heavens. There is nothing, nothing but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but peace and stillness. Thanks be to God!...." (War and Peace, 326)

There is much that could be said about this piece of writing, not least its mystical touch, and Tolstoy was himself quite a mystic in the most general and loose sense of that word. Here I am reminded of the mystical traditions within both the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox Churches and indeed within the Hasidic mystical practices of Judaism as recounted by the great twentieth century Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Mordechai Buber. Mysticism relates to union with the Godhead or with a personal God in most mainline Christian Churches, though these latter organizations tend to be very suspicious of it, simply because they wish to keep the power of intercession between God and His people in their clerical hands. Mystics, after all, have a privileged access to the Deity without the intercession of the Church and its clerical caste. Anyway, one can sense this mystical union in the above piece of writing. There is also a Buddhist feel to the piece as Prince Andrei speculates on the unreality of the world of war about him - it is all illusion or maya as the Buddhists say.

Then there is also the sense of the littleness and insignificance of man against the backdrop of the infinity of the heavens above the wounded prince. I am reminded here of the words of the brilliant and eccentric English Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge who said that the whole spiritual thrust in the human heart and mind was towards unity and that the goal of spirituality was to see "the unity behind the multeity." He also said, commenting on his nocturnal walks in the country with his father, that his "mind had become habituated to the vast" when he was but little. The vastness of space, "of that lofty, limitless sky" as Tolstoy puts it in the above passage, is very much a parallel sentiment. Then one is reminded of the words of the teacher in The Book of Ecclesiastes or Qoheleth from the Old Testament where the author declares again and again that "all is vanity," and "vanity of vanities, all is vanity." The work emphatically proclaims all the actions of man to be inherently "vain", "futile", "empty", "meaningless", "temporary", "transitory", "fleeting," or "mere breath," depending on translation, as the lives of both wise and foolish men end in death. While Qoheleth clearly endorses wisdom as a means for a well-lived earthly life, he is unable to ascribe eternal meaning to it. In light of this perceived senselessness, he suggests that one should enjoy the simple pleasures of daily life, such as eating, drinking, and taking enjoyment in one's work, which are gifts from the hand of God. I always found it heartening that such a sceptical book could make it into the Bible.

To be continued

Diving Deeper 6 - War and Peace 2

2012-04-03T18:29:00.000+01:00

Introduction:

What appealed to this reader most about War and Peace was the "thinking out loud," the philosophising and theologising of its main characters. Another great Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky has long been recognised as one of the first existentialist novelists. I believe that Tolstoy is equally existentialist in his presentation of his characters as they attempt to grapple with all the big questions and problems we all encounter in life. In existentialism the starting point is in the here and now with the individual's existence. As I type these words I am sitting in my attic study listening to Bob Dylan singing "I want you" as it chances, and some of my past experiences of love lost come to my mind while the rain rather appropriately lashes against the windowpanes above me. Other concerns crowd my mind: the various repairs that have to be done about the house, my tax returns, some essays I have to do for college, and then visiting my poor old demented mother (now approaching 95 years young) in her nursing home. There are many other existential concerns that clamour for space in my addled mind: the death by suicide of a friend's son at 32 years of age, another old friend who has recovered somewhat from brain cancer whom I must visit and so on. In short, the human "existential" or existing being, which I am, is struggling to make sense of all these concerns and to get on with living a life that I actively choose to live. The foundational idea, then, in existentialism is that "I"or "You", or "We," dear reader, decide how we ought to live for the individual defines everything for himself/herself. In short, the individual makes his/her own meaning in this world.

Some Reflections on Life from this Novel:

The Battle of Austerlitz 2nd December 1805: Francois Pascal Simon Gerard

What follows are basic quotations from War and Peace as I marked them as I first read this great novel. I will give the appropriate pages as we go along. My edition is the Penguin Classics edition, 1978 and runs to some 1444 pages including translator's notes.

Soldiers speaking on the eve of battle:

Suddenly, however, he was struck by the earnestness of their tones that he began to listen.
"No, my dear friend," said a pleasant voice, which Prince Andrei seemed to recognize, "what I say is - if one could know what will happen after death, then not one of us would be afraid of death. That is true, my dear fellow."
Another and younger voice interrupted.
"Afraid or not, it's all the same, there's no escaping it."...
"Yes, one is afraid," pursued the first speaker, the one with the familiar voice. "One's afraid of the unknown, that's what it is. It's all very well saying that the soul goes up to heaven... don't we know that up yonder it's not heaven but just space." (Op.cit., p 203)

In the above quotation, the question of death, which is a big one for all soldiers, looms large. It is also interesting that one of the speakers realises that our use of simplistic directional adverbs like "up" for heaven presupposes that heaven is a place in space, but we all realise that there is no such place in actuality. Heaven itself, then, what is it? Mere metaphor? This is both a good philosophical and theological question. This is precisely that type of issue that John A.T. Robinson discusses is his brilliant little book Honest to God (1963). For anyone interested in the God question this is a wonderfully sharp and intelligent book - written by a controversial theologian and Bishop in the Church of England - to begin with.

The Battle of Austerlitz

"What a terrible thing war is, terrible thing! Quelle terrible chose que la guerre"...
Just as in the clock the result of the complex action of innumerable wheels and pulleys is merely the slow and regular movement of the hand marking the time, so the result of all the complex human activities of the 160,000 Russians and French - of all their passions, hopes, regrets, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear and enthusiasm - was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the battle of the three Emperors, as it was called; that is to say, a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history. (Op. cit., p. 298).

Prince Andrei muses philosophically on the night before Austerlitz

The night was foggy and the moonlight gleamed mysteriously through the mist. "Yes, tomorrow, tomorrow!" he thought. "Tomorrow maybe all will be over for me, all these memories will be no more - all these memories will have no more meaning for me. Tomorrow perhaps- indeed tomorrow for sure, I have a presentiment that for the first time I shall at last have to show what I can do." And his fancy painted the battle, the loss of it, the concentration of the fighting at one point and the hesitation of all the commanders... but if I want glory, want to be famous and beloved, it's not my fault that I want it, and it's the only thing I care for, the only thing I live for. Yes, the only thing! I shall never tell anyone, but, oh God, what am I to do if all I care for is fame and the affections of my fellow men? Death, wounds, the loss of my family - nothing holds any terrors for me. And precious and dear as my people are to me - father, sisters, wife - those I cherish most - yet dreadful and unnatural as it seems, I would exchange them all immediately for a moment of glory, of triumph over men, of love from men I don't know and never shall know, for the love of those men there,... (Op. cit., p. 306

Surrender at Austerlitz: Emperor Francis of Austria surrenders to Napoleon

Again this is a deep enough passage. Death and extinction - what do they mean? What does this little consciousness mean? Am I just a collocation of memories? Where do they go when I die? Quite recently the Irish writer and journalist Nuala O'Faoláin, in an interview with the Irish broadcaster Marion Finnucane, shortly before her death from cancer adumbrated similar questions which plumbed the existential depths and soared the existential heights of dying and death. There is also the soldier in Prince Andrei, the ego of the macho soldier who wants to be hero. What does it mean to be a hero? What about that wonderful quotation from T.S.Eliot which he places in the mouth of St Thomas Becket in Murder in the Cathedral - "It is better to do the right thing for the right reason rather than the right thing for the wrong reason!" What is the truth of that statement? How do we square love with vainglory? How do we square love of family with love for fatherland or motherland? And yet, the irony is not lost on the sophisticated Prince Andrei as he realises he will be dying for the love of soldiers and countrymen whom he does not even know. And then, there are such poems from the pen of the poets of The Great War, like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen which question the whole point of war making. These poets raise deep questions for us all to ponder deeply. Maybe in the end, like these poets, we will end up believing that it is not a sweet and fitting thing to die for one's country?

Diving Deeper 5 - War and Peace 1

2012-04-02T18:37:00.001+01:00

Introduction

Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco asserts in his wonderfully thought-provoking book On Literature (2004) that we humans write and read literature in order to learn how to die. I have since found this insight quite incisive and perspicacious as well as being somewhat haunting and not a little scary. However, the fact that I experience these feelings means for me that there is not a little truth in what this erudite Italian scholar, critic, professor and novelist says. This sentiment from Eco I believe is parallel to the sentiments we find in the Bardo Thodol (Commonly called The Tibetan Book of the Dead * here in the West, though these two ancient Tibetan words translate as "liminality" and "liberation" respectively implying I believe that we are liberated through the liminality of the experience of death) and also in Sogyal Rinpoche's wonderfully meditative The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Now, with these preliminary remarks aired, I should like to return to that great masterpiece by Tolstoy, namely War and Peace, because I argue that therein the great Russian novelist was doing nothing less than what Eco believes is the essential work of all good literature - attempting to teach us how to die. (Indeed I should imagine that this sentiment could be ascribed to all art in its many forms and not just to literature. It occurs to me also that perhaps this sentiment is just one side of the coin, to use an appropriate metaphor, as perhaps the task of all art is to teach us to live and to die - both are in extricably linked, and indeed needed here, are they not?)

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

As I intimated in the last post I read this novel way back in the late 1970s when I was a college student somewhat "green about the gills" as the saying goes. I remember that this novel fairly blew my mind away at the time by its epic size, by the sheer power of the author's words, by his wonderful depiction of the lives of mostly Russian nobles and some notable Russian serfs during the Napoleonic Wars. These characters were so well depicted that they seemed to me to jump off the page. Once I had got over the strangeness of the Russian names, heavy with patronymics, I could not put down this tome of a book. I was also intrigued by the wide use of French by the nobles in this novel. I soon learned that this was a tradition among the Russian nobility from the time of Catherine the Great who made French the official language of her court because she thought Russian somewhat barbaric as a language and that French was far nobler. Indeed, I remember coming across the fact that the Russian nobles had so taken to French that they often spoke it better than they did the language of their fellow Russians. However, be that as it may, let us return to the matter at hand.

That this book has also been made into many motion pictures is also a testament to its enduring worth: (i) War and Peace: An American/Italian version, directed by King Vidor and produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti (1956), (ii) War and Peace (Voyna i mir) a Soviet-produced film directed by Sergei Bondarchuk who also co-wrote the screenplay and acted in the lead role of Pierre. It was produced over a seven year period and released in four parts between 1965 and 1967 and (iii) Robert Dornhelm's TV mini-series (2007). (See here for a scene from War and Peace (2007) by Robert Dornhelm and Brendan Donnison with a music score by composer Dosia McKay. The soldier in the white uniform is Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. At the Battle of Austerlitz, Andrei is inspired by a vision of glory to lead a charge of a straggling army. He suffers a near fatal artillery wound. In the face of death, Andrei realizes all his former ambitions are pointless and his former hero Napoleon (who rescues him in a horseback excursion to the battlefield) is apparently as vain as himself.)

The story of the novel and of these three films is basically as follows: There are two major story-lines that are complex and intertwined. One is the love story of young Countess Natasha Rostova and Count Pierre Bezukhov, who is unhappy in his marriage. Another is the "Great Patriotic War" of 1812 against the invading Napoleon's armies. The people of Russia from all classes of society stand up united against the French enemy. The 500,000 strong French army moves through Russia and causes much destruction culminating in the battle of Borodino. The Russian army has to retreat. Moscow is occupied, looted and burned down, but soon Napoleon loses control and has to flee. Both sides suffer tremendous losses in the war, and Russian society is left irrevocably changed. Change and our struggle to cope with the problems we encounter by such change are surely two of the perennial themes of all art and literature. As I write these short notes here, I have rescued my old edition of War and Peace from its attic cardboard box container and have it placed beside me for ease of access. It is also a fitting way to spend these few hours perusing the great novel I once read and reacquainting myself not alone with its characters and concerns but also with personal memories.

The WIKI informs us that this novel was first published in 1869 and that the work is epic in scale and is regarded as one of the most important works of world literature. Without a doubt it is considered Tolstoy's finest literary achievement, along with his other major prose work Anna Karenina (1873–1877). War and Peace, this article tells us, delineates in graphic detail events surrounding the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families whom I name below. It also informs us that portions of an earlier version of the novel, then called The Year 1805 by Tolstoy and written under the peculiar pseudonym of 1805, were serialized in the magazine The Russian Messenger between 1865 and 1867. The novel was first published in its entirety in 1869. Interestingly also Newsweek in 2009 ranked it first in its list of the Top 100 Books. (see here )

Tolstoy did much in the mid to late nineteenth century to bring new life to the genre of the novel - indeed we may say he brought a new consciousness to it. Yes, he was interested in story, but the sweep of his universal consciousness brought a more profound depth and breadth to the novel. This new consciousness of an overarching significance to life can be seen very clearly in his narrative structure. The narrator is omnipotent, omnipresent almost like a creator-god building his own world or universe of action. To speak anachronistically here, his use of visual detail is almost cinematic in its scope, using the literary equivalents of panning, wide shots and close-ups, to give dramatic interest to battles and ballroom scenes alike. These devices, while not exclusive to Tolstoy, are part of the new style of the novel that arose in the mid-19th century and of which our author proved himself a master. No wonder this great epic of a novel makes for good cinema and TV as we have outlined above.

It needs little thought or imagination to realise that Tolstoy was a consummate researcher as the novel is set some sixty years before he was writing. Our author would have known intimately the world of the military as he had fought in the Crimean War (1853-1856). He was also conspicuously "modern" in so far as he conducted "interviews" (conversations) with old soldiers from the period. Moreover, Tolstoy read all the standard histories then available in Russian and French about the Napoleonic Wars and combined more traditional historical writing with the novel form. He explains at the start of the novel's third volume his own views on how history ought to be written. His aim was to blur the line between fiction and history, in order to get closer to the truth, as he states in Volume II. He read letters, journals, autobiographical and biographical materials pertaining to Napoleon and the dozens of other historical characters in the novel. The WIKI points out that there are approximately 160 real persons named or referred to in War and Peace (See the link above).

However, my own interest was caught by the "thinking out loud" or philosophizing of the major characters in this novel. It is literally shot through with theological and philosophical debate and it is with this that I shall engage in tomorrow's post. (My edition is the Penguin Classics edition, 1978 and runs to some 1444 pages including translator's notes).

War and Peace has a large cast of characters, the majority of whom are introduced in the first book. Some are actual historical figures, such as Napoleon and Alexander I. While the scope of the novel is vast, it is centered around five aristocratic families. The plot and the interactions of the characters take place in the era surrounding the 1812 French invasion of Russia during the Napoleonic wars as I have already stated.

For the sake of clarity I will list the five families here: (i) The Bezukhovs: The central character of this family is Pierre (Pyotr Kirilovich) Bezukhov who is the illegitimate son of a wealthy count, an elderly man who is dying after a series of strokes. Pierre is about to become embroiled in a struggle for his inheritance. Educated abroad at his father's expense following his mother's death, Pierre is essentially kindhearted, but socially awkward, and owing in part to his open, benevolent nature, finds it difficult to integrate into Petersburg society. Much of Book Two concerns his struggles with his passions and his spiritual conflicts to be a better man. Now a rich aristocrat, he abandons his former carefree behavior and enters upon a philosophical quest particular to Tolstoy: how should one live a moral life in an ethically imperfect world? The question continually baffles and confuses Pierre. He attempts to liberate his serfs, but ultimately achieves nothing of note. (ii) The Bolkonskys: The central character here is Pierre's friend, the intelligent and sardonic Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky, husband of Lise, the charming society favourite. See the above YouTube link for his bravery in battle. At another point in the novel, he is burdened with such nihilistic disillusionment that he does not return to the army but chooses to remain on his estate, working on a project that would codify military behavior to solve problems of disorganization responsible for the loss of life on the Russian side. Pierre visits him and brings new questions: where is God in this amoral world? Pierre is interested in panentheism and the possibility of an afterlife. Prince Andrei does eventually go back to fight again, and he does die bravely from his wounds. (iii) The Rostov family are introduced somewhat later in the novel. The head of the family is Count Ilya Andreyevich Rostov who has four adolescent children. One of these is the twenty-year-old Nikolai Ilyich is about to join the army and has already pledged his love to Sonya (Sofia Alexandrovna), his fifteen-year-old cousin, an orphan who has been brought up by the Rostovs. (iv) The Kuragins - Prince Kuragin and his children: his daughter Hélène (Elena Vasilyevna Kuragina) and the equally charming and immoral Anatol, his son. (v) the Drubetskoys: The chief of these is Prince Boris Drubetskoy — A poor but aristocratic young man driven by ambition, even at the expense of his friends and benefactors, who marries for money, rather than love, an heiress, Julie Karagina.

Tolstoy's Philosophy

It is interesting to note that Tolstoy's fiction grew originally out of his diaries, in which he tried to understand his own feelings and actions so as to control them. He read fiction and philosophy widely. In the Caucasus he read Plato and Rousseau, Dickens and Sterne and through the 1850s he also read and admired Goethe, Stendhal, Thackeray, and George Eliot. War and Peace has a vast canvas that includes 580 characters, many historical, others fictional and his characters reveal his breath of philosophical and literary reading that I have just outlined. Right through we acquaint ourselves with Tolstoy's view that all is predestined, all that happens is fated, but we cannot live unless we imagine that we have free will. This is a very pessimistic and fatalistic view of life. That he was an authentic human being and brilliant writer and artist in search of his own personal truth (and perhaps eternal truth) is beyond doubt both from his writings and from his life. However, in his later years his thought grew more eccentric and strange and he began to imagine himself as an ascetic, a sort of guru. Indeed, so heterodox were his views that he was excommunicated by The Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. In the 1880s Tolstoy wrote a philosophical work called A Confession and What I Believe, which was banned in 1884. He started to see himself more as a sage and moral leader than an artist. In 1884 he made his first attempt to leave home and become a wandering ascetic. He gave up his estate to his family, and tried to live as a poor, celibate peasant. Attracted by Tolstoy's writings, many hundreds of people from all over the world visited his home at Yasnaya Polyana. He became seriously ill and he had to recuperate in Crimea. It is also interesting to note that his teachings influenced Gandhi in India, and the kibbutz movement in Palestine, and in Russia his moral authority rivaled that of the Tsar. Finally, after leaving his estate with his disciple Vladimir Chertkov on the urge to live as a wandering ascetic, Tolstoy died of pneumonia on November 7 (Nov. 20, New Style) in 1910, at a remote railway junction. His collected works, which were published in the Soviet Union in 1928-58, consisted of 90 volumes.

* An interesting comment by the great psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Gustave Jung is worth quoting here by way of a footnote: "The Bardo Thödol [Tibetan Book of the Dead] began by being a closed book, and so it has remained, no matter what kind of commentaries may be written upon it. For it is a book that will only open itself to spiritual understanding, and this is a capacity which no man is born with, but which he can only acquire through special training and special experience. It is good that such to all intents and purposes useless books exist. They are meant for those queer folk who no longer set much store by the uses, aims, and meaning of present-day civilisation.^"

— Carl Jung (See Evans-Wentz, W. Y., ed. (1960) [1927]. The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1957 3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. p. lii.)

To be continued.

Diving Deeper 4

2012-03-29T00:06:00.000+01:00

Discovering Russian Literature

Discovering Russian literature was perhaps one of the best discoveries of my student days in the late nineteen seventies. As I indicated in these posts before, it was a wonderful philosophy lecturer named Rev, Patrick Carmody, M.A., M.Phil., who introduced me to that particular world. Obviously, I am here referring to the works of Leo Tolstoy (1828 –1910) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (or Dostoevsky) (1821 – 1881) mainly. Initially, I found the names of characters in their writings - with patronymics abounding - somewhat hard to get my head around, but once I persevered for a while I got used to them pretty quickly. I also read some of Solzhenitsyn's (1918 – 2008) books. What blew my mind about this literature is how it grappled with the great philosophical and theological questions of life.

In short, my engagement with Russian literature introduced me to the written word which plumbed the depths and scaled the heights of what it means to be human, and indeed humane. This early Russian literature weaves philosophy into everyday life and indeed, everyday life into philosophy. The characters in these novels are thinking and feeling human beings. They are strugglers with life who seek to make some sense of what it means to be alive in the world of the here and now. It is literature with an edge to it, as it were. Russian literature is certainly not for the faint-hearted as it engages with all the big questions of life from birth to death and everything in between. It also engages with the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the human flesh. We meet murderers, lovers, gamblers, drunkards, alcoholics, madmen and mad women, philosophers, theologians, priests and people from all walks of life who are struggling to make sense of their existence on this earth. Characters, like Ivan Ilyich from Tolstoy's eponymous novella is dealing with nothing short of what it is like to be dying at forty five years of age.

This novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich tells the tale of the death, at age 45, of a high-court judge in 19th-century Russia. Living what seems to be a good life, even though he has a dreadful relationship with his wife, Ivan Ilyich Golovin bangs his side while putting up curtains in a new apartment intended to reflect his family's superior status in society. Within weeks, he has developed a strange taste in his mouth and a pain that will not go away. Then, within a short space of time he realises that he is in fact dying and that none of his consultants can help him at all. This is a short book as the term "novella" implies that raises that great central question of life - the question of our very mortality. To live means to die. In fact, we are dying as we are living. This is, in short, the central realisation or awareness of Existential Psychotherapy which I will describe in the next paragraph.

Existential Psychotherapy

Regular readers of these posts will know that I have written many entries on existential psychotherapy, mainly through my comments on the writings and work of the American existential psychotherapists Rollo May (See here and following) and Irvin Yalom (See here and following). Now the former of these two scholars and therapists is considered to be the father of American Existential Psychotherapy. May is the author of many books and he was much influenced by the theologian Paul Tillich as well as many existential philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. We may say, in summary, here that Existential Psychotherapy is a powerful approach to therapy that takes seriously the human condition in its whole spectrum or gamut of experiences.

It is also an optimistic approach in that it embraces human potential, while remaining realistic through its recognition of human limitation. Falling in the tradition of the depth psychotherapies, existential therapy has much in common with psychodynamic, humanistic, experiential, and relational approaches to psychotherapy. I have also written some posts entitled Existential Psychotherapy here. Having said this by way of tangential reference to my interest in psychotherapy of all kinds, I wish to stress here that the Russian Literature of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy bring us down to existential depths and up to existential heights. These two Russian authors enthralled me from the beginning because of this interest in the human Psyche, in the human Soul, in the human Self. In short, these Russian novelists were perspicacious and wise psychologists.

Existential Crises:

We all go through crises in life. Sometimes, if we are the anxious type, we can metaphorically "make mountains out of molehills" as the traditional phrase has it. However, what I am referring to here is a far deeper crisis, one which cuts us to the core, cuts us down to size or shakes the foundations of our being, to mention several metaphors by way of attempting to come to grips with life at its most painful. Other metaphors might be to say that these existential crises are experiences of life at the edge, or experiences where we feel "the jagged edges of existence." Hence,  an existential crisis can be excruciating since one is utterly alone in experiencing this crisis. One feels utterly cut off, utterly isolated, utterly alone.   At the very core of one's being there is nothing but emptiness, loss, absence and sheer meaninglessness.   There is no inherent objective meaning as to why you are alive at all - everything is meaningless.

Leo Tolstoy, too, whose wonderful novella I read years ago and which I described above in my opening paragraphs, faced his own existential crisis at the peak of his career. Despite all the accolades he received for his literary success, he still felt it was meaningless beyond the narrow and sycophantic blathering of would-be critics and the sophisticates of the nobility. To experience such existential angst at the peak of one’s success is terrifying – where does one go from there? One cannot even, as Jean Paul Sartre said, fall into Bad Faith by inauthentically believing there is a fixed reality which makes the world certain and predictable.  Once one knows that there is no inherent meaning, one is simply bereft, abandoned on a sea, not alone of confusion, but on a sea of possible extinction if one is really broken and crushed.

What if you achieve everything you desire and then realise that it is worthless to you? Central to the experience of the existential crisis is the awareness of one’s mortality. In fact, the awareness of the brittleness, littleness and shortness of our existence is something we humans wish to avoid at all costs lest we be undone. Hence, the repression of the reality of our mortal nature is one of our greatest repressions.  Once you become fully aware of the inevitability of your death, existential anxiety arises in the form of existential guilt for not living a life of one’s choice, but rather one of duty and obligation to social and cultural norms that you believe upheld a purposeful cosmic meaning. Now that is gone – what now? This, in short, is the existential crisis recounted by Tolstoy in his wonderful novella - The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

If you are caught in your own existential crisis asking in despair "What is this life all about at all?", take time to engage with the observer of your life – you yourself! Existential psychotherapy is a tremendous investment in yourself to reconcile the difficult feelings and experiences we must all face in coming to terms with our own Selves. Existential psychotherapy will assist you in addressing your angst and adopt the enormity of responsibility for choosing how to live and fully embrace what Freedom really means. An existential therapist will not shrink from letting you encounter repressed fears and to face them head on, thereby liberating you for the real work of Freedom - choosing to follow the unique path that leads to your true Self in all its creativity, that wonderful working out of the imagination with which you are blessed as a virtue of being human. They will journey with you and offer you the support to encounter your existential angst and live in the knowledge and awareness that you have the power to choose your own existence.

Diving Deeper 3

2012-03-21T18:51:00.002Z

Studying Theology

I have never regretted studying theology as I was taught by many good and even great theologians, and indeed all of them were good human beings. Theology is as much a serious academic study as is any other, and the scholars of that discipline are many indeed and they stretch way back in history to St Paul and early Christian scholars like the Ante-Nicene Fathers from the first century till 325, then the Great Fathers of the fourth century and half the fifth (325-451) and the Later Fathers shortly after that. Obviously the brilliant major theologian St Augustine of Hippo (354-430) belongs to the Great Fathers grouping. Augustine was both a philosopher and a theologian   When I was studying the history of the Church and of theology we read excepts from a lot of these great scholars, and much of their speculation was done by marrying Greek philosophy, especially that of Plato, with their more obviously Christian beliefs. Later the great medieval theologians would marry Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology. We may put this another way by saying that the early Christian thinkers used Greek philosophy - especially that of Plato and Aristotle to explicate the Christian mysteries and to help them reflect on their beliefs in a consistent fashion. In other words, here we had the development of doctrine at work in its early stages. (In still different words, when one studies theology and its history one comes to realise that doctrines did not appear from nowhere - they were the fruit of many years of reflection - albeit in a Christian community or Church context. God or Jesus did not hand over a book of doctrine to humankind ready-made - believers' mature reflection on their beliefs made them. After all, sociologically we can argue that religion/faith is a creation of culture essentially. I am, of course, all too aware of the theological argument that faith is a response to the prior revelation or communication from God and that theology would be in that context a reflection by the community of faith on their central beliefs. Arguing sociologically is more scientific we may argue, and indeed equally if not more valid. However, the Christian humanist in me is content to allow both arguments to have their place.

Then there were the theologians of The Middle Ages (adjectival form: medieval, mediaeval or mediæval) which for my purposes here I'm defining as that period of European history that spans the time between the 5th century and the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classical, Medieval and Modern. The term "Middle Ages" first appears in Latin in the 15th century and reflects the view that this period was a deviation from the path of classical learning, a path that was later reconnected by Renaissance scholarship. The theologians whom we studied from this period were Albertus Magnus, O.P. (1193/1206 – 1280), also known as Albert the Great and Albert of Cologne. This great scholar was the teacher of another great Dominican scholar St Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), whom we also studied. He is famous for his famous Five Ways or Five Proofs for the existence of God. They are worth perusing to be aware of his arguments, but such is beyond the scope of this short post here. I may return to the arguments contained therein at a later time. What concerns me here is outlining the history of my own religious/spiritual opinions and beliefs as I journey through life. Other theologians whom we studied were John (Johannes) Duns Scotus, O.F.M. (c. 1265 – 1308) who was one of the more important theologians and philosophers of the High Middle Ages. He was nicknamed Doctor Subtilis for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought.

Over the years I also read much from the pen of other theologians and spiritual writers like St Ignatius of Loyola ( Ignacio de Loyola) (1491 – 1556) and St Francis of Assisi (born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone; 1181/1182 – 1226). I was always greatly interested in the history of mystical theology which began with the great sixth-century theologian Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (We don't know his precise dates but he lived and wrote between the fifth and sixth centuries) whose discussion of the via negativa was especially influential and which I learnt to appreciate from the beginnings of my study in theology. (It is interesting to note that Johannes Scotus Eriugena (c. 815 – c. 877) who was an Irish theologian, Neoplatonist philosopher, and poet translated and made commentaries upon the work of Pseudo-Dionysius.)

Now mystics were always suspect in the Roman Catholic Church as they had, or at least had acquired, what we might call "a privileged access to the truth." These mystical theologians spoke about communion or union with God and really cut out the intercession of the Church as it were. Now the Church always valued its power over people. Hence orthodoxy was very suspect of mystics from the off. I was more interested in The Late Middle Ages which saw the growth of groups of mystics centered around geographic regions such as: the Beguines, which comprised Mechthild of Magdeburg and Hadewijch and others; the most famous Rhineland mystics Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso; and the English mystics Richard Rolle and Julian of Norwich. Other favourites were John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz) (1542 –1591), born Juan de Yepes Álvarez, who became a major figure of the Counter-Reformation, a Spanish mystic, Catholic saint, Carmelite friar and priest, as well as his famous contemporary mystic and fellow Carmelite Teresa of Avila (1515 - 1582).

Of course, over the years I studied many great modern and contemporary theologians like John Henry Cardinal Newman (19th century), Karl Rahner, SJ, Hans Kung, Avery Dulles, SJ, Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988), Yves Congar (1904–1995), Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928– )Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984). We also studied Protestant theologians like Karl Barth (1886–1968), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884–1976),  Oscar Cullmann (1902 - 1999) and others.

What did all this study of theology do for me? Well, all of the above are marvellously erudite scholars. One cannot do theology properly unless one has first studied philosophical thinking and argumentation. In fact theology is as logical and as closely reasoned as philosophy. However, their axioms are very different indeed. Theology assumes the existence of God from the outset whereas philosophy makes no assumptions at all - in fact philosophy is more a method of thinking things out and of teasing out different intellectual conundrums The automatic presupposition or even axiomatic proposition that God exists for theology/theologians is nothing short of a blatant assumption or foolish presupposition for anyone to make according to the philosophers of some persuasions. They argue that the content of this statement can never ever be verified one way or another. Atheists would argue that such axiomatic assumptions as the theologians are making here are patently false. Bertrand Russell says somewhere that the assumption that there is a God is as logical as the assumption that a teapot is circling the moon. Most of these arguments between theologians and philosophers or theologians and scientists are indeed good stuff to keep the mind ticking over, good grist as it were for the intellectual mill.

I am arguing here that my study of Theology, among the many other subjects I later studied, were intellectually rigorous and stimulating and often indeed spiritually uplifting and rewarding. Luckily enough, I studied Philosophy concurrently with Theology and found them fundamentally complementary. Theology opens the mind and forces it to deal with highly abstract concepts as one way among many which we humans have used to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves and to make sense of ourselves whom we find, in the words of Heidegger, literally thrown into that world. Whether one believes in God or not; whether one has a deep faith in some religious proposition or other is neither here nor there in a certain sense. By this I mean that fundamentally we are all meaning-making creatures, we humans. We seek to make sense of ourselves and of the world in which we dwell. Religion, backed up by theology, is one way among many of making sense of that world. I believe it is as equally valid a way of making sense of the world as all the scientific theories. At this moment in time or at this stage of my spiritual journey through life it is not now my way of making sense of life. However, I acknowledge its validity and respect people, all people indeed, for whom it is the only way they see of making sense of their lives in the here and now. For me there is a plurality of ways of making sense of life. Learn to live with plurality is what I say. Unfortunately fundamentalists of Religion (for example, Jehovah Witnesses and many other sects who proclaim that only the elect are saved and the rest are condemned to eternal damnation!) on the one hand and fundamentalists of Science on the other (for example trenchant atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens who are evangelists from the left, namely "God does not exist and you must believe that. If not you are deluded or simply stupid!") are narrow minded and often arrogant people who can only hold one theory and one theory of life alone in their minds at any one time. (Here I genuflect to the memory of the wonderful John Keats who said that the artist, or indeed any good strong human being, must be capable of holding contradictions together in his mind at any one time.  He called this wonderful ability "Negative Capability.")

I still read Theology, though not as much as I read of Philosophy. I also read General Science and literature in several languages. In other words, what I am arguing for here is a view of life that respects that there are many, many ways of making sense of it. Life is hard enough without me or you or X or Y or Z trying to force our opinions, no matter what they are, down another person's throat. It is a proud or indeed arrogant person who thinks they alone know the truth.  Life for me, or rather the spiritual journey of life may be likened to climbing a good big hill. For argument sake, let's say that Truth is at the top of that Hill. Now, in this metaphor there are many paths up to the top of that Hill - some straighter than others. Each religion may like to believe and even say their way is the best way up (hopefully not the only way up if they are truly ecumenical and not fundamentalist) but I'd like to believe (or even dream) that they might accept that there are many other paths up to the Top as well, be that path any religion or even none; be that path theism, atheism or agnosticism. In my spirituality only one main thing counts and that is AUTHENTICITY which leads essentially to right action and justice.

I wish all fellow travellers on the road to self-knowledge, authenticity and justice bonne voyage!