Journal of a Soul 53

People and Systems

As I write these few words, The Irish Times reports the following:

Sgt Maurice McCabe, whose allegations about malpractice prompted the establishment of the inquiry by barrister Seán Guerin, welcomed its findings and said it had vindicated him. “It is a good day after six years of fighting the system. Now I hope my family and I can move on,” he said, expressing his thanks to Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin for taking on his case and passing on his concerns to the Taoiseach. (See here )

Thorny branch versus water: Marley Park April, 2014

For non-Irish readers of these posts, the gentleman in question, Sergeant Maurice McCabe is a whistle blower within the police service, namely An Garda Síochána, here in Ireland. He and another former Garda, one John Wilson, have been treated atrociously by "the powers that be" within that police force, being viewed as traitors and as "letting the side down," to such an extent that the latter former officer had a dead rat nailed to his front door.  Wilson had this to say about the revelations of the Guerin Report: “I find the contents of the Guerin report to be disgusting, truly disgusting.” (see here )

What interests this writer here is the blind loyalty to systems that dulls the conscience and moral sensibility of the majority of individual members of those systems.  It would seem that very few of us are courageous enough to stand up and be counted by "blowing the whistle" on policies, practices and actions that are downright immoral. One needs only to recall the banality of the excuses of many of the leaders of Nazi Germany at the time of the Nuremberg Trials, viz., "I was only following orders."  The great philosopher Hannah Arendt would call this very ordinary and utterly childish use of excuses the sheer "banality of evil."  Indeed, all of the top Nazis were such flawed, weak and all-too-ordinary individuals that truly one feels a certain sense of incredulity when one looks at their pictures in defeat that such weak individuals could have unleashed such evil on the world of the twentieth century.

The present writer works in a small school with some 300 pupils only in the inner city area of Dublin, Ireland.  Even within our small system, there is often an unwritten rule of conformity to the system and of "keeping things running smoothly", of "not rocking the boat" and of not "washing one's dirty linen in public."  It would seem to this writer that systems create their own sense of morality or moral behaviour which are essentially self-referential, and that a sense of a greater moral criterion outside the system is simply not recognized or acknowledged.  Further, such systems seem to override individual conscience.  

Now, dear reader, I am a neophyte in social theory and in the theories of systems and how they evolve and organize themselves.  While the French founder of sociology as a science, Émile Durkheim did not live long enough to propound a completely refined sociology of morality, it appears to me that his thoughts on the matter are quite interesting.  In his moral theory, Durkheim rejected theorists who relied on "a priori" moral concepts, that is, concepts that are independent of experience or that can be reasoned out, "without leaving your couch" (as the contemporary philosopher Galen Strawson says) and are apparently immediately and obviously true. On the contrary, Durkheim treated all moral phenomena  as conditioned both socially and historically.  Each society, he argued, creates over time its own set of moral rules, which can vary dramatically from one society to the next.  In other words, Durkheim is here ruling out the existence of any universal moral code. (This intrigues me, as all the prosecutors at Nuremberg, in my humble opinion, had to stretch their moral vocabulary to include such a universal moral code because of the sheer horrific nature of the Nazi crimes.  The criterion is surely somewhere on an horizon beyond the system or the group.  (Of course, Durkheim had died at a mere 59 years of age before the end of World War 1 in 1917 and before the atrocities that WW II would unleash on the human race, and some 30 years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).  Morality, he argued, is a social fact and should be studied as such. Further, he argued, it could be studied just like physics in a system he called a physique des moeurs (physics of morals). 

In summary, then, we can say that according to the father of sociology, morality is a wholly social phenomenon, that is, it cannot exist outside the limits of society. He argued strongly that morality begins only when an individual pertains to a group.  And yet, how does this account for those heroes who stood out against Nazi injustice like the German lawyer Hans Litten who protested against Hitler, even calling him as a witness in a famous court case where he cross-examined him for three hours (1931), a action Hitler never forgot?  In fact, when the latter dictator came to power, he sent Litten to a concentration camp where he was eventually hanged: see here.

Durkheim argued that there is a central moral authority at the heart of morality that commands the enactment of its moral precepts. (One could ask what is the nature of that central moral authority, is it an "it" or an "energy" or a "person" as in a being like a God?). The individual in any specific situation, he argues, feels constrained to act in a moral way by society, and therefore, we may conclude that obligation is a fundamental element of morality.  This higher authority is not so much authoritarian, but rather a desirable authority (Durkheim speaks of the "desirability of morality" in this context) that is worthy of respect and devotion.  In such situations, an individual feels that he or she is working towards some sort of higher goal that Durkheim equates with the good, what he calls "le bien" - a very Platonic concept, indeed.  One could also say that this is a very philosophical/theological concept, too.  

And so, we may infer that this dual obligatory-desirability element of morality interweaves nicely with the influence of religion.  Indeed, this founder of sociology as a science would argue that morality and religion are closely linked as social phenomena: indeed, the moral life of a society, he says, is intimately intertwined with religion.  Moral authority, then, is born out of religious life and draws its authority from the power of religion.  However, to my neophyte mind in this area, Durkheim does not see morality as a one way street where an edict is issued from "on high" by a central power or an image of that central power (i.e., God or a god.  Remember that morality and religion are two sociological phenomena in our argumentation here).  For Durkheim there are two poles at play here: on the one hand, there is the morality of the group, which exists objectively outside the individual. However, on the other hand, there is the individual's way of representing that morality. While society creates many of the moral rules, the individual can add some little personal interpretation and nuances in understanding to them.  Each individual expresses that morality in his/her own way.  Indeed, while conformity to society and to collective rules and mores is often the greater reality for all of us in practice, there is still room for our individual conscience. Durkheim suggests that we all can add elements of our own personality and moral beliefs to society's moral codes and thereby build it up and refine it.  In other words, he leaves room for the individual to create, albeit in such a small way, their own morality. 

There is an old English saying that runs "there's nowt so queer as folk," meaning that there is nothing to account for the strangeness in people's behaviour.  There is a lot of truth in that old colloquialism, and yet if we are to live together in civilized societies we have to have codified behaviours.  There have to be rules and regulations and laws to ensure the doing of justice and the maintenance of peace.  However, as we have seen from my opening paragraph, it is so very difficult to stand up and be counted, especially to stand out from the crowd in any organization and openly reveal its errors, indeed its sheer corrupt practices, to the public.  All such people of such great courage, who have done so, have experienced the contumely, derision, opprobrium if not vilification, defamation and character-assassination of many individuals within that organization or society.  Some, as we have recounted above, have even paid with their lives for their courage in speaking out.

And so I will ask some questions, addressed to myself primarily:

• Do I speak out against corrupt practices within my organization or work place?
• Do I ask the hard questions of my own practices and those of my colleagues?
• Do I sleep easily at night? Why? Why not?
• Do I have the courage to speak my truth openly in my work place?
• What is my truth? Who am I? Am I an authentic human being?
• If I don't speak out for justice and right practices, why is that?  Is that due to my laziness, my cowardice, my lack of interest or my lack of commitment?
• Do I have causes I care about?  Why?  Why not?
• Do I read about whistle blowers and heroes?  Do I admire then?  Why? Why not?

Martin Niemoller

I will conclude this post with one of my favourite short poems about people who failed to speak out. It was written by pastor Martin Niemoller (1892-1984): It basically is a severe criticism of the failure of German intellectuals to speak out against the rise of Nazism:

First, they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Socialist. 

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Trade Unionist.  

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew.  

Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.

Journal of a Soul 52

The Courage to Leave the Orbit of Little Self or Ego Self

Imbalance: Going it Alone

Fast flowing stream, Marley Park, April, 2014

I finished my last post by saying that going it alone is always dicey.  Why?  Because the Soul or Self is a very fragile craft that can all too easily founder on the rocks of despair rather than taking to the open sea of promise and of life lived fully.  If any of you is a reader of this blog you will have read quite often in these pages that I say that the Self is a work in progress, never complete, but always on the way, as it were.  The development of Soul or Self is one that takes place through the interplay with other Selves (I mean other people essentially here, of course) who guide us and help us in that development.  Our identities, then, not alone have a personal psychological dimension but also a social and interpersonal one.

Balance: Being Lost and Being Found

Over the years I have always been fascinated with literature, and William Blake has been a luminary in my pantheon of poetic heroes.*  Why?  I suppose the simple answer is that not alone did I love the vivid imagery of his poems, but I was always truly moved by his balancing of opposites or polarities, and his ability somehow to sustain that tension all the way.  Hence, we have the title of one of his earlier books of poems, namely Songs of Innocence and Experience.  Notice the balance of opposites here, or the interplay of "antinomies" as William Butler Yeats would call it nearly 200 years later.  John Keats had a similar insight where he writes in his letters about "negative capability," that is where a great thinker is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” A poet, then, has the power to bury self-consciousness, dwell in a state of openness to all experience, and identify with the object contemplated.  Lest I get lost by too many literary allusions and end up roaming the back lanes of my literary past, I will return immediately to my initial point about the balancing of opposites.  While Blake wrote the Songs of Innocence, he also wrote the Songs of Experience.  Therein, he wrote about little boys and girls who were lost, and balanced those poems with ones about those same little boys and girls being found. 

Journeying is quite like that, I suppose, sometimes we get lost, we have to ask directions, consult maps, take help, hitch lifts, find fellow travellers to journey with us to find the right road, even to accompany us part of the way.  Big question, that, the right road, that is.  What is the right road?  What direction should we be travelling in?  Maybe, we can only work that out together.  Education certainly helps us - all the knowledge and wisdom of the ages that are handed on culturally.  

Depression: The way Out  and the Journey Towards Healing

Love: always a sign of hope: Ardgillan Park, April, 2014

These thoughts were also inspired by my reading in one sitting today the autobiography of the Irish playwright, actor and novelist Michael Harding called Staring at Lakes.  As I will review this book over on my other blog, I shall not say too much about it here, save to say that it is a tour de force of deeply personal insight into the highs and lows of one human being's life.  However, that book, in my opinion, shows more of "the little boy lost" than it does "the little boy found," though towards the end  we realise that he is making great strides on the way to either finding himself, or being found, as it were.

To be lost is a dreadful state in which to be as anyone who has ever been so will testify.  However, for the sake of our mental health, none of us can remain lost for too long.  Otherwise, we will end up in "the Slough of Despond" (as the great John Bunyan put it in his Pilgrim's Progress) or the depths of depression, to put it in more contemporary terms. In the above named book, Harding admits he has been a sufferer from depression for most of his life, but really had never admitted it until more recent times, because like a brave soldier he felt obliged to tough his experiences out. There is much despondency in this book, though there is the light of hope at the end where he wishes to start anew.  We feel instinctively that he will find himself, that he is being found in the comforting arms of his family and others, and perhaps by the Source of Life itself,  by what we traditionally term God, if his image of that God has not been totally destroyed by the more negative theology and spirituality harshly promulgated by some reactionary strands in the Catholic Church in Ireland over the years.  And yet, he, a former priest, is a truly spiritual one, truly a real pilgrim on the way to Self-acceptance and Self-healing.

The Fear of Extinction in Death

Portrane Graveyard, July 2013

As I type this post a good friend of mine has just informed me that his mother is dying and that he has to go to her bedside.  That feeling of mortality is very close to the bone for me as my own mother died last July and my two brothers and I waited over twenty hours by her bedside until she breathed her final breath.  It was agony watching her, though we were informed that she could feel no pain.  I am very much with my friend in spirit as he goes through these final hours of his mother's life.  The wound of mortality is the one wound we can never heal.  It is the one great common denominator that makes us human, or rather our consciousness of it does, more to the point.   In short, this awareness of the brevity of life leads to the very heart of what philosophers call existentialism, namely, what the so-called founders of this amorphous and disparate school of thought described as the feeling of angst or anxiety. **

This is the very heart of the existential dilemma, that is, the fear or anxiety of the very nothingness of our existence. This fear, Kierkegaard tells us can never be objective at all, because effectively it is a subjective anxiety that everything that I hold dear, including myself, will in the end, sooner or later, crumble into nothingness. Death takes everything away and, ironically, the very uncertainty of when it will happen only adds to our anxiety or angst.  Such angst is at the very heart of Harding's book.

Transcending and Healing Our Fears

And yet we cannot afford to dwell at such depths of angst or anxiety for too long, because it is essentially a bedfellow of depression, possibly even its author for more susceptible and fragile souls.  Living, I believe, requires us, not so much to overcome in as many ways as possible that anxiety at our essential fragility, but rather to transcend it - paradoxically, by acknowledging its role in the task of living.  Such acknowledgement means seeing death and dying as part of the great cycle of life.  That's what I wrote about in the immediately preceding post to this one.  There is the upside as well as the downside to life, the upswing and the downswing, the rising and the falling, the growth and the decay - essentially, the great wheel of life (or Rotha Mór an tSaoil  as we call this in our native tongue), the great circle, the eternal cycle of things. However, an appreciation of the foregoing requires amazing humility, an objectivity that demands an uprooting of the great tap root of obsession with self, that is, with the ego-self.  Further, it requires great courage by demanding a perspective that entails a moving out from our puniness and littleness in the scheme of things, a moving away from being grossly preoccupied with our pride as crafters and shapers of our little lives.  Preoccupation with the ego-self is a loss of perspective that can lead to the depths of despair.  This moving out into the world of Greater-Self or True Self or Real Self is one of sheer humility before the awesome power of the Universe, one of sheer wonder at its beauty and terror The origins of the word "sublime" and all it denotes and connotes lie in that latter paradoxical contrast of beauty and terror.  And yet, the true voyager beyond the small orbit of the little self often instinctively knows or intuits a safety or safeness of being embraced by a greater more benign power.  Some dare call that an experience of God, the truth which like the Sun, we stare at to our peril.

Notes

* I have written about William Blake on many occasions.  A short essay I wrote about this startlingly original genius, artist and great pilgrim on life's spiritual way can be found here William Blake

**The theme of anxiety was at the very heart of existentialism from its very origins. This is a sense of anguish which can be defined as a sense of dread at the nothingness of human existence. This theme goes back as far as Kierkegaard in modern existentialism though it stretched way back further into ancient philosophy, too. In fact, anxiety as a theme pervades this philosopher’s work. Kierkegaard lived his relatively short life (1813-1855) in Denmark. The meaninglessness of his existence filled him with anxiety and despair and a sense of hopelessness and deep depression. At base his anxiety was a deep despair at the very nothingness of human existence. In the great universal scheme of things we are mere minuscule ants on a minuscule anthill called earth, lost in the infinity of space. How do we cope with the fact that we as thinking and feeling subjects will come to nothing in the end?Let’s hear Kierkegaard’s words: “I stick my finger into existence – it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is this thing called the world? Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me here? Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?” [Quoted Lavine (1984, p. 322)]

Journal of a Soul 51

To Travel or Not to Travel

To travel or not to travel, sometimes that is the question.  We are a restless species at base. The great St Augustine described himself as "a restless seeker."  In a sense, that fifth century saint summed up the human predicament nicely.  An acquaintance of mine who died over a year ago was not alone a "restless seeker," but he was also a restless traveller.  The way he dealt with his imminent demise was to take to travelling with an increased compulsion, if his previous obsession with it had not been intense enough.  Even to meet this man, you instinctively and intuitively picked up his restlessness.  He was always on the move, always going places, always living in the future, always making plans and more plans and more plans.  He was a deeply discontent person, and evidently unhappy in the moment. 

This road in Marley Park will eventually lead into the mountains

As I write these lines on the screen before me, I am at home in my attic study, having just finished one of Deepak Chopra & Oprah Winfrey's online meditation sessions.  Usually, I would be down in Isca Marina in Calabria for Easter, but this time I chose to stay at home while both my brothers travelled southward to the Mediterranean.  I have also just completed an eight week guided course on mindfulness in my local university -DCU.  Maybe that was one of the contributing reasons to why I did not wish to travel this Easter. However, there were also issues of getting my house into a more homely state to dwell in.  I have managed to get some long-standing jobs done about the house, and so not travelling did help.

However, for me as I live alone, I enjoy the peace and solitude of my Easter holidays.  I find that when I stay put alone I do a lot mental travelling - sometimes maybe too much. However, such internal journeying can be either stimulating or even disturbing.  Let me spell out what I am about here.  Restlessness can result in our desire to physically travel, but it can also see us staying put and travelling the equally hazardous roads of our own inner landscape.

And so as I sit here typing these words on the screen of my laptop I am travelling the roads of my own inner landscape.  Thankfully these are mostly interesting pathways leading me to a great extent along scenic routes to the discovery of a newer and deeper sense of Self. Moreover, I am also painfully aware that inner exploration for anyone of a depressive nature can be most disturbing, deeply unsettling and not a little scary.  I have written much over the years in various blogs about my suffering from clinical depression of the uni-polar variety.  Hence, I have known only too well the back-roads and side-roads of sadness and depression for a good number of years in my past life.  Thankfully, I have had no reason to travel those dreadful by-ways of the lonely depressed mind in the last sixteen years. Knowing them only too well, and my consequent awareness of what can pull me away from the more secure roadways and pathways to the real self and  into those dreadful by-ways of depression has led me to leading my life with a good map, both medical and therapeutic.

So journeying to the centre, or journeying to the Real Self, can and often is a painful one. However, as I have just stated, like any journey we set out on, we must make preparations, arm ourselves with the best maps, bring passports, visas, money and so on.  For the journey inward, we need the help of friends, spiritual guides, reading, discernment, patience, humility, openness and above all compassion for the Self.  All self-exploration, then, must be done with sound preparation and guidance, because as all spiritual teachers, guides, counsellors, therapists and any good, solid and well-trained facilitators of it will know, any form of deep meditation or mindfulness must be accompanied by solid sustenance for the journey. 

Flowers in Ardgillan Castle & Demesne, Skerries

In a nutshell, the difference between mindfulness and meditation is that the former is the secular face or incarnation of the latter.  Mindfulness is meditation divested of its religious garments, to use a metaphor.  However, in practice, to my mind at least, they are very much the same thing.  In short, I believe that mindfulness can be done at several levels.  The basic or foundational level is that of being mindful of the body and breathe.  The next is the level of being mindful of the thoughts, feelings and emotions.  A further and deeper level would be mindfulness of the Inner Self or the Real Self.  Again, more religious incarnations of mindfulness, would speak of a spiritual, if not a divine, experience associated with either meditation or prayer.  However, I do believe my nutshell explanation in the first sentence in this paragraph gets at the essence of the thing for the beginner. 

Yesterday and the day before I went out walking with my camera in hand, after I had done my period of meditation.  I found on both occasions that I had a new and more aware sense of the beauty of things than I usually would have if I had not done any mindfulness practice at all. Having said that, I was also somewhat overcome, too, by the fragility and beauty of life.  I had a sense of the destructiveness of the power of the more worldly pursuits of humankind, namely the despoiling and destruction of nature that is occurring at an alarming rate.  One would have to be living in a cocoon not to be aware of the environmental destruction we are subjecting our planet to literally on a minute by minute basis.  

Now, as an experienced meditator, I know myself only too well and realize that I cannot let myself dwell too much or too deeply on the flip-side or negative side of the "realization of the fragility and beauty of life" as such would bring morbid thoughts on.  Enough to go out into my garden, mow the lawn, and do my own little bit to nurture nature, and in so doing nurture my own soul.   Likewise, I recommend getting involved in one or other green campaign because so doing lessens the negativity that can be overwhelming when we contemplate how humankind threatens the very survival planet Earth.

More flowers, Ardgillan Park, Skerries

Recently, I was counselling a young boy who is suffering with depression.  He is also attending a psychologist. He was sent onto me by the school counsellor as she felt that my teaching him some meditation and visualization practices might help him.   Usually, I make a brief sketch of the client's state of mind on the whiteboard, with his help.  Needless to say, I work with all the good advice given by his psychologist and school counsellor, ensuring at all times that I do not contradict what they say, as working with others and on the same path is always crucial.  I sketched out what he was doing with his psychologist.  She was working with what made him Happy and what made him Sad.  We listed both these on the whiteboard.  What made him sad was that life was ultimately about loss, that everything and everyone grew old and died.  What made him happy was everything to do with living.  These were polar opposites as we sketched them out.  The birth of his little sister in more recent times has been a moment of singular happiness and joy for him. "Seek life", "go on living", "live in the now" were all messages we felt were good for living.  I recommended that he buy a present for his little sister and one for himself to celebrate the option for life.  When he returned the following week he had bought both presents and was a far happier boy.  As we were talking we spoke of the cycles of life and that often the life-death cycle can be a unity which we must respect as we are integral parts of it.  To get lost in either end of the cycle might not be the whole truth somehow.  Certainly getting lost in a cycle of depression, where we choose the dark and the negative and the deathly and death-ridden will lead us to despair.  Choosing sheer hedonism, a life of sensual pleasures may be choosing life as nothing but empty satisfaction after empty satisfaction.  Such a choice may, in fact, be very superficial.  Choosing to hold the hand of a sick or dying person, may paradoxically be choosing life, because those last moments of that person's life are so worthwhile.

Now, this is what I mean by travelling within.  Another metaphor could be "internal weather."  What's the weather like in your mind now? Stormy? Sunny? Cloudy? Grey? Dark? Dismal? Rainy? Windy? Night? Day? Sunset? Sunrise? and so on.  We do mindfulness and meditation and we travel ever deeper or ever higher (depending on your directional metaphor) into the Real Self, but that journey has many twists and turns, many obstacles, many hills and valleys, many rivers to be crossed, even seas and mountains at times - all of which means that we need to be well prepared and always look for help.  Going it alone is always dicey, to say the least.

To all the readers of this journal of a soul, I say "Buon viaggio!"

Journal of a Soul 50

Introduction: Towards the More in Humanity

Our winning all-Ireland Science debaters! Towards the More!

I've been arguing that the phenomenon of our consciousness in itself is a greater entity than the mere sum of the signals or perceptions we register on our brains.  Indeed, I have also been arguing that the mind in the sense of consciousness is also greater than that organ known as the brain in which it is said to mainly reside.  What our personhood or selfhood may be is also somehow linked to our consciousness of what or who that person or self may be.  These are major areas that can be learnedly discussed in philosophy, philosophy of mind, psychology, philosophical psychology, anthropology, philosophical anthropology, neurology and indeed in psychiatry and cognitive science. (I'm sure there are many other learned areas of study in cognate areas that I have not listed here!)  Indeed, the arts in general explore that complex area of self-identity through all the various creative media: painting, sculpture, architecture, music and writing in all its incarnations.  Come to think of it, we should not leave the sciences out either. After all, they too, share in the creative impulses that make up our human consciousness.  Maths, Engineering and Technology also capture on the one hand the beauty, magic and brilliance of the human mind as well as its sheer practical application to human affairs on the other.

In my last post, I spoke about human passions that mark us out as different from the other animals in the Animal Kingdom.  I referred to (a) our desire for knowledge, (b) our desire to love and (c) our desire to be loved as demarcating qualities.  There are others, too.  I briefly referred to our desire for peace and justice.  As Pope Paul VI put it rather pithily, peace is the work of justice.  Let me turn to this last desire or passion here as a demarcating trait of the human person.

The Desire for Justice

One thing that has always inspired me about human beings is their idealism that is shown in many ways, and most especially in their desire to see justice done.  That we are instinctively drawn to causes which promote justice is certainly undeniable.  The Civil Rights Movement, headed up by the late great Martin Luther King Jnr., great prophetic figure, is an excellent example of this human trait I am describing here.  Then, closer to home, we had the Civil Rights Movement in the North of Ireland which sought to do the same for the Roman Catholic population of North of Ireland as its sister movement had achieved for the black population in the USA.  People gave their lives, and still do give their lives in great numbers in all parts of the globe for causes that promote justice for all.  And why do it?  Why put your life on the line for the cause of justice among others, especially when you yourself have those rights that are denied to those for whom you fight?  Why?  Because you believe that there are some values that are universal, and that those values point to what is great and good in the human being; that those values transcend the person and are interpersonal and even trans-personal;  that they somehow point to an author of values beyond us, to an horizon of meaning beyond us*, and perhaps point to some Giver of values beyond us... perhaps.  I will leave these thoughts open to a possible greater meaning or horizon of values above and beyond us.  I will stay with that tentativeness because I just cannot prove this last observation one way or another.

In the wake of the Nazi atrocities committed against innocent people before and during World War II, it was hard for the Allies to convict the accused before their courts of justice at Nuremberg without appealing to a higher court than those of mere mortals.  It has always appeared to this writer here that without the atrocities committed by both Hitler and Stalin; that without, as it were, falling into the pit of sheer atrocity and knowing the sheer depths of depravity to which we humans can descend; that without plumbing the depths of human evil we should never have been inspired to conceive of, write and agree to the International Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.  Article 1 states:

• All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

We are all endowed with reason and conscience.  As to the nature of conscience the Declaration, needless to say, has nothing to say.  After all it is a international document listing and declaring solemnly the rights of all men and women everywhere in the world.  As to where that conscience comes from, this document does not state, nor should it, indeed, as it is neither philosophy, theology or ethical theory.  Perhaps like Newman, and Kant before him, that conscience could be the voice of a higher power, an author of such universal human rights, before whom in conscience we stand accountable.  Perhaps.  I'm not saying, obviously, that this is definitely so.  I am merely stating it and leaving it out there as one of some few main propositions on the matter.

The Power of Vision

The power of vision: St Vincent's celebrate victory in our School

Another characteristic that describes humanity, both in its essence and in its actions, is that of having a vision of how things could be if we dream big dreams of progress, not alone in technology per se, but in technology which has an ethical and humane dimension to it, namely to improve the lot of other human beings.  Undoubtedly, this is linked with the desire for justice, but here in this paragraph I wish to emphasize the visionary aspect of the desire, rather than the work of justice itself.  In other words, I am talking essentially about the same thing, but from a different perspective.

Vision belongs equally to the engineer the technologist as it does to the poet and novelist.  It belongs to all peoples, to all cultures, to all faiths and to all colours.  In short, it belongs to the man and woman in the street, no matter what their profession, or indeed, their lot in life.  Here, I am reminded by those wonderfully apt words composed by the great Irish writer, socialist and dramatist,  George Bernard Shaw (1856 -1950) in Back to Methuselah (1921): ' "You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?' '  For me as an Irishman, the first time I heard these words was in the famous speech of John F. Kennedy before the Irish Parliament or Dáil in June 1963.  In the context of his speech, he was highlighting the very heart of justice, which is essentially the work of democracy.  Both he and his extended family have not alone been associated with the Democratic Party in the USA, but with the work of justice on an international level in an effort to bring about world peace.  That the Kennedys passionately believed in the work of justice as central to the democratic process is without doubt.  That John F.Kennedy openly embraced the vision of The Civil Rights Movement and of its prophetic leader Martin Luther King Jnr is also beyond question.  That JFK's brother Bobby was the bearer of his brother's beacon of justice for all after the latter was assassinated is a question of historical fact.  However, that Bobby Kennedy was perhaps the more courageous and more passionately driven of the two is not without evidence.  That the two were assassinated for their beliefs in peace as the work of justice can never be denied.  Their assassination as the asssassination of Mohandas Gandhi, Ruth First and Martin Luther King Jnr., just to mention a few, happened because their outspokenness for justice and equality for all stepped on the toes of those powerful interests within all societies that look to exploitation of the weak and poor for their selfish aggrandisement.  This is all incontrovertible.  The human drive to a vision of how things could be, the innate drive for a Utopia almost lies at the very heart of human dreaming, it seems...

And yet, history teaches us the very sad lesson that while we have such visions of how things might be, in reality wars and injustices abound.  However, without such visionary drives in humankind as witnessed in the lives and sacrifices of great prophets for peace as the work of justice, we should be in even a worse state of moral disintegration.  There are so many prophets of peace who have paid the ultimate price for their vision besides those few whom I have named above, and, indeed, many of them are unacknowledged and many more unknown.  Their sacrifice has not been in vain, as many countless others have benefitted by their sacrifice by either achieving their freedom or in escaping from injustice with their lives.

A Final Word

And lastly, dear reader, how do we account for the courage of heroes putting their lives at risk for those of others?  Where does that fit into an atheistic or indifferentist scheme of things or in an agnostic Darwinian structuralist view of what we humans really are?  Or push the idea of heroism further, and one comes up with the actuality of someone sacrificing their lives for those of others, many of whom are unknown to the hero or sacrificial victim to put it in more religious terms, as it were? How do we explain this in the overall scheme of things? These are all big cultural questions, all big philosophical and anthropological questions. Perhaps they are even spiritual and religious questions.  One thing is sure, they are not cold scientific ones at any rate.  Whoever we are essentially is a work in progress, and sadly we find out more and more about that essence by experiencing how low at times some of us can stoop.

Journal of a Soul 49

The Validity of Experience 4

Introduction:

Our winning Debating Science Issues team: The Desire to Know More!!

There is much in our experience that cannot simply be reduced to information garnered from our senses.  The preceding posts have all attempted to come at what human experience is from as many directions as possible.  Reducing our experiences to merely those perceptions that are registered on our human brains by empirical data accessed through the senses is very delimiting of what human experience is or may be in its totality. (And it is  the "totality" of experience at which I am aiming to describe in these posts).

In mystical theology there was a way of approaching the divine through what was termed "the via negativa" ("the negative way") which contended that the divine was so far beyond our human knowing that the only way of approach for us human beings to make any sense of that great mystery was to advance towards it by saying what it was not - hence its appellation as being a "negative way."  Another term for this type of mystical theology was Apophatic theology. *  The WIKI sums up this approach thus:

In negative theology, it is accepted that experience of the Divine is ineffable, an experience of the holy that can only be recognized or remembered abstractly. That is, human beings cannot describe in words the essence of the perfect good that is unique to the individual, nor can they define the Divine, in its immense complexity, related to the entire field of reality. As a result, all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization should be avoided. In effect, divine experience eludes definition by definition. (see HERE)

I shall discuss mystical theology later in these posts, but the point I want to emphasize here is that even on a human level we can learn from this humble approach.  Indeed, even if we are somewhat agnostic, or even atheistic, we can still learn something from the "via negativa" or "via negationis."  In other words, I am arguing here that if we are to proceed in the task of finding out what we humans really are in and through our experiences, it is surely better for us to proceed by being open-minded.  That is, it is better for us to allow  human experience to be all that it can be by keeping as many doors open to the mystery of truth, rather than by shutting certain doors of our perception because they cannot be contained within a narrow understanding of epistemology that reduces knowledge to those facts seen only through the doors of the five senses. 

And so, at this stage in this Journal of a Soul, I want to attempt a sort of summary position, or a sort of personal statement of what I believe, or what the great Victorian theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) called an "Apologia Pro Vita Sua."

(1) I am a creature of Desire

Autumn Scene, Fairview Park, 2013

As what I am attempting to do here is very personal, I must use the first personal pronoun a lot, though in academic writing one tries to avoid such a use in order to be as objective as possible.  However, it is also acceptable, especially in the social sciences to use qualitative as well as quantitative research.  These types of research methods involve describing in detail specific situations using research tools like interviews, surveys, and observations.  Self-research would fall under this heading, and it is a legitimate form of research if done methodically and with as much objectivity one can marshal. 

And so my experience of "myself" or of my "self" is that I am a sentient creature with desires and as I experience them these desires are (a) my animal desires, (b) my desire to know and (c) my desire to love and (d) my desire to be loved.  Let me briefly look at each of these subheadings: 

(a) My Animal Desires

This undoubtedly is, perhaps, the easiest to describe.  One needs to be no biologist to list our animal desires.  The obvious one is the desire for food and drink that is obvious from our very first moments of existence.  As a little child we have all cried to be fed and to have our thirst slaked.  After that the sexual nature of our bodies eventually kicks in, especially at adolescence where basically we experience our desire to mate with another of our species and so procreate or reproduce our species.

(b) My Desire to Know

Frank with the Debating Team before their victory!

This is, perhaps, the one desire, that distinguishes us most from our fellow sentient creatures.  I find as I age that this is the one of the  greatest desires that inspires me from day to day.  I am constantly desiring to know more and more. In The Metaphysics, Aristotle states: “All men by nature desire understanding.” ** This statement has also been translated as "All men by nature desire to know." Now, that statement appeals to me, but one could obviously argue that all men do not so desire and point to this or that person whose life showed that they did not desire to know because their actions showed otherwise or that they were cognitively deficient in some way.  However, Aristotle's phrase "by nature" is a qualification that retrieves his generalization somewhat as it refers to the potentiality of each individual person, irrespective of whether they achieve knowledge or not. 

Therefore, even if Aristotle's formulation is a broad generalization, we have here an insightful statement about the nature of human beings. Everyone of us desires to know or to understand something on a daily basis, no matter how small or insignificant.  "Where is room 202A?" for instance or "Could you tell me where the Post Office is, please?" and so on and so forth would be good examples of our daily desire to know small things.  We might also wonder what it would be like to travel to Athens or Corfu or Cagliari or New York and decide to go there to find out.  At a deeper level we might wonder what a "Black Hole" or "Dark Matter" is or whether the universe is really expanding. In other words we can surely say that in all the senses listed above and in many more instances, all humankind is involved in the world of ideas and reflection: Everyone is searching for some rational explanation of something, no matter how trivial on the one hand, or how important on the other. Everyone, then, contemplates the issues that are foremost in their minds.  In a deeper existential sense, each person, in his/her own right, asks the ultimate questions concerning his/her own existence. As I sit here, I experience the desire to know who I am?  Who is this creature that types these words, forms these sentences upon this virtual page out there in cyberspace. You may be wondering what it means to be you in your particular circumstances, what it means when you have to suffer X or Y or Z, or perhaps you are asking a question like, "Why did God allow my wife/husband/partner to die so painfully?" And so on.  These questions are truly unlimited, perhaps even infinite.

As I walked from the Dart Station at Sydney Parade with a group of some twenty sixteen and seventeen year old pupils over to UCD some days ago we talked about, among other trivia, different theories of the formation of the universe.  At some stage I asked a group around me how many times bigger would they think the universe was in size proportionally to the size of one little thinking human being like ourselves.  The answer of one very intelligent boy took me by surprise and got me thinking.  He replied that it would be a figure something like the reciprocal of Planck's constant that might fit the bill.  In other words, the number one over what is perhaps the smallest number known in atomic physics.  Lovely answer.  Wish I could have come up with it.  My question was not looking for a mathematical answer at all, though I appreciated the wonderful response.  It was merely asked to provoke wonderment at mystery, quite like the Biblical question of God asking Abraham how many grains of sand were on the seashore.  In other words, even as we walk here or there many questions cross our little minds by way of desiring to know.  Then, there is that wonderful philosophical question that hits me almost existentially as well as cognitively from time to time, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" ***

(c) My Desire to Love

This is also a complex desire.  There is much written on the topic of love from poems to songs to novels to learned prose essays, not to mention all the philosophical and psychological works this subject has inspired.  Our desire to procreate or our animal desires can to a little extent participate in what love is.  A materialist would perhaps have to say that his desire to love is just that, his desire to physically copulate with another.  Yet, we humans are more than a little outraged by such a reduction in what we consider ourselves to be.  Culturally, we have conceived ourselves to be so much more than our animalness or animality.  We are outraged, and rightly so, when the actions of some humans against others of our species reduce us to the actions of unthinking animals, e.g., rape, incest and legions of other horrific actions.  Indeed, oftentimes the crimes committed by humans are worse even than animalistic as even animals never drop so low.  The nature of such evil is beyond our purposes here, but it can be horrifying and troubling to a great and deep extent.

I desire to love my mother, father, brothers, sisters, cousins etc.  Indeed, we culturally desire to love even our enemies.  Those of us who might be sincere and peaceful Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics and indeed atheists and so on desire to love even our enemies as we sincerely believe in loving all of humankind.  On a human level, I desire to love my friends and even my work colleagues insofar as is humanly possible. However, we certainly cannot like everyone we meet, but we can certainly desire to love them in the sense of treating them justly.  Further, on a daily level I try to show my love for my pupils by the way I teach, how I treat them as individuals deserving of respect as other unique human beings and especially by  how I teach them to love and care for themselves as show real compassion for themselves as well as for others. In this context I should like to refer to an entry in my other blog on Book Reviews.  See Passion for Justice. 

(d) My desire To Be loved

With some friends, enjoying myself:  Quest for identity there, too!

I suppose, to use a fitting metaphor, to love and be loved are two sides of the one coin.  I remember my English lecturer at college, the great late John Devitt of Mater Dei Institute arguing that as a senior examiner in Leaving Certificate English he had insisted on one of his subordinate examiners increasing the essay marks of one candidate who had written with great insight on the dual nature of loving, i.e., to love and be loved.  Without a doubt, I am nothing if I am not loved.  My personhood and selfhood is reduced to a mere suffering entity which feels lost, rejected and scorned.  If Lady Macbeth could speak of being "unsexed" by her crimes, we could surely speak of being "unselfed" by not being loved.  To be loved is to be invited in from the cold, to be accepted as part of the group.  In short, to be loved means to belong somewhere.  When we don't belong, we are in fact outsiders, out in the cold, left one side, marginalized, forgotten, overlooked, discriminated against and so on.  You, dear reader, can add your own description of being unloved to my attempts here.

My desires, in my opinion, which I have outlined and explicated to the best of my ability above, push me to an identity which is, as it were, a being or a self who is so much more.  I have attempted to come to grips with what this more may be.  I see myself or my "self" as being a project, which while firmly rooted in the now, is like some strange plant that has been mysteriously sown in this body but which is striving daily to grow more and more.  Our personhood or our selfhood is a project that is always on-going.  We are reaching out to embrace that more all the time both individually and culturally.  Perhaps it is somehow in this quest for selfhood that the Divine enters in.  While I experience myself as very much finite in this all-too-human and animal body, I also simultaneously experience my desires to be of an infinite quality, that is desire belongs to the infinite, to the divine spark in me. Perhaps, I would not be so desiring, unless there is a more... unless there is a more somewhere ever ahead of me.  Or am I merely delusional?  I think not, I know not. I desire not.  All, I can proclaim, like Socrates is my ignorance seeking knowledge.  But why such seeking?  I'll leave the answer, or perhaps more accurately, the quest to you, dear read. Buon viaggio!

*Apophatic Theology: In the apophatic strand of Christian mysticism God is understood as “the One” who is way beyond words and images, the one who transcends every category in a radical simplicity beyond all human thought and idea.  God’s uniqueness and grandeur so ovewhelm our senses and minds that God is described as solitary, radically simple; even as hidden, invisible, or “dark”.  Thus, Henry Vaughan’s famous poem The Night: There is in God (some say)//A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here//Say it is late and dusky, because they//See not all clear//O for that night! where I in him//Might live invisible and dim.//

Hence, all apophatic theology can do, in one sense, is declare what God is not in terms of human words.  However, it can declare God's utter transcendence in terms that are actually ironically quite clear like that of dark mystery, of hiddenness and otherness, uniqueness and grandeur.  One might wonder here at the marvelling of our astrophysicists at the Black Holes and the Dark Matter of the Universe.  Maybe, just maybe, there could be some parallels here with The Dark Night of the Soul of St John of the Cross.  After all, there are some great parallels between mysticism and astrophysics, not to mention quantum physics. See the Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra.

** Aristotle's most famous book is perhaps his Metaphysics.  The parts of it still in existence span fourteen books. The early books give background information and survey the field before Aristotle's time. Therein, he describes the nature of wisdom as well as criticizing the theories of Plato which he deemed as too ideal and far too poetic: it begins with sense perceptions, which must be translated into scientific expertise. Such knowledge requires the understanding of both facts and causes, and wisdom comes only with an understanding of the universal principles and primary causes built on this science. Aristotle's work in metaphysics is therefore motivated by this desire for wisdom, which requires the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. What is known to us as metaphysics is what Aristotle called "first philosophy." Metaphysics involves a study of the universal principles of being, the abstract qualities of existence itself. The starting point of Aristotle's metaphysics is his rejection of Plato's Theory of Forms. In Plato's theory, material objects are changeable and not real in themselves; rather, they correspond to an ideal, eternal, and immutable Form by a common name, and this Form can be perceived only by the intellect. Thus a thing perceived to be beautiful in this world is in fact an imperfect manifestation of the Form of Beauty. Aristotle's arguments against this theory were numerous. Ultimately he rejected Plato's ideas as poetic but empty language; as a scientist and empiricist he preferred to focus on the reality of the material world.

***This question appears in Martin Heidegger's An Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, New Haven and London (1959), pp. 7-8  See here for the philosopher Arthur Witherall's short essay on this topic. 

Journal of a Soul 48

The Validity of Experience 3

Swan on the river Liffey, March 17th, 2014

Gerard Hall,* a well known and well respected Catholic theologian from Australia speaks about three turns in modern Catholic systematic theology, viz., (i) the anthropocentric turn, (ii) the turn to political theology and (iii) the embracing of liberation theology in Latin America and further afield.  All these three concerns are inextricably linked with the human experience element of belief. Green theology or ecological concerns in theology can also be brought in under this major direction in modern theology, as indeed can feminist theology. Prior to the early twentieth century, and most especially prior to Vatican II in Catholic circles, theology was almost completely done from a theo-centric or God-centred viewpoint. Faith was seen as the answer or response to divine revelation solely, with little human input. However, the more modern concerns with human experiences in theology take human beings as central to the whole enterprise and allow the more religious or divine dimension to come in after that, or perhaps, more conservatively, simultaneously with that.  In more theological terms, one could say that in more traditionalist theological circles the emphasis was particularly on the transcendence of God, while in more modern theological thinking the emphasis lies squarely on the immanence of the divine godhead in humanity.  This latter type of thinking could actually be construed as a return to an early Christian understanding of humanity that emphasized the fact that there was "a spark of the divine in man." ( This idea, most common to Gnosticism but also present in most Western Mystical Traditions such as Kabbalah and Sufism argues that all of mankind contains within itself the Divine Spark of God which is contained or imprisoned in the body.)

A Brief Account of Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl

Like all things that are studied, the resultant terminology is often confounding, and more often than not, leads the beginner to lose heart.  However, for my purposes here, there is no great complexity involved with this term, though any good philosopher will have to wrestle much with this subject if he is studying it academically.  That task, thankfully, is beyond our purposes here.  Briefly, phenomenology refers to a philosophical movement founded by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938) that concentrated on the reflection upon and the study of the structures of consciousness and those phenomena that appear in such acts of consciousness.  The empiricists had argued strongly that knowledge comes from sensory experience only, that is through the five senses solely, while phenomenology would see knowledge as coming through the total and fuller experience of consciousness itself. In other words, our experience is simply a broader phenomenon than our individual and even collective senses might allow.  Somehow, consciousness, then, is more.  Here, I return to what I particularly like to describe our humanity as, namely a phenomenon that is more than the sum of its parts.  My philosophical anthropology may be simply put as attempting to delineate "the more" that is humanity.

What impresses this writer here is that Husserl was a brilliant mathematician, who after achieving his Ph.D. in mathematics, turned to philosophy. (Indeed many mathematicians were to turn to philosophy, as did also the famous Bertrand Russell in England).  What further impresses me is that Husserl never ruled out religious experiences, quite simply because his phenomenology was broad enough to embrace all experiences, including the religious.  The following quotation from Prof. Herbert Spiegelberg is especially significant for this writer: "While outward religious practice never entered his life any more than it did that of most academic scholars of the time, his mind remained open for the religious phenomenon as for any other genuine experience." (See this link Here)

To cut a history of a very complex philosophy short, for our purposes here, Husserl influenced his friend and pupil Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), on whose existential phenomenology, the great Catholic Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner (1904-1984) was to base his transcendental phenomenology.  Rahner's approach, consequently, highlights the transcendental qualities of human experience, those qualities that open experience ever outwards, that is, in my words, to the more.  We are, according to Rahner, first and foremost a question to ourselves.  We live within mystery as fish live within the sea.  All our human longing and knowing do not dint or curb or lessen the deepest human transcendental questioning: Who are we? Why do we exist rather than not exist? What is it that we are called to be? Who or what does this calling to human beings in the world?

I remember struggling with Rahner's last great work The Foundations of Christian Faith, way back in the late 1970s.  One way or another, it seemed to me at the time, and still does, that this great work saw human experiences as foundational to christian experience, or, if you like, to faith.  Let me, therefore, finish this section with the words of Rev. Dr. Gerard Hall:

The Christian message is addressed to the totality of the human person--what Rahner calls the "experience of subjectivity" or the "original experience" of being human. This is the experience of mystery and radical self-questioning through which we transcend the limitations of the self and confront the whole. This radical self-questioning is what makes us who we are: we ask if death is final, if there is a purpose to life, if there is ultimate meaning to our existence? The searching human person experiences him/herself as "self-transcending being": one's self is revealed as 'more' than one's self. There is this fundamental relationship to mystery, God, Being or Holy Truth. To be human is to be called to be something 'other' than what we know ourselves to be at any moment of our earthly, human lives. (See HERE)

It seems to me that the human person is a mystery to himself or herself, a mystery that asks deep and ultimate questions of the human mind and heart.  Philosophy, if it is worth its salt at all, is that subject matter, or that method of thinking that teaches the human person much humility.  The human mind is indeed finite and yet is filled with a desire to ask a veritable infinity of questions.  We desire to know more and more and more.  And yet, no matter what amount of knowledge we amass, and no matter what amount of love we experience, we are fated to be extinguished just like a weak candle flame that can be blown out by the weakest of breaths.  It is sobering, indeed, to be a true philosopher of life.  The words that Shakespeare puts in his hero Hamlet's mouth, words issued to his friend Horatio, come to my mind here: "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy..." (Act 1, Sc 5) And these are sobering words that all of us should take to heart. They are, indeed, Socratic in temper, and justly so.  Socrates, after all, had advised any good philosopher to first admit his ignorance and thence proceed.

It is in generalizing from all too particular and limited viewpoints that much untruth and falsity emerge.  In this regard, the fallacy of reductionism blurs all truth.  And so it is that the turn to experience in its wholeness, in its sheer fullness, through a phenomenology that reaches for the more, appeals so much to this writer here.  I conclude, this rather strained post with the reflection that we encounter life in its mystery rather like a pool (or ocean) into which we dive than as a problem that presents itself like a wall against which we might vainly and meaninglessly bang our heads.  And the more, the more, the more... it opens out into so much wonder, so much mystery, so much that is beyond us, and it draws us ever onward into the more, the more, the more...

* Rev. Gerard Hall, sm is the Head of the School of Theology at McAuley Campus, Banyo, Brisbane -Australian Catholic University. His home page can be accessed HERE