Date: Tue, 03 Oct 2000 09:04:21 +1000 From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au> Subject: BHA: On suffering and wallowing and moving on >Dear listers, I will probably be off list for a week or more, though I will try and get to email outlet. Once a junkie always a junkie. However I thought I would take up a half and a full point with Phil. Firstly the half: my dear Phil I was not trying to score points in a 'psychological' way. I wonder if you realise how much I enjoy these exchanges with you and how much I admire and respect the way you put your posts together. So there,let us have no tetchiness between us. Just honest disagreement. Now the full point is occasioned by what Phil wrote on suffering and wallowing >I think the conveying of suffering and the moving forward from suffering are >two different things. For me Adorno moved forward. For me Kierkegaard and >the Roy of FEW are wallowing. There are some aspects of suffering that >should remain a private matter. My initial response to this was that it was so exquisitely English. So stiff upper lip. It was almost as if I were reading F.R. Leavis on Tennyson's "Tears Idle Tears, I know not what they mean.." I also thought that it was not dissimilar in tone to Bertrand Russell's reading of the Kierkegaard-Olsen affair. Russell wrote: "In the meantime he (K.) had been inconclusively engaged to a girl who did not seem to him sufficiently appreciative of what he took to be his own theological mission. At all events he broke off the engagement...Henceforth he devoted himself to theological and philosophic speculation, while his own-time betrothed very sensibly married someone else. (Wisdom of the West, 1970:254)." This is so unfair that it amounts almost to callousness. Certainly it trivialises K.'s and Olsen's suffering. The fact that she kept his letters proves that she was deeply involved with K. and he never ceased to love her. I know of course that Russell was better than this quotation would give people to think. He was for instance deeply effected by discovering Whitehead's wife in the middle of a severe heart attack. That brought home to him the facts of suffering and human frailty. He wrote: "She seemed cut off from everyone and everything by walls of agony, and the sense of solitude of each human soul suddenly overwhelmed me - the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached." (cited in Lewis,J., Bertrand Russell: Philosopher & Humanist, 1968: 22) Now I have to grant that Kierkegaard never 'moved on' as Phil in a rather brisk manner suggests he should have. However the content of his suffering is such that I personally am not offended by it. Rather Kierkegaard's agony, for that was what it was, does move me. Similarly when I read of the suffering of people like the poets Ivor Gurney and Gerard Manley Hopkins I do not feel they should have moved on. Gurney was unfortunate to suffer from schizophrenia before the discovery of neuroleptic medication, while Hopkins could never accept his homosexuality. He alas lived in an era before the Stonewall riots. I think the best attitude in these instances is that shown in Walter Benjamin's Ninth Thesis on the philosophy of history. "This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."(Benjamin, Illuminations,1970: 259-60) Now I am not at all implying that Phil is indifferent to the suffering of the mentally ill or the victims of homophobia. And I agree with him that some aspects of suffering should remain private. But not everyone can fulfill this criterion, and I for one will not chide the truly afflicted with what amounts to an accusation of bad manners. In any case although the "wallowing" charge might have some cogency when applied to K. it is exactly wrong to apply it to FEW. The whole point of FEW is that we must turn to an ethic of engaged non-attachment. We must let go. Granted the novella section of FEW does make it clear in some detail what has to be let go off. Nevertheless there is no wallowing at all. Indeed if anyone has moved on it is above all Bhaskar. And if I may say so that has caused not a little grief for those of us who want to identify with other aspects of the Critical Realist paradigm. And while I am at it I may as well in my Irish way throw the hatchet instead of just chopping. I have not had time to work through Nick and Alan's paper. I will do that when I return, but I have been struck by the fact that, brilliant as they are, the readings and responses to FEW so far have failed to point out the many wise and beautiful things that are in that book. To say it does not matter in philosophic terms is to fail to recognise how successful it is at times in conveying what we Westerners are pleased to call in our patronising way "Eastern Wisdom". Oops! There go the ropes. Retsina all round. much love to all Gary --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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