File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2000/bhaskar.0010, message 8


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



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