Being unreasonable

From time to time, I ask myself here “why do I blog?” and since most of my readers, or at any rate the ones who emerge from invisibility by appending comments, are bloggers too, it seems a popular topic with them. Not that I court popularity. Sorry, dear reader. I don’t get up in the early hours to sit at this keyboard just to entertain you and build up a fan-base. That may be the dynamic of “professional writers”, who do it for the money, or so they tell themselves, for they might not actually make any. Which brings to mind Martin Amis, an example of one who does succeed, to whom it is most important to succeed, to whom, one might guess, the spur for extraordinary effort is not money for its own sake but the challenge of not failing when you compete—especially against yourself—to try something extraordinarily difficult. On page 60 of his novel The Information there is a brief dialogue between the hero, a failing novelist, and his wife who says:

“It’s not that you spend. You don’t earn.”

“I can’t give up novels.”

“Why not?”

Because ... because then he would be left with experience, with untranslated and unmediated experience. Because then he would be left with life.

“Because then I’d just have this.” There follows a dispiriting description of his domestic scene, as viewed from the kitchen in the morning rush. “Days. Life,” he added.

What is wrong with just life? The novel’s first sentence provides an answer: Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. And when their women ask what’s the matter, they reply, “Nothing. No it isn’t anything really. Just sad dreams.” So this is a function of the novel (this one in particular, but perhaps more generally for all literary novels): to speak on behalf of those who don’t speak, to translate common experience, to mediate it, so that life becomes a little more understandable: not with the vain aim of making it fully understandable, but of being able to move on to the next mystery.

Does this help explain why I blog? It points in the right direction, but there is more. I try not to have any axe to grind, but I do have a bee in my bonnet. I’m grateful to Steve Law for pointing this out. He wrote a perfectly reasonable blog post to which I appended ten argumentative comments, which he felt were off-topic. Indeed he questioned several times whether I’d read his essay enough to understand what his point was. My comments added together amounted to a 1500-word essay - a third longer than his original. He was fully justified when he said,

I don’t want my blog to become just another forum for other people’s bonnet-bees. I have enough of my own. Perhaps you could promote your ‘Reason Is Evil’ campaign on your own blog - see what they make of it?

It was an exaggeration to say that I was conducting a ‘Reason Is Evil’ campaign, but a justified expression of his exasperation. And there is a bee in my bonnet! Ghetu, my friend and mentor (yes it’s a two-way mentoring relationship) frowns on my philosophical posts, and I take the view that he’s never wrong. But all the same, the bee in my bonnet buzzes, and I want to introduce an ally, one whom I discovered in my Camus project (see comments on last post). Here’s a quote from my new translation:

Shestov for his part, in an oeuvre of admirable singlemindedness, ever reiterating the same truths, never stops showing that the tightest system, the most universal rationalism, must forever impinge against the irrational in human thought. Nothing escapes him—no trace of irony, no trivial contradiction, nothing which belittles the role of reason. Nothing interests him but the exception, whether in the realm of heart or mind. Dostoyevsky’s analysis of the condemned man, Nietzsche’s fervid probing, Hamlet’s maledictions, Ibsen’s aristocratic venom—he tracks them all down, puts them under the bright gaze of his magnifying-glass, to reveal man’s revolt against the inexorable. He denies any reasonableness to reason. The only direction he goes with any certainty is the middle of a bleached-out desert, where every certainty has turned to stone.

Who was Leon Shestov? I found out, downloaded some of his books from this site. Camus is right, except for the bleached-out desert: to me, Shestov’s destination glows with infinite possibility. How to express it in non-philosophical terms? Impossible, I’ll just have to take the risk.

Reason, says Shestov, makes an imperious master. Aristotle says that reason dominates us with the iron fist of necessity, and there is nothing we can do about it. There is nothing that even God can do about it. This is the crux of the matter! He quotes Seneca’s summing up of our human situation:

Ille ipse, omnium conditor ac rector, scripsit quidem Fata, sed sequitur. Semper paret: Semel jussit.

The Author and Governor of the universe hath, indeed, written and ordained the Fates; but, having once ordained them, he ever after obeys them. He commanded them at first, for once: but his conformity to them is perpetual. *

Whether we be atheists or not, this is where Science and Philosophy lead us, says Shestov. They use Knowledge and Reason to bully us, in the manner of Epictetus, who offers an interesting teaching method against anyone who denies Aristotle’s Principle of Contradiction:

“I should have wished,” he said, “to be the slave of a man who does not admit the principle of contradiction. He would have told me to serve him wine; I would have given him vinegar or something still worse. He would have become angry and complained that I did not give him what he asked. But I would have answered, ‘You do not recognize the principle of contradiction; hence, wine, vinegar or any loathsome thing are all the same. And you do not recognize Necessity; therefore, no one has the power to compel you to regard the vinegar as something bad and the wine as something good. Drink the vinegar as if it were wine and be content!’ Or again, the master orders me to shave him, and I cut off his nose or his ear with the razor. He would again cry out, but I would repeat to him my argument. And I would do everything in the same way until I forced my master to recognize the truth that Necessity is invincible and the principle of contradiction omnipotent.”

This is from a text Shestov prophetically published in 1938. Today we see the totalitarianism of Reason express its violence via scientism and militant atheism. To Blake, Shestov, and I suggest, everybody (buried below the violently-enforced lip-service to Reason and Necessity), lies a revolt, within which resides the essence of humanness. Its expressions are myriad, but it’s the duty of a philosopher (or anti-philosopher) to eschew hypocrisy and bring everything out into the open. To Shestov, the answer lies in ...

But why should I attempt to reduce his life’s work to a sentence? Anyway, the question is more important. You and I can’t evade the question. Somehow, we each have to find our own answers. Don’t we each seek freedom, possibility? Don’t we resent the bully who tries to stand in the way?

I blog to let the bees out of my bonnet, to see if they may swarm in some new place where there has been no established hive before. I’m delighted to discover that almost every thought I have has been better expressed by someone else, for it makes my duty (to give back to the world what I’m uniquely qualified to give) lighter and more manageable.

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*Shestov (in his Athens and Jerusalem) gives a truncated version of the quote from Seneca. I’ve reproduced a more complete one with its own translation below, from elsewhere on the Web.