Even if receiving the most dire news from a doctor, the one question I would hope never to ask is: Why me?
For no question is more metaphysically naïve and egocentric than this request not only for meaning, but for a coherent narrative that unfolds in relation specifically to one's self. This may be all too human, but it's all too shameful for a philosopher.
For a philosopher should know better than attempt to explain, justify and integrate a random event into a
personal life story, or start asking crypto-theological questions of the universe.
And even if the question is more rhetorical than anything else - a venting of natural emotion - it should still never pass the lips of a philosopher; i.e., one who always remains stoical, always refuses to take things tragically, and always favours the Warholian response when given terrible news: So what? [1]
Notes
[1] See The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again), (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), in which he writes:
"Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, 'So what.' That's one of my favorite things to say. 'So what.' [...] I don’t know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget." (Ch. 7)
What price 'amor fati'?
ReplyDeletePhilosophy, to follow Heidegger, is a unique kind of discourse organised around the privileging of the question (and its own self-questioning), rooted in the question of Being itself (Seinsfrage). As such, I'm not sure how this authoritarian image of the philosopher as some kind of compulsory stoic and/or peculiar kind of tragedian fits with the demands of self-reflexivity (two 'shoulds' in what is a comparatively short text is odd for a blog that claims to have done with judgment) - or indeed TTA's own stated aim to 'interrogate everything' (which, in the interests of intellectual decency if nothing else, ought surely to include its own - in this case - massive assumptions).
If the 'rage for order' is so objectionable, why is the 'assumption of randomness' any less so as a picture of the cosmos? Life may not be wholly ordered, but it is far from random either - as anyone who has experienced the eruptive power of synchronicity will readily attest. Not for the first time, I would suggest it behooves the thinker not to settle for these crude dichotomies.
Hediegger, of course, also looked back to the Greeks, for whom the notion of (daimonic) destiny was pivotal to their world-view - for which, demonstrating their sophistication in this domain, they actually had four words: Μοῖρα; Αἶσαa; Πεπρωμένον (applied, in fact, to tragic destiny) and Ἀνάγκη.
Perhaps the 'little Greek' could metamorphose into a big Greek and comment here?
'Why Me?' is, in fact, the paradigmatic question concerning personal fate, which James Hillman explores with marvellous psychological dexterity in his book THE SOUL'S CODE. In short, life isn't all about you - unless it is all about you (which it usually is in some way or other)!
Is 'the eruptive power of synchronicity' a genuine experience, or just a failure to understand statistical inevitability in the search for pattern?
DeleteI was disappointed you ended with Hillman; I expected a reference to Michael Gelvin's 'Why Me? A Philosophical Inquiry into Fate' (1991), which addresses this subject without resorting to mysticism.
I wonder what you think a 'genuine experience' is? There are really just experiences, aren't there, unless, once again, you want to insist on some kind of personally legislated, extra-human distinction between what's real and what isn't . . .
ReplyDeleteI also think it's an easy/lazy (and less than well-informed) reduction to construe synchronistic phenomena as 'mystical'. Jung called it an 'acausal connecting principle', both psychic and material (like the archetypes themselves, of course), and there are a very considerable number of well-attested experiences of such phenomena across the literature, which open-minded TTA readers will do well to look into. The question, to which I think Jung also himself alludes, is not that we observe these phenomena - it's that we don't observe them more often! In this respect, I would suggest, they can be thought of as like dreams, which psychological science suggests we are undergoing all the time, but the noise and bluster of the so-called real world crowds and shouts them out. My own synchronistic experiences, for the record, are compellingly empirical, and relentlessly conducive to wonder.
Things are, for me at least, quite the other way about from 'searching' for patterns, whatever that means. Rather, life itself forces one to adjust one's image of what its principle of dis/order is through our continuous exposure to it. (Indeed, what else other than existence could do this?)
I might be passingly interested to leaf through the Gelven (note correct spelling) book, though Amazon's gloss - in advertising it as 'dismissing the mysterious or the psychological' in favour of imposing a 'rational sensibility' on the material - hardly draws one in. Reason/ratio generally explains very little in life in my view, since it is such a limited part of the human mind. As a poet, I suggest, imagination is a far better guide. In any case, it's more a matter of bearing experiential witness to existence rather than rationally elucidating its reality. A sensitivity to mystery keeps poets humble. As the myth of Oedipus teaches, by contrast, ratiocination tends toward dangerous hubris.
Do you remember that remark from Nietzsche in The Gay Science (III. 126): "Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even shallow". It was spot on then: and it's spot on now.
DeleteAnd so, Jung can dress up his idea of synchronicity with scientific-sounding language - it's an 'acausal connecting principle' don'tcha know - but I'm afraid, at best, it's a harmless bit of easily explained nonsense and, at worst, a completely delusional way of thinking.
"My own synchronistic experiences, for the record, are compellingly empirical ..."
If that's the case, then why don't you publish a paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and turn the world of physics on its head; revolutionising our understanding of causality, quantum mechanics, and the relationship between consciousness and matter.
Indeed, I'd venture to suggest if you could could provide rigorous and reproducible scientific evidence that synchronicity is a real, objective phenomenon, you would almost certainly pick up a Nobel Prize.
But then, I suppose, as a humble poet, your task is to bear 'existential witness to existence' and be sensitive to 'mystery', rather than 'rationally elucidating its reality'.
PS: thanks for the parenthetical correction, which adds a nice touch of condescending pedantry.