Love and reality

Simone Weil writes:

Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discovery that through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being? It is much more terrible than death, for death does not prevent the beloved from having lived. That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination. (Gravity and Grace, p.57)

These remarks sound deep, but they oversimplify the relation between love and reality. The reality love needs is not all or nothing --- in most cases, the person we love is partly real, partly imaginary. It is rare, if possible at all, for us to know and understand our beloved so well that we see her completely as she really is, without any distortions or fantasies. It is also rare for our beloved to be nothing but the product of our imagination, an imaginary being that we are attaching to the body of a person who we don't really know or understand.

Besides, it is not clear that imagination in love is all bad. A little imagination can be like light makeup: it makes our beloved look better without making her unreal. In love, sometimes fantasies can even breed reality.

Weil is still right that it is terrible to discover that we have been loving an imaginary (or mostly imaginary) being. What is terrifying, however, is not just the realization that the person we love has never existed, but also the realization that we have been so delusional. We may, because of the latter realization, lose our self-trust. If we need self-trust to trust another person (we need to trust ourselves in order to trust our trust in another person), and if we need to trust a person to love her, we may thereby lose our capacity for love. That's truly terrifying.

Readers' perception of an author

In an interview published in 1980 ("The Masked Philosopher"), Foucault was interviewed anonymously. When asked why in this interview he chose not to reveal his identity, he said:

Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard. With the potential reader, the surface of contact was unrippled. The effects of the book might land in unexpected places and form shapes that I had never thought of. A name makes reading too easy.

And then he made an interesting proposal, obviously not seriously:

I shall propose a game: that of the "year without a name." For a year, books would be published without their authors' names. The critics would have to cope with a mass of entirely anonymous books. But, now that I come to think of it, it's possible they would have nothing to do: all the authors would wait until the following year before publishing their books ...

Of course, what Foucault was talking about was not just names, but fame --- names that are well-known or at least recognized. An author's name will not have the kind of effect on readers that Foucault lamented if it is a name nobody knows. After all, none of Foucault's earliest work was published anonymously; as he himself understood it, what he said back then "had some chance of being heard" because his name was still "quite unknown", not because he did not use any name.

However, readers' perception of an author is not just a matter of how famous the author is. At the beginning of the interview and before he made the remarks quoted above, Foucault mentioned a story:

You know the story of the psychologists who went to make a little film test in a village in darkest Africa. They then asked the spectators to tell the story in their own words. Well, only one thing interested them in this story involving three characters: the movement of the light and shadow through the trees.

These African villagers were not interested in the characters of the film; perhaps they were not interested in characters generally. By contrast, as Foucault pointed out:

In our societies, characters dominate our perceptions. Our attention tends to be arrested by the activities of faces that come and go, emerge and disappear.

Readers' perception of an author is not just a matter of how famous the author is; it is also a matter of seeing the author as a character. If the author was seen only as the creator of some text, where attention was paid exclusively to the text, that would not be much of a perception of the author. If we are interested in the text enough to be interested in its creator, and if the text does not tell us much about the author, we will somehow create a character to be the author, sometimes by researching the life of the author, sometimes by reading more of the author's work, and sometimes by imagination alone.

But why are we so fascinated with characters? Because, I think, we see individual human lives as different stories, and stories require characters. If the African villagers were really not interested in characters at all, that was probably because they did not see their lives as stories, or, their lives were too simple to be seen as stories.

Now that we know "the masked philosopher" was Foucault, we won't be able to read the interview the way it was read in 1980 --- we won't be able to read it without seeing the character Foucault in it.

Arguing with the less sophisticated

I always find it difficult to argue with the less sophisticated. Since I see things in a more complex way than they do and my understanding may be beyond their comprehension, they rarely argue in my terms for the simple reason that they are not capable of doing so. In order to go on with the argument, I have to argue in their terms. However, expressing my points in their terms is not easy, if possible at all. And on top of this disadvantage, I may have to, when the less sophisticated have lost the debate, show them how they have lost it.

Thinking and feeling

Nietzsche says, "We have to learn to think differently --- in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently." (Daybreak) He is right that difference in thinking, at least in some cases and given sufficient time, will lead to difference in feeling. However, we all know that it is hard to think differently, particularly when the way of thinking involved is imbued with feelings. We can say that in such cases thinking is anchored to feeling. In such cases, thinking is unlikely to change unless feeling changes first.

Although a change in thinking may lead to a change in feeling, feeling does not have to change through a change in thinking. Sometimes feeling changes for other reasons (if we don't know what causes our feeling to change, we may say it just changes). And when feeling changes, thinking is likely to change too.

Here is a personal example: I did not like to travel and usually felt bored (because what I saw did not interest me) and anxious (because I was in a place that I was unfamiliar with) when I was traveling. I traveled simply because my wife enjoyed traveling and I had to accompany her. However, such feelings have changed lately --- I enjoyed my trip to the Silk Road thoroughly and did not feel bored or anxious at all, and I look forward to my next trip (probably South Korea). Why? I don't know. It was not because of the Silk Road, for I had been to places that were no less interesting. In any case, I now think what one can learn about a place by visiting there is essentially different from what one can learn about it by reading books and looking at pictures, while I used to think they were basically the same. This was a change in thinking, but the change in feeling came first.

The worship of reason?

Being the kind of philosopher I am, I am sometimes accused of worshiping reason (or Reason?). I don't worship anything, which entails that I don't worship reason. I do rely on reason as the best guide for belief and action, but that does not make me a worshiper of reason. I rely on my five senses too, but I don't worship them either.

Why do I rely on reason as the best guide for belief and action? Because it works --- because I want my beliefs to be true and my actions right, and relying on reason helps me achieve that aim. Indeed, there is no way of achieving that aim that is more effective.

Those who accuse me of worshiping reason may point out that it is just my belief that relying on reason is the most effective way of acquiring true beliefs and making right decisions (and acting accordingly). How should I respond? Well, what else can I say other than that I have good reason for believing that. Does that mean there is no escaping the charge of worshiping reason? No. It means only that there is no escaping the need for justifying or giving reason for one's belief.

Charming jokes

Schopenhauer called the ontological argument for the existence of God a "charming joke". What a charming way of putting it!

Some may think being a charming joke is not that bad for a philosophical argument; at least it is not as bad as just being a joke. However, when a philosopher gets carried away by his cleverness and produces a philosophical argument that is nothing but a charming joke, he may never be able to see that it is nonetheless still a joke simply because it is charming and because the charm is a result of his cleverness. For this reason, a charming joke is worse.

Knowing the limits of one's expertise

People who are experts in an area may be tempted to think and act as if their expertise is not limited to that area. A philosopher may expect others to take his view on arts as seriously as they take his philosophical view; a folklore expert may comment on politics in an authoritative tone even though he did not have any training in political theory or political analysis; a scientist may criticize a philosopher's argument because he does not understand how different are philosophical investigation and scientific investigation. Richard Feynman, for example, said this about Spinoza:

My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza --- and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these Attributes, and Substances, all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now, how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there was no excuse for it! In that same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions, and take the contrary propositions, and look at the world --- and you can't tell which is right. (The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, p.195)

Of course you can't tell which of Spinoza's propositions is true by looking at the world; you are not supposed to! Spinoza was not doing bad science; he was doing metaphysics.

However, Feynman was not unaware of the limits of his expertise. In another place he said this:

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy --- and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter. (Ibid., p.142)

Here he was referring particularly to social problems, and he certainly knew that social problems are utterly different from scientific ones. He laughed at Spinoza presumably because he thought that both he and Spinoza were investigating the world, or , reality, and that Spinoza did it in a laughable way.

Feynman might not think he went beyond science when he criticized Spinoza's philosophy. If that was the case, he was not as arrogant as those experts who knowingly exceed the limits of their expertise. But some philosophers would insist that a scientist looking at philosophical problems is just as dumb as the next guy and will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter.

WWJD

A simple proof that the correct answer to "What would Jesus do?" is "I don’t know":

1. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

2. When X works in mysterious ways, the correct answer to "What would X do?" is "I don't know".

3. Jesus is the Lord.

From 1 & 3, it follows that

4. Jesus works in mysterious ways.

From 2 & 4, it follows that

5. The correct answer to "What would Jesus do?" is "I don't know".

Christian techniques of the self

According to Foucault, in all societies there is a kind of technique that he calls "techniques of the self" (or "technologies of the self"); these are "techniques that permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain state of perfection, happiness, purity, supernatural power" (from his short essay "Sexuality and Solitude"; he elaborates the notion in a much longer essay entitled "Technologies of the Self". Both essays are collected in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth).

The notion of techniques of the self is interesting enough, but what I find even more interesting is Foucault's application of the notion to Christianity. He first points out that each technique of the self implies some truth obligations such as telling the truth, discovering the truth, and being enlightened by the truth. These obligations are either instrumental to or constitutive of the transformation of the self. He then describes the truth obligations implied by Christian techniques of the self:

Everyone in Christianity has the duty to explore who he is, what is happening within himself, the faults he may have committed, the temptations to which he is exposed. Moreover, everyone is obliged to tell these things to other people, and thus to bear witness against himself... First, there is the task of clearing up all the illusions, temptations, and seductions that can occur in the mind, and of discovering the reality of what is going on within ourselves.

I think most Christians would not disagree with this description. But this is not the interesting part yet. As Foucault goes on:

Second, one must get free from attachment to the self, not because the self is an illusion but because the self is much too real. The more we discover the truth about ourselves, the more we must renounce ourselves; and the more we want to renounce ourselves, the more we need to bring to light the reality of ourselves. This is what we would call the spiral of truth formulation and reality renouncement which is at the heart of Christian techniques of the self.

It is not clear that most Christians would accept these words. They may not see themselves as renouncing their selves, for they, like most human beings, do care about their selves.

What Foucault's characterization of Christian techniques of the self captures is precisely Christians' ambivalence towards their selves --- they both care about and renounce their selves. There is such ambivalence because Christianity is both a salvation religion and a confession religion: one has to care about one's self enough to see the need of salvation, but one also has to renounce one's self as a result of confession. In most cases the psychological condition is just ambivalence, but in some cases it may become so severe that it would not be much of an exaggeration to call it a form of schizophrenia.