The Restlessness of Thomas Merton, J. D. Salinger, and Jack Kerouac.
On balance, a very good essay, but just wrong in places. For example:
Due to our separation from God that occurred in the Garden, all men intuitively sense that they are missing something, that they are radically incomplete.3 Aristotle had this incompleteness in mind when he opened Metaphysics with the statement, “All men by nature desire to know.”
Vito Caiati, cradle Catholic, native New Yorker, former resident of Greenwich Village, ex-pat in France for a time, historian, NYU Ph.D., with a finely-honed literary sensibility, is well qualified to offer some astute commentary on this essay. I invite him to do so.
Caiati introduced me to the novels of Richard Yates.
Why did Kerouac's writing give rise to an outpouring of biographies, commentaries, dissertations, articles, not to mention new editions and the publication of the shoddiest of his literary efforts, when Yates' novels and short stories had no similar effect? One thought is this. Kerouac was a sort of unwitting pied piper. His 1957 On the Road gave rise to the 'rucksack revolution' of the 'sixties. Yates' 1961 Revolutionary Road, his best novel, was backward-looking, in large part social criticism of the Zeitgeist of the fading 'fifties.
But my one thought is one-sided and wants augmentation and qualification. Later perhaps.
While I admire Yates' superb craftsmanship, his writing does not move me. Kerouac moves me, literary slop, hyper-romantic gush, and all. No one would accuse Kerouac of being a craftsman.
Literary sensibility is an ineluctably subjective thing, but not so subjective as to disallow higher and lower grades of sensibility. But how describe and order them?
Two weblogs I regularly consult are Patrick Kurp's Anecdotal Evidence, and the late D. G. Myers' A Commonplace Blog. Myers died ten years ago. Kurp here recounts a meeting with him.
I study everything, join nothing. He studied everything, but joined the Trappists. Therein one root of one of his inner conflicts. His natural bent was to range freely over the cartography of the mind, but he voluntarily accepted intramural enclosure physically, intellectually, and spiritually. He took vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability. My impression from study of the seven volumes of his magnificent Journal, wherein one meets the man himself as opposed to the 'organization man,' is that the first and second vows were easy for Merton to keep. You might wonder about the second, but there is only one lapsus carnis known to us, so well known in fact that it needs no commentary from me. But he chafed under the vow of obedience which demanded of him that he submit to his intellectually inferior superiors. Stability, too, he found difficult given his gyrovagal and maverickian tendencies. The temper of the times, the fabulous and far-off 'sixties, did nothing to tame the gyrovagus in him.
One of the underlying questions is whether the truth, absolute and eternal, can be captured and owned by any one temporal institution and any one system of dogmas. Well, why not? If God can become man, a particular man, why can't the absolute and eternal truth be correspondingly 'incarnated' in a particular church with its particular and exclusive set of rites, rituals, and dogmas? If the God-Man established a church, what more could you want by way of ecclesiological validation?
But which church did he establish? The RCC?
Would it be in keeping with Protestant principles that some Protestant denomination lay claim to being the one, true, holy, catholic, and apostolic church? I'm just asking! In this blog I conduct my education in public and try to seduce people into helping me do so.
This just over the transom from Karl White:
Hope you're well. May be of interest.
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July 30, 2018 Dearest Robert, I feel about [Henri Nouwen] as I do about Thomas Merton. There is much self-deception and muddle in their lives; and yet there is an unwavering concentration on God.
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Beatific October, Kerouac month hereabouts, is at its sad redbrick end once again, but I can't let her slip away without one more substantial Kerouac entry. So raise your glass with me on this eve of All Saint's Day as I say a prayer for Jack's soul which, I fear, is still in need of purgation before it is ready for the ultimate beat vision, the visio beata. We rest at the end of the road, but don't assume that the road ends with death.
..........................
The Kerouac and Friends industry churns on, a recent product being Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats by Robert Inchausti, Shambhala (January 30, 2018), 208 pages.
From Scott Beauchamp's review:
The real tragedy of Kerouac’s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at face value, writing him off as a word-vomiting miscreant. But that’s a caricature of Kerouac that over-emphasizes the most obvious personal flaws of an intensely spiritual writer. It’s an oversimplification by way of calling someone a simpleton. The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century. Robert Inchausti’s recently published Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats makes an attempt at recognizing the heterodox spiritual focus of the entire Beat oeuvre, but it only points the reader in the right direction. Its simple and hodgepodge construction suggests the vast amount of analysis, particularly of Kerouac’s work, which remains to be done in order to change his reputation in the popular imagination.
I'm a Kerouac aficionado from way back. I love the guy and the rush and gush of his hyper-romantic and heart-felt wordage.* He brings tears to my eyes every October. His tapes and CDs accompany me on every road trip. He was a writer who was religious, but a "religious writer"? It's an exaggeration, like calling Thomas Merton, who was a religious writer, a spiritual master. I love him too, especially the Merton of the journals, all seven of which I have read and re-read, but he was no more a spiritual master than I am. And then there is Bob Dylan, the greatest American writer of popular songs, who added so much to our lives, but deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature? We live in an age of exaggeration. I submit that Flannery O'Connor is closer to the truth about Kerouac & Co.
Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:
I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves. That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do -- read them. But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them. Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue. They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline. They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing. It's true that grace is the free gift of God but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial. I observe that Baron von Hügel's most used words are derivatives of the word cost. As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything but false mystics. A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.
You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets. The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)
Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such. But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life. See Resolutions Made and Broken, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac.
And I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960? (Blast Books, 1993) Grace Beats Karma: what a wonderful title, apt, witty, and pithy!
Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).
Lucky me, to have been both in and of the '60s. And to have survived.
_____________________
*'Wordage' to my ear embodies a sense between the pejorative 'verbiage' and the commendatory 'writing.' I am reminded of Truman Capote's anti-Kerouac jab, "That's not writing; it's typewriting!"
Addendum. Vito Caiati writes,
I read with interest your post “Jack Kerouac, Religious Writer?” and it struck me that, with a bit of editing, Flannery O’Connor’s remark on “the true poet” might be applied to the too worldly Merton: “The true monk is anonymous, as to his habits, but this boy has to look, act, and apparently smell like a monk” I feel that Merton’s superiors, who failed to check his wanderings of one kind or another, harmed his rich spiritual potential, which is most evident in the early journals. As the protagonist of Georges Bernanos’ Journal de un cure de la campagne observes, when speaking of monks extra muros, “Les moines sont d’incomparables maitres de la vie intérieur, . . . mais il en est de la plupart of ces fameux ‘traits’ comme des vins de terroir, qui doivent se consommer sur place. Ils ne supportent pas le voyage. ” Monks are incomparable masters of the interior life, . . . but most of these famous ‘traits’ [that they possess] like the terroir wines, must be consumed in place, They do not support the trip.”Vito,Very good observation.While deeply appreciative of monasticism with its contemptus mundi, Merton, desirous of name and fame, was wide open to the siren song of the world, which became irresistibly loud when the '60s came along. Had he been our age, would he have become a monk at all? Had he lived beyond the age of 53, would he have remained a monk?I love his Journals. That is where you will find the real Merton. As in Kerouac, a deep sincerity of the heart to break the heart.I am familiar with Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest, which is both theologically penetrating and of high literary value. (I would not say that Kerouac's novels are of high literary value, but on the other hand, they are not trash like those of Bukowski.)There are superb passages on prayer, sin, lust, and confession in Bernanos which I may post.But I haven't found the passage you cite. Where is it roughly? Near the beginning, middle, end? I don't imagine you have an English trans.It is always good to hear from you.
During his years of unsuccess, when he was actually at his purest and best, an "unpublished freak," as he describes himself in a late summer 1954 letter to Robert Giroux, living for his art alone, Kerouac contemplated entering a monastery: "I've become extremely religious and may go to a monastery before even before you do." [. . .] "I've recently made friends in a way with Bob Lax and I find him sweet -- tho I think his metaphysics are pure faith. Okay, that's what it's supposed to be." (Selected Letters 1940-1956, ed. Charters, Penguin 1995, p. 444.)
And then on pp. 446-448 we find an amazing 26 October [sic!] 1954 letter to Robert Lax packed with etymology and scholarly detail which ends:
I'm no saint, I'm sensual, I cant resist wine, am liable to sneers & secret wraths & attachment to imaginary lures before my eyes -- but I intend to ascend by stages & self-control to the Vow to help all sentient beings find enlightenment and holy escape from sin and stain of life-body itself [. . .] but thank God I'm a lazy bum because of that repose will come, in repose the secret, and in the secret: Ceaseless Ecstasy.
"Nirvana, as when the rain puts out a little fire."
See you in the world,
Jack K.
For information on the enigmatic hermit Robert Lax (1915-2000) , see here
Robert Lax: A Life Slowly Lived is especially good. Excerpts:
One of the touchstone words in Lax’s spiritual vocabulary was “waiting”. By this he meant being still, standing one’s ground, knowing one’s ground, but never quite knowing the reality of what was awaited, longed for. In his volume 33 Poems, recently reissued by New Directions, he puts it this way:
Wake up & wait. Lie down & wait. Sit up again & wait. All in the dark now. No way of telling day from night. Do I expect to hear a voice? See a light? A dim one? A bright one? See a face? I sit up. I’m alert. Do I know what to expect? [2]
“What you see,” said Paul Spaeth, keeper of the Lax archive at St Bonaventure, “is the opposite of what can be called social action. What you see is a slowing down and waiting on God. Very much in keeping with the monastic tradition. Also very similar to the Buddhist tradition of moment to moment mindfulness.”
Robert Lax with his two close friends: Thomas Merton (middle) and the abstract painter, Ad Reinhardt (left). Photograph courtesy of the Thomas Merton Center © Bellarmine University
Unlike his friend Thomas Merton, the Trappist poet and author who shared Lax’s interest in Buddhism and brought his name to the world in The Seven Storey Mountain, [3] Lax never lived a life of structured monasticism. A Jewish convert to Catholicism, he built for himself an interior monastery, within which he wrote, prayed, contemplated, and received many visitors: poets, painters, writers (he’d been friends with the legendary abstract artist, Ad Reinhardt, and with Jack Kerouac), and spiritual seekers. “Lax can be thought of as a mystic,” said his biographer Michael N. McGregor, who nevertheless refrained from using that word in his book Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. [4] He shared his subject’s aversion to the superficiality of labels. He wanted readers to come to their own conclusions about who he was, what he was.
Steve Georgiou, a seeker from California and author of The Way of the Dreamcatcher, a book of dialogues with Lax, remembers their walks down to Skala, the Patmos harbour. “He would walk with a slow roll like the roll of a boat. He would take his meditative steps, encouraging you to slow down yourself and feel the actual experience of walking”. [5]
For Lax, there was no seam between walking, praying, writing. All experiences were to be fully absorbed, integrated into a life fully lived. Once Georgiou saw his friend writing a single word – “river” – over and over. He asked him why. “I want to live with the word for a while,” Lax said.
one word at a time.
I believe
I believe
that all people
should stop their fight;
I believe that one should
blow a whistle or
sing or play
on the
lute [6]
I have long been fascinated by the conflicted man revealed in Thomas Merton's Journals, all seven volumes of which I have read and regularly re-read. He was a spiritual seeker uncomfortably perched between the contemptus mundi of old-time monasticism and 1960's social engagement and 'relevance,' to use one of the buzz words of the day. He was hip to the '60s, its music and its politics, surprisingly appreciative of Dylan and Baez, and this despite being 50 years old in '65 when Dylan was 24.
I recently came across a journal entry in which Merton praises Walker Percy's 1962 novel, The Moviegoer. Then I recalled that the philosopher and surfer Tim Mosteller who visited me a year or so ago, and acquitted himself well on a memorable hike in the Superstitions, had mentioned some work by Percy, whom I have never read, but will. A search turns up he following articles of interest to Merton aficionados:
An Interview with Walker Percy about Thomas Merton
Existentialism, Semiotics and Iced Tea (Roger Kimball)
The Myth of the Fall from Paradise: Thomas Merton and Walker Percy
ADDENDUM (5/25)
Tim Mosteller writes,
I haven't read all of Percy's work, but I have enjoyed a lot of what I have read of him.I simply can't recall which work of his I mentioned when I last saw you.Here's his fiction that I have read:The MoviegoerThe Last GentlemanLove in the RuinsLancelotThe Thanatos SyndromeI think that I looked over, but didn't really study his collection of philosophical essays, some of them quite good on C. S. Peirce and semiotics which were published in top-ranked philosophy journals.Those essays are collected in The Message in the Bottle.Peter Kreeft is quite fond of Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. I think I've looked this one over too, but haven't read it. Kreeft has an essay on this book in his C. S. Lewis for the Third Millenium, and I recall enjoying the essay. In fact, I think that was how I got introduced to Percy.I've enjoyed everything I've read by Percy. It's rare to have a Christian writer who is a first rate philosopher (who was also a medical man) and a first rate novelist. Some of his novels are quite graphic and disturbing, which as a rule I don't enjoy reading, but they are not gratuitous.Percy is too heavily influenced by Kierkegaard and C. S. Peirce, but his story-telling makes of for some of the things I disagree with from these thinkers.Here is a great video lecture which Percy gave which captures a lot of his views: "Walker Percy The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve1f83mxE7kHope this helps!
Journals, vol. 4, p. 235, 8 August 1962:
Thoreau's idleness was an incomparable gift and its fruits were blessings that America has unfortunately never learned to appreciate. Yet he made his gift, though it was not asked for. And he went his way. If he had followed the advice of his neighbors in Concord, America would have been much poorer, even though he might have sweated a good deal. He took the fork in the road.
Old Henry David has meant a lot to me too. My mind drifts back to Wayne Monroe, high school history teacher, a grotesquely obese and superficial man who mocked Thoreau as a hippy who didn't want to work. "Freight Train Wayne," as we called him, drove a 1964 Pontiac Catalina. When he got in the vehicle it would list pronouncedly to the port side. We observing wits would typically make a crack about his Monro-matic schock absorbers.
That Merton was drawn to Thoreau has something to do with my being drawn to both of them. Thank you, gentlemen, for living your lives in your way and writing it all down for men like me to savor. Hats off, glasses raised, your memory will be preserved by the like-minded and discerning.
Thoreau was a great aphorist. My favorite: "A man sits as many risks as he runs." In those ten syllables, the sage of Walden Pond achieves aphoristic perfection. Study it if you would learn the art.
America may not have appreciated him, but the greatness of America is that it allows his like to flourish.
Success is living your own life in your own way.
Thomas Merton and Jean van Heijenoort were both studies in youthful idealism. Both made drastic life decisions early on, and both sacrificed much for their respective ideals. Van joined Leon Trotsky to save the world rather than attend the prestigious Ecole Normale in pursuit of a bourgeois career. While Van was motivated by a desire to save the world, Tom was driven by contemptus mundi to flee the world and retreat to a monastery, which is what he did in 1941 at the age of 26 when he joined the Trappists. A convert to Catholicism, with the zeal of the convert, he took it to the limit the old-time doctrine implied: if the temporal order is but a vanishing quantity, then one should live with eternity ever before one's mind.
Both became disillusioned,* but in different ways. Van lost his secular faith, broke with Marxism, and went back to the serene but lifeless precincts of mathematics to become a distinguished bourgeois professor of the subject. Tom remained a monk but dropped the contemptus mundi. Van abandoned activism for mathematical logic and romantic affairs. Tom dropped his quietism -- not entirely, however -- and became active in human affairs, the peace movement in particular, during that heady period of ferment inside and outside of the Church, the 1960s.
Both met their ends in foreign venues by unusual means. Unable to stay put like a good monk in Gethsemani, Tom flew to Bangkok for a theological conference where he died of accidental electrocution in December of 1968 at the relatively young age of 53. Van's addiction to sexual love and 'romance' led to his destruction, and in the same Mexico City where the long arm of Stalin, extended by Ramon Mercader's ice axe, finally slew his erstwhile mentor, Trotsky. Van couldn't stay away from Anne-Marie Zamora even though he believed she would kill him. Drawn like a moth to the flame he flew from Boston to Mexico City. And kill him she did. While he was asleep, Zamora pumped a couple of rounds from her .38 Special into his head. Trotsky was done in by the madness of politics; Van by the madness of love.
What is the moral of this comparison?
Superior individuals feel the lure of the Higher. They seek something more from human existence than a jejune bourgeois life in pursuit of property, pelf, and social status. They seek transcendence, and sometimes, like Marxist activists, in the wrong places. No secular eschaton is "right around the corner" to borrow from the prevalent lingo of the 1950s CPUSA. Man cannot save himself by social praxis. The question as to how we should live remains live. Tom chose a better and nobler path than Van. But can any church be the final repository of all truth?
For sources, see articles below.
Related:
A Monk and his Political Silence
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*Is 'disillusioned' a predicate adjective of success? If a person becomes disillusioned about X, does it follow that X really is an illusion? Or can one be wrongly disillusioned about X, i.e. come to believe falsely that X is an illusion? I would say that 'disillusioned' is not a predicate adjective of success.
ADDENDUM (11/13): WAS THOMAS MERTON ASSASSINATED?
This just over the transom from Hugh Turley:
Dear Mr. Vallicella,
In your article “Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment” you repeated a popular error when you wrote that Thomas Merton "died of accidental electrocution.”It is understandable that you could repeat this mistake because there was deliberate deception to conceal the truth about Merton’s death and the falsehoods have been repeated for over 50 years. In 2018 I co-authored The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation with David Martin.There is absolutely no evidence to support the accidental electrocution story.I invite you to visit our website and look at the official documents from Thailand concerning Merton’s death and find more information. http://www.themartyrdomofthomasmerton.comThere is also a video of a presentation that I gave in New York City in September.Yours for the truth,Hugh Turley
Mary Gordon, On Thomas Merton (Boulder: Shambala, 2018, 118):
By the late fifties Merton was deeply disturbed about his political silence.
Should he have been? This world is a passing scene. The temporal order is next to nothing compared to eternity. That is the old-time Roman Catholic teaching that justifies the world-flight of monks and nuns. From The Seven Storey Mountain we know that Merton understood and deeply felt the contemptus mundi enjoined by the monastic tradition. His sense of the vanity and indeed nullity of the life lived by the worldly, and the super-eminent reality of the "Unseen Order," a phrase I borrow from William James, is what drove Merton to renounce the world and enter the monastic enclosure. Despite his increasing critical distance from the enthusiasms and exaggerations of the book that brought him instant fame, he never lost his faith in the reality of the Unseen Order. He never became a full-on secularist pace David D. Cooper, Thomas Merton's Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist, University of Georgia Press, 1989, 2008. Although Cooper is wrong in his main thesis, his book is essential reading for Merton enthusiasts.
To repeat, the conflicted monk never lost faith in the Unseen Order. But the reality of said Order is not like that of a ham sandwich. To the world-bound natural man, the 'reality' of such a sensible item cannot be doubted despite its unreality and insignificance under the aspect of eternity. But the Reality of the Unseen Order can. It is given to those to whom it is given fitfully and by intimations and glimpses. Their intensity does not compensate for their rarity. They are easily doubted. The monastic disciplines are insufficient to bring them on. Meanwhile the clamorous world won't shut up, and the world of the 'sixties was clamorous indeed. The world's noisy messages and suggestions are unrelenting. No surprise, then, that Merton wobbled and wavered. Cooper describes him as a failed mystic (Chapter 6) who never reached infused contemplation. I agree with that. This is why it is foolishly hyperbolic when his fans describe him as a 'spiritual master.' But I don't agree with Cooper that Merton resolved his conflict by becoming a radical humanist. He remained conflicted.
Merton came to realize that the monkish ideal of a life of infused or passive or mystical contemplation was unattainable by him. That, together with his literary ambition and his need for name and fame, threw him back toward the world and drove the doubts that made him disturbed over his political silence.
It's a hard nut to crack. If you really believe in God and soul, then why are you not a monk? And if you are not, do you really believe in God and the soul?
I enjoyed Mary Gordon's book very much and will be returning to it. The lovely feminine virtue of sympathetic understanding is on full display.
The review is by Gary WILLS, not Willis. It is well worth reading. But, as someone who has read all seven volumes of Merton's Journals, I find this unfair:
In 1965, to keep him [Merton] on the vast grounds of the abbey, the abbot approved a state of virtual secession within the monastery. Merton could live in his own hermitage, distant from the main house, where he asked that other monks not visit him. He said that he wanted more solitude, but he told the truth in his journal, that he wanted “all the liberty and leeway I have in the hermitage.” It gave admiring outsiders easier access to him and let him slip off the grounds to make unmonitored phone calls to them.
Merton was conflicted, no doubt, but his commitment to the eremitic life was genuine.
Thomas Merton poses the problem in his Journals, vol. 6, pp. 260-261, entry of 8 July 1967:
Victor Hammer is critically ill . . . . Death is shocking in anyone, but most shocking in the case of someone of real genius and quality and someone you know and love well. The blunt fact is that it is just not conceivable that Victor Hammer should cease to exist. This is a basic absurdity which [Albert] Camus confronted, and which religious explanations may perhaps help us only to evade. [. . .] Yet what is man that his life instinct should translate itself into a conviction that he cannot really altogether die? Where is it illusory and where not? To my mind this is a great and pertinent question and one worthwhile exploring metaphysically -- not by abstractions but by contemplative discipline and by a kind of mystical "pragmatism" if you like . . . . (italics added)
I agree with Merton that the problem needs to be attacked via "contemplative discipline," i.e., in a non-discursive way by meditation. But I disagree with the "not by abstractions" bit whereby Merton advertises his poetic and literary and anti-philosophical bias. The problem has to be addressed both discursively via the discursive intellect and also by meditative Versenkung. (A great German word that suggests sinking below the storm-tossed surface of ordinary mind into its quiet depths.)
But what exactly is the problem?
Some will say that there is no problem at all. Death is perfectly natural and easily conceivable. We know that we are animals and we know that animals die. (And stay dead!) A loved one's death may be shocking, especially if it is sudden, but it is certainly not inconceivable. It is no more inconceivable than the death of a cat or a dog or a flea or a flower.
Yet when we think concretely and personally about death, our own death, and the deaths of those we love, we find ourselves agreeing with Merton and with Schopenhauer: "The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true." ("The Vanity of Existence" in The Will to Live, ed. R. Taylor, p. 229) Let us assume that you love and cherish your wife. Your loving her has conferred upon her uniqueness, at least relative to you. (Josiah Royce) Now imagine her lovable and loving unique personality blotted out of existence forever. Or consider your own case. You have devoted a lifetime to becoming who you are. You have worked steadily at the task of self-individuation. Only to become nothing? Could things be arranged so badly for us? But then the whole thing would be a bad joke.
Of course, what I have written does not show that it is not a bad joke. Maybe it is! (That's an epistemic use of 'maybe.') But then are you prepared to appropriate existentially this putative truth? In plain English: Are you prepared to live as if your life is a bad joke, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?" Or will you live in denial of what you take to be true?
The problem in its sharpest formulation is that it is both conceivable and inconceivable that one should cease to exist. Assuming that no contradiction is true, the task is to remove it. The task, in other words, is to show that the apparent contradiction is merely apparent. Expressed as an aporetic dyad:
A. It is conceivable that one cease to exist utterly.
B. It is not conceivable that one cease to exist utterly.
The problem arises in the collision of two points of view, one objective and external, the other subjective and internal. Objectively viewed, we cease to exist utterly. Subjectively viewed, we don't. The problem is genuine and worth pondering because it is not easy to see how either point of view could displace the other in a fair and rational accounting. For this reason it is not plausible simply to deny one of the limbs of the contradiction. The facile answers of the naive religionist -- one has an immortal soul -- and the naturalist -- one is just a clever land mammal -- won't cut it. There is evasion of the problem on both sides. I will now try to argue this out. One needs to 'marinate' oneself in the problem and not reach for a quick 'solution.' That is the way of philosophy. The other is the way of ideology.
An Objectivist Way Out via Naturalism?
Consider naturalism, which is the dominant form of objectivism. Naturalism, for present purposes, is the metaphysical view according to which causal reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents. (On this latitudinarian understanding of the term one can be a naturalist while admitting so-called 'abstract objects.') A naturalist in this sense maintains that (1) all causes are natural causes involving only natural entities; (2) "the distribution of minds in the universe is late and local" in a sense that implies that minds are necessarily tied to highly evolved organisms; (3) "there is nothing that is divine, or sacred, or worthy of worship." (Quotations from the Graham Oppy essay in Christianity and Philosophy, pp. 29-30) In other words: there is nothing concrete apart from the causal nexus of nature as understood by current physics; there is no God; there are minds (minded organisms) but they enjoy no higher (divine) origin but are merely products of evolution.
A naturalist would presumably just deny (B). The problem with this objectifying 'solution' is that it leaves out the first-person point of view and with it subjectivity. Or rather it either leaves it out, or, attempting to understand it in objective terms, fails to understand it adequately.
True, I am an object in the natural world. But I am also a subject for whom there is a natural world. I am a measly bit of the yeast of life, but I am also a "spectator of all time and existence." Subjectivity or mind in the broadest sense includes all of the following: consciousness in the sense of sentience; consciousness in the sense of intentionality; self-consciousness as evidenced in the thoughtful deployment of the first-person singular pronoun; conscience or moral sense; the sense of being a free agent; sensitivity to reasons as opposed to causes, and to the difference between good and bad reasons, in a word, rationality; sensitivity to norms in ethics and in axiology; concern for objective truth and for subjective-existential truthfulness.
Can each of the items on this (incomplete) list be adequately understood in an objectifying, naturalistic way? No, not even the first rather paltry item. It is widely recognized that it is a very hard problem indeed to fit so-called qualia into the naturalist picture. It is so hard that it is 'popularly' known among the learned as -- wait for it -- the Hard Problem. We've been over this many times before, so I won't go over it again. See the categories Qualia and Consciousness and Qualia.
For present purposes, suffice it to say that a blisteringly strong case can be made against the conceit that everything can be adequately and exhaustively understood in naturalistic terms.
Naturalism is involved in a vicious abstraction: it abstracts away from the necessary conditions of anything's being cognized or thought about in the first place. In trying to understand the whole of concrete Being, the naturalist must of course try to understand minds as well. But what does he have to work with? Only more objects. For example, the functioning brain of a particular animal. Could a brain be in an intentional state? No, it makes no sense. No physical state is an intentional state. No such state has semantic properties. No physical state can be either true or false. And so on. See the categories Intentionality and Mind.
Long story short, subjectivity or mind in the broad sense sketched above is not just real, but irreducibly real. It can't be eliminated and it can't be reduced. Obviously, an adequate case for this cannot be made in a single blog post. Besides, as my metaphilosophy teaches, no substantive philosophical thesis can be proven strictly speaking. (And if you are not speaking strictly in philosophy, then you are just fooling around.) But the irreducible reality of mind and truth are reasonably believed.
This goes some way towards showing that our aporetic dyad cannot be easily solved. No doubt we are animals in nature. If that is all we are, then our ceasing to exist utterly at death is easily conceivable. But that is not all we are. We are also subjects with all that that entails: sentience, intentionality, self-awareness, moral sense, reason, etc. We are not merely animals in a physical environment (Umwelt); we are also subjects for whom there is a meaningful world (Welt). (I am using 'world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense one finds in Husserl and Heidegger and their spiritual descendants.) A mere animal has an environment, but no animal has a world. (This is not self-evident: perhaps in some low-level sense my cat inhabits a world of meanings meager and mousy as it must be: the dude is, after all, sentient, pace Renatus Cartesius, and it seems we share a sort of emotional bond.)
We can sum this up by saying that man is a spiritual animal. Neither angel nor beast, he is a riddle to himself. He asks himself: Could I be just a monstrous fluke of evolution? But in asking this question he is spiritually outside of and above the horror chamber of nature red in tooth and claw.
But do I have any positive reason to think that my nonexistence as a subject or spirit is inconceivable? Well, everything objective about myself can be conceived not to exist include my body and its brain. But the I in its ultimate inwardness as pure subject is not objectifiable. The ultimate condition of all objectification cannot itself be objectified. As transcendentally other than every object it is not itself an actual or possible object. Only what I can think of as an object can I think of as nonexistent. But I cannot think of the transcendental I as an object among objects. Therefore, I cannot conceive of it as nonexistent. I cannot think my own nonexistence as thinker.
In short, there is something non-objective and non-objectifiable about me and it is inconceivable that it not exist.
But I hear an objection coming.
"Granted, you cannot doubt the existence of thinking while it is occurring. But surely you and your thinking might never have existed! After all you have written about modal fallacies, I hope you are not confusing the necessity of the consequence with the necessity of the consequent! Surely you can't infer from 'Necessarily, if I think, then I exist' that 'Necessarily I exist.'"
I plead innocent of that particular fallacy. Both valid and fallacious inferences presuppose what I have called the Discursive Framework. The point I am trying to make lies deeper than the framework in question. The non-objectifiable is transcendentally prior to the Discursive Framework.
My claim is not that I necessarily exist as an object among objects, but that I -- in my inmost egoity if you will -- cannot be conceived by me not to exist. For to do that, I would have to think of myself as an object, either physical or meta-physical -- when that is precisely what I am not, but the transcendental I for whom there are objects.
So there is some sense in which there is something necessary about me that cannot be conceived not to exist.
An Objectivist Way Out Via Metaphysics?
We are in the conceptual vicinity of the Cartesian cogito. Does it follow that I am a res cogitans, a thinking thing, a soul substance? Not that either. For wouldn't that just be another object whose existence I could doubt? Not a physical object, of course, but a meta-physical object. Husserl grapples with this problem but fails to solve it.
One cannot think without objectifying. If I try to think the I behind my thoughts I objectify it and make of it a meta-physical object, a thinking substance. This is what Descartes does. But then it seems I can conceive its nonexistence. Buddhists and Humeans have no trouble conceiving the nonexistence of a substantial self behind thoughts.
I cannot be identical to the (live) animal sitting in my chair and wearing my clothes. Let 'A' denote the animal in my chair wearing my clothes. 'I = A' is not a formal identity statement of the form 'x = x.' The latter is a truth of logic. 'I = A' is not a truth of logic. It is in some sense contingent, although not in a sense explicable by ordinary modal means within the Discursive Framework. The thought is not that there are possible worlds in which I exist, but A does not exist, or possible worlds in which A exists but I do not exist. On the other hand, the thought is of course not that in every world in which A exists, I = A. The logic of objects breaks down at the transcendental boundary of the logical.
I get a sense of this strange contingency when I look into a mirror. It seems in some sense contingent that I should be this particular man, with these particular features, and this particular ancestry and history and so on. Again, 'I = A' is not a tautology; it seems to give some sort of information, namely, that this man in the mirror, and no other, is the man that I am. You might think to make a Fregean move: 'I' and 'A' differ in sense but agree in referent. I can show that this does not work. But not now.
So one might be tempted to make an objectifying meta-physical move: 'I' refers to my soul; 'A' refers to my body.
But if I cannot be identical to a chunk of the physical world, how could I be identical to a meta-physical soul substance? Doesn't the same problem arise again? Suppose I have such a soul, denote it by 'S.' 'I = S' is not a tautology of the form 'x = x.' It asserts an identity between me and a metaphysical object, an identity that is 'contingent' in the boundary sense above alluded to. But then my subjectivity is reduced to an object, and in being reduced, eliminated! This object, in addition, could cease to exist or be annihilated by God. So we cannot secure the inconceivability of death by identifying the ego with the soul substance.
A Dialectic Tapering Off into Mystery
Following out the dialectic we arrive at a Grenzbegiff, a boundary notion of transcendental subjectivity that cannot be objectively articulated in a manner to satisfy the discursive intellect.
So is death inconceivable or not? Objectively, whether physically or meta-physically, death as utter annihilation is conceivable. But I cannot be reduced to anything objective. So there remains an element of inconceivability in the death of any person qua person.
But this cannot be made clear in the objectifying terms of the Discursive Framework. One cannot have a 'theory' about it. Our aporetic dyad above is insoluble. It is a sort of marker, this side of the Boundary, of the mystery of death and of spirit. We cannot speak of it, and so we must enter into silence, or, like, a positivist, deny the reality of the Transcendent entirely.
Any further understanding will not be discursive in nature. And so Merton is in one sense right: "contemplative discipline" is needed. All philosophy can do is show the way to the Boundary. Crossing it is not in her power. And to make up objectifying theories about the Far Side is arguably profanation.
An outstanding essay by Robert Royal on the many Mertons and their uneasy unity in one fleshly vehicle. There is of course Merton the Contemplative, the convert to Catholicism who, with the typical zeal of the convert, took it all the way to the austerities of Trappist monasticism, and that at a time (1941) when it was a more demanding and rigorous affair than today. In serious tension with the Contemplative, the Scribbler:
It did not help that Merton the Contemplative confronted Merton the Writer. Even for a man not vowed to silence, Merton's several dozen books would have been an extraordinary output. But adding the journals -- four volumes have now appeared and the whole will run to seven volumes totaling about 3,500 large pages -- we begin to glimpse a serious conflict. Can a man committed to the wordless apophatic way and a forgetting of self be preoccupied with recording-and publishing-every thought and act?
I live that tension myself very morning. For me it takes the form of a conflict between Athens and Benares, as I like to call it. Denk, denk, denk, scribble scribble, scribble from 2 AM on. But then at 4 AM, no later! I must tear myself away from the discursive desk and mount the black mat of meditation, going into reverse, as it were, moving from disciplined thinking to disciplined non-thinking.
Also in tension with the Contemplative, the Bohemian:
There were also other Mertons, among the more troublesome: the Bohemian. This Merton felt a constant need to be an outsider. When Merton lived in the world, it took the usual forms. He had aspirations to being an experimental writer and poet (his Collected Poems, which show real innovation but great unevenness, run to almost 1,000 pages). He listened to jazz, dabbled in leftist politics, hit the bottle pretty hard, smoked heavily, had his share of girlfriends, and did a bit of drawing. All relatively harmless, but some incongruous holdover bedeviled Merton the monk. Should a Trappist be interested in Henry Miller? Or follow Joan Baez? Or Bob Dylan? As late as 1959 (after eighteen years in the abbey), Merton was reading books like James Thurber's The Years with Ross, an account of life under Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker. The New Yorker of the fifties was more staid than its current incarnation, and Merton often claimed the chic ads reminded him of everything in the world he had fled. But there was something odd in a monk even being interested in a magazine like the New Yorker.
Also battling with the Contemplative and Quietist (in a broad sense of this term), a fourth Merton, the Social Activist who aligned easily with the Writer and the Bohemian:
In the 1960s that world [the world outside the monastic enclosure, the 'real' world in the parlance of the worldly] came to the fore in his work. The Contemplative who fled the world, however, was not always a good advisor for the Activist. The Contemplative had not fared well in European or American society, and had taken this as proof that those societies were not doing well either. This led him to a number of mistaken or exaggerated judgments. During the fifties he accepted a theory of the moral equivalence of the United States and the Soviet Union. The Vietnam War abroad and the civil rights struggle at home, he came to believe, revealed a totalitarian impulse in America and he wrote of the possible emergence of a Nazi-like racial regime in the United States. (Emphasis added)
Royal has it exactly right.
The frequent tendency of Merton the Activist to overstatement is telling. Merton was by background mostly a European. And lacking any experience of the moral realism and decency of most Americans, he tended to judge all of American society through the lens of heated political controversies and the usual intellectual complaints about the bourgeoisie. His essays on civil rights, for example, are heartfelt and penetrating, but are not even a very good description of the predicament of the American liberal. The kind of moderation Merton showed in spiritual and moral questions rarely appears in his social commentary. He was angry about political issues in the early 1960s. (Emphasis added)
Spot on, once again. Merton was in many ways a typical leftist intellectual alienated from and unappreciative of the country that allowed him to live his kind of life in his kind of way, as opposed to, say, being forced into a concentration camp and then put to death. The Commies were not all that kind to religion and religionists. You may recall that Edith Stein, another Catholic convert, became a Carmelite nun, but was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz. She was, by the way, a much better thinker than Merton.
Merton the Man is the uneasy unity of these four personae. His edifice is four-storied rather than seven, and I suppose 'story' could also be read as 'narrative' or 'script,' the Contemplative, the Writer, the Bohemian, and the Activist being as much multiply exemplifiable life-scripts as the competing personae of one particular man.
Intimately interwoven with these four Mertons is someone we are forced to call Merton the Man. This Fifth Business never entirely settled down. The Contemplative, as may be seen in painful detail in the journals, is constantly vacillating, though in his public work Merton displays spiritual mastery. The Writer is gifted, but so much so that he has a tendency toward glibness. The Bohemian Merton got the others into any number of scrapes, and the Activist Merton often got carried away by currents in the sixties that-in retrospect-were not entirely fair to American society. Yet when all is said and done, Merton remains one of the great contemplative spirits of the century.
Merton died young in Bangkok in 1968, at the age of 53. He was there for a conference. Those of us who have attended and contributed to academic conferences know how dubious they are, and how destabilizing to a centered life. I tend to think that it was the Writer, The Bohemian, and the Activist who, in the synergy of an unholy trinity, swamped the Contemplative and caused him to be lured away from his circumscribed but true monastic orbit.
If he had lived on into the '70s would Merton have remained a monk? Who knows? So many men and women of the cloth abandoned their vocations and vows at that time.* In his Asian journal he writes that he intended to return to Gethsemani. It is nevertheless reasonable to speculate that he would not have lasted as a monk much longer. The Zeitgeist would have got to him, and the synergy of the unholy trinity just mentioned. Not to mention the transports of earthly love:
The mid-1960s brought him to the brink of disaster. Merton had a back problem requiring an operation at a Catholic hospital in Louisville. When he recovered from the anesthesia, he was anxious that he had missed daily communion. He began making notes on Meister Eckhart. His long- desired hermitage awaited him back at Gethsemani. To the eye, it was business as usual.
But a pretty young student nurse came in. A Catholic, she knew of Merton from a book her father had given her. Something erupted between them- even though she had a fiance in Chicago. On leaving the hospital, he wrote her about needing friendship. She wrote back, instructed by him to mark the envelope "conscience matter" (lest the superiors read the correspondence). Under "conscience matter," Merton sent a declaration of love. Thus began a series of deceptions, and Merton only narrowly avoided the shipwreck of his monastic vows because of the impossibility of the whole situation.
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*I think of the Jesuits and others who had jobs in philosophy because they were assigned to teach it at Catholic colleges back in the day when such colleges were more than nominally Catholic, and how they left their religious orders -- but kept their jobs! Nice work if you can get it.
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