New Year's Resolutions and a Dichotomy

The Marginalian put out some very nice New Year’s resolutions.  This is a weekly blog by Maria Popova, whose mission is to remind us of the poetry of life.  I’ve subscribed for years and heartily recommend it.

I list a few of her suggestions here and then muse about one of the authors she quotes, Soren Kierkegaard.  I like that her list goes beyond the typical weight loss, drink less, poop perfect stools.  (Actually, that’s not a bad one.  When we are regular, we are quite happy.)

1.  Cultivate honorable relationships.  The Marginalian is built on offering little snippets from great and soulful writers.  Popova gets this one from the poet Adrienne Rich:

An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

2.  Make room for fruitful monotony.  Here some thoughts from the English philosopher Bertrand Russell:

The pleasures of childhood should in the main be such as the child extracts from his environment by means of some effort and inventiveness… A child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony. 

I do not mean that monotony has any merits of its own; I mean only that certain good things are not possible except where there is a certain degree of monotony… A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.

3. Pay attention to the world.  There are many artists one could choose from here.  She goes with a quote from the American public intellectual Susan Sontag:

I’m often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: “Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”

Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth than I thought of some more recipes for writer’s virtue.

For instance: “Be serious.” By which I meant: Never be cynical. And which doesn’t preclude being funny.

4.  Resist absentminded business.  Soren Kirkegaard, a theological philosopher from the mid-19th century, wrote:

Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.

The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself. But one can be absent, obviously, either in the past or in the future. This adequately circumscribes the entire territory of the unhappy consciousness.

These words grabbed my extra attention as I’ve recently been contemplating the dichotomy of the subjective and objective.  Kierkegaard was a big fan of exploring the subjective, our inner world.  

I remember being first introduced to this topic in primary school, both in literature and grammar.  We learned we should pick up on the “voice” when reading a poem or a novel.  Is it in the first person or the third person?  Who is the third person, I wondered.   Well, it’s the voice outside the first and second person.  It’s often called the “all-knowing” perspective or the “all-seeing eye of god.”  The third person is an important narrative device in literature because the narrator is aware of the personal thoughts of all the characters.  One scholar said “novel reading is mind reading.” Of course, it’s a fake perspective, but convincing.

Learning basic grammar, we became aware of the “subject” and the “object.”  The subject is the one who is being or acting.  The object is thought or acted upon.  Little did I know then that the core metaphysics of the Western mind was based on this basic grammar.

If everything we perceive happens in our mind, can we get outside the subjective?  If we’re honest, we must say that there is no objective.  We can ever be only inside our minds.   The best we can achieve is what Karl Popper called “inter-subjectivity.”  This is exemplified by good journalism always quoting two sources and peer review in science, multiple people agreeing on what they see. There is no all-seeing eye of god.

At least not one that we can access.  Or can we?  What about the objectivity of facts, of a world we measure, such as the distance from Earth to the moon?  Surely, if all the humans were to vacation on Mars, the Earth would still be here, rotating around the sun.  Just as if we went on vacation to France, our homes would still exist in Southern Utah.  That’s not only comforting, it’s “real.”  The house we left that had a leaky roof will still have a leak in the roof when we return.   We cannot say, well, in our minds there is no leaky roof.  We must, in the end, get the roof fixed.

There is a contradiction here that, precocious as I was, I did not pick up in grammar school.  This contradiction has led to most of the philosophical ideas in the history of men and women and non-binaries. Descartes set up the dichotomy for the modern era when he surmised that at the core of our existence is the thinking “I”; for him, this was the ultimate reality.  It led to much rational thought and perhaps the American and French Revolutions, both expressions of the individual's rights.  

However, 20th-century Anglo-American philosophy led by the English philosopher Bertrand Russell (quoted above) has increasingly pointed us toward the objective.  “Hogwash!”  they say about Descarte’s dualism.  There is only the objective perspective, which is that of science. Russel argued that the big shift came with the Copernican revolution when man discovered that he was not at the center of the universe. There is no magical “ghost in the machine.” We are only machines.  The late Donald Davidson went so far as to call the subjective “a myth.”  In our world of accelerating scientific knowledge, the objective is now the assumed position among Anglo-American thinkers.

European thought has been less eager to crown the objective as king of the realm, which brings me back to Kierkegaard.  This lonely writer from Denmark can be an intriguing figure to counteract today’s fetishizing of the "scientific objective.”  (Speaking of Denmark, there was that prince two hundred years earlier who agonized like no one before over the subjective/objective duality: “to be or not to be, that is the question.” Was Hamlet’s father’s ghost just “in his head?”) Raised in a well-to-do family of society in Copenhagen, Kierkegaard had a good education.  He quickly decided at university that he would not be a philosopher or a scientist—both those paths would be too stale for him.   He was interested only in the subjective, in the “single individual,” preferring concrete human reality to abstract thinking.  He went into theology passionately cultivating the belief that despite the Copernican revolution we are at the center of the universe, by definition.

Kierkegaard's theology is highly unique.  He was against the Church of Denmark and believed that Christianity is manifest in the individual life.    

“Science and scholarship want to teach that becoming objective is the way. Christianity teaches that the way is to become subjective, to become a subject,” he wrote.

While scientists learn through observation of “the world," Kierkegaard argued that observation is personal and most revealing of the inner workings of the soul.  He could be quite good with metaphor.

Imagine hidden in a very plain setting a secret chest in which the most precious is placed—there is a spring that must be pressed, but the spring is concealed, and the pressure must be of a certain force so that an accidental pressure cannot be sufficient. The hope of eternity is concealed within a person's innermost being in the same way, and hardship is the pressure. When the pressure is put on the concealed spring, and forcefully enough, the content appears in all its glory!

The trend in philosophy today is to question the self, again demonstrated by a new book from Stanford neuroscientist, Robert Sapolsky. “Determined" argues that the self and our free will are illusions.  Life is determined by the myriad causal events which led to this moment even though we sense that it is “us" who is making a decision.   This, of course, means that there can be no blame or praise for an individual’s actions, and our system of justice is no good. But unlike Hamlet, Sapolsky does not acknowledge being torn on the subject.

No one really believes that there is no free will or that the Supreme Court is a waste of time.  It is mere rationalization and shows the limitations—the danger?— of adopting the  “objective” position.    

Is it not the objective that is the illusion?  All science is built on individuals imagining the fictitious realm of the objective, that the third person is more real than the first person.  But it is just that, imagination.   The objective position, it turns out, works very well to advance scientific knowledge, but it is not great at developing a rich meaning in our lives.  Kierkegaard already perceived this in the mid-nineteenth century when science was much younger and less dominant. His writing reminds us of the fertile ground in each of us.

The fact that we are on the far side of one of the hundred billion galaxies in the universe says very little about the universe within us. My New Year’s resolution is to read more Kierkegaard and to take better care of “the self” and that inner world of relationships and beauty that exists beyond the realm of fact.

When it is said, "you shall love your neighbor as yourself," this contains what is presupposed, that every person loves himself. Thus, Christianity which by no means begins, as do those high flying thinkers, without presuppositions, nor with a flattering presupposition, presupposes this. Dare we then deny that it is as Christianity presupposes?”