Gospel & Universe 🧩 Introduction

A Literary Approach

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Literature & Experience

In exploring agnosticism I emphasize literature, yet I also use a fair amount of history and philosophy.

While philosophy and history play crucial roles, I don’t treat them in scholarly ways. For instance, although I refer to Locke and Hume, I’m more likely to view empiricism and skepticism (two main influences on agnosticism) through the writing of Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, and Voltaire. Nor do I attempt to cover topics such as phenomenology from Husserl to Sartre, as Sarah Bakewell does so well in At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails. Yet I tend to assume phenomenological and existential perspectives in general. It seems clear — at least ever since our understanding of evolution, neurons, and DNA — that however abstractly we conceive our selves, our conceptions are ultimately tethered to the physical reality of our bodies. Our sense of identity and understanding comes from our moment in time and space, whatever other dimensions might exist.

The Stanford online (and free) Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a helpful summary of the relation between phenomenology and philosophy of mind, both of which lie behind much of what I write:

Traditional phenomenology has focused on subjective, practical, and social conditions of experience. Recent philosophy of mind, however, has focused especially on the neural substrate of experience, on how conscious experience and mental representation or intentionality are grounded in brain activity. It remains a difficult question how much of these grounds of experience fall within the province of phenomenology as a discipline. Cultural conditions thus seem closer to our experience and to our familiar self-understanding than do the electrochemical workings of our brain, much less our dependence on quantum-mechanical states of physical systems to which we may belong. The cautious thing to say is that phenomenology leads in some ways into at least some background conditions of our experience.

Once neurologists get a fuller understanding of “the electrochemical workings of our brain” and of the “quantum-mechanical states of physical systems to which we may belong,” we’ll have a better picture of the way we experience, think, and feel. At that point we’ll most likely come up with powerful theories about how the brain relates to belief systems. This may also involve a fuller understanding of the cosmic forces operating in the universe. Things like gravity and light are still somewhat mysterious, yet not as mysterious as dark matter or whatever we might find at the end of CERN’s Collider or the James Webb Space Telescope. In such a context, it’s somewhat easier to see the cultural conditions of our existence, and leave the scientific angle for future generations.

In this sense literature shares a great deal more with philosophy than it does with science. Anthony Kenny writes in his History of Western Philosophy that it’s tempting to see philosophy as a gradual process that culminates in “whatever philosophical system is currently in fashion. But this temptation should be resisted. There is no force that guarantees philosophical progress in any particular direction.” What Kenny says here of philosophy is easy to see when one thinks of literature: few writers in the last four hundred years come close to Dante or Shakespeare. Speaking in very general terms, one might say that while the insights of great scientists are not forgotten, they are superseded by more developed experimentation and verification. On the other hand, the insights of great philosophers and writers are neither forgotten nor surpassed.

This is even more true in literature than in philosophy, since much of what early philosophers debated is now better understood. For example, Aristotle’s subject might be the qualities of Nature, yet his arguments are not as convincing as they might be if he had known the shape of the solar system or envisioned the operations of DNA. The same is somewhat true of writers who have at the forefront of their writing an erroneous view of basic scientific facts — such as Dante with his mountain on the other side of the planet and his heavens rotating above it. Yet Dante’s geographical and astronomical errors don’t lessen his literary value. Moreover, literature stays with him, sometimes even concocting ways in which his errors may be insights from a psychological, aesthetic, or poetic point of view.

By and large writers aren’t trying to get at what’s true in a geographical, astronomical, or scientific sense. Rather, their job is (to borrow from Shakespeare) “to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” For instance, in the following excerpt from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, (1879-80), it doesn’t really matter whether or not Dostoevsky understands insects, or if angels exist. His references to them aren’t treatises on entomology or theology, but rather entry points into the jammed psyche and the conundrum of human experience:

At bounteous Nature’s kindly breast, / All things that breathe drink Joy, / And birds and beasts and creeping things / All follow where She leads. / Her gifts to man are friends in need, / The wreath, the foaming must, / To angels — vision of God’s throne, / To insects — sensual lust.

But enough poetry! I am in tears; let me cry. It may be foolishness that everyone would laugh at. But you won’t laugh. Your eyes are shining, too. Enough poetry. I want to tell you now about the insects to whom God gave ‘sensual lust.’ To insects — sensual lust. / I am that insect, brother, and it is said of me specially. All we Karamazovs are such insects, and, angel as you are, that insect lives in you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood. Tempests, because sensual lust is a tempest worse than a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am a cultivated man, brother, but I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s terrible what mysteries there are! Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve them as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty! I can’t endure the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What’s still more awful is that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence.

Writers, playwrights, and poets probe into what we are, regardless of what we believe or what the theories of the moment might say about the universe, the earth, human geography, or the human mind. Shakespeare and Dostoevsky aren’t writing to advance or confirm a theory; they’re writing to explore the variegated dimensions of what it means to be a human being.

It’s in this explorative sense that literature is very close to agnosticism, which doesn’t aim to advance or confirm a particular viewpoint. The most fundamental operational principle of such exploration is the ability to understand (or experience) one thing and yet be willing to suspend one’s understanding in order to consider (or experience) the next thing. I explore this notion in Critical Distance, Montaigne, Pyrrho, Zhuangzi, & Hegel, Whitman & Byron, and Keats & the Romantics (all in the chapter ❤️ Three Little Words). This jumping from one understanding to the next requires letting go of the former at least long enough to grasp the latter, to see if it’s worth holding onto. In science this is sometimes more difficult than it is in poetry, since scientific knowledge is cumulative, and one feels wary of letting go established facts. In philosophy and literature, cumulative knowledge is important and can’t be ignored, yet it isn’t the main thing. Of course Plato and Dostoevsky are making arguments and challenging the received wisdoms of their day, yet the insights they give into the human condition transcend any specific point they make about their day and age. Their emphasis on human experience — on Whitman’s question, “To be in any form, what is that?” — remains with us now and will probably remain with us in 500 years.

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I see literature as largely phenomenological, that is, as an account of existence as it’s experienced by the self. A short poem can take us quickly into abstractions, but it’s largely about the poet’s subjective experience. Even when poets break the link between self and world, it’s usually to suggest how the self sees or experiences this break. Drama moves closer to the space between selves, yet even here the audience sees the dynamic between characters in terms of subjective selves responding to other subjective selves. Novels and long narrative poems are perhaps better at distancing the self from larger historical or epistemological concerns, yet they also highlight the experience of history and meaning. Otherwise, the novels and long narrative poems start to look less like literature and more like history or philosophy.

Literature has the virtue of being able to explore the relation of self to meaning without having to systematize this exploration. The situation of literature is somewhat paradoxical: while it’s almost always seen in a historical and cultural context, one of its most primal assumptions is that there isn’t always a rational explanation or a coherent context for the experience which lies at its core. Or if there is an explanation, the explanation could go on forever. The problem with explanations in this case is that they rely on causes, and in finding causes there’s no end in sight.

What recent language theorists call deferral of meaning or différance in regard to the bottomless meaning of words (or the endless origins of etymology) was analyzed by Zhuangzi in the 4th century BC in regard to action and identity. The Penumbra (the edge of a shadow) asks the Shadow why it moves. The Shadow tells the Penumbra what causes him to move, and what causes that cause to move, and what causes the cause of that cause to move… Finally, the Shadow says, How can I know why I do one thing and not another? This is the preamble to Zhaungzi’s famous butterfly scenario: a man wakes up and wonders if he just dreamed he was a butterfly or if he’s a butterfly dreaming he’s a man. Zhuangzi sees the self in the same way post-structuralists see words: with indeterminate meanings and with no clear points of reference or origin. This is similar to the way the existentialist Camus sees the self: as water running through our fingers.

In the light of such constant metamorphosis of word and meaning, even a short poem becomes like the creek-water that runs away from us down to a river, from there to a swirling pond, and from there, eventually, down to the sea. Even where we imagine the water stays in the same place, it changes in front of our eyes. And the closer we look at this still water, even for a micro-second as it gathers in a pond, the more we see the molecules change and the atoms whirl. Chomei’s short poem about the foam in a river’s pool can be applied to the changes that lie within all apparently changeless structures:

A larger work of literature, like Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), becomes like Somadeva’s Ocean of the Streams of Stories, with endless origins, combinations, re-combinations, and ambiguities. My reference to the 11th century Kashmiri writer brings up an important point about cultural time and space: the Indian tradition from Rg Veda to Ocean of the Streams of Stories reminds us, in the same way Zhuangzi’s stories remind us, that this business of indeterminacy and metamorphosis doesn’t start with Ovid or end with Kafka. It’s a global phenomenon, as basic as the changing nature of language, culture, and life itself. Literature is simply a discipline which tends to embrace this constant change, as well as the ambiguity which points to one understanding as well as the next.

While the Classical epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante presented a coherent view of cultural conditions, in general literature doesn’t seek to bring all the meanings of human experience together into one system. Writers like Dante and Milton depict a cosmic scheme, a sort of universalist Christian epistemology, yet their Arno and Thames eventually flow into the sea, and the European currents of meaning remain an endless flow of causes and effects. In this study I return quite often to the epic tradition, pointing out how it presents a universal view, yet ends up reflecting a particular view — a many-sided and insightful, yet particular view.

One can see this especially in the extended water metaphors that start in the great rivers of Mesopotamia and end in the endless currents of the Milky Way. In the world’s first epic, Gilgamesh, the afterlife is 1. a meaningless scrabble in a dark underground, 2. a boat that sinks into the Euphrates, and 3. an island on which no humans are allowed to live. Gilgamesh is taken to this island by the ferryman Urshanabi, and when they get there Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that humans (except for his wife and him) are not allotted eternal life. We see a similar water metaphor in Greece and Rome, where the gods change and the notion of crossing water to the after life becomes ever more distinct, changing at last into the Christian version — a version so positive in its idealism that it’s almost Egyptian. Then, after a thousand years, Copernicus and others demonstrate that the heavens never whirled around the earth, and that the earth was never still. It takes several centuries before the implications of this fact sink in, that is, before the epic itself fractures, and the sea journey becomes a solipsistic circling of the earth. The grand epic meanings get lost in the endless cantos of Don Juan, where the epic tropes are debunked and the story has no end. Decades after this, the sea journey that gives meaning becomes that of the Beagle. Darwin’s empirical reality of Galapagan finches supersedes the metaphorical idealism of doves. This is especially true a decade later when cuneiform is deciphered: the birds Noah sent forth from his Ark are the same birds that Utnapishtim sent forth from his Ark. In the end, the water metaphors chronicle the changes in universal meaning rather than the transcendent endurance of any one Grand Meaning.

Changing the metaphor from water to cloth, one might say that writers like Byron and Joyce take the tightly woven epic threads of Dante and Milton and weave them into other tapestries, baskets, bedroom rugs, Cairo cotton sheets, and flying carpets. If there is a literary philosophy, it’s like agnosticism in that it weaves and unravels simultaneously. Tying literature down to cause-and-effect systems is like tying life to any given philosophy or religion: you can do it, but the boat slips away and sails downriver.

Or, to return to Japanese symbolism, it’s like trying to fix the forms and colours that a goddess mixes into the watery world of cloud, ocean, and river:

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