Gospel & Universe ❤️ Three Little Words

Que Sais-je?

These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they 
        are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe.

— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 17

Philosophers might argue that before you can say I don’t know you have to look deeply into the overwhelming question, What is the meaning of life? You have to understand Creation and evolution. You have to know how philosophy travelled over the globe and into history, from the existential angst of Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia to the cafés of Montparnasse, where the well-dressed hominids repeat the overwhelming question as they reach for bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and ibuprofen.

Yet Montaigne says that a child can understand philosophy. It’s an attitude of open exploration and doubt, not an intellectual achievement. It’s the ability to ask the question, What do I really know? We rightly admire the great Athenian philosophers, yet they thought the planets rotate around the Earth, and they had no clue how important the brain is or how it works (it wasn’t until 1888 that Ramón y Cajal demonstrated the operations of the neuron). Now it appears that the brain is our control centre, and that our sun is only a tiny dot in the enormous pointilliste canvas of the universe. Yet we still don’t know how consciousness is born. Or what gravity is. Or how big the universe is. Or what it all means. Those who think they know it all still resemble the comical figures in Joshua Reynold’s 1751 painting, Parody of Raphael’s School of Athens:

Often, those who spend the most time answering What does it all mean? are the ones who have the most difficulty admitting that the more they know, the more they know that they don’t know. And yet this maxim is both logical and inevitable. Socrates said, The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing. I would amend this: One of the requirements of wisdom is to understand that whatever you know is part of an expanding awareness of the unknown.

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Ch'eng of North Gate said to the Yellow Emperor, "When Your Majesty performed the Hsien-ch'ih music in the wilds around Lake Tung-t'ing, I listened, and at first I was afraid. I listened some more and felt weary, and then I listened to the end and felt confused. Overwhelmed, speechless, I couldn't get hold of myself."

"It's not surprising you felt that way," said the emperor. [… “My music] begins with fear, and because of this fear there is dread, as of a curse. Then I add the weariness, and because of the weariness there is compliance. I end it all with confusion, and because of the confusion there is stupidity. And because of the stupidity there is the Way, the Way that can be lifted up and carried around wherever you go." (Zhuangzi, trans. Burton Watson, from this site)

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The infinite, which has no final definition or meaning, can be understood in at least two ways, both of which are entirely open for the agnostic to explore. On one hand infinity can be taken as an invitation to explore the spiritual unknown, as we see in mystics, Daoists, Hindus, Buddhists, Sufis, Romantic poets, Transcendentalists, etc. Here the lack of final knowledge is an enticement to spiritual adventure. The Grand Mystery emphasizes the ineffable, infinite qualities of Being, whether one calls this God or Brahman, the Way or the Great Spirit. On the other hand, infinity can be understood as the relative world, where no essence lies hidden within or beyond the physical spaces which extend infinitely into outer space. This world is a fascinating, awesome one, yet just as Heaven has its Hell, the wondrous physical world can also appear meaninglessness and chaotic. For existentialist philosophers, it leads to an absurd situation where we yearn for meaning in a universe that doesn’t supply it.

The French have a strong literary tradition in which they explore the relation between belief (with its consoling meaning but also its sin and guilt, its damnation and salvation) and skepticism (with its freedom, but also its doubt and anxiety). We see the depth of this French tradition in the rebellion of Rabelais and the skepticism of Montaigne in the 16th century, in the mix of mathematics and faith in Pascal and Descartes in the 17th, and in the global awareness of Montesquieu and Voltaire in the 18th. Deeply influenced by the science and empiricism of England (especially Newton, Locke, and Hume), the French look deeply and critically into the nature of belief and society. The skeptical self-critical angle becomes quite sharp in Montesquieu, Pope, Swift, and Voltaire, and it it’s easy to see their influence on the 20th century existentialism of Sartre and Camus.

Voltaire’s distant God and the alienation of Sartre can be seen in Alain Bashung’s 2008 song, “Like Lego” / “Comme un lego.” Bashung’s song is here interpreted by Gérard Manset and accompanied with stunning and sobering visuals:

Quelqu’un a inventé ce jeu / Someone invented this game
Terrible, cruel, captivant / Terrible, cruel, captivating
Les maisons, les lacs, les continents / The houses, the lakes, the continents
Comme un lego avec du vent / Like lego with wind […]

Voyez-vous tous ces humains? / Do you see all these humans?
Danser ensemble à se donner la main / Dancing together, hand in hand
S’embrasser dans le noir à cheveux blonds / Kissing each other in the dark with their blond hair
À ne pas voir demain comme ils seront / So as not to see what they will be tomorrow

The notion that someone invented this game echoes Newton, Descartes, and other Enlightenment thinkers who saw God as a Clockmaker who sets the universe in motion but doesn’t seem to care about its day-to-day ticking. Swift asks in Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1704), “Who that sees a little paltry mortal, droning and dreaming, and drivelling to a multitude, can think it agreeable to common sense that either Heaven or Hell should be put to the trouble of influence or inspection upon what he is about?” Likewise, the dervish in Voltaire’s Candide (1759) asks, “When His Highness sends a ship to Egypt, does it bother him if the mice on board are comfortable or not?”

The Deist position lies somewhere between the traditional Christian view that God cares deeply about every human soul, and the Naturalist view that develops toward the end of the 19th century, in which the universe is controlled by a Nature that’s indifferent to humans. Agnostics doubt that anyone really knows if the universe is one way or the other, or if it’s something in between. As a result, they pay attention to the questions on the traditional theist side and to those on the scientific side, as well as to the questions that lie between. One thing seems clear to them, however: even the most educated and subtle thinkers don’t agree on any final Ultimate Truth.

Agnostics doubt that so-called experts are always expert, and that those who profess to be illuminated are in fact enlightened. Maybe they are, or maybe they aren’t. Nor do agnostics imagine that the common human being is any more enlightened. The educated may delude themselves, yet uneducated people are equally prone to error. In his Essay on Man (1733), Pope makes it clear that thinking too little or thinking too much can have the same result:

Alike in ignorance, his reason such;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Whether he thinks to little, or too much;
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confused;
Still by himself, abused or disabused;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

The educated may be in endless error hurled, yet so too are the uneducated, who generally aren’t even aware of the historical and cultural context of their own beliefs. They aren’t in a position to say This is the right way or That isn’t the right way because they haven’t taken a good look at the wide variety of ways on offer. They can assert what they consider a universal truth, yet their truth is immediately outflanked by others that make just as much sense, make different assumptions, or have different histories.

Agnostics argue that the learned and the unlearned are in the same basic position: they’re both faced by an expanding universe of greater understanding. Sometimes learned people are hoodwinked by their intellect into thinking that they have the key to a greater, wider, more sophisticated understanding. Sometimes unlearned people have deep gut feelings or ways of thinking that give peace or insight, which they then express as a universal truth. Agnostics are skeptical of these two extremes. They’re skeptical of any key to an ultimate understanding, any pronouncement about the Secret, or any claim to universal Truth. They argue that what really counts is to acknowledge the vastness of the universe which lies beyond whatever insight they’ve gained.

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I ask as a fool who doesn’t know his own spirit: / Where are the hidden traces of the gods? — Rg Veda 1.164 (trans. R. Panikkar)

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