Gospel & Universe ♒️ A River Journey

Riverboats & Sheep

From Rabelais to Sartre, the currents get rough indeed. But the French are not alone in their attempt to navigate these currents. From China to Peru philosophers have dealt with the existential problems of existence — from the steady flow of the Yangtze and the changing course of the Yellow River, to the mighty Ganges and the invisible Saraswati, to the five river systems that empty into Lake Titicata and the union of the thousand rivers that flow into the Amazon.

Two of the closest rivers to the Seine are the Rhine and the Thames. This geographic proximity works on a metaphorical level as well: there are few peoples closer to the French than the Germans and English in terms of the history of science and empiricism, the Ages of Reason and Industrialization, Deism and Naturalism, and the philosophical challenges of phenomenology and existentialism. In these pages I don’t attempt to sound the depths of the Rhine or German philosophy. I make the occasional reference to German writers and philosophers, but I don’t read German and my knowledge of German philosophy is woefully inadequate. I will, however, highlight the tight connection between French and English thinkers in their attempts to come to term with the uncertainty of both our knowledge and our existence. I should add that when I write French and English I include Québecois, Romands, Wallons, Scottish, Irish, American, Canadian, Australian, etc. For instance, in the following section I compare Pope and Voltaire to the American writer Mark Twain and to the English band Pink Floyd.

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In his memoir Life on the Mississippi (1883), Mark Twain compares a riverboat passenger who gazes on the pretty surface of the water, to a riverboat pilot who looks gravely at the surface of the water in order to gauge the dangers below.

Samuel Clemens adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain from the nautical call indicating two fathoms (twelve feet), the depth required for a steamboat to travel safely. For the riverboat pilot, as opposed to the passenger, what’s below the water matters most:

[the passenger saw — in the past tense — the surface of the water that was] broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver …

[the pilot sees — in present tense — that] … those tumbling ‘boils’ show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the ‘break’ from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats…

Twain’s pilot has a skeptical or realistic viewpoint because his job is to look for troubles and dangers. Yet do the rest of us want to look at the world this way, or do we want to maintain an idealistic viewpoint? Do we want to understand things that make us feel uncomfortable or unimportant, or that disclose an inconvenient truth? Will we say with Voltaire’s character Pangloss that it’s a lovely river, with its tumbling rings and its long, ruffled trail that shone like silver?

In Candide (1759), Pangloss’ name reflects his tendency to describe (or gloss) everything (or pan), including even the most horrible things, as if they were good. In creating Pangloss, Voltaire attacks the mathematician and philosopher Leibniz, who argued that whatever faults the world may have, it’s still the best of all possible worlds. Or, as Pope put it in An Essay on Man (1734), All partial evil is universal good. Voltaire exaggerates Leibniz’ position to the point that even the horrifying Lisbon earthquake of 1755 fits into a Grand Scheme of Things. Yet Voltaire’s point is a valid one: to gloss the world like Pangloss does, translating all its terrors into hidden beauties, is to see things only from the viewpoint of a passenger.

Or is the passenger right to see the world this way? Is there in deepest fact some Field or Unity that lies beneath the struggle and the angst of conventional perception and rational understanding? Is there a substratum of Truth that both includes and transcends the brutality and squalor? Is Pope right when he says that “All nature is but art, unknown to thee; / All chance, direction, which thou canst not see”? And is ignorance a protective veil that allows us to live out our days, happy as lambs, ignorant of the nearby slaughterhouse?

Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate,
All but the page prescribed, their present state:
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:
Or who could suffer being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.
Oh, blindness to the future! kindly given,
That each may fill the circle, marked by Heaven:
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

Are Pope and Pangloss right here, or is the truth a more brutal one? Is blissful ignorance an insult to truth? By not looking deeply into the dark side of things, are we like sheep, skipping blithely into the Valley of Doom? Or worse, are we the monsters (or wolves) who herd these sheep, and then cut them up with our circular saws in our secret horror-house of slaughter? Pink Floyd plumbs this dark Orwellian depth in the 1977 song “Sheep,” which contrasts the innocence of sheep with the wolfishness of humans:

The question remains, Is there some meaning in or beneath the war and the slaughter? Or are we like the soldiers who in the song “The Bravery of Being Out of Range” (1992) are “Sick of the mess they find / On their desert stage”? As Roger Waters says, “the question is vexed.”

Believers find a comforting Truth beneath the grim realities. Metaphorically speaking, every river is the Jordan or the Ganges, and all rivers eventually lead to the fullness of the Sea.

Realists, skeptics, and atheists keep their eyes peeled on what’s happening in the depths of the river, twenty feet below. Yet they don’t think that a grand Truth is down there waiting for them. Rather, they’re convinced that there are only facts and contingencies. Truth is a practical, logical extension of what they see, not an otherworldy conjecture.

Agnostics suspect that it’s one or the other: one Truth with a capital T or a billion truths with a small t. Yet agnostics can’t bring themselves to say which it is. Perhaps it’s both. In any case, they find it impossible to be the judge of truth, because they are — by necessity or by Fate — in endless error hurled. They are deeply conscious that they reason but to err, whether they think too little or too much. Whether humans are the world’s glory or its jest, they are certainly its riddle:

Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too 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 hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

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Next: Fry Day: The Atheist Fish

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