Gospel & Universe ✝︎ Saint Francis: Pascal 4
Zhuangzi in Tipasa
Zhuangzi’s Pivot - Consider Everything - Thou Shalt Choose - Albert, Geoffrey, & John
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“Les doutes, c’est ce que nous avons de plus intime” / “Doubts, these are what we have that are most intimate" — Carnet, Camus
“Un homme est toujours la proie de ses vérités” / "A man is always the prey of his truths." — Le Mythe de Sisyphe
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Zhuangzi’s Pivot
In the previous pages I advanced objections to Pascal’s notion that the safest bet is to believe in God. Here, I’d like to conclude by suggesting an opposite paradigm: Zhuangzi’s pivot. I’ll then circle back to Pascal, suggesting that he’s not alone in forcing his readers into a false dichotomy: Christian existentialists, French existentialists, and New Atheists also present us with similar dichotomies. Camus’ version of existentialism is less insistent than the others, however, and strays closest to agnosticism. Camus’ writing is tinged with Romanticism, and echoes what Keats called negative capability.
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Zhuangzi’s paradigm of the pivot of the Dao helps us shift away from the dichotomy that pits belief against disbelief. The 3rd century BC writer opens up a third possibility, a continual openness which can explore belief and disbelief, as well as an infinite number of other positions. Zhuangzi’s pivot doesn't seek to cement any particular truth about philosophy, religion, art, phenomenology, science, or any other field of exploration or experimentation:
Are there or are there not two views, that and this? They have not found their point of correspondency, called the pivot of the Tao. As soon as one finds this pivot, one stands in the centre of the ring of thought, where one can respond endlessly to the changing views — endlessly to those affirming, and endlessly to those denying. (The Texts of Taoism, trans. James Legge)
From this pivot, which is a state of being as well as a state of mind, we can respond without end to the dichotomous opposites, the half-way and quarter-way positions, as well as all the imperatives that others feel so strongly about.
While Zhuangzi's pivot is fascinating, I would disengage the notion from its Daoist context, since this envisions an unknowable God-like Force in nature. Yet in light of Pascal’s Wager, Zhuangzi’s Dao is crucial, as it clearly doesn’t see the deepest and most powerful Force in the universe as a jealous force. Quite to the contrary, both Laozi and the later Zhuangzi see the Dao as benefitting all creatures yet uniinterested in taking credit or getting accolades. It certainly doesn’t demend belief and there is certainly no unspoken threat of punishment for those who don’t believe. Nevertheless, the Dao is a Daoist axiom, and hence it situates Zhuangzi's pivot on the periphery of agnosticism, that is, on the edge of the doubt that has no fixed position.
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Consider Everything
An agnostic might pivot toward the Dao, lean toward it, inhabit it if possible, lean away from it, and consider its opposite, still open to any magnetic pull the Dao may have. He might enter the empty spaces of the Dao, yet also also those of the anarchist in frenzy, the sentimentalist in nostaglia, the Franciscan monk in a field of flowers, or Pascal hovering over the abyss.
The agnostic might become the butterfly, dreaming it was a human slumped over a rock, asleep, 2300 years ago in Ancient China. The sky is the colour of honey and the leaves turn into wings setting off for the far-off mountains. When they reach the far summit, Zhuangzi wakes up and thinks about the seventh degree of separation.
The agnostic stares up into the honey-coloured trees along the avenue, and into the half-filled cup of coffee that sits on the table. The table is perfectly still, and the well of the cup has a million layers of subatomic particles and waves, yet its surface is perfectly still. Both the table and the surface of the well are travelling along the circumference of the Earth at 300 metres a second.
The pivot becomes the stool on which the agnostic swivels, and the ring of thought becomes the cafe, or rain in the streets outside, or the oceans of rain beyond the farthest ocean, just as Buddha said it would. Go to the fathest shore, and the shore beyond that.
Zhuangzi swivels away from the endless shores, and remembers that the Buddha and he had no argument. He came one day, over the Western hills, and set up shop in some temple down the street. He had a great sense of humour, that rolly-polly one. For two thousand years Buddhism and Daoism have coexisted, even including that party-pooper Confucius, to create what many refer to as the Chinese religion, itself a circle of thought, flung from Lumbini and Anhui, spinning around the Yangte and the cosmos. Still, Zhuangzi almost regrets making fun of Confucius.
And as for Pascal, that Frenchman is thousands of miles away, over the Ganges and faraway, past the Black Sea and the vampire castles of Romania. And yet no shore separates them.
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Thou Shalt Choose
Pascal tells us that we must bet on belief or disbelief, yet he doesn’t offer the possibility of continual doubt. If there’s a pivot, it’s stuck on two opposite positions, and the odds are stacked so that one chooses one direction over the other. He says “It’s necessary to bet. / Il faut parier.” According to him, we’re hovering over an abyss, unable to find certainty, and the only thing that can fill this abyss is the mystery of God. In a fragment from Chapter 28 of Pensées, he writes:
… there was once in man a true happiness, of which there now remains only an empty mark or trace, which he tries vainly to fill with everything around him, searching in absent things the salvation he can’t find in present things, which aren’t up to the task because an infinite gulf can only be filled by an object that’s infinite and unchanging, that is, by God. / … il y a eu autrefois dans l’homme un véritable bonheur, dont il ne lui reste maintenant que la marque et la trace toute vide et qu’il essaye inutilement de remplir de tout ce qui l’environne, recherchant des choses absentes les secours qu’il n’obtient pas des présentes, mais qui en sont toutes incapables parce que ce gouffre infini ne peut être rempli que par un objet infini et immuable, c’est-à-dire que par Dieu même.
For Pascal, the logical choice is to believe in God, who is the only thing that can fill the emptiness of man.
Christian existentialists like Kierkegaard conclude much the same, yet take longer to get there: we can't obtain certain knowledge of ourselves, the world, or God, so we should therefore make a leap of faith. As in Dostoevsky, the existential Christian has doubts, anguishes, and self-loathings that are insightful, at times exquisite. Yet their versions of angst lead inevitably to despair, which can only be countered by belief in a redeeming God. Christian existentialists appear to escape the dichotomy of essentialism vs. existentialism, yet they only do so by leaping from an existentialist world to an essentialist one, a one-way trip that lands them in the theistic and essentialist camp, despite their initial existential premises.
They do what Pascal did hundred of years before them: seeing a chaotic world full of uncertainty and realizing that it’s impossible to find an ultimate meaning in such a world, they grab hold of the old Christian notion that God supplies the only possible escape from the predicament of the human condition. Once they've made the leap they have a foot on both sides, yet their belief weighs squarely on the essentialist side, even if they have no poof whatsoever that spirit or God exist. It simply has to be. People may call them existentialists, yet their conclusions are essentialist in nature. There may be a tension that keeps the existential and the essential in continual interplay, yet what they believe, however desperately, remains a function of their belief in the soul and God. They may live in an existential world yet they choose to believe in an essentialist one. The dichotomy here is extreme, and is almost reminiscent of the early Gnostics, who emphasized the fundamental split between the physical world and the spiritual world.
The New Atheists are also forceful in their insistence that we choose. One version of this imperative is found in Rush's song "Free Will." Geddy Lee tells us that if we don't decide between religion and atheism, we still have made a choice: “You can choose a ready guide / In some celestial voice / If you choose not to decide / You still have made a choice." He proceeds to paint religion in most unflattering terms and then to inform us how we can free ourselves from its evil clutches: “You can choose from phantom fears / And kindness that can kill / I will choose a path that's clear / I will choose free will.”
Lee makes a reasonable point in that if we reject two systems of thought, we've made a choice to reject them. Yet deciding against two choices doesn't mean we've chosen some comparable option. What if we choose not to believe in any system at all? Or what if we choose to believe in some third or fourth system, which remains undefined in his lyric, and which is liable to remain ill-defined, given his stark dichotomy between bad religion and good atheism. By not deciding between two systems agnostics have very precisely NOT made a choice. To imply so much, from so simple a refusal to choose, denies the very free will he otherwise celebrates. The lyric presupposes that whoever rebels against religion or science sees these two as the only two choices on offer. To reduce our choice, and then to argue that we must choose one of the two options provided, isn't likely to lead to much free will.
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From the winner-takes-all gamble of Pascal to the ultimatums of the New Atheists, we're presented with the command: Thou shalt choose! Yet there are at least three problems with this command: 1. we’re hardly in a position to make this choice, since there’s no clear definition of God and since we know so little about this universe, 2. the command presents us with a false dichotomy, since it gives us only two options (when there are at least three, if not three trillion), and 3. making a definitive choice tends to get in the way of discovering truth, since it deters us from exploring different options.
Perhaps there’s something in the human brain that requires certainty, that finds it unbearable to live with dichotomous directions at once -- whether one sees these directions as an angel in one ear and a devil in the other, or as a loop of neurons pulling in one way and another loop pulling us in another. Perhaps we need the cloud of this tension to be blown away, so that we can bask in clarity beneath the sun. Enough of shadows, of greys, of the chaos that comes from thinking two opposite things at once! Or, all of these are variants of a false dichotomy between a problem and a solution. What I suggest is creating a large space in your brain that is dedicated to revolution; a space that revolts against the very idea that we are in need of conviction.
In coming up with a philosophical position, it's not that we have to do something that requires a choice, and that it'll be a whole lot easier once we decide on a course of action. It's not that we're deciding to stay silent or speak up in order to stop Hitler from closing down the Reichstag, or even to buy this versus that brand of computer. Deciding on a general approach to life or a philosophy isn't like deciding to do something; it's deciding to do everything. We can make sense of things in their particular contexts, yet we can't pretend to make sense of everything. Making meanings is possible, but making meaning isn't. And in this type of doing, why limit the possible field of action in advance? Why not take in the range, always open to whatever makes most sense?
On the other hand, deciding on a philosophical position may be practical in that we can start from a base or conviction rather than go over and over in our minds the pros and cons. Yet refusing to make a final decision doesn't mean we have to go over all the options all the time. One can decide not to decide, not to limit in advance the approach we take to meaning.
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Albert, Geoffrey, & John
It's in this context that Camus' rejection of the label existentialist can be especially helpful. In Noces, he refuses to give his joyful experience in Tipasa any greater significance or grander Meaning than the scene supplies him. Camus sees himself as an actor, whose meaning comes from successfully playing his part in the given context — in this case a summer day in which “Tipasa is inhabited by the gods, and the gods speak in the sunlight and in the smell of absinthe” (Noces à Tipasa, 1938, trans. RYC). The sunny day is itself the grand panoply of meaning, and his enjoyment of this context, this scene, is the meaning he finds. He is the actor in the play of living, a lover wedding himself to the beauty of the world.
The sort of secular salvation brought by literature doesn’t give us rules that break or stories we must believe, but rather a fluid continuum of meanings — like we see in Longfellow’s image of Chaucer in a lodge within a park, still writing, still alive to the real world around him and to the imaginative world within him:
Camus refuses to make a fetish of any particular meaning, much as Keats does when he celebrates negative capability and the chameleon poet. By coining these terms Keats elevates the notion of a spirit that lives openly and changes with the circumstances, a spirit which remains open to meaning yet does this "without irritably searching after Fact and Reason." In a historical sense, Keats was reduced to waiting for conclusive facts, since the scientific explanation for our lives wasn’t nearly as complete in the early 19th Century as it is now: the science of the day was backed by astronomy, geology, and the scientific method, yet Darwin, neurology, and genetics had not yet bolstered this foundation.
Yet if we've learned one philosophic thing, it's that any explanation is subject to change, and that the inexplicable, once explained, becomes inexplicable again. The galaxy that was a little cloud only 150 years ago is now Andromeda. The discovery of galaxies hasn't stopped, and our understanding of the universe changes weekly.
Keats was also deeply aware that knowledge systems come and go, like the generation of gods in his two unfinished epics on the fallen god Hyperion. The Keatsean poet enjoys life, finds beauty in the worlds of myth humans create, agrees with the methodology of science, and remains open to the inevitable fact that we’ll be receiving more facts and more reasons in the foreseeable future.
In such a world, what is there to choose? While the words are a tad long, Huxley’s agnosticism and Camus’ phenomenological existentialism may be our natural state. In this open field, why do we need to decide that the soul or God exists or doesn't exist? How can we decide on things about which we really have no clue?
What benefit is there, either personally or philosophically, to pre-determine that one does or doesn't have the chance for eternal life, or that the universe is or isn't bound by the loving bands of God? Why feel constrained to believe that those who question and disbelieve are in some way evil or lesser? Why would belief in soul or God prescribe some weird damnation for those who think differently?
To sit and wait for revelation, forestalling other experience, seems perverse. The water will stay water, however much we hanker for merlot or pinot noir. To struggle with Meaning in a meaningless world is absurd, yet to coax a spirit from the shadows, all the while ignoring the sunlight and the smell of absinthe would be a greater absurdity.
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Next: ✝︎ Pascal 5: The Cosmic Casino