Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice

‘Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and prohibitions upon desire as it can. Such a society is already implicitly atheist and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us from proximate goods. Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the only truly substantial value at the center of the social universe: the price tag.’

― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

Ateismia[kin] on monenlaista, fiksua ja typerää

 “I can honestly say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism. And it is sometimes difficult, frankly, to be perfectly generous in one’s response to the sort of invective currently fashionable among the devoutly undevout, or to the sort of historical misrepresentations it typically involves.”

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― David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart

Melankoliasta iloon ja takaisin eli onko uskottava moraali mahdollista ilman tiedollista varmuutta?

Otsikko esittää tämän ‘väsähtäneen keskipäiväisen’ pohdinnan viimeisen ja vastaamatta jääneen kysymyksen.

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1

Olemassaolo, jolle edes hetkittäinen ilo ei anna voimaa, on elävää kuolemaa. Se on zombie-tila, josta irtipääseminen on ihmisen luovuuden äärimmäisin koettelemus ja vaarallisin lähde. Se on kuilu, jonne ihminen on aina vaarassa pudota lopullisesti ja josta ylösnouseminen on kuin pelastus ikuisesta helvetistä. Jos inhimillisen olemassaolon ja elämän puolesta voidaan julistaa jotain ilosanomaa [evankeliumia], se ilosanoma on erottamaton luovien ja ilon täyttämien hetkien antamasta toivon tunteesta.

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2

Spinoza ja Nietzsche ovat kyllä oikeassa korostaessaan ilon tunteen ja elämän mielekkyyden kokemuksen riippuvuutta toisistaan, mutta moraalin kanssa aktiivisilla passioilla ja positiivisilla affekteilla ei edelleenkään ole tiedollisesti juuri mitään tekemistä. Moraali, kantilaisen deontologian lähtökohdista ymmärrettynä, ei voi perustua tiettyihin, hyvinkin perusteltuihin, mutta yhtä kaikki satunnaisiin tuntemuksiin ja taipumuksiin, olivatpa ne sitten miten useasti toistuvia tahansa. Moraali on lähtökohdiltaan normatiivista pakkoa, joka asettaa jopa ihmisen kokeman suurimman ilon rationaalisen päättelyn puitteisiin. Ilosta voi päätellä rajattoman vapauden herättämän mielekkyyden tunteen [joka ihastuttavuudessaan voi olla myös kauhistuttava], mutta rajattomasta vapaudesta, jotta se ei johtaisi rikokseen, tuhoon ja kaaokseen, on pääteltävä Normin välttämättömyys. Muussa tapauksessa ilo ja vapaus kääntyvät itseään vastaan kumoten toteutumisensa mahdollisuudet ja edellytykset.

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3

Kyseessä on ratkeamaton jännite ja ambivalenssi, kaksi vastakkaiseen suuntaan vetävän inhimillisen ajattelun perustavaa ‘voimaa’. Kyseessä ei ole vain liberalismin ja konservatismin välillä vallitsevaa kiistaa ilmentävä jännite vaan sekä liberalistisen että konservatiivisen etiikan sisäinen ambivalenssi [liberalismin lähtökohtana ovat ensisijaisesti normit (oikeuksina), konservatiiveilla arvot (traditioina)]. Tämän jännitteen purkamiseksi ja sovittamiseksi ‘Suuren Normin’ alaisuuteen tarvitaan arvoja, mutta koska arvot ovat yksittäisten traditioitten tuotetta, ne eivät voi apriori eli ensisijaisesti ja ontologisesti olla perustavia ‘Normin’ ehtoja eivätkä siten pysty sovittamaan/ratkaisemaan ikuista jännitettä suunnattomasta [ei suuntaa] ja rajattomasta [ei rajaa] ilosta kumpuavan negatiivisen vapauden ja sitä välttämättä kontrolloimaan asetettavan ‘Normin’ välillä.

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4

Arvojen  ja normi/e/n välillä vallitsee ratkeamaton jännite, ambivalenssi ja ‘ontologinen dikotomia’, joka on kuitenkin pakko ottaa ‘kontrolliin’, jotta ihminen itse ja yhteisö, jossa hän elää ei ajautuisi kaaokseen [sillä vaikka anarkismi yksilötasolla on vapauden ensisijainen ja luovuttamaton lähtökohta, niin yhteisötasolla anarkismi toteutuu kontrafinaalisella logiikalla johtaen tyranniaan]. Vasta ‘kontrolliin ottamisen jälkeen’ yksittäisten arvojen ja normien väliselle ristiriidalle voidaan antaa pitäviä ja pitempiaikaisesti pysyviä sisältöjä eli arvoja, joiden puitteissa sitä voidaan ilmentää ja toteuttaa.

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5

Tiedän, että moni väittää asian olevan päinvastoin: arvot määräävät normit, mutta kun arvot kerran pääsevät rönsyämään ja/tai yksipuolisuudessaan dominomaan, mikään ei niitä pidättele tai pysty enää kontrolloimaan. Kiista on kuitenkin syvemmällä tasolla – arvojen  ja pelkästään yksittäisten normien tavoittamattomissa. Se on päätöksenteon aktuaalisen ongelman ytimessä, niin yksilötasolla kuin poliittisesti ja kulttuurisesti.

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6

Ihmisestä itsestään on tultava oman ilonsa = vapautensa rajoittaja kategorisen imperatiivin ehdottomuudella. Hänestä on tultava autarkinen itsensä suhteen [itseään hallitseva]. Jos hän ei tähän kykene, tarvitaan ‘Suvereeni’, joka tekee tuon ‘ensimmäisen päätöksen’ hänen puolestaan. Mutta eikö ole parempi, että ihminen itse on oman itsensä ‘suvereeni’ eli hallitsija, jota hänen intohimonsa tottelevat kuin, että joku ulkopuolinen ‘tyranni’ [olipa tämä sitten todellinen tai kuviteltu] tekee sen hänen puolestaan ja usein jopa häntä lainkaan kuulematta?

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7

Entä mistä pysyvä eli muut normit perustava Normi lopulta tulee ja saadaan? Carl Schmitt sanoo sen ytimekkäästi: Aus einem Nichts –‘ ei mistään’. Mitä tämä merkitsee? Lopultakin sitä, että järki kumoaa tällä tavoin itse itsensä ja mahdollisuutensa legitimoida oman päättelynsä tulokset itsestään käsin. Habermas ei tätä perimmäistä ongelmaa pysty ratkaisemaan [jos kohta hän ei sitä tässä (identiteettifilosofisessa) muodossa enää kysykään], koska mikään kollektiivinen päätösproseduuri ei voi olla täysin neutraali, puolueeton ja objektiivinen.

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8

Kaikki tämä väsynyt päättely toimii ikään kuin yhden kortin varassa ja myös kaatuu sen mukana. Ensinnäkin se uskoo rationaalisen päättelyn sisällölliseen voimaan [tässä mielessä järjellä on uskon ‘luonne’] ja toiseksi se edellyttää jokaiselta ihmiseltä sellaista rationaalisesti autonomisen päättelyn kykyä ja tasoa, jota mitä ilmeisimmin ei kaikilta kerta kaikkiaan vain löydy. Ihminen ei lopultakaan ole rationaalinen olento, joskin jotkut ihmiset ovat ’rationaalisempia’=vaikutusvaltaisempia kuin toiset. Mutta jos näin on, ei moraalikaan ole rationaalinen vaan [foucault’laisesti] strategisen toiminnan [vallankäytön] projekti. Silloin Nietzsche on sittenkin [ja jälleen kerran] oikeassa - myös sen suhteen, ettei hän [toisin kuin Spinoza] sekoita stoalaisittain aktiivisia passioita [iloa] ja rationaalisuutta toisiinsa. Järki on näin kumonnut itse itsensä. Lopussa on nihilismi. Moraali on makuasia.

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9

Kärjistäen sanottuna David Bentley Hart hyväksyy Nietzschen tiedon oikeutusta ja totuutta (merkitystä)] koskevan nihilismin [modaalilogiikka sen sijaan pätee myös nihilismiin] ja esteettisen elämyksen ‘eksistentiaalisesti perustavan vaikutuksen’, mutta haluaa ‘laulaa Nietzschen suohon’ ja ‘valitsee’ Jumalan. Jos dialektinen argumentaatio ei johda kuin loputtomaan käsitteelliseen saivarteluun, joka lopulta kumoaa jopa oman perustansa, niin voimme, jos vain koemme henkilökohtaisesti mielekkääksi [mikä ei välttämättä implikoi liberalismia vaan myös eri traditioiden ‘henkilökohtaisuutta’], valita ‘hyvällä älyllisellä omalla tunnolla’ evankeliumeissa kerrotun Jeesuksen ja hänen Jumalansa. Nietzsche itse ei vastustaisi [eikä voisikaan vastustaa, vaikka hän kyllä korostaa älyllisen omantunnon merkitystä - omista lähtökohdistaan käsin] tällaista perustelua: hänhän johdonmukaisesti tunnustaa argumentaatiomme loputtoman tulkinnallisuuden, joka ei ole enää tiedollista vaan ‘makuasia’. Nietzsche ei siis kieltänyt kristinuskon mahdollisuutta nyt ja aina, mutta halusi itse sanoutua siitä irti – loppuaikoinaan jopa ‘fundamentalistisella ehdottomuudella’.

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Se, joka nyt ateistina etsii Nietzscheltä luottamusta tieteeseen ikään kuin kristinuskon korvaajana tulee kuitenkin pettymään karvaasti. Tiede oli Nietzschelle lopulta sekin vallankäyttöä [ei pelkkä vallan väline vaan nimenomaan vallan ‘luomus’/vrt. Foucault] siinä, missä kaikki muukin tässä maailmassa ja elämässä: itse asiassa tiede on Nietzschelle uusi myyttisen ja siten ‘totalitaarisen’ vallan ilmentymä.

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Vallan muuttumisesta myös Nietzschellä ja Foucault’lla ajattelun transsendentaaliseksi perustaksi voidaan kyllä väitellä loputtomiin, mutta emme silti [tai pikemminkin tuon loputtomuuden vuoksi] pääse mitenkään ulos vallan ja tiedon yhteen kietoutumisesta ja siten päättelymme kehämäisyydestä, mikä tosiasia pätee tietenkin myös Nietzscheen ja Foucault’hon itseensä. Nietzsche tosin kommentoisi meidän, hänen tiedollisen oikeutuksen tulkinnallisuudesta esittämäänsä, kritiikkiämme, jonka mukaan myös hänen oma tulkintansa on relativistisesti kehäinen: ‘aina vain parempi’ (= kaikki on ‘vain’ tulkintaa)].

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10

Tämä teksti alkoi yrityksestä välttää melankolian ajautumista masennuksen kuiluun, yrityksestä kokea iloa, joka nostaa ihmisen edes hetkeksi melankolian ‘yläpuolelle’, ellei peräti melankolian ‘tuolle puolen’. Siihen se myös palaa, vain ilon suomaa toivoa odottaen ja etsien: vailla järkeä, vailla moraalia, vailla rajoituksia - kohti taivasta ja ikuisuutta, kohti ‘olemattomuuden harmoniaa’, joka on perimmäisen ‘kaipauksemme’ todellinen kohde ja Jumala [jos joku sellaista termiä haluaa käyttää].

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt

http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modaalilogiikka

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche

http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontologia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics

Kommentti teismistä ym.

Tapsa kysyi edellisessä päreessäni: ‘Onko tämä teismiä? Eikö siihen kuulukaan persoonallista Jumalaa?’

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Aiheellinen kysymys. Tämä on asia, johon oli tarkoitus palata jossain vaiheessa. Sanon tässä kuitenkin sen verran, että mm. aasialaiseen uskonnollisuuteen erikoistuneen Hart’n klassinen platonistisyyppinen kristillisyys ja jumalakäsitys on selvästi lähempänä ‘itämaisia’ uskontoja [hindulaisuus] kuin [Platoninkin kuvaamaa] demiurgia eli ‘tekijäjumalaa’ [käsityöläistä] tai juutalaista ‘käskijäjumalaa, [tahtovaa Persoonaa]’, jotka molemmat ovat perimmältään antropomorfistisia projektioita, eivät niinkään transsendenttista todellisuutta, joka ikään kuin väistämättä on läsnä kaikessa kokemuksessamme ja tietoisuudessamme. - - Kristinuskon tarinassa [kyseessä on siis ‘vain’ yksi (joskin kristitylle tärkein) ‘suuri kertomus’ monista] transsendenttinen [hyvän ja pahan ‘tuolla puolen’ oleva] todellisuus [Jumala] tulee kuitenkin ihmiseksi eli inkarnoituu = personoituu ihmisenä/ihmisessä eli Jeesuksen hahmossa ja juuri tämä Jeesuksen kaksinainen luonne Jumalana/ihmisenä [nimenomaan jumal-ihmisenä (varhaisen kristinuskon käsitys, ortodoksinen kirkko), ei ihmis-jumalana (vrt. reformaation ja liberaaliteologian Jeesus eettisenä ‘yli-ihmisenä’)], on kristillisen teismin perimmäinen lähtökohta [näin olen antanut itseni ymmärtää ja tulkita, joskaan en väitä Hartin näin sanoneen, koska ‘The Experience of God’ kirjan lukeminen on kesken]. - - Toistan: kristillisen teismin perusta on siis Jeesuksessa/Kristuksessa, mutta Hartille transsendentti Jumala itsessään ei ole ‘antropomorfinen/ihmismäinen demiurgi-käskijä-persoona’ vaan olemassaolon, tietoisuuden ja [käsitteellisesti määritellyn hyvän ja pahan ‘tuolla puolen’ olevan] kauneuden/rakkauden perusta. - - Hart edustaa myös antiikin kreikkalaisessa maailmassa tunnettua divine apathy-kantaa, jonka mukaan Jumala ei kärsi ihmiskunnan puolesta [juutalaisuudessa ‘Jumalan kärsimys’ ymmärretään lähes päinvastaisella tavalla]. Tämä on  varsin kiistelty kanta etenkin modernissa reformaation jälkeisessä teologiassa. [Hartiin on syytä palata myöhemmin monestakin syystä].

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Panteismin koen vielä triviaalimmaksi kuin buddhalaisuuden. Panteismissa palvotaan persoonatonta luontoa [esim. ‘kaukaisia tai läheisiä kiviä’ ;\], mutta pyhyydeksi mielletyn kauneuden kokemus on väistämättä aina ihmisen persoonallisesti kokemaa, ei itse luonnosta jotenkin naturalistisella välittömyydellä seuraavaa ja heijastuvaa [*]. - - Buddhalaisuutta taas pidän perimmältään pelagiolaisena itsepelastuksen projektina, joka on täysin triviaalin karma-arpapelin armoilla [koska triviaali syy-seuraussuhde ei sisällä eettistä tarkoitusta], niin sympaattis-empaattisia säälin/myötätunnon motiiveja kuin buddhalainen haluaakin toteuttaa suhteessaan toisiin ihmisiin [pelastuakseen eli päästäkseen nirvanaan; boddhisatvat tosin ovat merkillisen ‘epälooginen’ ja lähes epäuskottava poikkeus kyseisestä projektista, koska he uskomattoman epäitsekkäästi ‘kieltäytyvät’ lopullisesta [jo 'annetusta'] pelastuksestaan (nirvanasta) toisten ihmisen auttamisen tähden (miksi kaikki buddhalaiset eivät 'toimi' kuin boddhisatvat vaan ovat suin päin menossa nirvanaan, jos vain karma 'sallii'?)].

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[*] Naturalismista ei ilman 'piilo-teleologista' oletusta [esim. evoluutioteoria: kelvollisimpien (fittest) luonnollinen valikoituminen on triviaa, jota käytetään eksplisiittisesti funktionaalisena mutta implisiittisesti teleologisena/päämääräisenä selityksenä (käänteinen teleologia)] tai muuta kategorista päättelyvirhettä seuraa mitään transsendentaalista [kuten kauneutta], koska se on eksaktia kausaalista deskriptiota eikä kuvaa todellisuutta itsessään vaan ilmiöitten [metodisidonnaisia] syysuhteita [mittaava metodi ja mitattava todellisuus ovat kategorisesti eri asioita; todennäköisyydet eivät muuta tätä loogista välttämättömyyttä miksikään].

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PS. Kirjoitin tämän ennen kuin luin Kullervon lähettämän selkeän, selväjärkisen ja ymmärrettävän kommentin [edellisessä päreessä]. Olen hänen kanssaan jotakuinkin samaa mieltä omassa 'teksti-piikkilanka-päreessäni'.

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http://actuspurunen.blogspot.fi/2014/02/jospa-uskoisin.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_apathy

http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonismi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonism#Christianity_and_Platonism

http://kullervon.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/david-bentley-hart-the-experience-of-god/

Jos[pa] uskoisin

Jos panteismi [mm. Spinoza, Goethe, Einstein] on kohteliaista ateismia, niin fideismi [mm. Tertullianus, Pascal, Kant[?], Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein[?], William James on melko 'epätoivoista' teismiä. Itse valitsen mieluummin David Bentley Hartin klassisen kristillisen teismin kuin mitään uskonpuhdistuksen jälkeistä modernin filosofian, humanismin, teismin ja ateismin liberaalia sekasotkua – jos siis uskoisin. Panteismin koen sen sijaan yhtä triviaaliksi kuin kaiken 'muunkin' luonnontieteen.
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Hartin mukaan sellaista J/jumalaa, jonka olemassaolo uusateistien [esim. Dawkins ja Dennet] mielestä on erittäin epätodennäköistä, ei ole eikä edes voi olla olemassa, ja sen vuoksi he eivät tule kumonneeksi muuta kuin omat väärinkäsityksensä. Kreationistien tavoin uusateistit ovat ymmärtäneet J/jumalan demiurgiksi eli jonkinlaiseksi käsityöläiseksi tai kellosepäksi [Intelligent Designer], joka on suunnitellut maailman luonnonlakien [tai ikuisten ideoiden] mukaisesti. Hartille transsendentti Jumala ei kuitenkaan ole ideoista/luonnonlaeista riippuvainen muttei myöskään ristiriidassa niiden kanssa. 'Hän' ei ole ‘empiirinen syy’, ‘käsitteellinen olio’ tai ‘erisnimi-persoona’ vaan kaikessa ikuisesti ‘läsnä oleva’ olemassaolon, tietoisuuden ja kauneuden/rakkauden perusta [ja siinä mielessä myös alkuperä eikä vain tietty fysikaalinen syy]. Sellaisen Jumalan voi kokea, mutta ‘häntä’ on mahdoton verifioida empiirisesti tai kieltää loogisesti, vaikka tietenkään ‘häneen’ ei tarvitse uskoa. [Hartin jumalakäsityksestä lisää joskus myöhemmin].

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II

David Bentley Hart; Being, Consciousness, Bliss: Beauty as Knowledge of God

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David Bentley Hart, is an Orthodox theologian, philosopher, and cultural commentator, whose specialties include philosophical theology, patristics, and aesthetics. Hart has been published in various periodicals including, Pro Ecclesia, The Scottish Journal of Theology, First Things, and The New Criterion. He has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of St. Thomas, Duke Divinity School, and Loyola College in Baltimore. Hart is the author of seven books including Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans, 2004), which has been lauded by The Christian Century as "one of the most brilliant works by an American theologian in the past ten years." His two most recent books are The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans, 2011), and The Devil and Pierre Gernet: Stories, his first work of fiction (Eerdmans, 2012).

*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism

http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panteismi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideism

http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideismi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart

http://www.amazon.co.uk/David-Bentley-Hart/e/B001JRTRC0

http://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-burkeman-s-blog/2014/jan/14/the-theology-book-atheists-should-read

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_designer

http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%84lyk%C3%A4s_suunnittelija

http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%84lyk%C3%A4s_suunnittelu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPwnE_DNgBw

‘Korjaavaa terapiaa’ autonomisen järjen kantilaiselle advokaatille, osa 2

David Bentley Hart

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Nature Loves to Hide

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Two issues back, I spoke ill of a modern form of natural law theory that unsuccessfully attempts to translate an ancient tradition of moral reasoning into the incompatible language of secular reason. Because of an obscurity I allowed to slip into the fourth paragraph, several readers imagined that I was speaking in propria persona from that point on, rather than on behalf of a disenchanted modern rambling among the weed-thronged ruins; and some were dismayed. Edward Feser, for instance, issued a robust if confused denunciation, accusing me of numerous logical errors I did not commit and of being a Humean modernizer who doubts reason’s natural orientation toward the good. I suppose I should savor that as a refreshing change from the invective I usually attract; but, honestly, what most interested me about Feser’s argument were its fallacies, chief among them a notably simplistic understanding of such words as “revelation” and “supernatural.”

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There is an old argument here, admittedly. Somewhere behind Feser’s argument slouches the specter of what is often called “two-tier Thomism”: a philosophical sect notable in part for the particularly impermeable partitions it erects between nature and grace, or nature and supernature, or natural reason and revelation, or philosophy and theology (and so on). To its adherents, it is the solution to the contradictions of modernity. To those of a more “integralist” bent (like me), it is a neo-scholastic deformation of Christian metaphysics that, far from offering an alternative to secular reason, is one of its chief theological accomplices. It also produces an approach to moral philosophy that must ultimately fail.
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Before completing that thought, however, it might help to rehearse just a few of the conceptual obstacles our age erects in the path of natural law theory. So:
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First. Finality’s fortuity. Most traditional accounts of natural law require a picture of nature as governed by final causality: For every substance, there are logically prior ends—proximate, remote, or transcendent—that guide its existence and unite it to the greater totality of a single cosmic, physical, moral, social continuum embraced within the providential finality of the divine. They assume, then, that from the “is” of a thing legitimate conclusions regarding its “ought” can be discerned, because nature herself—through her evident forms—instructs us in the elements of moral fulfillment. In our age, however, final causality is a concept confined within an ever more beleaguered and porous intellectual redoubt. One can easily enough demonstrate the reality of finality within nature, but modern scientific culture refuses to view it as in any sense a cause rather than the accidental consequence of an immanent material process. Within any organic system, for instance, ontogeny is fruitfully determined by strict formal constraints, but these are seen as the results of an incalculably vast series of fortuitous mutations and attritions, and therefore only the residue of an entirely stochastic phylogeny. Hence nature’s finality indicates no morally consequential ends (much less the supereminent finality of the Love that moves the stars), but is rather merely the emergent result of intrinsically meaningless brute events.
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Second. Dame Nature, serial murderess. Even if final causality in nature is demonstrable, does it yield moral knowledge if there is no clear moral analogy between natural ends and the proper objects of human motive? After all, our modern narrative of nature is of an order shaped by immense ages of monstrous violence: mass extinctions, the cruel profligacy of an algorithmic logic that squanders ten thousand lives to fashion a single durable type, an evolutionary process that advances not despite, but because of, disease, warfare, predation, famine, and so on. And the majestic order thus forged? One of elemental caprice, natural calamity, the mercilessness of chance—injustice thrives, disaster befalls the innocent, and children suffer. Why, our deracinated modern might ask, should we believe that nature’s organizing finality, given the kinds of efficient causes it prompts into action, has moral implications that command imitation, obedience, or (most unlikely of all) love?
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Third. Elective priorities. Assume, however, that we can establish the existence of a moral imperative implicit in the orderliness of the world, as perceived by a rational will that, for itself, must seek the good: Does that assure that we can prove what hierarchy of values follows from this, or how we should calculate the relative preponderance of diverse moral ends? Yes, we may all agree that murder is worse than rudeness; but beyond the most rudimentary level of ethical deliberation, pure logic proves insufficient as a guide to which ends truly command our primary obedience, and our arguments become ever more dependent upon prior evaluations and preferences that, as far as philosophy can discern, are culturally or psychologically contingent. Consistent natural law cases can be made for or against slavery, for example, or for or against capital punishment, depending on which values one has privileged at a level too elementary for philosophy to adjudicate. At some crucial point, natural law argument, pressed to disclose its principles, dissolves into sheer assertion.
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Fourth. Theory’s limits. The most gallantly errant of Feser’s assertions is that, because reason necessarily seeks the good, there exists no gap into which any “Humean” separation of facts from values can insinuate itself. But obviously the gap lies in the dynamic interval between (in Maximus the Confessor’s terms) the “natural” and “gnomic” wills: between, that is, the innate yearning for the good that is the primal impulse of all rational life and the particular acts of judgment and choice by which finite individuals live. The venerable principle that the natural will is a pure ecstasy toward the good means that, at the level of our gnomic deliberations, whatever we will we inevitably desire as the good (for us); it does not mean that philosophical theory can by itself prove which facts imply which values, or that the good must naturally be understood as an incumbent “ought” rather than a compelling “I want.” Feser asserts that “purely philosophical arguments” can establish “objectively true moral conclusions.” And yet, curiously enough, they never, ever have. That is a bedtime story told to conjure away the night’s goblins, like the Leibnizian fable of the best possible world or the philosophe’s fairy tale about the plain dictates of reason.
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The question relentlessly left open in all of this is what “reason” really is. It is perfectly possible to believe that the whole natural dynamism of our reason and will is toward the good, and even to desire a true moral cultural renewal, and yet still to deny that natural law theory provides a sufficiently rich or logically coherent model of how the intellect can know moral truths. There is nothing scandalous in this unless one creates a false dilemma by imagining a real division between the discrete realms of supernatural and natural knowledge. Feser thinks of revelation as an extrinsic datum consisting in texts and dogmas, and of the supernatural as merely outside of nature, and believes there really is such a thing as purely natural reason. From that perspective, one cannot deny philosophy’s power to demonstrate objective moral truth without denying reason’s intrinsic capacity for the good. Like a Kantian (the two-tier Thomist’s alter ego), one must believe that philosophical theory’s limits are also reason’s.
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These divisions are illusory. What we call “nature” is merely one mode of the disclosure of the “supernatural,” and natural reason merely one mode of revelation, and philosophy merely one (feeble) mode of reason’s ascent into the light of God. Nowhere, not even in the sciences, does there exist a “purely natural” realm of knowledge. To encounter the world is to encounter its being, which is gratuitously imparted to it from beyond the sphere of natural causes, known within the medium of an intentional consciousness, irreducible to immanent processes, that grasps finite reality only by being oriented toward a horizon of transcendental ends (or, better, “divine names”). There is a seamless continuity between the sight of a rose and the mystic’s vision of God; the latter is in fact implicit in the former, and saturates it, and but for this supernatural surfeit nothing natural could come into thought.
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It does not then represent some grave failure of natural reason that philosophy cannot achieve definitive moral demonstrations, or that true knowledge of the good is impossible without calling upon other modes of knowledge: the (ubiquitous) supernatural illumination of a conscience—a heart—upon which the law is written, Platonic anamnesis (of the eternal forms or of what your mother taught you), cultural traditions with all their gracious moments of religious awakening (Jewish, pagan, Christian, Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, and so on), prayer, inspiration, the cultivation of personal holiness, love of the arts, and so on. There is no single master discourse here, for the good can be known only in being seen, before and beyond all words. Certain fundamental moral truths, for instance, may necessarily remain unintelligible to someone incapable of appreciating Bach’s fifth Unaccompanied Cello Suite. For some it may seem an outrageous notion that, rather than a collection of purportedly incontrovertible proofs, the correct rhetoric of moral truth consists in a richer but more unmasterable appeal to the full range of human capacities and senses, physical and spiritual. I, however, see it as rather glorious: a confirmation that our whole being, in all its dimensions, is a single gracious vocation out of nonexistence to the station of created gods.
*
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/05/nature-loves-to-hide
http://www.firstthings.com/simpleSearch.php?offset=0&mySqlSearchCriteria=%22David+Bentley+Hart%22
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/02/is-ought-and-natures-laws-1
http://ethikapolitika.org/author/dylanpahman/

‘Korjaavaa terapiaa’ autonomisen järjen kantilaiselle advokaatille, osa 1

David Bentley Hart

 

Is, Ought, and Nature’s Laws

There is a long, rich, varied, and subtle tradition of natural law theory, almost none of which I find especially convincing, but most of which I acknowledge to be—according to the presuppositions of the intellectual world in which it was gestated—perfectly coherent. My skepticism, moreover, has nothing to do with any metaphysical disagreement. I certainly believe in a harmony between cosmic and moral order, sustained by the divine goodness in which both participate. I simply do not believe that the terms of that harmony are as precisely discernible as natural law thinkers imagine.

That is an argument for another time, however. My chief topic here is the attempt in recent years by certain self-described Thomists, particularly in America, to import this tradition into public policy debates, but in a way amenable to modern political culture. What I have in mind is a style of thought whose proponents (names are not important) believe that compelling moral truths can be deduced from a scrupulous contemplation of the principles of cosmic and human nature, quite apart from special revelation, and within the context of the modern conceptual world. This, it seems to me, is a hopeless cause.

Classical natural law theory, after all, begins from the recognition that the movement of the human will is never purely spontaneous, and that all volition is evoked by and directed toward an object beyond itself. It presupposes, moreover, that beyond the immediate objects of desire lies the ultimate end of all willing, the Good as such, which in its absolute priority makes it possible for any finite object to appear to the will as desirable. It asserts that nature is governed by final causes. And, finally, it takes as given that the proper ends of the human will and the final causes of creation are inalienably analogous to one another, because at some ultimate level they coincide (for believers, because God is the one source in which both participate). Thus, in knowing the causal ends of nature, we should be able to know many of the proper moral ends of the will, and even their relative priority in regard to one another.

So far, so good. But insuperable problems arise when—in part out of a commendable desire to speak to secular society in ways it can understand, in part out of some tacit quasi-Kantian notion that moral philosophy must yield clear and universally binding imperatives—the natural law theorist insists that the moral meaning of nature should be perfectly evident to any properly reasoning mind, regardless of religious belief or cultural formation.

Thus, allegedly, the testimony of nature should inform any rightly attentive intellect that abortion is murder, that lying is wrong, that marriage should be monogamous, that we should value charity above personal profit, and that it is wicked (as well as extremely discourteous) to eat members of that tribe that lives over in the next valley. “Nature,” however, tells us nothing of the sort, at least not in the form of clear commands; neither does it supply us with hypotaxes of moral obligation. In neither an absolute nor a dependent sense—neither as categorical nor as hypothetical imperatives, to use the Kantian terms—can our common knowledge of our nature or of the nature of the universe at large instruct us clearly in the content of true morality.

For one thing, as far as any categorical morality is concerned, Hume’s bluntly stated assertion that one cannot logically derive an “ought” from an “is” happens to be formally correct. Even if one could exhaustively describe the elements of our nature, the additional claim that we are morally obliged to act in accord with them, or to prefer natural uses to unnatural, would still be adventitious to the whole ensemble of facts that this description would comprise.

The assumption that the natural and moral orders are connected to one another in any but a purely pragmatic way must be logically antecedent to our interpretation of the world; it is a belief about nature, but not a natural belief as such; it is a supernatural judgment that renders natural reality intelligible in a particular way. I know of many a stout defender of natural law who is quick to dismiss Hume’s argument, but who—when pressed to explain why—can do no better than to resort to a purely conditional argument: If one is (for instance) to live a fully human life, then one must . . . (etc.). But, in supplementing a dubious “is” with a negotiable “if,” one certainly cannot arrive at a categorical “ought.”

In abstraction from specific religious or metaphysical traditions, there really is very little that natural law theory can meaningfully say about the relative worthiness of the employments of the will. There are, of course, generally observable facts about the characteristics of our humanity (the desire for life and happiness, the capacity for allegiance and affinity, the spontaneity of affection for one’s family) and about the things that usually conduce to the fulfillment of innate human needs (health, a well-ordered family and polity, sufficient food, aesthetic bliss, a sense of spiritual mystery, leisure, and so forth); and if we all lived in a Platonic or Aristotelian or Christian intellectual world, in which everyone presumed some necessary moral analogy between the teleology of nature and the proper objects of the will, it would be fairly easy to connect these facts to moral prescriptions in ways that our society would find persuasive. We do not live in such a world, however.

It is, after all, simply a fact that many of what we take to be the plain and evident elements of universal morality are in reality artifacts of cultural traditions. Today we generally eschew cannibalism, slavery, polygamy, and wars of conquest because of a millennial process of social evolution, the gradual universalization of certain moral beliefs that entered human experience in the form not of natural intuitions but of historical events. We have come to find a great many practices abhorrent and a great many others commendable not because the former transparently offend against our nature while the latter clearly correspond to it, but because at various moments in human history we found ourselves addressed by uncanny voices that seemed to emanate from outside the totality of the perceptible natural order and its material economies.

One certainly may believe that those voices in fact awakened us to “natural” truths, but only because one’s prior supernatural convictions prompt one to do so. To try then to convince someone who rejects those convictions nevertheless to embrace those truths on purely “natural” grounds can never be much more than an exercise in suasive rhetoric (and perhaps something of a pia fraus).

The truth is that we cannot talk intelligibly about natural law if we have not all first agreed upon what nature is and accepted in advance that there really is a necessary bond between what is and what should be. Nor can that bond be understood in naturalistic terms. Even if it were clearly demonstrable that for the majority of persons the happiest life is also the most wholesome, and that most of us find spiritual and corporeal contentment by observing a certain “natural” ethical mean—still, the daringly disenchanted moralist might ask: “What do we owe to nature?”

To his mind, after all, the good may not be contentment or even justice, but the extension of the pathos of the will, as Nietzsche would put it: the poetic labor of the will to power, the overcoming of the limits of the merely human, the justification of the purely fortuitous phenomenon of the world through its transformation into a supreme aesthetic event. What if he should choose to believe (and are not all values elective values for the secular moralist?) that the most exalted object of the will is the Übermensch, that natural prodigy or fortunate accident that now must become the end to which human culture consciously aspires?

Denounce him, if you wish, for the perversity of his convictions. Still, after all hypothetical imperatives have been adduced, and all appeals to the general good have been made, nothing would logically oblige him to alter his ideas. Only the total spiritual conversion of his vision of reality could truly change his thinking.

To put the matter very simply, belief in natural law is inseparable from the idea of nature as a realm shaped by final causes, oriented in their totality toward a single transcendent moral Good: one whose dictates cannot simply be deduced from our experience of the natural order, but must be received as an apocalyptic interruption of our ordinary explanations that nevertheless, miraculously, makes the natural order intelligible to us as a reality that opens up to what is more than natural.

There is no logically coherent way to translate that form of cosmic moral vision into the language of modern “practical reason” or of public policy debate in a secular society. Our concept of nature, in any age, is entirely dependent upon supernatural (or at least metaphysical) convictions. And, in an age that has been shaped by a mechanistic understanding of the physical world, a neo-Darwinian view of life, and a voluntarist understanding of the self, nature’s “laws” must appear to be anything but moral.
*
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/02/is-ought-and-natures-laws-1
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/05/nature-loves-to-hide
http://www.firstthings.com/simpleSearch.php?offset=0&mySqlSearchCriteria=%22David+Bentley+Hart%22
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart
http://ethikapolitika.org/author/dylanpahman/

Steven Pinker näkee kaunista mutta valheellista päiväunta valistuksen ja rationalismin saavutuksista

Vallankumoukselliset vapauden puuta istuttamassa vuoden 1790 Ranskassa. Tämän jälkeen alkoi päitä pudota ja veri virrata, kun myös veljeyttä ja tasa-arvoa ryhdyttiin istuttamaan ihmisten mieliin ja ruumiisiin.

 

The Precious Steven Pinker

 

David Bentley Hart

 

I sometimes find it hard to believe that Steven Pinker really believes what he believes; surely, I think, some occult agency in his mind is forcing his conscious intellect to accept premises and conclusions that it ought to reject as utterly fantastic. I suppose, though, that that is one’s normal reaction to ardent expressions of a faith one does not share; at its worst, it is just a reflex of supercilious fastidiousness, like feeling only an annoyed consternation at having to step over someone in the throes of mystical ecstasy in order to retrieve an umbrella from the closet. A healthier sentiment would be generous and patient curiosity, a desire to learn whether the believer has in fact—guided by a rare purity of heart—glimpsed truths to which one’s own cynicism or coarseness has blinded one.

Not, of course, that Pinker would care for that way of putting the matter. He detests religion and thinks of himself as a champion of something he blandly calls “reason” (that is the most enchantingly guileless aspect of his creed). In his latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, he devotes over seven hundred pages to arguing the case that modernity, contrary to the common impression, has seen a steep decrease in every kind of violence—domestic, political, criminal, and martial—as a result of a variety of causes, but principally because of the triumph of “Enlightenment” ideas. It is a simple narrative, and at many points a painfully simplistic one, but it is clear and bracing and merits sympathetic consideration.

Whether Pinker himself does the tale justice, however, is debatable. He is definitely not an adept historian; his view of the past—particularly of the Middle Ages, which he tends to treat as a single historical, geographical, and cultural moment—is often not merely crude, but almost cartoonish (of course, he is a professed admirer of Norbert Elias). He even adduces two edited images from Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch as illustrations of “the everyday texture of life in medieval Europe,” without noting that they come from a set of astrological allegories about planetary influences, from which he has chosen those for Saturn and Mars rather than, say, Venus and Jupiter. (Think what a collection of Saturnine or Martial pictures he might have gathered from more recent history.)

It is perfectly fair for Pinker to call attention to the many brutal features of much of medieval life, but one would have more confidence in his evenhandedness if he acknowledged at least a few of the moral goods that medieval society achieved despite its material privations. He says nothing of almshouses, free hospitals, municipal physicians, hospices, the decline of chattel slavery, the Pax Dei and Treuga Dei, and so on. Of the more admirable cultural, intellectual, legal, spiritual, scientific, and social movements of the High Middle Ages, he appears to know nothing. And his understanding of early modernity is little better. His vague remarks on the long-misnamed “Wars of Religion” are tantalizing intimations of a fairly large ignorance.

Perhaps such complaints miss the point, though. Pinker’s is a story not of continuous moral evolution, but of an irruptive redemptive event. It would not serve his purpose to admit that, in addition to the gradual development of the material conditions that led to modernity, there might also have been the persistent pressure of moral ideas and values that reached back to antique or medieval sources, or that there might have been occasional institutional adumbrations of modern “progress” in the Middle Ages, albeit in a religious guise.

He certainly would not want to grant that many of his own moral beliefs are inherited contingencies of a long cultural history rather than discoveries recently made by the application of disinterested “reason.” For him, modern culture’s moral advances were born from the sudden and fortuitous advent of the “Age of Reason,” which—aided by the printing press—produced a “coherent philosophy” called “Enlightenment humanism,” distilled from the ideas of “Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and John Stuart Mill.” We know what he means: not the dark side of the “Enlightenment” and the printing press—“scientific racism,” state absolutism, Jacobinism, the rise of murderous ideologies, and so on—but the nice Enlightenment of “perpetual peace,” the “rights of man,” and so on.

Well, each to his or her own tribalism, I suppose. It is pleasant to believe one’s society is more “enlightened” or “rational” than all others, and Pinker has every right to try to prove the point. He would be more convincing, though, if only the central claim of his book were not so entirely dependent upon a statistical fiction.

That is to say, yes, of course modern societies have reduced certain kinds of brutality, cruelty, and injustice. Modern technology makes it far easier to control crime. We have weapons both too terrifying to use in open combat and so precise that we can kill at great distances, without great armies, out of sight and mind. We have succeeded at reforming our own nations internally in ways that make them ever more comfortable, less threatening, and more complacent. Our prison system is barbaric, but not overtly sadistic, and our more draconian laws rarely inconvenience the affluent among us. We have learned to exploit the labor and resources of poorer peoples not by enslaving them, but merely by making them “beneficiaries” of globalization. The violence we commit is more hygienic, subtler, and less inconvenient than that committed by our forebears.

Even so, the numbers do not add up. Pinker’s method for assessing the relative ferocity of different centuries is to calculate the total of violent deaths not as an absolute quantity, but as a percentage of global population. But statistical comparisons like that are notoriously vacuous. Population sample sizes can vary by billions, but a single life remains a static sum, so the smaller the sample the larger the percentage each life represents. Obviously, though, a remote Inuit village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in a fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that exterminates one million of its citizens. And even where the orders of magnitude are not quite so divergent, comparison on a global scale is useless, especially since over the past century modern medicine has reduced infant mortality and radically extended life spans nearly everywhere (meaning, for one thing, there are now far more persons too young or too old to fight). So Pinker’s assertion that a person would be thirty-five times more likely to be murdered in the Middle Ages than now is empirically meaningless.

In the end, what Pinker calls a “decline of violence” in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion. Well, not to put too fine a point on it: So what? What on earth can he truly imagine that tells us about “progress” or “Enlightenment”—or about the past, the present, or the future? By all means, praise the modern world for what is good about it, but spare us the mythology.

And yet, oddly enough, I like Pinker’s book. On one level, perhaps, it is all terrific nonsense: historically superficial, philosophically platitudinous, occasionally threatening to degenerate into the dulcet bleating of a contented bourgeois. But there is also something exhilarating about this fideist who thinks he is a rationalist. Over the past few decades, so much of secularist discourse has been drearily clouded by irony, realist disenchantment, spiritual fatigue, self-lacerating sophistication: a postmodern sense of failure, an appetite for caustic cultural genealogies, a meek surrender of all “metanarrative” ambitions.

Pinker’s is an older, more buoyant, more hopeful commitment to the “Enlightenment”—and I would not wake him from his dogmatic slumber for all the tea in China. In his book, one encounters the ecstatic innocence of a faith unsullied by prudent doubt. For me, it reaffirms the human spirit’s lunatic and heroic capacity to believe a beautiful falsehood, not only in excess of the facts, but in resolute defiance of them.

*

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/12/the-precious-steven-pinker

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature

http://suite101.com/article/the-influence-of-the-enlightenment-on-the-french-revolution-a371333

Kommentti

Kommentti edellisen Zizek-päreeni kommentteihin.
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St. Nicholas Cathedral, Kronstadt, Russia

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1

Art2 siteerasi Zizekiä: ‘In buddhism, if we are really honest, we have to admit that once you are in enlightment, nothing immanently prevents you, for example, from torturing people.’

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Näköjään Art2 ei ole ainoastaan kuunnellut vaan myös ymmärtänyt olennaisia asioita Zizekin luennosta. 

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Sitaatti on Zizekin vanha väite buddhalaisuudesta. Eikä kyseessä ole pelkästään hänen oma dialektinen inversionsa vaan periaatteessa juuri Suzukin kaltaisten zen-buddhismiin taipuvaisten tunnustama fakta. Myös Dalai Lama-sitaatista [jota Zizek muistaakseni on myös aiemmin käyttänyt] voi tosiaan vetää aika kyynisiä johtopäätelmiä buddhalaisen hyveen olemuksesta.

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Mutta eihän valaistunut enää edes voi olla jokin inhimillinen ego vaan [hyväntahtoinen?] kosminen zombie, joka ei itse asiassa enää kuulu ihmisen yhtaikaa paheelliseen ja hyveelliseen maailmaan. Hän on täydellinen ja omnipotentti niinkuin vain täysin hyveellinen olento voi olla. Eikö siis olisi johdonmukaista, että buddhalainen meditaatio onnistuessaan päätyisi egon harhoista vapautuessaan myös ‘ego-ruumiin’ häviämiseen. Tapahtuisi eräänlainen 'autoeutanasia'.

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Jos kerran päämääränä on täydellinen nirvana-tyhjyys, niin eikö silloin mikä tahansa elämään/olemassaoloon jäävä osa valaistuneesta ihmisestä ole ‘liikaa’ eli muistuttamassa siitä, että olemme yhä vielä valaistuneinakin lihallisen elämän kirotun kiertokulun kahleissa. Niinpä en voikaan täysin ymmärtää, miksi boddhisatvat kääntyvät valaistumisensa tilassa tai prosessissa auttamaan ‘jälkeenjääneitä’ matkallaan oikeaan tietoon. Mikä voi olla niin tyydyttävä motiivi, että se inspiroi heitä jopa valaistuneinakin tällaiseen auttamistyöhön/välitystehtävään? Tämä taitaa olla buddhalaisuuden varsinainen salaisuus/ihme ja todellisin hyve - [?]

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2

-rh kirjoitti: ‘Joku piispa Huovisen koko ikänsä hokema `Miksi Jumala sallii?´ on mun mielestä täysin merkityksen ja triviaali kysymys - itämaisen ajattelun näkökulmasta varsin falskia’

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Olen samaa mieltä -rh, mutta mieleni ei jostain syystä erityisemmin rauhoitu tuosta ‘itämaisen ajattelun näkökulmasta’, koska vaistoan siinä piilevän sieluttoman determinismin, jossa ihminen tuntuu muuttuvan automaatiksi vailla yksilöllistä minuutta. Koen sellaisen metafysiikan paitsi mahdottomaksi myös vaaralliseksi – ainakin itselleni [;\]. Vapaus ei ole tietoa välttämättömyydestä vaan kontrolloitua itseilmaisua.

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Ortodoksi-teologi David Bentley Hart, joka tuntee hyvin myös itämaisia uskontoja, on pohtinut sitaattisi asiaa ‘itämaisemman’ kristinuskon lähtökohdista. Hartia minä arvostan, vaikken ymmärrä uskosta enkä tiedä Jumalasta yhtään mitään [PS.]. Hän on loistavan tyylitajuinen esseisti ja selkeä ajattelija. Sopivasti konservatiivi [:\].

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PS.

Kirkkoni on ortodoksinen [koska se on maailman kaunein kirkko], vaikka en synergisti ja panteisti olekaan. Pelastusoppini on nimittäin äärimmäisen luterilais-monergistinen – aina ateismiin asti. Ihmisen ja Jumalan välillä on peruuttamaton kuilu/katkos [luonnollinen teologia on taikauskoa/animismia; - sorry nyt vaan D. B ja muut ortodoksit], mikä merkitsee, että ensin katoaa Jumala [Entzauberung der Welt/Max Weber] ja sitten ihminen järkiuskoineen [D. B. Hartin lailla en usko valistuksen projektiin kuten ei uskonut myöskään nihilisti Nietzsche]. Ortodokseilla sen sijaan on mahdollisuus muuttua theosis-opissaan hieman samantyyppisiksi hyve-zombieiksi kuin buddhalaiset. Minä en sellaiseen pysty. Olen peruspaha ihminen. Rottaakin pahempi. Voin siis syntyä vain paremmaksi olennoksi tulevassa elämässä. Vaikka kiveksi. Ihan sama mitä teen.

*

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2008/05/tsunami-and-theodicy

http://www.amazon.com/Doors-Sea-Where-Was-Tsunami/dp/0802866867

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart

http://www.aoiusa.org/blog/is-this-the-most-beautiful-orthodox-church-in-the-world/

Don Juanin loistava pahuus

Don Juan ja David Bentley Hart
*
[Kielimafia lisäsi tarkennuksen kohtaan 3 - 4.9]

I
Don Juan hahmo ilmaisee hyvin barokin ajan elämänkokemusta, hämmennystä sen suhteen, onko äärimmäinen nautinnollinen elämä samalla äärimmäisen tyhjää. Hahmo esiintyy ensimmäisen kerran Tirso de Molinan näytelmässä El Burlador de Sevilla y convivado de piedra (Sevillan pilkkaaja ja kivinen vieras).
Don Juan on naisten viettelijä, joka kutsuu luokseen erään viettelemänsä naisen isän kivisen hautapatsaan, ja kun tämä sitten tuleekin, hän vie Don Juanin mukanaan helvettiin.

Voimme kysyä, mikä Don Juanin tarinassa on modernia. Eikö antiikissakin ole lukuisia viettelytarinoita ja viettelijähahmoja; eikö tällainen ole esimerkiksi Zeus itse, jolla on lukemattomia naisjuttuja kuolevien ja kuolemattomien kanssa?

Ero antiikin ja modernin tarinan välillä on juuri siinä, että Zeus ei antiikin perspektiivistä katsoen ole viettelijähahmo, koska hänen naisseikkailunsa nähtiin yksittäisinä tekoina, joihin oli syynä jumalaista alkuperää oleva (Afroditen aiheuttana) rakkauden intohimo, jonka uhreiksi kuolemattomat voivat joutua yhtä hyvin kuin kuolevaisetkin. Toisin sanoen henkilön tekojen syynä ei ole hänen taipumuksensa tai luonteensa vaan hänen joutumisensa tiettyyn objektiiviseen asiaintilaan. Modernissa sen sijaan rakkausseikkailu on ihmisen oma valinta, johon hänellä on tai ei ole luontainen taipumus.

Don Juan-myytti rinnastuu Faustiin eräänlaisena maailman valloittamisen ja omien voimien mittelemisen myyttinä sekin. Myöhemmissä kirjallisissa tulkinnoissa Don Juan on nähty usein romantisoiden ideaalin etsijänä, joka ei voi tyytyä reaaliseen todellisuuteen, tai rakkauteen kykenemättömänä ja siksi yhä uusiin viettely-yrityksiin tuomittuna. Hänestä on tullut kuten Faustista hahmo, johon voidaan suhtautua sympatialla.

II
1
A SPLENDID WICKEDNESS

David Bentley Hart considers the moral significance of Don Juan's amoralism.

Publication: First Things
Author: Hart, David Bentley
Date published: August 1, 2011

The literature of Spain's "Golden Age" produced two figures - Don Quixote de La Mancha and Don Juan Tenorio - who quickly escaped the confines of the works that gave them birth and took up exalted but previously unoccupied stations in the Western imagination. Each soon became as much an archetype as an invention, somehow existing beyond his written story. In either case, moreover, the result was rather curious, since neither figure in his final form was so much a mythic aggrandizement of the literary model as an almost total inversion.

The mythic Quixote - the paladin of the impossible, the heroic dreamer, the holy fool whom Unamuno regarded as a kind of "saint" and "Christ"-is not really the Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes. The old "knight of La Mancha" was intended by his creator principally as an object of mirth. By the same token, the mythic Juan - the irresistible seducer, the apostle of lighthearted satyriasis, the proud rebel against society and heaven, whom Kierkegaard saw as the perfect personification of sensuousness and Camus saw as a hero of the absurd - is not really the Juan created by Tirso de Molina in El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra. Tirso's character is definitely a roué, but hardly a virtuoso of the boudoir. His appetites are lavish, but his methods are generally jejune, and his conquests are the results not of personal magnetism but of cunning opportunism. True, he bravely defies the laws of God and society - not, though, as a philosophical rebel, but rather as a moral oaf.

Today, both figures have withdrawn to a considerable degree from popular awareness, especially outside the Spanish-speaking world; but Quixote's myth still retains a concrete shape, and something of his story remains fixed in our minds. Juan, by contrast, has disappeared almost entirely, or been replaced by a vague and insipid popular image of some primped and purring amorist who bears no real resemblance to him at all. And yet, until less than a century ago, his story was by far the better known, more influential, and more vital of the two. For three hundred years, playwrights, poets, and essayists returned to him not only regularly but almost obsessively. And then, all of a sudden, he was gone. What became of him?

There is an immediately tempting answer, but it seems to me inadequate. Quixote has survived the ravages of time chiefly because he is of his nature timeless; he enchants us with his absolute exorbitance, his ability to inhabit a parallel reality of his own, corresponding wholly to his own poetic and moral creed. He floats high up above any age as a kind of shimmering antithesis, perennially impossible, beautiful, and moving; indeed, he is more attractive the more implausible his values come to seem. Perhaps, then, we could by analogy assume just the reverse in the case of Juan: Perhaps today we live in an age of such pervasive "Donjuanism" (understood simply as insouciant sensualism) that the original has lost his power to scandalize, surprise, or even interest us. I think, though, that this answer rests on an irreparably flawed premise.

The reality of the matter is quite the opposite: Juan is not familiar to us at all today, and the reason our cultural imagination no longer has much room for him - -and would certainly be incapable of producing another figure like him - is that he, far more than the buoyantly eternal Quixote, is a figure fixed in a particular cultural moment. He is not timeless, but only epochal. He personifies a long but circumscribed historical episode, apart from whose ambiguities and energies he is unintelligible: that twilight interval stretching between the late Renaissance and contemporary secular modernity. Juan was the greatest immoralist of European literature precisely because he served as the negative image of the moral convictions and capacities of his time and place, the exemplary contradiction of an entire and coherent vision of the good, whose story magically combined a certain nostalgia for fading cultural certitudes with a certain cynicism toward them. So, when the values of his time disappeared, he dissolved with them.

In truth, if he could speak to us today as clearly as he did to earlier generations, it would not be in the amiable tones of someone familiar to us but in a distant, almost prophetic voice, full of ironic moral reproach. He would tell us not of ourselves - of either our virtues or our vices - not even satirically. Instead, he would remind us of a vanished magnificence, inseparable from a now largely abandoned conception of what it is to be human.

Unlike Don Quixote, who made his debut in a work of genuine literary genius, Don Juan has always somehow exceeded the occasion of his first appearance. In fact, we are not even sure when he really did first appear. Tirso de Molina (the nom de guerre of Gabriel Téllez, a monk in his day job) wrote most of his plays between 1605 and 1625; but he did not include El Burlador de Sevilla in any collection of his works, so we do not know when - or perhaps even if - he wrote it. More to the point, as entertaining as Tirso's play is, it is neither an extraordinary literary achievement nor even necessarily the most authoritative version of the tale. Its chief importance lies in its having initiated a theme that for three centuries of European letters seemed nearly inexhaustible, and for having established the canonical pattern of Juan's tale as it was told in most subsequent renderings up to the time of Mozart's Don Giovanni. In the end, then, "Juan as such" is an abstraction, derived from a positively oceanic literary history, of which any distillate is necessarily only very partial. He has no single, wholly solid form, but comes to us in a series of shifting translucencies.

Certain essential elements of the character are there from the very beginning, however, if only in an inchoate way, and endure throughout his literary career. The most important, and by far the most attractive (literarily speaking), is his proud impenitence. This in itself is odd. Tirso intended his protagonist as a cautionary example of the vicious and debased state to which unrestrained appetite reduces a soul. His Juan, far from being meant to engage our sympathy, is for the most part rather uninteresting: an ordinary profligate, cad, and sexual predator of noble extraction, with sufficient means to pursue his desires and without any discernible sign of a conscience to impede the pursuit. When he comes to a bad end, we are supposed to recognize it as divine justice and to concur with the verdict.

But that is not quite what happened. Inadvertently, Tirso endowed his character with a faint but invincible glamour. A man so recklessly devoted to his own passions that he can careen knowingly into the very embrace of hell, without wavering from the course his own character steers him on, is intrinsically interesting. However repellent we may find his deeds, we cannot help but feel a certain exhilaration at, and even envy of, his unconquerable exuberance. And this, more than anything else, accounts for the figure's profuse longevity in European letters. It was Juan's insane inflexibility of will that almost all later versions of the tale, even when they were not intended to do so, seemed to celebrate.

But, again, Tirso's play, as he wrote it, is essentially a morality drama. It begins late at night in the royal palace of Naples, where Juan has gone disguised as one Duke Octavio so that he can bed the duke's fiancee, the Duchess Isabela. She discovers the imposture too late to save her honor (such as it is), but before Juan can elude the guard; he does eventually escape, though, his true identity still undiscovered, and flees the city. Isabela, to save face, allows Octavio to bear the blame.

En route to Seville, Juan and his servant Catalinón ("coward") are shipwrecked but manage to swim to shore, where Juan promptly seduces, enjoys, and abandons the fisherman's daughter who comes to his aid. On reaching Seville, Juan finds that report of his Neapolitan adventure has reached the court of Castile, as has Duke Octavio, but fortunately the duke still does not know who cuckolded him. The king, however, guesses easily and commands Juan to marry Isabela - whom he has summoned from Naples - and grants the duke the hand of a certain Doña Ana as a consolation. But Ana is in love with a certain marquis, and Juan, knowing this, disguises himself as her beloved and attempts a nocturnal assault on her virtue, of the sort that had worked so well with Isabela. Ana is not fooled, however, and calls for help. When her father Don Gonzalo, commander of the Order of CaItrava, comes to her rescue, Juan kills the old man and flees. The marquis is arraigned for the murder. Later, passing through the countryside, Juan happens upon a peasant wedding feast, seduces the new bride with promises of marriage, deflowers her, and then slips away back to Seville.

There, however, forces are gathering against him: Isabela, Octavio, the fisherman's daughter, the marquis, the peasant bride, and even Juan's own father, Don Diego. Meeting Juan in a church, Catalinón warns his master of the danger, but Juan is unimpressed. Then, in a side chapel, he comes upon a statue of the murdered commander and, mockingly pulling its beard, invites it to dinner. When, surprisingly, the statue appears for its meal, Juan betrays only momentary consternation and then plays host with all the panache one would expect of a true hidalgo. He even takes the statue's proffered hand and accepts its invitation to dine the following night in Don Gonzalo's chapel. Juan confesses to himself that the stone had burned his hand and that he had felt fear, but he quickly shrugs that off as something unmanly.

The next night, he goes to dinner as appointed, dragging Catalinón along; there, after the amenities have been observed (a dish of vipers, a cup of gall), the statue takes Juan again by the hand and draws him down to hell. Juan cries out in pain, and even asks to be shriven by a priest, but otherwise meets his end bravely. In the final scene, Don Diego's honor is restored, Octavio is reunited with Isabela, and the marquis is returned to Ana.

Anyone familiar with most of the notable versions of the tale from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will recognize almost all the standard elements here, however much names and details may shift about in various tellings. Only a few additional features needed to be added by Tirso's successors. In the anonymous II convitato di pietra, from the 1650s, Juan's servant (now called Passarino) for the first time both produces the famous list of his master's conquests and cries out in despair for his wages when his master is taken to hell. In the various versions of the tale that entered the repertoire of the commedia dell'arte, the elevation of the story's comic aspects over the tragic became more pronounced. And the French playwright Dorimon penned a version in which Juan treats his own father so callously that the old man dies from emotional shock, which may be how the element of parricide entered the standard narrative.

The most original seventeenth-century treatment of the story is, without question, Molière 's Dom Juan ou Le Festin de pierre (1665), which, even if it is not a work of genius, is the work of a genius, and is the first treatment of Juan that is of genuine literary interest. Still, it has all the appearances of a work Molière might have concocted over a few winedrenched afternoons. It is written in prose, its structure is sprawlingly haphazard, and its abrupt finale is as nonchalant a piece of deus ex machina as any hack might have flung in the face of his audience. But the dialogue is hilarious, the characters have real dimensions, and the language is frequently splendid. Molière gave the world the French Juan: acerbic, coolly proud, skeptical, nonchalantly raffish, earnestly frivolous, naturally polygamous, a bad but not particularly abusive son, a duelist but not a murderer.

The most arresting seventeenth-century version, however, is certainly Thomas Shadwell's lurid and demented extravaganza, The Libertine (1676), whose "Don John" is not merely a burlador or rake, but something like Satan's less reputable twin brother. The antinomian monster at the center of this play is a prolific murderer and rapist, who has murdered his own father and is laying plans to rape several nuns; he is also a thief, a blasphemer, and - almost as bad - a philosopher. As he and three equally evil boon companions rampage across the stage, committing one atrocity after another with delirious gaiety, they also spin out elaborate but perfectly cogent rational justifications for their actions, of an almost proto-Nietzschean kind. And, even on the brink of damnation, amid a roiling phantasmagoria - ghosts of his victims, devils, the living statue, hell's fire - he expresses neither fear nor remorse but goes to his perdition proudly affirming his unshakable loyalty to himself, with a courage so insane it almost deprives hell of any significance. When the curtain falls, one is left wondering whether the devil is ready to receive him, or might rather be too shocked at his morals.

Molière's and Shadwell's renderings were aberrations, however. In the almost countless versions that appeared between Tirso's play and Da Ponte's libretto for Don Giovanni (1787), Juan remained very much the villain Tirso had made him: a violent, rapacious, unreflective, and unrepentant seducer whose fate is both just and satisfying. So he remained in Don Giovanni. And so, but for shifting cultural fashions, he might have remained indefinitely: a perennially popular theatrical motif, but not yet a fully fledged myth.

Something unanticipated, however, happened to Juan as he moved into the third century of his literary existence. The tacit sympathy he had perhaps always enjoyed among the patrons of the theater began to reshape his narrative explicitly. In the Romantic Age, he became more glamorous, was invested with deeper pathos, and was finally burdened with profundity. He remained a seducer, but now one to whom women were naturally drawn; and his desire for women, which had formerly been simple animal appetite, now took on the character of heroic "striving," an insatiable longing for the perfection of love or deification of the passions. The Romantic Juan actually loved women, or at least loved "woman" as an ideal, and in despair of finding the ideal embodied fled from one woman to another. So, at least, said E. T. A. Hoffman in 1814. In 1830, in The Stone Guest, Alexander Pushkin depicted Juan as a womanizer, but one who can unexpectedly lose his young, impetuous heart to Anna. Byron's Juan (who really little resembles the Juan of the classic narrative) is a figure of almost infinite romantic vulnerability. In 1844, Nikolas Lenau portrayed Juan as a disillusioned erotic idealist, embittered and defeated by the purity of his own passions.

Juan became, in short, a symbol of the rebellion of sentiment against society or heaven, and thus a tragic lover whose soul was worth contending for. Now his damnation, rather than being merely the condign consummation of a rogue's career, became the tale's crucial moment of philosophical truth. Some playwrights went so far as to rescind the sentence in the final moments. Others sent Juan to hell, but almost in triumph. Hell seemed merely to endow him - his defiance, his virility, his freedom of will - with a dark Miltonic grandeur. This tendency reached a quiet climax in Baudelaire's poem "Donjuán aux enfers," which shows Juan being ferried across the waters of death by Charon, surrounded by the specters of his many victims, but remaining utterly impassive all the while:

Mais le calme héros, courbé sur sa rapière,
Regardait le sillage et ne daignait rien voir.

(But the hero, unperturbed, leaning upon his rapier, Gazed at the wake and deigned to see nothing).

When Yeats, in 1914, described the eunuchs in hell's street enviously watching mighty Juan riding by, he was making use of what by then was something of a literary commonplace.

The Romantic eye was particularly suited to see something in Don Juan more interesting than had been noticed in the past: some deeper significance lurking behind all that romping, glittering, ravenous exuberance - some secret sadness or divine discontent. But the more the Romantics encumbered his story with "meaning" by converting his unreflective sybaritism into a Promethean defiance of the gods, the more they deprived him of his few engaging qualities: mirth, frivolity, childish pride, thoughtless wickedness. Most egregious in this respect were those poets and playwrights who saw some sort of deep analogy between Don Juan and Dr. Faust - on the grounds that both go to hell, or nearly do, and that both are striving after something, whether absolute knowledge or absolute sensuousness. Nicolas Vogt actually conflated the two figures in his immense, ludicrous, mercifully unfinished Gesamtkunstwerk from 1809, Der Färberhof. Christian Dietrich Grabbe, in 1829, produced Don Juan und Faust, a vast, seething swamp of large ideas, exaggerated passions, incoherent action, crushing monologues, deranged lyricism, and adolescent moral nihilism, which is somehow made even more unbearable by its numerous moments of poetic brilliance. In this play, Faust and Juan - each magnified or reduced to a symbol of a certain kind of spiritual temperament - vie for the love of Anna, whom Faust ends up killing. Both of the protagonists go to hell - Faust in remorse, Juan in defiance - but only in order to prove that Satan is more powerful than either.

And it was not only Germans who brought the two figures together. Some French authors did it as well, though with (needless to say) a lighter touch: Eugène Robin in 1836, in his poem Livia, and Théophile Gautier in 1838, in his poem La Comédie de la mort. And various later versions of Juan's story were influenced by Goethe's Faust even when the good doctor made no personal appearance on stage. Alexei Tolstoy's poem Don Juan (1860) includes both a prologue in heaven and a final redemption scene. And the dénouement of José Zorilla's glutinously pious (and still popular) Don Juan Tenorio (1844) - in which Juan is saved from hell at the last moment by the pure spirit of the one woman he truly loved - is a particularly unfortunate encore on the part of Goethe's Eternal Feminine.

By the end of the nineteenth century, I think it fair to say, the myth was fully formed. None of the twentieth-century revisions of the story made any actual contributions to the legend. The best of them - Shaw's Man and Superman, Rostand's underrated La Dernière Nuit de Don Juan, Frisch's Don Juan oder die Liebe zur Geometrie - were sardonic commentaries on a legend already fully formed. Each starts from the presupposition that we already know who Don Juan is and what he represents, and that we will therefore be able to appreciate the playwright's comic or caustic variations on the story. And then, around about midcentury, Juan's tale ceased altogether to generate any significant works of literature. A few philosophers continued to write about him for a while, a few psychologists - perhaps a fate worse than hell - seized on him as a pathology or psychological type. And then he more or less receded permanently to unvisited library shelves, a superannuated archetype.

Again, why was this so? And, again, the obvious but inadequate answer would be that Juan's ability to fascinate, exhilarate, and alarm has been lost in our age of unrestrained sensuality, voluntarism, glandular liberation, and relaxed consciences. Not that such an answer is wholly false: Certainly the more picaresque side of Juan's adventures - the veil of night, the cloaked figure stealing over balconies and through windows, the sordid incognito - seems only quaint in light of today's morbidly austere and functionalist venereal aesthetics. Contemporary erotic etiquette, even among the young, has so drained physical love of its enticingly forbidden and urgent quality, and so dispelled its atmosphere of rapturous risk, moral uncertainty, tantalizing mystery, and irresistible yearning, that the actual quantum of pleasure in the transaction is often, one imagines, diminished to a very transitory set of neural agitations. One should speak a reverent word or two for the aphrodisiac virtues of emotional innocence and inhibition. Fruit stolen after midnight from a walled and moonlit garden has a sweetness that the riper fruit purchased at midday in the market lacks.

All of this being granted, however, there is more to the mystery of Juan's disappearance than that. For one thing, his was never just the story of a selfindulgent hedonist on the prowl; it always possessed a larger metaphysical significance. No matter how great Juan's metamorphosis had been in his translation from Baroque to Romantic literature, his legend continued throughout to speak of transgression, of the power of unrestrained desire, and of the spiritual paradox of free will. Behind the tale's winsome glitter or lurid glare, there was always the outline of a sacred or demonic drama, however the sympathies of the poets may have shifted one way or another over time.

Moreover, if one looks back over all the figure's variations - the Latin or Teutonic Juan, the Baroque or Romantic Juan, Juan the pure voluptuary immune to disenchantment, or Juan the shattered idealist of love - one sees that two crucial elements remain fairly constant: First, he is indeed a true sensualist, delighting not only in sex, but also in food, wine, poetry, and song; and, second, he is truly courageous to the last, going to his doom gladly rather than attempting a repentance incongruous with his nature. These are obvious points, perhaps, but they should be understood in very particular ways. To say he is a sensualist is to say he is both servant and master of the senses, in all their elemental power. And to speak of his courage is to speak not of his spiritual rebellion or cosmic despair but only of his exultant awareness of the inalienable power of his own will. And, on both these points, Donjuán is a figure curiously alien to modern sensibilities.

That may seem an odd assertion, admittedly. We tend to think ours is a hedonistic age, and individual liberty is certainly its highest value. But distinctions should be drawn. For one thing, though there are no doubt many sensualists among us, ours is by no means a sensualist culture. Genuine sensualism requires a fairly healthy sense of natural goodness, and some developed capacity for discrimination. Late Western modernity, especially in its purest (that is, most American) form, certainly values the available and the plentiful, but not necessarily the intrinsically pleasing. As far as the actual senses are concerned, ours is in many ways a culture of peculiar poverty, evident even - perhaps especially - in its excesses. The diet produced by mass production and mass marketing, our civic and commercial architecture, our consumer goods, our style of dress, our popular entertainments, and so forth - it all seems to have a kind of premeditated aesthetic squalor about it, an almost militant indifference to the distinction between quantity and quality.

There has always been, of course, a division between popular and high culture, but usually also some continuity in kind between them. Today it often seems as if truly aesthetic values have been moved out of the social realm altogether, into ever smaller private preserves. Certainly they are not central to our concept or experience of the common good, even though we may occasionally make a public pretense of caring about such things. Our culture, with its almost absolute emphasis on the power of acquisition, trains us to be beguiled by the bright and the shrill rather than the lovely and the subtle. That, after all, is the transcendental logic of late-modern capitalism: the fabrication of innumerable artificial appetites, not the refinement of the few that are natural to us. Late modernity's defining art, advertising, is nothing but a piercingly relentless tutelage in desire for the intrinsically undesirable.

True sensualism, by contrast, is a longing for real intimacy with the world of sensible things. What Juan desires is desirable of itself, and his appetency is a real expression - however corrupt - of the dignity and loveliness of incarnate life. He is a thoroughly unethical soul, but his way of life is still an ethos, not simply a state of unremitting distraction. When he pursues or embraces the phenomenal aspect of what he desires, he at least seeks some kind of communion with the thing in itself, some capture of the whole nuptial totality of form and matter. Late modernity prepares us to live far more contentedly in their divorce: material goods without formal beauty, phenomenal diversions without material depth, nervous stimulation without sensuous enrichment. If our style of life is a materialism, it is of an oddly disembodied kind, and does more to shield us from the senses than to liberate them.

By the same token, Juan's pride and willfulness are more than mere bourgeois self-indulgence or latemodern narcissism. His self-love is destructive, even demonic, but it certainly is not petty. Frivolous as he is, his tale is cast against a backdrop of cosmic significance, because he still inhabits a coherent moral universe. He knows the rules that govern it and by the end certainly understands the consequences of violating them, but he rejects the moral order nonetheless. Even setting aside all those Romantic exaggerations about Juan's Promethean or Luciferian defiance of God, one can still say that his unwillingness to repent and his insistence on accepting that final dreadful invitation actually affirm both the existence of divine law and the godlike power of the soul to choose its own destruction.

In the end - and this is the principal reason his myth has lost its power for us - his tale is a volatile combination of the most exalted idealisms and the coarsest cynicisms of an age of radical change. He was born in the waning light of the last epoch of triumphal Christian humanism, the inverted double of the Renaissance Man, and his story was a satire in the full Attic sense: a satyr-play concluding a glorious but exhausted drama, at once mocking and celebrating the cycle it brought to a close. Hence his long progress from worthless rogue to champion of the passions to psychological cliché to obsolescence perfectly symbolizes the transition from the premodern to the postmodern cultural imagination, moral and aesthetic: from faith to disenchantment to resigned equanimity. He could not have been invented earlier than he was, and he could not have endured any longer than he did. His proper element was that long cultural gloaming in which the old moral metaphysics retained its formal authority, but not its credibility.

Over those few brief centuries, all the old paradigms would be entirely recast: The mechanical philosophy would transform nature from a living theophany into a spiritless machine; secularization would subordinate all human associations to the bare dialectic between the state and the individual; the ideology of market economics would reduce human community to the impersonal algorithms of private interests; Darwinian biology (both as science and as a metaphysics) would absorb human nature into the mechanistic narrative; and so on. In the end, modernity would achieve its inevitable revision of our understanding of ourselves and our world, and the mythic Juan - personifying the irresoluble tension between what was passing away and what was coming into being - would at the last quietly melt away. His myth vanished because it was essentially a myth of withdrawal; his Odyssey through European letters was, from the first, a single long recessional.

So I return to where I began. The figure of Don Juan is an imaginative impossibility in our time because he comes from a period in which the human being was understood not merely as a biological machine, generated randomly out of the incessant flux of an aleatory universe, but as a radiant and terrible enigma, dangerously and daringly poised between beast and angel, hell and heaven, the elemental abyss and the infinite God: a period in which it was still just possible to believe that human freedom was not merely the all-but-illusory residue of a random confluence of mindless physical forces and organic mechanisms, but a glimpse of the transcendent within the world of matter. Juan's wickedness, by its sheer garish or stylish flamboyance, still reflected an exalted - and not merely sentimental - sense of human dignity. Even his sexual esurience was not just brute impulse, but the darkly distorted image of an angelic liberty.

This cannot be the case for us. Our culture is not subject to the torments of immutable moral laws or to the allure of the transcendent good: The terror and the ecstasy of the absolute are not the deep, flowing springs of our shared conscience. In such an age, there can be no such thing as splendid wickedness. If we do not see ourselves in the light of the Good beyond being, nothing in our nature can be cast in sufficiently striking relief. And now that so many deeds that once were thought to place a soul in the balance have become matters of moral indifference, most of the choices we make are by definition unimportant, and the heroism or antiheroism of moral choice is all but impossible. This is simply the modern condition; perhaps it is a blessing. It means, however, that not only our virtues, but also our vices, have been robbed of their poetic resonances. Individual writers will, of course, always be able to dream up deplorable but charismatic rogues with enormous appetites, like George MacDonald Frasier's Flashman or Roald Dahl's Uncle Oswald; more-ambitious artists may produce the occasional jubilant amoralist with a gift for momentarily transforming the bleak absurdity of existence into a rude carnival, like Alvaro Mutis' Maqroll the Gaviero. But our shared cultural imagination has no real place for a moral and metaphysical drama like Juan's.

As I have said, the figure of Quixote abides because he is borne aloft by his beautiful and mysterious timelessness. Juan was never timeless. He was weighed down from the beginning by a whole history of cultural dissolution. And now, in his majestic frivolity and obdurate impenitence, he is beyond our ken. If we could grant him a few moments of serious attention, however, he would remind us of a world in which the moral meaning of the universe could be read in a single soul, because a sublime and integral sympathy united them, as macrocosm and microcosm, totality and epitome. And still, whether we are conscious of it or not, the heroic scope of his negations rebukes us with the image of a human grandeur perhaps no more unattainable than in the past, but certainly far more unimaginable. Any modern attempt at the invention of a Don Juan, or of any similar archetype of animal vitality or spiritual revolt, would fail almost inevitably. The figure we would produce would have no meaning now: no depth, no height, neither deformity nor beauty. Compared to Juan, whoever might emerge from our common cultural imagination to take his place would simply be too damned boring - or, more precisely, too boring to be damned.

Author affiliation: David Bentley Hart is contributing editor of First Things and author of Atheist Delusions (Yale).

Read more: http://periodicals.faqs.org/201108/2410208671.html#ixzz1WB3BqPi5

2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6IdKGp3fAk
The Wabash Commentary is hosting a talk by David Bentley Hart. The title of his talk is 'Don Juan as Moralist' - [April 18, 2011].

3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK1_vm0FMAU
'The Commendatore Scene' [loppukohtaus] - Don Giovanni
*
In the modern opera house the final curtain falls upon this scene. In the work, however, there is another scene in which the other characters moralize upon Don Giovanni’s end. There is one accusation, however, none can urge against him. He was not a coward. Therein lies the appeal of the character. His is a brilliant, impetuous figure, with a dash of philosophy, which is that, sometime, somewhere, in the course of his amours, he will discover the perfect woman from whose lips he will be able to draw the sweetness of all women. Moreover he is a villain with a keen sense of humour. Inexcusable in real life, he is a debonair, fascinating figure on the stage, whereas Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Don Ottavio are mere hinges in the drama and as creations purely musical. Zerlina, on the other hand, is one of Mozart’s most delectable characters. Leporello, too, is clearly drawn, dramatically and musically; a coward, yet loyal to the master who appeals to a strain of the humorous in him and whose courage he admires.

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Don Giovannista Facebookiin

Don Juan/Giovanni ei kadu tekojaan komentajan 'henkipatsaan' sitä kysyessä, mikä merkitsee, että hän tällä tavoin tulee katumattomassa uhmassaan vapaaehtoisesti valinneeksi kuoleman ja nimenomaan helvetin eikä pelastusta, jonka katumus vielä viimeisenä vaihtoehtona saattaisi hänelle mahdollistaa.

Don Giovannin radikaalissa pahuudessa [täysin riippumatta närkästyksestämme hänen tekojaan kohtaan] on tiettyä moraalista ylevyyttä - luonteen suuruutta ja siten jopa hyveellisyyttä - olkoonkin, ettei Don Juan koskaan voi toimia positiivisena ihanteena - ainoastaan loistavana esimerkkinä mielen lujuudesta henkilökohtaisen päätöksen tasolla.

Don Giovannin katumaton ehdottomuus muistuttaa perverssillä joskin ylevällä tavalla käänteistä mutta yhtä lailla perverssejä piirteitä omaavaa fanaattista uskon marttyyriutta eli patologisen ehdotonta hyvettä [moraalia].

Don Giovannin barokkimaista pahuuden 'puhtautta' ['puhtaus' ei siis merkitse moraalista hyväksyntää vaan ko. asenteen subjektiivisen vilpittömyyden ja aitouden tunnustamista] ei liberaali-demokraattisesta sivilisaatiosta kuitenkaan enää löydä, koska se on diagnosoitu psykopatiaksi, jota voi kuitenkin juuri tuon kliinis-moraalisen etäisyyden vuoksi käsitellä fiktiivisten hahmojen puitteissa.

Ja miten on - eikö koko nykyinen maailmamme ole täynnään don-giovanneja, joista ei kuitenkaan enää löydä mitään moraalista suuruutta? - [Eikä sellaista edes voi löytää, koska Don Giovannin intohimoisen moraaliton sensuaalinen egoismi on demokraattisen yhteiskunnan tabu, jota se väistämättä joutuu läpielämään fantasioissa ja etenkin porno- ja väkivaltaviihteen muodossa].

Mutta ehkäpä juuri faktionaalis-viihteellisten murhaajien metsästys valtaisaan suosioon yltäneessä dekkari-kirjallisuudessa ja toisaalta yhtä lailla valtaisan suosion saavuttaneessa uudentyyppisessä viihde-genressä eli tosi-teeveen rikos- ja poliisidokumenteissa ilmentää eräänlaista moraalisen pahuuden banalisoitumis-prosessia, joka tapahtuu [hegeliläisittäin ja freudilaisittain] käänteisyyden, etäisyyden ja turvallisen faktion kautta - kuitenkin vulgaareihin väkivalta- ja seksi-fantasioihin vetoamalla ja niitä hyödyntämällä.

Ehkäpä Don Juan vakavasti otettavan valinnan tekevänä immoralistina todellakin on mahdoton modernina aikana - tosin paradoksaalisella tavalla. Don Juan edustaa liberaali-demokraattiselle järjestykselle aidosti vaarallista tyyppiä: hänet on modernismin kehittyessä torjuttu ja fiktioitu alkuperäisestä eli 'autenttisesta saatanallisuudestaan' tabuksi, jota kuitenkin viihteessä ja fantasioissa [joita tosi-teevee ovelimmin stimuloi] jatkuvasti kierrämme ja rikomme, mikä [hegeliläisittäin ja freudilaisittain] merkitsee, että Don Juan on paradoksaalisesti muuttunut juuri modernin ihmisen itsensä reaaliseksi hahmoksi, jota tämä moderni kansalainen ei kuitenkaan tabun vuoksi itsekseen tunnista - [a) virallinen eli symbolinen imago: pitää olla suvaitsevainen ja humaani demokraatti, b) reaalis-imaginaarinen imago: vulgaari ja lattea egoismi].

Tällainen ihminen on yhtä aikaa vulgaari ja banaali - liberaalis-subjektiivisen valinnan vapauden ja demokraattisen moraalin tuotos: itseään häpeämätön ja itseään 'toteuttava' nautinto-onnen addikti, jolta kuitenkin puuttuu Don Juanin uskonnollisen ja yhteisöllisen moraalin ylittävä - kaiken läpäisevä ja häikäilemätön sensuaalisen subjektiivisuuden ehdottomuus - suorastaan loistava sensuaalinen pahuus, josta on tullut maailmankatsomus.

Tällainen ajattelutapa oli mahdollista kohdata vakavasti moraalis-esteettisenä tyyppinä vain renessanssiin ja uskonpuhdistukseen jyrkän ambivalentisti reagoineen barokin monenlaisten äärimmäisyyksien aikana, mutta jo 1700-luvun eli universaaliin valistukseen ja moraaliin pyrkivän vuosisadan jälkeen Don Juan alkoi transformoitua erottamattomaksi osaksi modernin ihmisen identiteettiä, mikä merkitsi yhtä aikaa hänen faustisuutensa [rajoittamaton sensuaalis-tiedollinen ambitio - maksoi mitä maksoi] omaksumista sekä hänen moraalittomuutensa kieltoa [tabu, joka imaginaarisesti ruokkii väkivalta- ja seksi-mielikuvia]. 

Paria epäilyn hetkeä lukuunottamatta ehdottoman uskon varmuuden sisäistäneestä Jeesus Nasaretilaisesta ja hänen vielä ehdottomampaa subjektiivis-sensuaalista valintaa edustaneesta saatanallisesta 'sukulaisielustaan' Don Juanista on tullut liberaali-demokraattisen massa-sivilisaatiomme tiedostamattomia [ja tavallaan myös tuntemattomia] arkkityyppejä. Niinpä heidän hahmoistaan on myös 'liberaalisti' ja 'demokraattisesti' kadotettu kaikki se alkuperäinen radikaalius ja ylevyys, jota he edustivat - vain vulgaari ja lattea perverssiys on jäänyt.

Mitä kaikkea kertookaan [mm.] Jeesuksen ja Don Juanin hahmojen moraalisen uskottavuuden latistuminen [esim.] kapitalistisen itsetuotteistamisen ehdoilla toimivaksi näennäiskaveruudeksi globaaleissa facebook-yhteisöissä näennäisen transparentista [läpinäkyvästä] ja näennäisen pluralistisesta [monikulttuurisesta] nykymaailmastamme? 

Ilmeisesti ja etenkin sen, ettei mitään kerrottavaa enää juurikaan ole eikä tule. Historia on alkanut toistaa itseään jo niin nopeutuvalla tahdilla, että trendit vaihtuvat ja mikä-tahansa-tuotekierto markkinoilla nopeutuu sen verran merkittävästi, että nykyhetki aivan konkreettisella tavalla muuttuu ikuisuuden kaltaiseksi pysähtyneisyydeksi.

On todella irnoista, että Jeesus ja Don Juan molemmat pyrkivät tavallaan aivan samaan eli ajan pysäyttämiseen ja siten sen ikuistamiseen nykyhetkessä. Jeesus julistamalla ja odottamalla Jumalan valtakunnan pikaista tuloa [mitä ei koskaan tapahdu empiirisessä maailmassa] - Don Juan yrittämällä saavuttaa maksimaalisen ja äärimmäisen nautinnon lopullinen hetki [jota ei koskaan tule, koska puute/halu ei lopu].

Jeesus ristiinaulittiin [hän tosin nousi ylös taivaisiin]. Don Giovanni joutui helvettiin [omasta tahdostaan].

Entä facebook-kaverit? He saavat tietysti lisää kavereita. Tällä tavoin pyörii uudenlainen 'ihmiskauppa', sillä facebook on kapitalistisen [itse-]tuotteistamisen korkein jalostettu muoto. Ja kun kommunikaatio lopullisesti muuttuu talous-arvotetuksi tavaraksi, loppuu myös aika.

Mutta tässä ei ole enää mitään hyveellistä,  ylevää tai syvällistä. Tavara/tuote ei ole enää tahtova olento. Toisin kuin Jeesus ja Don Juan tuotteeksi muuttunut kommunikaatio on saavuttanut ikuisuuden jo eläessään. 
*
http://periodicals.faqs.org/201108/2410208671.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Giovanni
http://www.musicwithease.com/don-giovanni-synopsis.html
http://nateduffy.blogspot.com/2011/07/don-juan-and-david-bentley-hart.html
http://www.arthis.jyu.fi/kirjallisuushistoria/index.php/12_barokki/2_espanjan_kultaajan_draamaa/barok_1209.htm
http://whatyouthinkmatters.org/blog/article/nietzsches-good-manners
http://www.reform-magazine.co.uk/index.php/2011/07/david-bentley-hart-interview-modernity-recognise-source-its/