Hello friends,
To get around the Chinese firewall, I've moved my blog to dontblinkforasecond.wordpress.com. The old posts aren't up yet, but there is a new one up right now. I'll keep adding stuff to the site over the next few weeks.
Para evitar el cortafuegos chino, mudé mi blog al sistema Wordpress. Hay una versión española (con bailarinas de flamenco, cuerpos sudosos y todo :)) a dontblinkes.wordpress.com. Es un spanglish juego de palabras. Estoy en el proceso de subir las entradas viejas y cambiar el diseño, pero ahorita hay una nueva post. Vete!
Ciao
Monday, April 4, 2011
Monday, June 28, 2010
Miroslav Volf's "The End of Memory": an Exercise in Charitable Writing
Volf fluently switches between complex twenty-first century philosophical dilemmas and his experiences with "Captain G." This intelligence officer apparently subjected Volf to serious psychological torture through a series of illegal interrogations that occurred during Volf's obligatory service in the socialist Yugoslavian army. Far from searching for pity, Volf treats Captain G with discretion and respect. Even though his style is artless and confessional, it stands more on the strength of his arguments than emotional appeals to his personal life.
Although he is a firm Christian, Volf presents his argument in such a way that we see it as one perspective among many. Many times, his task is simply to provide the Christian perspective on questions posed by twentieth-century thinkers. Other times, he advances his own interpretation of the Christian vision for reconciliation. There is a deliberate dialogue with secular thinkers on these issues: I was very glad to see Volf begin with Weisel, Ricouer, Freud, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard rather than C.S. Lewis, Jonathan Edwards, and Karl Barthes. His thoughts come from a line of recent theology that emphasizes the power of Christian doctrine to alter peoples' lives in the present moment as well as in the world to come. Strange then that he draws from Dante's Paradiso in Part Three to suggest what eternal Christian reconciliation might be like.
As happens with many books of theology and philosophy, my favorite part was the beginning, especially chapters three and four. Here, Volf interrogates secular understandings of reconciliation and demonstrates effectively how remembering often becomes a tool for revenge rather than brooking reconciliation. He shows how the Christian vision provides necessary guidance for the act of reconciliation, most importantly by providing a way to "forget" and still treat grievances with justice. "Forgetting" for Volf means the "not coming to mind" of a certain event or grievance rather than the willful oppression of memories. He argues that in an ultimate sense, this kind of forgetting is only fully realized in Christ's final redemption of the world, neatly laying the difficult boundary between heaven and earth while showing how the two could interact.
I must say I was disappointed by Volf's reading of Freud. Since Freud is such a controversial figure, I would have liked to see some references to modern psychology. The postscript at the end was also a bit of a let-down. Here, he imagines what reconciliation with Captain G might look like. Volf has a tendency toward idealism and the hypothetical situations he poses are ultimately unsatisfying for me. I do not think this discredits his argument. By ending the book with a personal story rather than a didactic list of commands, Volf is giving his reader the freedom to choose which path to follow.
For atheists, agnostics, and Calvinists, there may be a good deal of content in this book you don't believe, but I do not think the experience will be uncomfortable. If anything, this book is an invitation to dialogue even if it is stocked with Christian theology. Because Volf is so articulate and never comes across as judgmental, he is an easy narrator to trust. The End of Memory is a masterpiece that will give you pause to reconsider the foundations of justice themselves.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
La sexe
For those who know me, it may be surprising to see a movie such as Sex in the City 2 on the blog. It was all over the institute today, and before I knew it, I was taking an afternoon off with a load of Portugés and Colobiana college girls to see the flick. As much a nerd as my father, I thought it would be a language-learning experience... I already hear your skepticism.
True, I did learn quite a bit of French from reading subtitles while watching the movie. For example, "vale la pena" has its equivalent in French: "il vaut le peine." Nevertheless, what was most fascinating (and disturbing) was viewing an archetype of American pop culture from a non-US perspective. Every cinematic revelation - a new wardrobe of clothes, the decadent Dubai hotel suite, the moment when the heroine kisses her ex-fiancee, etc - was accompanied by gasps and oogles from the audience as if the entire showing were preplanned.
At one point, Carrie discovers that her butler only sees his wife once every three months because he is too poor to return to his home in India. When the four women visit the Dubai marketplace, they fail to notice the striking economic disparities between their luxurious hotel paradise of "the future" and the real UAE. Of course, one would hardly expect the franchise that catalyzed New York glam's rise to fame to cast a bone to the poor of the world - beyond the patronizing plane ticket that Carrie leaves for her butler when she leaves - but the cultural blindness of the movie is astounding. What was more shocking was how the audience, especially my classmates, bought into the excessive vision of the movie.
I recall a conversation I had yesterday with one of the Brazilian girls at our school. Like me, she had studied Spanish in Salamanca, and she was remarking about the slutty behavior of the American girls she had seen. When I agreed that I thought it was inappropriate, she backed off. She claimed the difference was merely cultural, that such things were acceptable in America, and I think that for a second she forgot she was speaking to an American. I didn't understand how someone could come to believe such things were commonplace in the US until I witnessed the craze today over Sex and the City.
Films like this are, for all practical purposes, propaganda to the outside world, even if their dreams are as empty to us as North Korean radio. In my class, we've been sharing our favorite works of art over the last few days. It surprises me that these girls respect the socialist-revolutionary poets of their countries, and yet adore Mr. Big, Adrienne, and the eroticized American Dream just as much as Carrie and Samantha.
I wonder how the voice-over changes the patriotic message of the war movies advertised before the feature. These contradictory images can be held in tension abroad. If you travel outside the US this year, I encourage you to witness an American culture icon from the other side. It will test more than your artistic sensibilities.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
I Am Not a Good Enough Pupil: the Place of Repentance in the Essays of Michel de Montaigne
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan . . .
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs
- Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”
Assuming an attitude of confidence, Montaigne declares “let me justify here what I often say: that I rarely repent” (Montaigne 234). Indeed, this is about the only claim he justifies by the end of his essay “On Repenting.” After my fourth read through the essay, I was still unsure what Montaigne meant by repentance in the first place, and it seemed as if the process of repenting itself only lead him to melancholy and pessimism. This was at odds with the kind of repentance he set out to describe at the beginning of the essay. Like the stoics, Montaigne withdraws from his emotions, uses his limited reason to judge his actions as best as he can, and attempts to amend his ways. If Montaigne is satisfied with this approach to repentance, it is incoherent that he would experience melancholy when reflecting upon repentance. Taking a closer look at the progression of the essay, I found that when Montaigne meditates upon the way he repents, it leads him to question his very perceptions of right and wrong. This leads him to question his ability to repent: repentance should reform the will, but he is unsure that he can change his will, leading him to grieve his human condition.
The act of isolated self-meditation provides the foundation for this essay and Montaigne’s essays in general. As he explains in “On Solitude,” “we have to withdraw from such attributes of the mob as are within us. It is our own self we have to isolate and take back into possession” (Montaigne 99). By contemplating our personal experience in isolation, we better understand ourselves, but Montaigne does more than simply embark on an identity quest. He is testing the validity of his own actions against his experience. He claims in “On Experience,” “were I a good pupil there is enough, I find, in my own experience to make me wise” (Montaigne 375). Experience itself is unlimited, but human understanding limits Montaigne’s ability to make sense of it. In “On Repentance,” these limits lead him to doubt his ability to reform his wayward will.
Montaigne first gives us a fairly simple picture of repenting based on his ability to judge right and wrong. He is satisfied to repent only of those things which he can clearly perceive as vices: “There is no vice that is truly a vice which is not odious and which a wholesome judgment does not condemn . . . perhaps those philosophers are right who maintain that [vice] is principally the product of stupidity and ignorance, so hard it is to imagine that anyone could recognize it without loathing it” (Montaigne 234). Since he speaks “as an ignorant questioning man” (Montaigne 234), Montaigne must be ignorant of most vices, and we cannot hold him in contempt if he rarely repents. To be able to judge his actions, Montaigne must create his own system of moral judgment: “we must establish an inner model . . . by which at times we favor ourselves or flog ourselves. I have my own laws and law-court to pass judgment on me and I appeal to them rather than elsewhere” (Montaigne 236). While he restrains his actions “according to the standards of others, I enlarge them according to my own” (Montaigne 236). In practice, Montaigne might “abide by the common beliefs” (Montaigne 234) of the Catholic Church, but he only passes moral judgment upon his actions based on what he perceives as right and wrong.
Yet when Montaigne tests this model against his experience, he finds that it fails to account for the influence of the in his actions: “we can disown such vices as take us by surprise and towards which we are carried away by our passions; but such vices as are rooted and anchored in a will which is strong and vigorous brook no denial” (Montaigne 236). This leads Montaigne to question the efficacy of repentance: “to repent is but to gainsay our will and to contradict our ideas; it can lead us in any direction” (Montaigne 236), even to the denial of virtue. He questions whether repentance for one’s actions can lead to true reform, since it fails to address the will, but this leads him to doubt the impartiality of his own reason. He acknowledges “there is hardly an emotion in me which sneaks away and hides from my reason or which is not governed by the consent of almost all my parts” (Montaigne 240). His reason consents to those actions which he clearly identifies as vice, and he doubts that this same reason can be an impartial judge of these same actions. If his perceptions of right and wrong are not good enough bases for his own judgment of his actions, this questions whether he can repent of any vice whatsoever. “To be right-ruled within, in you bosom . . . where everything is hidden – that’s what matters” (Montaigne 236), but Montaigne doubts that we can even know if we are right-ruled.
If the will causes us to sin and Montaigne doubts our ability to reform, it is uncertain how people can be held responsible for their actions. Just as the author cannot speak French better than Latin when the latter is his native tongue, “you cannot extirpate the qualities we are originally born with: you can cover them over and you can hide them” (Montaigne 239). A man born into beggary might blame himself for becoming a thief, but even if he himself knows thievery is a vice and habitually repents of it, he will continue to steal out of habit and necessity. Yet this does not excuse vice. Rather, “the real condemnation which applies to the common type of men nowadays is that their very retreat is full of filth and corruption, that their amendment of life is vague . . . . Some of them are so stuck to their vices by long habit or some natural bonding that they no longer find them ugly” (Montaigne 239-240). Montaigne, too, has generally acted according to the impulses of his will, but he seems to believe there is at least a way of covering one’s negative qualities.
To be effective, it seems that repentance must at least acknowledge one’s impulses and intentions, and this sort of repentance will inevitably lead to grief. More than righting simple, isolated wrongs, it must address habitual vices that have developed even under the governance of reason. Nevertheless, the stoics claim it is not good enough to feel bad for doing something wrong; they “command us to correct any vices or imperfections which we acknowledge to be in us but forbid us to be sorry or upset about them” (Montaigne 241). In contrast, Montaigne identifies an urge to “condemn my universal form and . . . beg God to form me entirely and to pardon my natural frailty. But it seems to me that that should not be called repenting” (Montaigne 241). This form of grieving is dangerous. It is the “deep and chancy undertaking” (or better, “arduous and hazardous”) that Montaigne discusses in “On Solitude,” the process of probing “right down inside and [finding] out what principles make things move” (Montaigne 131). Melancholy results when Montaigne touches the point where his nature falls short of an ideal standard. Even if better men have overcome the vices Montaigne grieves, it seems that he himself has never changed: “when I reflect on my behavior as a young man and as an old one I find that I have mainly behaved ordinately secundum me [relative to my capacities]” (Montaigne 242). For Montaigne, repenting is not the same as grieving, but when he reflects on how little he has changed, it seems he cannot help that one leads to the other.
The situation becomes more hopeless as Montaigne addresses his declining appetites that accompany old age. As the longings of the will become less forceful, “we must not allow ourselves to be so borne away by natural degeneration that it bastardizes our judgment” (Montaigne 244). Montaigne finds that he has not lost his ability to judge, but as his convictions decline, temptation becomes more difficult to resist. To correct vice, he must rely more on his reason than conviction to distinguish between right and wrong. At this point, the stoic project reaches its limits: “I disclaim those incidental reformations based on pain. God must touch our hearts. Our conscience must emend itself by itself, by the strengthening of our reason, not by the enfeebling of our appetites. . . . We must love temperance for its own sake and out of respect for God who has commanded it to us” (Montaigne 245). Perhaps what Montaigne is looking for, then, is the ability to correct wrongs out of a desire for virtue, but this task is even more difficult: “we do not so much give up our vices as change them – for the worst, if you ask me” (Montaigne 246). Two processes of change emerge: the first, the stoic process, works against the will from a state of emotional detachment to address habitual vice; the second transforms the will itself before addressing the habit. Montaigne does not seem hopeful of achieving either consistently in his old age, and moral decline is inevitable.
Our conclusions must be bleak. Beginning at a place of clear conviction about the differences between right and wrong, Montaigne not only shows that true reform is very difficult, if not impossible, but he also acknowledges that his moral judgments may be negatively influenced by his will, and sincere repentance becomes more difficult as one grows older. Underlying these conclusions is the assumption that ideal repentance would actively work to amend the will and would be guided by clear moral judgment. Montaigne cannot repent every time he acknowledges a vice in his life. On one hand, he only holds himself responsible for those things he can amend, which allows him to repent rarely and hold a clear conscience. On the other, he is not comfortable with the idea of inevitable decline and is upset that his will seems to have been mostly unchanged throughout his entire life. Repenting must be something more fundamental than simply “gainsaying the will.” It must touch the entire being.
In the final essay he ever wrote, “On Experience,” Montaigne discusses once again his ability to reform his own life. He claims, “it is to my inadequacy (so often avowed) that I owe my tendency to moderation, to obeying such beliefs as are laid down for me and a constant cooling and tempering of my opinions as well as a loathing for that distressing and combative arrogance which has complete faith and trust in itself: it is a mortal enemy of finding out the truth” (Montaigne 377). He seems to have become more accepting of the advice of others since writing “On Repenting”:
"When I find that I have been convicted of an erroneous opinion by another’s argument, it is not so much a case of my learning something new he has told me nor how ignorant I was of some particular matter – there is not much profit in that – but of learning of my infirmity in general and of the treacherous ways of my intellect. From that I can reform the whole lump. (Montaigne 375)"
Perhaps it is because he trusts the advice of other that he can achieve reform despite his own treacherous intellect. Even when he does not trust his own opinions, he achieves moderation. This allows him to better utilize his own experience: from the opening lines of the essay, he has been more open to the ability of experience to discover truth and guide us in living our lives as a supplement to reason. This leads to a greater faith in moral judgment: “Nature always gives us happier laws than those we give ourselves” (Montaigne 366). When experience is enlarged by the wisdom of others, Montaigne overcomes some of the limitations of the human understanding, and reason can deny the desires of the will, leading to moral virtue rather than moral decline.
Nevertheless, this is not exactly the repentance Montaigne was looking for in “On Repenting,” the kind that “[touches] me everywhere, [grips] my bowels and [makes] them yearn – as deeply and universally as God does see me” (Montaigne 242). This sort of repentance is deeply emotional and seems to transform emotions as it seeks to transform the will itself. Such a statement does not make Montaigne a good stoic; in fact it violates the very precepts of detachment that guide the stoic to reform. Montaigne seems to yearn for the ability to love virtue. He is looking for change in desire, which will inevitably transform habits of vice. True repentance comes out of a heartfelt desire to change, which is supplied by God. What he achieves in “On Experience” is detached and emotionless. In fact, it is accompanied by self-loathing, which makes the reader doubt how effectively this method can combat melancholy. In both cases, the change is not driven by one’s personal guilt or the guilt of others, but by an objective evaluation of his own actions. Nevertheless, he longs to change the will before the habit. By reducing this change to a mere act of reason, the reform Montaigne achieves in “On Experience” is a diminished form of repentance.
From what we observed earlier in the essay concerning Montaigne’s doubts about his own ability to judge between right and wrong, it seems the desire for virtue would be a useful tool in developing one’s internal notions of moral justice. If this desire is hard to find, it makes sense that Montaigne rarely repents, since even with the help of his friends, he cannot always know if he is right or wrong. It also seems that the process of self-examination forces him to acknowledge the infirmity of his nature, leading to melancholy, and a transformation of that nature itself would become a powerful force in conquering melancholy. While Montaigne seems to eventually succeed in his stoic goals through long and arduous practice, he never roots out his own self-loathing.
Perhaps if he were the student he wishes to be, Montaigne would find the repentance he desires through his own experience, but after giving his conclusions some thought, I realized that Montaigne’s willingness to accept the stoics’ model of emotional withdrawal bothered me. Scholars draw parallels between Montaigne’s confessional style of writing and Augustine’s Confessions, and I think a few key differences between the two writers highlight what is problematic about Montaigne’s approach to repentance. We first notice a difference in words: Montaigne discusses repentance, which is a reasoned process of acknowledging specific acts of vice and working to reform the habits that cause those acts; Augustine discusses confession, which for him means an emotional laying bare of all that he is before God. In Book Ten of Confessions, he makes his confession “not in words and sounds made by the tongue alone, but with the voice of my soul and in my thoughts which cry aloud to you. Your ear can hear them” (Augustine 207). This leads us to a second difference, which is that while Montaigne is concerned with temporal justice within his society and within himself, Augustine evaluates his actions based on an eternal divine standard and addresses his entire work to God. While Montaigne judges himself, Augustine claims “It is you, O Lord, who judge me” (Augustine 210).
Perhaps the difficulty in Montaigne’s writings is that he has atomized his system of moral justice and reform. While Montaigne may not experience the intimate connection with God that Augustine seems to claim, he is too ready to separate out his reason from his emotions and his actions from his will. It is necessary to do our best in judging between right and wrong, but there comes a point at which the reasoning process fails and we must be sincere to our emotional grief. For the Catholic, it seems that repentance is part of the larger practice of confession: acknowledging one’s own inadequacy in light of divine justice and to reforming as best as one can manage. Montaigne touches on this holistic approach to reform but is afraid to engage it because of his melancholy. If our actions lead us to grief, we should not remove ourselves from that emotion in the process of reform but rather acknowledge that wrongdoing and melancholy are inevitably part of our being.
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan . . .
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs
- Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”
Assuming an attitude of confidence, Montaigne declares “let me justify here what I often say: that I rarely repent” (Montaigne 234). Indeed, this is about the only claim he justifies by the end of his essay “On Repenting.” After my fourth read through the essay, I was still unsure what Montaigne meant by repentance in the first place, and it seemed as if the process of repenting itself only lead him to melancholy and pessimism. This was at odds with the kind of repentance he set out to describe at the beginning of the essay. Like the stoics, Montaigne withdraws from his emotions, uses his limited reason to judge his actions as best as he can, and attempts to amend his ways. If Montaigne is satisfied with this approach to repentance, it is incoherent that he would experience melancholy when reflecting upon repentance. Taking a closer look at the progression of the essay, I found that when Montaigne meditates upon the way he repents, it leads him to question his very perceptions of right and wrong. This leads him to question his ability to repent: repentance should reform the will, but he is unsure that he can change his will, leading him to grieve his human condition.
The act of isolated self-meditation provides the foundation for this essay and Montaigne’s essays in general. As he explains in “On Solitude,” “we have to withdraw from such attributes of the mob as are within us. It is our own self we have to isolate and take back into possession” (Montaigne 99). By contemplating our personal experience in isolation, we better understand ourselves, but Montaigne does more than simply embark on an identity quest. He is testing the validity of his own actions against his experience. He claims in “On Experience,” “were I a good pupil there is enough, I find, in my own experience to make me wise” (Montaigne 375). Experience itself is unlimited, but human understanding limits Montaigne’s ability to make sense of it. In “On Repentance,” these limits lead him to doubt his ability to reform his wayward will.
Montaigne first gives us a fairly simple picture of repenting based on his ability to judge right and wrong. He is satisfied to repent only of those things which he can clearly perceive as vices: “There is no vice that is truly a vice which is not odious and which a wholesome judgment does not condemn . . . perhaps those philosophers are right who maintain that [vice] is principally the product of stupidity and ignorance, so hard it is to imagine that anyone could recognize it without loathing it” (Montaigne 234). Since he speaks “as an ignorant questioning man” (Montaigne 234), Montaigne must be ignorant of most vices, and we cannot hold him in contempt if he rarely repents. To be able to judge his actions, Montaigne must create his own system of moral judgment: “we must establish an inner model . . . by which at times we favor ourselves or flog ourselves. I have my own laws and law-court to pass judgment on me and I appeal to them rather than elsewhere” (Montaigne 236). While he restrains his actions “according to the standards of others, I enlarge them according to my own” (Montaigne 236). In practice, Montaigne might “abide by the common beliefs” (Montaigne 234) of the Catholic Church, but he only passes moral judgment upon his actions based on what he perceives as right and wrong.
Yet when Montaigne tests this model against his experience, he finds that it fails to account for the influence of the in his actions: “we can disown such vices as take us by surprise and towards which we are carried away by our passions; but such vices as are rooted and anchored in a will which is strong and vigorous brook no denial” (Montaigne 236). This leads Montaigne to question the efficacy of repentance: “to repent is but to gainsay our will and to contradict our ideas; it can lead us in any direction” (Montaigne 236), even to the denial of virtue. He questions whether repentance for one’s actions can lead to true reform, since it fails to address the will, but this leads him to doubt the impartiality of his own reason. He acknowledges “there is hardly an emotion in me which sneaks away and hides from my reason or which is not governed by the consent of almost all my parts” (Montaigne 240). His reason consents to those actions which he clearly identifies as vice, and he doubts that this same reason can be an impartial judge of these same actions. If his perceptions of right and wrong are not good enough bases for his own judgment of his actions, this questions whether he can repent of any vice whatsoever. “To be right-ruled within, in you bosom . . . where everything is hidden – that’s what matters” (Montaigne 236), but Montaigne doubts that we can even know if we are right-ruled.
If the will causes us to sin and Montaigne doubts our ability to reform, it is uncertain how people can be held responsible for their actions. Just as the author cannot speak French better than Latin when the latter is his native tongue, “you cannot extirpate the qualities we are originally born with: you can cover them over and you can hide them” (Montaigne 239). A man born into beggary might blame himself for becoming a thief, but even if he himself knows thievery is a vice and habitually repents of it, he will continue to steal out of habit and necessity. Yet this does not excuse vice. Rather, “the real condemnation which applies to the common type of men nowadays is that their very retreat is full of filth and corruption, that their amendment of life is vague . . . . Some of them are so stuck to their vices by long habit or some natural bonding that they no longer find them ugly” (Montaigne 239-240). Montaigne, too, has generally acted according to the impulses of his will, but he seems to believe there is at least a way of covering one’s negative qualities.
To be effective, it seems that repentance must at least acknowledge one’s impulses and intentions, and this sort of repentance will inevitably lead to grief. More than righting simple, isolated wrongs, it must address habitual vices that have developed even under the governance of reason. Nevertheless, the stoics claim it is not good enough to feel bad for doing something wrong; they “command us to correct any vices or imperfections which we acknowledge to be in us but forbid us to be sorry or upset about them” (Montaigne 241). In contrast, Montaigne identifies an urge to “condemn my universal form and . . . beg God to form me entirely and to pardon my natural frailty. But it seems to me that that should not be called repenting” (Montaigne 241). This form of grieving is dangerous. It is the “deep and chancy undertaking” (or better, “arduous and hazardous”) that Montaigne discusses in “On Solitude,” the process of probing “right down inside and [finding] out what principles make things move” (Montaigne 131). Melancholy results when Montaigne touches the point where his nature falls short of an ideal standard. Even if better men have overcome the vices Montaigne grieves, it seems that he himself has never changed: “when I reflect on my behavior as a young man and as an old one I find that I have mainly behaved ordinately secundum me [relative to my capacities]” (Montaigne 242). For Montaigne, repenting is not the same as grieving, but when he reflects on how little he has changed, it seems he cannot help that one leads to the other.
The situation becomes more hopeless as Montaigne addresses his declining appetites that accompany old age. As the longings of the will become less forceful, “we must not allow ourselves to be so borne away by natural degeneration that it bastardizes our judgment” (Montaigne 244). Montaigne finds that he has not lost his ability to judge, but as his convictions decline, temptation becomes more difficult to resist. To correct vice, he must rely more on his reason than conviction to distinguish between right and wrong. At this point, the stoic project reaches its limits: “I disclaim those incidental reformations based on pain. God must touch our hearts. Our conscience must emend itself by itself, by the strengthening of our reason, not by the enfeebling of our appetites. . . . We must love temperance for its own sake and out of respect for God who has commanded it to us” (Montaigne 245). Perhaps what Montaigne is looking for, then, is the ability to correct wrongs out of a desire for virtue, but this task is even more difficult: “we do not so much give up our vices as change them – for the worst, if you ask me” (Montaigne 246). Two processes of change emerge: the first, the stoic process, works against the will from a state of emotional detachment to address habitual vice; the second transforms the will itself before addressing the habit. Montaigne does not seem hopeful of achieving either consistently in his old age, and moral decline is inevitable.
Our conclusions must be bleak. Beginning at a place of clear conviction about the differences between right and wrong, Montaigne not only shows that true reform is very difficult, if not impossible, but he also acknowledges that his moral judgments may be negatively influenced by his will, and sincere repentance becomes more difficult as one grows older. Underlying these conclusions is the assumption that ideal repentance would actively work to amend the will and would be guided by clear moral judgment. Montaigne cannot repent every time he acknowledges a vice in his life. On one hand, he only holds himself responsible for those things he can amend, which allows him to repent rarely and hold a clear conscience. On the other, he is not comfortable with the idea of inevitable decline and is upset that his will seems to have been mostly unchanged throughout his entire life. Repenting must be something more fundamental than simply “gainsaying the will.” It must touch the entire being.
In the final essay he ever wrote, “On Experience,” Montaigne discusses once again his ability to reform his own life. He claims, “it is to my inadequacy (so often avowed) that I owe my tendency to moderation, to obeying such beliefs as are laid down for me and a constant cooling and tempering of my opinions as well as a loathing for that distressing and combative arrogance which has complete faith and trust in itself: it is a mortal enemy of finding out the truth” (Montaigne 377). He seems to have become more accepting of the advice of others since writing “On Repenting”:
"When I find that I have been convicted of an erroneous opinion by another’s argument, it is not so much a case of my learning something new he has told me nor how ignorant I was of some particular matter – there is not much profit in that – but of learning of my infirmity in general and of the treacherous ways of my intellect. From that I can reform the whole lump. (Montaigne 375)"
Perhaps it is because he trusts the advice of other that he can achieve reform despite his own treacherous intellect. Even when he does not trust his own opinions, he achieves moderation. This allows him to better utilize his own experience: from the opening lines of the essay, he has been more open to the ability of experience to discover truth and guide us in living our lives as a supplement to reason. This leads to a greater faith in moral judgment: “Nature always gives us happier laws than those we give ourselves” (Montaigne 366). When experience is enlarged by the wisdom of others, Montaigne overcomes some of the limitations of the human understanding, and reason can deny the desires of the will, leading to moral virtue rather than moral decline.
Nevertheless, this is not exactly the repentance Montaigne was looking for in “On Repenting,” the kind that “[touches] me everywhere, [grips] my bowels and [makes] them yearn – as deeply and universally as God does see me” (Montaigne 242). This sort of repentance is deeply emotional and seems to transform emotions as it seeks to transform the will itself. Such a statement does not make Montaigne a good stoic; in fact it violates the very precepts of detachment that guide the stoic to reform. Montaigne seems to yearn for the ability to love virtue. He is looking for change in desire, which will inevitably transform habits of vice. True repentance comes out of a heartfelt desire to change, which is supplied by God. What he achieves in “On Experience” is detached and emotionless. In fact, it is accompanied by self-loathing, which makes the reader doubt how effectively this method can combat melancholy. In both cases, the change is not driven by one’s personal guilt or the guilt of others, but by an objective evaluation of his own actions. Nevertheless, he longs to change the will before the habit. By reducing this change to a mere act of reason, the reform Montaigne achieves in “On Experience” is a diminished form of repentance.
From what we observed earlier in the essay concerning Montaigne’s doubts about his own ability to judge between right and wrong, it seems the desire for virtue would be a useful tool in developing one’s internal notions of moral justice. If this desire is hard to find, it makes sense that Montaigne rarely repents, since even with the help of his friends, he cannot always know if he is right or wrong. It also seems that the process of self-examination forces him to acknowledge the infirmity of his nature, leading to melancholy, and a transformation of that nature itself would become a powerful force in conquering melancholy. While Montaigne seems to eventually succeed in his stoic goals through long and arduous practice, he never roots out his own self-loathing.
Perhaps if he were the student he wishes to be, Montaigne would find the repentance he desires through his own experience, but after giving his conclusions some thought, I realized that Montaigne’s willingness to accept the stoics’ model of emotional withdrawal bothered me. Scholars draw parallels between Montaigne’s confessional style of writing and Augustine’s Confessions, and I think a few key differences between the two writers highlight what is problematic about Montaigne’s approach to repentance. We first notice a difference in words: Montaigne discusses repentance, which is a reasoned process of acknowledging specific acts of vice and working to reform the habits that cause those acts; Augustine discusses confession, which for him means an emotional laying bare of all that he is before God. In Book Ten of Confessions, he makes his confession “not in words and sounds made by the tongue alone, but with the voice of my soul and in my thoughts which cry aloud to you. Your ear can hear them” (Augustine 207). This leads us to a second difference, which is that while Montaigne is concerned with temporal justice within his society and within himself, Augustine evaluates his actions based on an eternal divine standard and addresses his entire work to God. While Montaigne judges himself, Augustine claims “It is you, O Lord, who judge me” (Augustine 210).
Perhaps the difficulty in Montaigne’s writings is that he has atomized his system of moral justice and reform. While Montaigne may not experience the intimate connection with God that Augustine seems to claim, he is too ready to separate out his reason from his emotions and his actions from his will. It is necessary to do our best in judging between right and wrong, but there comes a point at which the reasoning process fails and we must be sincere to our emotional grief. For the Catholic, it seems that repentance is part of the larger practice of confession: acknowledging one’s own inadequacy in light of divine justice and to reforming as best as one can manage. Montaigne touches on this holistic approach to reform but is afraid to engage it because of his melancholy. If our actions lead us to grief, we should not remove ourselves from that emotion in the process of reform but rather acknowledge that wrongdoing and melancholy are inevitably part of our being.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Over the Valley
The single from Pink Martini's new album, "Splendor in the Grass," is as much a love song to the city of Portland as it is to China Forbes' husband. Okay, perhaps that isn't how Forbes sees it, but as a Portland native, I couldn't help noticing a few Northwest themes that pepper the song's otherwise generic country landscape: the house among the trees, the refrain "We would never roam/ever far from home," and of course the opening image, a pink-lined cloud. If there were an archetypal vision of Portland, it would be this country house dwarfed by evergreen forest under a cloudy sky with a pink lining at sunset.
Love has location. We come to Oregon and never want to leave. This is true for my sister and I: neither of us are choosing careers that have a market in Portland, yet we daily consider scrapping all our plans simply for a chance to live in the Northwest again. The song would be empty without its central image, which is of course the Willamette Valley. This isn't an "anywhere we go, so long as I'm with you" sort of relationship. We have a home - the forest, the valley, the sunset, and yes, even the rain.
Why does this version of love seem so much more powerful than the Beatles' "A Little Help from My Friends" style? Is it just a cultural thing? Portland is a community culture. I never realized this until I moved away and discovered that there are places in the world where your neighbors aren't your best friends, where community events aren't the coolest thing to do on a Friday afternoon, and city life doesn't feel like the natural evolution of Sesame Street ("Sing"). There are cities in the world where it isn't kosher to write a little ditty poking fun at the mayor for his sex scandal that broke last year ("Bitty Boppy Betty"). In fact, there are places where what you think of the city depends primarily on your socioeconomic class and race. You might even hate the nameless suburb that you called home for the past eight years and never speak to the person living next to you. At worst, spend an afternoon in a Starbucks coffee shop. The innocent native Portlander asks, where is the love in all that generic mass-culture, individualism and isolation?
But China Forbes is no Portland native. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she moved here as a young adult. As an outsider, encountering Portland culture must have been a slightly moving experience, and yet it's twelve years later, and Pink Martini is already a city establishment. They play the New Years Eve show down at the Schnitz. Sam Adams is there, as are choirs from the local high schools and a Brazilian marching band. So is the cross-dressing repairman who fixed my mother's heater two weeks ago. And there's love here. Location, permanence, and fidelity; all in one big neighborhood. We've come a long way since the sexual revolution, even if we still sing about illicit relationships occasionally ("And Then You're Gone," "But Now I'm Back"). Who knows how we got here, but when we sober up, we're happy with the results all the same.
I'm fascinated with what this kind of song says about cultural trends. It seems permanent relationships are popular again among young American adults. Having shed ourselves of religious morality, we find we still prefer lasting companionship and fidelity. Perhaps we're realizing it isn't all about the sex - even if that part is great too. It takes a degree of maturity to look at yourself and realize, "Hey, I'm aging, and I'd like to grow old with someone. Maybe even have a family that isn't torn apart by divorce or a father married to his career."
Songs like "Over the Valley" tell us companionship is out there, ripe for the taking. We've moved beyond instant gratification, which is refreshing to see. The song's slow shuffle-beat, springy Lauderdale piano, and lyrical violin bridge leave us sitting on the back porch in late autumn, watching the sun settling over the pine forest as birds sing about the rainstorm that has just lifted. Perhaps if we look behind us, we'll even glimpse the peak of the mountain through the clouds. As the song ends, a cool October breeze sets in sleep comes on fast and easy.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
The Librarian
For Jorge Luis Borges
He fills and empties the shelves
of threadbare bindings,
feeding off oily pages
of Mishnah and Gemara.
He grows used to coffee
cold on his desk,
forming concentric rings
while he loses himself in the labyrinth
of swiftly evanescent thought,
of books to be reshelved
and classroom notes left unsaid,
searching the card catalogue
for some forgotten golden thread.
dj
He fills and empties the shelves
of threadbare bindings,
feeding off oily pages
of Mishnah and Gemara.
He grows used to coffee
cold on his desk,
forming concentric rings
while he loses himself in the labyrinth
of swiftly evanescent thought,
of books to be reshelved
and classroom notes left unsaid,
searching the card catalogue
for some forgotten golden thread.
dj
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