THE HOLY CHARLATAN; The Dialetheism of Saintliness
Ross Campbell Barham
29.09.2005; 11th APPC @ Uni. of Melb.
0. Introduction
The question is: Why are people so afraid of contradictions? It is easy to understand why they should be afraid of contradictions, etc., outside mathematics. The question is: Why should they be afraid of contradictions inside mathematics?
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics. pp. 512-3
Dialetheism is the rather controversial position that there are such things as ‘true contradictions.’ Not that all contradictions are irresolvable, mind you, but that there at least some contradictions that are truly paradoxical.
I consider myself to be a weak-dialetheist. That is to say that, in a sentiment reminiscent of the Wittgenstein quote abstracted above, I believe that there are indeed true paradoxes to be found within any abstract system of reasoning – be it Logic, Mathematics, or Philosophy.
I am only a weak-dialetheist, however, as I am yet to be convinced that the concrete world can present us with true contradictions. Take, for example, The Liar Paradox:
For logicians (especially of the classical sect), the statement ‘This sentence is false’, does indeed seem self-contradictory in a truly paradoxical way. For your average Joe, however, there’s nothing to it. The corresponding statement ‘This sentence is True’ isn’t paradoxical. It’s just a stupid thing to say, as there’s no way of determining (or verifying) whether or not it is true or false. It’s not something that you’d enter into.
The same holds true for The Liar Statement: if you don’t enter into it in the first place, then you don’t get dragged down into the abyss. This is not to say that the logicians are wasting their time. Rather, it is to suggest that, while it should come as little surprise to discover that, say, an engineer, in drawing-up the plans for a machine, might mistakenly assign the same exact space for two separate parts, it would be an utterly miraculous event if a mechanic could subsequently make the two separate solid parts exist in the same time-space.
Over the past year of researching philosophical conceptions of saintliness, I have encountered a number of seemingly meaningful contradictions. Today, I would like to run through four of the more promising cases with you, to see if we can thereby find justification for strong-dialethesim. My hope is more to evoke discussion than to provide knock-down arguments either for, though mainly against, the dialetheism of saintliness.
1. Arthur Schopenhauer’s Exchange of Signs
… every nihil negativum or absolute nothingness, if subordinated to a higher concept, will appear as a mere nihil privativum or relative nothing, which can, moreover, always exchange signs with what it negates, so that the former would then be thought of as negation, and it would itself be thought of as assertion.
Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea.
Book IV, #71. p. 260
The logic of the above argument initially looks as though it has the potential to be paradoxical, for if the exchange of signs can take place in one direction, then what’s to stop them from oscillating back and forth?
In order to get a proper grasp of the matter at hand, one must first realise that this passage was intended to provide the argumentative mechanism that Schopenhauer believed would get him through the following metaphysics:
Most people hold being to be an innately positive aspect of the universe or of life. Nothing or nothingness is the corresponding negative aspect of being. However, both of these dichotomous aspects of the world belong to the Idea or human consciousness that, Schopenhauer explains, is the mirror of the world as pure will. “We ourselves are this will and this world, and to it belongs all ideation, as one aspect of them,” he says. Moreover, following Kant, Schopenhauer holds that Time and Space are inexorable to all ideation. If, then, one becomes an ascetic saint and thereby denies in themselves the will to life, then along with one’s own self-annihilation, one annihilates the mirror of the world, the idea, and therefore, the world itself. As Schopenhauer puts it: “If we no longer glimpse the will in this mirror, we ask in vain where it has gone … because it has no longer a where and when…” Furthermore, it is owing to this peculiar metaphysical vacuum that the ascetic saint is able to invert the valuation of being and nothingness. Nothingness becomes the positive aspect, whereas being is the negative.
This denial of the will to life via saintly asceticism may seem to the rest of us ‘sinners’ to be repugnantly pessimistic. However, according to Schopenhauer ál la Buddha, all life is suffering. We sinners may vainly think that happiness can be found with the gratification of our desires, but the saint knows better.
The saint, on their way to becoming an ascetic, will have travelled the road of heightened compassion. On this path, they will have come to appreciate the futility of charity, owing to the fleeting contentment produced by the temporary alleviation of suffering via the gratification of desires. Such measures, the saint understands, really only feed the flames of desire, and, therefore, of discontent and suffering also. Ultimately the saint truly knows that all life is suffering. From this perspective, then, that the annihilation of the universe can be seen as a positive thing, might not seem all that backward.
Nor, however, does it seem truly paradoxical. Certainly the ascetic saint values being and nothingness in contradiction to our own evaluations of these categories. However, this definitely doesn’t entail a paradoxical situation.
Indeed, even if we were to try to make a paradox (as Nietzsche once did) of Schopenhauer’s claim that the ascetic saint, in themselves, must constantly “strive with all their might to keep to this path [of quieting the will] by self-imposed renunciations of every kind” (W1, 391), Schopenhauer’s theory of the will as acting independently of intellectual agency, manages to ensure consistency, at least within the context of his metaphysical system.
2. William James on Extreme Charity
‘Resist not evil,’ ‘Love your enemies,’ these are saintly maxims of which men of this world find it hard to speak without impatience. Are the men of this world right, or are the saints in possession of the deeper range of truth.
William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience. p. 355
With regard to the above maxim recounted by William James, one perceives what initially seem like a paradox: ‘Love your enemies.’ How can one love what one hates? Surely, the two emotions are diametrically opposed to one another; and thus, through this maxim, suggest a true contradiction.
There are, however, I believe two other possible responses to this:
1) Firstly, an enemy needn’t be someone that you hate. Indeed, according to the Penguin Dictionary, ‘an enemy is merely a person who is opposed to or actively seeking to harm somebody or something.’ To love one’s enemy, by this light, makes no account of any sentiments opposed to love. An enemy may merely be someone who interests coincidentally happen to be at odds with your own. The maxim, then, quite prudently, recommends that one shouldn’t let their feelings of love be effected by such an unfortunate state of affairs.
Indeed, even if your enemy hates you and is actively seeking to harm you and all that you stand for, then there is still nothing self-contradictory about loving them. The hate belongs to the other party; no mention of hate on your part has been made (although one may assume that it is the implied propensity of people to foster hate towards those whom oppose them, that the maxim was designed to warm against).
2) Secondly the maxim ‘love your enemies’ might be thought to be temporally bound.
When one asks oneself: what is the best way to vanquish my enemy? Destruction is what normally springs to mind. But how can one be certain that after you kill your enemy that you’ll be content … that, from the depths of your hatred, you’ll not subsequently feel the need to kill your enemy’s family as well, their friends, their culture, all that that they ever stood for, the very memory of them – in a word – everything that every had anything to do with them … including yourself?
So to ask the question again: What’s the best way to vanquish one’s enemy? The answer surely lies in bringing about a state of affairs where they are no longer your enemy anymore. ‘Love your enemies’ can, therefore, be read as commandment to this end; for, although you may have enemies now, if you were able to love them, then quite simply they would no longer be your enemies. The apparent self-contradiction is seen, so to speak, in the vanishing of an eye.
William James’s own account accords well with either one of these interpretations. He says, that “psychologically and in principle, the precept ‘Love you enemies’ is not self-contradictory” . However, he goes on to argue that in real-world circumstances “the saint may simply give the universe into the hands of the enemy by his trustfulness. He may by his non-resistance cut off his own survival.” Such thinking leads James to conclude that:
… in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.
William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience. p. 356
According to James, the saint points towards a brighter, more idealistic future and, so, serves to ensure that we not forget the ideals that we are fighting for. However, in accordance with our “empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices,’ we non-saintly types must nevertheless realise the necessity of ‘fighting fire with fire’, or more literally ‘using violence to bring about peace.’
To me, it is these latter maxims that seem more paradoxical, but as they belong to the philosophy of saintliness only in so far as they contrast with it, I must move on to consider the next case.
3. Sartre’s Saintly Sophistry
… the Saint, making use of divine mediation, claims that a Nay carried to the extreme is necessarily transformed into a Yea. Extreme poverty is wealth, refusal is acceptance, the absence of God is the dazzling manifestation of his presence, to live to die, to die is to live, etc.
Jean-Paul Sartre. Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr. p. 202
The abstracted Sartre quote above may initially appear to advocate a dialetheist conception of saintliness, but as he himself explains: “I am not as fond of shit as some people say I am. That is why I reject Saintliness wherever it manifests itself.” The passage quoted, then, is to be read as a cynical summation of the claims that the saints make themselves (perhaps not explicitly, but at least via their actions).
To get a proper appreciation of what is going on here, we have to go all the way back 100 years to Schopenhauer and trace his influence back through his successor, Friedrich Nietzsche, to his, in Jean-Paul Sartre.
As we saw earlier on, for Schopenhauer, saintly asceticism is able to metaphysically transcend the suffering of all existence once and for all, via self-annihilation. For a time, Nietzsche swallowed this hook-line-and-sinker, and went around, ál la Schopenhauer, claiming that the saint, the artist and the philosopher made up the supreme triad of human-types. Eventually, Nietzsche conceived of what he considered to be a truly universal force: The Will to Power. According to this doctrine, the artist and the philosopher still forms the epitome of the human-type, whereas the saint falls to the bottom of the heap, as they no longer are held to be in anyway able to transcend anything even remotely metaphysical. According to Nietzsche, saintly attempts to embody The Will to Power are made with a bad conscience, in the most literal sense. For, as it features in his Genealogy of Morals, the ‘weak’ – having been actually oppressed by the ‘strong’ – were oppressed even further by the saints who convinced them that it was only owing to their own sinfulness that they suffered at all. In plainer terms: the ‘strong’ are happy with the power that they naturally obtain/attain, and the ‘weak’ are then further oppressed by the saints who convince them that they are unhappy, not because they don’t have the power that the strong have, but because they want for these manifestations of power in the first place. While the ‘strong’ truly achieve greatness despite the weak, the apparent achievements of the saints were brought about only by a perversion of values in spite of the weak.
This conception of saintliness
To this, earlier, quote, I have a quick two-pronged response:
1) Firstly, ‘the need for contrast.’ Imagine, if you will, a person who finds themselves in circumstances of severe and wide-spread famine. For them to attempt to claim that they’ve decided to adopt a life of ascetic poverty and fasting, would be, in this context, quite meaningless. Sartre argues that the phenomenon of saints can only occur in a consumerist society; this, he claims, provides us with some insight into his characterisation of the saint, not as a becoming, but as a final product that is presented to the purchaser or user as polished, varnished, sparkling object that demands to be consumed.
I want to reassert Sartre’s position that the phenomenon of sainthood can only occur in a consumerist society, but for a different reason: the need for contrast.
2) Therefore, let Nietzsche’s strong be happy in their power.
But also let the Saint serve as a role model to reveal true contrast to us all, in the same sense that James suggested they do via their acts of extreme charity.
Certainly Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals, may be right; the message taken historically from the saints has often been that one can’t be happy unless one is absolutely destitute: ‘Extreme poverty is wealth,’ as Sartre puts it. I agree that this message is misguided, but it is as equally misguided as the belief that one can’t be happy without riches.
‘One can be happy without riches’ does not entail ‘one cannot be happy with riches.’ In the same way ‘The strong are powerful and happy’ does not entail ‘The weak are not powerful, and, therefore, unhappy.’
Let the contrast between the strong and the saints reveal to us, then, the true nature of happiness.
4. Simone Weil’s Saintly Mysticism
The first Simone Weil quote included in your handout, suggests that saints are true dialetheists. That may well be the case. However, this quote doesn’t really provide us with anything more than the suggestion that what we’ve been doing here today will pay off in the end. So lets keep at it:
The second Weil quote in the handout offers us a little bit more to chew on in the form of a metaphor of climbing a mountain.
As far as I can gather, Weil here seems to be suggesting that, while the world seems paradoxical to the unenlightened, from the saintly (or perhaps dialetheist) perspective, everything is as it should be.
This sentiment reminds me strongly of a line that Graham Priest was trying to run a here a couple of weeks back.
Borrowed from the Buddhist teachings of Nagarjuna (Nag-a-june-a), the argument goes something like this:
In Conventional Reality there are distinctions (for instance between Conventional Reality and Ultimate Reality, or ‘p and not-p’). In Ultimate Reality, however, there are no distinctions and, therefore, the Conventional is subsumed in Ultimate Reality.
There are, as far as I can see, two equally plausible ways of looking at this.
1) The first is to take the ‘paradox’ literally. Fine, if that’s the case then I have no idea of what is being talked about. I hold no claim to Ultimate Reality, nor could I ever know that another did without also knowing Ultimate Reality; therefore I’ll simply back away and find someone to talk to that I have more in common with.
2) Or, alternatively, I can attempt to make sense of the matter … to bring it into play in the real world. In this way, we might want to re-state the seemingly paradoxical relation of CR and UR in this way (and, yes, I’ve ripped-off the ‘mountains as mountains, not as mountains, and mountains again’ Buddhist saying):
In ignorance I knew only Conventional Reality.
Then, in learning, I was directed towards Ultimate Reality.
Now, in enlightenment, Ultimate Reality is my Conventional Reality.
This is as much to say that:
When I was a student, I sought answers from my teachers.
Now that I am a teacher I have the answers that my students seek,
Though they are not the answers that I once thought they were.
And so I still seek answers from my teachers.
Or
When I was a student, I knew nothing and my teachers knew everything.
Now I am the teacher, I realise that I still know nothing,
Though it is a different nothing than I used to not know.
All this amounts to making sense of what may seem to be self-contradictory statements:
To know that there is no Answer is to know the Answer.
Or
To know that there is no Ultimate Reality is to know Ultimate Reality.
Admittedly, these truths cannot really be taught; but, through experience, they can be learnt. Perhaps, this way of thinking applies to Weil’s metaphor as well. Let us take, for example, the following more concrete example:
We possess nothing in the world – a mere chance can strip us of everything – except the power to say ‘I’. That is what we have to give to God – in other words, to destroy. There is absolutely no other free act which it is given to us to accomplish – only the destruction of the ‘I’.
Simone Weil. ‘The Self’ in Gravity and Grace. p. 26
The question then is, how can one consistently sacrifice the ‘I’ without falling foul to the same sort of reasoning that saved us in the case of Jamesean charity? That is to say, how can the sacrifice of one’s individuality be the highest manifestation of one’s individuality? Here, I think a quick passage from Dostoyevsky can help us out:
To sacrifice one’s life willingly for others, to be crucified, burned at the stake for others, can only be done at the highest point of the attainment of individuality. A highly developed individuality, completely convinced of its right to be individual, no longer fearing anything for itself, cannot possibly do anything else with its individuality, that is, can find no greater use for itself that to give itself up entirely for others, so that others too may become equally autonomous and happy individualities.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. pp. 184-5
This is as much to say that, for us non-saintly individuals, we feel the need to fill the emptiness of our unfulfilled individuality with junk that we hope will give us an identity: SUVs, ipods, holidays, specialised interests, honours, etc.
With regards to the saint individuality, however, their cup runneth over, so to speak, and the overflow is freely given to whomsoever is in need.
Thankyou
