Dancing Back Into Elfland

Imagine a forest. Make it a good forest. Actually imagine a forest you can’t really imagine because the real world is always surprising you; the real world is a source of wonder and of encountering that which is beyond our own selves. It contains danger, and pain, and beauty, and grandeur. So imagine a forest you can’t quite imagine — a forest haunted by wonder.

Now imagine that you are traveling through that forest. How do you want to do it? What is, in your mind, the best possible way to be traveling in a forest? Do you want a man-made highway running through it? Do you want a car to drive on that road? Maybe a hiking path? Or do you even really want to get out of the forest? Maybe you are happy with a trail? Or how about just a guide — someone who really knows this forest and who can make your time here worth while.

Now imagine a life. Make it a good life. Actually imagine a life you can’t really imagine because real life is always a surprise; real life is a source of wonder and of encountering that which is beyond our own selves. It contains danger, and pain, and beauty, and grandeur. So imagine a life you can’t quite imagine — a life haunted by wonder.

Now imagine that you are living that life. How do you want to do it? What is, in your mind, the best possible way of living through a life? Do you want man-made structures cutting though it to make it easier to navigate? Do you want a way to insulate yourself from the extremes of the life? Maybe some rules for how get through it? Or do you even really want to get out of the life? Maybe you are happy with some general guidelines for living it? Or how about just a guide — someone intimately acquainted with suffering and joy, with living itself and can make your time in the life worthwhile.

This comparison begins to get at what I think my favorite poem in the DaoDeJing is getting at. Poem 38 reads in part as follows:

A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,And is therefore good.A foolish man tries to be good,And is therefore not good.… Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.When goodness is lost, there is kindness.When kindness is lost, there is justice.When justice is lost, there is ritual.Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of the Tao.It is the beginning of folly.

This echoes one of the best quotes from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity:

…though Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.

And the same sentiment appears in the Mystic Muslim Poet Rumi:

Beyond good and bad, there is a field, I’ll meet you there.

Aristotle made similar points when he talked about morality, calling it not at act, but a habit. Of course each of these thinkers had different ideas about how to achieve this state of goodness, but the thing they all seem to agree on — to have discovered — is that the good life, the right life, is an un-reflective sort of thing. That is, they saw that living well is not about a technique. It is wandering in a forest, not getting through the forest. Specifically, for each of these folks, any ethical system is a degradation from the whole point of things. Ethical systems are, at best, a concession to our brokenness.

I find that DaoDeJing breaks it down most clearly, starting with the the first step down from right-being (the Tao/Dao). The poem presents, in roughly narrative form, a brief taxonomy of ethical systems, all of which have had their own moments in history.

Non-Ethics and Flourishing

The Tao

As a Christian, I would characterize being with the Tao/Dao as being with Christ. It is following the suffering King, the Prince of Peace, and Lord of Joy in the dance of life. To follow Jesus is to give up on the notion of where we are going and to focus instead in who we are with. It is a matter of being rather than a matter of getting somewhere. This is existence characterized by relationship and love, it is being in the forest; nobody knows what it leads to, we only know that it is right it is flourishing.

Virtue Ethics

Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.

The loss of un-reflective, flourishing existence, is goodness. A preoccupation with becoming like the sort of person who just is un-reflectively good. This is the ethics enunciated by Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, it is a system built, not out of an intimate knowledge of the Tao, but of a careful observation of those who do. To characterize this shift in Biblical terms, it is the fall, an attempt to systematize and know what is beyond knowledge. It is a diminution because it is an attempt to squeeze the infinitude of possibilities of being into our finite minds. It is the centipede’s dilemma: we stop dancing in order to work out how we were doing it and find that we cannot start again. So we begin to study other dancers and awkwardly ape their movements.

Kantian Ethics

When goodness is lost, there is kindness.

When that proves unsustainable, when we discover that we do not have the mental or moral fortitude to make ourselves into good persons, we resort and therefore diminish to kindness. Kindness — treating people correctly, as people — is also characteristic of un-reflectively good people but it is not a rule it is something they simply are. This is the ethics of people who know what flourishing looks like and are trying to discipline themselves towards it. Imagine someone who is trying to behave in a kind way, not because kindness is a natural reaction for them but because they know that they ought to be, it feels a little uncomfortable doesn’t it?

Divine Command Theory — the Rules

When kindness is lost, there is justice.

When people trying to be kind to one another fails to hold society together we resort of laws (what Laozi characterizes as justice though I don’t particularly like that definition of the word). We make rules prohibiting harmful behavior and then we institutionalize ways in which to harm the people who break those rules. At this level we get the many ethical systems which insist on rigid set of rules (or the principles from which those rules ought to be derived). This is also the level on which our whole system of human rights operates — it is the level below which we have tried to guarantee we will not go. This is where most religions live and operate in discomfort together with other less religious secular systems and the classically liberal understanding of human rights.

Utilitarianism, Objectivism

When justice is lost, there is ritual.

If we take the concept of ritual out of a classical Chinese context and put it in a contemporary Western one we get something like social norms or manners. When basic allegiance to human rights and laws fails to guarantee social coherence or human flourishing, we resort to being polite to one another. The whole idea here is that we need to just not hurt anybody. Think about the number of calls there have been recently for a return to civility or decorum. The yearning for norms which are enforced by social acceptance rather than institutional violence seems to be the last gasp of a society trying to hold together as a benefit to its own members. When it fails, there isn’t much left; all of our barriers to evil have been broken. We are no longer un-reflectively good, we are not trying to emulate goodness, virtue holds insufficient attraction for us, our laws have become brutal and unjust, and social acceptance has become tyrannical and stifling.

The Narrative

It is worth pointing out that this downward progression can also be characterized as forward movement. Each system is built, in some ways, on a recognition of the failures of the types of system above it. Virtue ethics begins with the recognition that there is flourishing and that we aren’t doing it. Justice ethics recognizes that those who try and fail to be virtuous without structural and institutional constraints tend to end up making things worse for everyone (think about the misogyny of the Roman empire’s ultimate conflation of virtue with masculinity) so, giving up on making people better, we bring in rules backed by the threat of violence in order to establish a sort of lowest common denominator in our relationships with one another (and sometimes, but far to rarely, the rest of the world). But those power structures and systems always seem to end up disenfranchising and ultimately marginalizing and oppressing people so we dismantle them, we deconstruct them, and we narrow the scope of our concern to harm and fairness. At this point we are probably having some trouble enunciating any justification for those to concerns (instead the easy thing to do is to become appalled with anyone who would dare to question them) but we are clinging to them with intense focus. This is also a movement forward, the concerns at each stage were real and serious concerns; with the failure of each previous stage the scope of our moral universe narrowed but also intensified, it is a process of “Maybe we can’t do all of it but we will at least manage this area of greatest concern”. But the thing is doomed, it must eventually fall to pieces as the debates about negative and positive rights emerge, as harm is accepted for the sake of preventing more or different harm to those more worthy of protection.

And then we are back where we started, or at a Looking Glass Land image of where we started. The systems have failed, the destination has evaporated or proved impossibly distant. There is only a lost wandering in the woods. We did not know good and evil, then we learned it, and now we have lost it again. It was always beyond us, the question is what comes next. We were, then we thought we knew but did not know, now we begin to know that we do not know.

Now if only we could stop trying to get somewhere and just be, we might begin to dance again

Some Perspective - The Wisdom of the Vikings Part 9

Self-Deceit

Only fools

hope to live forever

by escaping enemies.

Age promises

no peace

though the spear spares them.

Note: This is part 9 in an ongoing series (the series starts HERE) bringing together the Hávamál (a collection of Norse wisdom poetry) and the still-evolving rules and mores of the Internet, particularly as they are developing in the realm of social media.

The last several posts in this series have focused on the various forms of discretion which were vital for medieval Iceland and are important the great multitude who inhabit the internet. Today's poem, in contrast, highlights the importance of engagement. As something of a side note: as I have been working through the Hávamál I have begun to notice a heavy favoring of Aristotelian style virtue ethics and a reliance on a concept similar to his "golden mean". I'll link a  Crash Course Philosophy video, which explains the concept nicely, at the bottom for those of you who are interested in following along.

Poor Randall Munroe gets ripped off a lot. 

In this poem, the sentiment, far from advocating caution and reticence, is more along the lines of carpe diem. In an age of great uncertainty and physical danger, particularly danger from neighbors who might respond to offence with a swinging axe and a warcry, this pair of aphorisms are reminding the reader that a life lived in fear, driven by a desire to avoid all conflict is ultimately empty and self-extinguishing. "Age promises no peace though the spear spares them" would make a tragically damning eulogy. Certainly "timid" is not the sort of adjective we are inclined to associate with Viking culture, and that for a good reason. Having reminded the reader that discretion is the better part of valor, the Hávamál now continues with an insistence that action, too, is often necessary. The Viking who failed to defend her honor, or to stand up for those in her care, was likely to come to just as bad an end as the Viking who failed to think before she boasted. 

This balance between caution and indiscretion turn out to be a vital one for those of us who choose to participate on social media as well. While we are often very well advised to write, read, and delete our comments or combative post/tweet/blog, we are nearly as often morally required to take a stand. As someone who engages fairly frequently in social media "conversations" which turn hostile more frequently than I would like, I want to attest to the fact that I often receive private messages or in person comments from friends and even strangers, thanking me for standing up for them when they felt bullied or dehumanized online. 

Be the hero we need

According to Aristotle, "courage" is the virtue between the vices of cowardice and foolhardy brashness. Sound familiar? Reading this poem in context with those which come before it. We are well served to remember that while there is certainly a time for holding our tongue and letting silence be the voice of peace, there is equally a time for calling out hatred, ridicule, and vitriol. And in fact, I would suggest (at the risk of fanning the flamewars) that in our current climate, you are more likely to hear people calling for "peace" when some vocal and defiant speech is what is actually required than you are to hear people calling for contention when things are calm. Bystanders generally prefer not to have their boats rocked after all and it is far easier for people who are not devalued by misinformation and hateful rhetoric to call for calm, than it is for them to risk looking like troublemakers by calling out smarmy screes and flat out lies. 

In future posts I will try to address some of the thorny questions around developing the discernment to know one situation from another (given the fact that medieval Icelanders' lives literally hung on this ability, it is likely that we will run into it again) but in the meantime I want to end be encouraging you to think about the motives behind your decisions to comment as well as your decisions to "just scroll past and avoid feeding the troll" and remember that sometimes the only course of action is to jump in and try choking the troll with your own body... or words and reputation as the case may be.

Click to get the Hávamál on Amazon

Click HERE for Part 10: A Time to Speak and a Time to Listen

What a Flimsy Reality!

There is another way of writing about my topic today. In almost any other format it is a better way. I plan to talk about my suspicions about the nature of the non-material world. In another context I would do this by documenting the original publisher of the germ of every thought and observation I use to build my conclusion. I would provide comprehensive footnotes and I would address the primary objections that occur to me (I would also cite the originators of those objections). I would do that if I were writing a lecture or a formal paper. But this is a "heaven and earth questions" blog post. As such, I try to structure my writing as a conversation; partly because I think that make it a more engaging read for most people, and partly because I am way too lazy to implement the full scholarly rigor that an academic paper or lecture would require. Whether this is a good or bad thing, I have noticed one advantage that has risen out of it. This format allows me to write up and thereby work through ideas before I have them entirely worked through - it works as a great half step on the way to an academic paper.

More preamble! - this topic is, in some ways, focusing on one aspect of a larger topic I have been working on trying to develop a different way of understanding pre-modernism, modernism and post-modernism. The more I research and read, the more I find myself in agreement with what I understand to be a pre-modern mind set toward philosophy and theology. I do want to make a distinction between the descriptive (the model in itself) and the prescriptive (my sympathy for one approach as the model would describe it). This post will be focusing on certain implications I draw from the pre-modern outlook as I understand it through the (new?) model. Also it could just be a poor attempt to justify some sort of odd contemporary neo-platonism.

As I have said in another post, I believe that pre-modern thinkers began with metaphysics. That is to say, they began with statements and arguments about what life, the universe and everything are really like. So far as I can tell, nearly everyone who did this was influenced by Plato's theory of the forms which (in a bare bones way that will certainly not cut the mustard if you ever find yourself in my PHIL101 class) basically claims that there is a world behind the physical world of our senses in which the essences or patterns or archetypes or abstractions exist. Something my students have a lot of trouble getting is that this "world of the forms" is more real than the physical world.

I am sympathetic to the difficulty. First, we are conditioned to think of the objects of our senses as the most real things there are. Even metaphysical relativists who like to go around talking about "my reality" and "your reality" - an absurd notion so far as I can see - tend to at least treat the physical world as a fundamentally shared, base line reality. On top of this, every time we run into a world "on top of" or "behind" the physical in literature or the media, it is nearly always presented as shadowy and/or ethereal; we get the sense that it is less real.


The only exception that springs to mind is C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce, which portrays people in purgatory/heaven as looking and functioning somewhat like ghosts because their environment is more real than they are. So he sort of inverts the popular portrayal. This sort of thing comes out in a few of his other works (notably his angels in the space trilogy and especially the ecstatic cosmic dance scene in Perelandra) But then, Lewis described himself as a pre-modern (De Descriptione Temporum) and seems to have been something of platonist as well.

But if I am going  to explain Plato, much less recommend co-opting part of his worldview, you need to understand that the world of forms genuinely is more real, it has more being, than the physical world. If it helps, you might try following Lewis' approach and imagine the physical world as ghostly in comparison to the world of the forms. Once you have this settled in your head, you will be in a much better position to understand the pre-modern approach.


Things in this world are merely things of seeming. Of course there is some reality to the world of seeming, things really do seem this way or that way. But if we can begin to think and talk about the world of being -  a world which this one reflects - then we can begin to get at understanding. Thus, "what is a human?" is a far more interesting question than "how does the blood circulate?"; "what is justice?" is far more profound than "did she hit him without cause?".


Furthermore, the greater reality of the world of forms is actually a really great thing for all of us. Anything which has a soul, has a connection to the world of forms and (to mix my philosophers and bring in our old buddy Aristotle) pretty much everything that lives or has lived has a soul of some sort. In fact, everything that has any being at all is thereby anchored in the world of the forms from which the seeming of existence gets its start (Plato would have said "emanates"). Basically, everything physical that you think of as real is based on its greater reality in the world of forms. Although the aspects of it that we tend to focus on are probably not its more "form-ish" aspects. 


Now I take this understanding of two worlds and I am inclined to modify it by denying the separation (that's not new people have been doing it at least since Augustine). I do not think that there are so much two worlds as that there is one world, many aspects of which we are not in the habit of experiencing. We pretty much orient ourselves around our senses. But that doesn't mean that there aren't aspects of reality that our senses just aren't designed to pick up. And if those aspects of reality are more profound, are more fundamental to our identities and being than the physical aspects we are so preoccupied with then it might just be worth thinking about them. 

This is one reason I have been so sympathetic to the pre-modern understanding of life, the universe and everything recently. Rather that assuming that our senses give us as much reality as there is and trying to be content with that (modernism) or assuming that what our senses give us isn't even real so that ultimately there is no real reality (postmodernism) I find myself much more persuaded by the idea that our senses communicate some of reality but that there is so much more to it. Maybe there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.

P.S. I decided to make this a purely philosophical post. Next week I intend to post on what I see as the religious/spiritual implications of all this.