Birthday Meditations

“Even if we distance ourselves from some of our thoughts and impulses, and regard them from outside, the process of trying to place ourselves in the world leads eventually to thoughts that we cannot think of as merely “ours”. If we think at all, we must think of ourselves, individually and collectively, as submitting to the order of reasons rather than creating it.” Thomas Nagel, The Last Word

Each of us has an internal state that has gone by many different names and been addressed in radically disparate ways. Some will speak of the soul or spirit, others simply talk of consciousness, possibly the dimmest among us will speak merely of a self-organizing organism, or even only neural circuitry. This interiority is a sacred bedrock. It is inviolable.  It is not only that this state is supremely individual unique - being full of colors, shades, tones, subtleties, nuances, indirection - but it is an opaque one. No amount of quantification or measurement will ever capture the limits of this state, so full and deep is its mysteries, so vast is its contents and horizon, to paraphrase the great Heraclitus ("the obscure").

Yet as we face the world, in and with our interiority, we face what is, in part, a profoundly external world, a world at times so external as to be quite alien and apart, however unified we might feel or claim to be with this external reality. There is a real separation here. A great deal of this external world consist of plethora of stimuli - literally "coming at us", of course in the form of solid objects as well as more fluid colors and lights, but above all in separate life forms, from humble vegetation, to complex animals, and, above all, other fellow humans who are as akin to us as they are opposite to us.

I must say that my chief problem as a human being, for my first forty years on this marvelous planet, has been in the negotiation and relationship between the inner and outer worlds. It is not a question of boundaries but rather of feelings. Simply put, I rarely match the external world in terms of likes, dislikes, or what I feel to be important on the inside. Moreover, the sheer density of stimulation from this external world can at times be most overwhelming. One solution I came across was my discovery of the truth of pluralism. I realized, upon leaving my thirties, that others can achieve the deepest pleasures from things with which I have had only negative experiences and, of course, in reverse. That is, my own internal states, though important and sacred to me, are of little or no use in terms of other's values. I began to read the world around me in the terms that others created. I began to step outside of myself and try and see others as having equal, sometimes greater, yet very different claims. This is not quite the same as sympathy or empathy; it is a "meta" belief wherein my awareness of other's values allows me to put aside my own values and essentially ask others where their happiness comes from. I cannot live there, for that would be to lose myself, but I certainly must visit and visit regularly.

A large measure of human culture and art, and I should include practical philosophy as well as politics and economics, is concerned with how we are to negotiate the boundary of the inner and the outer, how we are to understand it, if and when we are to fight or love it, if we are to transform it, overturn it or defend the status quo and on what grounds and so on.

Sometime during the past decade I became familiar with the thought and scholarship of one George Kateb. He is really one of the few philosopher/academics who, as odd as it is to say in what is essentially an aporetic tradition, seems to give more correct answers to some important questions. He works in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau and thus could be called a kind of individualist, and yet - and this is most important - he rejects all appeals to conservatism and tradition. Kateb's individualism is of a most responsible kind. He is sui generis: he rejects communitarian and utilitarian infringements upon individual conscience and liberty, while at the same time he upholds the strongest sense of social responsibility. It is the rare thinker or intellectual who can do both and moreover offer a theory of both.



His most recent book is called Human Dignity and it is a beautiful work of prose, easily one of the best works of non-fiction in the past decade. I should like to use my forty-fifth birthday to do briefly review it. However, I am not sure review is quite the word since I really only have time, space, and, more importantly, energies to summarize in a brief note and offer examples from this work.

George Kateb's aim in the entire book is to defend and define what it is in us or about us that makes us human - in the spiritual and non-reductive sense of that label - and to describe, if only in part, what about our humanity makes us special on this planet. This last project will doubtless not always endear Kateb to anti-"speciesist" egalitarians, yet I feel that Kateb is onto something most important when I think of that fact that no other living creature composes a Beethoven's Ninth, enters couples' counseling, or negotiates at Camp David. One lengthy passage reveals the quality and character of Kateb's prose:

"A uniquely human trait, self-consciousness is potentially but not actually possessed by all human beings, whereas consciousness is actually possessed by all the living who function. To be a self-conscious person is to be conscious of oneself as a self, as a person who can think about many things, but also about himself or herself. A person can arrive at a self-conception. But the process is not automatic, and cultural conditions - say, tribal life or village life - may discourage it or be so rigorous in in suppression of the sense of self that many people would find it strange to imagine what it means to have a self-conception. They know themselves through a group, and the group knows itself through its differences from other groups. Without a self-conception, we are tends to take the place of I am, in most of the transactions of life. Some choices might be left free, and particular members of a group might stand out because they perform exceptional deeds. In larger hierarchical societies where human rights are not recognized, self-consciousness is actually consciousness of oneself as a member of this class or caste rather than that one. Such consciousness is quite compatible with individual egotism, but the ego is defined by reference to membership. One cannot imagine oneself separately from membership. But in a society in which people have a sense of individual human rights and the state recognizes and respects those rights, a particular self-consciousness will develop; the ego will grow in a certain direction. One feels special not because one has what others lack, or has a rank higher than others, but because one has has what everyone is entitled to have, just by being human." 

Readers should note that this is an argument reminiscent of Kateb in his Patriotism and Other Mistakes, in which he regards patriotism itself as immoral, in part for its violation of the individual in the name of group pride and identity. It is this part of Kateb that places him at odds with both the Left and Right on our current political spectrum. His belief in unearned human dignity makes him automatically opposed to all conservatism and libertarianism because if we have innate unearned human dignity then we are entitled to certain things without having to appeal for them at best or beg for them at worst as in, say, health care or food (to say nothing of nutrition). His remarks about group identity might put him at odds with a Left that wants to speak on behalf of suppressed or repressed group identities as groups rather than as lone individuals. But Kateb is ultimately making an ontological argument as is clear from this passage:

"Human life at any time and all through time is ultimately incomprehensible. this incomprehensibility is testimony to human stature, perverse as that may sound. Human stature is not so great as to have the capacity to take the measure of human stature. Humanity is too much to be encompassed; it is indefinitely large in its actuality, past and present, and unpredictable in the future. In contrast objective knowledge of nature, which has no inwardness is easier on the talented mind despite formidable obstacles, than understanding human life which is governed by human inwardness."

Starting from the tradition of Emerson, with its respect for infinite mystery and finite intellect  it comes as no surprise that Kateb is skeptical and at times hostile to attempts to make scientific explanations of who we are as the only acceptable explanations. Kateb is not hostile to science as such, but rather to all forms of tyranny: an attitude of regarding us as mere matter or, however more noble, as just a natural object or life form among others on this planet - in a word, anti-humanism - is an attitude that has similar problems in intellectual life as tyranny does in social and political life. Kateb is a critic of evolutionary biological accounts of the human being that aim to replace other accounts. Like Thomas Nagel, he manages to maintain a strictly secular even agnostic foundation while still insisting upon a spiritualistic definition of our humanity. He agrees with the scientific conclusions of evolution but also agrees with the worries of those religionists who feel that those conclusions are insufficient and are partly bereft:

"Against evolutionary psychology in particular, we can say that it is a category mistake, indeed a serious blunder, to say that on any given occasion, a person't motive, mediated as it is by mind, is unconsciously determined by evolutionary inheritance. No human motive is reducible to a natural cause. Human self-description is not a superstructure of superstition."

"Against neuroscience I want to say that when a section of the brain lights up on a scanning device, as, say, the person is listening to music, we learn nothing interesting about the person's experience of the music or the music itself."

Kateb might be seen as going too far here in the eyes of many, especially with the popularity of bestselling non-fiction books concerning our brains on music, yet I would still maintain that Kateb's old fashioned argument might be more properly thought of as an argument on behalf of the humanities itself as an equal though separate companion to the sciences. And Kateb has much to say in the latter chapters of the book on what art is and how best to evaluate it.

Throughout the book Kateb wrestles with the tension between fairness and justice on the one hand and excellence and reward for unique effort on the other. Kateb also makes the rather unfashionable claim in this age of Nature awareness, that we are not wholly natural beings, but in part artificial, subject to cultural innovation and diversity. George Kateb is unafraid to take commonsensical intuitions (say, our sense of being somehow free in making choices, as not merely beholden to nature or tradition alone, our sense that we can trust at least some of our senses) seriously as having objective truth. He is not hypnotized into a skepticism about our perceptions by the apparent success of scientific assaults upon those perceptions. In this sense George Kateb is, as he admits on other occasions, trying to take a democratic approach to life in the wider sense of the word democratic than the political sense. Though he is labelled a political philosopher, Kateb wants to restore the value of that which resides outside of our roles as citizens, the value of that which is separate from roles as such.

I cannot recommend Human Dignity highly enough. Though it is ostensibly a work of non-fiction philosophy it reads as beautifully as poetry or prose. Its subject is nothing less that the state and status of our humanity itself.

Human Dignity by George Kateb The Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2011

Why I am an Aesthete

"Artistic language by definition has to be experienced and has to be gone through. You can't just extract the 'ideas' from it and leave behind the object and the way in which it was expressed without actually reaching conclusions opposed the intention and effect of the art itself." Colin Jager

"But isn't what we experience when reading the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament the same as when we read Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, or Proust? Isn't the difference between the scriptures and worldly literature only social and political? The centuries-long polemics on the contrasts between poetry and faith can perhaps be reduced to the question of whether we should consider one poem or story holier than another. I have long since come to the conclusion that we can say with certainty that any powerful literary work is holy. And the opposite claim, that it is worldly, is equally valid. But it would be completely senseless to consider any great literary work holier or worldlier than another". Harold Bloom

What do I mean when I say I am an aesthete? Even when the pronunciation is correct and understanding partial there are suspicions. My interlocutors are always taken aback, sometimes amused. Does it not mean a devotion to sensation for its own sake? It is it not anachronistic, indulgent? Is it not guilty of holding beauty above all other values? And so on.

Let us ease into the matter slowly.

There is surely more than one way of knowing the world. Today, though, there are many people, usually, but not restricted to scientists, who think that explanations and knowledge form a whole, are all of a piece. It follows that if there are multiple ways of knowing the world, then none of those ways of knowing the world could ever replace or stand in for any of the others. None of the ways of knowing the world are more precise or true versions of the others.

There is a way of knowing the world in which you understand it; you can take it a part and see of what it consists. Science is the best version of such a way of knowing. In science you prove that something is so by using experiment, evidence and so on. In science something must be repeated thousands of times before it even has the beginning of validity. This very caution is why science has been extraordinarily successful at explaining certain things.

What science explains is something we can look at and point to. No matter how internal the object of study, even if it consists of a report of inner human dreams, strife, and sensations, the account of science is, by definition, limited to being a purely external one, involving third person subjectivity. It can show what neurons are firing or what part of the brain can light up when a we think about food or sex, or anticipate the end of the world. And sure enough we can report on what the brain does under those conditions.

Now many people feel that the effects of such physical processes are side effects, in essence fantasies or illusions that give us a sense that there is an "I" apart from such scientifically proven and observed facts.

Now, remembering what I observed about there being different ways of knowing, ask yourself the very basic question, what are you doing when you have an experience? Do you buy the scientists when they tell us that the neurons firing are all that is? When they tell us that humans created music in order to attract a mate? Should we trust our intuition that our experiences are real?

When we have an experience it can be a thin or a thick one. Most of popular culture, regardless of what its boosters will tell us, only gives us a rather thin experience. Now some of it is quite excellent, but we should not make it out to be more than what it is. (Some popular culture is a mixture of the thin and the thick - the Beatles' A Day In the Life is a good example)

Part of the reason that something is "thin" is that the goals of the object are clear and admit of no difficulty in meaning or emotion. People crave these types of experiences because it is a kind of dress rehearsal for life. It might even serve a pedagogical function. That is why popular things review over and over the same emotions, events, touchstones, bromides, sometimes emotional cliches and the like and why they tend to deal with and resolve "hot button" issues or current events.

I am currently watching a rather thin product called Pan Am. It has as many pains (need to flee or fly to detective and thriller business) as joys (the relationships and dreams of the stewardesses).

A Japanese filmmaker named Ozu made a film called Late Spring in which he narrated a daughter leaving her father's home and getting married. In that film the final wedding is never shown. We don't even meet the husband which normally would be characteristically opportunistic for Ozu to indulge his observations of female-male interaction and difference. All that is shown are the backstage or backyard preparations around the wedding. The events of these characters are so rich with innuendo and emotional meaning, so thoroughly observed, that it can get quite an intricate, and funny, affair. That is because Ozu is an artist who is essentially a thick artist, who is interested in inducing thick experiences in the spectator. That is another reason why he spends an inordiante amount of time showing us beautifully composed static shots of scenes and objects in which no person appears. He is trying to literally get us to a place where we must contemplate such a space and vision, in part to train our vision towards an act of contemplation, attention and focus. He wants us to treat part of the movie as a static painting. His is a project that takes very seriously indeed the first personal, experiential aspect of reality.

Science, since it is a report of what things are made of, from the third person, has been and will always be practically worthless to try and account for this first personal effect. All science can report about an Ozu film is that the shots in Ozu might relax or bore or distract the spectator. Science can tell us that it might make us healthier or something. Science can determine that it is from another age. It can track and record the box office receipts and receptions. Science can tell us that females like this particular bit of character doings in a scene and that men appreciate this other scene and so on.

Yet NONE of those accounts has anything to tell us about whether we should spend our time watching Late Spring, or, more importantly why. Though Ozu undoubtedly has what I am calling thin elements in his films - their popular subject matters for example - his films are also as thick as could possibly be in my formulation. Indeed I think that all thick artworks incorporate a thin outlying structure from which to begin.

We must remind ourselves, if possibly on a daily basis, that some of the most important things to human life are things that, on certain accounts, seem certainly worthless. In actuality their worth is spiritual, that is, their value is that they get us to do two things:

1. to meditate upon ourselves and the world. This mediation could be contemplation of beauty or excellence in creation, or it could be contemplation of the state of our souls or our character.

2. to think of how our lives might be otherwise, how we might improve ourselves. Part of this in giving an account of how we got to where we are. But this account must, if it is aesthetic, by definition, must part company from what we think of as news or journalism (at least journalism when it is a report of events rather than an art of prose).

There is a tension between understanding and experience. In my view the highest art deemphasizes understanding in favor of experience, in other words, it abandons reporting and enters into the expression of consciousness. You might think about the difference between understanding and experience as the difference between a man hearing about his pregnant wife and being at her side and the wife actually having the baby. He can certainly have a moving experience. He can even feel as if he is going through it with her. But his experience will be limited at the level of understanding. Only the wife having the baby has gone beyond mere understanding unto full experience. It is a kind of special knowledge. This is the domain of mysticism, of magic, and spirit. Art, good, bad, or middling, tries to place the reader in the position of that pregnant wife. This is a constant truth, quite apart from whether the artwork seems detached or not, in fact.

All art at at its best strives the recreate such experiential intensity. It aims to go beyond the mere intellect to the emotional and spiritual levels.

Marcel Proust, in his wisdom, said that: "books with themes stuck in them are like goods with their price tags still attached"!

When Walter Pater suggested that all art aspires to the condition of music this priority granted experience is what he had in mind. Not to privilege music as a medium but to suggest how we should think about art in general!

Now it will always be a matter of debate what experiences are thick versus those that are thin.

I don't want to get into that now since it would be useful for another essay and another time.

Obviously we need both thin and thick experiences in our lives. Yet the experiences themselves nevertheless do exist.

THESE EXPERIENCES DO NOT HAVE ANY MOTIVATION OTHER THAN FOR THEIR OWN SAKE. THEY ARE NOT RESULTS OF EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY. THEY ARE NOT RESULTS OF THE NEED FOR STATUS, OR LOVE, OR SEX. THEY ARE NOT EVEN WAYS OF EDUCATING OURSELVES ABOUT THE WORLD INTELLECTUALLY, NOT EVEN FOR SURVIVAL. ALL SUCH ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE THE AESTHETIC TO SOME OTHER MORE FUNDAMENTAL PURPOSE MISUNDERSTAND THE AESTHETIC AND WOULD DENY A GREAT DEAL OF OUR HUMANITY IN THE PROCESS. THE AESTHETIC IMPULSE IS ESSENTIALLY A RELIGIOUS ONE, AND AS SUCH, AS IN ANY RELIGION, THEY CONSIST OF FAITH, STRUGGLE, AND THE ATTEMPT OF HUMANS TO EITHER BE HERE NOW OR TRANSCEND THE HERE AND NOW.

If we look at the etymology of the word I use to describe myself - aesthete - it will help clarify a lot of confusion around these matters.

The word arose in the 19th century, in a time that was as often hostile to aesthetic experience as it was suffused on the one hand by the utilitarian demands of a growing Left politics, and by the discoveries of a a Materialist and Physicalist science, and on the other by the rise of markets and money fever, technological innovation, and other worldly pursuits. Many voices rose to counteract this, such as Hegel, John Ruskin, William Morris, and the often misunderstood decadent authors like Oscar Wilde or Walter Pater. At the end of the century writers like Henry James and Marcel Proust (these two in particular) tried to claim the power and importance of completely interior subjectivity. Others like Dickens or Flaubert stuck to a more narrative or realist approach. In painting Whistler, Degas, and Manet shocked viewers into reflecting upon ideas of the human body and visual perception. Degas in particular depicted figures with a radical unawareness of being observed and outside of the frame in a ways that anticipates modernist cinema and theater. There is a very direct line from Degas to all of modernity and post modernity in this sense( as a way of destabilizing the frame).

In the United States the figures of Emerson and Nietzsche - who were fans of one another - and the poetry of Walt Whitman tower above even the foregoing by the force of their emphasis upon experience.

In essence all of these creators were attempting to save and protect the human individual from the forces of quantification and dehumanization. That is, their projects were essentially religious projects - importantly shorn of the the specific preachments of an authority figure or specific creed - for an increasingly secular age.

In sum, to be an aesthete is to commit to a romantic vision of sorts, borne in the 19th century, yet indebted to a Kantian autonomy. It is to project this vision into the present day. It is a way of reading. I might not convince that it is the best way of reading, as my opponents on the utilitarian or even neo-classical side appear to be winning our hour. Yet it is a way of reading that was a genuine progress over earlier, essentially tribal or homogenized readings.

What Kirkegaard got so terribly wrong in his Either/Or is the assumption that the aesthetic is about simple and indulgent pleasures, that it is behind or beneath the ethical or religious life Actually the aesthetic is really only the religious or spiritual pursued by means other than propositional creeds or texts. It is really not very different. As Bloom remarked in his quote from the opening, we study Shakespeare as we study the Bible, or rather we ought to study them in identical ways. We ought to look at the Mona Lisa in much the way we pray or sit yoga.

Unfortunately the Mona Lisa is being taught to us as if it were about the sociology of the times in which it was painted, or the technique of brush stokes. It might be talked about as an inquiry into painters attitudes towards the female. It might be seen as a mystery to be solved. (What does her face say or mean and so on). None of these approaches will get you to approach it like Yoga or Bible study. Nevertheless, I am suggesting that is how we should go about it. We should ask the Mona Lisa what it has to tell us. It is painting that clearly never shuts up after all these years (and all those bad interpretations!)

Anyway if you really want one answer to the Mona Lisa, it is a painting about our inability to get to the bottom of the woman in painting. Yes, that rather old painting is so very contemporary in that it reflects upon its own preconditions of creation and artifice!

Another mistaken notion is that the aesthetic is interested in "beauty" per se or at least the pursuit of superior standards of beauty or snobbish fetishism of beauty.

But if we take beauty to mean the intense exploration of our own experience and subjectivity beauty itself is not so straightforward a matter. There is an obvious beauty that appeals to a lust of the senses and this is absolutely necessary in life, though it leans towards the "thin" mode in my binary formulation. But there are other forms of beauty that are a bit more complex, as Andrey Tarkovsky wrote:

"When I speak of the aspirations towards the beautiful. of the ideal as the ultimate aim in art, which grows from a yearning for that ideal, I am not for a moment suggesting that art should shun the dirt of the world. On the contrary. The artistic image is always a metonym. where one thing is substituted for another. Hideousness and beauty are contained within each other. This prodigious paradox, in all its absurdity, leavens life itself, and in art makes that wholeness in which harmony and tension are unified."

Then there is the question of ethics. It is the charge that aestheticism is amoral at best and immoral at worst because it traffics in surfaces.

There are two problems here. Firstly, all surface appearances are themselves inseparable from inner substance. Secondly, the highest ethics aims at experiencing the actual causes of evils in an excruciating and dangerously fearless fashion. By definition then, many artworks - sad to say for the sensitive - must depict graphic evils in order that we understand the points of view of both perpetrator and victim. There is, it is true, an excess of such stuff, yet it fills a need to expand our compassion.

Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Joyce Carol Oates' Zombie, Vladimir Nabakov's Lolita and Pasolini's Salo, some artworks of the 1970s are attempts to understand the ugliness of life, yet go beyond understanding towards experience. Bresson's Mouchette does the same for an innocent victim. In works like these our faces are shoved into ugliness so that we may come to leave behind our naive levels of comfort.

As to the other charges from the ethical: that art should not contain certain behaviors or gestures within them, all of these objects are not literally real life events, so they should not be taken as such. If they are taken as such then they have been perverted by their consumers, to say nothing of having been misread. The poet neither claims or disclaims, as Sydney wrote in Defense Of Poetry.

As to the charge that the aesthetic is a waste of time and energy that should otherwise be put towards survival or charitable works, these charges are non sequiturs, since the aesthetic has always about it a gratuitous character removed from the practicalities of life.

While this gratuitous aspect might, in times of great privation or hardship, be something we are forced to forgo, it is nevertheless one of the marks of our human species: that is, if any of us are still interested in demarcating ourselves from other animals, as something other than one being or type among the rest.

That is all I can do at this time to explain my chosen label. But don't hold me to it. Like all categories it is as much a fiction as a truth. It is capacious; indeed it has something of life itself. But whatever else it is aesthetics is not empty and it is not superficial. It is but another word for another way for we people to reflect upon ourselves in a space - sacred or not - away from purely direct or immediate concerns.

Christmas Blog: A Look at Emerson's Divinity School Address

On July 15,1838 Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered what was to be one of his great orations; it is part essay, part jeremiad, a confession, an exhortation, and a marvelous work of theology all rolled into one.

Since this blog is supposed to be contrarian and since Christmas is fast upon us let us revisit a particular passage in the work:

In this point of view we become very sensible of the first defect of historical Christianity. Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. But by this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence and fear have built, the friend of man is made the injurer of man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with expressions, which were once sallies of admiration and love, but are now petrified into official titles, kills all generous sympathy and liking.

Those words caused Emerson to be essentially banned from speaking at Harvard for thirty years. Emerson was also invited to speak at the bequest of the senior class rather than faculty.

A few words before this passage Emerson does praise the person of Jesus, but note the nature of this praise:

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, `I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.'

If only many of our contemporary Christians discussed Christ in this way instead of as a ruler who asks that you confirm or deny him as a kind of test, only to condemn you for all eternity if you deny him.

The address begins with one of the most beautiful passages in all of Emerson. As is typical of Emerson he begins the address with reflections on natural processes, since for Emerson process is all:

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward, has not yielded yet one word of explanation. One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which our senses converse.

But no amount of pastoral and bucolic rhetoric could have prepared the listeners for what was to come.

When it comes to the person, symbol, myth, or holiness of Jesus Christ, it appears that today little has changed. One one extreme there are those, and they are legion, who feel Jesus Christ to be a a man and a god who in his omnipotence has the deepest held opinions on the sexual, dietary and other practices of the three hundred and eighty plus million souls who inhabit these United States. On the other extreme are the debunkers who are convinced Jesus never existed in the first place. In between lies a motley of degrees and variations, not many of them much better, in my view, than the extremists.

Actually, let us say the most offensive (in certain quarters) and most unthinkable thing: let us say that "Christ-Mythers" (to use an unfairly uncharitable term) are correct. That changes very little because in fact it matters little whether Christ was real in the sense that I am real typing this into the blogosphere and you are real as you read what I type. At its best, which isn't often, Christianity and Christmas are not propositional affairs. Rather they are eternal mysteries of human imagination and they exist in order that we may entertain what it would mean, for example, for a stranger to come to town in such a way and with such force that all is forever changed. Much power of certain Western (in more than one sense) art comes from this act. Equally some of the worst in human life (that is, after Christianity) comes from this attachment to pining all hopes on a single person or deity. This last problem was the problem Emerson was referring when he discussed, to use far worse yet up to date language, being "hung up" about Jesus.

In a larger cultural sense there is a split between, on the one had, the advocates of science, some of whom really do believe that the scientific method and only the scientific method can tell us with any accuracy about our lives, and on the other hand, those that deny scientific truths and live only for faith. On the science side, in the most extreme form one finds the proposition that we are nothing but our neurochemistry. On the other side are those who deny scientific values altogether, and read their sacred texts as if they were how-to manuals or maps of the planet earth.

We would all do well to read Emerson's address, conceived of and performed in the Summer, in this Winter season. I have only excerpted from it here. But all of it is a jewel whose brilliance hasn't dimmed a bit in the 172 years that have transpired since. Indeed, it has only brightened and deepened, and reading it makes the so-called seers and gurus of today's world seem themselves most dim.

And that is all I have to say this Christmas. On the subject of Jesus Christ, besides Emerson, I like what Kris Kristofferson has to say best: