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A John Haught Reader. John F. Haught
Читать онлайн.Название A John Haught Reader
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isbn 9781532661044
Автор произведения John F. Haught
Жанр Религия: прочее
Издательство Ingram
We experience beauty in nature, in the physical appearances or personalities of others, in great architecture, art, music, poetry, and other types of literature. But one of the most intense instances of aesthetic experience lies in the spectacle of an heroic story. Since such stories involve the narrative patterning of struggle, suffering, conflicts, and contradictions into a complex unity, they stand out as one of the most obvious examples of beauty. In fact, it is often our being conditioned by the stories of great heroes that determines our whole sense of reality, personal identity, and purpose, as well as the quality of our aesthetic experience in general. From the beginning of human history, it appears that the consciousness of people—their sense of reality, identity, and destiny—has been shaped primarily by their sense of the heroic as it is deposited in the paradigmatic stories of their traditions. In myth, legend, ballad, history, epic, and any other type of story, people have woven around themselves a narrative womb with all the ingredients of ordered contrast that I am here attributing to beauty.
In this light, the seemingly nihilistic dismantling of tradition, history, religion, and story in the “deconstructionist” element of modern criticism may be interpreted as itself a moment of contrast that adds nuance to the wider pattern of beauty for which we remain forever nostalgic. The way in which human consciousness has, at times, been frozen in particular narrative patterns deserves the kind of negative criticism one finds in a deconstructionist philosophy. In spite of its inevitable protests to the contrary, I would suggest that, like Nietzsche, its criticism is directed less at narrative as such than at narrative fixation. Deconstructionists are by no means the most significant threat to the integrity of story. For the demise of story is first of all the result of our childish obsession with particular versions of a dynamic narrative tradition. The attempt to freeze a particular tradition in an absolutely conservative way is already the end of story, the true “nihilism” that prevents the story from remaining alive. Story-fixations bring about the end of story and, with it, the impression of the death of God, long before modern deconstructionists begin their work. Nietzsche himself was well aware of the implicit nihilism buried in the superficial narrative fixation of much Christian theology and spirituality. By bringing the “ending” into narrative view prematurely, by failing to wait in the midst of struggle, and by narrowing the ending down to dimensions too suffocating to satisfy the human desire for the infinite, story-fixation is itself already the death of narrative. To be properly narrative, the cosmic and human story must remain in process. To freeze the story artificially is to kill it. Hence, the deconstruction of story(-fixation) of which we have been speaking is an essential nullifying operation undertaken for the sake of the survival of narrative itself. The stories, histories, and cosmologies taken apart by deconstructionists are, in my view, highly caricatured versions with which some (but by no means all) believers are uncomfortable anyway. Although its proponents would undoubtedly deny it, deconstructionism announces not the end of story as such but rather the end of naive story-fixations. And thus it may be seen as contributing, in the final analysis, to a wider aesthetic vision.
However, the narrative sense which our critics have rightly tied to the idea of God is incapable of being absolutely eradicated. Their own writings display a narrative undercurrent of which they are not always aware. They themselves tell a story about story. Their tale has a beginning, a period of struggle, and an end. Deconstructionists envisage themselves as living in the “final days,” when history and narrative have come to an end, when an eternal “play” of language eschatologically appears.45 Ironically they usually invoke and transform ancient myths (stories)—like those of Sisyphus, Eros, Thoth, Prometheus, Zarathustra, and others—to instruct us about the futility of myth. In the very performance of the deconstruction of narrative, they give evidence of the ineradicably narrative quality of all human experience and consciousness.
In its announcing the “closure” (which does not necessarily mean chronological end) of history, self, and narrative, and in its endorsement of a formless and insignificant play of language, deconstructionism also falls short of giving us the ultimate aesthetic fulfillment we all long for. In the final analysis, this philosophy is not a space within which one can live. If it has any value at all in terms of our aesthetic needs, it is only as a “moment” in the process of moving toward a wider narrative vision of beauty than is allowed by our story-fixations. Unfortunately, in its repudiation of the tension intrinsic to narrative, and in its artificial efforts to force the eschaton of play into the temporal narrowness of the present, it is reduced to one more version of the gnostic escapes from history to which religious people are always tempted whenever they grow tired of waiting and struggle. Once again, it is worth recalling Tillich’s words: “We are stronger when we wait than when we possess.”46 This applies not only to our search for depth but also to our quest for an ultimate beauty.
The Absence of God
The quest for a completely satisfying aesthetic experience always leaves us with some element of discontent. In the first place, an intense experience of beauty never lasts indefinitely. The most memorable sensations we have of being carried away by beauty are often only instants that quickly fade and that resist adequate repetition. In the second place, there is always a region of our aesthetic longing that remains unfulfilled—even by the most poignant encounters with beautiful persons, music, art, or natural phenomena. It is not difficult for any of us to conjure up examples from our own lives of the elusiveness of beauty. We are seemingly unable to completely control the beautiful, but must instead patiently await the summons to be taken into its grasp.
The experience of never being completely filled up by particular aesthetic experiences is of course frustrating. It might even tempt one to an “absurdist” interpretation of reality. The inability of particular aesthetic manifestations to satisfy the infinity of our desire for the sublime might easily be construed as just another instance of the insuperable incongruity of humans and the universe. And it would be very difficult to offer an empirical refutation of this tragic view.
However, there is another at least equally plausible interpretation of our aesthetic frustration. It stems from our thesis that, ultimately, the beautiful is the divine, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. And if the divine is the beautiful or sublime, then, in keeping with what we have noted in each of the preceding chapters, we should expect not so much to grasp beauty as to allow it to comprehend us and carry us away into itself. However, as we have also emphasized, our initial instinct is usually that of resisting and even denying the gentle envelopment of our existence by the mysterium—in this case, the beautiful. Aesthetic frustration, therefore, is not so much a failure on the part of the beautiful to meet us as it is the result of our shriveling our aesthetic sensitivity to restrictive dimensions that “protect” us from the beautiful. The “absurdist” interpretation would insist that our aesthetic frustration is the result of the fact that while we ourselves have an insatiable, even infinite, capacity for experiencing beauty, reality is limited in its ability to satisfy our needs. Hence, absurdism places the source of our frustration in the universe itself instead of in the possible limitedness of our own aesthetic perceptivity. The view that I am presenting, on the other hand, holds that the “doors” of our perception are possibly too narrow to let in the fullness of the beautiful, while the inner chamber of our consciousness continues to ache in emptiness for a beauty that would fill it and to which our perceptivity is inadequate. Aesthetic frustration stems from the inadequacy of our perceptive faculties to the deep inner need we have for limitless beauty. The absurdist view seems to be based on an unrealistic notion of perception.
Whitehead has shown how an unduly narrow doctrine of perception has dominated most of modern thought, including our understanding of beauty.47 According to the commonly accepted view of modern, empirically oriented thought, the five senses are the only doors of our perception.