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| ISBN-13: | 9780226617671 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 243 |
| File size: | 753 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
When We Love — A Place: World's End with Cormac McCarthy
To live "with the world at heart," according to the immeasurably influential turn that Christian thought takes with Augustine of Hippo (354–430), to dwell in the world in one's heart (habitare corde in mundo) rather than merely in one's flesh (carne), is to be in truth already dead. If I live with the world at heart, I inhabit what Augustine calls in his Confessions a "living death" or a "dead life." In such a living death — which, so long as we live it, we do not know or even suspect to be a death — we are closed off from the only true life, and thus from the only true happiness, because we are bound in our affections to change, dispersion, and loss. According to Augustine, genuine happiness and its distinctive life suffer, by definition, no loss, and thus we enjoy real life and its happiness only when we are freed of loss, in the one and immutable God. In light of his teleological and eudaemonistic construal of human existence, according to which the end of love is enjoyment, Augustine presents us with a stark decision: "What do you want? To have temporal things and to pass away together with time, or not to love the world and to live forever with God?"
Through his inheritance of the New Testament writings of John and Paul, Augustine understands "world" not simply as created fabric of the heavens and the earth, or something akin to the "natural world" we might conjure in thinking today of world or creation; "world" here refers more importantly to the distinctive turn of human love in its alienation from God, a misdirected turn of love, or a perversion of the heart that determines our fundamental way of being-in the world as a being-away from God. "For the world," as Augustine writes in his Second Tractate on the First Epistle of John (407),
is a designation not only of this structure that God made, the sky and the earth, the sea, the visible and invisible things, but the inhabitants of the world are called the world, as a house is called both the walls and those dwelling in it [Mundus enim appellatur non solum ista fabrica quam fecit Deus, coelum et terra, mare, visibilia et invisibilia: sed habitatores mundi mundus vocantur, quomodo domus vocatur et parietes et inhabitantes]. And sometimes we praise the house and criticize those dwelling in it. ... And in another way we say, "A good house. No one there suffers wrong." Now we are praising, not the walls but those who dwell within the walls, yet it is called a house, whether this or that. For all lovers of the world, because they dwell in the world by their loving, as they dwell in heaven whose heart is on high and yet walk by their flesh on the earth — all lovers of the world, then, are called the world [Omnes enim dilectores mundi, quia dilectione inhabitant mundum; sicut coelum inhabitant quorum sursum est cor, et ambulant carne in terra: omnes ergo dilectores mundi mundus vocantur]. (TJ 2.12, 154–55; PCC 1995–1996)
In making this distinction between world as created fabric of sky and earth and sea, on the one hand, and world as an orientation of our human affection, on the other hand, Augustine signals that love is fundamental to human dwelling, and thus to the opening of those places where we dwell. In the coming pages and chapters, our central concern will be just this question of the role played by love in opening — constituting and sustaining — the worlds we live in, and a central argument will be that one of the most influential and incisive lines of thinking about the nature of world in twentieth-century philosophy — that of Martin Heidegger and his heirs — marks both an inheritance and a critical revision of this Augustinian insight concerning the foundation of dwelling in loving. That revision, I will suggest, offers fertile ground on which to understand the secular today in terms of affection.
Crucial to Augustine's distinction between fabric of creation, or dwelling as structure, and world as a way of being or dwelling that amounts to an orientation of loving, is his often cited contrast between two modes of love that he names "use" and "enjoyment" (uti and frui). Enjoyment is love of something in and for itself, according to Augustine, while use is love of something for the sake of something else. Because God alone, he claims, is to be enjoyed, God alone is to be loved for himself, whereas all else should be loved — which is to say used — for the sake of loving God. Thus, love turned toward the world — whether as place or as mode of being (which perhaps in the end cannot be separated) — must be so only in the mode of use. To love the created order in itself (that is, to enjoy it) rather than for the sake of something else (which would be to use it), or to love the creature rather than loving, through the creature, the Creator, is to turn the created world into a region of death. We cannot in a rightly living way, which is to say in a rightly ordered love, love the world in itself, Augustine contends, insofar as such a love — binding us affectively to what is multiple and passing — distracts us from the one and eternal God, in whom alone love would suffer no loss, and in whom alone we are not torn to pieces through distraction. Our temporal existence turns deadly for Augustine insofar as it forgets the true origin, and thus loses any genuine future; and a sure sign of such a deadly turn is the sorrow our love suffers. A truly living future, he holds, can be hoped for only with assurance, and thus only in relation to the sole, unshakable eternity of a God who is without past or future. This is the God who does not know "was" and "will be" but only the pure and constant presence of his eternal Being, as spoken — without syllables — in the divine "I am." In other words, God is eternal day, without morning or evening, a pure today with neither yesterday nor tomorrow. "For when 'was' is said of anything," as Augustine writes in his Second Tractate on 1 John,
it no longer is; and when "will be" is said of anything, it not yet is — he knows only "to be." In reference to the fact that he is God, he knows "to be," he does not know "to have been" and "to be going to be." There is one day there, but an eternal [day]. "Yesterday" and "tomorrow" do not put that day in between themselves, for when yesterday has been ended, today is beginning and will be ended when tomorrow will come. There that one day is without darkness, without night, without intervals, without measurement, without hours [Quod enim dicitur quia fuit, non est; et quod dicitur quia erit, nondum est: ille non novit nisi esse. Secundum quod Deus est, esse novit; fuisse et futurum esse non novit. Dies est ibi unus, sed sempiternus. Non ponunt illum diem in medio hesternus et crastinus: hesterno enim die finito, incipiens hodiernus venturo crastino finietur. Ille unus dies ibi est sine tenebris, sine nocte, sine spatiis, sine mensura, sine horis]. (TJ 2.5, 148–49; PCC 1992)
While a fuller treatment of Augustine's nuanced and often ambiguous thinking about time will be a focus in our next chapter, we can note now already that, whatever affirmation of time Augustine may intend, at least in principle, by understanding time as created and thus inherently good, he also associates a genuinely living and happy human time with a love that adheres unfailingly to the nightless day of God, the day without darkness, difference, deferral, or passage; and he binds the experience of our mortal and deadly time — the days that come only with night, those whose beginning means already an ending — to a love torn and dispersed amidst the multiple and fleeting distractions of the world wherein, forgetting God, we lose ourselves.
According to a construal of alienation in Augustine that will resonate in Western thought through the likes of Luther, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, the inherently unreadable sign of this self-loss, when we are in its midst, is our failure to see or experience that loss as a loss; busily and all too comfortably absorbed in the distractions of the world, we enjoy a false sense of security and self-possession, when in fact we are in mortal danger and utterly lost to ourselves — because we are turned away from the God who alone gives us to ourselves.
The movement through which human temporality is made deadly, while depriving the sinner of any genuine future by distancing the sinner from God's eternal and living day, at the same time captures the sinner within a form of temporality that mimics such eternity perversely by closing the sinner within the habit of sin, an ongoing and inescapable repetition of our fall that can seem, in its persistence, timeless. The human temporality that imitates God's eternity in this way, like the sin from which it derives, wherein we imitate perversely the freedom and independence of God, goes hand in hand with a false security, and related self-satisfaction, in which the self, without knowing it, and indeed while believing itself to be self-possessed, actually loses itself. The sinful time that yields our death at the same time hides that death from us and gives us a deceptive sense of life. For Augustine, thus, we are most in danger when we believe ourselves most secure. In the name of the sinner's healing, then, Augustine warns against the desire for security in this world and insists that a trembling heart in face of our peril should replace our deluded complacency and self-satisfaction. A complex dynamic thereby emerges such that, on the one hand, God repeatedly relieves me of my trembling heart while, on the other hand, he works first to liberate me from my lack of anxiety. "My heart trembles and strains," as Augustine writes in Confessions 10.39, "in the midst of all these perils. ... It is not as though I did not suffer wounds, but I feel rather that you heal them over and over again." Such healing, however, is premised on my being first freed from the alienating, and tranquilizing, effect of sin, wherein I do not even see the peril in which I dwell. Hence the importance of John for Augustine, when he "takes this wicked lack of anxiety away from you and implants a useful fear. Wrongfully you wish to be free of anxiety, be apprehensive! For he is faithful and just to forgive us our offenses if you should always be dissatisfied with yourself and undergo change in yourself until you reach perfection [tollit tibi malam securitatem, et inserit utilem timorem. Male vis esse securus, sollicitus esto. Fidelis enim est et justus, ut dimittat nobis delicta nostra, si semper tibi displiceas, et muteris donec perficiaris]" (TJ 1.7, 130; PCC 1983).
To live, as fallen, in the world and its temporality, which means to dwell there — rather than in the heavens — in the heart, is to live without hope of any opening to any genuine future — while failing, however, to recognize one's own despair, or to see that one is already dead. The turn of conversion, which entails a turn of the heart from the sinful closure of a temporal world to the living openness of God's eternal day, requires then a decisive rupture or disruption of that time and world in which the sinful self finds its overly secure enjoyment. I must be torn out of my secure sense of self-possession, where I am actually losing myself, in order then truly to find myself — as absolutely dependent on, and standing before, the God whose condemning judgment is also a mode of his love, an unsettling of my self that gives me back authentically to myself. Augustine thus inherits and extends the Pauline contention that "law came in, to increase the trespass; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more" (Romans 5:20), and that "it was sin, working death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin" (Romans 7:13). Hence, following a logic well established in Paul, Augustine highlights the vital role played by those moments of crisis, dispossession, and anxiety — when I can no longer rest secure in relation to the things or persons of the temporal world and must therefore seek true rest in the eternal.
This Augustine for whom an unsettled heart proves crucial in opening hope for a genuine life stands among the more influential sources for Martin Heidegger's analysis of human existence in its inescapably worldly and temporal character. Already in his 1919–20 course Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger highlights the shift effected by Christianity, and especially Augustine, toward a thinking of factical life and self-experience that emphasizes the unsettled heart. It is above all Augustine who, in the "inquietum cor nostrum ... saw the great incessant disquiet of life. He gained a wholly original aspect, rather than just a theoretical one. Rather, he lived in it and brought it to expression." Dedicating a seminar to book 10 of the Confessions in the summer of 1921, Heidegger highlights again what will become a central theme of Being and Time: our distinctive capacity to lose ourselves, the human property of openness to dispossession or impropriety. Such a capacity for self-loss, in Heidegger's analysis, involves both the unavoidable subjection of human life to trouble and disquiet, the human self's becoming a question to itself, and the tendency of human life to flee just such trouble and disquiet — to flee itself as question — by forgetting itself, along with its troubled and questionable character, through distractions offered up by things and persons of the "world." In his reading of Augustine along these lines, Heidegger emphasizes that the human experience of the "I am," by contrast to the constancy of the divine "I am" in Augustine, occurs as trouble and question insofar as the self can experience — paradoxically — its own self-difference or self-absence: its own having-been absent or lost to itself. Augustine finds a notable example of the self's experience of its own absence to itself in the transition, or differential movement, from the sleep of a dream I enjoy to the wakefulness in which I regret both that enjoyment and my having-been lost to myself within it. "Especially in the 'transition,'" Heidegger writes in discussing Augustine's reflection on the dream he regrets (C 10.30),
we have noteworthy experience of ourselves, namely that there is something quod nos non fecimus [that we have not made], which is not enacted by us, quod in nobis factus est [(but) which is made in us], but which nonetheless occurs and proceeds with us and in us, so that we are somehow sad about it, something that is in us, something that "we" ourselves are and yet, that we are not. — Concept of the molestia [trouble].
If we can see emerging here the logic according to which Heidegger will contrast and relate authentic and inauthentic modes of factical existence in Being and Time, then we might suspect also that this latter work, at the heart of its thinking, may well keep something of the Augustinian sense that the trouble and disquiet of our experience have to do fundamentally with the heart.
As distinct from Augustine, however, who marks the difference between loss or dispersion of self and the recovery of a continent self by referring to the absolute future, and absolute past, of the one and eternal Father, who is not of this world, Heidegger takes such a difference between dispersion and recovery of self, or between forgetting and awakening, as internal to my Being-in-the world and its temporality. He does this in terms of his much discussed, and often distorted, distinction between inauthentic and authentic modes of my existence — neither of which is more "real" than the other, but which concern instead that which, on the one hand, is distinctively mine, and susceptible to a loss that is mine, and that which belongs more to the anonymous sociality of my being in the "they," which no one can ever distinctively own, nor thus ever lose. By contrast to Augustine, Heidegger contends that we must not "take the fallenness of Dasein as a 'fall' from a purer and higher 'primal status'" (BT 220; SZ 176). The structure, terms, and sense of the distinction between fall from and return to self, however, remain strikingly similar in the two thinkers, as does — what is key to my concerns here — the understanding of how it appears to me: in both cases, it is some unsettling suspension or eclipse of my world that deprives me of support for my flight from my self and its truth, thereby throwing me back upon myself in an isolation that brings such truth, and my relation with it, to light.
Much as in book 4 of the Confessions Augustine finds himself deprived of his habitual preoccupations and pleasures through the abrupt death of a beloved friend, such that he becomes a question to himself as his world and its usual possibilities recede into darkness, so Heidegger's phenomenological eye will find especially illuminating those forms of world suspension that we experience in moods such as boredom and anxiety, the latter as tied notably to the horizon of our finite Being-toward-death.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations of Main Texts Cited
Preview: The Demands of the Day
1 When We Love—A Place: World’s End with Cormac McCarthy
2 Mourning Places and Time in Augustine
3 The Conversion of Time to the Time of Conversion: Augustine with Marion
4 The Time of His Syllables: Dying Together with Derrida and Augustine
5 Thinking Love and Mortality with Heidegger
6 World Loss or Heart Failure: Pedagogies of Estrangement in Harrison and Nancy
7 Ages of Learning . . . the Secular Today with Emerson and Nietzsche
Last Look
Bibliography
Index