Crazy Hope and Finite Experience
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Crazy Hope and Finite Experience

Final Essays of Paul Goodman

Taylor Stoehr, Taylor Stoehr

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eBook - ePub

Crazy Hope and Finite Experience

Final Essays of Paul Goodman

Taylor Stoehr, Taylor Stoehr

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About This Book

From the publication of Growing Up Absurd in 1960 until his death in 1972, Paul Goodman had the ear of the young radicals of the New Left, pouring forth books and articles on education, technology, decentralization, and of course, the war in Vietnam. Yet Goodman saw himself primarily as an artist rather than a political thinker or sociologist, and many of his books, even during the 1960s, were works of poetry, drama, and fiction. He had also practiced as a psychotherapist and joined with Frederick Perls and Ralph Hefferkine in producing a new synthesis in psychological thought, Gestalt therapy, which has since become an international movement. In an age of specialization, few writers have taken on so braod a range of concerns.

Crazy Hope and Finite Experience is the final summing up of the thought and life of a self-described "old-fashioned man of letters." This book brings together for the first time five personal essays, all written near the end of his life, in which Goodman discusses his sense of the world and how he was "in" it, his politics, his spiritual and religious attitude, his sexuality, and his calling as a literary artist.

For those already familiar with one or another aspect of his work, Goodman's self-assessment will provide new insight into the credo that underlies his whole career. For those learning about him for the first time, it offers a vivid sense of the man and his perspective. And for psychotherapists - especially Gestalt therapists - the book will fill in the picture of Goodman as a theorist whose work was crucial to the development of a new approach to therapy.

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Publisher
Gestalt Press
Year
2013
ISBN
9781134898176
3
Beyond My Horizon—Words
I am willing, God, to say
just how it is with me,
the prayer best I can.
But look, again and again
to say that we are dying
—this message is boring.
“No, you do not need
to write that down,” He said.
I have no further grief in me.
I can imagine, no, foresee
the losses I will suffer yet,
but my eyes do not get wet.
When once the brass is burnished, Sire,
there is no use of further fire,
it is a mirror. But it can be melted,
Sire, and destroyed.

IT’S A RUDIMENTARY EXPERIENCE I choose as mine, as if I were a simpler animal who doesn’t have a long human memory, nameless yearning, creature anxiety, synoptic vision, and abstract language. How do I fill the gaps and make sense to myself? There are things that I do and say ritually, that go beyond experience. I can read them off as sentences, but they are empty of content. They are not perceptions, meanings, or feelings. They are theological, “the substance of things unseen.”
I do not “believe” these theological sentences, that is much too intellectual a term. Not that I am skeptical by disposition; I am rather gullible. I entertain as likely almost any esoterica that people tell me with conviction, whether telepathy, orgone boxes, the Eucharist, or the revelations induced by psychedelic mushrooms. Having no wonders of my own, I marvel at other people’s. Writing this, I have a sudden fellow feeling for Hume, who said he would walk a mile to hear Whitefteld deliver one of his revival sermons. Except that we won’t use these ideas as premises for anything that we might responsibly say or do.
I don’t have a “faith,” that is much too factual and erotic a term. I think of Karl Barth, one of the few modern writers whom I always read with empathy and pleasure, surfing on the wave of his thought, and his beautiful style speaks right to me. But he had a kind of substantial love affair with Jesus; and either Jesus made him happy or his faith did. My experience contains no such fact or feeling and I am tolerably unhappy.
Rather, I go along exactly with Kant in his little book on religion, “within the limits of mere reason.” What I say here was already well said by him, that sticking to finite chunks of experience, it is inevitable to say words that go beyond their horizons and relate them to what surrounds them. But there is no sense to the spatial metaphors of “beyond” or “surround” any more than to other prepositional metaphors like “above” or “within,” or to Kant’s own nominative metaphors “things in themselves” and “symbols.” Conversely, however, there is nothing in my finite experience that prevents me from saying such words! This gives me a crazy freedom of speech that I otherwise lack. Freer and crazier than if I were superstitious or had a faith. But of course nothing follows from this freedom empty and crazy.
The agnostic way of being of Hume and Kant is out of fashion these days, so people do not remember the positive exhilaration of it. (Today, nonbelievers are atheists.) Since the theological sentences of agnosticism are empty, it is possible to pick and choose and shape them, as the Deists, Unitarians, Universalists, and Ethical Culturists did, to be edifying. Or for poetry. Or just to live on a little.
Let me say again what I don’t mean and do mean. “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.” This is crashingly true, but it is not what I mean. Pascal meant deep impulse, specifically his Christian impulse, as when Lawrence said, “Follow your deepest impulse.” It was high romance for a mathematician like Pascal to make Pascal’s wager.
Credo quia absurdum.” This is a powerful defiant idea, underlining the quite certain folly and Pharisaism of human judgments and moral values, and preferring to throw oneself on the Wholly Other. Writing about Ishmael and other outcasts in my twenties, I used to affirm the antinomian version of absurdity: let us rebel and sin in order to be touched by something divine, if only God’s wrath.
Angel: Hypocrite! do you not live and breathe by the daily gifts here and here given you?
Ishmael: So You say! when this mask of the world is stripped away, then shall we have full joy!
Nevertheless, though I am still not impressed by the wisdom or morality of righteous society, I am no longer tempted to deny what I think I do know, nor to act imprudently on principle.
But I like the safeguard of the Negative Theology of Jewish and Islamic philosophers—and from a different angle, of the Taoists. That whatever we say, is not true of God, nor is the contrary true. Simply, God is not a body and I know only about bodies, including myself. I mustn’t take them as idols, including myself.
And yet—and yet—Why should I be fastidious of idols? What difference does it make? “Manlike my God I make.” It makes no difference. But idolatry is stupid, and try as hard as I can, I cannot be stupider than I am.
Psychoanalytically, the obvious interpretation of inevitable but empty religious ideas is that they are obsessional rituals, like hand-washing or touching lampposts—their real meaning is repressed. I agree. Kant himself was the type of an anal character, with his scrupulosity, his routine, his sometimes amazingly harsh and strict sense of duty, his classifying, his aversion to instinctual feelings.
Yet it was Kant. Through middle age and a good old age, his work flowed on spontaneous, vigorous, brave, endlessly inventive and continually maturing, minutely attentive and boldly synoptic, and with a fine rhythm of style. We have to ask if Kant’s way of being obsessional is not a good way to cope with the nature of things, in order to live on a little. I repeat it: the proof of a sage is that he survives, he knows how. “To work out your allotted span and not perish in mid-career: this is knowing” (Chuang-tzu).
And there is something sweet in religious routines, once drained of the virulence of belief. The cozy religiosity of the Danes, benignly ineffectual, is a good background for guiltless sex and common-sense pacifism. Every human child is necessarily brought up among tribal myths old or new. We must of course use our wits as best we can and strictly affirm and act our best judgment; but it is harsh and imperious toward oneself to try to root out one’s archaic symbols. Especially since in the field of myths, new is almost invariably worse.
Finally, there is a wide divergence between the agnostic Enlightenment and what has proved to be the history of positive Science. But from the beginning they had different aims. It was the idea of humanism and the Enlightenment—of Erasmus and Montaigne, Hume and Kant—that the purpose of philosophy is to get rid of superstition so that life can go on; philosophy has no content. But the idea of positive Science— consider the program and utopia of Francis Bacon—was to accumulate a system of self-correcting natural philosophy by which we can live happily, with a useful scientific technology.
Naturally, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when humanism and heroic science were undermining the orthodox dogma, they were close allies. Indeed, before and during the French Revolution, they were for a time disastrously identified; together, they seemed to be the Enlightenment. But the Rule of Reason enthroned at Notre Dame was bound to disappoint, if only because the scientists did not yet know enough.
Now two centuries later, however, when positive Science does know a wonderful and fearful amount, it has itself become the worldwide system of orthodox belief, heavily capitalized, recruited by a million trained minds—“there are more scientists alive today than since Adam and Eve.” And it is hand in glove with the other powers-that-be.
It still disappoints, though its futurology promises infinite blessings. But to us threadbare men of letters, heirs of humanism and the Enlightenment, it is again the entrenched system served by a priestly caste, and it is again our duty to show how it is a superstition, so life can go on. (Oddly, the agnostic critique of Hume and Kant has become an intrinsic part of the orthodoxy, as conventional positivist logic.)
In his swan song, The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant spoke of philosophy as the “loyal opposition from the Left,” whose duty was to harass the three positive Faculties of Law, Medicine, and Theology. I have no doubt that at present he would be criticizing the Faculties of Law, Medicine, and Scientific Technology.
For us who are thankful that we occupy only the ground that we cover with our two feet, the primary theological virtues are patience and fortitude, so said Kafka. (I think also of the comic portrait of Socrates firmly planted during the battle, not going out of his way to look for trouble, but every now and then giving a hard knock.) No doubt those who have a different kind of experience require different virtues.
Patience is drawing on underlying forces; it is powerfully positive, though to a natural view it looks like just sitting it out. How would I persist against positive eroding forces if I were not drawing on invisible forces? And patience has a positive tonic effect on others; because of the presence of the patient person, they revive and go on, as if he were the gyroscope of the ship providing a stable ground. But the patient person himself does not enjoy it.
In a passage that I often repeat, Goethe speaks of that patient finite thing the Earth. “The poor Earth!—I evermore repeat it—a little sun, a little rain, and it grows green again.” It has a tonic effect on us. So the Earth repeats it, Goethe repeats it, and I repeat it.
Kafka himself, to be sure, was not persistent in his finitude. He was invaded by terrible paranoiac abstractions. (I take him as what he wrote.) Then his serene obsessional defenses broke down and he could not finish his stories.
Fortitude is to persist in one’s task with an extra ounce of strength, after one has exhausted one’s resources. As we say it in American, fortitude is to stay in there pitching. As I recall how often I have done it in bleak ball games and I have seen others do it, I realize it is a mystery.
But it must be a man’s own ball game, exhausting his own natural powers, otherwise I will not get the extra ounce of strength, more than I have.—I learned from the most grievous event of my life, Matty’s death five years ago, that it is useful to persist in doing what is one’s own thing, exhausting one’s natural powers very quickly when, in such a case, one has little grip on his own life. I wrote repetitive little poems about the one subject. And I was upbraided by an uncharitable lady for making literature out of the death of my only son. (My eyes are suddenly full of tears, but I will write down this too.) So I venture to give advice to other people in mourning: be sure that what you are doing is yours and persist in doing it; in everything else, willingly break down, suddenly bawl, run away if you feel like it.
Plato’s Socrates defines courage as having an idea, and I suppose this helps one transcend his natural fear. But my hunch is that Socrates—it is in one of the early dialogues—said something less abstract: if one is in the situation, identifying with its meaning, he does not have a structure for running away; it does not occur to him, he is occupied. Then he will have an extra ounce of strength. He doesn’t know from where; he has no leisure to ask.
I notice that I keep recurring to my authors of the concrete, the finite, the intrinsic: Socrates, Goethe, Kant, Kafka when he was well. It shows me again that I cannot learn anything different, and it shows that what I say is mine to say.
But I could spell it out as “developing” and it would come to the same thing. In my teens I was a Platonist and I wrote a long paper on the place of myths in the Dialectic Method: the plot was that it is the purpose of dialectic to bring us to a pause, paralyzed by the narke, the man-o’-war, and then there is a myth to revive us. But the form of Platonism to which I temperamentally gravitated was Leibniz: the concrete monad and its molecular petites perceptions,
—the dainty noise of drop on drop
accumulates to be the ocean’s roar.
This seemed to me compatible with Freud whom I was also reading, as my only pornography.
Soon Berkeley and Hume, however, seemed to me even more like home. They were matter-of-fact. And I went backward from Plato to Socrates and Heraclitus and Parmenides. Kant, “of course,” solved all the problems. When I was subjected to a heavy dose of McKeon’s reading of Aristotle, for my purposes it was the same philosophy. Evidently, in these notes, I still think so.
I later learned just enough from the positivists and phenomenologists to steer my middle course between them, in the wake of William James, who was real American.
Meantime, I was a hungry reader of the neo-Protestants— I remember Nygren, Otto, Schweitzer, and Barth; and Maimonides, and Lao-tzu These have somehow permitted me to say the magic I need, like Kant or William James or Rank, but unlike Aristotle or Freud.
No. As I now think of all of them, and scores of other great authors, what stands out is the common enterprise: how to explain (or explain away) the matter-of-fact, the erotic, the abiding, and the unknown. How it is and what to do. It is possible that being a philosopher sets it up this way; or it is possible that it is this way for everybody and philosophers cope by spelling it out. I don’t know.
Faith is having a world-for-me. That my experience is given. That it will continue to be given: the Next is not the brink of a precipice. Its structure has consequences that I can draw; there might be evidence to clarify the meaning if I attend. By faith I am not caged in my finite experience; it has an horizon rather than bars; so I speak of it as “roomy enough.” I am not alone, only lonely.
It is a latitudinarian notion of faith, like being sane. Nearly everybody behaves as if he had a world. A child runs headlong as though there will be gravity and ground, though he does not have nearly enough experience to believe this as certain as he acts it; it is built into his constitution. A speaker has a hearer in his language community, he does not think about it. Noah planted a vineyard because the Lord promised with his rainbow that something would come of it, there wouldn’t be another flood. A scientist pursues his method as though the evidence was not planted to deceive him. I go to an orgasm by faith, I will not fall apart or not come down. We fall asleep by faith. I suppose there is nothing we do that we do not do by faith. “We live by faith.”
I am paraphrasing Anselm’s or Descartes’ ontological argument: however we do proves faith. But there are no grounds for the faith. I cannot find anything in my experience that I would call faith. It is like Kierkegaard’s Postman: one cannot tell, looking at him, that he is a Christian.
Perhaps the animal feeling of faith is t...

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