Evil becoming direct, clear, simple, obvious... (Things coming to a point...)

As evil becomes more dominant in our world, it ceases to be subtle and strategic. In the end, evil is about motivation - so it is never happy when it has to dress-up and disguise its true motivations in a costume of good. The flimsier the excuse for evil the better - so long as people still do it.

As things come to a point, the mass of people are more corrupt, and their basic metaphysical assumptions about reality become themselves evil - so that making evil choices becomes more and more natural and spontaneous.

In such a situation; evil can afford to be relatively open about its nature - which is negative and incoherent in strategic pursuit of the destruction of Good - it attacks Good in whatever way is immediately effective. Thus - evil gathers-pace...


For example, Christian people can be mocked for their Goodness - for being dull, predictable and miserable - and also mocked for Not being Good but being in-reality depraved hypocrites - and also for being dumb-happy-clappy idiots who don't even have the wit to want evil - and also for being fiendishly-clever sinister-conspirators - for being consumed by hate, resentment, bitterness - for being grovelling cowards - and at the same time insane fanatics.  For being boring conformists and intolerable anti-Enlightenment subversives. 

This is the way evil works. Its coherence can be seen in its opposition. As for what evil actually wants as a state of affairs... well that cannot be answered; not least because each evil group and person wants the world organised around their own desires. So, when not allied in opposition, evil is a war of all against all; evil is anticohesion, intrinsically fissile (which is a feature, not a bug, for the Father of Lies).


But things coming to a point means not just that evil is more powerful, more short-termist, more clearly negative -but also that evil is more obvious.

The ultimate goal of evil is that people will choose evil because it is evil; in other words, choose evil our of a resentment against the Good, from a fear of the Good. Evil has used a debased version of Love and a battering-ram in the Sexual Revolution (Love as meaning mostly sensual gratification but still aspiring to long-termism).

But as things come to a point, even the fig-leaf of fake-Love will be discarded; and the choices confronting people will be purely a matter or their own personal gratification, here-and-now, and damn the 'consequences'.


In sum, when things have come to a point - life-choices will be substantially (this can never be absolute, due to our mixed-nature and mixed-motives) simple, dichotomous and direct. The choices will be between God, Love, Beauty, Truth, Virtue, Harmony... and the negation of these.

Once we have people choosing against-Good, against God, consciously and with their eyes wide-open; then that will also be the situation when people will choose eternal damnation in preference to the gift of salvation and eternal life as Sons and Daughters of God - they will reject Heaven and choose to reign in their own personal Hell.

This is the end game; yet we can see that this must be carefully prepared if the situation is not to 'backfire' from the perspective of evil...

The clearer that choices become, the more likely that the mass of distracted, cloudy-minded, muddled, partly conscious and not-yet-fully-corrupted people will perceive the situation and choose Good.


So - a world of things coming to a point is also a world in which it is easier to discern Good. Much easier...

The iron fist has emerged from its velvet glove; the wolf has shrugged of his sheep's clothing. Strategic deception becomes a thing of the past.

For Men of Good intent - life becomes clear and simple - right choices are easy to recognise.

After that - it is up-to-us, each as individuals.

C.S Lewis's Trilemma as THE Christian moment

*

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis made a famous, perhaps notorious - and I believe profoundly true statement: 

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

*

This is saying that Jesus intended to present Himself as someone who was either The Christ and Son of God; or else must be regarded as either insane or evil. A trilemma - a three way choice.

*

For me, the shocking nature of Jesus's behaviour is very well brought out in this four minute dramatization of John 8: 12-58 - the 'I am the light of the world' section - especially the contrast between Jesus's calm and emphatic manner of speaking, and the response of the priests and of the crowd

http://tinyurl.com/ph342pc 

*

Indeed, I think this is something of a key to Christianity, and to becoming a Christian.

We need to come to that point where we see that the claims of Christianity are - on the one hand - coherent, and that there is evidence to support them; but on the other hand that the evidence is not conclusive, nor compelling of assent - but rather that the claims are vast, shocking, extraordinary...

And that having come to this point, a point of balance - our free will has been brought to a moment of decision, of choice between two divergent paths, two contrasted world views.

*

So it is not un-reasonable nor utterly counter-evidential to reject Christ, in the sense that the whole thing can be regarded as a tissue of falsehoods and misunderstandings and coincidences; a horrible scheme of exploitation.

In this sense, militant atheists are perfectly correct to regard Christianity as evil or insane - if it is not true, Christianity in an individual is either evil or stupid-insane; and long-term strategic organized Christianity (The Church), which cannot be regarded as insane, is therefore and necessarily evil: some kind of elaborate trick, disguise and conspiracy.

*

Since we really are free agents, this point and no further is how far God can bring us: to the point of recognizing the necessity of a choice for which there is no safe default decision and for which we bear individual responsibility.

God can bring us to the Trilemma, and after that we are responsible for what happens. 

*

This point of balance, of treble choice - Lewis's Trilemma - is something we feel if the strategy is has worked, if - that is - the circumstances or argument has succeeded in bringing us up to this point... but of course the attempt to bring people to this point may not work on any particular instance.

In which case the apologist must try again. 

But this is the proper goal of evangelism: not to bludgeon the potential convert into submission by pretending that Christianity is the one and only necessary sane consequence of irrefutable arguments and evidence; but to bring the potential convert to that point at which he sees Christianity as reasonable but extraordinary: and perceives the road branching ahead - and acknowledges that in this exact here-and-now, it is up to him and to nobody and nothing else.
 

*

Understand that what we are seeing is 'things coming to a point': and that this is our best hope

I know I have said this many times over the years I have been blogging, but not all current reader have been around that long; and it is terribly important to understand!

(To see what I have previously written - word-search 'coming to a point'.)

In the public domain, the mass media, the politics-government, in education and all other major social systems we are seeing 'things coming to a point' - this process is very far advanced, continues, is apparently accelerating.

The phrase comes from That Hideous Strength by CS Lewis, which is available free online at Project Gutenberg in Canada; it means much the same as what people imply by the misuse of the word 'polarisation' - it means that Good and evil are becoming so extreme as to lose the grey areas and be starkly separated; it means that there is no neutrality and every-thing of any possible public significance is now-and-increasingly either positively/ actively/ purposively-Good or positively/ actively/ purposively-evil.

This creates all kinds of problems, suffering, hardship, But in a world such as this one, coming to a point is a Good-thing. By 'Good' I mean in a spiritual and eternal sense - not a materialist and this-worldly sense. The process is Good for our souls, even when it is bad for our minds and bodies.

It is Good because it is better than the alternative; which is more of the same as we have been getting for the past fifty years; and which has led-to, is leading to ever-more, materialism, hedonism, short-termism, hopelessness, cowardice, despair... and consequently the active-embrace-and-propagation of lies, ugliness, sin and all other forms of evil.

The news, the law, the workplace, the schools and colleges, the mainstream churches - are pushing the evil agenda more and more aggressively, extremely, and rapidly. Whether this is because they can't help themselves, or because they feel that all opposition has now been crushed - or whether they fear that people might wake-up and push back (or from some blend of these) doesn't really matter: It Is Happening.  

Because things are coming to a point, it gets easier to notice and understand what is happening; and this a Good because it is something that each individual can only do For Himself. If he does not do it For Himself, then it merely passive, therefore it has Not Actually Happened.

Of course, so far, things have been coming to a point, Good and evil are ever-more-clearly distinct - and people have been choosing evil en masse. So be it. People have agency, people can choose evil, and they are apparently doing so in very large numbers. If so, they have made their choice and Will live with that choice (unless or until they repent it, which usually gets harder with time).

This is a test for everyone: it is a test for Christians. Christians are confronted with worldly-expediency versus spiritual virtue again and again, every day and in multiple situations; and their response (I mean their response in their own thinking) will necessarily go one way, or the other way.

Our true motivation is recurrently being tested, hence refined and strengthened.

This is Good and we ought to be grateful; because this is exactly theosis; it is how we grow in divinity (or the opposite).

**

Excerpt from Chapter 4 of That Hideous Strength, giving the origin of the concept of 'Things coming to a point':

"Have you ever noticed," said Dimble, "that the universe, and every little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point?"

His wife waited as those wait who know by long experience the mental processes of the person who is talking to them.

"I mean this," said Dimble, in answer to the question she had not asked. "If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family--anything you like--at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow-room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder. Like in the poem about Heaven and Hell eating into merry Middle Earth from opposite sides . . . how does it go? Something about 'eat every day . . . till all is somethinged away.' It can't be eaten, that wouldn't scan. My memory has failed dreadfully these last few years. Do you know the bit, Margery?"

"What you were saying reminded me more of the bit in the Bible about the winnowing fan. Separating the wheat and the chaff. Or like Browning's line: 'Life's business being just the terrible choice.'"

"Exactly! Perhaps the whole time-process means just that and nothing else. But it's not only in questions of moral choice. Everything is getting more itself and more different from everything else all the time. Evolution means species getting less and less like one another. Minds get more and more spiritual, matter more and more material. Even in literature, poetry and prose draw further and further apart."

Mrs. Dimble with the ease born of long practice averted the danger, ever present in her house, of a merely literary turn being given to the conversation.

"Yes," she said. "Spirit and matter, certainly. That explains why people like the Studdocks find it so difficult to be happily married."

"The Studdocks?" said Dimble, looking at her rather vaguely. The domestic problems of that young couple had occupied his mind a good deal less than they had occupied his wife's. "Oh, I see! Yes. I dare say that has something to do with it. But about Merlin: what it comes to, as far as I can make out, is this. There were still possibilities for a man of that age which there aren't for a man of ours. The earth itself was more like an animal in those days. And mental processes were much more like physical actions. And there were--well, Neutrals, knocking about."

"Neutrals?"

"I don't mean, of course, that anything can be a real neutral. A conscious being is either obeying God or disobeying Him. But there might be things neutral in relation to us."

"You mean eldils--angels?"

"Well, the word angel rather begs the question. Even the Oyéresu aren't exactly angels in the same sense as our guardian angels are. Technically, they are Intelligences. The point is that while it may be true at the end of the world to describe every eldil either as an angel or a devil, and may even be true now, it was much less true in Merlin's time. There used to be things on this earth pursuing their own business, so to speak. They weren't ministering spirits sent to help fallen humanity, but neither were they enemies preying upon us. Even in St. Paul one gets glimpses of a population that won't exactly fit into our two columns of angels and devils. And if you go back further . . . all the gods, elves, dwarfs, water-people, fate, longaevi. You and I know too much to think they are just illusions."

"You think there are things like that?"

"I think there were. I think there was room for them then, but the universe has come more to a point. Not all rational things perhaps. Some would be mere wills inherent in matter, hardly conscious. More like animals. Others--but I don't really know. At any rate, that is the sort of situation in which one got a man like Merlin."

"It all sounds rather horrible to me."

"It was rather horrible. I mean even in Merlin's time (he came at the extreme tail end of it), though you could still use that sort of life in the universe innocently, you couldn't do it safely. The things weren't bad in themselves, but they were already bad for us. They sort of withered the man who dealt with them. Not on purpose. They couldn't help doing it. Merlinus is withered. He's quite pious and humble and all that, but something has been taken out of him. That quietness of his is just a little deadly, like the quiet of a gutted building. It's the result of having laid his mind open to something that broadens the environment just a bit too much. Like polygamy. It wasn't wrong for Abraham, but one can't help feeling that even he lost something by it."

"Cecil," said Mrs. Dimble, "do you feel quite comfortable about the Director's using a man like this? I mean, doesn't it look a little bit like fighting Belbury with its own weapons?"

"No. I had thought of that. Merlin is the reverse of Belbury. He's at the opposite extreme. He is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation on Nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one's horse. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead--a machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it won't work the way he pleases. Finally come the Belbury people, who take over that view from the modern man unaltered and simply want to increase their power by tacking on to it the aid of spirits--extra-natural, anti-natural spirits. Of course they hoped to have it both ways. They thought the old magia of Merlin, which worked in with the spiritual qualities of Nature, loving and reverencing them and knowing them from within, could be combined with the new goeteia--the brutal surgery from without. No. In a sense, Merlin represents what we've got to get back to in some different way. Do you know that he is forbidden by the rules of his order ever to use any edged tool on any growing thing?"

A Philosophical Novel: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig - by Bruce G Charlton, 1992

Note: I am archiving this paper I wrote some thirty years ago (and more than 15 years before I became a Christian) - because it was previously published online only at the moq.org web-pages, which have sometimes been offline. This version - taken from the moq.org transcript - retains many small errors of transcription, punctuation etc - but I can't be bothered to fix them at present. What is intended is usually obvious. 

I first encountered Robert M Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM) aged 17 when it made a colossal impact; and for a couple of decades it was a major influence on my life and thinking - and a broadly positive influence. 

I now see clearly that it was intrinsically inadequate as a basis for life, and leaves the most fundamental questions for a Man of these times not only unanswered but unasked. Yet, I still regard ZAMM as one of the outstanding non-fiction books of my life: a true masterpiece.

 

Charlton B. A Philosophical Novel: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig Durham University Journal. 1992; 84: 111-17

The purpose of this article is to suggest a way to approach Robert M. Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Enquiry into Values (ZAMM for short). 

In an important sense the book does not require an introduction or gloss as it is specifically designed to induce the reader into its desired way of thought. However, Pirsig’s message is so radical that it can prove hard to hold onto the insights attained from reading the book, and it is at this point that an unpacking of the meaning can be useful. Furthermore, a comparison with the work of other philosophers can be helpful in clarifying just what Pirsig is suggesting.

Pirsig is doing philosophy for moral reasons. He is concerned with the effects of his thinking and writing on ordinary life. The book is intended to be read for this reason, and not just by professional philosophers. 

Which, I presume, is why Pirsig gave his book such a paradoxical and arresting title. If he had called it by the subtitle An Enquiry Into Values it is unlikely that it would have been read outside educational institutions; although the price paid is that it is not much read within them. 

But it is not just the title which makes Pirsig’s book stand apart from the usual academic books. ZAMM is written as a sort of novel, in that it achieves much of its effect by literary techniques such as characterization, plot and suspense.

— What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua — that’s the only name I can think of for it — like the traveling tent-show Chautauqua’s that used to move across America... an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. ( p.7)1’

Pirsig adopts a deliberately 'homespun' tone throughout. even though the book tackles problems of great importance and difficulty. This is perhaps an American trait, and Pirsig is a Midwestern American of a kind seldom encountered in the cultural products with which we are familiar in Britain. We are used to the West Coast hedonists, the East Coast intellectuals and the wealthy Southerners; but the Midwest is known, if at all, only for its football teams. It is not the least of the pleasures of this book that we are given a view of another America, one which Pirsig clearly values.

But why write philosophy as a novel? It is as if in order to say something new, Pirsig was compelled to say it in a new way so as to avoid getting drawn into the old predictable arguments with the old predictable results (objective versus subjective, realism versus idealism, ends versus means, or whatever). He is engaged in supplying us with a different context for our lives. The text must supply the new context, must defeat our tendency to view the new things it says in the same old ways; slotting the new information into old categories. 

Pirsig achieves this context by writing philosophy as a novel. He dramatizes the philosophical process. and in order to follow the drama we must put ourselves into the new context through imaginative identification with the protagonist. In doing this the book’s form reflects its message. The book is about the importance of ‘care’ in all that we do, so an impersonal and ‘objective’ text would not be appropriate.

Philosophical discourse as a narrative is nothing new when we consider the dialogues of Plato, rather than simply the part spoken by Socrates. ‘Philosophy’ as the whole thing and not just one point of view. A digest of Socrates ‘philosophical views’ abstracted from this context misses the point that it is the dialogue in its totality which is what we should consider. Bald conclusions are neither compelling nor correct. What Plato regards as the philosophical life (the best life) is that of the dialogues, and not that of the opinions of Socrates in isolation from that life.

In ZAMM Pirsig tells the story of his former self, a philosophical system builder he names Phaedrus. after the character in Plato’s dialogue of that name. While the Pirsig who narrates the book seems to be fairly breezy and down to earth. Phaedrus was a more tormented, solitary and metaphysical character. Phaedrus goes through a process of system building, but the system is broken apart by its contradictions to lead, via insanity and a complete change in personality, to a better state (post-metaphysical. even post-Philosophical). By the end of the book Pirsig has attained the ability to engage in direct action, without the tortured craving for ‘objective’ foundations.

Pirsig at the time of writing this book is asking himself a whole different set of questions about life from those he asked himself as Phaedrus. He is no longer hung-up on the metaphysical puzzles which previously ‘bewitched’ him (to use Wittgenstein’s word): the hunt for the ‘ghost of reason’; the nature of quality. Pirsig the narrator sometimes puts himself forward as merely the husk remaining after insanity has destroyed the ascetic genius Phaedrus: ‘Just another middle-class, middle-aged person getting along’. However it is the Pragmatic (in both senses) narrator who has got it right, and who leads a better life than the hero of faith called Phaedrus. This modesty is best seen as a literary device; after all it is the present-day Pirsig who wrote the book.

On the one hand Pirsig presents himself as a plain man, but on the other hand to attain this he had to go through the processes described for Phaedrus. Which is, of course, why he describes the tragedy of his former self Phaedrus, rather than simply describing his present way of life for us to admire and emulate. We identify with Phaedrus as his story unfolds, and come to understand how it was that he needed to ask the questions he did, and how deep he needed to dig to believe that the questions themselves were the products of bewitchment. That is how deep the reader must dig, because we too are subject to these delusions.

There are two valid ways of life described in ZAMM: the pre-critical Romantic and the post-metaphysical Pragmatist; and one non-valid (though understandable) way of life: the metaphysical system builder. If as a Romantic you don’t feel drawn towards philosophical speculation but lead your life as an integrated whole without trying to analyse it, then that is fine. The pre-critical or ‘unexamined’ life can be a good one, although Pirsig clearly feels it is fragile, vulnerable. An example of a successful Romantic is portrayed. the abstract painter De Weese. This is how people were (says Pirsig) before Socrates, and sometimes they still are. It is a special kind of moral genius’ who has a natural but unreflective sureness of action: De Weese in his painting, intuitive and undivided.

It is fragile because it cannot answer questions from ‘square’ or Classical critics, questions concerned with analysis or justification. Indeed it can hardly even risk thinking about such things. And it has great difficulty dealing with technology — the ‘motorcycle maintenance’ of the title. For most of us, things can only get better after getting worse; we must pass through the illusions of metaphysics in order to become free of their distortions. Pre-critical innocence cannot be got by trying; instead we must stay with our legacy of metaphysical ‘nonsense’ (another Wittgensteinian term), pushing it as far as it will go until we have seen past it to the clear light of a post-metaphysical state: a state when we realise the futility of becoming entrapped in our own metaphors and mistaking them for inescapable and insoluble paradoxes. We are then less vulnerable, our innocence will not be corrupted by reflection, and we can act with sureness and satisfaction. And technology can become a joy.

It is in this context we can see Pirsig’s description of working on a motorcycle (pp. 296—3 19) with its discussion of gumption. There is reason to suppose that this section forms the most important part of the book for the author, the part where the ‘philosophical’ discussion is cashed out in a down-to-earth example in everyday life.

— I like the word ‘gumption’ because it’s so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn’t likely to reject anyone who comes along... I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption. (p. 296)

— The paramount importance of gumption solves a problem of format of this Chautauqua. The problem has been how to get off the generalities.., there’s the kind of detail that no motorcycle shop manual goes into but that is common to all machines and can be given here. This is the detail of the Quality relationship. the gumption relationship, between the machine and the mechanic, which is just as intricate as the machine itself. Throughout the process of fixing the machine things always come up. low-quality things. from a dusted knuckle to an ‘accidentally’ ruined ‘irreplaceable’ assembly. These drain off gumption, destroy enthusiasm and leave you so discouraged you want to forget the whole business. I call these things ‘gumption traps’. (p. 298)

And after discussing the particular gumption traps involved in motorcycle maintenance. Pirsig is able to return to the general discussion, but with a better sense of just how much, and how little, such general principles can help us.

— Maybe it’s just the usual late afternoon letdown. hut after I’ve said it these things today I just have a feeling that I’ve somehow talked around the point. Some could ask, ‘Well, if I get around all those gumption traps. will I have the thing licked?’

The answer, of course. is no, you still haven’t got anything licked. You’ve got to live right too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts...

The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be ‘out there’ and the person that appears to be ‘in here’ are not two separate things. They grow towards quality or fall away from Quality together. (pp. 3 18—19)

The philosophical impulse (the desire to analyse, systematize, ‘objectify’ the sense of mystery on regarding the world) is seen, finally, to be a blasphemous response; immoral, a superstitious reaction with the covertly egotistical aim of attaining mastery.

— Why [Phaedrus] chose to disregard [advice from De Weese] and chose to respond to this dilemma logically and dialectically rather than take the easy escape of mysticism. I don’t know. But I can guess... Philosophical mysticism... has been with us since the beginning of history... But it’s not an academic subject...

I think a second reason for his decision to enter the [philosophical) arena was an egoistic one. He knew himself to be a pretty sharp logician and dialectician, took pride in this and looked upon the present dilemma as a challenge to his skill. I think now that trace of egoism may have been the beginning of all his troubles. (p. 225)

Pirsig wants to dislodge objective truth from its status as providing the bottom-line justification for human action. And we tend to feel that he should provide us with an alternative. But even to name the alternative will expose it to attack by philosophers who ask questions which can only be answered in the terms appropriate to enquiries into objective truth, whereas those terms are exactly what are under question. If we really want to understand we must listen, not argue. On the other hand to leave ‘it’ unnamed is to risk being incomprehensible, in exactly the way that Zen koans are incomprehensible (that is irrelevant, incoherent, inconclusive — a series of non-sequiturs). Pirsig does name his alternative as Quality, and takes the bull by the horns, or rather goes between the horns (to use his own bullfighting metaphor for philosophical debate). by refusing to define it.

Much of the book is taken up with this refusal to attempt a definition of the central term, and the reasons for this. How could we define our primary value except in terms of lesser values, and therefore fail to capture it? But, what is more to the point, why do we feel we must define it before we can act well? That is the crux. Instead of practice (how we do our motorcycle maintenance) we get stuck on paradoxes derived from the process of definition and analysis; subjectivity versus objectivity, the real versus the ideal. This is exactly what happened to the debating opponents of Socrates, and what has been happening to philosophers ever since. Why then, says Pirsig, do we keep doing it?

The very notion of first thinking up a philosophy and then applying it to life is at fault. That division between thinking and doing is the whole problem: the idea that the good life is the examined life. Before you start living (or doing) you must sort out certain ‘Philosophical’ problems, and what is more sort them out using terms defined more or less) by Plato et al.

This agenda is woven into our discourse from so far back that we can’t see any other rational way of discussion. Breaking the grip of reason is just what Zen Buddhism is about, and also why Pirsig adopts an historical approach: he is telling a story of how we came to think this way, in order to show us alternatives (places where we could have branched off), and to explain that our present way of thinking is only one of the possibilities (the one that for some reason or another actually happened), and that reason throughout history is a changing concept.

We should see Pirsig’s use of the concept of Quality as a way of short circuiting the entanglements of philosophy which prevent us from living the good life. It is not a name for something, hut a deliberate non-sequitur such as mu or the fourfold negative for Zen Buddhists. Like the off-the-wall answers or unpredictable responses of a Zen master, it means something like ‘think again’; or in a more American parlance, ‘shut up and wise up’.

— Perhaps [Phaedrus] would have gone in the direction I'm now about to go in if this second wave of crystallisation, the metaphysical wave, had finally grounded out “here I’ll be grounding it out, that is, in the everyday world. I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it. (p. 240)

The search for the nature of Quality digs back and back to the ‘fall of man’: that point at which Socrates (or Plato) demoted Quality (or what the ancient Greeks called arête) and instead substituted Objective Truth as the greatest good.

It seems to me that Pirsig is a Pragmatist, as that description is used by Richard Rorty in The Consequences of Pragmatism (Brighton: Harvester, 1982):

— Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True and the Good, or to define the word ‘true’ or good’. supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area... The history of attempts to do so. and of criticisms of such attempts. is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call philosophy’ — a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see that tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions anymore... They would simply like to change the subject. (p.xiv)

— Pragmatists are saying that the best hope for philosophy is not to practice Philosophy. They think it will not help to say something true to think about Truth, nor will it help to act well to think about Goodness, nor will it help to be rational to think about Rationality. (p.xv)

Pirsig is also against principles or law’s as a guide to conduct, and in favour of the ‘holistic’ notion of Quality or arête (the quality of an excellent life). And this notion is not something we should (or can) try to define, analyse or even talk about much. He regards the whole business of looking for foundations as profoundly mistaken, and is trying to substitute for it a different way of doing things. If he is successful we will find the new way so interesting that we will simply forget about our old preoccupations, cease to be tormented by them.

This is a two-stage process, although both stages happen together: first Pirsig attacks the philosophical way of doing things by describing it as a social and historical ‘accident’, then he shows us an alternative way of doing things. The text must succeed at both of these aims in order to effect change. Following Rorty, I regard Pirsig as being engaged in the overthrow’ of capital ‘P’ Philosophy which is (roughly speaking) that enterprise begun by Plato to establish eternal and objective foundations for knowledge.2 He is trying to change the subject of conversation, and the way in which we converse. This links him to the likes of Wittgenstein. but in mood more closely to Rorty himself and to the earlier American Pragmatists such as John Dewey and William James.

— If you want to build a factory. or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge although necessary, isn’t enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what’s good. That’s what carries you forward. This sense isn’t just something you’re born with, although you are born with it. It’s also something you can develop. It’s not just ‘intuition’, not just unexplainable ‘skill’ or ‘talent’. It’s the direct result of contact with basic reality. Quality. which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal.

It all sounds so far out and esoteric when it’s put like that it comes as a shock to discover that it is one of the most homespun, down-to-earth views of reality that you can have. Harry Truman. of all people. comes to mind, when he said, concerning his administration’s programs. ‘We’ll just try them... and if they don’t work... why then we’ll just try something else’. (pp. 277—78)

So the end of Pirsig’s philosophical quest is a return to the down-to-earth, the particular: a return to practice. Philosophy does not give us the key to a ‘new’ and transcendent way of life. What was a good life before philosophy is still a good one after it. Pragmatism is the hard-nosed, no bullshit, Midwestern version of Zen.

However, it can also be seen from the above passage that even Pirsig does not entirely avoid metaphysical thinking. In talking about Quality, he is almost irresistibly tempted into the business of defining Quality. Just prior to this point in the book there is a somewhat half-hearted attempt to draw an analogy between Quality and ‘reality’:

— The real train of knowledge isn’t a static entity that can be stopped and subdivided. It’s always going somewhere. On a track called Quality...

Romantic reality is the cutting edge of experience. It’s the leading edge of the train of knowledge that keeps the whole train on the track... The leading edge is where absolutely all the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the future. It contains all the history of the past. Where else could they be contained?...

Value, the leading edge of reality, is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of structure. Value is the predecessor of structure. Its the pre-intellectual awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is pre-selected on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it’s derived. (pp. 276—77)

Well.., sort of. But Pirsig is coming close, at this point, to stating that this ‘pre-intellectual awareness’ (value) is Reality (with a capital R): in other words that Quality is the objective truth (the railway track) of the world about which all else is an approximation: coming close, in other words, to epistemology — which is just what he is warning us against. Because how on earth could we understand ‘the value source’ from which our structure is derived, without being able to take a God’s eye (timeless, omniscient) view of Reality, and then compare it with our perception of that reality? The whole discussion makes no sense and is not necessary.

In this passage the notion of quality has become reified by having it located in sentences where it can be construed as having a place in time and space.

— At the leading edge there are no subjects. no objects, only the track of Quality ahead, and if you have no formal way of evaluating, no way of acknowledging this Quality, then the train has no way of knowing where to go. (p. 277)

Of course, this is an analogy, but it is going against the trend of the rest of the book to talk of ‘formal’ ways of evaluating Quality, or even to say just exactly where Quality is situated (i.e. in the track). As Peter Cook and Dudley Moore might say, ‘That could confuse a stupid person’. I am being rather unfair in picking out this portion of the book, because it is one of the few places where ‘Pirsig nods’, but it shows the constant danger, in this kind of writing, of slipping back into vocabularies which inevitably depict things in a way which favours the opposition. In trying to do justice to his opponents’ arguments. Pirsig has allowed them to choose the vocabulary (the metaphors) in which discussion will proceed — in doing this he concedes important ground. You cannot, meaningfully, philosophise about Quality, and that is that.

It is particularly unfortunate that this misleading (although well meant) analogy should appear at this particular point in the book, where Pirsig approaches nearest to a credo, and indeed puts the pragmatic (anti-Philosophical) message most strongly.

— One’s rational understanding of a motorcycle is therefore modified from minute to minute as one works on it and sees that a new and different rational understanding has more Quality. One doesn’t cling to old sticky ideas because one has an immediate rational basis for rejecting them. Reality isn’t static anymore. It’s not a set of ideas you have to either fight or else resign yourself to. It’s made up. in part. of ideas that are expected to grow as you grow, and as we all grow. century after century. With Quality as a central undefined term, reality is, in its essential nature, not static but dynamic. And when you really understand dynamic reality you never get stuck. It has forms but the forms are capable of change. ( p. 277)

We must not be misled by complimentary metaphors like the ‘essential’ nature of reality. There are no essences except those changing ‘forms’ which are ‘reality’ only insofar as they are helpful to us in improving the Quality of our world. With metaphors, as with anything else, ‘We’ll just try them... and if they don’t work... why then we’ll just try something else’.

This is Pragmatism, surely. the same as the way of life outlined by James C. Edwards:

— The sound human life, construed pragmatically. would be tolerant. experimental. optimistic. forward looking, unconstrained by outmoded intellectual or practical patterns. and so forth. It would, according to men like James and Dewey, free us to preserve the good of the past while remaining outside the clutches of its various rigidities; and the sound human life would give us confidence in a better future, a confidence unshadowed by fears of skepticism (and its political correlate, anarchy) or dogmatism (with its offspring, tyranny). The sound human life points towards an ever-increasing liberalism, the wider and wider extension of that conversation among equals which J.S. Mill thought essential to civilisation itself.3

I am well aware that Pragmatism forms a circular justification (‘people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like’), but that is what every justification boils down to —in argument (or conversation) what we are really trying to do is to persuade other people to enter our favoured circle alongside us.

In this essay I have not been trying to say that Pirsig should be regarded as a canonical philosopher and studied in Universities, although there is no reason why he shouldn’t be. But I would like to suggest that philosophers read Pirsig for personal rather than professional reasons. I am unsure whether there is much to be gained from a specifically ‘academic’ placing of his work. but I am confident that there is a lot to be gained from reading the book: and from listening, not arguing.

However, it does seem to me that the radical nature of the philosophical message in ZAMM has not been sufficiently realised. Nor have Pirsig’s links with writers who, in different ways, have been attempting to round-off the Western philosophical tradition and start something different: for example Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger from the German tradition:

Rorty, James C. Edwards. Thomas Kuhn, William James and John Dewey from the USA; Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida from France; Don Cupitt from Britain, to name but a few. The differences between these writers, I would contend, are mostly differences of their characters. Pirsig is, in this analysis, an optimistic, practical ‘middlebrow’ philosopher writing for a broad audience of non-professional philosophers like himself.

I am not being dismissive here. Whether a writer counts as highbrow (academically respectable) or middlebrow (read by an intelligent lay audience) is a matter of style rather than intelligence, excellence or importance. Charles Dickens, Bernard Shaw and Dylan Thomas are middlebrow writers, and are at least the literary equals of equivalent highbrows such as George Eliot, Henry James or Ezra Pound. Not superior, but different. Likewise for philosophers, we need all types and temperaments. There is a long line of brilliant and influential lay philosophers such as Montaigne, Samuel Johnson. John Ruskin and G.K. Chesterton. And I would suggest that Pirsig is one of our best living representatives.

Notes

1 Page references are to the 1976 Corgi edition published in London.

2 Small ‘p’ philosophy has been defined as loosely as possible by Wilfrid Sellars as ‘an attempt to see how things. in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term’ (quoted in Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p.xiv). Philosophy in this sense is something done by novelists, poets, playwrights, priests, jounalists and critics, as much as, or more than, by professional Philosophers.

3 James C. Edwards, Ethics Without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida. 1982), pp. 225—26. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the influence of this book by Edwards on my essay. The whole approach I have taken with Pirsig was suggested by Edwards’s intense and satisfying unpacking of Wittgenstein’s moral purposes. My interpretation of the nature of Pragmatism was also substantially affected by this book, although derived primarily from the writings of Richard Rorty.

Postscript

Since I wrote the above essay in 1989, Pirsig has published another hook. Li/a: An Enquiry into Morals (London: Bantam. 1991). My impression (after a single. careful reading) is that the book forms a sort of extended and elaborated commentary on ZAMM. However, it differs significantly in explicitly pursuing a ‘Metaphysics of Quality”, and therefore advocating a different philosophy from that of ZAMM: no longer Pragmatism but something else.

I sent a typescript of my essay to Robert Pirsig shortly after it was completed, and he was kind enough to reply and make some comments (letter dated 18 August 1989). My explanation as to why the hook was written as a novel, he described as ‘exactly right’, as was my point that the philosophical argument in ZAMM ‘continues the philosophy of William James’.

Nevertheless, for reasons explained in Li/a. Pirsig has now come to believe that Pragmatism is incomplete, and that the Metaphysics of Quality is its completion. As he recognizes, ironically, according to the argument I have made in my essay. this Metaphysical enterprise ‘will strike [me] as an enormous “nod”’. Well, perhaps.

Clearly, Pirsig’s views have evolved over the years since ZAMM. I do not yet feel ready to make a firm decision as to whether or not this evolution constitutes progress or merely change. I still maintain that pragmatism undercuts the goal of metaphysics: i.e. to establish objective and eternal Truth rather than that kind of provisional and temporary ‘truth’ which it is best to believe for a given purpose.

On the other hand, it may be the case that when we act, we always (implicitly) act on the basis of a metaphysical system. This system may never be grounded in God-like certainty, but may nevertheless be unshakable without destruction of the individual: a ‘final vocabulary’ as Rorty has called it.

Notwithstanding. the kind of optimistic, wholesome liberal pragmatism which is expounded —with almost complete success in ZAMM looks to me like one of the best ‘philosophies of life’ I have so far come across. It will take a lot to make me drop it.

The neccessity of revelation as a basis for (unavoidable) faith

*

Excerpted from Nihilism by Eugene Rose (later Father Seraphim Rose)

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/nihilism.html

*

"We have discussed, in an earlier chapter, the universality of faith, seeing it as underlying all human activity and knowledge; and we have seen that faith, if it is not to fall prey to subjective delusions, must be rooted in truth.

"It is therefore a legitimate, and indeed unavoidable question whether the first principles of the scientific faith--for example, the coherence and uniformity of nature, the transsubjectivity of human knowledge, the adequacy of reason to draw conclusions from observation--are founded in absolute truth; if they are not, they can be no more than unverifiable probabilities.

"The "pragmatic" position taken by many scientists and humanists who cannot be troubled to think about ultimate things--the position that these principles are no more than experimental hypotheses which collective experience finds reliable--is surely unsatisfactory; it may offer a psychological explanation of the faith these principles inspire, but since it does not establish the foundation of that faith in truth, it leaves the whole scientific edifice on shifting sands and provides no sure defense against the irrational winds that periodically attack it.

*

"In actual fact, however,--whether it be from simple naivete or from a deeper insight which they cannot justify by argument-most scientists and humanists undoubtedly believe that their faith has something to do with the truth of things. Whether this belief is justified or not is, of course, another question; it is a metaphysical question, and one thing that is certain is that it is not justified by the rather primitive metaphysics of most scientists.

"Every man, as we have seen, lives by faith; likewise every man--something less obvious but no less certain--is a metaphysician. The claim to any knowledge whatever--and no living man can refrain from this claim--implies a theory and standard of knowledge, and a notion of what is ultimately knowable and true. This ultimate truth, whether it be conceived as the Christian God or simply as the ultimate coherence of things, is a metaphysical first principle, an absolute truth.

"But with the acknowledgement, logically unavoidable, of such a principle, the theory of the "relativity of truth" collapses, it itself being revealed as a self-contradictory absolute.

*

"The proclamation of the "relativity of truth" is, thus, what might be called a "negative metaphysics"--but a metaphysics all the same. (...)

"The "pragmatist" and the "agnostic" may be quite sincere and well-meaning; but they only deceive themselves--and others--if they continue to use the word "truth" to describe what they are seeking. Their existence, in fact, is testimony to the fact that the search for truth which has so long animated European man has come to an end.

"Four centuries and more of modern thought have been, from one point of view, an experiment in the possibilities of knowledge open to man, assuming that there is no Revealed Truth.

"The conclusion (...) of this experiment is an absolute negation: if there is no Revealed Truth, there is no truth at all; the search for truth outside of Revelation has come to a dead end.

*

"The scientist admits this by restricting himself to the narrowest of specialties, content if he sees a certain coherence in a limited aggregate of facts, without troubling himself over the existence of any truth, large or small; the multitudes demonstrate it by looking to the scientist, not for truth, but for the technological applications of a knowledge which has no more than a practical value, and by looking to other, irrational sources for the ultimate values men once expected to find in truth. (...)

"Logic, thus, can take us this far: denial or doubt of absolute truth leads (if one is consistent and honest) to the abyss of solipsism and irrationalism; the only position that involves no logical contradictions is the affirmation of an absolute truth which underlies and secures all lesser truths; and this absolute truth can be attained by no relative, human means.

"At this point logic fails us, and we must enter an entirely different universe of discourse if we are to proceed. It is one thing to state that there is no logical barrier to the affirmation of absolute truth; it is quite another actually to affirm it. Such an affirmation can be based upon only one source; the question of truth must come in the end to the question of Revelation.

*

"The critical mind hesitates at this point. Must we seek from without what we cannot attain by our own unaided power? It is a blow to pride--most of all to that pride which passes today for scientific "humility" that "sits down before fact as a little child" and yet refuses to acknowledge any arbiter of fact save the proud human reason. It is, however, a particular revelation--Divine Revelation, the Christian Revelation--that so repels the rationalist; other revelations he does not gainsay.

"Indeed, the man who does not accept, fully and consciously, a coherent doctrine of truth such as the Christian Revelation provides, is forced--if he has any pretensions to knowledge whatever--to seek such a doctrine elsewhere; this has been the path of modern philosophy, which has ended in obscurity and confusion because it would never squarely face the fact that it cannot supply for itself what can only be given from without.

"The blindness and confusion of modern philosophers with regard to first principles and the dimension of the absolute have been the direct consequence of their own primary assumption, the non-existence of Revelation; for this assumption in effect blinded men to the light of the sun and rendered obscure everything that had once been clear in its light. To one who gropes in this darkness there is but one path, if he will not be healed of his blindness; and that is to seek some light amidst the darkness here below.

"Many run to the flickering candle of "common sense" and conventional life and accept--because one must get along somehow--the current opinions of the social and intellectual circles to which they belong. But many others, finding this light too dim, flock to the magic lanterns that project beguiling, multicolored views that are, if nothing else, distracting, they become devotees of this or the other political or religious or artistic current that the "spirit of the age" has thrown into fashion.

"In fact no one lives but by the light of some revelation, be it a true or a false one, whether it serve to enlighten or obscure. He who will not live by the Christian Revelation must live by a false revelation; and all false revelations lead to the Abyss."

*

Comment:

This passage contains the key to this end-stage of modernity in which we now dwell: Four centuries and more of modern thought have been an experiment in the possibilities of knowledge open to man, assuming that there is no Revealed Truth. The conclusion of this experiment is an absolute negation: if there is no Revealed Truth, there is no truth at all; the search for truth outside of Revelation has come to a dead end.

The Nature of Wisdom - by William Arkle (1976)

Wisdom - Bill Arkle, August 1976

Wisdom has to start with our ordinary understanding of the term 'wisdom' which we know is a relative term, in the same way as we know the term 'beauty' is a relative term - relative to the attitude and the perception, as it were, within the eye of the beholder. And so wisdom also is relative to the perception and the eye of the beholder of actions and responses which are measured in terms of being more wise or less wise. But, behind the ordinary terminology of wisdom, we may suppose that there is a deep absolute form of wisdom which is in line with, and in tune with, the absolute level of our being and the absolute creative intention behind the manifestation of the universes at all their levels, from the most ethereal level, which we call the heavenly levels, down through the more and more dense levels to the most dense and concrete, which we call the earthly levels.

My understanding of this absolute form of wisdom depends on an ability I believe we have to resonate with the deep heart of our being into the deep heart of the Creator's being and feel, with that very deep sense of in-feeling, how the Creator felt towards creation before it began. In other words one can learn to feel what it was that the Creator was longing for, aspiring to, or simply desiring, from the great work and the great effort that he has engaged in in what is known to us as creation. Now, if we can feel with all our deepest understanding, our deepest intelligence and our deepest perception, what it was that the Creator looked for, above all else, in creation, then, and only then, shall we be close to the absolute point of wisdom which I believe is in the absolute point of deepest desire in the heart of the Creator's being.

As I myself attempt to do this, I come away with the understanding that the greatest longing that was in the Creator's heart before creation, and which brought about creation and brought into existence the individual beings, who each of us is in the Creator's eyes and to one another, was the desire to have real individual friends, in the deepest possible meaning of that word. Friends to share his understanding, his joy and his wisdom within the context of real friendship, which creates a vital relationship between each friend and the other friend, from which ever-renewing possibilities and responses can grow. My feeling is that the Creator first of all wished to bring into existence real and individual children, whose nature was based on a part of his own divine nature, but the characteristics of which were to be developed by each of those individual children as they grew up in the universes, or the universities, of his creation. They would develop in the nature of their own individual spirits, so that each of those children would become a unique individual child and then, hopefully, would become more than a child - would wish to grow into a mature condition which was not as a child to the Creator, but was as an individual being to the Creator. Thus all these beings could each have creative relationships of friendship and gladness with one another and with the Creator. Not with the Creator as a special 'God' individual, who was not approachable as other friends are approachable, but He himself wanted to be able to befriend us and have a creative friendship with us as we befriend one another and have a creative friendship with one another.

In the heart of the Creator's being we find all manner of wonderful things; but we find, above all, great love, great affection, great beauty, great sweetness, great gentleness and great strength. We find all the great qualities, such as courage and devotion, which to us become deeply valuable properties of our most valuable relationship. Now, the nature of wisdom as we will try to define it, is something other than the nature of love.


We can understand that the Creator's nature is, as it were, all love, but wisdom is the application of that love to the purposeful aspiration or desire which emanates from that love which, in the case we are talking about, was to bring into existence real individual children who have unique characteristics of their own and who were truly separate and autonomous beings. These would learn to live and grow amongst one another according to the specieshood of the divine nature, but within that specieshood, would develop the ability to express their own unique characteristics and express the initiative and spiritedness which emanates from any healthy spiritual being. Thus they would be able, as they gained more strength, to stand apart and upon their own feet, in a metaphorical sense, in order that each of these individuals could be a unique polarity to which other individuals could relate, and between which living polarities, new, ever growing, vortices of creative potentiality would develop.

Now wisdom, as I would understand it, is the appreciation of the value that comes out of the effort, and the means to bring about this great desire, as the means become available in terms of this created universe at all its levels. We understand that, after the universe was created and prepared, the spirits, the particles of the Creator's being, which were individual units of his own being nature, were sown into this universe as pupils are placed in a university. In it they work from the lowest level of the university up to the highest level of the university and, eventually, learn to appreciate the nature and value of the university as a whole, from the highest level to the lowest level. Wisdom begins by understanding that these potential children cannot become real, in any sense of that word, if they are prestructured or pre-programmed in such a way that their individuality and their sense of selfhood cannot be properly developed and appreciated by them.

If the Creator in any way subverts the processes which maintain the individual autonomy of each of these children as they grow and mature, then the Creator is allowing the desire and longing to slip away from the possibility that the universe contains for the bringing about of that great longing. So, from the beginning, the Creator had to work with wisdom to create processes which would allow for the potentiality of each of these Divine particles, who were individual children in a potential condition, gradually to become aware of the structure of values and relationships that it was living in with regard to nature and to other individual beings. And this had to be brought about in such a way that at no time was the individual overawed or over-dominated by the too great nearness or presence of the Creator's own personality. For, if that occurred, then the dominance of the Creator's personality would stamp itself completely upon the individuality of the individual child and prevent that individuality flourishing in its fullness; which it must do if it is to carry any real value as a real child in its own right.

So we can understand that, from the beginning, a great wisdom was needed which understood that, although the Creator was longing that each of his children should understand the value of, and the nature of, each of the Divine qualities, these children could not have an objective understanding of divine qualities if they were not able to experience them in a condition which would allow for the opposites of those qualities to be experienced at the same time. Thus to enter into the judgement of the value of the qualities which each of them must learn to apply for themselves. It would have been very beautiful and very happy for us all to have been born into a perfect and heavenly environment, perhaps close to the person and, shall we call it, the home of our Divine Creator, but this would not have produced in us the qualities which the Creator's heart most longed for; which was a longing for the quality of unique individuality which each of us longs for in a friend.

A friend is one who can stand apart from us in strength and values us in freedom as we would value them in strength and freedom. We value our friends not so much in terms of their cleverness or their special abilities, but for their profound uniqueness of characteristics which they exhibit towards us as completely separate autonomous individuals.

Now wisdom has to learn to discriminate between the lower forms of love and affection and the higher forms of love and affection. The lower forms of love are not true forms of love at all, but are the desire and the need for one another to supply the gratifications which are necessary to the outer forms of our being nature and the appetites which go along with the outer forms of our being nature. The deeper and real forms of love and affection are not based on the desire to use individuals as a source of gratification of needs, but rather we are very deeply glad about the existence of the other individual in an entirely undemanding way. The basis of the friendship is nothing other than the deep and instinctive recognition of the divine individuality in that other being, and all that divine individuality implies in terms of potentiality.

So real friendship and real love is a very creative, purposeful, ongoing situation, which desires that new things, new possibilities, new responses, should forever arise from that friendship. Wisdom is that knowledge which recognises the nature of true loving relationships and true friendships, and recognises the way that the individual children of God have to be brought in a very slow and gradual state to a condition of self awareness, through which their individuality will receive the greatest encouragement to grow and develop without being overshadowed and overruled by the potency of the Creator's own being and characteristics.

So we can see that wisdom is that understanding which realises the value of the means, and every moment that those means are striving to achieve the end, which was the initial desire for divine children and divine friends to share divine life with. We are saying that wisdom is that understanding which realises that you can only have a deep friendship with an individual who has a deep set of experiences and characteristics; who has deep awareness, which is supported by strength and integrity, of the objective significance of each of the divine qualities which are exhibited in the university, the universe, and which come to us through the activities that each of us play out for the other in the processes or life.

Wisdom will therefore be at great pains to draw out the potentialities and the benefits from the rich mixture of spontaneous responses that all of the individual children of God produce for one another. So far as those responses are unique and individual, then so far do they carry the possibility of producing some spontaneous mixture which did not exist before, and, upon which, other spontaneous mixtures and responses may be built, to produce new possibilities for new understandings and new growth, not only in creation but in terms of eternal purpose and eternal value.

So we can see then that wisdom is that ability in us that can stand back and, through its knowledge that you can only have a thin relationship with a thin personality, can appreciate the thickening of the characteristics of individuality which occur in a very rich and spontaneous and uninhibited form of existence, which is full of initiative and spontaneity. This is the spontaneity which makes mistakes and realises, through its own sense of responsibility, the fact that it has made mistakes, and, through its own sense of responsibility, wishes to put those mistakes right again and correct them. Now this sort of richness can only come to those individual children in a level of the university in which mistakes can occur. My own feeling is that these mistakes can only occur at the lower end of the university, and, as our nature gravitates to a more and more ethereal level of experience in the university, so does the possibility of creative spontaneity and endeavour become less and less.

Whereas, at the higher levels, the enjoyment and adoration of the beautiful divine qualities, that are not only in the Creator's being but present as potentialities in our own being, absorb our whole attention, the desire to use our initiative and the desire to enter into creative and exploratory forms of life, disappear. We can understand that if our educational processes at the lower end of the university were perfect as they are in the higher and more heavenly level of the university, then the initiative to make mistakes and correct them again may be lacking. We would be unable to experience the opposite of all the values of the divine nature, such as love being experienced against the quality of hatred, and kindness being experienced against the quality of cruelty, and weakness being experienced against the quality of strength, and beauty being experienced against the quality of ugliness.

Now this ability for us not only to see and feel and experience the qualities which we come to value most deeply in terms of their opposites, but our ability to get into situations, through the use of our own initiative, which have to be corrected and thoroughly understood before we become clear of those situations again, does not occur at any other level than that of the most concrete and separate forms of creation, which the physical level of creation represents. It represents the most crystallised form of the Creator's spirit in action and therefore, at this level as in no other, are we able to define the specific significance of all the divine potential qualities which exist in our nature and in the Creator's nature; through perceiving them and understanding them, being involved with them, having to use them, having to use them correctly, and correct them when we use them incorrectly.

This sort of experience produces true wisdom and true understanding, and produces in us a deep awareness of the significance of the Creator's great work on our behalf. This attitude towards the significance of wisdom helps us to understand why it was, in the allegorical sense, that the Creator allowed us to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and yet, at the same time, warned us that it would be a thing which would cause us pain. The Creator knew that in order to fulfil the great longing in his heart to produce craggy, leathery, strong individuals, who had deep characteristics of individuality in them, we would have to enter into a level of experimental living in which mistakes occurred and which pain would be felt as a result of those mistakes occurring. As the source of love and affection, the Creator himself could not force us into that situation; he could not place us in that place in which pain must come to us. But on the other hand, he could Go straight to large imagetake us close to the door which led into this field of experiment and pain, and hopefully wait for our initiative to become strong enough to take us through that door. So that we, from our initiative, entered into the realm of pain and suffering through the spiritedness of our spirit and the desire to know all things; to register the true value of ourselves in a deep sense and to register a sense, which is very strong in us, of being the arbiter of our own actions and the carrier of responsibility for those actions.

In other words, it was the deep, instinctive sense of the godlike creative experimental and responsible individuality which led us through that door into the world of the knowledge of good and evil, and caused us to be engaged with good and evil in a way which we were not engaged with them before. Because, before we entered that door and experimented unwisely with the forces of our own being, we were not engaged with the processes and the qualities of evil, we were only engaged with the processes and the qualities of good.

Although we may have chosen to remain on the good side of that door and not pass through it, if we had done so we would have lost the potentiality of growth and development which can only come to us through the deep, tragic, heroic and painful experience which comes to us through the misuse of our godlike abilities, but which also registers in us the godlike remorse and the godlike desire to correct the mistakes we make as we make them.

So that great wisdom, whereas it will not force people into situations which it knows are incorrect and painful, at the same time will learn to wait for the individual to work out the results of such wrong engagement in life. Because wisdom knows that it is only through the wrong engagement in life that some greater value than obedient perfection can arise, which is not an ability to be in perfect harmony with all the beautiful qualities of the divine nature, but is, in fact, the ability to know on its own account, to know for itself, to know objectively within its own experience, why the divine values are divinely valuable, and what the values are which detract from and destroy those divine values.

From that type of knowledge arises a great strength and a great wisdom and a great love, which cannot arise if that spirit has not passed through the gate into the world of knowledge of good and evil. It is only on the other side of that gate that great strength will be required to recover from mistakes, and it's only on the other side of that gate that great mistakes will be made and great understanding developed in order to recover from those mistakes.

So we can see that great wisdom is not engaged in interfering with the processes of life in order to tidy them up, in order to do away with disharmony, in order to do away with the crosscurrents of life which stir the pot of experience and produce a rich soup of opposing currents and values and desires and attitudes. Yet, at the same time, wisdom is certainly not indifferent to suffering, and it is not indifferent to the fact that continually the experiences produce a stumbling and a faltering, and mankind has to be rescued and brought back to a reasonable level of buoyancy again from which further movements and further experiments can be made.

In a sense, although wisdom does not interfere, wisdom is always on the lookout for a situation which has gone too far, and become so negative that nothing of value can arise from the situation anymore. Then wisdom will try and suggest to an individual who is stuck in such a situation that there is a way out which that individual hasn't yet seen.

Thus, the way out will produce a form of recovery which will lead to the individual realising why he has fallen, why he has got stuck in a situation which has stopped life happening to that individual, stopped experience growing and developing, stopped understanding and awareness growing in the individual.

Wisdom, while it will stand back and allow people and individuals to make mistakes, will equally engage in rescuing people from mistakes and from over-stressed situations, from which those individuals cannot rescue themselves. We can see that wisdom is a very deep awareness which is continually balancing out all the processes engaged in building deeper and deeper characteristics into the individuality which exists in each of the divine children of the Creator.

Wisdom is encouraging each of those divine children to grow into a level beyond childhood, which is more mature than childhood is, which is a level of growth in which divine friendship can occur between the individuals and their Creator.

Wisdom will forever be observing the balance occurring in experience, particularly at a physical level, in order that this absolute value can be extracted and made use of in every situation. So that wisdom is not so much engaged in easing the burden of life, as it is engaged in the harvesting of the fruits of the burdens of life. Wisdom develops an ability to see that the harvest in life is not at the level of ease, happiness, bliss and joy, but exists in a level of beingness in our nature which is at a very deep level of strength and integrity and selfhood which, while it is being autonomous and highly individual, is also becoming aware of its unity and loving relationship with all other forms of selfhood.

So we are saying that the deep wisdom which exists in the Creator's nature, and which we can learn to understand, is a deep wisdom which values not only the individual who is a friend to each other individual, but values the depth of character and strength and integrity, the leathery, craggy, strong, warrior-like toughness and individual responsiveness that each individual can develop in their own right. And wisdom recognises that individuality which doesn't have strength and doesn't have deep experience, is less valuable.

Although all the divine qualities of heaven are something we must have an experience of, and a taste of, wisdom recognises that, if these qualities are not understood arid lived at this outermost physical level of the universe, they are not fully appreciated in terms of their opposites, and therefore do not produce the deep understanding, the objective valuation, and the deep strength which can support them and which is needed in any true individual.

Wisdom recognises that there are three things that we need to achieve. First of all our unique separate beingness, then the objective understanding of values, which produces the ability to understand the real quality and value of all things, and then the strength and integrity which is necessary to support the being and the understanding; and it is on earth that these experiences have been made available for us, to a degree which they may not be available for us in any other form of experience. That is why there is a wisdom that is able to grow from the earth which is so valuable.


The essay Wisdom, published in The Great Gift, by William Arkle - 1977

Where does evil come from? A simple answer is needed

"Where does evil come from" is a simple question, and an obvious question! 

Christians ought to be able to answer the question, in the same simple and obvious terms it is stated - without recourse to vast, complex and soaring abstractions - and would-be-profound discourse on the nature of 'infinities'! 

And answered without recourse to statements that "Men cannot know", such things - or that they are divine-mysteries... 

Why? Because the question is obvious, reasonable, real, serious; and therefore will (deservedly!) block conversion unless answerable in the same terms it has been asked.  

The basis of the question is that there are obviously evils in this world; and Christians also know that God - the creator of this world - is Good: So where do these evils comes from?

The proper answer - the answer demanded and deserved - should be short, concrete and to the point; or else it is not a real answer 

...and will be recognized by most people as not a real answer. 

If God is supposed to have created everything except Himself (i.e. if God is an Omni-God) and is also supposed be wholly Good (i.e. if the real Christian God was also the Omni-God) - then where does evil come from? 

It's a valid question. And there is no coherent answer: If God is Omni then he cannot be wholly Good, and if wholly Good then he cannot be Omni. 

A Christian God and Omni-qualities are incompatible. 

And this incompatibility has always been obvious to most people in the world; including, I would guess, many Christians.

One attempt at arguing the compatibility of Omni-God and Christianity is to insist that evil and Good are actually, ultimately, the same and indistinguishable aspects of God's will - that both apparent-Good and apparent-evil come from God; and it is only our erring, limited human minds who cannot see this oneness. 

Indeed, taken one at a time - any proposed evil can be reframed as potentially an aspect of Good - in some larger sense.

However, even though individual instances of putative evil can be put-in-doubt, to insist on the oneness, inseparability of Good and evil-as-such is Not to be a Christian. If there is no evil, no 'sin' - if all is an equal expression of oneness - then there is no point to Christianity. 

So that kind of argument does not work. 

If evil is really-real, and God is really Omni - then evil must come from God, evil must be located-in God, ultimately. 

The usual Omni-God answer is that God gave some creatures - including Men - agency, or free will; so that Men can choose to oppose God and creation. 

Okay - but where does that motivation to oppose God and creation come from? 

If every Man was wholly-made by God (as the Omni-God concept insists); then - even if agency-within-omnipotence was granted - where does the motivation to evil come-from? It has to come from God, ultimately, because (with an Omni-God) there is nowhere else for motivation to come-from. 

In more general terms, all evil motivations, indeed the whole possibility-of-evil, would need to be baked-into the created world by the Omni-God - because the Omni-God ultimately created every-thing. 

Evil is best understand as opposition to God and to God's creation... So how can there be opposition to God and creation from some being who is created by God?  

One answer is to regard evil as a kind of insanity: something that doesn't make sense. 

For instance, Satan is described in terms of knowing that he was created-by God, but (for some crazy reason!) hating and resenting this fact; and therefore hating himself - along with the whole of creation.

Okay - but where did such insanity originate - if not the Omni-God Himself? 

How was it possible that one of God's creatures could develop this kind of pathology of insane self-hatred, resentment - pride? The only ultimate answer is that God-made-him-that-way - because, with Omni-God, that is eventually the answer to all questions...

For Omni-Godites; God made Satan that way - for reasons we cannot comprehend, but which God comprehends - therefore, the duty of all good Christians is submission, obedience to God's will... 

...But wait a minute! Uncomprehending submission to God's incomprehensible will... That sounds very much like another religion; but it is not Christianity - it is not the kind of thing that Christ would teach in the Gospels, and of course there is no essential role for agency. 

And this not Christianity; because this argument means that Christians are regarded as incapable of personally recognizing and rejecting evil...

The Omni-God answer to any version of the question: "Where does evil come from?" can only either be God - or else, the denial that evil really is evil.

And either or both of these lead either to a God beyond human discernment, a God to whom we must submit without understanding; or else the denial that evil really is different-from Good.  

Both of which are incompatible with Christianity. 

The incompatibility of the Omni-God with Christianity is indeed very easy to see and impossible to deny without redefining Christianity; or else moving to a level of uncomprehended-abstraction piled-upon uncomprehended-abstraction that makes coherent thinking impossible - and seems intended to stun all opposition into silence!

And this is why all honest defenses of a Christian Omni-God always end-up with putting 'incomprehensible mystery' at the very heart of the Christian religion - and the Christian is required simply to accept that. 

Which is hardly a satisfactory state of affairs. Especially not for someone considering conversion to Christianity, or to a Christian who wants a proper answer to an urgent question. 

So if the question is "where does evil come from?" - then what would I personally regard as an answer that is short, concrete and to the point - and true?

My answer is that:

God the creator is indeed wholly Good, however God creates using already-existing Beings - such as Men. It is these already-existing Beings that are the source of evil.

In other words, God's creation includes evil because it is made from beings that were already-evil; in different ways, and to different degrees. 

Or, God is wholly Good, but Men are - and always have been - partly evil. 

Therefore; evil really is evil; and God the creator really is Good - but the Christian God is Not an Omni-God. 

Now - of course! - such an answer raises further questions; and invites expansion. 

So much for this mortal earth; but can we not look-forward to inhabiting a wholly-Good world? What about Heaven the wholly-Good place, for example? 

How can Heaven be really-real and wholly Good - when the beings in God's creation contain evil?

It's another question; and it needs another answer. 

A short answer to this question is: that is where Jesus Christ comes in. 

This world contains evil because men brought evil into it; but for those who follow Jesus Christ, the next world can be wholly Good...

Because after death, and through resurrection, Men can choose to leave all evil behind and take-forward into Heaven only that which is Good.  

Note: Whether or not you regard my short, simple and to-the-point answers as sufficiently correct (given that all possible answers are bound to be incomplete and biased, and especially short answers!) - I hope they at least illustrate the kind-of-answer that is required to this question. And that the above suggested answers may demonstrate, by contrast, the kind-of-answer that is not suitable to the question. 

Further note: Those seriously interested in agency, which itself is the other side of the coin of evil - and in the Omni-God (aka Supergod) in relation to Christianity - should read William James Tychonievich's superb essay, published today.