“Here’s another in that series: religious beliefs vindicated by being redefined to mean something different from what people used to think they meant. We’ve had religion not being about beliefs so much as about practices;  . . .”

Well, actually, not quite.   Nothing has been redefined, and most people did not previously think the way asserted here.  Unless, of course, by “people” Norm means merely, “educated Westerners since the Enlightenment”.   But that group constitutes a small (and often blinkered) minority of the world’s human population.  For  most of the world’s people,  for most of human history, religion has indeed been mostly about practices and not about beliefs.   I am thinking of Taoism, Buddhism (particularly Zen), large parts of Hinduism, and the mystical strands of Judaism (eg, the Kabbala), of Christianity (eg, the Name-Worshipping of Russian Orthodox believers) , and of Islam (eg, Sufism).   In the tradition of The People of The Book (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), one hears and accepts The Good News and then engages in religious actions such as worship, prayer, and meditation.  In the Eastern tradition, by contrast, it is the repeated doing of certain religious actions (Yoga, Zen sesshin) which may lead to Enlightenment, not the  other way around.   I have argued this before, for example here and here.

That beliefs should or do always precede actions is a peculiarly western and peculiarly modern notion, part of the prevailing paradigm of post-Reformation Western thought.    That this fact is hard for many modern westerners to grasp is evidence of the strength of the prevailing paradigm on our thought.  However, the strength of a paradigm on the mind’s of our best and brightest is not itself evidence of the paradigm’s necessity, nor its uniqueness, nor its truth, nor even its comparative usefulness.

The meme that Cage was more of a music philosopher than a composer has become commonplace, most of all, it seems, among people who don’t like his music and are in need of a way to justify his celebrity.  Cage was not a philosopher in any sense that the philosophy profession would recognize, but he was very much a composer who drew inspiration for his music from philosophical ideas.  The list of artists, writers, and thinkers he names in justification of his musical trajectory is a long one:  Meister Eckhart, Huang-Po, Kwang-Tse, Erik Satie, Henry David Thoreau, Gertrude Stein, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage Sr., Marcel Duchamp, Sri Ramakrishna, Daisetz Sukuki, Joseph Campbell, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Alan Watts, Antonin Artaud, Robert Rauschenberg, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, Norman O. Brown, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Gita Sarabhai, and Christian Wolff, among others.”

I was reminded of James Pritchett’s intention, when writing his book on Cage’s music, as much as possible to read everything that John Cage had himself read, and in the order he had done so.

References:

Kyle Gann [2010]: No Such Thing as Silence.  John Cage’s 4′ 33”.  New Haven, CT, USA:  Yale University Press. 

James Pritchett [1993]:  The Music of John Cage.  Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press.

Technorati Tags: John Cage, Kyle Gann, James Pritchett

The New York Times has an obit here and Quantum Tantra a tribute here.

Reference:

George Leonard [1985]: On getting a black belt at age fifty-two. pp. 78-98 in:  Richard Strozzi Heckler (Editor) [1985]: Aikido and the New Warriors.  Berkeley, CA, USA:  North Atlantic Books.   This volume also contains a reprint of Leonard’s fine account of Heckler’s aikido black belt examination, “This isn’t Richard” (pp. 198-205).

Technorati Tags: George Leonard, Richard Strozzi Heckler, aikido

Joseph’s Amazement

When Christ, by growth, disclosed his descent
Into the pure receipt of Mary’s breast
Poor Joseph, stranger yet to God’s intent,
With doubts of jealous thoughts was sore oppressed 
And, wrought with diverse fits of fear and love,
He neither can her free nor faulty prove.

Now sense, the wakeful spy of jealous mind,
By strong conjectures deemeth her defiled,
But love, in doom of things best loved blind,
Thinks rather sense deceived than her with child
Yet proofs so pregnant were that no pretence
Could cloak a thing so dear and plain to sense.

Then Joseph, daunted with a deadly wound,
Let loose the reins to undeserved grief.
His heart did throb, his eyes in tears were drowned,
His life a loss, death seemed his best relief.
The pleasing relish of his former love
In gallish thoughts to bitter taste doth prove.

One foot he often setteth forth of door
But t’other’s loath uncertain ways to tread.
He takes his fardel for his needful store,
He casts his Inn where first he means to bed.
But still ere he can frame his feet to go,
Love winneth time till all conclude in no.

Sometime, grief adding force, he doth depart.
He will, against his will, keep on his pace.
But straight remorse so racks his ruing heart,
That hasting thoughts yield to a pausing space;
Then mighty reasons press him to remain.
She whom he flies doth win him home again.

But when his thought, by sight of his abode,
Presents the sign of mis-esteemed shame,
Repenting every step that back he trod,
Tears drown the guides; the tongue, the feet doth blame.
Thus warring with himself a field he fights,
Where every wound upon the giver lights.

“And was my love,” quoth he, “so lightly prized?
Or was our sacred league so soon forgot?
Could vows be void, could virtues be despised?
Could such a spouse be stained with such a spot?”
O wretched Joseph that hast lived so long,
Of faithful love to reap so grievous wrong.

Could such a worm breed in so sweet a wood?
Could in so chaste demeanour lurk untruth?
Could vice lie hid where virtue’s image stood?
Where hoary sageness graced tender youth?
Where can affiance rest to rest secure?
In virtue’s fairest seat faith is not sure.

All proofs did promise hope, a pledge of grace,
Whose good might have repaid the deepest ill.
Sweet signs of purest thoughts in saintly face
Assured the eye of her unstained will.
Yet in this seeming lustre seem to lie
Such crimes for which the law condemns to die.

But Joseph’s word shall never work her woe:
“I wish her leave to live, not doom to die.
Though fortune mine, yet am I not her foe,
She to herself less loving is than I.
The most I will, the lest I can, is this,
Sith none may salve, to shun that is amiss.

Exile my home, the wilds shall be my walk,
Complaints my joy, my music mourning lays,
With pensive griefs in silence will I talk;
Sad thoughts shall be my guides in sorrow’s ways.
This course best suits the care of cureless mind,
That seeks to lose what most it joyed to find.

Like stocked tree whose branches all do fade,
Whose leaves do fall, and perished fruit decay,
Like herb that grows in cold and barren shade,
Where darkness drives all quick’ning heat away,
So must I die, cut from my root of joy,
And thrown in darkest shades of deep annoy.

But who can fly from that his heart doth feel?
What change of place can change implanted pain?
Removing moves no hardness from the steel.
Sick hearts that shift no fits, shift rooms in vain.
Where thought can see, what helps the closed eye?
Where heart pursues, what gains the foot to fly?

Yet still I tread a maze of doubtful end.
I go, I come, she draws, she drives away,
She wounds, she heals, she doth both mar and mend,
She makes me seek and shun, depart and stay.
She is a friend to love, a foe to loathe,
And in suspense I hang between them both.”

Notes and Reference:

A fardel is a package.  Affiance is a binding marriage pledge.  I have modernized the spelling and added punctuation.   Previous poems by Robert Southwell are here and here.

Robert Southwell [2007]: Collected Poems. Edited by Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney. Manchester, UK: Fyfield Books, pp. 19-21.

Joseph’s Amazement

When Christ, by growth, disclosed his descent
Into the pure receipt of Mary’s breast
Poor Joseph, stranger yet to God’s intent,
With doubts of jealous thoughts was sore oppressed 
And, wrought with diverse fits of fear and love,
He neither can her free nor faulty prove.

Now sense, the wakeful spy of jealous mind,
By strong conjectures deemeth her defiled,
But love, in doom of things best loved blind,
Thinks rather sense deceived than her with child
Yet proofs so pregnant were that no pretence
Could cloak a thing so dear and plain to sense.

Then Joseph, daunted with a deadly wound,
Let loose the reins to undeserved grief.
His heart did throb, his eyes in tears were drowned,
His life a loss, death seemed his best relief.
The pleasing relish of his former love
In gallish thoughts to bitter taste doth prove.

One foot he often setteth forth of door
But t’other’s loath uncertain ways to tread.
He takes his fardel for his needful store,
He casts his Inn where first he means to bed.
But still ere he can frame his feet to go,
Love winneth time till all conclude in no.

Sometime, grief adding force, he doth depart.
He will, against his will, keep on his pace.
But straight remorse so racks his ruing heart,
That hasting thoughts yield to a pausing space;
Then mighty reasons press him to remain.
She whom he flies doth win him home again.

But when his thought, by sight of his abode,
Presents the sign of mis-esteemed shame,
Repenting every step that back he trod,
Tears drown the guides; the tongue, the feet doth blame.
Thus warring with himself a field he fights,
Where every wound upon the giver lights.

“And was my love,” quoth he, “so lightly prized?
Or was our sacred league so soon forgot?
Could vows be void, could virtues be despised?
Could such a spouse be stained with such a spot?”
O wretched Joseph that hast lived so long,
Of faithful love to reap so grievous wrong.

Could such a worm breed in so sweet a wood?
Could in so chaste demeanour lurk untruth?
Could vice lie hid where virtue’s image stood?
Where hoary sageness graced tender youth?
Where can affiance rest to rest secure?
In virtue’s fairest seat faith is not sure.

All proofs did promise hope, a pledge of grace,
Whose good might have repaid the deepest ill.
Sweet signs of purest thoughts in saintly face
Assured the eye of her unstained will.
Yet in this seeming lustre seem to lie
Such crimes for which the law condemns to die.

But Joseph’s word shall never work her woe:
“I wish her leave to live, not doom to die.
Though fortune mine, yet am I not her foe,
She to herself less loving is than I.
The most I will, the lest I can, is this,
Sith none may salve, to shun that is amiss.

Exile my home, the wilds shall be my walk,
Complaints my joy, my music mourning lays,
With pensive griefs in silence will I talk;
Sad thoughts shall be my guides in sorrow’s ways.
This course best suits the care of cureless mind,
That seeks to lose what most it joyed to find.

Like stocked tree whose branches all do fade,
Whose leaves do fall, and perished fruit decay,
Like herb that grows in cold and barren shade,
Where darkness drives all quick’ning heat away,
So must I die, cut from my root of joy,
And thrown in darkest shades of deep annoy.

But who can fly from that his heart doth feel?
What change of place can change implanted pain?
Removing moves no hardness from the steel.
Sick hearts that shift no fits, shift rooms in vain.
Where thought can see, what helps the closed eye?
Where heart pursues, what gains the foot to fly?

Yet still I tread a maze of doubtful end.
I go, I come, she draws, she drives away,
She wounds, she heals, she doth both mar and mend,
She makes me seek and shun, depart and stay.
She is a friend to love, a foe to loathe,
And in suspense I hang between them both.”

Notes and Reference:

A fardel is a package.  Affiance is a binding marriage pledge.  I have modernized the spelling and added punctuation.   Previous poems by Robert Southwell are here and here.

Robert Southwell [2007]: Collected Poems. Edited by Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney. Manchester, UK: Fyfield Books, pp. 19-21.

In her book Yuendumu Everyday, Yashmine Musharbash refers to the Aboriginal notion that knowledge is acquired through ”doing” rather than questions.”

Reference:

Yasmine Musharbash [2009]: Yuendumu Everyday: Contemporary Life in Remote Aboriginal Australia.  Aboriginal Studies Press.

Of course it’s true that a religious community is not a debating society, and a religious service, with its prayers and hymns and rituals, is not an academic seminar whose business is to assess and defend theories. But the key phrase in the passage from Cornwell is “only partly”. The asserting of beliefs may not be the main preoccupation of religious activities, but it is still essential. Without the beliefs, the practices make no sense. Prayer is meaningless without a belief of some kind, however vague, that there is someone, a person, who is being addressed. Hymns of praise and adoration are meaningless without some kind of belief in a deity who is worthy of adoration. And there is accordingly no evading the question of whether these beliefs are true.”

Norman is profoundly wrong here.  When he says, “Without the beliefs, the practices make no sense,” he means, “They make no sense to someone wedded to the idea that actions have to be informed by prior beliefs.“    Most prayers of most people may have the syntax (the external form) of supplications, but that is usually not why most people pray most of the time.  If that were so, then why would intelligent, rational people keep on praying in the face of the repeated failure of their supplications?    Only a literalist (and, my goodness, aren’t there are lot of those among the noveau atheists!) would imagine that the syntax of an utterance represents the full extent of its possible meanings or uses. Rather, most people who pray or chant or sing hymns or attend church do so in order to commune with what they consider to be (or might be) a non-material realm, the divine.  In particular, people can feel drawn to interactions with such a realm (in the form of prayers or meditation, or through the reading of scriptures, or by attendance at religious ceremonies, etc) for reasons or motivations or experiences that they themselves do not fully understand or that they cannot even put into words.    It is possible, but not becoming, to mock these motivations, as Norm does here.  But mockery, although historically the standard  approach of scientists faced with phenomena they can’t yet explain (from magnetism to meteors to new planets), does not make the underlying experiences any less real nor the evidence any less compelling for those who have had the experiences or felt the motivations.  

As I have said before (and many have said before me), belief can be what comes after one practices spiritual activities long enough, not necessarily what leads one to practice them.   I suppose it can be great shock to a professor of moral philosophy that intelligent people may act without first having a well-grounded belief to justify their actions, but that is what most of us have done, in most cultures, most of the time, for most of human history.  It is surely ironic that the new atheists attacking religious ideas and practices should be so firmly in the grasp of a meme – that beliefs necessarily precede and inform actions – whose origins are in the Confessing Protestant ideas of the Christian Reformation, and one which is historically and culturally an aberration, even within Christianity.

POSTSCRIPT (2009-11-14):  Norm has responded to this post, here, and Martin commented here.

But Milner’s book is replete with some wonderful insights, many of which express a Zen sensibility.     Herewith a sample: 

But if willed effort to create a “good’” picture or a “good’” person only, so far as I could see, led to something which had a counterfeit quality, surely this did not mean that one should never try to learn what a good picture or a good person was like?  It seemed rather than one must do two things.  One must certainly work at hammering out internally one’s ideal, know as far as possible what one wanted or liked. But then one must forget it, plunge into a kind of action in which the acting and the end were not separate”  [p. 92]

Also it now seemed possible to say more about where the learning of the rules did come in, in learning how to paint.  For the beginner, the chief obstacle emphasised is his lack of skill in managing the medium.  Thus he is often expected to spend a long time discovering and learning the laws of optics, finding out how certain arrangements of shapes and colours produce certain regular effects on the eye.   If one is going to be a professional painter probably this is all right.   But for the Sunday-painter I thought it was not at all all right, at least not for me; for one might [page-break] spend a lifetime of Sundays and get very little way, if one did not also how to become more used to taking the plunge, more able to throw the rules to the winds and forget the separateness of oneself and the object.   I thought of children’s drawings in this connection, how often with so little knowledge of proper methods of depicting visual experiences they can yet take the plunge and the results delight us.   Probably they can do this because the plunge itself is less of plunge to them, since they live so much of their  lives, through play, in a state where dream and external reality are fused; it is a familiar element for them, they are like birds and can live both on land and in the sky without complicated machinery to get there.” [pp. 92-93]

Thus the phrase “expression of’” suggested too much that the feeling to be expressed was there beforehand, rather than an experience developing as one made the drawing.” [p. 116]

Now another question had to be answered about the free drawings. For the fact that the ideas in them were obviously in part  determined by the circumstances of a Freudian analysis did not, I thought alter another fact; that was that they embodied a form of  knowing that traditional education of the academic kind largely ignores, and one that I myself was unaware of using - until I  began to study the drawings in detail.  But when I had done this there had been no doubt that many of the drawings did represent thinking of [page-break] some sort, reflections about the human situation, as well as the experiences with a medium.  So, the question arose, why had it not been possible to think out such ideas directly in words?  This raised a more general question of thinking in the private language of one’s own subjective images, as against thinking in the public language of words.  It also brought to the fore the problem of the academic and over-linguistic bias of traditional education.” [pp. 122-123]

Such ideas about what one might be trying to do in one’s painting pointed the way to settling certain very practical doubts I had had about the relation between painting and living.  For years I had had to decide each week-end, should I shut myself away and paint or should I just live?  It was perhaps less of a problem for the professional painter who could live in his spare time. But for the Sunday-painter it brought the need to balance up the various renunciations and gains. I had so often come away from a morning spent painting with a sense of futility, a sense of how much better it would have been to get on with something practical that really needed doing.  And I had often felt, when out painting, both exalted and yet guilty, as if I were evading something that the people round me, all busy with their daily lives, were facing, that their material was real life and mine was dreams.” [p. 135]

“There was another reason why it was now possible to paint. It was because there was one central fact that made it seem worthwhile going on, whatever the objective value of the pictures to other people. It was that I had discovered in painting a bit of experiences that made all other usual occupations unimportant by comparison.  It was the discovery that when painting something from nature there occurred, at least sometimes, a fusion into a never-before-known wholeness; not only were the object and oneself no longer felt to be separate, but neither were thought and sensation and feeling and action.  All one’s visual perceptions of colour, shape, texture, weight, as well as thought and memory, ideas about the object and action towards it, the movement of one’s hand together with the feeling of delight in the “thusness” of the thing, all seemed to fuse into a wholeness of being which was different from anything else that ever happened to me.  It was different because thought was not drowned in feeling, they were somehow all there together.  Moreover, when this state of concentration was really achieved one was no longer aware of oneself doing it, one no longer acted from a centre to an object as remote; in fact, something quite special happened to one’s sense of self.  And when the bit of painting was finished there was before one’s eyes a permanent record of the experience, giving a constant sense of immense surprise at how it had ever happened; it did not seem something that oneself had done at all, certainly not the ordinary everyday self and way of being.” [p. 142]

“The central certainty that this process [the investigation and writing of this book] does not work from purpose to deed, in the way that expedient activities do, is easy to put into words now, at the end, but was not there with effective conviction from the beginning . . . . There had been nothing in the beginning but vague uneasy feelings and an urge to follow certain trickles of curiosity wherever they might lead. All the same, I have left the introduction as it was originally written, partly because books  need introductions, partly because the fact it had seemed, retrospectively, that that was what I had set out to do from the beginning, was in itself an illustration of the later discovered truth that activity creates purpose.” [p. 145]

References:

Alfred Gell [1998]: Art and Agency:  An Anthropological Theory.  Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

Marion Milner (Joanna Field) [1950]: On Not Being Able to Paint. London, UK:  William Heinemann.  Second edition, 1957.

Alan Rusbridger [2002]: On not being able to play the piano. The Guardian, 2002-01-05.

Technorati Tags: Alan Rusbridger, Marion Milner