More on Friendship

Another Aristotle Quote on Friendship

My old friend replied to what I'd written:

I just don't know what to say. I appreciate what you said, but I could have said the same about you. I remember well our times together, and our long conversations. I can't think of anyone else that I talked with like that.

As to being smart, you, after all, were the Valedictorian. I ran second, maybe in part because of unwise choices I made at the time. You might remember that I was a little undisciplined. And unwise, which doesn't sound very smart to me.

I believe that anyone who read your description of us, and me, would admire you. You write so well, and that is no accident. You've worked hard for a long time to become a good writer.

I think of you a lot, though my work life has kept me from writing regularly. When I see that scary stuff on the news, I wish that you and Sun-Ae and the kids could come back.

Hopefully I'll be able to back off of business a little, after forty years in the wine business, and be better and checking in with you. In the meantime, please remember that I'm out here, and that I care about you, and our friendship. Please take care of yourself, and don't kick that bucket for a long time. And if I could ever be helpful in any way please call me.

As for unwise choices, I think we are all culpable there. What is youth, if not a time for foolishness? Anyway, we survived, and we wised up, so maybe our foolishness played a role in that process.

On Friendship

An Aristotle Quote on Friendship

I have been thinking quite a bit about friendship recently, not in the abstract philosophical sense, despite the Aristotle quote above, but in a concrete reflection on a particular friend, to whom I wrote the following email:

I've been thinking about friendship, lately, and I thought of something you said at the lunch during our celebration of the fortieth anniversary of our graduation, namely, that our friendship was unusual because we didn't have much in common. I had to think about that a bit, but you were right.

Except that we had one central thing in common: we were smart. Or you were. I just pretended to be.

Anyway, being smart (or passing as such in my case), we found that we could enjoy interesting conversations together, and I remember hours-long conversations on various things. We had opinions and expressed them.

We also worked together, hauling hay or doing other farm work, and otherwise helping each other, which once again gave us time to talk, and we took long walks on your folks' farm, which again gave time for talking.

Our friendship was therefore not so odd. More to the point is why we've stayed friends. I think that we've remained friends because you have the overriding virtue of loyalty. Added to that is your quality of helpfulness. When I think about your helpfulness, I realize that you were always willing to help.

You have many other good qualities, of course, many of which find usefulness in your work, and I admire you for them and for your success in your chosen field.

Anyway, that's about it, and I wanted to say it because I'd kept putting it off, kicking the can down the road, and I realized that if I didn't ever get around to telling you, I might end up kicking the bucket instead of the can, without having ever gotten around to telling you.

Thanks for being a loyal friend (and for being helpful) . . .

By the way, I'm not about to kick the bucket anytime soon - I just thought I should say some things about our friendship because one never knows . . .

Having crossed my sixtieth birthday this year - on May 14, 2017 - I find my thoughts turning to how much time remains, to which I don't know the answer, of course, except for knowing the truism that the time remaining will not be enough.

James J. O'Donnell: Augustine's curiositas as "concupiscentia oculorum"

James J. O'Donnell

'...surrounded by spectacula to tempt

the concupiscentia oculorum'

(Image from James J. O'Donnell UPenn Website)

Yesterday, we encountered the usefulness of James J. O'Donnell's Augustine: Confessions, an online text with scholarly commentary, for it provides insight and links concerning Ancient and Medieval views on curiosity.

Curiously, however, in his commentary to Augustine's Confessions Book 10, Chapter 35, Paragraph 54, O'Donnell tells us: "Curiositas (for the concept in A. before conf., see on 3.2.2)" -- which I will spell out as this: "For the concept of 'curiositas' in Augustine prior to his fuller view in his Confessions, see the commentary to Confessions Book 3, Chapter 2, Paragraph 2," which we will do in a moment, but let us first see what the passages itself says in Latin:

rapiebant me spectacula theatrica, plena imaginibus miseriarum mearum et fomitibus ignis mei. quid est quod ibi homo vult dolere cum spectat luctuosa et tragica, quae tamen pati ipse nollet? et tamen pati vult ex eis dolorem spectator et dolor ipse est voluptas eius. quid est nisi mirabilis insania? nam eo magis eis movetur quisque, quo minus a talibus affectibus sanus est, quamquam, cum ipse patitur, miseria, cum aliis compatitur, misericordia dici solet. sed qualis tandem misericordia in rebus fictis et scenicis? non enim ad subveniendum provocatur auditor sed tantum ad dolendum invitatur, et actori earum imaginum amplius favet cum amplius dolet. et si calamitates illae hominum, vel antiquae vel falsae, sic agantur ut qui spectat non doleat, abscedit inde fastidiens et reprehendens; si autem doleat, manet intentus et gaudens lacrimat.

If your Latin is as wonderful as mine, you'll also need help, so let us seek guidance from the Holy Catholic Church -- I mean its encyclopedia, which provides this translation of Confessions Book 3, Chapter 2, Paragraph 2:

Stage-plays also drew me away, full of representations of my miseries and of fuel to my fire. Why does man like to be made sad when viewing doleful and tragical scenes, which yet he himself would by no means suffer? And yet he wishes, as a spectator, to experience from them a sense of grief, and in this very grief his pleasure consists. What is this but wretched insanity? For a man is more affected with these actions, the less free he is from such affections. Howsoever, when he suffers in his own person, it is the custom to style it "misery" but when he compassionates others, then it is styled "mercy." But what kind of mercy is it that arises from fictitious and scenic passions? The hearer is not expected to relieve, but merely invited to grieve; and the more he grieves, the more he applauds the actor of these fictions. And if the misfortunes of the characters (whether of olden times or merely imaginary) be so represented as not to touch the feelings of the spectator, he goes away disgusted and censorious; but if his feelings be touched, he sits it out attentively, and sheds tears of joy.

Augustine would here seem to be arguing against Aristotle's defense of 'poetry' (cf. Plato's critique of poetry in The Republic), which included drama, particularly of tragic drama, which Aristotle argued acted as a sort of catharsis, a purifying of the spectator. Augustine, like Plato, disagrees with Aristotle on tragic drama's effect, finding that it does not purify but, rather, corrupts.

Be that as it may, you will now see why I found 'curious' that O'Donnell would direct us to his commentary to Confessions Book 3, Chapter 2, Paragraph 2, for Augustine does not use the term "curiositas" in this passage. However, we can understand if we see that the passage fits what Augustine elsewhere says of "curiositas" as "concupiscentia oculorum," i.e., "curiosity" as "lust of the eyes."

Anyway, let's see what O'Donnell has to say:

Curiositas is always a vice for A. For a definition using the word itself, vera rel. 52.101, 'quid enim appetit curiositas nisi cognitionem quae certa esse non potest nisi rerum aeternarum et eodem modo se semper habentium?'; though the word is absent, more revealing perhaps is vera rel. 33.62, 'ille [animus] autem vult mentem convertere ad corpora, oculos ad deum. quaerit enim intellegere carnalia et videre spiritalia, quod fieri non potest.'

For bibliography, see on 10.35.54. There is much originality to A.'s development, but the possible influence of Ambrose has not been sufficiently considered. Not that Ambrose has a concept of curiositas, but some of his suspicions of the excesses of the philosophers are at least apposite to A.'s own thoughts, though A. develops them further. See Amb. off. 1.26.122 (written 386), 'itaque tractant in veri investigatione tenendum illud decorum, ut summo studio requiramus quid verum sit, non falsa pro veris ducere, non obscuris vera involvere, non superfluis vel inplexis atque ambiguis occupare animum. quid tam indecorum quam venerari ligna, quod ipsi faciunt? quid tam obscurum quam de astronomia et geometria tractare, quod probant, et profunda aeris spatia metiri, caelum quoque et mare numeris includere; relinquere causam salutis, erroris quaerere?' Such ill-guided search for knowledge Amb. then contrasts to Moses' superior wisdom.

The subject emerges early and pervades the years before conf.; at ord. 1.8.26 he recalls watching a cock-fight: 'cur . . . nos ipsa pugnae facies aliquantum et praeter altiorem istam considerationem duceret in voluptatem spectaculi?' Later in the same work, he cautions measure in inquiry: ord. 2.5.17, 'si quis temere ac sine ordine disciplinarum in harum rerum cognitionem audet inruere, pro studioso illum curiosum, pro docto credulum, pro cauto incredulum fieri' (cf. ord. 1.11.31, 'curiosi vel nimium studiosi'); specific examples are offered: ord. 2.12.37 (the trivial pursuits of grammarians), 2.15.42 (on astronomy: 'astrologiam genuit, magnum religiosis argumentum tormentumque curiosis'); cf. quant. an. 19.33. The noun curiositas itself is introduced at mus. 6.13.39, 'avertit [a contemplatione aeternorum] denique amor vanissimae cognitionis talium rerum. . . . curiositas nascitur ipso curae nomine inimica securitati, et vanitate impos veritatis'. Connection with 1 Jn. 2.16 (see on 1.10.16 and on 10.30.41) is slower coming, though it may underlie mor. 1.21.38: 'quamobrem recte etiam curiosi esse prohibemur, quod magnum temperantiae munus est. . . . reprimat igitur se anima ab huiusmodi vanae cognitionis cupiditate, si se castam deo servare disposuit.' Similar discussions occur later: cf., e.g., trin. 10.1.3, 'aut si tam curiosus est ut non propter aliquam notam causam sed solo amore rapiatur incognita sciendi, discernendus quidem est ab studiosi nomine iste curiosus; sed nec ipse amat incognita, immo congruentius dicitur, odit incognita, quae nulla esse vult dum vult omnia cognita.'

A clear echo of 1 Jn. 2.16 occurs at lib. arb. 2.19.53 (nothing in the work can be surely dated before it was put in final form, which may have been as late as 395), 'ad proprium convertitur [1], cum suae potestatis vult esse; ad exterius [2], cum aliorum propria vel quaecumque ad se non pertinent cognoscere studet, ad inferius [3] cum voluptatem corporis diligit. atque ita homo superbus [1] et curiosus [2] et lascivus [3] effectus excipitur ab alia vita quae in comparatione superioris vitae mors est.' But comparable echoes may be found at Gn. c. man. 1.23.40 (quoted on 10.30.41) and 2.18.27 ('genus tertium temptationis his verbis figurare, quod est curiositas').

The last thing A. wrote before his ordination in 391 was vera rel., whose structure and contents are heavily influenced by 1 Jn. 2.16; there are clear attacks on curiositas at vera rel. 3.4, 4.7 ('nam tertio vitio curiositatis in percontandis daemonibus'), 29.52 ('in quorum consideratione non vana et peritura curiositas exercenda est, sed gradus ad immortalia et semper manentia faciendus'), 38.70, 38.71 (quoted on 10.30.41 for the link between the temptations of 1 Jn. and the three temptations of Christ in the desert), 49.94 ('iam vero cuncta spectacula et omnis illa quae appellatur curiositas, quid aliud quaerit quam de rerum cognitione laetitiam?'), and cf. also vera rel. 52.101-54.105, and see div. qu. 68.1, quoted on 5.3.5 below.

When we bring our modern incomprehension to A.'s disdain for what is now an unquestioned virtue, we forget that for him curiositas led directly to demons: cat. rud. 25.48, 'qui christianum nomen oderunt . . . et adhuc simulacris et daemoniorum curiositatibus servire desiderant,' and Io. ep. tr. 2.13 (on 1 Jn. 2.16), 'iam quam late patet curiositas? ipsa in spectaculis, in theatris, in sacramentis diaboli, in magicis artibus, in maleficiis ipsa est curiositas.' See also trin. 4.11.14-4.12.15, civ. 10.26, 10.28 (where he presents Porphyry playing to an audience of the curious: 'ut talium quoque rerum quasi peritus appareas et placeas inlicitarum artium curiosis, vel ad eas facias ipse curiosos'), and 10.29. (A familiar villain for fourth-century Christians was similarly led astray by curiositas, acting in concert this time with ambitio saeculi: civ. 5.21, 'apostatae Iuliano, cuius egregiam indolem decepit amore dominandi sacrilega et detestanda curiositas'.) For the word and the thing, see further on 10.35.54.

Curiositas emerges here in narrative as A. comes to the great city and finds himself surrounded by all manner of marvels. One innocent recollection may date to this awed time: civ. 16.8, 'quosdam [homines] sine cervice oculos habentes in umeris, et cetera hominum vel quasi hominum genera, quae in maritima platea Carthaginis musivo picta sunt, ex libris deprompta velut curiosioris historiae.'

spectacula . . . imaginibus: Students were discouraged by the local authorities from too much spectacle-going: cod. theod. 14.9.1 (12 March 370), 'neve spectacula frequentius adeant'. The same law declared that indiscipline could be punished (at least at Rome and Constantinople) by whippings and forced rustication. A similar moralizing restriction was enjoined upon the young Julian by his tutor Mardonius (Julian, misopogon 351c-d), and Libanius (ep. 976.) thought the theater a distraction for students. A.'s remarks here make it clear that it was the enacted stories that appealed to him most, as later the circus (6.7.11-12) and the gladiatorial combats (6.8.13) would appeal to Alypius; these seem to have been the three main classes of entertainment available to A. (and classed by him as spectacula): s. 198.3, 'delectantur nugatorio spectaculo et turpitudinibus variis theatrorum, insania circi, crudelitate amphitheatri, certaminibus animosis eorum qui pro pestilentibus hominibus lites et contentiones usque ad inimicitias suscipiunt, pro mimo, pro histrione, pro pantomimo [these three are from the theatra], pro auriga [from the circus], pro venatore [from the gladiatorial amphitheater].' 1

Spectaculum in A. is almost always accompanied by verbs of seeing, frequently with word-play on spectare; in this paragraph note 'spectacula', 'spectat', `spectator', `spectat', and add 3.2.3, `spectaculi', 3.2.4, `spectare', 3.8.16, 'spectatores', 3.8.16, 'principandi [1] et spectandi [2] et sentiendi [3] libidine'; the recapitulation at 4.1.1 (parallelling the recapitulation of Bk. 2 at 3.1.1) speaks of 'spectaculorum nugas'.

The appeal is to the concupiscentia oculorum (s. Den. 14.3, 'quae mala facit turpis curiositas, concupiscentia vana oculorum, aviditas nugacium spectaculorum, insania stadiorum, nullo praemio conflictus certaminum!'; cf. Io. ep. tr. 2.13, quoted above). Compare Alypius covering his eyes at the gladiatorial spectaculum, but yielding, 'curiositate victus' (6.8.13); cf. 1.10.16 ('eadem curiositate magis magisque per oculos emicante in spectacula'), 1.13.22, 10.35.54 (`ex hoc morbo [curiositatis] in spectaculis exhibentur quaeque miracula'); theatra also appeal to curiositas (10.35.56). Cf. vera rel. 22.43, 'nec ob aliud a talibus prohibemur spectaculis, nisi ne umbris rerum decepti ab ipsis rebus quarum illae umbrae sunt aberremus'; sim. at vera rel. 49.94, 54.105; and again at trin. 4.11.14. civ. 2.4, 'veniebamus etiam nos aliquando adulescentes ad spectacula ludibriaque sacrilegiorum, spectabamus arrepticios, audiebamus symphoniacos, ludis turbissimis qui diis deabusque exhibebantur oblectabamur, Caelesti virgini et Berecynthiae matri omnium, ante cuius lecticam die sollemni lavationis eius talia per publicum cantitabantur a nequissimis scaenicis qualia non . . . matrem ipsorum scaenicorum deceret audire. . . . quae si inlecta curiositate adesse potuit circumfusa, saltem offensa castitate debuit abire confusa.' civ. 2.26, 'ante ipsum tamen delubrum, ubi simulacrum illud [Caelestis] locatum conspicebamus . . . intentissime spectabamus, intuentes alternante conspectu hinc meretriciam pompam, illinc virginem deam.' See also civ. 1.32-3, 1.35, 2.8, 7.26.

G-M, Theiler P.u.A. 60, and BA all attempt to situate this text in the tradition of ancient discussions of the emotional impact of the theater. There is nothing here in conf. to connect A.'s views with any of the surviving discussions, but he is surely their heir at some distance (at civ. 8.13 he even invokes Plato's suspicion of poets in support of his views). Dominant is surely his own notion of the connection to curiositas. His works nevertheless (including the passages just cited from civ.) offer some glimpses of what the life of the spectacula entailed in the Carthage of his day. See also en. Ps. 103. s. 1.13 ('videtis quid faciat civitas ubi abundant spectacula: in agro securius loquerer'), 146.4, 147.8, s. 241.5 (quoted on 1.13.20, 'Aeneae nescio cuius'). Alfaric 32-33 offers additional texts.

O'Donnell provides even more commentary, but the above remarks are most relevant to our interest in curiosity. I notice that O'Donnell notes that Augustine "invokes Plato's suspicion of poets in support of his views," a point that I raised above. But O'Donnell's opening remark is the most significant: "Curiositas is always a vice for A." As O'Donnell explains, "When we bring our modern incomprehension to A.'s disdain for what is now an unquestioned virtue, we forget that for him curiositas led directly to demons" -- a reminder, however, that probably renders us not so much baffled in our incomprehension as aghast in our revulsion. One has to wonder how much of Augustine's mind remained captivated by a Gnostic distrust of the cosmos.

But let us return to this Blumenbergian theme later...

Blumenberg's Legitimacy of the Modern Age: Reviewed by Martin Jay (On Curiosity)

Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration

Curious Odyssey through the Pillars of Hercules...

(Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France)

The Christmas season is upon us, the season of giving, and dozens of students are generously giving me their final papers.

Well, I believe in the Christmas spirit of reciprocity, so each one of these same students will soon be receiving something particularly fitting in response.

Merry Christmas, O My Students...

Anyway, due to this holiday cheer, I won't be writing much this morning, nor perhaps for several mornings, though I'll keep posting daily snippets.

Today, a long snippet. First, though, I should inform you that I contacted my old history professor Martin Jay because I wanted to get a copy of his review of Blumenberg's Legitimacy book. I read it some 20 years ago but couldn't recall where I had found it. Jay wrote back:

I was very interested to hear that you are working on Blumenberg, a thinker who definitely repays the effort it takes to read him. I don't know of anything as penetrating on the theme of curiosity as his discussion in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age . . . . As for my own review of the Blumenberg book, it first appeared in History and Theory back in about 1975 [sic: 1985] and then was republished in my collection Fin-de-siecle Socialism a few years later. I don't have an electronic copy to send as an attachment, but if you can't find it anywhere, I would be happy to send a reprint.

Once I knew where to look for it, the search became simpler -- though I could have located it anyway through a Google search but didn't want to deal with logging in to the university's document retrieval system. Well, I had to log in anyway, and I've easily found the review. Jay does such an excellent job of summarizing Blumenberg's thesis that I will simply quote the five central paragraphs on curiosity:

[I]t was the unleashing of curiosity, so Blumenberg contends in the third major section of his book, that marks the modern sensibility. Turning a remarkable amount of erudition on the question of why that unleashing took so long, Blumenberg presents a brilliant account of what he calls the "trial" of theoretical curiosity. Theory in its classical guise was, as we have already had occasion to note, contemplative rather than experimental, which meant that the ancients refrained from doing more than passively "reading" a cosmos whose objective existence they did not doubt. What made it even more inimical to the full unleashing of curiosity was the assumption that such contemplation could produce human happiness, an assumption itself tied to the belief, still held by many medieval thinkers, that knowledge of the Truth was the road to contentment. In this sense, both classical and medieval theory could be called "pragmatic," for its ultimate goal was not knowledge per se, but the happiness its possession would bring. But this kind of pragmatism, which perhaps can be traced back as far as the Socratic quest for the good life, proved hostile to any kind of knowledge that does not translate into personal fulfillment. Thus, Blumenberg concludes, it created an impediment, more passive than active, to the complete valorization of human curiosity no matter what its purpose.

With the Stoics, Blumenberg argues, came a further obstacle to unlimited curiosity. Far more skeptical than their predecessors about the possibility of achieving a human version of divine truth, they preached against the inevitable disappointment that seeking it would engender. Instead of an open-minded and open-eyed contemplation of the world, they counseled a therapeutic form of ataraxia, in which disillusionment is avoided by a preemptive refusal to seek the truth at all. For the Stoics, Blumenberg writes, "intellectual curiosity is now the disastrous drive that misleads us into violating the boundary settlement between the human and the divine sphere" (264). Although Christian thinkers like Augustine had to work their way through the skeptical implications of this doctrine, they nonetheless did not come to accept theoretical curiosity as a viable alternative. For now the road to happiness was understood to be through faith, not philosophy and certainly not science. Augustine was particularly uneasy about worldly curiosity because of its potential to distract man from his proper sacred concerns. Moreover, insofar as legitimate knowledge comes only from its rightful author -- here the Platonic residue was still potent -- the Truth can be grasped not by examining the world through the fallible senses, but rather through the unmediated acceptance of God's word. What Augustine damned as "ocular desire" (312), because it led man into temptation, was thus as far removed from the classical emphasis on contemplative vision as the modern stress on its experimental counterpart.

Although the Scholastics were poised ambiguously between Aristotle's affirmation of a contemplative knowledge of the cosmos and Augustine's warning against all curiosity as a vice, it was not really until the modern age that the verdict of the "trial" was finally rendered in favor of unconstrained curiosity. One major reason for the change was the uncoupling of happiness and salvation from knowledge, which followed the growing popularity of the doctrine of predestination prepared by the nominalists and brought to a head by Calvin. For if man's redemption had nothing to do with his practical life on earth, then it was unnecessary to be so anxious about the distracting effects of curiosity about allegedly superfluous matters. In addition, the growing hiddenness of God in the early modern era meant the world could no longer be passively read as a divine text. A Deus Absconditus meant a "speechless" world lacking the marks of the divine word, a world as a result open to man's own constructs and manipulations.

The vindication of curiosity was therefore closely linked to the emergence of self-assertion as an alternative answer to the still unresolved Gnostic question of the meaning of an imperfect and corrupt world. Only when the qualitative knowledge assumed to be the analogue of divine wisdom was abandoned as a goal and replaced by an inevitably imperfect knowledge expressed in quantitative terms could modern science begin. Only then could man break through the forbidding Pillars of Hercules standing as the image of transgression as far back as the Odyssey and embark, as the famous title page of Bacon's Instauratio Magna implies, on uncharted seas.

Moreover, only when personal happiness was decisively severed from the collective pursuit of a truth that could be sought but never completely won, only when the hope for immortality was displaced from the individual soul to the species as a whole, only then could curiosity be utterly without limits. As such, it could then be extended from nature to man himself by philosophers like Hobbes and projected by others like Feuerbach into a desire to know what is not yet knowable. Faust's famous pact with the devil, an early modern invention that expressed a still ambiguous attitude towards the "vice" of curiosity, could ultimately become a triumphant symbol of modern man's insatiable desire to know, which Freud would later naturalize into a sublimation of an infantile sexual curiosity to see. (Martin Jay, "Review: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age by Hans Blumenberg; Robert M. Wallace," History and Theory, Vol. 24, No. 2. (May, 1985), pp. 190-191. Accessed via JSTOR.)

The irony in Blumenberg's moral tale lies in the way that Christianity liberated the 'vice' of curiosity from its Ancient and Medieval constraints by its dissociating human happiness from any human effort, a feat achieved first through the late Medieval Nominalists but carried forward by the Protestant Reformation, especially by the Calvinists.

In short, Blumenberg argues that modern science emerged not through Christianity's conception of a rational God but through its conception of an irrational one.

Augustine: Curiosity in the Catalog of Vices...

Aristotle, Copy of Lysippos

Louvre Museum

"All men by nature desire to know."

(Image from Wikipedia)

Let us look again today into Hans Blumenberg's chapter "Curiosity Is Enrolled in the Catalog of Vices" (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age), in which Blumenberg discusses St. Augustine's classification of "curiositas" as a vice.

I want to reflect on a couple of paragraphs in which Blumenberg notes that Augustine criticizes that cupidity (cupiditas) of vain desire in the appetite of our insatiable curiosity (curiositas) to seek knowledge beyond our proper limits, i.e., beyond either utility (utilitas) or self-knowledge:

When we return . . . to the central passage, book 10, chapter 35 of the Confessions, some light is shed on the catalog of the levels of curiositas: After amusment as a mutilated corpse, theatrical shows are mentioned, and from here a transition to investigation of nature and to the magical arts is found. The riddles of nature, to which the mere desire to know applies itself, are characterized as objects that lie praeter nos [beyond us], in the double sense that neither are they seen from the point of view of their utilitas nor do they relate to man's self-knowledge. Investigation of the things that nature does not make openly accessible to man is of no use to him. This proposition involves the teleological assumption, familiar from Cicero, that the degree of a thing's theoretical accessibility indicates its 'natural' relevance for man. When he goes beyond this region of what lies open to him, he obeys the cognitive appetite that is justified by no other interest.

The appeal to nature proves itself here, as so often, to be an ambiguous type of argumentation, whose self-contradiction Augustine seeks to avoid by not attributing a natural status to man's inherent cognitive appetite but instead interpreting that appetite -- as always where cupiditas is applied -- as a consequence of the condition of man having fallen away from his original nature as a result of his original sin. The first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics has become, through the omission of "by nature," a description of man's status defectus [failed, defective condition]. On this assumption, confirmation by the "predilection for sense experience" can no longer be a "sign" from which the vindication of the disinterested purity of the theoretical attitude "independent of need" can be obtained. The grasp at the 'tree of knowledge' caused the unregulated cognitive appetite to degenerate into the vana cura [futile care] of a godless state of being fallen into the power of the world. (Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, page 314)

The famous first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics states:

All men by nature desire to know. (Aristotle, Metaphysics (350 B.C.), translated by W. D. Ross)

Blumenberg's point is that Augustine, despite his appeal to the teleological point about not going beyond what nature has laid open to our senses, cannot consistently accept even Aristotle's assumption, grounded in nature, of our cognitive right to any knowledge, for our original nature has been distorted, as has been nature itself.

Augustine may rely upon Aristotle to critique our 'busybody' tendency to inquire into nature's riddles, a realm beyond that which is teleologically fit for us to know, but Augustine's views on the double aspect of fallenness -- mankind and the world both being fallen -- entail that the teleological fitness of mankind to the world no longer holds since sin has entered the world through Adam and Eve and ruined God's creation.

For Augustine, therefore -- if he were to be consistent -- curiosity about the cosmos would inevitably lead reason into the coils of error through any attempt whatsoever to study nature, given its deceptive, quasi-Gnostic appearance, let alone a foolhardy attempt to investigate the even more recondite riddles of nature.

Let's return to this tomorrow...

Response to Warren T. Reich on ars moriendi

Aristotle

Philosopher of Phronesis

(Image from Wikipedia)

I suppose that I can now name one of the scholars whose papers I'm responding to.

Yesterday at Sogang University's Death, Dying, and Spirituality Conference, I responded to two papers, but I'll report on just one of my two responses, the one I made to Warren T. Reich's paper on "The Art of Caring for the Dying: A Crisis in Western Culture."

Professor Reich, by the way, is a Professor Emeritus of Bioethics at Georgetown University (Washington, DC), where he holds a position as Distinguished Research Professor of Religion and Ethics.

I won't summarize his entire article here because I'm pressed for time this morning, but I'll draw some passages from my response to a distinction that he made between negative and positive empathy, and I'll also include some observations relevant to caring for the dying:

You make the interesting point that empathy for the feelings of another requires not simply positive but also negative attention to the other as an individual. I confess that I had never thought of this negative aspect of empathy, by which you mean our need to diminish the attention given to anything distracting us from feeling 'with' the other.

...

I'm not a professional caregiver, but when I lived in Tübingen, Germany, I knew a young man named Daniel from Uganda who was dying of AIDS. I didn't know him well, but because we had a friend in common and because Daniel was very alone, I decided to visit him every afternoon in his hospital room on my way back from the theology library where I was pursuing my doctoral research. In doing so, I had to learn a capacity within myself to be with another person who is dying, and that requires patience, something that I'm not abundantly endowed with. I had to give up my impatience, my desire to do things quickly, for I did not know how long his dying might take. Perhaps by negative empathy, you mean something like that? I also had to relinquish some other things, such as disgust, for I occasionally had to help hold Daniel as the nurse wiped him clean after he had used the toilet. That also involved my overcoming my own trepidation about the virus that he carried. However, my knowledge of the disease helped me in that, for I knew that HIV is very hard to contract.

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Recently, I have read reviews of a book by a young physician who has learned some of the lessons [about empathy, consolation, and care for the dying] that you describe. Her name is Pauline W. Chen, and her book is titled Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality. She also maintains a blog, and in an entry titled "Our two jobs," she writes:

I met a woman whose father had practiced surgery from the 1950's until his death from pancreatic cancer in the 1980's. He had a very busy practice and on top of his clinical duties was chairman of surgery at two of the local hospitals.

One day, this woman went to visit her father at the hospital. She found him in a patient's room, sitting at the bedside and reading the Bible aloud to his patient. When he later left the patient's room, his daughter asked him, "Why were you reading to that patient?"

"She asked me to read from the Bible to her," her father replied. "And because I could no longer do anything for her medically, I did what I could." (Chen, Amazon Blog)

Chen tells us that she was trained in surgery at a time when therapeutic failures were an exception but that older surgeons learned at a time when such failure was the rule. Older doctors understood the importance of taking time, and Chen advises younger doctors to learn the importance of doing so as well:

[S]ometimes the most therapeutic thing you can do has nothing to do with another drug or operation. Sometimes all we can -- and should -- do is simply be with our patients, make them comfortable. Sometimes the very best thing we can do as someone's doctor is to sit at their bedside, take their favorite book, and read aloud. (Chen, Amazon Blog)

I think that Chen and you are asking us to develop wisdom, a sense for the right thing to do.

From your citation of Walt Whitman as nurse and as poet, I gather that you would agree that he was one who had this sort of wisdom. Concerning the wisdom of knowing what to do, I am reminded of an anecdote about Abraham Lincoln:

Towards the end of the war, Lincoln went to see Seward, his Secretary of State, a man with whom he often disagreed and whom he did not particularly like. Seward had managed to break both his arm and his jaw in a carriage accident. Lincoln found him not only bedridden but quite unable to move his head. Without a moment’s hesitation, the President stretched out full length on the bed and, resting on his elbow, brought his face near Seward's, and they held an urgent, whispered consultation on the next steps the administration should take. Then Lincoln talked quietly to the agonized man until he drifted off to sleep. Lincoln could easily have used the excuse of Seward's incapacity to avoid consulting him at all. But that was not his way. He invariably did the right thing, however easily it might be avoided. Of how many other great men can that be said? (Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999) page 487; citing David Herbert Donald, Lincoln, (New York: Touchstone, 1996) 580-1)

William H. Seward was not dying, of course, but he was suffering, and Lincoln showed wisdom in extending a special kind of compassion -- negative empathy in relinquishing his dislike for the man, and positive empathy in recognizing that Seward needed company, someone to be there in his suffering until he drifted off to sleep.

Could we call this sort of practical wisdom by Aristotle's term for it: phronesis? Or is it a different sort of ethical wisdom? If so, could you suggest a different term?

Such was a portion of my response to Professor Reich's interesting paper on the issue of how to care for the dying, which I cannot quote directly since it is not yet published. Reich seems to have liked what I said, for he replied by remarking at the outset that my response "was the finest that he had ever heard at any conference that he had attended in his life," or something to that effect. I was so surprised that my astonishment may have interfered with my capacity to retain his exact words, which were, actually, the nicest thing that anybody's ever said to me.

Anyway, he did confirm that he was thinking about Aristotle's category of phronesis, or "practical wisdom," and he later asked me if he could have the sources for the quotes from Chen and Johnson.

Now, I must ready myself for another day at the conference.