Transforming Philosophy and Religion: Love's Wisdom available in Hardcover, Paperback
Transforming Philosophy and Religion: Love's Wisdom
- ISBN-10:
- 0253219582
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253219589
- Pub. Date:
- 05/07/2008
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0253219582
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253219589
- Pub. Date:
- 05/07/2008
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
Transforming Philosophy and Religion: Love's Wisdom
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253219589 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/07/2008 |
| Series: | Philosophy of Religion |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Transforming Philosophy and Religion
Love's Wisdom
By Norman Wirzba, Bruce Ellis Benson
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2008 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35073-2
CHAPTER 1
The Primacy of Love
NORMAN WIRZBA
Philosophy is the wisdom of love at the service of love. — Emmanuel Levinas
It is misleading, even if it is etymologically correct, to define philosophy as the "love of wisdom." As a definition it assumes too much. Do we know what we mean when we utter the word wisdom, especially in a time dominated by the "end of philosophy?" Do we fully appreciate the significance and the complexity of the relation between the work of love and the realization of wisdom? Moreover, how does the practice or character of our love, especially given the precarious, flexible, and fluid nature of contemporary social bonding, determine the shape of our wisdom? If we attend to these questions, it should become clear that the pursuit of wisdom entails much more than the mere accumulation of knowledge or information. Indeed, the mass production and consumption of data that characterizes our "information age" may actually be an impediment to the realization of those forms and habits of love that promote genuine wisdom.
Put differently, the pursuit of wisdom requires that we be as attentive to the manner of our pursuit as we are to the goal of it. We need to ask about the very practical conditions — our skills and work environments, cultural assumptions and goals, personal dispositions and aspirations — that inspire and propel any and all pursuits. Are there forms of life that better ignite and fuel a genuine love of wisdom? Conversely, are there personal, social, or institutional contexts that, because of their flow and aim, work against the development of an affectionate, charitable, understanding stance in the world? When we consider these sorts of questions, the issue of primary importance is whether or not we have developed the capacity to love. Love, as this essay will argue, is the indispensable prerequisite for wisdom. If we do not exhibit appropriate forms of love, our access to wisdom will be seriously impaired if not altogether denied.
What love itself is, of course, is not easily or simply determined. This is especially apparent when we consider how other languages, Latin for instance, employ several terms to reference love: amor, caritas, pietas, dilectio, affectio, and studium. The diversity of these terms, their meanings but also the practical contexts in which they would appear, indicate that love is a varied and complex phenomenon that should not be narrowly or quickly reduced to one thing. It may be more appropriate to cast love as being an essential ingredient in the several dimensions of human existence and practice that bind us to each other, to the world, and ultimately to God. On this view, familiar and unfamiliar human relationships, the work of devotion and attention, our response to suffering, and our handling of the material world are at their best when they are permeated by a disposition to love. Love begins in our opening to and welcome of others, and grows as we attend to them in their integrity and wholeness.
Though love flowers into many different forms, at root a loving disposition is one that acknowledges, affirms, and nurtures (human and nonhuman) others in their ability to be. Love cherishes and exults in the independence and interdependence of another. The prototype for this sort of affirmation is to be seen in God's own creative, loving act that keeps and brings the whole world into existence (remembering here the theological link between creation's affirmation as "very good" [Genesis 1:31] and the view that "God is love" [1 John 4:8]). God loves primordially and concretely by "making room" for others "to be" and to flourish. Creation is, in the first instance, a given reality and thus a reflection of the divine life as giving-ness itself. Because creation did not need to exist (it does not contain the principle of its existence within itself or hold it as an intrinsic property), the fact of its existence must be understood as a reflection of divine love.
If we are to become acquainted with this world and truly know and understand it, we must also become acquainted with — and learn to practice — the divine love that inspires and sustains it. Having wisdom would require us to understand the world and God together, since the former finds its bearing in the latter, that is, the meaning of the world is tied to its origin in the mystery of divine love. Wisdom's pursuit would also require us to proceed along the paths of love, since love is the root of our and all being. The various blossoming forms of human love — as revealed in our relationships, economies, art, work, and philosophical reflection — must tap into this primordial divine love if they are to be considered true or authentic. What this means is that wisdom does not have its origin or goal in us, for whatever finite power we possess would have the characteristic of making others dependent upon us. When our inspiration and focus is ourselves, our contact with others is rendered oblique and distorted, since who or what they are is always mediated by our desires, fears, anxieties, and needs. This is why John insists that "Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love" (1 John 4:8). Only love makes it possible for us to meet another as genuinely other (and not a projection of our needs or desires).
The practical pattern for this love, John continues, is the life of God's own son Jesus Christ: "God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his Son into the world so that we might live through him" (v. 9). From a Christian point of view, if we want to truly know the world, we must approach all of it with a Christ-like disposition and perspective. Sensing how the Christian "way" leads to new patterns of relating to others and to the world, early Christians thought it entirely appropriate to speak about Jesus as the "true and complete philosopher" and to claim a "philosophy according to Christ." We cannot have wisdom of the world if we have not first firmly committed ourselves to loving it in ways modeled for us by Christ, which means that we have put to death sinful patterns of relating that dissimulate, distort, disfigure, and destroy.
Not surprisingly, given this Creator/creation/Christic starting point, an emphasis on the primacy of love is fairly common within mystical literature. Here the anonymous fourteenth-century text The Cloud of Unknowing can be seen as representative: "Thought cannot comprehend God. And so, I prefer to abandon all I can know, choosing rather to love him whom I cannot know. Though we cannot know him we can love him. By love he may be touched and embraced, never by thought." A primary problem with thought is that it seeks comprehension, whereas God is in principle incomprehensible. The capacity of thinking is simply too small for the grandeur of God. Moreover, the faculty of thought is itself constantly constrained by the power of sin: anger, envy, sloth, pride, covetousness, gluttony, and lust. The merit of love, however, is that it "heals the root of sin" and nurtures practical goodness, making us more sensitive and responsive to God's grace at work in the world. Whereas the drive toward knowledge lends itself to personal conceit — a separation from the love of God — the work of love promotes humility, a form of self-forgetting that makes room for the truth of the world and the glory of God to appear.
But what does mysticism of this sort have to do with philosophy? Should not philosophers be dedicated to the scientific, objective, disinterested pursuit of knowledge, and thus shun such mystical talk? Clearly, it would be a mistake to advocate the mass conversion of philosophers into mystics. Nonetheless, it will be my claim that the primacy of love that mystics advocate is of crucial significance for philosophical work. We cannot have anything like an honest, detailed, clear look at reality if our sight and our sensitivity have been tainted or clouded by a knower's ambition or desire for mastery and control. Love is central to the philosophical task because it keeps our focus off ourselves, and directs our energy and discipline to the expansion of our sympathies and the clarification of our vision so that we can better attune our lives to the complexity and depth of the world. Love makes it possible for us to receive the world as it is rather than as we want or wish it to be. Love enables us to resist the (often violent) integration of others into the sameness and comfort of the thinker's world. It acknowledges in a way that no other disposition or activity can the integrity and the mystery of existence.
Philosophy, in other words, needs to be a practical discipline in which the expansion of our sympathies and the clarity of our vision assume first importance. If these disciplines are lacking, perhaps because they do not have sufficient social or cultural support or because the material conditions of our economic and practical life militate against them — consider here the speed, ephemerality, and transience of global culture — then it is safe to say that our perception and understanding will have been compromised. It isn't that we will fail to perceive altogether. More likely we will see and feel differently, with more superficiality and less insight. The irony, of course, is that a problem of perception is rarely "perceived" to be a problem. More than we care to admit, we are like Plato's prisoners, stuck in the bottom of our self-assured caves, convinced that reality is as we take or make it.
Our movement toward true enlightenment (which is not to be confused with modern Enlightenment ideas of "progress") — remembering here the long-standing affinity between love and light — has been hampered by the confusion between knowledge and genuine understanding or wisdom. In modernity this confusion reached a fevered pitch as the quest for scientific knowledge took center stage. In part, this happened because technical knowledge enabled the newly autonomous individual to better control or master the world. In this context, philosophical training lost its earlier focus on wisdom so that it could become the handmaiden and legitimating support of economic, political, and social practices that would maximize human ambition and success (often at the expense of each other and the world). The only knowledge that was prized was of the instrumental or pragmatic sort that we could easily possess or wield as an instrument with the aim of exercising possession or power.
Wisdom, however, is not a possession or a tool in the service of controlling the world. Consider here the words of Henry Bugbee:
Wisdom is not a form of knowledge which we can be strictly said to possess. Wisdom may better be conceived as giving us the strength and courage to be equal to our situation than as knowledge giving us command of it. To the extent that human well-being and capacity for acting well ultimately turn upon understanding (I will not say knowledge), the understanding in question is going to have to be distinguished from powers we can be said to wield, including such knowledge as we acquire and might employ as an acquisition.
Bugbee is alerting us to a long tradition of philosophical practice that appreciates wisdom as fidelity and attunement to the world. Wisdom cannot be reduced to knowledge, nor should knowledge invariably be understood as a sufficient condition for understanding. We can see this because at precisely the time when we have the greatest amount of data or information in the natural and social sciences, we are also witnessing human communities and natural habitats everywhere in decline or under assault. Social and personal life are beset by anxiety, worry, boredom, stress, loneliness, violence, and fear. Biological life is compromised by soil erosion and toxification, water and air pollution, unprecedented rates of species extinction, deforestation and desertification, and uncontrolled suburban sprawl. Apparently what we "know" has not translated into the sort of understanding that would enable us to affirm others in their integrity and equip us to live well or in a manner that facilitates mutual flourishing.
Knowledge without understanding unleashes destructive potential because it is knowledge without sense or purpose, knowledge without an appreciation for what our "knowing" is ultimately for. Put differently, when our knowledge is merely about the world or others, it becomes abstract and simplistic because it is not forged through a sympathetic and practical engagement with them. What is missing is an appreciation for the complex requirements and responsibilities that follow from our living with others — fertile soil, clean water, healthy organisms, vibrant farming communities, sustainable production practices, a just distribution of goods, meaningful work, face-to-face encounters/conversations, nurturing friendships, and grateful consumption. The modern disenchantment with the world reflects a failure to understand how our living is supported by others and in turn affects others, a failure that is repeated again and again in the ways we shop, work, and consume. Our cultural malpractice prevents us from living lives that are healthy and whole. In too many cases our practical living is without art and without love. It is no accident that the gradual disappearance of wisdom should go hand in hand with a gradual loss of the sense that we belong to the world and are deeply implicated in its well-being.
The difference between knowledge and understanding is decisive. Though the discovery and production of knowledge can be difficult enough, the process of understanding entails a much more intimate, and thus also more complex, involvement and participation in what is understood. As we enter the domain of understanding, we move past a description of things (the surface perception of them) to their explanation, the discovery of the workings of things, their sense, direction, integrity, and purpose as well as their connectedness with others. At a bare minimum, understanding requires our interaction with and participation in things in a way that knowing about them simply does not. Wisdom reflects this patient, educative experience and practice informed by basic care and affection. It manifests itself in persons who understand who they are in relation to the many others that inform and intersect their living. It results in a life of propriety, a life in which the patterns of individual existing resonate and harmonize with the existence of others.
We attain a level of understanding insofar as our thinking and acting acknowledge and are informed by the many bonds that connect us to others. We should ask: Are these bonds inspired and directed by love? The character and extent of our connections to reality are crucial. The sense (direction) or purpose of our own living as well as the meaning of things around us depend on whether we can perceive the complex flows of life going on around us and then learn how to adjust our lives accordingly so that they fit or harmonize. Without this fundamental level of perception or sympathy, something like a moral or religious sensibility risks becoming artificial or disingenuous, a feigned piety that relies more on changeable emotional states than it does on a faithful accountability to others and the world. As we engage the world around us, not with an eye to understanding it, but rather with the goal of turning it to our own advantage, we falsify and destroy it. "He who has his mind on taking, no longer has it on what he has taken."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Transforming Philosophy and Religion by Norman Wirzba, Bruce Ellis Benson. Copyright © 2008 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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