Allow me an aside if you will, on this topic of sudden discretion. Why do I study French? Why am I willing to spend my hard earned money and, even more precious, time on a seemingly useless, Eurocentric indulgence? I shall be brief: the anglophone oriented world as we know it has ceased to interest me for a variety of reasons: personal, academic and political. My life is called to be in France, for as long as I am needed there, for reasons beyond reason; for the irrationality of my own meaning and purpose in life.Thus I have begun to ponder: the distinction between meaning and reason, and how great a distinction it is.
Now, I take a pause from my sabbatical to write one last article here upon this small and humble hypertexted space, a tiny diatribe upon the essence of the meaning of existence, and how we should live accordingly, in a moral and right way. Being a self-professed and semi-educated student of philosophy, I am more familiar with the modern Western theories than that of the ancients. Thankfully, this article, entitled A Life Beyond Reason has referenced those for me, and how helpful it is, and to what understanding it has brought me. This article is about a boy with a great mental and physical disability, and his intellectual university professor academic father whom has learned to care for him. The article is extremely long-winded (quite like my own blog), but every word is necessary.
"Can you hear it? Can't you hear the horrible voice that screams from the whole horizon, that voice that Man usually calls Silence?"
The father had been a well-learned student of the philosophy of Enlightenment, which proposes that Reason and Logic are the pinnacle ability of humankind, and therefore also the defining property of what it is to be human. Upon the birth of his son, he encountered something which he had not expected: his instincts of love, which quickly threw his world into turmoil:
My son's birth initially cast me into a wilderness of perplexity, doubt, and discontent. This was part of my wife's and my tragic mode. My formerly complacent assumptions began coming apart, and over the next few years they crumbled. I had seen the dark side of medicine—the quintessence of the Enlightenment—and firm ground slipped out from under me.
...
In my teaching and scholarship, I now interrogate some of the ideas that once informed my assumptions, and the questions that I ask fit awkwardly into the academic landscape. Is it really true that the unexamined life is not worth living? And is it accurate to say that only the possession of logos qualifies an entity for human status?
...
Especially in an academic environment that rewards being smart, how do I broach the idea that people with intellectual disabilities are fully equal? We academics advance in our careers by demonstrating how clever we can be, and because so much depends on flaunting intelligence, it is harder for us than for most people to steer clear of prejudice.
Please do read the entire article. The author states he has arrived at questions which he cannot answer, and yet, to his questions, I will provide one in detail, with references even. Firstly, his point about academics being prejudice is true, but it is true of all human beings. In fact, prejudice and judgement are one of the key traits of a rational mind, if not the essence of it. To deliberate, ruminate and decide the superior from the inferior is the entirerty of all intellectual pursuits. And yet, it is a vacuum because it does not account for man's ability to think with his heart, for his ability to believe and to love. The heart is a thinking thing, it is a mind of Meaning rather than that of Reason. The Enlightenment has failed to provide this man with answers because it has failed to produce a purpose for life itself, for the life of all living things great and small. For these ideals, in Western thought, we must go back to the "unenlighted" times of the Middle Ages, where logic was seconadry to a deep spiritual faith which guided all understanding, to the acceptance of mystery, to the veneration of harmony and completeness outside the self, of the self, and of the self with the world outside it. Dostoyevsky once said:
“The secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for.”
And yet, if that is so, then is not Reason the atom of understanding, the ultimate building-block of the mind? No, because even behind Logic, there lies the essensce of its existance: the belief that it is good for the world, the belief that it is understanding, and the warm-blooded value placed in its goodness, which stems in the faith of the idea, the faith of truth. This was the ruling idea in the Middle Ages, which stemmed from the idea of agape love, the unconditional outpouring of goodness, caring and unbending trust which dominated the philosophy and theology of the time. None of which was stemmed in logic, but in purpose and meaning. This is where the logiticians, and scientists fail to grasp the entirety of the human spirit, that a thought man cannot exist without a deeper meaning in his life, for if not his thoughts will eventually become superfulous.
And this the conundrum at which the hero of our article has arrived: not what is a human but, what is the meaning of a human's existance? And in his life, his son has provided that purpose, and given him a thing in to care for unselfisly, a thing to love unconditionally, the kind of love that Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard understand, and the same unwavering love that the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages laboured under: to work for something by love, and love alone, is work enough, because it provides you with a meaning and a selfless extension of the self which fullfills the self by reflexive action and regconition. To love a thing wholly yet without an expectation of self-benefit is itself fullfilling to the highest end, this is an idea well-understood by the aforementioned philosophers, and in the Christian thought of St. Augustine and other prominent minds of the Middle Ages. But the real question here is about the man's son: to what ends is he fully human, and why does he exist, and to what purpose can we understand them? The crux of the problem here is that this is an entirely selfish question. Allow me to paraphrase John Ruskin's idea: A man's purpose is to do what he is best able to do, and to the best he can, and for the best end.This does not exclude a disabled person, for the disabled person's purpose is to be loved, and if he can do that, his purpose is equal to that of anyone who has fullfilled their own. Back to the article:
...August's disability does not form a part of "God's plan" and does not serve as a tool for God to teach me or anyone else wisdom. What kind of a God would it be, anyway, to deprive my boy of speech and movement just to instruct me? A cruel and arbitrary God. August's disabilities are not a blessing; but neither are they a divine curse. To traffic in a cosmic economy of blessings and curses is to revert to an ancient prejudice. Indeed, even though August's disabilities offer ample opportunity for public interpretation, they do not mean anything at all in and of themselves—they have no intrinsic significance. They simply are what they are.
And the simplicity of allowing a thing to be what it is meant to be is the purpose of being, which is why the real evil in a person's life comes when an able person chooses to ignore their abilities, in that sense, the disabiled person, being unaware of their consciousness, will remain a pure object to be loved and loved only, an existance which a person possesing a judgemental consciousness could never attain. They exist in pure duration, and are more informed of goodness than others because they have been deprived of conscious choice, and may only exist in a pure and uncorrputed state. The conscious mind which chooses to ignore its fullest abilities is truly more unhuman, because he chooses to inhibit himself by ignoring them, whereas the disabled person does not have this ability, and remains forever wonderous in a state of pure duration, of pure living, like the flower, like the mountain, like the living and breathing Earth that lives without asking why, but to fufill its reason of continuation without an acknowlegement of time and space, uninhbited by the consciousness from where all evil and torment stems. The begining of the article, the author states:
Many such well-meaning people would like to put an end to August's suffering, but they do not stop to consider whether he actually is suffering. At times he is uncomfortable, yes, but the only real pain here seems to be the pain of those who cannot bear the thought that people like August exist...
The torment is within ourselves, not within the disabled person. If you give a disabled person the love you can provide, what suffering could they have? Could they even be aware of suffering? I believe that it is impossible to suffer by love, love can cure ills that logical doctors do not understand, because there is a faith in the mind that the meaning is true, and the intent pure. I detect a slight bitterness in the end of this man's article, because he is rebelling against a false assumption of a "God" instead of seriously examining what the meaning of it might entail. If he looked to Dostoyevsky (who's books often feature disabled characters), Søren Kierkegaard, John Ruskin, and works of art that seriously examine the deeper and more mysterious aspects of humanity, he will abandon his "englightened" past for the comforting shadow and unknowning mystery of agape love and surrendered faith of the heart. These are ideas I hope to elaborate on in the future, for now I hope these brief sketches have been of some use and will suffice for my own reflections momentarily.
This article reminded me of Werner Herzog's film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser ( Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle), the story of a strange foundling, mysterious in everyway and posssive of a learning disability, where he is passed around from all kinds of people in the society, to a normal family, a side show, a teacher of Englightenment ideals and finally a kind old man who only wants to care for him and love him as he is. Here in the scene with the logitican:
And does Kaspar's inability to understand make him less human? The entire film explores the question of what is humanity, and happiness, and we see in the end the most contenment comes not from the (ironically) angry logictican, but the loving old man who takes Kaspar under his wing and loves him as he is, a pure being without intention and only to be loved, and taught what he can, and if he does all he is able to, he is as fully human as another who lives their life to their fullest ability.
For a closing remark, I would like to source a point of understand that the author of the article reached which he isn't even aware of it: his sacrifice of his career for that of the caring of his son. While this is an illogical choice, it is a choice driven by purpose, and driven by meaning. Such choices are the best that a person can make, because it helps one to live to their fullest ability, and to their purpose. For similar reasons I am off to France in the future, to fullfill the abilites I can do, to pursue that which I am able, to the fullest and best of ends, and such a life lead cannot falter in unhappiness, it cannot be underminded by reflection, because it is driven of the heart, and powered by the faith in the good.
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