Dear All
I'm just back from a pleasant (but tiring) few days at Liverpool Hope University in the company of the Mystical Theology Network (the brain-child of Dr Louise Nelstrop and Dr Simon Podmore), the Society for the Study of Continental Philosophy and the Eckhart Society - what a combination! It really was a fascinating few days with some heavy-weight breakfast table conversations with some great scholars from all over Europe and beyond. Below is an extract from my contribution to the feast - reflections on the relationship between Merton and Wittgenstein which seemed to go down well. I shall be giving an extended version of this paper in Durham at the beginning of September so if you like this then do come to Durham for the full thing.
Best wishes
Peter
The 'Inner' Merton
I'm just back from a pleasant (but tiring) few days at Liverpool Hope University in the company of the Mystical Theology Network (the brain-child of Dr Louise Nelstrop and Dr Simon Podmore), the Society for the Study of Continental Philosophy and the Eckhart Society - what a combination! It really was a fascinating few days with some heavy-weight breakfast table conversations with some great scholars from all over Europe and beyond. Below is an extract from my contribution to the feast - reflections on the relationship between Merton and Wittgenstein which seemed to go down well. I shall be giving an extended version of this paper in Durham at the beginning of September so if you like this then do come to Durham for the full thing.Best wishes
Peter
The 'Inner' Merton
The Inner Experience (IE), published in 2003
from the manuscript of Merton’s 1950s revision of his earlier What is Contemplation (1948), neatly
encapsulates Merton’s lifelong attempt to describe the nature of the
contemplative life.[1]
Throughout it appears to assume the approach to the ‘inner’ as a distinct
‘mental realm’ that Wittgenstein had so forcibly critiqued in his own late
writings. Take this passage from the beginning of the text for example:
Every deeply spiritual
experience, whether religious, moral, or even artistic, tends to have in it
something of the presence of the interior self. Only from the inner self does
any spiritual experience gain depth, reality, and a certain incommunicability.
But the depth of ordinary spiritual experience only gives us a derivative sense
of the inner self. It reminds us of the forgotten levels of interiority in our
spiritual nature, and of our helplessness to explore them. (IE: 7)
Now much of the language here is the
traditional language of the Christian contemplative (and often mystical)
tradition – that is, ‘interiority’, ‘depth’, ‘the inner self’ and ‘levels of
interiority’. As explained above, Wittgenstein was deeply sceptical of such
metaphors, not least because he continually asked: ‘Yes, but what do they mean?’ How can we talk of
psycho-physical spatial ‘depth’ in the construct of the mental which is essentially
non-spatial. Merton is right to point to the ‘certain incommunicability’ that
lies in this process for the very concepts of meaning (or in Wittgensteinian terms,
‘the language game’) begin to break down at this point.[2]
Now if Merton was to simply essay ‘the inner’ as a realm to be ‘mysteriously
approached’ through contemplation without intuiting
(I use the word here in its Kantian sense) an unease with such language this
paper could finish at this point, we could cheer the wisdom and perception of
Wittgenstein and leave the mystical theology of Merton to continue languishing
in its dark ‘inner’ prison. But, fortunately for our investigation today, what is fascinating in Merton’s late writing
(and the editing of the Inner Experience
by William Shannon allows us to read the middle-aged Merton critiquing the work
of his younger self) is that Merton himself intuits that the mental language of
‘inner and outer’ simply won’t work as a means of expressing what he has
encountered in the contemplative life. These ideas are brought out forcibly in
one of his last published works, Zen and
the Birds of Appetite (ZB,1968). In this late work Merton (like
Wittgenstein) takes as his target the Cartesian self:
Modern man, in so far as
he is still Cartesian... is a subject for whom his own self-awareness as a
thinking, observing, measuring and estimating ‘self’ is absolutely primary. It
is for him the one indubitable ‘reality’ and all truth starts here. The more he
is able to develop his consciousness as a subject over against objects, the
more he can understand things in their relations to him and one another, the
more he can manipulate these objects for his own interests, but also, at the
same time, the more he tends to isolate himself in his own subjective person,
to become a detached observer cut off from everything else in a kind of
impenetrable alienated and transparent bubble which contains all reality in the
form of purely subjective experience. (ZB:22)
Which is as good an account as any of the
false subject-object duality that Wittgenstein is also gently teasing apart in
his later writings. Modern consciousness, for Merton, becomes ‘an ego-self
imprisoned in its own consciousness, isolated and out of touch with other such
selves in so far as they are all ‘things’ rather than persons’ (ZB: 22). So our
two authors, then, share a common unease of the developing of the
subject-object duality of the post-Cartesian Western empirico-scientific
mindset. However the two authors do differ somewhat in their solutions to this
problem. Wittgenstein prefers to lay the problem before us and give us his
unendingly curious, frustrating and infuriating puzzles, crypotgrams and aphorisms
in order to coax each of our dualistic Cartesian mindsets out of our
individualised fly-bottles.
Within Merton’s
writings, on the other hand, we can find at least three attempts to crack this
problem by three related, but quite different solutions (which has led, perhaps
unfairly but understandably, to charges laid at Merton’s feet over the years of
eclecticism and syncretism).
The first is the one
that occured to Merton as a young man – his encounter on the trams of New York
with the writings of Étienne Gilson,
especially his Spirit of Medieval
Philosophy. From this work he became interested in what he later
characterise as ‘the search for Being’ as being at the root of his conversion
from post-modern lost soul to reborn Trappist monk:
Underlying the
subjective experience of the individual self there is an immediate experience
of Being. This is totally different from an experience of self-consciousness.
It is completely non-objective. It has in it none of the split and alienation
that occurs when the subject becomes aware of itself as a quasi-object... In
brief this form of consciousness assumes a totally different kind of
self-awareness from that of the Cartesian thinking-self... Here the individual
is aware of himself as a self-to-be-dissolved in self-giving, in love, in
‘letting-go’, in ecstasy, in God. (ZB: 24)
This, as I say, is an attitude that Merton
had explored all his life following his conversion to Catholicism in his 20s
and developed through his long study of scholastic theology in Gethsemani
monastery. However, as revealed in this late quote from Zen, Merton is still striving for the healing of a split (between self and Other) rather than the
dispersal of the illusion of a split
that Wittgenstein is pursuing in his late works.
[1]
Both authors share the distinction of having just as much published after their
deaths as in their lifetimes. As with Wittgenstein, editors have sometimes been
less than transparent about giving their reasons for certain editorial choices.
However this makes studying the posthumous work more challenging and exciting
for the serious research student!
[2] In
similar vein see Tyler 2013.
