Learning to Speak Christian. Stanley Hauerwas
twentieth-century moral philosophers who saw cultural relativism as an argument for tolerance, Nazi theorists drew the opposite conclusion. Assuming that cultural diversity breeds antagonism, they asserted the superiority of their own communitarian values above all others.57
I suspect many will find my judgment that Augustine provides how Christians should think about evil far too close to what Koontz describes as the Nazi exaltation of their particular community’s values. We, that is, we who are modern, think the only way to defeat the kind of evil we associate with the Nazis is to have at our disposal a universal ethic, that is, an ethic on which all agree. Christians are often thought to represent such an ethic. However, Augustine thought that virtue and vice were correlative to a particular community. According to Augustine, God’s law is a law for anyone, but he also thought that law would differ from age to age and place to place. “What may be done at one time of day is not allowed at the next, and what may be done, or must be done, in one room is forbidden and punished in another. This does not mean that justice is erratic or variable, but that the times over which it presides are not always the same, for it is the nature of time to change.”58 The variable character of ethics does not mean justice is arbitrary, but Augustine argued that for justice to be rightly understood requires the right worship of the true God.59 Absent that worship, Augustine assumes that there can be no alternative to what we know as “relativism” or what James Edwards calls “normal nihilism.”60
Does the loss of common worship mean, however, that there is no alternative, that there is no defense, against the “Nazi conscience”?61 I do not think such a conclusion follows, but such an alternative will depend on whether communities exist capable of discerning their own propensities for the evil so often done in the name of good.62 It would be tempting to put Christians on the side of those who advocate “universal moral values” as a bulwark against “relativism.” That strategy, however, fails to see that “relativism” is the creation of the assumption that “universal values” can be known apart from formation in a community capable of recognizing the evil it does in the name of those same “values.” Ironically, too often, as I suggested above, those who try to sustain accounts of morality in the language of universal rights or values are but secular versions of Constantinian Christians, pridefully assuming they know what is wrong with the world. That such is the case should not be surprising because the philosophical developments that gave original impetus to these now widespread political movements intended if possible to defeat or replace Christianity in the name of the human or, failing that, at least to render Christian convictions at best “private” having no role for the public discernment of evil or good.
But if we cannot rely on “universal values” does that not mean we live in a very dangerous world? That is exactly what it means. That world, moreover, has been made all the more dangerous by attempts to save the world from danger by appealing to “universal values” that result in justifications to coerce those who do not share what some consider universal. If Christians have any contribution to make for helping us survive the world as we know it, it is because God has “brought us low,” forcing humility on us by humiliation. Such humility hopefully might help Christians refrain from identifying or comforting themselves with the sentimentalities of reigning humanisms. Christians do not believe in the “human.” Christians believe in a God who requires we be able to recognize as well as confess our sins. Exactly because Christians are in lifelong training necessary to be a sinner, it is our hope that we might be able to discern the evil that so often is expressed in idealistic terms. So what Christians have to offer is not an explanation of evil, but rather a story, and a community formed by that story, that we believe saves us from the idols of the world. That I think is what Augustine might say today.63
3
Disciplined Seeing:
Forms of Christianity and Forms of Life1
with BRIAN GOLDSTONE
On How One Sees Things
“To work at seeing the world as though one were seeing it for the first time is to get rid of the conventional and routine vision we have of things, to discover a brute, naïve vision of reality, to take note of the splendor of the world, which habitually escapes us.”2 If Pierre Hadot’s meticulous, often poignant reconstructions of the philosophical traditions of antiquity have taught us nothing else, it is that there was a time when what it meant to be a philosopher was to set oneself on the course of becoming a certain type of person. Beset with a kind of blindness, stemming above all from our unregulated desires and exaggerated fears, philosophy’s charge was fundamentally that of a reeducation of the senses that would effect a “profound transformation of the individual’s manner of seeing and being,” a metamorphosis of personality and a thoroughgoing renovation of one’s mode of existence. The ensemble of techniques deployed in this learning to live, the array of practices that unequivocally situated the philosophical act not merely on the terrain of theory and cognition but in the formation of a concrete attitude and a determinate lifestyle—these habits Hadot refers to as “spiritual exercises,” and they show us, he asserts, that philosophy at its inception constituted more than a specific way of life; it constituted, necessarily, a therapeutics as well.
So it comes as little surprise that Hadot would discern in Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose writings he was among the earliest French intellectuals to discover (and in reference to whom, incidentally, he would first use the term spiritual exercises), a modern articulation of a decidedly premodern view of philosophy’s curative function—even if, as Hadot rightly points out, Wittgenstein believed that “the true philosophy would consist in curing itself of philosophy, in making every philosophical problem completely and definitively disappear.”3 For like Hadot and the tradition he elucidates, Wittgenstein’s therapeutics were directed at the recovery of a distinctive mode of looking—as in his famous injunction “To repeat: don’t think, but look!”4—where looking at the world means to see it differently, that is, naturally, in all its “splendor . . . which habitually escapes us.” Or in a note written on October 14, 1931: “Work on philosophy—like work in architecture in many respects—is really more work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On how one sees things. (And what one expects of them.)”5
Far from insinuating a retreat from the ordinary, Wittgenstein believed that the cultivation of a particular manner of seeing—here associated with the therapeutic “work” of a certain kind of philosophical training—might rather provide the conditions for our finally acknowledging the strangeness, the beauty, even the terror of it.
The wonder correlative of this acknowledgement is an experience that suffuses the whole of Wittgenstein’s output.6 But it is the shifting status or character of that wonder, as he moves from the Tractatus to his Investigations, that most clearly evinces the implications of its eclipse by our desire for explanation. Hence the loci of wonderment in his later philosophy are “small, local, various, and mundane” and reside in such commonplaces as this gesture or that flower blossoming—a wonder, in other words, not at the existence of the world as such but at the “amazingly intricate ways in which we are interwoven with it.”7 And yet, Wittgenstein seems to say, it is precisely this practice of seeing that becomes less and less tenable as we progressively, habitually, coast through the calculable currents of our modernity. Thus Wittgenstein writes in his journals from 1947, collected in Culture and Value, of a person who “might admire not only real trees, but also the shadows or reflections they cast, taking them too for trees. But once he has told himself that these are not really trees after all and has come to be puzzled at what they are, or at how they are related to trees, his admiration [bewunderung] will have suffered a rupture that will need healing.”8 Note that it is not puzzlement per se that is at issue here; rather, it is that kind of puzzlement whose incapacity to sustain awe in the face of, say, a tree’s shadow betrays a style of “thinking” (or what Wittgenstein will otherwise refer to as a “scientific” or “causal” perspective) that searches for and invariably uncovers systematicity beneath the rough surface of things, and in whose characteristic pronouncement—“Of course, it had to happen like that”—lies the truth