The Captured Perspective

Lately, I have thinking a good bit about the relationship between the words we speak and the realities we attempt to describe. Not being a trained philosopher, I am not really interested in delving into whether we can be accurate in describing the look of a chair, or the movement of a small animal; rather, I am interested in understanding the way which this dilemma affects our lived experience with complicated and ambiguous realities. So, before you click onto ESPN.com because of having just witnessed the most boring opening paragraph of a blog post EVER, try staying with me for a bit through two more concrete examples.

Let’s start with something like religion, or really any sort of ideological commitment. This weekend, I listened to an old interview on National Public Radio with the late religious historian Jaroslav Pelikan. Pelikan is famous in history circles for his work on religious creeds, and the way such documents have encapsulated religion traditions over the generations. Specifically, he chronicles the way in which religious creeds in the Christian tradition arose historically (often through argumentation, and making a statement in contrast to another interpretation), and the relationship these have to the faith of the modern believer. This relationship can become a point of existential tension for the modern religion person when there are significant differences in understanding across time. For example, while the writers of the creed had a clear three tiered view of the universe where one can descend into hell, and ascended into heaven, much like “a lift in a small building,” the modern believer (and unbeliever) often finds this notion confusing at best, and implausible at worst. So how does this person reconcile their own personal feelings with the historical nature of creeds that they consider and recite at mass or some religious service? How does one reconcile the personal existential faith of a sunday afternoon with friends and the historical rigid faith of orthodoxy?

Or consider something like love. What does it mean to say you love someone, especially when ‘feelings’ and ‘sentiments’ can be hot and cold, hitting high and low points? Imagine an old married couple and the way their relationship and feelings have changed over the course of their committment. Is love in this relationship infatuation in the same way that it was when they first laid eyes on each other? And is it inauthentic for this couple to say “i love you” when they are frustrated with the personality traits of the person they chose to spend their life with, or upset at a set of actions this person portrayed? Was it inauthentic in earlier times?
In both cases, there is a distinct difference between one’s feeling at specific moments, and the limited supply of words which capture their feelings. What does one do in these situations? The person of faith must either move long in reciting this statement, or they could not state their creed, move away from tradition, and attempt to forge their own existential path forward. Similarly for the couple, they must either state their love and feel the tension, or state the feeling as it is at the moment (“my love is contingent on your being a certain way”).

The interview with Pelikan rang home on this dilemma range true to me for several reasons, but I want to address two in particular. First, sometimes asserting something is more about showing your commitment and belonging to a certain community, or a certain person, than it is about perfectly accurately describing one’s sentiments. So for the person of faith, reciting the creed is not so much as asserting what they think at one specific moment in time (though it could be this), but rather about aligning oneself with a complicated community, deep tradition, and specific way of being, even when there is dissonance. And for the lover, asserting love is about rehashing a commitment, and speaking to something that ideally transcends the conditionality which we most easily fall into when living. In making such statements, we are compelled to moving beyond statements which hedge feeling and belief. This is the ‘absurd‘ at the core of faith for Kierkegaard, a point which one should note does not pull him away from such tradition even given some unorthodox interpretation. On the love front, we resonate with love stories in their assertion of (implausible, improbably, beautiful) statements such as “I will love you no matter how you look someday, or how you change,” even if we struggle with these sentiments ourself. Perhaps we say these things because we believe in the power of language to transform, and its formative role in our own dispositions. The couple grows in love by asserting it. The person grows in faith by aligning himself with a community and an (absurd?) statement of belief.

The second clear take away from Pelikan’s interview is that certain things require an enmeshing in words, no matter how limited that language is. Saint Augustine, at the end of his long treatise on the foundation of the trinity and its relationship to the human soul, states “we have said this, not in order to say something, but in order not to remain all together silent.” Similarly, with love, though it brings up potentially inaccurate connotations at both deep (unconditional commitment) and shallow levels (infatuation), in some ways it is the only way two people can assert their feelings, and assert their commitment. And though there is risk and vulnerability in such statements (what if I am wrong, what if I am not ready, isn’t there something between like and love), they must say something so that they do not remain silent, and that they can forge a path to move forward in vulnerability.

In this way, both situations bespeak to the acute concern of people in our generation of the ‘vulnerability’ and felt ‘inauthenticity’ by a lack of alignment between language and reality. It is a tendency which draws us to the sciences and makes us uncomfortable (or uncertain) with the way in which poetry can speak of truth. This is not to say that when there is enough of a misalignment we shouldn’t move away from such traditions (for the person that loses faith) or such relationships (for the person who falls out of love), but reality is sometimes complicated and thus requires traversing ambiguity, and living with the risks involved even if a lack of perfect correspondence. I think CS Lewis said it best on the role of vulnerability in living and loving in the following quote:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

Language, though limited, is all we have, and as such it stands as the most frightening and beautiful tool we could possibly hold.