Creative Writing In Higher Education
The words “Creative Writing in Higher Education” fill me with dread (angst, disquietude). For the past 7 years, to varying degrees, I have studied creative writing at university level. If there was any consistent philosophy that held together the various modules I studied, it was evidently wasted on me: from the standpoint of a student there was no coherent vision for any of these modules. I have listened to creative students bemoan the courses which they cannot get their heads around and worry about whether they’re doing what they’re meant to be doing. But perhaps that is the point, the significance, the substance of these creative writing modules: that they have no “point”, as such, but instead play roulette with undiscovered talents and ignore them when they make significant headway. And there is a part of me that thinks this whole process insidious and evil: a damning summation of everything wrong with the teaching of creative writing in higher education. But, as Lars Svendsen points out in A Philosophy of Evil, the problem with many theories of evil is that they have a tendency to assume that evil wants to commit harm. (Cf. Natural evil.) And the one-sided nature of this tendency “leads us to lose sight of ourselves” which in itself can be described as evil (Svendsen 87). The whole losing-sight-of-ourselves could be prescribed to the evils committed under both Hitler and the Nazis as well as Stalin and the Communists. Thankfully, the teaching of creative writing in higher education is nothing so serious. And in many ways that is a part of the problem: it is not taken seriously enough.
It’s also a mistake to try and make people take things seriously. What often happens when this is attempted is the people for whom the lesson is being taught start cracking up; because the fact of the matter is that anyone who says they ought to be taken seriously ought not to be taken seriously at all. (E.g. Hitler and Stalin.)
I wish I had the knowhow to explain the manifold contradictions and confusions within my dastardly readings of the current state of the teaching of creative writing in higher education. But I am writing about an allotropic subject, the strengths of which are paradoxicality itself. We can’t speak of philosophical disappointment because that would suggest there was a philosophy to be disappointed with (Critchley 1). So how might I go about describing the nothingness of creative writing in higher education? I am faced with an eddy of ineffectual certitude which means I can’t prove that I have or haven’t lost sight of myself. Therefore, I’m free to say whatever I like.
Alan Watts writes that Nirvana is “the way of life which ensues when clutching at life has come to an end” (50). But writing is merely a part of life; it is an activity. And you would be hard pressed to find writers who spend their whole life writing; because if this was attempted the writing would quickly dry up and there would be nothing to write about. And yet here I am saying that creative writing in higher education ought to be taken more seriously. For a start, what is it about evil that we take so seriously? Some of the worst things in the world have been committed out of the desire to solve “practical problem[s]”; and we’d be right in such circumstances to speak of a moral vacuum being the cause of this sort of evil (Svendsen 163). But there must be something which causes the moral vacuum; and perhaps it is this which is evil, and not the desire to solve practical problems. What I mean by this is that the desire to solve practical problems in the presence of a moral vacuum is more to do with dehumanization than with evil itself. I’m pressed to say we take evil seriously because it exists. But the moment someone says “humanitarian intervention” it becomes difficult to take this argument seriously. After all, the crux of any humanitarian intervention is that of judgement: judging something or someone to be evil, and to take them seriously as a result (Svendsen 225). (And there is also the added problem of what comes out of our-taking-something-seriously-as-evil: NATO’s war in Kosovo, for example, is problematic because their bombing strategy caused more civilian deaths than were necessary (Ibid.).)
So I’m pressed to say that we take creative writing in higher education seriously because we can say it exists with certainty. But the moment someone says “certainty” it becomes difficult to take this argument seriously. Ludwig Wittgenstein writes in On Certainty that the phrase “I know…” can only have meaning in connection with other evidence of my “knowing” (OC 56). I know for a fact that there are creative writing courses at universities. And I know for a fact that I have taught a seminar on creative writing. But what I don’t know is what the exercise and process of writing actually consists of. This is extremely irresponsible because I ought to know this if I’m teaching seminars on it; not to mention hundreds of other creative writing lecturers. It may be true that we can be “bewitched” by a word like “knowing” (OC 57). But there’s also the more important matter of being able to complete an action and to then show this action to someone else. The transmitting of what we call knowledge is difficult in the teaching of creative writing because I don’t think we’re entirely sure what ought to be transmitted. What is there to be transmitted to another person about what is evil in the world? We can try explaining to someone how evil draws an “enthusiastic crowd” all we like; but this person won’t understand the power of evil until something evil happens to them (Svendsen 104). This is the awful truth about the sun: you don’t know it’s painful until you look at it. There is a lesson to be learned with the sun example, but there’s no lesson to be learned about the evil of murder when you’re the one who’s been murdered. Whatever lesson there is to learn in the case of moral evil must be left to the surly judge and the well-paid lawyer (Svendsen 83). What’s more, we can’t transplant this notion to creative writing in higher education for the simple reason that in the case of writing a novel I take the place of the murderer and not the victim. It’s not surprising that many look upon writing as intellectual onanism; writing is something one does to oneself. Therefore, we can only imagine lessons being learnt from those people who read the writing I produce. And since I can’t get inside their heads any more than I can get inside the head of someone who has been murdered, I’m left in the unfortunate position of non-Nirvana.
*
I said that when I started writing under the title “Creative Writing in Higher Education” I shuddered and shook and struggled to form a coherent argument. But there’s another feeling I get which is at once humorous as well as damning: I feel incredibly bored when I task myself with investigating the teaching of creative writing in higher education because I’m aware that the humanities thrive on wrongness and not rightness. It’s because of this that Wittgenstein says in his Philosophical Investigations that if someone were to advance theses in philosophy there’d be no debate because everyone would agree to them (PI 56). And yet I would like to encourage debate; because without debate and being wrong there can be nothing educational. It’s for this same reason that living and being alive is not educational; life and death are states and there is nothing innately educational about either. (The existence of natural evil proves that much.) And I’m inclined to say from experience that when there is nothing educational going on in a university seminar, I get bored. We have once again crashed into the innate paradoxicality of creative writing in higher education: I should like to teach students about writing, but in my doing so I would be proving that there was nothing to be taught.
Lars Svendsen writes in A Philosophy of Boredom that anthropocentrism gave rise to boredom (88); and I would add to this that boredom gave rise to the writer. But I think writing is something which happens when I feel bored and not when I’m faced with something that is boring (108). I don’t think it’s possible for Angela Carter’s work to be innately boring. It’s a fact that people admire her work; and I know they don’t do this because it’s boring. I have to reach the conclusion, then, that the boredom is within me; that my boredom is a personal reaction to everything and nothing. But I am “unaware of being attuned in [any] particular way” (113). And so it’s possible for me to be bored without knowing why in the same way that it’s possible for me to write without knowing what caused that writing to appear. There’s no recourse for causation in the exercise and process of writing. In existentialism meaning is left to the individual. And because of this, all meaning is completely arbitrary (79). I believe that creative writing in higher education is the great inheritor of this philosophical mode. Take for example what Norman Mailer has to say in his Academy Class on YouTube about the difference between fiction and non-fiction, a common quandary for the creative writing lecturer:
I look at good fiction as much more true to life than non-fiction for one simple reason: non-fiction’s almost always written to a deadline [.] It spoils everything if you don’t deliver it on time because one of the assumptions that’s almost always made in non-fiction writing for 99 per cent of it […] is that you’re part of a living context in which this non-fictional book will have a say.
Mailer’s comments go to great lengths to prevent that very existential boredom from encroaching on the exercise and process of writing. It is a perfect example of how within the existential mode we “seek all sorts of meaning-substitutes, always embracing something new so as to create the illusion of meaning” (Svendsen 79). Mailer’s comments are a postponement of the inevitable boredom the writer succumbs to when they accept that there is nothing that can’t be explained about the exercise and process of writing in five minutes. But there is something restraining about being right; and so the meaning-crisis of boredom is intertwined with the pursuit of liberation and, we can assume, happiness (79). Boredom and existentialism is fine when I’m alone with my word document. But if I’m tasked with teaching creative writing in higher education this emphasis on meaning-substitutes and meaning-crises which inevitably result in private meaning will be of little use to a group of students with whom I wish to share universals. There is no universalism in existentialism; that’s what makes it so fantastically dangerous. But I don’t want to be prescriptive either because at the other end of these extremes we have George Orwell.
George Orwell is someone who embraced that existential boredom about the exercise and process of writing. He did not look upon it as something mystical or strange; rather, he offered six elementary rules for the exercise and process of writing which leap so scarily towards thought-control that one cannot help but think he was being purposefully ironic in creating such a list (Ricks 184). And yet Orwell made the argument that “bad writing” (e.g. the Conservative Party manifesto) was bad on purpose (Ricks 185). He had an aversion to writing which “disguised what was happening”. But he does not seem to take into account how in Soviet Russia (and Tsarist Russia) the majority of fiction was “resistance literature” written by progressive individuals “in a repressive culture, under constant threat of censorship, in a time when a writer's politics could lead to exile, imprisonment, and execution” (Saunders 2). A writer like Andrey Platonov would have had no choice but to disguise his writing as pro-State when it was anything but; and I see no reason to distinguish between this kind of linguistic camouflage and the kind seen in the Conservative Party manifesto—apart from intent, of course. So with regards to the teaching of creative writing in higher education the rule-book model is just as dangerous as the pursue-your-own-meaning model.
*
I said that boredom and existentialism were fine when I was alone with my word document—cut off from other human beings, the exercise and process of writing is a ten-finger exercise—but that loneliness experienced so often by writers is part and parcel of the difficulty in teaching creative writing at university-level. It is like trying to teach how the void has no inside or outside (Hsiu 108); it is simply something you accept prior to undertaking the exercise and process of writing. But there is a difference between being alone and being lonely; and perhaps I am hasty in saying that all writers suffer from loneliness. But the pervading factor of loneliness Lars Svendsen sets out in A Philosophy of Loneliness is that you can be alone “in a crowd or at home” (Svendsen 9). There is no correspondence between loneliness and the number of beings around you. What I mean to say is that when you represent the world through a piece of writing, there is a high chance of your being lonely because of the detachment needed for the exercise and process of writing to take place.
It seems straightforward to me that I ought to be alone when I write; whether or not I have sufficient grounds on which to convince a student of this is another matter. It may strike the student as ridiculous to deny the existence of Napoleon, for example; whereas denying that she ought to be alone when she writes would be straightforward (OC 26). Then there is the more important question: whether I ought to be lonely when I write; and whether loneliness actually improves my writing. After all, the pain of loneliness is encapsulated in the relationship between insufficient acknowledgement and overly high expectations (Svendsen 134). And I think there is a great deal of insufficient acknowledgement present in the mind of the writer because the exercise and process of writing can only represent so many things at once. There’ll be a plethora of unrepresented things at the end of each and any writing exercise; even those writings that George Orwell would have referred to as “bad writing”. And as though I were teaching mathematics, I will never start the exercise and process of writing by stating that I know with certainty what I’m going to represent as well as what I’m not going to represent (OC 17). As for overly high expectations, I speak from experience when I say that that is the only thing standing between me and deciding to become a chicken farmer. And you cannot explain the need for overly high expectations to a creative writing student because you are doing so outside of the exercise and process of writing. The fact that Aldous Huxley envisioned a future based on pleasure and that George Orwell envisioned a future based on pain is irrelevant (Ricks 257). What matters is that both writers had overly high expectations for their work, and that it was this that carried them through the exercise and process of writing. What they were representing in their writing was almost matter of fact compared to the solitary state both writers had to undertake in order for those books to appear, because in order for either of them to think they were any good, they had to make themselves solitary: cut themselves off from the world which is populated by writers of totemic qualities who strike the fear of inadequacy into every writer.
But like evil, we have a habit of forming a purely negative conception of loneliness. I would term loneliness as simply being aware of my being alone, and not liking it. But that is not to say I cannot turn loneliness into a positive force. It is the fact that I’m afraid to forget my mind which makes me retain my negative (dualistic) conception of loneliness; and I am afraid to “fall through the void with nothing” to stay my fall despite the fact that this, as far as Huang Po is concerned, is “the realm of the real Dharma” (41): a veritable and sudden awareness of self (34). But I have a tendency to embrace a “broad conception of loneliness” which disallows me from separating out the most severely affected by loneliness (Svendsen 48). And I can’t help but think that when I engage with a student of mine this is the conception of loneliness I will use. Perhaps I am doomed as a human being to be enslaved to the broad conceptions of loneliness and of evil. And that between these two emotions is an existential boredom which prevents me from leaping into the world of Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller 2015) with glee and abandon. But these are merely emotional habits which are the result of feelings I have cultivated. And by altering my evaluations, I can alter my emotions (Svendsen 46). The reason why this is important to the teaching of creative writing in higher education is because the alteration of one’s emotions cannot be a part of any university’s code. And with the maturation of creative writing into a serious academic discipline there is a temptation to make the prescribed alteration of emotions by the university the better part of the student’s creative writing degree. There are pervading and developing dangers in every discipline; and emotion-control is the most likely to be exercised in the teaching of creative writing in higher education. Thus, loneliness is essential for the preservation of emotional freedom on creative writing courses and should not be tampered beyond our self-identities which already are anchored to others’ (Svendsen 90).
There is a scene in Philip K. Dick’s criminally underrated first novel in which a representative from the Chinese People’s Political Consultive Conference called Harry Liu visits an American factory which is about to be handed over to the new Communist regime (305). American Verne Tildon picks an ideological fight with Liu and accuses the Chinese population of being little more than slaves to the new religion of Communism. He goes on to ask Liu if he wants to “keep them from growing up and learning the truth about things”. Liu smiles and says: “Are we doing that? Perhaps.” (311). This is not unlike Svendsen’s reading of three high-ranking Nazis (Adolf Eichmann, Rudolf Höss and Franz Stangl) in A Philosophy of Evil. What is noteworthy, he says, is that all three men seem to be incredibly self-centered and do not care about their victims. Then he makes an insightful comment: “Their dedication to their work demonstrated a clear belief in the value of their labours—but we must then ask: What value could anyone possibly find in such monstrosities?” (161). The dilemma in Gather Yourselves Together is that the Communists (Liu) see no value in the monstrosities of Western life, and that the Westerners (Tildon) see no value in the monstrosities of Communist life. And the remarkable thing is that people like Harry Liu and Adolf Eichmann are able to demonstrate “a clear belief in the value of their labours” in the same way that I am able to demonstrate through this essay how important creative writing in higher education is to me. But what I am working towards is a scenario where the teaching of creative writing in higher education is something evil; and we’re able to ask those who either teach or study creative writing how they’re capable of finding value in it.
It is one thing to explain the problem of evil as being made up of three evils (Moral, Natural and the kind of evil where there seems to be a disproportion between virtue and happiness in the world) and another to approach evil from the standpoint of Zen thinking (Mautner 205). Huang Po states that both good and evil arise from an attachment to form: there is “toil and privation” in doing good and a risk of undergoing unnecessary “incarnations” in doing evil (Hsiu 34). In short this means you’re better off achieving the aforementioned realization of self than you are doing either good or evil. Alan Watts tries to elaborate on this in The Way of Zen and in doing so writes something which fits nicely with the type of evil I would envision creative writing to be. Because the world is “necessarily a world of opposites” it is inconceivable to think about light without darkness and in other words “every drama must have its villain” (Watts 35). The late books of Philip K. Dick (e.g. VALIS) played with this idea: they were creative books inasmuch as they were religious books. There is a potent cynicism about the infinite in these books; but from the “divine standpoint” eternity has “all the fascination of the repetitious games of children” and should be seen as being a “single wondrous instant” and not some endless cynical timeline (Watts 35). But in a world where people like Eichmann have existed it’s easy to see why people might think Zen is evil. The description of nihilism as being a “significant denial” could be used to describe Zen (Mautner 427); I say this because early Indian philosophy (out of which Zen emerged) “concentrates on negation [and] liberating the mind from concepts of Truth” (Watts 37). And I think creative writing is negation as much as affirmation. I affirm the world’s existence by nature of writing down what I see, but I also negate the world by re-writing things and people to suit my stories. Therefore, creative writing’s evil may arise out of its ostensible neutrality.
At the beginning of this essay, I said that when I start writing under the title “Creative Writing in Higher Education” I shudder and shake and struggle to form a coherent argument. I went on to suggest that perhaps what was evil about creative writing in education was having to discuss it using dualistic terminology. Perhaps Huang Po is right when he says: “When the true nature of all things that ‘exist’ is an identical Thusness, how can such distinctions have any reality?” (109). The point—and the risk—is that it is impossible to bracket creative writing from evil any more than one can bracket evil from good because it is this which leads us to lose sight of ourselves (Svendsen 87). And in the same way that Svendsen concludes that only those who can be guilty can also be innocent (196), I myself must conclude that only activities like writing that are innocent can also be guilty[GB5] . Much of what has been written about writing is wrong. And much of what is said in creative writing seminars cannot be proven. But if I set out to prove things with the aid of the exercise and process of writing I will never be satisfied. (And, in fact, I think satisfaction is evil.) There is not much to conclude because not much has been said. “But all people fail at some point,” writes Svendsen in A Philosophy of Evil; and we are caught between that and innocence by design (196).
+ Sceptical Interruptions
In geometry infinity is regarded as a location; for example, parallel lines can be said to intersect at an infinite point (Nelson 231). But does scepticism constitute a kind of geometry of its own? Where intellectual lines and shapes coexist? What’s more, is it possible to even begin to be sceptical? Or is scepticism constant like a pair of static parallel lines in the ether?
There’s a case to be made that Ludwig Wittgenstein was always sceptical. The fact that he considered himself engaged to be married to Marguerite Respinger suggests that he was sceptical even about his own homosexuality (Monk 258). Life is not always in a state of progress, but when it is I’m questioning things; I challenge my reality. Thus, it makes sense to describe this as a kind of sceptical interruption in the otherwise blind stream of living.
A “permanent” sceptical interruption must equate to a sceptical life, one where nothing can ever be what it seems, or proven to be what it is not—yet at the end of Wittgenstein’s life, as he lay dying of cancer, he said he’d had a wonderful life (Monk 579). There are things that warrant our investigation whilst others don’t—I don’t think, as Wittgenstein does, that a child learns that when she is young; rather, I believe this to be an ongoing process. I can’t judge whether a cupboard is real or just a stage set if I’ve naught but certainty because my scepticism ended in my twenties (OC 62). But the process of scepticism is renewed like daylight; and its permanence, perhaps, is merely a blueprint or an ideal. Thus this permanent sceptical interruption I speak of is something which can only be sought—because it is the seeking itself that is scepticism. But like Buddhism, it’s heretical (another word for unorthodox) to expect something outside this world (Suzuki 103). There’s no higher authority which tells me when I don’t know the truth so it’s impossible for my eyes to be forcibly opened (OC 76). But I must be willing to do so and accept the fact that I may not like what I see.
Wittgenstein writes in the Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus that the world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man (TLP 87). Therefore, a sceptical interruption is something we first impose on ourselves and then upon the world. To do this I have to know when to impose scepticism. I’m inclined to say it’s possible to start being sceptical as my life is not infinite. But it’s difficult to find the beginning. And it’s difficult to begin at the beginning and “not try to go further back” (OC 62). These two points Wittgenstein makes in On Certainty mean two things:
(1.) He does away with the geometric idea that life is a straight line because it has two points (Nelson 136). After all, if life was a straight line defined by two points, I’d not only be able to point at the beginning and the end; I’d also be able to engage in segmentation and suggest smaller beginnings and trace them back to the originary one.
(2.) What he says shows that I can’t think of life as a system of dynamic programming: a method of solving problems of optimization in which the most effective route can be deduced and taken (Nelson 137). Nor can I work backwards through dynamic programming behind the beginning because I’d be working towards it all the time. Like solitude, scepticism has more in common with a state than a route. Routes have order so they begin and they end. But it’s hard to say where one state ends and another state begins (and vice versa). For example, the main requirement for scepticism is solitude, but solitude is also the main by-product of scepticism.
But first I need to sketch out the negative form of solitude: Lars Svendsen writes that loneliness shouldn’t be thought of as a disease (33); and although I’m responsible for managing loneliness when it appears I can’t control when it appears (47). There’s also the idea that lonely people are “socially over-sensitive, and that this sensitivity hinders [their] social participation” (61). But I have to understand that by shutting others out I’m also shutting myself in (71). There’s another aspect to this, however, and one of the themes of A Philosophy of Loneliness is there is as much a positive side to loneliness as there is to scepticism. This positive form of loneliness can be known as solitude: and solitude is something which provides freedom from outside demands and generates an inner space where I can think (Svendsen 111). Solitude and scepticism are of a piece because they basically perform the same function. And given both are required for any sceptical interruption it will be helpful to use the same geometric metaphor for both. Just to clarify, however, I don’t think sceptical interruptions are geometric things in a literal sense. I don’t think sceptical interruptions can be used to understand better the “properties of space and of figures in space” (Nelson 194). But I’d be wrong to claim that sceptical interruptions couldn’t be sketched via geometry in the same way that living things are represented through paint and through clay.
Let’s begin at the beginning, then, and try to avoid “indubitable truths” (OC 62). I’m going to use fractals as my metaphor: fractals are geometric objects which have fractional dimension, in other words, their dimensions are composed of smaller identical components. The example usually given for fractals is that of a snowflake curve: a shape whose dimensions are self-similar because they’ve been generated by an infinitely repeated process (Nelson 177). In keeping with the manifold applications of these fractal curves in the realms of urban growth and of crystal formation, I’m going to imagine what would happen if instead of infinite generations of self-similar dimension the whole process was headed the other direction, in other words, a finite degeneration whose end was defined by a single equilateral triangle (Nelson 408). For the sake of our argument, this single equilateral triangle is the geometric stand-in for our solitude and scepticism (and sceptical interruptions by extension).
With that in mind, is scepticism a rejection of replication? It’s conceivable that I know the world “existed long before my birth” and that there are books detailing this (OC 37). I have no grounds for doubting this but if someone were to ask me whether I knew with certainty I’d have to answer in the negative. It’s not just that I believe the planet has history before my birth; I see other people believing this and “I believe that they believe it”; and I replicate their belief (OC 38). So, if I were to engage in a sceptical interruption I’d be doing away with what other people thought to be the case. But I can also say my doubt is hollow; except it’s no more hollow than believing in history (OC 40). Except if I spend my time debating internally whether my suspicions are rational or not, I doubt my sceptical interruption will be doing away with replicated convictions as it should be. (Because it must have a use, mustn’t it?)
Concerning solitude, I must now differentiate between replication and self-similarity. I may not be able to literally become Cardinal Wolsey but what I can do is adopt his theological convictions. So if scepticism rejects replication, does solitude reject self-similarity? I don’t see other people as random objects but as beings who use the same methods I’m using to perceive the world; and because of this my life will always consist of “being-with” if I leave it uninterrupted (Svendsen 122). It’s precisely because my inner world is affected by being the object of other people’s gazes that when I do engage in a sceptical interruption it’s something like an out-of-body feeling. Wittgenstein writes that a schoolboy believes his teachers and his schoolbooks, but what does that moment consist of where he suddenly doubts both and believes neither (OC 34)? I don’t think it’s the case that if I lack a “rich, inner life” I’ll find it difficult to abandon myself to solitude (Svendsen 127). I believe that Othello, for example, despite the richness of his inner life, has solitude thrust upon him by the dishonest Iago when the latter claims his wife, Desdemona, has been unfaithful to him. Othello subsequently bids farewell to “the tranquil mind” and says his “occupation’s gone” (Shakespeare 70, Act 3 Scene 3). (Although the difference between naïvety and purity in the character of Othello is up for interpretation.) Regardless I can argue Othello, after Iago’s input, spurns self-similarity from that point onwards and becomes solitary to the point of insanity. He abandons himself to solitude; and what difference does it make if he gets a little help?
Summing up what’s been said: my scepticism rejects the replication of other people’s belief; and my solitude rejects self-similarity between myself and whomever I wish to be similar to. This, then, is a kind of equation for sceptical interruptions. But it’s not so hard to describe what a sceptical interruption is; instead, the hard part is pinpointing when to use such a state. This query is not unlike one proffered by On Certainty where Wittgenstein argues the importance of imagining a language in which my concept of “knowledge” does not exist (OC 74). But when do I imagine such a language? Why do I imagine such a language? What happens after I’ve done the imagining in a train station and get arrested for looking suspicious?
Taking this one step further, for those of us that do, when do we imagine such a God? Why do we imagine such a God? What happens after we’ve done the imagining—and yet cling still to the possibility of there being a God, when if what was at stake was an imaginary language we would’ve given up imagining a long time ago? (Very quickly: I don’t think it’s unfair to say that some of the most religious people on the planet are the least imaginative. And equally some of the most imaginative people are incapable of believing in anything except themselves. So there is a stark difference between imagination and believing.) The more pressing question, however, is can I undertake either the imagining of a God or the imagining of a language when I’ve committed myself to a path of sceptical interruption and solitude?
Alan Watts describes karma as “arising from a motive and seeking a result”; there’s good karma and bad karma, but all karma is “self-frustration” (49) and ought to be ended by the attainment of nirvana (50). What’s noteworthy is that this is precisely what a permanent sceptical interruption ought to be: an enlightenment where “no acquisition and no motivation are involved” because the whole state is one without intention and spontaneous (51). Then there is this fascinating passage by Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki: “You may think Buddha attained some stage where he was free from karmic life, but it is not so. Many stories were told by Buddha about his experiences after he attained enlightenment. He was not at all different from us” (101). So the Buddha had as much at stake with motive and seeking results after he’d attained enlightenment as I would with replication and self-similarity were I to commit myself to sceptical interruption. In both cases there are paradoxes. Nirvana by definition has no place for karma; and sceptical interruption by definition has no place for replication and self-similarity. And like the snowflake-curve, the aforementioned paradoxes are like a single equilateral triangle existing simultaneously alongside the exponential shape it generated—because this is without a doubt the case. The originary shape does not cease to exist. It begins the process of self-similarity but remains at the centre of the ongoing process. I could say the same for those things which lay at the starting line of enlightenment and of sceptical interruption, namely karma, and replication and self-similarity.
Wittgenstein writes that the “truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements” (OC 12). But if I write that fractals don’t need to justify themselves any more than the universe does, how do I check for faults in my understanding? For the logician, and for those people who purport to think logically, we’ve arrived at the point of nonsense—but as far as Watts is concerned, nonsense (e.g. a paradox) is a thing which illustrates how, for example, fractals and the universe are not signs pointing towards something beyond (Watts 146). Wittgenstein says as much when he writes that pointing at a game and saying it’s always been played wrong has no meaning (OC 65). In which case paradoxes are essential markers of existence; and things which are perhaps easier to recognize in solitude than when amongst thousands of others in concurrent states of “being-with” (Svendsen 122). This is why scepticism must be renewed like daylight; and why it is my seeking of a sceptical interruption—and not the interruption itself—which is truly sceptical.
I asked at the beginning whether scepticism was a kind of geometry where intellectual lines and shapes coexisted. What’s so reliable about a straight line is how it’s a curve which is completely determined by its two points (Nelson 266). But as we saw in our discussion of routes and states, it’s difficult to say where one state ends and where another state begins. (But this does not mean the state is nonexistent.) Now as to the existence of my sceptical state I’d argue that my previous experience is the cause of my present certitude; but this certitude, Wittgenstein posits, cannot be the grounds on which I know my sceptical states exist; or that I act upon them in certain ways (OC 56). So, any comparison with geometry here is quite useless because to do so excludes my failing to see infinity as anything but a location. Which naturally begs the question: If not a location, then what?
A. Tanesini concludes Wittgenstein: A Feminist Interpretation by saying the agnostic citizen is not a responsible one (138). So perhaps what is preventing my regarding infinity as being anything else but a location is my own scepticism, which, on occasion, rears its agnostic head. Because where “nowhere” persists there can only be responsibility and the individual capable of imagining infinity in the first place.
REFERENCES
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