But then, when that day loomed near as he grew old and infirm, “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul” suddenly could not fathom the total disbanding of his atomic selfhood, suddenly came to “laugh at what you call dissolution.”
I think she is saying he laughed because he realized something about the whole of who/what we are. Following soon after the stanza in Leaves of Grass about our sharing all our atoms he writes
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
The way I read it he doesn’t so much reject death and with it life as he comes to see it as a whole stretching back through ancestors and on through progeny and through every sort of creature forever. There is no where to go. Day, night. Life, death. The world and our place in it goes on, only that which most sets us apart one from the other comes to an end. If we identify only with these eyes, these finger prints and the biographical features of this lifetime, then indeed we go into oblivion when we die. But I think he realized we are the world and have no where else to go … or somthing like that.
My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
Here is a quote from the final, book length chapter of McGilchrist’s newest book which may help to explain why I am now content to use the word God to describe the something more so many experience.
That awe and wonder are the end as well as the beginning of philosophy is one reason why God may be a better name than just ‘the ground of Being’ for this creative mystery. A phrase like ‘the ground of Being’, too, may have its conventional cultural baggage - in this case its presumed dullness. …
So, providing we remain appropriately skeptical about language, we not only can use a term other than ground of Being, but, it seems to me, we must. Metaphysical argument can take us some of the way, but it deals only with the what, not the how. Even the rather abstract question ‘why should there be anything at all? Is not, after all, just an intellectual puzzle. It is a fundamental question - the fundamental question - for human beings; and we miss the point if we suppose it is a matter for abstract reasoning alone.
In a wonderful passage Schelling writes about how we should prepare ourselves for an understanding of any subject:
First and foremost, any explanation should do justice to what is to be explained, not devalue it, explain it ‘away’, diminish it or mutilate it, simply so as to make it easier to grasp. The question is not ‘what view must we adopt so as to explain the appearances in a way that accords neatly with some philosophy?’, but precisely the opposite: ‘what philosophy do we need if we are to measure up to our object, and be on a par with it?’ It is not how the phenomenon must be turned, twisted, skewed or stunted, if need be, so as to be explicable according to principles which we have already resolved never to go beyond. The question is ‘in what way must we broaden our thinking so as to get a hold on the phenomenon?’
…But he who refuses, for whatever reason, to broaden his thinking in this way should at least be honest enough to count the phenomenon amongst those things (which, when all is said and done, are for all of us plenty enough) that he does not understand; rather than drag it down and degrade it to the level of his own conceptions; and, if he is incapable of raising himself up to the level of the phenomenon, at least to stop short of holding forth about it in wholly inadequate terms.
I am only at the stage of trying to broaden my thinking sufficiently to do justice to the subject. And choosing a traditional term seems more likely to serve than some carefully constructed description that stays within the confines of what I know and understand.
Not sure who originally said this. May just be some random person online but it gets shared around often last several months.
“You cannot be bothered to care for the lives of the small, yet you still curse your own gods when they grant you injustices of similar apathy?”
Basically highlighting humans who just mindlessly kill life like mice or insects because they are considered so far below us yet they get mad when God who we are so far below does not help us.
The problem with words, isn’t it. Even terms like “ground of being” that are intentionally neutral, that attempt to be factually accurate, have picked up significance along the way that don’t communicate what we mean or intend to communicate.
I think what you’ve always talked about here sounds more like “god” or “God” in a very broad sense than any other term or phrase you have used. But in using the term “God” you will also usually be misunderstood to some degree. The problem with words.
At its core, Schelling’s approach (as well as IM’s) to describing phenomena strikes me rather more like worship than philosophy. Obviously, for me, worship is a desirable category to spend time and to use language in. And the experience of working within that category is entirely different from philosophy or theology - or apologetics for that matter. Trying to get to the accurate, neutral, precise understanding of something or someone or something is not at all like connecting with them or it.
(Sorry it has taken me so long to respond. i had begun a reply almost a week ago and lost track of it and time. In spite of my distractedness, I appreciate your insights!)
Looking back I think reading something so densely precise and often bewildering which makes you read and reread, is a good way to force your fast thinking brain to stand down and leave room for better insight to show up.
I don’t see it that way. IM I see as making the general point that the nature of our attention greatly influences what we find or can accept. If you start off certain that energy and material come first you will never be able to understand what God denotes. You cannot fill a cup that is already full. But IM is saying God is not the kind of thing you can hold at arms length and examine critically, though he does take a long apophatic look at what God denotes. There is much more to the chapter but in the end it comes to look as though the apprehension of God is something that can only exist where a person recognizes truths about the limitations of their own deliberations. Reason alone cannot take you there and so analytic philosophy alone is insufficient.
So the nature of God is tied up with our own nature. God cannot exist for us unless we are receptive enough and we could not exist in our fullness or fully appreciate the lives we have without God. But there are no causal chains leading from God to that perception. It is just a potentiality.