Imperfection

Imperfection Imperfection_Interior.indd 1 12-04-10 6:31 PM Cultural Dialectics Series editor: Raphael Foshay The difference between subject and object slices through subject as well as through object. — Theodor Adorno Cultural Dialectics provides an open arena in which to debate questions of culture and dialectic — their practices, their theoretical forms, and their rela- tions to one another and to other spheres and modes of inquiry. Approaches that draw on any of the following are especially encouraged: continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools of cultural theory, deconstruction, gender theory, postcoloniality, and interdisciplinarity. series titles Northern Love: An Exploration of Canadian Masculinity Paul Nonnekes Making Game: An Essay on Hunting, Familiar Things, and the Strangeness of Being Who One Is Peter L. Atkinson Valences of Interdisciplinarity: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy Edited by Raphael Foshay Imperfection Patrick Grant Imperfection_Interior.indd 2 12-04-10 6:31 PM I MPERF E C TION Patrick Grant Imperfection_Interior.indd 3 12-04-10 6:31 PM Copyright © 2012 Patrick Grant Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, ab t5j 3s8 isbn 978-1-926836-75-1 (print) 978-1-926836-76-8 (pdf) 978-1-926836-77-5 (epub) A volume in the Cultural Dialectics series issn 1915-836X (print) 1915-8378 (digital) Cover and interior design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design. Cover image: Lauri Rotko/Folio Images/Getty Images. Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printers. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Grant, Patrick Imperfection / Patrick Grant. (Cultural dialectics, 1915-836x) Includes bibliographical references. Issued also in electronic formats. isbn 978-1-926836-75-1 1. Philosophy — History. 2. Criticism. 3. Imperfection. 4. Self. 5. Philosophical theology. 6. Ethnic conflict — Religious aspects. I. Title. II. Series: Cultural dialectics bd450.g73 2012 128 c2012-901432-x We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (cbf) for our publishing activities. Assistance provided by the Government of Alberta, Alberta Multimedia Development Fund. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution– Noncommercial–No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada: see www.creativecommons. org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons license, please contact AU Press, Athabasca University, at aupress@ athabascau.ca. For Larry Imperfection_Interior.indd 5 12-04-10 6:31 PM Imperfection_Interior.indd 6 12-04-10 6:31 PM Imperfect and full of faults as we are, we’re never justified in stifling the ideal, and what extends into the infinite as if it were no concern of ours. vincent van gogh, May 1883 There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. francis bacon, Of Beauty Imperfection_Interior.indd 7 12-04-10 6:31 PM Imperfection_Interior.indd 8 12-04-10 6:31 PM Contents pre face xi introduction 1 part i Imperfection 1 Plato and the Limits of Idealism 9 2 The Van Gogh Letters: The Art of the Unfinished 17 3 The Trouble with Visions 31 4 Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, and Regressive Inversion 41 5 Osama, Theo, and the Burnt Fool’s Bandaged Finger 49 6 What the Buddha Didn’t Say 57 7 Not So Good News: The Gospel According to Mark 67 part ii Self 8 Immortal Souls and State Executions 79 9 The Eyes Have It: Seeing One’s Self and Others 89 10 The God of Battles and the Irish Dimension of 99 Shakespeare’s Henry V 11 Crucifying Harry: Victims, Scapegoats, and the Northern 107 Ireland Troubles 12 Talking to the Cyclops: On Violence and Self-Destruction 115 13 Doing Nothing About It: Taoism, Selflessness, and 121 Non-Action 14 Cliff Jumpers and Delta Dwellers: On Religious Language 133 and Commitment Imperfection_Interior.indd 9 12-04-10 6:31 PM part iii Freedom 15 Dr. Johnson, Freedom, and the Book of Psalms 143 16 Sex, Society, and Romeo and Juliet 155 17 Cartoons from Denmark and the March of the Zombies 165 18 Vergil and the Almighty Dollar 173 19 Endgame in Sri Lanka: Dharmapala’s Legacy and 183 Rajapaksa’s War 20 Jung and The Secret of the Golden Flower 195 21 Kieslowski’s Red: Fraternity in the Making 205 bibliographical notes 225 Imperfection_Interior.indd 10 12-04-10 6:31 PM Preface This book has developed partly from a retrospective view of other books I have happened to write over the course of an academic career. On the face of it, these books are an eclectic mix, beginning with studies of Renaissance English literature and proceeding by way of inquiries into the scientific revolution, Christian mysticism, literary modernism, the New Testament, the idea of the person, ethnic conflict in Northern Ireland, and Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Although I was aware that these projects were interconnected, I would have been hard pressed to set out explicitly the key values that were (more or less) tacitly at work in the project as a whole. In the following chapters, I revisit several questions raised by these earlier studies, but I do so mainly to clarify what I take to be the key guiding principles and ideas that have been at work throughout and which in turn under- pin a certain view, or assessment, of the human predicament that, for better or worse, we find ourselves sharing. xi Imperfection_Interior.indd 11 12-04-10 6:31 PM patrick grant imperfection In a nutshell, this view, or assessment, can be summarized by the observation that people are imperfect but they have ideas about perfection, and the most interesting and creative things that people do are produced from within this opposition between the ideal and the actual. In itself, this claim is straightforward, but its implications are less so, and are explored in a series of essay-like chapters which have a bearing especially on the present state of the God debate, on modern ethnic conflicts in which religion is a marker of identity, and on the idea of freedom in relation to the uncertainties of personal identity and self-determination. Acknowledgements should go all the way back, but the list would be all but endless. Nonetheless, I would like to single out one par- ticular lodestar that has been there from the beginning. From the first undergraduate essay almost exactly a half-century ago, down to the present volume, Laurence Lerner has, with unfailing goodwill and almost terrifying endurance, been engaged, vigorous, testing, humane, insightful, and difficult to please. It has been a long con- versation; I am the better for it, and, with gratitude, I look forward to keeping it going. Earlier versions of chapters 5, 10, 11, 12, and 14 appeared in Fort- night magazine in February 2005 (no. 433), December 2003 (no. 420), October 2004 (no. 429), December 2002 (no. 409), and September 2004 (no. 415). Chapter 9 draws on materials published in Personal- ism and the Politics of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1996), chap. 4; the remarks on Dharmapala in chapter 19 draw on materials published in Buddhism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka (New York: State Univer- sity of New York Press, 2009), chap. 4. xii Imperfection_Interior.indd 12 12-04-10 6:31 PM Introduction “Only madmen and fools are pleased with themselves: no wise man is good enough for his own satisfaction.” I’m not sure that I entirely agree with this statement by the seventeenth-century philosopher- theologian Benjamin Whichcote, but he puts his finger on a fact about human experience with which I am mainly concerned in the following pages. That is, human beings are distinctive among the creatures because humans can conceive of and aspire to a perfect or ideal good even though they themselves remain imperfect. Whichcote’s wise man understands this and accepts the dispar- ity. By contrast, the madmen and fools suffer from a deluded self- satisfaction that, we can assume, might make them dangerous. As Whichcote’s aphorism suggests, ideas about perfection and about the self are closely bound up with one another. That is, the notion that we are autonomous moral agents develops alongside our acceptance of ideals. Thus, an individual who is committed 1 Imperfection_Interior.indd 1 12-04-10 6:31 PM Introduction to a moral ideal and who fails to live up to it is likely to experience guilt and feel irresponsible. For such a person, the enduring identity of the self over time as the bearer of responsibilities is assumed as self-evident. Whichcote doesn’t mention whether or not guilt and responsibility accompany the wise man’s dissatisfaction with himself, but instead he warns against what for him is a bigger problem: the mad- ness and folly of those who don’t feel dissatisfaction at all because they are sufficiently good already. One step further and we find the madmen and fools entertaining delusions of grandeur — the idea that they are perfect already and can treat others accordingly, play- ing God. Historically, religion has done much to explain and manage rela- tionships between the self and the ideas about perfection to which it aspires and by which it is simultaneously shaped and rebuked. Espe- cially in the main monotheistic traditions emergent from the Middle East, God, who alone is perfect, creates and oversees the human drama, and religion focuses on human experiences of imperfection, responsibility, guilt, and aspiration — experiences within which the sense of individual, autonomous personhood is shaped.

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