It would be an exaggeration to say that the three words that introduce the second part of this book contain the whole of philosophy. But it would not be far from the truth. Philosophy arises from reflecting upon reason, consciousness and being – the three ideas expressed in turn by ‘therefore’, ‘I’ and ‘am’.
It is often the little words, the unobtrusive nuts and bolts of syntax, that conceal the deepest philosophical problems. Bertrand Russell set English-speaking philosophy on its modern path with an article devoted to ‘the’ – a word that does not have its equivalent in everyone’s language, and which makes no sense, when standing alone, in ours. Russell’s article expounded his celebrated ‘theory of descriptions’; it was the beginning of ‘analytical’ philosophy, laid the foundations for logical atomism and logical positivism and was the first of many blows struck against the ancient practice of metaphysics by the iconoclasts of Cambridge.
Consider ‘therefore’. What more useful word than this one, which makes connections without which we could not negotiate our days? But what does it mean? And does it have any single or settled meaning? Wine vividly reminds us that thoughts may be connected by association, even if not by logic. ‘He is a man and therefore a human being’ is logically impeccable, and shows ‘therefore’ on its best behaviour. ‘He is a man, and therefore a house, an income, a protector’ may very well enter the mind of the woman whose glass he has just filled; but it shows ‘therefore’ in less respectable guise. This is not logic, but speculation – to be criticized not logically but morally.
In all its normal uses, the word ‘therefore’ goes hand in hand with ‘why?’: it answers our need for a reasoned account of things, by showing that there is either a cause or a reason for their being as they are. Causes should be distinguished from reasons: causes explain, reasons justify. But both are expressed in terms of ‘why?’ and ‘therefore’. Moreover, reasons are of many kinds: some logical, some practical; some compelling their conclusion, others only inviting it. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the deep differences, in normal discourse the word ‘therefore’ links things in consecutive ways, drawing on laws, conventions and expectations that are the common property of the speakers. It exerts a controlling force over what we say – implying that the things it connects are either joined by nature or linked by rational argument. And rational beings are, by definition, beings who understand and take advantage of connections made in that way.
Rational beings live in another world from the non-rational animals – a world of laws and times and plans and goals. They also live in another way – with intentions as well as desires, convictions as well as beliefs, values as well as needs, happiness as well as pleasure. Their emotions are not to be understood as animal emotions are understood, in terms of appetite and aversion, since they involve judgement, reflection and a concept of self and other. Rational beings experience remorse, guilt, and shame as well as hostility and fear. They find their fulfilment in love, duty, aesthetic contemplation and prayer. And all this is reflected in their appearance. Unlike animals they smile – and ‘smiles from reason flow/ To brute denied, and are of love the food’, as Milton expresses it. As I pointed out in discussing Greek wine and eros, rational beings do not merely look at things, they look into things, as lovers look into each other’s eyes; they reveal their inner thoughts in frowns and blushes, and their gestures shine with the soul within. Their relations are informed by a conception of good and evil, right and duty, and they approach each other as unique individuals who demand recognition for their own sakes and not merely as instruments for some purpose that is not their own. All this and more is what we mean, or ought to mean, when we refer to them as persons.
Even in the sphere of thought rationality manifests itself in ways that defy the laws of reasoning. Our ‘therefores’ dance along imaginary roads like the followers of Bacchus, strewing flowers about them and linking ideas like pearls on a string. Here, however, a word of caution. The experience of one thing may lead us to think of another, in two quite different ways. Suppose I am looking at a landscape by Francesco Guardi, in which little houses with flaking yellow stucco nestle beside a dusty roadway in the light of a setting sun. And suppose this leads me to recall a walking holiday in Calabria, the old houses along the roadway, the flavour of the dusty air at sundown, the touch of my companion’s hand when she stopped suddenly in the roadway and said that peculiar thing, and what I might have said to her, but didn’t by way of a reply … Here my looking at the pigment-spattered canvas leads me to two quite different collections of ideas. On the one hand I am led to imagine houses with flaking stucco by a dusty road, in Guardi’s inimitable sunset style, so full of the sense of time’s passing and the consolations of decay. On the other hand I am set off on a reverie of my own, for which Guardi can claim no special credit, and which leads me through memories of sights, smells and sensations, and through imagined episodes and things that I might have said but didn’t. The first collection of thoughts refers to things that I see in the canvas – things which form part of the intentional object of my experience and which belong to it intrinsically. The second collection concerns associations with the picture – not things that I see in the picture, but things that I imagine by means of it.
The distinction here is of particular relevance to the understanding of wine. It is often said that, while the senses of sight and hearing admit of double intentionality – so that I can see or hear in x what x itself can neither contain nor be – the senses of taste and smell act only by the association of ideas. Thus when, in Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel finds that the taste of a madeleine brings back the memories and imaginings of a lifetime, these are merely associations of the taste, and not features of it. He does not taste the past in the madeleine, as I see the houses in the picture or hear the sadness in the song.
Whether that is exactly so, and whether wine operates on the imagination only in the way of Proust’s madeleine, are questions to which I return in the next chapter. But already we see that there are two quite different phenomena here. Imagination may lead us along a path of dreams and associations, transforming our thoughts in response to some perception; or it may focus on the presented object, transforming our perception in response to our thoughts. Just where wine is situated between these two exercises of our imaginative powers is one of the deep questions that all winos must ask, if they are to understand their dear companion. Is wine like daydreams or like art? Does it point inwards to our subjective impressions and memories, or outwards to the world – bringing order as Tintoretto, Wordsworth or Mozart brought order, by reshaping the objects of our perception?
Ancient philosophy, Christian religion and Western art all see wine as a channel of communication between god and man, between the rational soul and the animal, between the animal and the vegetable kingdoms. Through wine the distilled essence of the soil seems to flow into the veins, awakening the body to its life. And having swamped the body wine invades the soul. Your thoughts race; your feelings break free; you plan the triumphant career, the immortal work of art, the world takeover, or the new kitchen. The Greek poet Bacchylides tells us that ‘irresistible delight sweeps from the wine-bowls and warms the heart. Hope of love returned darts through the mind, imbued with the gift of Dionysus, winging the thoughts to heights supreme. Straightway it overthrows the battlements of cities and every man sees himself as a great monarch. With gold and ivory his palace gleams, and corn-laden argosies bring him from Egypt over the sun-bright sea wealth beyond count …’10 Yet tomorrow morning all will be forgotten. Hence wine symbolizes those radical changes, those soarings and plummetings from one existential plane to another, that characterize the life of the rational being. Perhaps this way of working on us is neither the way of daydreams nor the way of art, but something entirely sui generis.
No artist has seen this more clearly than Wagner. Isolde presents Tristan with what they both believe to be the drink of death, snatching the cup from his hands to be certain of her share. Then they fall into each other’s arms. Even a glass of water would have done the trick, wrote Thomas Mann, since there is no reason now to pretend. But that is not the point. The love potion that Brangäne has substituted for the drink of death symbolizes what it also permits. It is a force working from within, from the body. This is how erotic love must be experienced if it is to be genuine – a conquest of the soul by the body, and of the body itself by that world of magic, of simples, of vegetable mystery and unconscious life, to which love joins us in an act of self-renewal.
Likewise, when Siegfried is presented with the drink of forgetting (Götterdämmerung, Act 1), and it slides down his body into his soul, you hear that vegetable invasion once again, obliterating memory, rubbing out the image of Brünnhilde, bringing down the once exalted Siegfried to the level of ordinary ambition, so that he will betray his love and deserve his death.
The experience of wine shows how to understand the great existential transformations that form the enduring theme of Western art. A few works have come from opium – ‘Kubla Khan’, The Bride of Lammermoor, De Quincey’s Confessions; a few more have been kick-started by cannabis. But far more owe their life, their subject-matter and their symbolism to alcohol. For wine reminds the soul of its bodily origin, and the body of its spiritual meaning. It makes our incarnation seem both intelligible and right. This too is an exercise of the imagination, and maybe it is of quite another kind from the two that I discussed in relation to Guardi.
Those thoughts lead us on from ‘therefore’ to ‘I’. Contained in this word are some of the most intransigeant problems of philosophy: the problems of consciousness, of the subjective viewpoint, of the relation between subject and object, of free-will and moral obligation – and each of those problems brings us back, as we explore it, to the concept contained in ‘therefore’, the concept of the rational being. Modern philosophy began with Descartes, and with his study in depth of the ‘I’ – a study which, precisely because of its depth, was entirely futile. ‘I’ does not denote, as Descartes thought, a ‘substance’ hidden from public perception; there is nothing to be discovered by looking inwards, and the relentless concentration on the first-person case, which Descartes initiated but which came to its apogee in our time with the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl, has generated one of the greatest heaps of jargon-infested rubbish in the history of ideas. There are no deep truths about the self; but the shallow truths are all-important and hard to state. Thomas Nagel has a nice way of putting the point. Imagine, he counsels, a complete description of the world, according to the true theory (whatever it turns out to be) of physics. This description identifies the disposition of all the particles, forces and fields that compose reality, and gives spatio-temporal coordinates for everything that is. Not a thing has been overlooked; and yet there is a fact that the description does not mention, the fact which is more important than any other to me – namely, which of the things mentioned in the description is me? Where in the world of objects am I? And what exactly is implied in the statement that this thing is me?11
We tremble here on a vertiginous edge, and it is important not to fall, but to stay there tottering. That is one of the great gifts of wine, in my experience, that it enables you to hold the problem of the self before your mind, and not fall into the Cartesian abyss. The self is not a thing but a perspective; but, as Nagel reminds us, perspectives are not in the world but on the world, and being on but not in is a difficult balancing act that can be successfully accomplished only in a meditative posture of the kind induced by that smiling meniscus over which the I stays bowed while the it is nourished.
What I mean can perhaps best be explained in terms of the problem of consciousness. Consciousness is more familiar to us than any other feature of our world, since it is the route by which anything at all becomes familiar. But this is what makes consciousness so hard to pinpoint. Look for it wherever you like, you encounter only its objects – a face, a dream, a memory, a colour, a pain, a melody, a problem, a glass of wine, but nowhere the consciousness that shines on them. Trying to grasp it is like trying to observe your own observing, as though you were to look with your own eyes at your own eyes without using a mirror. Not surprisingly, therefore, the thought of consciousness gives rise to peculiar metaphysical anxieties, which we try to allay with images of the soul, the mind, the self, the ‘subject of consciousness’, the inner entity that thinks and sees and feels and which is the real me inside. But these traditional ‘solutions’ merely duplicate the problem. We cast no light on the consciousness of a human being simply by re-describing it as the consciousness of some inner homunculus – be it a soul, a mind or a self. On the contrary, by placing that homunculus in some private, inaccessible and possibly immaterial realm, we merely compound the mystery.
Putting the point in that way makes it clear that, in the first instance at least, the problem of consciousness is a philosophical, not a scientific problem. It cannot be solved by studying the empirical data, since consciousness (as normally understood) isn’t one of them. We can observe brain processes, neurones, ganglions, synapses and all the other intricate matter of the brain, but we cannot observe consciousness, even though observation is itself a form of it. I can observe you observing; but what I observe is not that peculiar thing which you know from within and which is present, in some sense, only to you. So it would seem at least, and if this is some kind of mistake, it is a philosophical and not a scientific argument that will tell us so.
One source of the problem of consciousness is therefore the manifest asymmetry between the first-person and the third-person points of view. When you judge that I am in pain it is on the basis of my circumstances and behaviour, and you could be wrong. When I ascribe a pain to myself I don’t use any such evidence. I don’t find out that I am in pain by observation, nor can I be wrong. But that is not because there is some other fact about my pain, accessible only to me, which I consult in order to establish what I am feeling. For if there were this inner private quality I could misperceive it: I could get it wrong; and I would have to find out whether I am in pain. I would also have to invent a procedure for identifying my inner state without reference to publicly observable conditions – and that, Wittgenstein plausibly argued, is impossible.12 The conclusion to draw is that I ascribe pain to myself not on the basis of some inner characteristic but on no basis at all.
Of course there is a difference between knowing what pain is and knowing what pain is like. But to know what it is like is not to know some additional inner fact about it, but simply to have felt it. We are dealing with familiarity rather than information. ‘What it’s like’ is not proxy for a description, but a refusal to describe. We can spell it out, if at all, only in metaphors. Q: ‘What’s it like, darling, when I touch you there?’ A: ‘Like the taste of marmalade, harmonized by late Stravinsky.’ And this intrusion of metaphor into the very heart of self-knowledge reminds us of our attempts to describe the taste and significance of wine. It is precisely because what we are describing is so shallow that we have recourse to these deep descriptions. And yet the descriptions, if they do their work, are metaphors, which take us on a tour through other vistas, before returning to their point of departure, in this, here, now. There are philosophers who have attempted to describe ‘what it’s like’ in terms that are both deep and literal, purporting to give the internal structure of the first-person case. An example is Edmund Husserl, pioneer of ‘phenomenology’. And if you want to know how philosophy should not be done, then read that philosopher’s Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness – or at least, open the book, and alongside it a bottle of something better.
Similarly, we are not going to get very far in understanding consciousness if we concentrate on the idea of ‘feeling’ things. For there are conscious mental states that have nothing to do with feeling. We feel our sensations and emotions, certainly, just as we feel our desires. All of those mental states would once have been classified as passions, as opposed to the mental actions – thought, judgement, intention, deduction – which are not felt but done. I can deliberately think of Mary, judge a picture, make a decision or a calculation, even imagine a centaur, but not mentally create a pain in the finger, a fear of spiders or a desire for more cake. Even if I can have a pain by willing it, or overcome my desires by an act of will, this does not mean that pains and desires are actions, but only that they are passions which I can affect through mental discipline, in the way that a medium might move a wardrobe. Moreover, there are psychologists and philosophers who seem quite happy with the idea of ‘unconscious feelings’. We may balk at the expression, but we know what they mean. Feeling is a mark of consciousness only if we interpret ‘feeling’ as ‘awareness’. But what is it, to be aware of something? Well, to be conscious of it.
How do we fight ourselves free from this tangle of circular definitions and misleading pictures? Two ideas seem to me to be especially helpful in explaining our sense of consciousness as a realm apart. The first is that of supervenience. Mental states generally, and conscious states in particular, emerge from other states of organisms. A useful analogy is the face in a picture. When a painter applies paint to a canvas he creates a physical object by purely physical means. This object is composed of areas and lines of paint, arranged on a surface that we can regard, for the sake of argument, as two dimensional. When we look at the surface of the painting, we see those areas and lines of paint, and also the surface that contains them. But that is not all we see. We also see a face that looks out at us with smiling eyes. In one sense the face is a property of the canvas, over and above the blobs of paint; for you can observe the blobs and not see the face, and vice versa. And the face is really there: someone who does not see it is not seeing correctly. On the other hand, there is a sense in which the face is not an additional property of the canvas, over and above the lines and blobs. For as soon as the lines and blobs are there, so is the face. Nothing more needs to be added, in order to generate the face – and if nothing more needs to be added, the face is surely nothing more. Moreover, every process that produces just these blobs of paint, arranged in just this way, will produce just this face – even if the artist himself is unaware of the face. (Imagine how you would design a machine for producing Mona Lisas.)
One way of expressing that point, is to say that the face is supervenient upon the blobs in which we see it. Maybe consciousness is a supervenient property in that sense: not something over and above the life and behaviour in which we observe it, but not reducible to them either. I would be tempted to go further in this direction, and describe consciousness as an emergent property: a property with causal powers over and above the powers possessed by the life processes from which it is, in some sense, composed.
The second helpful thought is one first given prominence by Kant, and thereafter emphasized by Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer and a whole stream of thinkers down to Heidegger, Sartre and Thomas Nagel. This is to draw a distinction between the subject and the object of consciousness, and to recognize the peculiar metaphysical status of the subject. As a conscious subject I have a point of view on the world. The world seems a certain way to me, and this ‘seeming’ defines my unique perspective. Every conscious being has such a perspective, since that is what it means to be a subject, rather than a mere object. When I give a scientific account of the world, however, I am describing objects only. I am describing the way things are, and the causal laws that explain them. This description is given from no particular perspective. It does not contain words like ‘here’, ‘now’ and ‘I’; and while it is meant to explain the way things seem, it does so by giving a theory of how they are. In short, the subject is in principle unobservable to science, not because it exists in another realm but because it is not part of the empirical world. It lies on the edge of things, like a horizon, and could never be grasped ‘from the other side’, the side of subjectivity itself. Is it a real part of the real world? The question begins to look as though it has been wrongly phrased. I refer to myself, but this does not mean that there is a self that I refer to. I act for the sake of my friend, but there is no such thing as a sake for which I am acting.
That fatal drink – the drink of atonement – which Isolde offers to Tristan reminds us of a remarkable property of wine – at least of wine that we can savour. At the very moment of heightened consciousness, in which the wine brings into focus the choices and concerns which we have been putting out of mind so as to wash them down in style, we are also aware of our predicament, as incarnate beings, whose conscious life erupts from forces that lie outside the reach of direct decision. We can choose, in that moment, to think of Anna, to recall a poem, to meditate on God and salvation, to review the household finances. But we cannot choose to be or not to be in that heightened state of mind that rose within us as the wine went down. The wine confronts us with the mystery of our freedom: it amplifies our power to say ‘I’ and with that word to roam freely in the world of thought, to take decisions, to commit ourselves to actions both now and in the future. And yet it operates on us through the causal network in which our body is ensnared.
Kant, who enjoyed wine and provided a pint bottle for each guest at his regular dinner parties, wrote more beautifully of this paradox than any other philosopher. The use of the word ‘I’, he suggested, distinguishes the rational being from all other objects in the natural world, and also defines his predicament as a creature both bound and free. Descartes had argued for the supreme reality of the self, as a unitary substance, whose nature is infallibly revealed to me by my introspective thoughts. That view, Kant argued, is profoundly flawed. For it tries to make the self, as subject, into the object of its own awareness. I know myself as subject, not as object. I stand at the edge of things, and while I can say of myself that I am this, here, now, those words contain no information about what I am in the world of objects.
Yet there are two things which I know about myself, and about which I cannot be mistaken, since any argument against them would presuppose their truth. The first is that I am a unified centre of consciousness. I know without observation that this thought, this sensation, this desire, and this will belong to one thing; and I know that this thing endures through time, and is subject to change. I am directly aware, as Kant put it, of the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’, and this defines the I as the single unified owner of all my mental states.
The second thing that I know with certainty is that I am free. This freedom is contained in the very ability to say ‘I’, which is the decision from which all other decisions follow: I will climb that hill, kiss that woman, storm that fortress. Saying such things I change my whole stance to the world, put myself in a condition of readiness, and do so by my own free choice. Every utterance, every train of thought, proceeds by these free gestures. And to that argument Kant added another, and for him far more powerful, consideration, namely that reason tells me not only to do certain things, but that I ought to do them. I ought to help that person in distress; and not doing so it is again myself that I blame. I focus on that very centre of being from which decisions flow the full force of moral condemnation. Our whole way of thinking about ourselves is built upon the ‘moral law’, and since ‘ought implies can’, we can engage in practical reasoning only on the assumption that we are free.
But this leads to a strange question: what kind of world must it be that contains a thing like me – a thing with freedom and self-knowledge? It must be a world of enduring objects, Kant argued, objects with identity through time. And I am such an object: the thing which, deciding this here now, will do that there then. A world of enduring things is a world bound by causal laws: so Kant set out to prove in the immensely difficult section of the Critique of Pure Reason entitled ‘The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories’. Without the web of causality, nothing ‘preserves itself in being’ long enough to know or be known. So my world, the world of the free being, is a world ordered by causal laws. And causal laws, Kant thought, must be universal and necessary. They refer to connections in the very nature of things, connections which cannot be suspended on this or that occasion and merely for the convenience of people.
Building his argument in this way – by steps too many, too complex and too controversial to detain us here – Kant drew the following conclusion. Any being who can say ‘I’ and mean it is free; and any being who can say ‘I’ and mean it is situated in a world of universally binding causal laws. I am governed by a law of freedom, which compels my actions, and a law of nature, which binds me in the web of organic life. I am a free subject and a determined object: but I am not two things, a determined body with a free soul rattling inside. I am one thing, which can be seen in two ways. This is something that I know to be true, but which lies beyond understanding. I can never know how it is possible, only that it is possible.
That which cannot be grasped intellectually, however, can be made present in sensory form. This is the lesson of art, which has provided us down the centuries with sensory symbols of conceptions that lie beyond the reach of the understanding – symbols like the late quartets of Beethoven, which present the idea of a heart filled in solitude by a God who can be known in no other way; or like the landscapes of Van Gogh, which show the world burst open by its own self-knowledge. There is no way of explaining such works without using paradoxical language: for what they mean cannot be spelled out properly in words and arguments, but must be grasped in the immediate experience.
Wine too has a part to play in presenting what the intellect cannot encompass. That first sip of a fine wine stirs, as it makes its way downwards, the rooted sense of my incarnation. I know that I am flesh, the by-product of bodily processes which are being brought to a heightened life by the drink that settles within me. But this very drink radiates the sense of self: it is addressed to the soul, not the body, and poses questions that can be formulated only in the first-person case, and only in the language of freedom: ‘what am I, how am I, where now do I go?’ It invites me to take stock of my situation, to wrap up the day’s events, and to take those decisions which were waiting on this moment of calm. In other words, it presents, in a single experience, the doubled-up nature of the person who drinks. He may not have the words to describe this experience: and anyway words will never suffice. Through wine we know, as through almost nothing else that we consume, that we are one thing, which is also two: subject and object, soul and body, free and bound.
This knowledge contained in wine is put vividly to use by the Christian Eucharist. Christ, holding the cup to his disciples, declares that ‘this is my blood of the New Testament, shed for you and for the remission of sins’. The blood in question is not the physical stuff that goes by that name, but something intimately bound up with the ‘I’ of Christ. The bread just eaten at the altar – the body of Christ – is made conscious by the wine. Bread and wine stand to each other as body to soul, as object to subject, as the thing in the world to its reflection at the edge.
I do not wish to imply that only a Christian can understand the mystery of wine, any more than it is only a Christian who can understand the Eucharist. Different people and different communities renew themselves in different ways. But the Eucharist reminds us that this renewal is an inward thing – a repossession of freedom. And with freedom comes agape, the strange and transforming ability to give, ‘the love to which we are commanded’, as Kant put it, whose meaning dawned on me that day in war-torn Beirut. In the Christian view the Eucharist is described as ‘these gifts’, gifts which represent the original gift of himself that Christ made on the cross. And by conveying this idea through wine, the Christian Eucharist provides us with the sensory image of a thought beyond words. Before considering this mystery, however, we must examine the third word in our heading: ‘am’.
Of all the little words that have troubled human thought, the verb ‘to be’ has been the most potent. It features in those deep questions which point us towards the metaphysical abyss: ‘why is there anything?’ ‘Is being a property?’ ‘How can we think of what is not?’ ‘And how can non-beings have properties?’ Some philosophers write of the ‘question of being’, though what that question is, and what might be its answer, are as controversial as anything in philosophy. Aristotle and Aquinas constantly refer to the idea of being when the going gets tough, just as I, in my weakness, refer to the idea of going when the being gets tough. However, while we all acknowledge that there is an idea of going, not everyone is persuaded that there an idea of being, or that there is anything more to being than the concept of truth. But what concept is that? And how can you explain what truth is if you do not refer to being? Round and round the argument goes, and after a while creates a compelling urge to duck out of it. What does it matter that there is or is not Being, in addition to the things that are? And why should we think that there is such a study as metaphysics, as Aristotle described it, as the study of being qua being? Why not qua being qua?
And would Aristotle have defined the science of metaphysics in that way if he had known what thinkers like Heidegger would have done with the result, spinning disastrous spider-webs of nonsense around ‘the question of being’, breaking up being into a thousand fragments like being-for-others, being-towards-death, ahead-of-itself-being, puffing up the copula with flatulent pseudo-thought, and all the while forgetting that there are languages in which the ‘is’ of predication isn’t? Consider this, ostensibly part of a commentary on Aquinas:
the proposition stating the necessity of questioning to human existence includes in itself its own ontological proposition which says: man exists as the question about being. In order to be himself he necessarily asks about being in its totality. This question is the ‘must’ which he himself is and in which being as that which is questioned presents and offers itself, and at the same time, as that which necessarily remains in question, withdraws itself. In the being of the question, which man is (so that he needs to question) being as that which is questioned both reveals itself and at the same time conceals itself in its own questionableness.
So there you are: the question about being is what your irritating aunt Mabel is; and don’t worry that the question of being ends up, in that passage, as the being of the question – it will all come out fine and dandy in the end, when being conceals itself once more in its own questionableness. The author of the passage, the theologian Karl Rahner, is capable of sustaining prose like that for 500 pages, and the only writers that are reliably more obscure are those (and there are quite a few of them) who set out to explain what Rahner says. Don’t go there, is my advice: life is too short, and we need to get to the end of this chapter before finishing the bottle.
As long as we keep a tight hold of grammar, and fight against what Wittgenstein described as the ‘bewitchment of the intelligence by means of language’, we find that, after all, being is not such a bad idea. As David Wiggins has shown, the ‘is’ of identity is one of the more fertile of the little words from which philosophy begins.13 And being features in some of the most striking arguments that have been given for the existence of God. Some of these arguments continue to fascinate both theists and atheists with their air of profundity – which theists take at face value, and atheists as the outward sign of fallacy.
One is the argument from contingent being, due largely to Avicenna (Ibn Sina), a philosopher who flourished in the early eleventh century of our era in Isfahan, and who is ever to be esteemed by winos, for recommending that we drink as we work. ‘At night I would return home,’ he tells us in his autobiography, ‘and occupy myself with reading and writing. Whenever I felt drowsy or weakening I would turn aside to drink a cup of wine to regain my strength, and then I would go back to my reading.’ All praise to Avicenna for defying the Koranic injunction against wine, and for citing it as an example of sloppy reasoning. The sentence ‘Wine intoxicates’, he writes in the Ishârât, has no clear truth-value. ‘We should take into account whether potentially or actually, and whether a little or a large amount’. But yet more praise for the argument from contingent being, which bypasses all the nonsense prattled out by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and the likes, and goes straight to the core concept of any theology worth the name, which is that of contingency. Being, Avicenna argued, is caught in three predicaments: there are impossible beings (those whose definition involves a contradiction), contingent beings (those which might not have existed) and necessary beings.14 The contingent being (mumkin bi-dhatihi) has the potentiality both to be and not to be, without contradiction. You and I are contingent beings in that sense, and even if I am granted a certain intuition of my own existence, that certainty is merely a personal possession and neither guarantees my survival, nor refutes the view that there are possible worlds in which I am not.
A necessary being is one that is ‘true in itself’ – i.e. whose existence follows from its nature – whereas a contingent being is ‘false in itself’ and owes its truth to other things – in other words, is contingent upon the thing that causes or sustains it. The necessary being has no essence (mahiyya, or ‘whatness’) other than existence itself. Hence it cannot be distinguished from others of its supposed kind, all of which are identical with it. The necessary being therefore is one (wahid): a point later taken up by Spinoza and used to argue that nothing exists except the one necessary being, but connected by Avicenna with that central concept in all Islamic thinking, the concept of tawhîd, which means recognizing, in heart and mind and soul, the essential and transcendent oneness of God. This oneness is also a unity, the necessary being having no parts or internal structure, even though it turns out to have the attributes traditionally accorded to God.
Avicenna argued that since all contingent beings are contingent upon some other thing to which their existence is owed, there must be a necessary being on which they all depend. Avicenna argued for this in one way, Maimonides, taking up the argument, in another. Suppose, Maimonides argues, that there is no necessary being, and that all beings might not have been. Since time, in which all contingencies occur, is infinite (there being, on the hypothesis, no being who can set limits to it) then it is true of any contingent being that there will be some time at which it is not; and therefore some time at which all contingent beings are not – a time of utter nothingness. But this null point of the universe must already have existed, since past time, like future time, is infinite. And since nothing can arise out of nothing, then there would, from that point, be forever nothing. But there is something – namely this thing, which is pondering the question of being. So the hypothesis must be false, which means that there is, after all, the necessary being on which all other things depend. And this thing is – to adapt Avicenna’s language – causa sui (wajib al-wujud bi-dhatihi); it is dependent on itself, the sustainer of everything. And it is one thing, a unity, admitting, in the words of the Koran, ‘no partners’.
One of the many insights that are contained in this argument, and all the subtle (if at times tedious) metaphysics that flowed from it in the medieval schools, is the implication that the world of contingent beings, to which we belong, is governed by its own laws, the laws of generation and passing away. We discover those laws through scientific investigation, and they are the laws of nature which bind us all. They include those laws of genetics which, in the view of Dawkins, provide a final refutation of the belief in God. But, according to Avicenna, there is another relation of dependence than the one explored by science: the relation of the contingent to the necessary, of the world to its ‘sustainer’ (rabb, to use the Koranic term), and this is not a relation subject to empirical enquiry, nor one that can be known or refuted by scientific advance.
And that sends us straight back, as it sent Avicenna in one of his midnight meditations, to those other two words from the heading to this part: ‘therefore’ and ‘I’. The relation of dependence which binds the world to God gives the reason why things are as they are. But this reason is not a cause: causes are the subject-matter of science and are spelled out by the universal laws that we discover through experiment and observation. The causal relation is a relation in time, which binds temporal (and therefore contingent) entities. In referring to the ultimate reason of things we are dealing here with another kind of answer to the question ‘why?’, and another meaning of therefore. And this is what gives sense to the life of prayer. We do not suppose that God can be summoned to our aid at every instance, or that He is waiting in the wings of nature, dealing out the cards. If we take the ideas behind Avicenna’s argument seriously then we move towards another idea of God than that which informs the superstitious mind. God’s freedom is revealed in the laws which bind us, and by which He too is bound, since it would be a loss of God’s freedom, and not a gain, were He to defy the laws through which we understand Him. But this does not mean that God is beyond our reach. He is in and around us, and our prayers shape our personal relation with Him. We address Him, as we address those we love, not with the ‘why?’ of explanation, but with the ‘why?’ of reason. We want to know the end, rather than the cause, and to school ourselves in the discipline of acceptance.
Why should we do this, and how? We do this because we, like God, exist on the very edge of things, with one foot, or rather one vista, in the transcendental. We, like Him, are in the world but not of the world, and although Avicenna did not put it in the way that I have put it, he was schooled by wine into the exploration of the inner life. Imagine yourself, he writes, suspended in the air, free from all sensations, and all contact with bodies, your own included. It is obvious that this thought-experiment is possible, and indeed for the true wino it occurs every day. Yet, in imagining yourself thus, as a ‘floating man’, you do not imagine away that core of being, the self (nafs), the ‘I’ which is the very subjectivity on which the experiment depends. I don’t go along with the conclusion that Avicenna then drew, which is the conclusion later drawn by Descartes, that the I is a substance, a primary being in the world. Indeed I draw the conclusion that I have attributed to Kant, namely that the subject is not in the world at all, but stands always at the edge of it, in relation to the other persons whom he can address I to I, one of whom and the greatest of whom is God.
As Kant brilliantly showed, the person who is acquainted with the self, who refers to himself as ‘I’, is inescapably trapped into freedom. He rises above the wind of contingency that blows through the natural world, held aloft by Reason’s necessary laws. The ‘I’ defines the starting point of all practical reasoning, and contains an intimation of the freedom that distinguishes people from the rest of nature. There is a sense in which animals too are free: they make choices, do things both freely and by constraint. But animals are not accountable for what they do. They are not called upon to justify their conduct, nor are they persuaded or dissuaded by dialogue with others. All those goals, like justice, community and love, which make human life into a thing of intrinsic value, have their origin in the mutual accountability of persons, who respond to each other ‘I’ to ‘I’. Not surprisingly, therefore, people are satisfied that they understand the world and know its meaning, when they can see it as the outward form of another ‘I’ – the ‘I’ of God, in which we all stand judged, and from which love and freedom flow.
That thought may be poured out in verse, as in the Veni Creator Spiritus of the Catholic Church, in the rhapsodic words of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, in the great Psalms that are the glory of the Hebrew Bible. But for most people it is simply there, a dense nugget of meaning in the centre of their lives, which weighs heavily when they find no way to express it in communal forms. People continue to look for the places where they can stand, as it were, at the window of our empirical world and gaze out towards the transcendental – the places from which breezes from that other sphere waft over them.
If we are to follow this way of thinking – which is something I propose to do in the remainder of this book, since it is a way of drinking too – we should take seriously the status of the word ‘I’. This is an ‘indexical’, a word that points, like ‘this’ and ‘here’ and ‘now’. And if we say that it points to something we should be careful to insist that this something is also a nothing, a place on the edge of things which has no identity in the world of objects. This is, in fact, contained in that Arabic word for soul – nafs – which is nothing more than the reflexive pronoun. And if there is a question of Being, it seems to me, it concerns this something which is also nothing, this point of view which vanishes when we turn to hold it in our grasp.
It is not only Arabic that has connected the soul with the reflexive pronoun. In Sanskrit the pronoun is atman, and the great Upanishads which the Hindu sages have bequeathed to mankind contain what is perhaps the most profound attempt to get inside Being, and to know it as it is in itself, and as it is for itself: as atman. Observing contingent beings, the Upanishads argue, we are confronted only with appearances that come and go, and not with the being that sustains them. Wherever we look, whether outwards to objects, or inwards to our own thoughts and desires, we encounter only properties, transitory states and vacillating sensations – the veil of Maya, and not the being that it hides from us. How do we approach being itself, therefore, so as to know it as it is? The question, phrased using the reflexive pronoun, answers itself. We need to enter the self, the atman of being. Having done so we will discover the universal self of the world, which the Hindu sages call Brahman. The path to this discovery is a path of renunciation, a path of selfless action in which we discard all attachment to success, profit, pleasure and reward, and do each thing that we do for its own sake. In this way we leave behind our own self, which is an illusory self, and attain to that other Self, which is the divine atman.
That makes it look as though the Upanishads are repeating the fallacy of Descartes and Avicenna, making the self – the atman which is the truth of the world – into an object, depriving it of its subjectivity, its nature as an I. Not so, however, and this is the subtle part of Hinduism that winos, I believe, are better placed to appreciate than most other mortals. Suppose we set out to remove from our consciousness all that is fleeting, all that is contingent, all that is desired. What then remains? Not physical objects, not space or time, not causality and the web of natural laws. All these things belong to the veil of Maya, and come before us as distractions from the central spiritual task. Remove these things, however, and we remove all the ways in which one thing can be distinguished from another. We remove what Leibniz called the principium individuationis, so that what we confront at the end of the path of renunciation is not an individual, nor something that contains individuals. Individual things have been left behind. Brahman is not an object, not even an object of thought; it is only a subject – an eternal thinking of itself, which is also identical with itself, the point of view outside things which is a point of view on them. This Brahman is Eternal, because time has been left behind; it is One, because number has been left behind. And it is Self, because that is all that we have retained in the journey towards it. Arriving at our destination we discard the dross of individual existence, and become one with the One, putting ourselves beyond all harm. It is thus that the King of Death describes Brahman to the seeker Nachiketa in the Katha Upanishad:
When a man is free from desire, his mind and senses purified, he beholds the glory of the Self and is without sorrow. Though seated, he travels far; though at rest, he moves all things. Who but the purest of the pure can realize this Effulgent Being, who is joy and who is beyond joy. Formless is he, though inhabiting form. In the midst of the fleeting, he abides forever. All-pervading and supreme is the Self.
The Upanishad adds that the wise man, knowing atman in his true nature, transcends all grief. This encounter with the subjectivity of the world frees us from the attachments that are the source of grief, and offers redemption in the form of a supreme tranquility, the tranquility of the eternally contemplating I. Now the Hindus do not believe that it is easy to reach this condition; indeed it may need many lives before a person is finally on the path of the Hindu saint, leaving behind his empirical self for the sake of the transcendental. But I take heart from the Vedas, which tell us that Soma, the god of wine, is a fitting object of our worship, and from the Hindu scholars, who tell us that Soma is an avatar of Brahman, wine symbolizing the divine bliss that we feel when we reach the fount of Being. And I would go further and say that we idle and sensual creatures, whose attempts at sainthood begin each morning and have fizzled out by late afternoon, can nevertheless gain some apprehension of the atman by taking a glass of wine in the evening, and so perceiving a path to the inwardness of things. To take that path requires sacrifice and renunciation; and you certainly cannot achieve the goal of philosophy merely by swallowing a drug, whatever people might have thought in those early enthusiasms for mescalin and LSD.
However, wine shines a light along that path, and the beam it casts reaches far into the inner darkness, highlighting the puzzling forms of things with a glow of subjectivity. Wine, properly drunk, transfigures the world at which you look, illuminating that which is precisely most mysterious in the contingent beings surrounding you, which is the fact that they are – and also that they might not have been. The contingency of each thing glows in its aspect, and for a moment you are aware that individuality and identity are the outward forms taken by a single inner fire, and that this fire is also you.
It is the first glass of wine that gives its real taste, wrote Schopenhauer, just as it is the first encounter with another’s features that reveals what he truly is. And among Western philosophers it is Schopenhauer who has taken the Upanishads most seriously, rephrasing in Kantian language the thesis that the ultimate reality is One and Eternal and that individuality is a mere appearance. For Schopenhauer, however, the ultimate reality is Will, not Self, and his philosophy promises not peace but an eternal restlessness. I have often wondered why he took this unsatisfactory path, and am inclined now to put it down to his fondness for beer. Schopenhauer was not in the habit of steadying before his face each evening the glass in which the I confronts its own reflection. There is a knowledge contained in wine, a knowledge that you yourself bring to it: in your close encounter with the aroma you sense that all is ultimately at rest in its being, each thing curled like an embryo within its own appearance. And with that first sip each evening, you return to a world of amniotic tranquillity.
How is this so? What is it about wine, that enables it to carry such a message?