The Four
Natural Duties
(being Love, Creativity, Haecceity and Praise)
praise
What else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan. But since I am a reasonable creature, it is my duty to praise God, and I call on you to join the same song. (Epictetus)
Zum Erstaunen bin ich da
I am here to wonder (Goethe)
Mungo Park was desperate. In the depths of the rainy season in ‘darkest Africa’, five hundred miles from the nearest European settlement, the young Scottish explorer and botanist had been robbed of his horse, his compass and everything but his hat, boots and trousers. He looked around at what was likely to be his dying-place:
‘At this moment, painful as my reflections were, the extraordinary beauty of a small moss in fructification irresistibly caught my eye. I mention this to show from what trifling circumstances the mind will sometimes derive consolation; for though the whole plant was not larger than the top of one of my fingers, I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves, and capsula, without admiration.’
The Divine Being who tended such a tiny plant could not be forgetful of a creature made in His own image, thought the good young Calvinist, starting out of his despair assured that God would see him safely back to civilisation. And sure enough, in a series of remarkable adventures, He did.
This sudden awareness of reality close at hand is the essence of STA, even if the religious conclusions to which Park leapt are not. However plentiful and exquisite the mosses in the forest, there was no such miraculous escape from Park’s next African expedition, and he died aged only thirty-five. Awareness is the root of STA – a constant alertness to objective reality, to its infinite haecceities, deepening into what Annie Dillard calls ‘the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object.’ It is a state of mind which will, I believe, inevitably manifest itself as Praise.
Praise is not relative; it is inherent. We do not thrill at the glimpse of a kingfisher because we have also seen Bluewater shopping centre and find, after due consideration, that the comparison works in favour of the bird. But by contrast we are appalled at Bluewater because we have known better places. Misery is born out of comparison: loss and pain look back to happier times, fear looks ahead to worse. But joy is a natural state. No child is born expecting the worst, finding in rattles and squeaky toys scant compensation for the shittiness of human existence. Such a view, common enough in adults, is a learnt, social attitude.
‘Praise’ might seem a tendentious term, too closely associated with religion. I don’t mean to sneak a Divine Creator into the story; you can praise the purposeless activity of sub-atomic particles if you like. But ‘enjoy’ is too self-reflexive a word, as is ‘celebrate’: the former implies passivity, the latter Prosecco. The crucial element of ‘Praise’ is that it is outward-looking and generous rather than self-indulgent. It recognizes the otherness of the external world, and responds with gratitude. Galvanised wonder.
If, for example, when you are at a Test match, no matter which team you are supporting, you quite spontaneously applaud something so simple as a perfectly timed cover drive, surely the rather greater wonders of the cosmos – of the hawthorn on the hill, of the starlings’ murmuration, of the beating of one’s heart – must stir you to wonder and to praise. It is an instinctive rather than a calculated reaction – neither the cosmos nor the batsman feels the benefit.
‘For God will descend in visible glory when men begin to applaud him,’ cries Christopher Smart. In other words, the more generously you respond to nature, the more wonders you will notice in the world. ‘And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands,’ sings Isaiah, which, in fact, is just what they’re doing now on this blustery October day.
Nature repays close investigation with fathomless layers of wonderful things, but detailed exploration is not always necessary. The commuter on a train may not have the leisure to study botany, but she can see the tree and its shadow on the pasture, or even the tree between the tower blocks, and recognise its reality, its beauty, its otherness, its relatedness, which is all that STA asks.
Mancunian miserere
As I walk west on Cross Street have mercy on me, O God,
for the cold of my fingers, the clam of my palms,
for the knots I have tied in my tongue and for their undoing,
for the constancy of my inattention, for my inner tension and its ills,
for the fact that the undersides of leaves (my mother told me)
are blown visible before a storm but I forget to look,
for the unlearned lore that rain when it runs unhindered
in a gutter will still trouble itself into opacity, for the cities
- rich, exotic, gifted – of my days that I have sacked, abandoned,
given up for the price of a light, my hands cupped in case
you try to blow it out, for thinking you would waste your breath on me,
for fearing you may not, for the coin-jar I save for a deluge,
for the wide berth I gave that man-cocoon asleep on the steps
of a new-closed bank, where once I queued to find my balance,
for the stars I thank, for the losses I adjust, for the cost
have mercy, let the seas hold themselves, let the streets dry out,
and flood instead the cambers, ventricles, capillaries of me,
prise my teeth apart O God that I might learn to praise.
Michael Symmons Roberts
Thomas Browne may, in one mood, cavil at ‘those vulgar heads, that rudely stare about, and with a grosse rusticity admire his works’, but so long as they are actually looking around them, they have made a start. With minimal specialist knowledge, we can be filled with wonder on an afternoon stroll.
Annie Dillard is the most watchful of writers: ‘What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things as multiply and intricately as possible present and visible in my mind.’
Knowledge and wonder are not, of course, mutually exclusive. They can go hand in hand, egging each other on. But if knowledge is good, wonder (‘an astonishment which does not cease when the novelty wears off,’ as Kant describes it) is more important.
The crucial element is humility. Wonder is unfailingly humble. Knowledge can be dangerous without the safety-harness of humility. ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing,’ and all our learning, in the end, is little. [Footnote: for example, we have only very recently learnt of the existence of the ‘wood-wide web,’ that intricate communication and supply network of plant-roots and fungi. How many thousands of cocksure books have learned biologists, arborists and gardeners written about trees in total ignorance of this essential part of their life-cycle, something known for millions of years by every toadstool and liverwort in the forest?] Like Pope I prefer that old-fashioned word ‘learning’ to ‘knowledge’. ‘Learning’ suggests a continuing process, and implies all that remains to be learnt – that ‘great ocean of truth’ which lay undiscovered as Isaac Newton played with his pebbles on the beach. ‘Learning’ is open, and still umbilically attached to wisdom. ‘Knowledge’ suggests capital accrued, information acquired. It is a commodity to be used and, without wisdom and humility, can be put to ill uses. [Footnote: and, of course, all our knowledge is inseparably accompanied by the invisible shadow of our ignorance. When we impose our knowledge, we also weaponise this ignorance. Thalidomide, DDT, CFCs, PCBs, microplastics, climate change, iatrogenic diseases. These are just some of the (almost) universally acknowledged examples from the present and recent past of our applied knowledge unleashing the entirely unexpected and disastrous side-effects of our ignorance.]
Essentially, wonder is not about us; knowledge, albeit covertly, is. Wonder reminds us how much we don’t know. Knowledge emphasises how much we do, and looks to get busy with it. ‘Measure what you can measure, and what you cannot measure, make measurable,’ says Galileo. That is to say, try to understand the world and, when you cannot, distort it so that it fits your conceptions. For all Galileo’s unquestionable genius, this is poor science and poor philosophy – truth is more valuable than achievement. Wonder and humility trace a better path – ‘It is the greatest joy of the man of thought to have explored the explorable and then calmly to revere the unexplorable,’ wrote Goethe, to which Konrad Lorenz’s tutor used to add, ‘No not calmly, gentlemen, not calmly!!!’
A dispute between Einstein and Niels Bohr illustrates the problem. Einstein stated, ‘What we call science has the sole purpose of determining what is.’ Bohr countered, ‘It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’ Of course, Bohr was right. We are inevitably limited by our perspective – what the biologist Jakob von Uexkull called our Umwelt (‘surrounding world’), any creature’s ‘self-centred subjective world, which represents only a small tranche of all available worlds.’ [Footnote: at this point, I must apply the same caveats to my claims for STA. I have said somewhere that it appears to be true which, in an everyday usage of the word, I believe. But claiming Truth as an absolute is something we should avoid – our perspectives are too narrow. It would be more strictly accurate to say that I believe STA’s world-view affords us a robust understanding which, though open to experiences and phenomena, is as yet unshaken by them. To be even more pedantic: by ‘us’ I mean ‘myself and those with whom I have a high degree of intersubjectivity’, but I think ‘us’ will do.] We can expand that perspective by inventing instruments and using our imaginations, but we cannot entirely transcend it. A creature with a different Umwelt entirely, say a clam, experiences the world differently from us, and it would be absurd to say that we were right and the clam wrong, or to count up nerve-endings to see who was ‘truer’. The clam bases its behaviour on what it knows and feels; so do we. We know many more facts than the clam, which is not so venturesome as to spend its time acquiring information irrelevant to its survival. Many of these facts greatly enrich our lives. But we can relish all this without making self-important claims that our experience is more valid than the clam’s – indeed, recognizing a clam’s limitations ought to open our eyes to our own. Perhaps the clam, in its simplicity, enjoys an uncomplicated bliss we cannot imagine. (Perhaps it does not. We have no way of knowing.) Who on earth decided that ratiocination was the standard measure of the universe?
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