Stadiums and Satellites: Apophatic Scholarship
A long time ago, I read Umberto Eco’s explanation of how he became an atheist. He was watching a soccer game from way up in the stands, and feeling disconnected from what was going on below. From that vantage point, all the people just looked like little ants moving around arbitrarily, and he started to believe that this is how the world actually is. As he says, in that moment, “I felt how the high noonday sun seemed to enfold men and things in a chilling light, and how before my eyes a cosmic, meaningless performance was proceeding. Later…I would discover that this is the sense of the ‘everyday unreality,’ but at that time I was thirteen and I translated the experience in my own way; for the first time I doubted the existence of God and decided that the world was a pointless fiction.”
Modernity — the time period following the Enlightenment until now — has often been obsessed with the idea of achieving “objectivity,” which generally implies a stance outside and at a distance from the thing being observed or contemplated. This positionality allows for the sort of “gaze” that enables the objectification of subjects through the erasure of the sorts of emotions that would have otherwise created some sort of distance-erasing connection (empathy etc.) between the viewer and the viewed. In a world ruled by economic paradigms, that which is seen as an object then becomes open to being possessed (in the case of capitalism) or subjected to communal use (in the case of communism). In either case, anything that is objectified is also commodified.
In a 2018 podcast interview, Yuval Harari, who is famous for writing a book called ‘Sapiens’, describes a perspective on human beings reminiscent of Eco’s. He is aware of all the research that shows that humans are intrinsically narrative creatures; we see the world in terms of narrative, and need everything put in a narrative structure if we are to make sense of it. (Narrative structure is usually described in terms of the sort of action that takes place at various places in the plot, but the point, it seems to me, is to create a satisfying emotional flow grounded in a sense that the events unfold in a way that reveals an order and directionally-derived meaning to experience.) Harari views this as a false anthropomorphizing overlay placed over the world. The world itself is not narratival; if it appears that way, it is because we have made it appear that way. Thus, said Harari, he distrusts any descriptions of the world that lend themselves to a narratival telling. Like Eco, he thinks that we should distance ourselves from normal ways of viewing the world in order to see it as it “really” is.
Harari also mentions during the interview that he meditates for several hours every day. His meditation has apparently allowed him to distance himself from the world to such a degree that he is able to call all the normal views of it just so much B.S. He seems to view this meditation-derived ability to be “objective” as a virtue, his own personal superpower, the source of his superior perspective. Detachment provides the “correct” perspective on reality; the “gaze” is the God’s-eye view that makes it impossible to believe in God (or, really, in humans, unless by humans we mean “objects needing to be continually debunked, deconstructed, and dismantled”). After all, as the first Soviet astronauts were so quick to point out, if God is supposed to live in the heavens, and we go there and don’t see him, then he can’t exist; we’re there, so we know he isn’t.
The objective view is a view that not only disintegrates narrative and erases God, but is apophatic in other ways as well. I’ve read many an academic article that struck me as exemplifying this. While it feels unfair to single out any particular one as an example, I will choose one that doesn’t require too much background explanation, an argument made by Anne McClintock about the historical tendency for explorers think of their task in erotic terms, thinking of the act of conquering new territories, and their occupants, in terms of sexual domination. Although she makes some good points, the perspective from which she views the phenomena under investigation was such that any object of investigation would have withered under her gaze — with the exception of those that shared her cynical detachment.
So, for example, she argues that the desire of these explorers to name the things they “discover” came from male paternity insecurity — that men like to name their progeny as a way of imprinting ownership or domination in situations where their paternity is in question. Moreover, she argued, Christian baptism (which traditionally is the procedure in which infants are named) is a way of taking the process of birth away from women and putting it into the hands of men, since baptism is rebirth, and it’s something that men (priests, etc.) enact. She concludes that “In the eyes of Christianity, women are incomplete birthers: the child must be born again and named, by men.” These are clearly the words of a person who is viewing the Christian life from a very long distance, believing that this is what gives her deep understanding of what’s “really” going on.
This is just one example of the way her lens, which as a thesis initially has quite a bit of plausibility, given the evidence she offers, becomes somewhat ridiculous once it is wielded as a lens by which to see all phenomena. From her elevated, totalizing perspective, much of the normal stuff people do is, at its core, imperialistic and oppressive, and the only people who are doing something valuable are those who are undermining “normal.” In the end, even such phenomena as the typical Western family are found to be B.S., whereas behaviors such as drag and its attendant expressions are revelatory. Again, this isn’t to say that the author didn’t make some good points; it’s just to say that given the perspective from which she chose to view her subject, the conclusions were foregone. Even if the Western family were, in its lived reality, truly nothing but wholesome, her vantage point would have led her to view it as ultimately meaningless ephemera.
This is a problem that I suspect haunts academic ways of seeing generally. I remember reading, years ago, a classic set of ironic comments about the attachments people have to commodities and to the social meanings we give them (such as turning them into status symbols). As I imagined the space from which the pioneering sociologist was making these comments, I envisioned a man in a book-lined room warmed by a glowing fire, ensconced in a leather chair as he sat at a thick, ornamented oak desk, smoking his cigar and writing with a fine pen. That is to say, it sounded like a person who was purposely, carefully disconnected, at least in the event of reflection, from the things on which he was reflecting, and hence those things presented themselves to his mind as abstractions, rather than realities.
Whether or not this was in fact the setting in which the sociologist made those “observations” about human society, it easily could have been; academics often believe that this sort of removal is actually necessary for true insight. It is all too appealing, when in academic mode, to go up to Eco’s stadium seats, which feels like a God’s-eye view, and to view phenomena under the delusion that such detachment makes us capable of analyzing from a “view from nowhere,” which makes us “objective.” Again, it is all too telling that this attempt at a God’s-eye view seems to turn the viewer into an atheist. The “view from nowhere” truly is a view from nowhere — from the non-place of alienation, from nihilo, from behind the veil of ignorance, which, pace Rawls, is actually total ignorance.
Some might argue that the scientific method, upon which all modernity’s undeniable achievements are based, requires an objectifying gaze. That is presumably what makes so many academics within the humanities and so-called “soft” sciences think that it is the appropriate gaze for academics to cultivate. But in reality, science is the repudiation of that view. The Greeks, because of their gnostic view of materiality, believed that the world could be thought about from an a priori distance, and it was this that kept them from discovering science. It was only when people realized that plunging down into the literal dirt and getting messy via experimentation was necessary that science, and its consequent discoveries about the way things really are, happened.
Science is all about doing this experiment with these molecules, and then replicating the experiment using these other similar molecules, and then concluding something universal. This is how understanding and enlightenment is achieved. It’s incarnational. Which is to say, from a theological perspective, it’s the actual God’s-eye view. Of course, science is not some pristine field in which any human who enters is guaranteed to have all the right perspectives, motivations, etc. My point is only that in its commitment to engagement as the means of observation, it is doing something fundamentally right. That fact is what has led to its success in understanding and transforming the world. The humanities’ tendency to try and view a phenomenon from a Cartesian perspective divorced from one’s own material enmeshment in the world is a reversal of the kind of engagement necessary for true understanding.
Granted, Rene Descartes, the OG Cartesian, was a father of modernity, and modernity has brought many good things to humanity, so it may seem unfair to say that the Cartesian perspective is antithetical to understanding. Descartes’ willingness to question everything — which, as I seem to recall one of my old professors suggesting, was probably just as much a trauma response to his participation in the Thirty Years War as it was a product of his prodigious intellect — implies a willingness to separate himself from the world of appearances in order to attempt to understand the realities behind them. This is what objectivity is aiming at. It is what allows a scientist to not only make observations about the experiment happening right here, but to extend those conclusions to what is assumed to be the orderly universe undergirding those materialities.
Descartes was perhaps the father of critical distance. But that critical distance can go in either a helpful or unhelpful direction — and it perhaps went in both directions for Descartes himself. When one uses the ability to stand in a particular embodied place and project out to the universe, one is using critical distance helpfully. When one uses the bifurcation of mind and body as an excuse to “follow” mind out to the stratosphere and look down at the body with an attitude of gnostic dismissal, one is being unhelpful. Academics who use the excuse of critical distance to call B.S. on whatever phenomena they wish to debunk may be providing an interesting perspective, but it’s probably not one that is going to serve the larger ends of understanding. As in the case of McClintock, it may lead to some interesting observations, but as a lens, it will ultimately lead the thinker in unhelpful, un-insightful, ultimately reductive directions. Apophatic scholarship, in other words, is destructive in a Nietzschean sort of way. God and humanity end up dead at the end of it, because we have killed them both.
Granted, that isn’t a bad thing, provided a resurrection movement is made possible at the other side. Attempting to see phenomena from a new angle, to draw connections in new ways, is not a bad thing. But if one finds that one’s viewpoint is leading to a sense of anomie — about humans, the world, and God — then it’s time to regroup and recalibrate — to leave the smoke-filled library and go on a vigorous walk around the campus quad. To carefully negotiate the steps down from the upper stands to get a whiff of the sweaty athletes as they give everything to the game. To stop staring at the computer that holds one’s devastating critiques of colonialism in order to participate in, say, an Orthodox baptism, in which the squalling baby is baptised naked while the community circles around the infant and sings the ancient liturgy.
And just see what happens.
