I caught onto The Elegance of the Hedgehog a little late, after all the hype and hullabaloo had died down. Apparently, it was a best-seller in France having sold over a million copies there. But, I guess there's always some good in coming to something after all the popularity and noise has faded. For the uninitiated, there are really huge clumps of philosophical, musical, manga and literary references in this novel so if you're unfamiliar with her references, it may get a little tiring at times. At some points, the novel also reads more like an extended collection of essays than a story with a unified plot. But, the end was heartbreakingly bittersweet that will move you to a little bit of tears :) All in all, it was a wonderful read.
Still, I think one of the funniest parts was her observation on the uses and purposes of philosophy. Sometimes during LTP, I also felt like that haha. The following is an extract from the book on the philosophies of Kant and Husserl:
"Which brings us to the second question: what do we know of the world?
I dealists like Kant have an answer to this question. What do they answer? They answer: not a great deal. Transcendental idealism holds that we can know only that which appears to our consciousness can say about it because of what it has perceived - and nothing else.
Let us take an example, at random: a sweet cat, by the name of Leo. Why? Because I find it easier with a cat. And let me ask you: how can you be certain that it really is a cat and, likewise how can you even know what a cat is? A healthy reply would consist in emphasising the fact that your perception of the animal, complemented by a few conceptual and linguistic mechanisms, has enabled you to constitute your knowledge.
But the response of the transcendental idealist would be to illustrate how impossible it is to know whether what we perceive and conceive of as a cat […] It may well be that my cat - at present I perceive him as an obese quadrupled with quivering whiskers and I have filed him away in my mind in a drawer labelled "cat" - is in actual fact, and in his very essence, a blob of green sticky stuff that does not meow.
[…] But there is an even more depressing theory than that one, a theory that offers a prospect even more depressing than that of innocently caressing a lump of green drool of dropping our toast every morning into a pustular abyss we had mistaken for a toaster.
[…] This is the idealism of Edward Husserl… According to Husserl's theory, all that exists is the perception of the cat. And the cat itself? Well, we can just do without it. Bye-bye kitty. Who needs a cat? What cat? Henceforth, philosophy will claim the right to wallow exclusively in the wickedness of pure mind. The world in an inaccessible reality and any effort to know it is futile. What do we know of the world? Nothing. As all knowledge is merely reflective consciousness exploring its own self, the world, therefore, can merrily go to the devil.
This is phenomenology: the “science of that which appears to our consciousness.” How does a phenomenologist spend his day? He gets up, fully conscious as he takes his shower that he is merely soaping a body whose existence has no foundation, then he wolfs down a few slices of toast and jam that have been nihilized, slips on some clothes that are the equivalent of an empty set of parentheses, heads for his office, and then snatches up a cat.
[…]
But enough of phenomenology: it is nothing more than the solitary, endless monologue of consciousness, a hardcore autism that no real cat would ever importune."
Haha, at first read, I thought this brought out some of my gripes with philosophy pretty well. I like it, it's a matter of analysing who we are, but sometimes it goes too far, and it loses any real connection to what happens in real life.
But then I was led to a blog post discussing the relevance of this novel to the religious experience which kinda linked to a conversation I had with a friend about another book, Justice for Hedgehogs by Dworkin. Some background is necessary: If you look at the title, it is derived from an Isaiah Berlin essay which discusses the difference between foxes and hedgehogs. Basically, it is about two ways of seeing or knowing the world. Either you are a fox who draws on a wide variety of experiences or you a hedgehog who sees it through one defining idea.
How this relates to the religious experience is in the difference between God and humans and I thought he described the analogy really poetically. According to him:
Berlin took the name of his book from the Greek poet Archilochus’ statement, “The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” [...]
My intention is not to go into Berlin’s text, but Archilochus’ phrase brings to mind two slightly different ways of knowing than Berlin discusses: simple apprehension and discursive knowledge. According to Aquinas, spirits (that is, angels) as well as God, know by simple apprehension. When they know an object, they grasp its essence of the object, its quiddity or “whatness” along with all of its accidents in one single act of knowing. Human beings, a hylomorphic unity of body and soul, do not have the power of simple apprehension. Humans know by discursive reasoning. When a human apprehends an object, it is only partial, and perfect knowledge is gained only by synthesis or syllogizing.Accordingly, spirits are the hedgehog who “know only one thing”; humans are the foxes who “know many little things.”
The reason this is important as relates to the book is that both Renee and Poloma are illustrations of discursive reasoning at work. Both proceed from what is known to what is not known. What is known is the stirring of the heart at the story of Levin and Kitty, the fall of a rosebud on the table, the shiver of delight at the sound of Mozart, the repugnance of phenomenology and nominalism, and the allure of Japan. What is unknown is love, truth, and beauty.
Both Renee and Paloma reason discursively to arrive at the knowledge of love, the knowledge of beauty. Human beings cannot grasp the essence of love or beauty in an instant; we must arrive at such knowledge by experience, by piecing together bits of what we know over time, imperfectly and slowly, but nevertheless, humanly. Human beings are foxes. But we are foxes capable of becoming hedgehogs.The Elegance of the Hedgehog unintentionally provides an excellent theological anthropology. Human beings are somewhere between earth and heaven, body and spirit. They are trapped in time and yet desire eternity. They are limited and yet desire transcendence. They know imperfectly and yet long for perfect knowledge."
[Emphasis mine]
I guess the whole point of this was two-fold. One, the novel wasn't perfect but it was amazing at certain parts and I think it's worth a read. Two, I think I was trying to get at why people I speak to can be in a dilemma like the one described above. To understand why we sometimes get the feeling that there needs to be a reason to life. Of course, everyone reaches their own conclusion but I like how we hold out hope for there to be an ending point, a point where we can reach a perfect understanding that persists for eternity. A gift of understanding that does not require analytical judgement or reasoning that proceeds from either cause or effect.
Practically speaking, for the two atheist characters in the novel, the pursuit of beauty in nature was the closest they could come to an understanding of God. For you then, what is your understanding of God?
He stops in turn, hand still on my arm. "It is because they have never seen you," he says. "I would recognise you anywhere."
//Muriel Barbery; The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Know that you are fifty kinds of special and all different kinds of tough. Know that they can't judge you because they see only what you show them. Know that there are some answers that you don't ever need to find out, that sometimes even the person who needs to face up to them doesn't know what the heck is going on as well. Time wounds, all heal.
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
//Oscar Wilde
Whoa, down tiger. Down. I know it's not always that you get a day out. But today, it was totally, awesomely crazy. Haven't felt like this in a long, oh really long time. It was like we had put on scarlet shoes and we could have danced all night.
“There’s a widespread notion that children are open, that the truth about their inner selves just seeps out of them. That’s all wrong. No one is more covert than a child, and no one has greater cause to be that way. It’s a response to a world that’s always using a tin-opener on them to see what they are on the inside, just in case it ought to be replaced with a more useful type of tinned foodstuff."
//Peter Høeg; Miss Smilla's Sense of Snow
Is your life turning out the way you expected it to? Are you making it safely through the turns and the twists, the let-downs and the disappointments? Today S shared about his past five years studying culinary arts in TP. He said that when he started out, he thought that it would just be something to pass his years in school, but over time, he understood that it had become more than that. It had turned into a lifelong passion, an important element of who he was, and he could not imagine it not being part of his life. And it made me wonder - how many of us are fortunate enough to find something that we care so deeply about? And are we as intensely passionate about the things that we are doing now, in this stage of our lives?
I hope we are, because that's the best way to roll.
"What was the real point of escaping, Helene wondered, chasing through your life so fast? Be consistent, be consistent, Helene whispered to herself, and as she heard herself whispering, she said out loud, in a firm voice, the concluding words of Buchner's Lenz: Inconsistent, inconsistent."
//Julia Franck; The Blind Side of the Heart
I guess at the end of it all, the process of becoming different is difficult to understand, unless it is seen in context and in hindsight. While we're in the midst of all the flow that has been going on, the best thing to do is to hold on, hold on until it gets better, until order is restored, until we see patterns in the chaos.
Head above water, you best be paddling fast, my dear.
12 April 2011
;17:29 "Experience is the most brutal of teachers but you learn. My God, do you learn."
//CS Lewis
The beginning starts off easy, the middle writes itself, the ending is almost always the toughest part. How do you put the threads of an amazing experience into words? Where do you begin to describe a journey that took almost a year and was full of ups, downs and all sorts of in-betweens? Honestly, if I could stand at the starting point where it all began, I don't think I could have taken the plunge with as much courage and blind faith again. But I'm so, so glad that we did. That we worked our guts out endlessly through late nights and early mornings, that we laughed as hard as we cried together, that we weren't afraid of what people would think of us, that we were blessed with the most amazingly patient stand-in coach ever.
So thankyou for the friendships, the lessons, the food, the laughter, the tears, the jokes, the heartaches and heartbreaks, the fun, the hugs and everything else in-between. It's been such a difficult and sometimes, painful journey, But it was all worth it to have you all at the end :)
I caught onto The Elegance of the Hedgehog a little late, after all the hype and hullabaloo had died down. Apparently, it was a best-seller in France having sold over a million copies there. But, I guess there's always some good in coming to something after all the popularity and noise has faded. For the uninitiated, there are really huge clumps of philosophical, musical, manga and literary references in this novel so if you're unfamiliar with her references, it may get a little tiring at times. At some points, the novel also reads more like an extended collection of essays than a story with a unified plot. But, the end was heartbreakingly bittersweet that will move you to a little bit of tears :) All in all, it was a wonderful read.
Still, I think one of the funniest parts was her observation on the uses and purposes of philosophy. Sometimes during LTP, I also felt like that haha. The following is an extract from the book on the philosophies of Kant and Husserl:
"Which brings us to the second question: what do we know of the world?
I dealists like Kant have an answer to this question. What do they answer? They answer: not a great deal. Transcendental idealism holds that we can know only that which appears to our consciousness can say about it because of what it has perceived - and nothing else.
Let us take an example, at random: a sweet cat, by the name of Leo. Why? Because I find it easier with a cat. And let me ask you: how can you be certain that it really is a cat and, likewise how can you even know what a cat is? A healthy reply would consist in emphasising the fact that your perception of the animal, complemented by a few conceptual and linguistic mechanisms, has enabled you to constitute your knowledge.
But the response of the transcendental idealist would be to illustrate how impossible it is to know whether what we perceive and conceive of as a cat […] It may well be that my cat - at present I perceive him as an obese quadrupled with quivering whiskers and I have filed him away in my mind in a drawer labelled "cat" - is in actual fact, and in his very essence, a blob of green sticky stuff that does not meow.
[…] But there is an even more depressing theory than that one, a theory that offers a prospect even more depressing than that of innocently caressing a lump of green drool of dropping our toast every morning into a pustular abyss we had mistaken for a toaster.
[…] This is the idealism of Edward Husserl… According to Husserl's theory, all that exists is the perception of the cat. And the cat itself? Well, we can just do without it. Bye-bye kitty. Who needs a cat? What cat? Henceforth, philosophy will claim the right to wallow exclusively in the wickedness of pure mind. The world in an inaccessible reality and any effort to know it is futile. What do we know of the world? Nothing. As all knowledge is merely reflective consciousness exploring its own self, the world, therefore, can merrily go to the devil.
This is phenomenology: the “science of that which appears to our consciousness.” How does a phenomenologist spend his day? He gets up, fully conscious as he takes his shower that he is merely soaping a body whose existence has no foundation, then he wolfs down a few slices of toast and jam that have been nihilized, slips on some clothes that are the equivalent of an empty set of parentheses, heads for his office, and then snatches up a cat.
[…]
But enough of phenomenology: it is nothing more than the solitary, endless monologue of consciousness, a hardcore autism that no real cat would ever importune."
Haha, at first read, I thought this brought out some of my gripes with philosophy pretty well. I like it, it's a matter of analysing who we are, but sometimes it goes too far, and it loses any real connection to what happens in real life.
But then I was led to a blog post discussing the relevance of this novel to the religious experience which kinda linked to a conversation I had with a friend about another book, Justice for Hedgehogs by Dworkin. Some background is necessary: If you look at the title, it is derived from an Isaiah Berlin essay which discusses the difference between foxes and hedgehogs. Basically, it is about two ways of seeing or knowing the world. Either you are a fox who draws on a wide variety of experiences or you a hedgehog who sees it through one defining idea.
How this relates to the religious experience is in the difference between God and humans and I thought he described the analogy really poetically. According to him:
Berlin took the name of his book from the Greek poet Archilochus’ statement, “The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” [...]
My intention is not to go into Berlin’s text, but Archilochus’ phrase brings to mind two slightly different ways of knowing than Berlin discusses: simple apprehension and discursive knowledge. According to Aquinas, spirits (that is, angels) as well as God, know by simple apprehension. When they know an object, they grasp its essence of the object, its quiddity or “whatness” along with all of its accidents in one single act of knowing. Human beings, a hylomorphic unity of body and soul, do not have the power of simple apprehension. Humans know by discursive reasoning. When a human apprehends an object, it is only partial, and perfect knowledge is gained only by synthesis or syllogizing.Accordingly, spirits are the hedgehog who “know only one thing”; humans are the foxes who “know many little things.”
The reason this is important as relates to the book is that both Renee and Poloma are illustrations of discursive reasoning at work. Both proceed from what is known to what is not known. What is known is the stirring of the heart at the story of Levin and Kitty, the fall of a rosebud on the table, the shiver of delight at the sound of Mozart, the repugnance of phenomenology and nominalism, and the allure of Japan. What is unknown is love, truth, and beauty.
Both Renee and Paloma reason discursively to arrive at the knowledge of love, the knowledge of beauty. Human beings cannot grasp the essence of love or beauty in an instant; we must arrive at such knowledge by experience, by piecing together bits of what we know over time, imperfectly and slowly, but nevertheless, humanly. Human beings are foxes. But we are foxes capable of becoming hedgehogs.The Elegance of the Hedgehog unintentionally provides an excellent theological anthropology. Human beings are somewhere between earth and heaven, body and spirit. They are trapped in time and yet desire eternity. They are limited and yet desire transcendence. They know imperfectly and yet long for perfect knowledge."
[Emphasis mine]
I guess the whole point of this was two-fold. One, the novel wasn't perfect but it was amazing at certain parts and I think it's worth a read. Two, I think I was trying to get at why people I speak to can be in a dilemma like the one described above. To understand why we sometimes get the feeling that there needs to be a reason to life. Of course, everyone reaches their own conclusion but I like how we hold out hope for there to be an ending point, a point where we can reach a perfect understanding that persists for eternity. A gift of understanding that does not require analytical judgement or reasoning that proceeds from either cause or effect.
Practically speaking, for the two atheist characters in the novel, the pursuit of beauty in nature was the closest they could come to an understanding of God. For you then, what is your understanding of God?
He stops in turn, hand still on my arm. "It is because they have never seen you," he says. "I would recognise you anywhere."
//Muriel Barbery; The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Know that you are fifty kinds of special and all different kinds of tough. Know that they can't judge you because they see only what you show them. Know that there are some answers that you don't ever need to find out, that sometimes even the person who needs to face up to them doesn't know what the heck is going on as well. Time wounds, all heal.
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
//Oscar Wilde
Whoa, down tiger. Down. I know it's not always that you get a day out. But today, it was totally, awesomely crazy. Haven't felt like this in a long, oh really long time. It was like we had put on scarlet shoes and we could have danced all night.
“There’s a widespread notion that children are open, that the truth about their inner selves just seeps out of them. That’s all wrong. No one is more covert than a child, and no one has greater cause to be that way. It’s a response to a world that’s always using a tin-opener on them to see what they are on the inside, just in case it ought to be replaced with a more useful type of tinned foodstuff."
//Peter Høeg; Miss Smilla's Sense of Snow
Is your life turning out the way you expected it to? Are you making it safely through the turns and the twists, the let-downs and the disappointments? Today S shared about his past five years studying culinary arts in TP. He said that when he started out, he thought that it would just be something to pass his years in school, but over time, he understood that it had become more than that. It had turned into a lifelong passion, an important element of who he was, and he could not imagine it not being part of his life. And it made me wonder - how many of us are fortunate enough to find something that we care so deeply about? And are we as intensely passionate about the things that we are doing now, in this stage of our lives?
I hope we are, because that's the best way to roll.
"What was the real point of escaping, Helene wondered, chasing through your life so fast? Be consistent, be consistent, Helene whispered to herself, and as she heard herself whispering, she said out loud, in a firm voice, the concluding words of Buchner's Lenz: Inconsistent, inconsistent."
//Julia Franck; The Blind Side of the Heart
I guess at the end of it all, the process of becoming different is difficult to understand, unless it is seen in context and in hindsight. While we're in the midst of all the flow that has been going on, the best thing to do is to hold on, hold on until it gets better, until order is restored, until we see patterns in the chaos.
Head above water, you best be paddling fast, my dear.
"Experience is the most brutal of teachers but you learn. My God, do you learn."
//CS Lewis
The beginning starts off easy, the middle writes itself, the ending is almost always the toughest part. How do you put the threads of an amazing experience into words? Where do you begin to describe a journey that took almost a year and was full of ups, downs and all sorts of in-betweens? Honestly, if I could stand at the starting point where it all began, I don't think I could have taken the plunge with as much courage and blind faith again. But I'm so, so glad that we did. That we worked our guts out endlessly through late nights and early mornings, that we laughed as hard as we cried together, that we weren't afraid of what people would think of us, that we were blessed with the most amazingly patient stand-in coach ever.
So thankyou for the friendships, the lessons, the food, the laughter, the tears, the jokes, the heartaches and heartbreaks, the fun, the hugs and everything else in-between. It's been such a difficult and sometimes, painful journey, But it was all worth it to have you all at the end :)
