Stanisław Barszczak
A struggle for esteem. On philosophical anthropology by Paul Ricoeur and Joseph Conrad
Abstract: There has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity, as Paul Ricoeur told, the hermeneutic question today seems to us a new one.There has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity, because Christianity proceeds from a proclamation. Man is this plural and collective unity in which the unity of destination, the differences of destinies are to be understood through each other. If the Resurrection is resurrection from the dead, all the hope and freedom are in spite of death. Testimony gives something to be interpreted. Joseph Conrad proposes something new. A man’s most open actions have a secret side to them. The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. So, they talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience. Then, a caricature(in human life) is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth. Going home must be like going to render an account… Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men. History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird. I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go, Conrad said. Though, in order to gain respect you need to give us wisdom.
Keywords in this article: transcendence, memory, ethics, beyond relational externality, the proximity with no relation, the struggle for identity, immanence, substitution, the inevitability of God, agathological consciousness, love
- From a narrative identity to a recognition of the relation of the self to an other
This essay seeks to follow also the intellectual path of Paul Ricoeur at grips first of all with the notion of identity. “Oneself as Another” (1990) and “Memory, History, Forgetting”(2000) are at the heart of the topic. The essay also studies certain aspects of The Course of Recognition (2004), the last great work of the philosopher returning to this topic. Thus it is observed how Ricoeur grants to different theories of the quest for the temporal meaning of identity a choice place in the development of a hermeneutics of the self, and how he leads the reader to the heart of a central inquiry, that of the capacity of a person to establish a relationship to himself/herself, and to the society. Rights of mankind even cosmopolitical cannot be claimed on my behalf unless they are recognized in the same way for others. This extension of individual capacities belonging to legal persons concerns not only the enumeration of their civic rights but widens the sphere of application to new categories of individuals and powers previously scorned. This extension is the occasion for conflicts stemming from exclusions due to social inequalities but also those arising from forms of discrimination inherited from the past that still afflict various minorities. Disdain and humiliation, however, infect the social bond at a level that surpasses rights; this concerns social esteem directed to personal value and to the capacity to pursue happiness in accordance with one’s own conception of the good life. This struggle for esteem occurs in the context of different spheres of life: at work, the struggle to prevail, to protect one’s rank in the hierarchy of authority; at home, relations of neighborhood and proximity, together with all the many encounters that make up daily life. It is always personal capacities that demand to be recognized by others. The question then arises whether the social bond is constituted only in the struggle for recognition or whether there is not also at the origin a sort of good will tied to the resemblance of one person to another in the great human family.
When Paul Ricoeur distinguishes human time both from inner and from cosmic time, what he wants to do is call our attention to the time of human action and suffering. Only in and through the act of telling a story can this time acquire a figure and, in so doing, be preserved from oblivion as ‘time passes by’. Story telling makes it be that there is someone who can be referred to when we ask: ‘Who has done this?’, ‘Who has behaved in this way?’, or ‘To whom did such a thing happen?’ This comes down to asserting that an individual or collective entity can only be identified along with and through the act of composing what we call a narrative, be it of the fictive or the historical kind. As Paul Ricoeur states in a condensed formula: ‘the story relates the Whom of the action’. Or, as he also puts it: ‘the identity of this whom is no other than his narrative identity’. The notion of ‘a narrative identity’ allows one to think through the question of ‘personal identity’ in a new way, taking into full account the temporal dimension (the temporality) of a being who, by existing with others in the horizon of a common world, is led to transform him (her)self in the course of a life history, that is, who is what he or she is only in the course of becoming himself or herself. This notion also makes it possible for Paul Ricoeur to distinguish two dimensions: identity as sameness (Latin: idem); and identity as selfhood (Latin: ipse). The thesis I hope to develop here in outline is the following: “Oneself as an Other” shows that selfhood cannot be reduced to a form of narrative identity. And this, because the question of selfhood exceeds that of narrative identity… It is precisely this excess that brings to the fore the ethical dimension of the self, thereby inviting the question: how selfhood is associated with narrative identity, without being absorbed into it. Only on this basis is it possible to do justice to the ethical patterns embodied in the very act of telling a story. To put it otherwise: When we tell a story we inevitably prefer a certain course of action to others, we value one character and devalue another. The axiological neutrality of narrative is not equivalent to ethical neutrality… We have to bear in mind that, for Paul Ricoeur, a ‘philosophy of selfhood’ is needed to replace the philosophy of the ego, the advantage being that the refusal of the latter makes it possible to dispense with the claim of a transcendental egology to furnish an epistemological foundation for philosophy. In opposition to an ego that, in a specific act of reflection, removes itself from the world, the self recognises itself as having been given over to itself, thereby at the same time acknowledging, as fundamental to its very being, its essential passivity. In sum, the self understands itself by being open to otherness and affected by it. It follows that, in its own apprehension of selfhood, the self feels itself vulnerable, exposed to others and to those actions of the other by which it is affected, and this whether the actions in question are its own or those done by others. This amounts to saying that this kind of self-apprehension encompasses a temporal experience which schematises itself as a life history. Thus, narrative identity presents itself as the essential structure of human identity and so of human self-understanding. Paul Ricoeur also holds narrative identity responsible for mediating between the two poles of personal identity, the pole of sameness (idem), referred to by what we call character, a set of innate or acquired attitudes and capacities, and the pole of selfhood (ipse), including trustworthiness and faithfulness to oneself, despite all the deviation and transformations which mark the path of life… The latter polarity is the key to what Ricoeur names his ‘philosophy of selfhood’, where narrative identity ensures a mediation between the two poles (character and selfhood). Character can be the object of a narrative thanks to a narrative identity through which it is referred to the temporal becoming of a particular existence. However, it is only when we return the pole of selfhood that the ethical dimension of a person (its personal identity) can be fully revealed… By remaining true to oneself (with regard to which the crucial experience is that of keeping one’s word), the identity of the self emerges in response to the continuous changes which occur in the course of a life, and this in the form of a relation to an other which is constitutive of one very own self. The dialectical relationship involved in being true to oneself also makes it possible for the self to be true to others. As Ricoeur puts it: “to be faithful to oneself is for a person to behave in such a way that an other person can rely upon him or her”.[1] My self-engagement in keeping my word makes it possible for another to trust me, which at the same time assures me of my own internal consistency, of my own identity. The result is not some sort of sticking to oneself by dint of stiffness or inflexibility but rather what is meant by being reliable, responsible.
So, for Ricoeur, ethics has its place within a philosophy of selfhood. The corollary of this is the impossibility of reducing ethics to the question of moral obligation, as in a Kantian horizon, where the subject (viewed exclusively from a transcendental point of view) subjects himself to the categorial imperative as the form through which the moral law presents itself to him. Beyond the universality of the moral law, there is the aspiration for a true and good life. Because this could seen as something of a paradox, what now has to be done is to complete the Kantian ethics with an ethics drawn from Aristotle. But what does this call for a true life, placed under the sign of the Good and heard within oneself, actually consist in? Ricoeur answers: ‘I am called to live well with and for the other within righteous (fair) institutions’. [2] This formulation lets us see how each one of us is responsible for developing his own answer to the injunction to lead a good life, a life oriented toward the Good. It is the diversity of our personal answers to this call that explains the variety of those narratives by means of which our life experiences get told. Through them we are confronted with the crises of identity that have affected the self in the past and that can even lead to a loss of self. Some of these crises may be analyzed as permanent, as in cases where the self is diluted ‘forever’.(The Man without Qualities) . But the self can also be presented in a multitude of facets. An approach of the coherence of a life in “Oneself as an Other” concentrates on the question of the intrinsic constitution of the self, excludes neither the experience of love nor the relationship established between the self (ipse ) and God. Only through just a genuine dissolution and destitution of the ego could the self be fully restored to itself by God, acknowledge itself as being a creature among the other creatures of this very same God. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ (Lk 6.31). For, by starting out from action, the latter inevitably privileges the ethical dimension of selfhood at the expense of the affective and the mystical. “Inward creative reciprocity” of contemporary, this state itself is but a further stage of man’s ontological individualization or self-interpretation in existence. The “reciprocity of love” first of all consists in a search for the meaningfulness of events for our own existence, which results in “ciphering” their significance into the weaving of the thread of our existence. It is also an attempt to find the meanings which “the beloved” gives them in reference to his own thread. The interrogatory process is shared by both members of this relationship. The identification of the dialogical relations occurs merely in the perspective of the creative function of man, because it proceeds using all the ways and means of creativity. We seek for clues of our lifes to the meanings to be given to our interior existence as radically turned toward the Other, considered as caught within his own identical quest. This self interpretation in destiny is not oriented toward ciphering a rational intersubjunctive message. We attempt to penetrate into the most secretive tendencies and intentions of the other self and into the way in which he appreciates their significance by confronting them with our own, in order to dig deeper into our virtualities. So we sustain the perduring validity of our very self, it must be wrung from the fleeting segments of existence and spun by their means. In order to “transcend” our natural, empirical, everyday self at the present stage in which we are constituted and seemingly stabilized, we must reorganize even our vital functioning at its elementary stage. So by trial and error crystallizes at the and a mutual self-revelation. My own new self becomes “other without ever stopping in its course and without identifying itself with a form; indeed, no definite form may grasp it. We then address our interrogatory quest simultaneously in a two-fold direction: toward our innermost self and toward the Other, while we attempt to scrutinize the most intimately personal experiences, convictions, and attitudes in their foundations and reasons. But we do not expect to find within the Other an already established sense of life which we could accept. This must come from within our own resources and upon our own evidence, but none of these to offer which is ready and waiting to be discovered. So to know “all the reasons” for our choice “we have to invent ourselves.” This interrogatory quest is, thus, not yet a passive flow. We address ourselves to the Other as to a witness and a judge, seeking his approval or consent for our deepest concern and conflicts. We then introduce the Other into the very heart of our creative investigation as a second self. We face him as an “other self”…We face him as a being-in-a-quest, other than ourselves and over against whom we may measure our own self. He is an “other self”. None of their meanings appears capable of transmitting, of holding this unique significance we seek to establish.
- We create the new phase of our creative world
According to Prof. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka the dynamic thread of our communication with the other self, this creative process is constructive.[3] Furthermore, the self-interpretation in destiny employs for its own purpose the means of human functioning and the constituted life-world. But it is by no means subject to its organizing regulations and projects; on the contrary, it is worked out through a functional system devised for its own unique purpose by the interrogating process itself. Mrs. Professor also repeats: the soul addresses the other self with a transparent sincerity that is not capable of mastery even toward herself alone. She addresses him beyond the reach of any objectivity, leaving the life-pursuits, concerns, and values aside…So do we really ever meet the other self in his truth? Each self progresses, in fact, in separation; in the quest after the new, final interpretative system each has scrutinized all personal signals. There is the quest, by discarding the interpretative schemes one by one like the leaves of a tree…So from time to time we are looking for the self-centered search for the meaning of life or of human existence (cfr. Kafka, Camus). And so is good, when man is convinced that the self and the other self are firmly established within the same meaningful text, that he has constructed a common “universe” which we both share, and that this is meaningful with reference equally to us and to him. But the instants in which we communicate with each other in our ultimate concern with existence are extremely rich in “substance”. So in the common search with the Other, the clues are found for their working into a thread of destiny-every discourse, every interpretative process, every communication fails. But we believe on the eternal, immortal soul. The soul, on the one hand, is left free from the empirical ties. On the other hand, the Other having detached himself and vanished from her horizon, the soul finds herself to be indeed lost. However, cut off from the world, she has spontaneous, and on the other side of the opening abyss the soul discovers the Absolute Other abiding with her face to face. Consequently we consider ourselves to be carried by our creative spontaneity, so we may move to invent more and more and create the new phase of our creative world.
Paul Ricoeur taking as his point of departure, human action (which is itself never ethically neutral), Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self not only led him to a conception of narrative identity as forming an essential part of self-understanding but also to a recognition of the relation of the self to an other, a relation intrinsic to the very constitution of the self. On the third part of my book titled “Another and he” I describe the Self in possession of me. That self needs be on the best possible of the realization ourselves. There is here a problem not only what a state we are in but also a problem of being in the state indeed. I am interesting in the liberty of a person but before all I love the truth of our life. My Self may have of me but it depends on many reasons. Life is often messy, things don’t fit together as they should, we often don’t get what we want. There are the questions: Where does our need for love come from, and does it ever disappear? Or are we condemned, or blessed, to fall in love again and again and again? But by going out unflinchingly in front of us the philosophy of today is able indeed, without a trace of sentimentality or condescension, to reassure us – and to show us perhaps what life is really like. What natural right does not recognize is the place of struggle in the conquest of equality and justice, the role of negative conduct in the motivation leading to struggle: lack of consideration, humiliation, disdain, to say nothing of violence in all its physical and psychological forms. The struggle for recognition is pursued on several levels. It begins on the level of affective relations tied to the transmission of life, to sexuality, and to descendents. This struggle for recognition is pursued on the juridical plane of the rights of civil society, centered on the ideas of liberty, justice, and solidarity. Rights cannot be claimed on my behalf unless they are recognized in the same way for others. This extension of individual capacities belonging to legal persons concerns not only the enumeration of their civic rights but widens the sphere of application to new categories of individuals and powers previously scorned. This extension is the occasion for conflicts stemming from exclusions due to social inequalities but also those arising from forms of discrimination inherited from the past that still afflict various minorities. Disdain and humiliation, however, infect the social bond at a level that surpasses rights; this concerns social esteem directed to personal value and to the capacity to pursue happiness in accordance with one’s own conception of the good life. This struggle for esteem occurs in the context of different spheres of life: at work, the struggle to prevail, to protect one’s rank in the hierarchy of authority; at home, relations of neighborhood and proximity, together with all the many encounters that make up daily life. It is always personal capacities that demand to be recognized by others. The question then arises whether the social bond is constituted only in the struggle for recognition or whether there is not also at the origin a sort of good will tied to the resemblance of one person to another in the great human family.
- The diseases of faith – thinking of Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad grew up in the Polish Ukraine, a large, fertile plain between Poland and Russia. It was a divided nation, with four languages, four religions, and a number of different social classes. A fraction of the Polish-speaking inhabitants, including Conrad’s family, belonged to the szlachta, a hereditary class in the aristocracy on the social hierarchy, combining qualities of gentry and nobility. They had political power, despite their impoverished state. Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, studied for six years at St. Petersburg University, which he left before earning a degree. Conrad’s mother, Eva Bobrowska, was thirteen years younger than Apollo and the only surviving daughter in a family of six sons. After she met him in 1847, Eva was drawn to Apollo’s poetic temperament and passionate patriotism, while he admired her lively imagination. Although Eva’s family disapproved of the courtship, the two were married in 1856. After Apollo was arrested on suspicion of involvement in revolutionary activities, the family was thrown into exile. Eva developed tuberculosis, and she gradually declined until she died in 1865. The seven-year-old Conrad, who witnessed her decline, was absolutely devastated. He also developed health problems, migraines and lung inflammation, which persisted throughout his life. Apollo too fell into decline, and he died of tuberculosis in 1869. At age eleven, Joseph became an orphan. The young boy became the ward of his uncle, who loved him dearly. Thus began Joseph’s Krakow years, which ended when he left Poland as a teenager in 1874. This move was a complex decision, resulting from what he saw as the intolerably oppressive atmosphere of the Russian garrison. He spent the next few years in France, mastering his second language and the fundamentals of seamanship. The author made acquaintances in many circles, but his “bohemian” friends were the ones who introduced him to drama, opera, and theater. In the meantime, he was strengthening his maritime contacts, and he soon became an observer on pilot boats. The workers he met on the ship, together with all the experiences they recounted to him, laid the groundwork for much of the vivid detail in his novels. By 1878, Joseph had made his way to England with the intention of becoming an officer on a British ship. He ended up spending twenty years at sea. A journey to the Congo in 1890 was Joseph’s inspiration to write “Heart of Darkness”. His condemnation of colonialism is well documented in the journal he kept during his visit. He returned to England and soon faced the death of his beloved guardian and uncle. Still always writing, he eventually returned to Poland, and he then traveled to America, where he died of a heart attack in 1924 at the age of 67. Conrad’s literary work would have a profound impact on the Modernist movement, influencing a long list of modern writers.
Is there not also a central obscurity, something noble, heroic, beautiful . . . but obscure, obscure? Tolstoi said, “These essays do suggest that he is misty in the middle as well as at the edges, that the secret casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel”. Moreover the base from which he starts: Christianity “is distasteful to me”(Lev N.Tolstoi) If anybody had ever struggled with a soul, I am the man. . . . I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.” Nevertheless achieves in the course of the novel what one has to call a saving faith, even though he does it at the price of his life. Heyst is not an “infidel…he only thinks he is…Conrad is. Isn’t actually stageable: too much depends on the narrator’s ironic control. For me Victory passes the crudest, indispensable test of tragedy: it makes you cry. That, though, is a necessary but not sufficient condition of tragedy…The tears in Victory are not tragic ones…Heyst says, “She was engaged in the task of defending her position in life. …It’s a very respectable task”. Heyst père is not systematic but a “destroyer of all systems, of hopes, of beliefs”…Heyst is a post-Hume Victorian unbeliever,…But the philosophical position is strong more by force of character than by any argumentation: “You still believe in something, then? You believe in flesh and blood, perhaps? A full and equable contempt would soon do away with that, too. But since you have not attained to it, I advise you to cultivate that form of contempt which is called pity. . . but all action is bound to be harmful It is devilish. That is why this world is evil upon the whole. But I have done with it! I shall never lift a little finger again. At one time I thought that intelligent observation of facts was the best way of cheating the time which is allotted to us whether we want it nor not; but now I have done with observation, too…by folly alone the world moves. His apparently illogical lurch in to action in the interests of progress, bringing coal as “a great stride forward for these regions”…Heyst has none himself, is never hostile or contemptuous. Compare his narrative to Lena: Being cornered, as I have told you, he went down on his knees and prayed. What do you think of that?” Heyst paused. She looked at him earnestly. You didn’t make fun of him for that?” she said. Heyst made a brusque movement of protest. “My dear girl, I am not a ruffian,” he cried. .. Heyst is in fact as far from Kurtz as from Don Martin Decoud, dying because he can’t stand his own company. Heyst prefers his own company and consistently ascribes all his misfortunes to involvement with the world…“A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth that which is good.”Victory is the story of Heyst’s attainment of self-knowledge (perhaps my mother never has any need of that), but whereas in the primeval garden self-knowledge comes, along with the certainty of death, in the later paradise of youth, self-knowledge is of a redeemed state. Heyst the sceptic is unable to resist the temptation of his Christian impulses…Heyst felt a sudden pity for these beings.[4] Heyst’s goodness—what else to call it?—provokes him to intervene first in the matter of Morrison then in that of Lena,… The Christ-like self-sacrificing love of Lena, for instance, is much clearer in Victory…Heyst-a man more unexpected than an angel. “Nobody has sent me. I just happened along.” In the New Testament our Lord repeatedly assures those he has miraculously healed that their faith has made them whole: without it there would have been no miracle. The moral discovery in Conrad’s Victory is that it may be possible to love God unawares. before Heaven, I am not!’”… As to me, I am no blacker than the gentleman you are thinking of, and I have neither more nor less determination.” It is true that at one point he calls himself “the world itself, come to pay you a visit” But the other signs are consistently Satanic…A man living alone with a Chinaman on an island takes care to conceal property of that kind so well that the devil himself. ”Heyst’s skepticism…Lena or to Heyst, whose convictions are actually redeemed by his passions…Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog”… You should try to love me!” she said. He made a movement of astonishment…She resisted without a moment of faltering, because she was no longer deprived of moral support; because she was a human being who counted; because she was no longer defending herself for herself alone; because of the faith that had been born in her—the faith in the man of her destiny, and perhaps in the Heaven which had sent him so wonderfully to cross her path…We have here the wholeness of faith…
4. Fight for own sense isolation from past
The book of Job demonstrates the exstra-ordinary role which the idea of divine personality plays there. For K. Barth the moral is the discovery that in dealing with God we have to do with a totally unique Personality, with a Subject which alone offers content to the predicates ascribed to him. [5]At the outset of the Jobian drama Job knows only Elohim, the Deus revelatus, God as partner and friend. His idea of God has been formed and confirmed by benevolent experiences in life. Now he suffers terrifying afflictions. He is bewildered because as a believer in one God he knows that whatever sorrow befalls him comes from God. As a monotheist he knows that suffering comes from no secondary god. Job’s faith and honesty force upon him the recognition of a relentless, cruel, hostile force. At the same time the memory of Elohim, and the covenantal compact support his protestation against this alienating power. He appeals to the co-signatory of that ‘record on high’ for witness and vindication. Only at the conclusion of the dialogues with man and the voices out of the whirlwind does Job come to know the identity of this alien and unpredictable form. Yahweh, the concealed personality of the divine, is the same as Elohim. In Job’s moment of truth, the ‘two gods’ are knows as one. Adversary and advocate inhere within the same Personality. Through this shock of recognition Job finds his reconciliation with God.
How to live? First of All we want to give the memory of our land, from the Bug River to the Oder, from the Baltic see to the Tatras mountaines. For it is in our hands that the future of our country lies. It is not enough to give a sign, such even as solidarity, but pass a personal wisdom! But what I can see here, you are disconsolate spirits! My eye is not looking in another direction! And we need to acquire this land! It depends on the conquest of the earth! Then we have the eyes half shut. But on the other hand may well! In search of a answer for the problem above, let’s give a famous text reproduced here with the English passport Pole, Joseph Conrad. In search of power from on high, we rely on the bible. “Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.” You may had read the texts by Joseph Conrad: “He struggled with himself, too. I saw it. I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.” And again Conrad: “They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.”[6] But also: “They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.” “I couldn’t have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life…” “They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.”On the other hand: “There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.” “We couldn’t understand because we were too far… and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, those ages that had gone, leaving hardly a sign… and no memories.” “We live in the flicker, may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.” According to Joseph Conrad, even if we have reached a perfection that awaits us at the end of horror. „Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror, of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: The horror! The horror!” So, “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it much.” “It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts…Droll thing life is, that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself, that comes too late, a crop of inextinguishable regrets.” “My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel, it is, before all, to make you see.” “Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank, but that’s not the same thing.” The writer has said: I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.” “Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream–making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams…” “No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence, that which makes its truth, its meaning, its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream, alone! And here we make new mistakes, we begin to do errors: “There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.” His hero has mentioned: “He hated all this, and somehow he couldn’t get away.” He always loves past: “I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more, the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires and expires, too soon, too soon before life itself”. Finally, at this point I want to thank God for my forest, the house where I live now, for it has been one of the dark places of the earth, like a bow over the ark of the covenant of the Lord in the Old Testament. So, I meant to swim until I sank there. It is here that I could open up more strongly the great culture of the East. Also on the west: “There must be a necessity superior to our conceptions there”. I started here issue and publish my books. They now keep me alive. “Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.”In the jungle of passion and adversity, let us support the hope of God’s infinite mercy. Do not be surprised with your weaknesses, but treated each other as you are. Love always pain, which in addition to being a work of divine wisdom, reveals even more the work of His love. Angels envy us, Father Pio said, just one: the fact that they cannot suffer for God. Only pain one can say with certainty of the soul: My God, you see well that I love you!
The uncertainty would have called Joseph Conrad probably as the resignation:“Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.” Earth would be easier without the sun than without the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, Father Pio said. We adore and bless especially that which is most difficult for you. You should ask you about one thing only, love for Him. All the rest should be thanksgiving. Mass is infinite like Jesus. Think of the mercy of God is the only thing that sustains me. To put on Jesus Christ we die to ourselves. And it does not mean leave yourself, but make an effort built in imitation of Christ himself.” „They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force, nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.” And it also means: ”In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility”. The Lord is ready to do great things, but on condition that we are truly humble. Let us serve the Lord with all our heart and will. He always gives us more than we deserve this. “Pain is a grace, which is not deserved. I speak that somebody really loves me when agrees to suffer along with me. Otherwise, it is usurer, who in my heart wants to put his sordid business, ” Leon Bloy said. We must go deeper, to our interior! For “Life knows us not and we do not know life, we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow”. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it”. In depth of the heart lies the root of all good and, unfortunately, all evil: there is a conversion must take place or “metanoia”- so, the change of direction, mentality, life choice. Saint Paul, the most educated of his generation, knew a Syrian language. But he never met Jesus personally before. He was called by name: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”(Act. 9,4) But after his conversion preaches the doctrine of the mystical body of the church. It begins the mission to Ananias, who spoke to Saint Paul: “you have to be baptized in the death of Christ.” This is the name of Jesus is persecuted. Paul now understands what the man what his data, the data Christ. Moreover, he understood: you will be known in the face of authoritarian governments and priorities of this world only from suffering of yours. This is the whole conversion. And now add the mystery of our faith, the bank one is not bad: ”Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out.”“The world is to the young, Joseph Conrad said”. “Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” Make love, do this in memory of our justice.
[1] Cfr. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Soi-même comme un autre), trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 (1990); Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil, 2000.
[2] Cfr. Paul Ricoeur, O sobie samym jako innym, Translation by Bogdan Chełstowski, Warsaw 2003, p.285.
[3] Cfr. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Logos and Life, Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1987-2000, 4 vols.
[4] The lady artists of Zangiacomo’s troupe, exploited, hopeless, devoid of charm or grace, whose fate of cheerless dependence invested their coarse and joyless features with a touch of pathos”, cfr.: J. Conrad, Victory 1915, p.60. In: Victory by Joseph Conrad, Dover Publications; Dover Thrift Editions edition, 1990.
[5]Karl Barth’s Job: “Morality and Theodicy”, see: Harold M. Schulweis, The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Jan., 1975), pp. 156-167 (article consists of 12 pages). Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press.
6 Cfr. all quotes of Heart of Darkness (Penguin Classics) by Joseph Conrad, Owen Knowles, Robert Hampson and J. H. Stape, 2007.
(to be continued)
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