The Drama of Possibility: Experience as Philosophy of Culture

12. Ill-At-Ease: The Natural Travail of Ontological Disconnectedness

twelve ill-at-ease The Natural Travail of Ontological Disconnectedness Preamble Iam grateful for the honor and privilege of delivering the Annual Patrick Romanell Address. One accepts the invitation with alacrity and then, faced with the task of beginning to compose a text for such an auspicious occasion, insecurity sets in. One soon becomes, as it were, ‘‘ill-at-ease.’’ Perhaps, taking a leaf from Kierkegaard, I should address my listener, herewith my reader, der Einzelner, directly. Given that I have to say something, do I tell you a story, as in ‘‘Grandpa, tell us a story.’’ Which story, little ones? There are so many stories to tell. Tell us the one that has you falling through Grandma’s ceiling, plummeting to the floor below, startling all of us, most of all, you. Good story, yet too blunt, too crass, and it lacks rhetorical flourish, verbal polish and, so, is inappropriate for this occasion. On reflection, most of my stories turn out to be inappropriate for any audience other than a few trusted companioning souls. Well then, how about starting with a text, an epigraph. Such a beginning would provide me and the listener a sort of locus from which we {  } ill-at-ease  can eject, or further; such a text would enable each of us to conject. The dreamers among us can traject, playing with their respective fantasies as I speak. The personally intense listeners can render our text a subject or turn it to an object, as in, I object. And, given that this performance is to be in a philosophical vein, tradition allows that the response individually and even collectively, alas, could be simply to reject. Even though my intended literary lily-pond now seems to be faced with this series of respondent piranha fish, I push on. Ah! The text. Would it not be appropriate to begin with an excision from the codex of the philosophical tradition on nature, the De rerum natura of Lucretius? [A]ugescunt aliae gentes, aliae minuuntur, inque breui spatio mutantur saecla animantum et quasi cursores uitai lampada tradunt. (Book 11, 77–79)1 The nations wax, the nations wane away; in a brief space the generations pass. And like to runners hand the lamp of life one unto another. How could any start be more salutary than to begin with a text warning of cyclic inevitability, and yet affirming generational continuity, and in an affectionate way no less? Still, as soon as I begin to address the meaning of this text by Lucretius, there arises from within me still another ancient text, this from The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: ‘‘life is a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn, and after fame is oblivion’’ (Book 2, 17).2 Surely, these two texts will take us in very different directions, and although moral and spiritual syncretists will find compatibility, I think not. Being torn between them brings to mind still another text, that of St. Augustine, who diagnoses our situation, or is it better called our ‘‘plight,’’ as one which features an irrequitur cor, a restless heart.3 For Augustine, the ultimate future can be salvific, for we can rest in a ‘‘Thee.’’ Yet, for others, such a restlessness reveals what Martin Buber calls ‘‘the exalted melancholy of our fate,’’4 an oscillation between the poles of the sacred and the profane, between the enhanced and the obvious , a rhythm seemingly natural, intractable. Is this restlessness a harbinger of liberation or is it a malady, endemic to nature, when humanly had, as in you and me?  the drama of possibility I could, of course, render this ‘‘melancholy’’ in a more terrifying way if I invoked a text of Nietzsche, who warns us that ‘‘since Copernicus man has been rolling from the center toward X.’’5 He subsequently adumbrates that prophecy by claiming that we are ‘‘slipping farther and farther away from the center into—what? Into nothingness? Into a penetrating sense of his [our] nothingness?’’6 Nietzsche’s subsequent remark that this sense ‘‘has been the straightest route to the old ideal’’ is not sufficiently cheering.7 Consequently, I hark back to the death-bed lament of St. Francis of Assisi, who tells us that if he had it to do over, he would have loved brother ass more.8 Now that is a text with which I can do something. But I shall not! Lest I...