Ariadne’s Snake and Daedalus' Labyrinth, Part 2
The other day I was talking to a friend about how philosophy feels like a kind of hell. Just constantly deriving abstractions upon abstractions to further theorize about, playing word games - creating new word-phrases to suit the new theory... which, most of the time, has not revealed an actual truth about reality but has only further obscured and mystified it. Bourgeois philosophy is too much a spectacle, a pure decadence of the mind.
That got me thinking again about Limbo in Dante's Inferno, which is the realm of the virtuous pagans. For Christians, this simply means that all people who lived and died before Christ are spared from hell, but neither will they ever get to heaven. Still, Limbo is described as a natural paradise, illuminated by the light of reason, where, without hope, they live on in desire.
The virtuous pagans have no hope of getting to heaven, according to the theology of Dante's time. But, what could it mean to live on in desire, without hope? I'd like to first point out that not all pagans are 'virtuous,' so, who does the church consider a virtuous pagan? Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, etc...you get it - philosophers! These are the ones who, because of their embrace of reason, certainly would have accepted the logos of Christ had he come in their time (at least from Dante's Renaissance perspective).
What if it could be said that what they have no hope for is actually transcending themselves, due to their over-reliance on their reasoning faculties? Plato, for example, reasoned his way further from reality, from any pure being in the world...and this trajectory in Western philosophy would not really begin to be corrected until Kant. Kant was an enlightenment thinker who attempted to reign in reason for the sake of transcending the limitations of the reasoning self, for the ultimate sake of social morality.
Eve ate the forbidden fruit because she desired the wisdom of God, and so it was because of her naturally limited reasoning combined with her desire to know what she cannot possibly know that she was then alienated from paradise, or pure being in the world.
An old cliche says that the only way out is through, I think we can see this notion demonstrated in Kant's approach, but also metaphorically depicted in the myth of King Minos' labyrinth. Recall that all who entered to kill the Minotaur had gotten lost and were defeated by the half-man half-beast who lived there. This naturalized, solitary resident of a gardenesque maze; a prisoner kept from society in a structure which archaically resembles a brain, spells the death of any man who enters. To be so far away from ourselves, in the belly of the reasoning mind's labyrinth, is to split ourselves in half, dangerously alienating our humanity from nature.
It is only by Ariadne's thread that Theseus can make his way out after going through the maze to complete his mission. It is only by cooperatively understanding and holding to the ties that bind us to the world, to others, that we can escape the entrapments of our minds.
Most of philosophy is going round and round in the maze of 'reason' until the half-man beast that we've created destroys us. The maze only exists to contain the beast, an artificial solution to an artificial problem: this is what it is to deal in idealism's abstractions; to theorize upside down.
Are we animals or are we made in the image of God? The truth is we are both, for our (limited) capacity for reason still elevates us into our minds where we can create our reality....we can live on in endless desire, for better or worse. But we do not have to further alienate ourselves, we do not have to despise the animal with a limited capacity for reasoning that is also the human being. The only knowledge we should desire is that of our own reasoning, the only way out of ourselves is through.
Karl Marx, with a wisdom like Ariadne's, knew that only by anchoring our reasoning to our material lifeline in the social world could we actually reason our way out of our very real problems. It's when we understand the way this lifeline, this epistemological red thread, works that we can hope to change the world ourselves; we can pair hope with desire in the least alienated way; we can go to the real garden of paradise.
Consider that Eve's 'original sin' was desiring a wisdom detached from her actual existence. The result was being cast from a natural paradise illuminated by reason to a dark garden maze of the mind's desire: a place of pure alienation.
Possessing knowledge that is not situated in reality (having place-based emergence) does effectively imply a kind of death. The serpent was not lying when he told Eve it wouldn’t result in actual death, nor was God lying when he relayed to Adam that it would mean death....to lose your sense of harmonious belonging and feel shame, as in feeling udeserving of belonging, just as you are, is a kind of social death - alienation from pure being in the world. The serpent, as an animal, is only concerned with the literal event of death, while humans are also concerned with conceptualizing the experience of death. God, knowing what he knows, knew that man should not know more than is necessary for his being in the world. Placed in the garden, they had all the knowledge they needed always-already. That Eve was speaking with the serpent alludes to a kind of perfect harmony with nature, while The Fall amounts to making false value judgements.
Further, tying this in to the myth of Prometheus upsetting the gods by bringing the power of fire to humans, it’s not that it’s wrong for humans to develop knowledge and technology, it’s that it’s wrong for us to acquire these outside of what is necessitated by real need. Knowledge and technology for the sake of knowledge and technology, or, for the sake of exploitation and profit, is not virtuous. Much like Daedalus' inventions, where just because he could doesn’t mean he should. This is such a perennial theme, from Greek myth to Frankenstein to Westworld.
So, again, what is hope? Hope at once hinges on what is, and at the same time is willing to let what is go so that whatever could be can become. What could be is beyond our knowledge. Hope requires a positive assessment of what is, or has been, without being overly sentimental towards our own constructions, hope allows for their unmaking if the movement should involve it. It’s not wrong that the virtuous pagans live in desire, for that is at the base of mankind’s original state of alienation, but the virtuous pagans have no hope because they had not realized a reason greater than themselves; a reason to abandon their attachment to their reason.