MINDING OUR LANGUAGE David Paterson The Last Philosophy. By Don Cupitt (SCM, £9.95) Our world contains a lot of unhappiness. Philosophy (like religion) has not always been innocent of making matters worse, Don Cupitt, in his new book, asks the question: ‘How may the world be viewed as a place in which human beings may find fulfilment and eternal happiness?’’ (page 116).
The question is almost the last sentence. Don’s answer is in part given at the beginning: ‘‘Live like a child, or a seventy-year-old for whom life has become feather-light, pure grace’’ (page 3). Between the answer and the question the book explores the issues in two ways, the way of observation and wisdom, and the way of argument and assertion. I found the wisdom to be often inspiring, but was less happy with the assertions. I hope this selection of quotes gives some idea of the way of observation and wisdom: “‘T haven’t got any higher world or any deep structure of things to tell you about. In fact, you already know all that you need to know”’ (page 8). ** liberate people from the belief that there is something structurally wrong with this life of ours’’ (page 11). “For us, our life-world is the world’’ (page 20). “There will no doubt always be people who claim to have privileged knowledge of a superior realm outside the sphere of ordinary language and everyday life. Such people have included, in particular, priests, philosophers and scientists’’ (page 27). “*A philosophy book is a very queer sort of book’’ (page 37). ‘‘Language’s job is to structure the world, to add value and so to make life more interesting’’ (page 44). **,..a cosmic religious humanism need not be thought of as in any way spiritually diminishing. Rather the opposite’’ (page 61). **..pethaps the quest for substance - solid, enduring, independent being - is neurotic, and our highest happiness is to dance away out into the flux’’ (page 66). “The idiot cult of the Ego must go. One should hope to go up like a rocket and burn out at the summit of one’s flight, falling unnoticed to earth in the darkness’’ (page 81). ““My heart goes out, and I am ravished, in a moment when vocabulary, feeling-experience and the objective intensity of life’s joyous self-affirmation all coincide’’ (page 84). “‘The world itself is our objective redemption’’ (page 107).
Don’s life is in his philosophy. Not only his observation and wisdom but also his assertions and arguments are deeply personal statements. How could it be otherwise? “‘Philosophy has the advantage of being ‘propositional’ or ‘textual’. By that I mean that it can be written and read, it can be made public: it can be argued, shared and even - as I hope - democratized. And if so, then it may again come to be seen as offering a generally-accessible way to salvation’ (page 7). True, but is not that very ‘propositional’, ‘textual’ character already a diminishing of the ‘Don Cupitt’s insistence that the world is made by language has often seemed to me desperately human-centred’ varied richness of everyday life? Indeed, on page 36 in the concluding sentence of chapter 6, ‘‘What are Words?’’, Don - never able to resist the power of irony - writes: ‘‘Our theory has become so rich that we’ve talked the world into being all talk’’. ‘‘What would the world be like if there were no language? Darkness, blind chaos. But these too are words’’ (page 16). “‘What we are, what we’ve got, how we tick, is all there is’’ (page 20). This sentence follows the passage quoted above from page 20. Does the argument really follow from the observation? “The only eyes that have ever looked upon a world, and indeed the only eyes period, are the eyes of animals like ourselves’’ (page 24). How could we ever possibly know that? “Only language is publicizable’’ (page 43). Later, Don acknowledges that this statement only stands up if “‘language’’ is widely defined to include all that enables communication to take place. Chapter 18 explores the biological development of communication signs.
I am grateful for the considerable space the book gives to reasserting that human nature is ‘‘the same stuff’’ as all biological being, for Don’s insistence that the world is made by language has often seemed to me desperately human-centred. It is arguable that ideas are testable mainly by the behaviour they engender, and present-day humanity seems all too dangerously to regard its own concerns as overriding the well-being of all other life species. Don has a neat juxtaposition on pages 98 and 99: “*But it doesn’t in the least follow that we should live like animals. On the contrary, our world is a human world’’ (page 98). “*The laws of the market... are only human conventions... what human beings first invented, other human beings can modify, or even reinvent altogether. Perhaps... even capitalist economics might not be sacrosanct’’ (page 99).
But a great deal in this book is argument and assertion of the proposition that ‘‘everything is language’’, even though there is a new breadth and the writing is spiced with ironic asides. ra If I lie quietly - as Don asks his reader to do on pages 14-15 - to experience the emergence of Becoming, I find myself in something I cannot wholly communicate or even think about. If I now try to look at what I have been experiencing, then indeed I must reduce it to some language (not necessarily of words), but for me it does not follow that what I can now be conscious of, think about and communicate, was all there was. Far from it. I may be finding new insights in such an experience for the rest of my life.
Some of these insights I may put into words, others into the arts, but most into my everyday life. The up-welling primal Chaos Don describes on page 13 ‘‘emerges into light as it gets formed by language’’. But does it not remain a part of the stuff of which we all consist? “Sanity lies in ordinariness. If there is anything that stands on its own feet, it is everydayness’’ (page 29).
David Paterson is Vicar of Loughborough, a foundermember of the SoF Network and a member of its Steering Committee.