Author: Meng-hu

In his felicitous essay titled “Walking,” published posthumously in 1862, Henry David Thoreau approximates a historical practice that he recognizes by analogy. Thoreau presents walking not as the taking of exercise but of deliberate “sauntering.” He repeats the formula of Samuel Johnson that the notion of sauntering is taken from the medieval sense of leisurely walking (i.e., “sauntering” to the “sant terre,” the Holy Land). The idea of walking should be a significant spiritual expression. Or is made so, by Thoreau.

Such is the idealized version of the term, which even in medieval times came to represent first the idea of pilgrimage or crusade, but then, among the common people, the freer notion of what idlers and vagabonds pursued in their poverty, simply walking idly, anywhere, for everywhere is holy land, after all. And here the parallel assessment of the hermit is approximated. Thoreau is aware of this nuance, and embraces it fully.

While Thoreau is the more familiar popularizer of walking for its own sake, other modern thinkers have expressed the same sensibility, as Rebecca Solnit describes in her 2000 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking and Frédéric Gros in his A Philosophy of Walking (2008, translated 2015). Notes Solnit: “The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as welll as in songs, streets and almost everyone’s adventures.”

Or, potentially everyone’s adventures, from which is crafted the advocacy of walking, the philosophy of walking. Philosopher Gros concentrates on Thoreau, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. Solnit highlights Rousseau, Kierkegaard, the Chinese hermit Cold Mountain and the British Romantic poet Wordsworth, who composed the famous “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Wordsworth’s is the image of the wanderer, clearly alone, in a natural setting, who delights that the “crowd” is thankfully not of people but of flowers!

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Thoreau makes a further reference to Wordsworth: “When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered,’Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.’”

Thoreau also refers to the medieval ballad “Gest of Robin Hode,” the stanza wherein Robin Hood sighs upon seeing the green forest and hearing birdsong. Here is the potential for both vagabonding and freedom. But, back to walking.

Thoreau tells us, “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”

Thoreau dismisses the question of where one should walk, it being obvious to his reader that he intends wilderness, not town or city; in the latter one encounters a stultifying image of self and not the liberating one embodied in nature. He entertains the notion of walking in specific directions, perhaps to emphasize the priority of intellectual and cultural self, telling us that one should walk westward towards California, not southward towards the Confederacy, and not eastward where New England already lies. Westward, too, in his mental geography, is the Amazon, the Orinoco, ultimately Africa and Asia, India and China, the lands of the future, as he understood them.

But for the moment, Thoreau tells us, he is noticing the brilliant golden sunset, the oaks, the meandering brook, a marsh hawk.

“So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in Autumn.”

URL (original June 1862 Atlantic article): https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/06/walking/304674/

For centuries, Western intellectuals have centered public culture around the triumvirate of Homer, Socrates, and Plato. In Homer they placed the origins of Greek tragedy and extended its ethos to popular cultural sentiment in the arts. In Socrates they centered rationality and public discourse. In Plato they centered metaphysics and the origins of Western cultural bounds of expression.

Thus reflections on Homer have historially revolved around the so-called “ Homeric question”: Was Homer one person or two? Or, perhaps, a school? Was the author of the Iliad the same author of the Odyssey? Such were the innocuous inquiries of the academics and literati.

But in the twentieth century, French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), praised by thinkers as diverse as Albert Camus and T.S. Eliot, overthrew the vacuities of the academics in a searing essay titled “The Iliad, Poem of Force.” The essay maintained that the West constructed its institutions on the ethos of a grand seminal premise, on the foundational values expressed in the Iliad, a foundation based on force, coercion, and violence.

Weil did so without pedantic argument but simply by presenting the text itself and letting the passages and descriptions speak for themselves. Her commentary is simple and illustrative. In the Iliad, the poem of war, the paean to violence, elite men slaughter one another, and elders, women, and children suffer in agony and resignation.

Notes Weil:

“The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.

“To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us.“

Weil goes on to quote the text of the Iliad and to comment briefly on the given passage. Here is the first such passage, with comment:

Rattled the empty chariots through the files of battle,
Longing for their noble drivers. But they on the ground Lay,
dearer to the vultures than to their wives.

“The hero becomes a thing dragged behind a chariot in the dust:”

All around, his black hair
Was spread; in the dust his whole head lay,
That once-charming head; now Zeus had let his enemies
Defile it on his native soil.

“The bitterness of such a spectacle is offered us absolutely undiluted. No comforting fiction intervenes; no consoling prospect of immortality; and on the hero’s head no washedout halo of patriotism descends.”

His soul, fleeing his limbs, passed to Hades,
Mourning its fate, forsaking its youth and its vigor.

Plato dismisses this sentiment angrily, objecting to Homer’s sense of resignation. A magnificent military sacrifice is belittled by Homer as meaningless death. For Plato, death means glorious afterlife and, therefore, a purpose and value to war. For Plato, useless slaughter was not in vain but was patriotic service, redeeming itself of horror. This is Plato’s bequeathment to Western culture. Weil merely points out that the lessons in the core literary document of Greek antiquity have been dismissed from the beginning of formal philosophizing. Greek tragedy is evident in the Gospels but noticeably absent in Rome.

The Western defense of the glory of war and death begins with Plato. In Book 3 of his Republic, Plato avers (through Socrates): “Can he [the citizen-warrior] be fearless of death. Will he choose death in battle rather than defeat and slavery? We must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales … and beg them … to commend the world below, intimating to them that their descriptions are untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors.”

The warrior class must see Hades as redemption and glory not as bleak darkness. Indeed, not just the warrior class but the entirety of society must be instructed accordingly. The first step is to be rid of Homer, to be rid of the poem exposing the absurdityof violence. The first step toward accomplishing social and political control is to justify, extend, and praise war as virtue. And so Plato gives us the Republic and, later, the Laws, the origins of authoritarian thought in the West.

The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (404-323 BCE) is usually described as a hermit, complete with representative anecdotes and ubiquitous lantern as a symbol of the search for knowledge and wisdom. There were no “official” hermits in ancient Greece, of course, but Diogenes captures the image of eccentric gadfly that is the “genre” of philosophical hermit in the Western world.

But overlooked as another potential hermit is the philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. 500 BCE).

Heraclitus wrote a long and complex tome titled On Nature. Here he presented his ideas of flux or flow and his idea of “unity of opposites.” Like so much of the work of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the work is now in fragments. The most familiar fragment is no. 12: “You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” Another rephrased fragment (49) says: “We step and do not step into the same river; we are and are not.” These and other ideas expressed by Heraclitus were both quietly approved in part by contemporaries and later thinkers, including Plato, though opposing the basic notion of flux and the premises of the unity of opposites.

What annoyed contemporaries of Heraclitus — like those of Diogenes — was his outspoken criticism and disdain of others. His biographer Diogenes Laertius described Heraclitus as “hard to please,” “over-weening,” and “lofty-minded beyond all other men.”

Heraclitus did not think much of the classical thinkers: “Much learning does not teach understanding, else it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, or, again, Xenophanes and Hecataeus.” Heraclitus went further, commenting that “Homer should be turned out of the lists and whipped, and Archilochos likewise.” He provoked and ridiculed his fellow citizens, as when he “would retire to the temple of Artemis and play at knuckle-bones with the boys, and when the Ephesians stood round him and looked on, Heraclitus would say to them “Why, you rascals, are you astonished? Is it not better to do this than to take part in your civil life?”

Finally, he dismissed his contemporaries peevishly: “Heraclitus am I. Why do you drag me up and down, you illiterates? It was not for you I toiled, but for such as understand me. One man in my sight is a match for thirty thousand, but the countless hosts do not make a single one. This I proclaim, you in the halls of Persephone.”

Heraclitus lived simply, in a rude hut. When a delegation of visitors came to see him one day, they looked about his quarters disdainfully. Heraclitus perceived their scorn and said quietly: “Here, too, the gods dwell.” (He used the term daimon, referring to spirits of beneficence). Finally, Diogenes Laertius tells us, Heraclitus in old age “became a hater of his kind and wandered in the mountains, and there he continued to live, making his diet of grass and herbs.”

Hut-dweller? Wanderer in the mountains? Eater of only plants — a vegan? These details alone may assure his status as hermit, a nay-saying, grumpy, but philosophical hermit.

Heraclitus was called the “dark” philosopher and the “weeping” philosopher beause of his philosophy of change, impermanence of self and universe, implying pessimism. In Raphael’s famous painting “The School of Athens, Heraclitus separates himself from all the assembled philosophers and thinkers, looking melancholy and aloof. But not far from him, also aloof but perhaps more defiant, is Diogenes of Sinope.

“Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord,
That David played, and it pleased the Lord.
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
— from Hallelujah, by Leonard Cohen.

Music has long taken a central role in the public expression of culture. Music is a product of culture, like ritual (religious and agricultural), in art, food, ceremonies (marriage, birth, death), and war.

Just as historical religions reflect the particular geography and environment of the given culture (gods of deserts, mountains, ocean, etc.), so too music can represent the psychological and physical circumstances of a culture in its instruments, choirs, singers, and in the rhythms and tones of vocalizations, the compositions and tones. Ultimately, music can represent an instrument of culture representing what is taken to be particular social and economic norms.

The philosopher Plato maintained that the music of the era has the important function of supporting the ethos of the state. Thus, in Republic, Book IV, Plato argues that the vigilant ruler will retain the original forms of music, and that  new songs or compositions conform not only in lyric but in form, what he calls “rhythm.”

Centuries later, St. Augustine notes, in his essay De musica the dualism that the Christian era music proposes, the connection between music that bolsters the institution and its narrative (lyrics adhering to strict theology) versus music that addresses the individual emotionally and pychologically, especially through what Augustine himself calls “lovely chants.” Where Plato would advocate a music that sustained the state, Augustine effectively (or inadvertently) notes that Christian era permits both official music but also and emotional genres, based on “rhythm,” as forms of communication with God.

Through the Middle Ages in the West, religious music came to reflect forms that centered on doctrine and liturgy, paralleled by subjective forms in chant and other song. This was the equivalent official music of Plato. Of course, popular and folk music thrived among peasants, laborers, and non-elites. Skeptical clerical views spread quickly in the late Middle Ages, discretely amused by the provocative songs and themes of minstrels and troubadours. The overlap of Plato and Augustine reached a high point in the central medieval period. The split between official ecclesiastic and moderated popular is seen in 12th-century bishop John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, where he denounces minstrels as demons. Their songs do not support the institution nor the morals of the lay person.

With the modern music of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, the disputing duality of purpose accelerates. Music primarily served to bolster the institutional, social, and personal elite classes of ecclesiastics and aristocrats. The composers are tempered by their patrons, the equivalent of Plato’s music monitors. Thus the music of the era is not viable without the assent of the patrons, who in turn supports the state, culture, and morals of the era.

J. S. Bach composed for churchmen, dukes, a prince, and a king. Handel served his patron King George III of England, who was also patron to Purcell. Telemann, close friend of Bach, served both church and secular patrons by composing in both forms (as did Bach). Monteverdi, composer of madrigals, was employed by several Italian cities. The unfortunate Vivaldi did not receive regular commissions due to his eccentricities, and sustained himself by teaching music to pupils of orphanages. Haydn enjoyed lifetime commission to the wealthy Esterházy family. With Mozart the transition to the classical era begins. Mozart outnumbers all the composers dependent on patrons, enjoying the patronage of Holy Roman Emperor to prince, to countess, to archbishop, to wealthy amateurs.

The patronage of classical music largely remained the expression of elite class and cultural education without conscious attention to classical composers are prerequisite to social polish. In that sense, the composers of this era, culminating in Mozart, designate the music of Plato’s dictum. But the Baroque style was broken by both new composition and new social and economic phenomena.

With the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century, its ideas and impulses spreading throughout Europe, the signal cultural dominance of aristocracy began to wane. The influence of emotion, sentiment, and morals rises. The first composer of the era to represent these changes is Beethoven, whose compositions throw themselves into expressible themes provoking listeners to new openness. Beethoven chronicles the passions of society and the souls of its modern protagonists. Ironically, Beethoven enters music as a work of honor, having suffered trauma at the hands of his abusive father, who beat him as a child, with blows to the head, leading to the young Ludwig’s deafness at a young age, but provoking an irrevocable desire to excel in musical composition. From Beethoven we have symphonies portraying politics, nature, and the celestial, and in the sonatas deep philosophizing.

Most importantly here, perhaps, is the fact that Beethoven suffered only three patrons, a count, a baron, and a prince, each with his own eccentricity, his music remained as free and emotive regardless of his patrons’ pretenses. Beethoven’s patrons were music enthusiasts but not composers, performers, or aesthetes, one described by a contemporary (enemy?) as “a cynical degenerate and a shameless coward.”

With Beethoven and going forward, the Romantic era is full of brilliant sentiment. Sentiment is dominant and no obvious attempt by aristocrats arises to bolster institutions in the Platonic sense. The composers simplify. Franz Schubert, for example, held few published works, very little patronage, and no public life. Chopin eventually withdrew from public performance, his sustenance coming from sale of compositions and in teaching piano. The work of the Romantics, even when grandiose as in Rossini, Berlioz, or Wagner, quickly gathered emotional elements, excluding rationality as present truth. Drama and myth, not logical presentation, dissolved the classical sense of stability and control. Patronage relationships continued to diminish. Wagner prospered only under one patron, the King Ludwig of Bavaria. The extremely popular Rossini — wealthy from commissions from the French government — retired from music at an early age when the commission was suddenly dropped. Rossini had combined Plato and Augustine, in effect serving the remnant aristocracy of Europe as well as its growing bourgeoisie. Tchaikovsky had one patron, whom he never met: business woman Nadezhda Von Meck, whose funding over thirteen years granted Tchaikovsky years of full-time composition. But by this time, we may say that the era of traditional music intended to entertain the elite of society, had dissipated.

What is today called “classical music” (as in “classical music radio station”) refers to centuries of music and even contemporary music crafted to echo the music of the centuries. But how many listeners realize that that they are listening to music entirely intended to amuse and entertain the economic and social elite of another era? Or does such listening srve to perpetuate this attitude of elitism? We can wonder if we lived as contemporaries with those composers what our music listening would have been? Or what it should be today?

Some years ago this blog ran a series of entries titled “The Politics of Eremitism.” Eremitism does not propose guidelines for others, but the guidelines for the person are themselves a cultural foundation as much as a personal one. The historical hermit (not necessarily the quirky individuals here and there) is eminently qualified to offer ethical and logical insights into what are the components of the most beneficent organization and functioning society.

This notion of practical hermit wisdom is not new. Ancient Chinese thinkers recognized the urgency of discovering society’s benign face. Confucius – who was not a hermit – realized that who holds power at whatever level should reflect values that promote benignity. He dedicated his life to crafting ideas and rituals that would reinforce cultural values. Throughout his life Confucius traveled the provinces of China to educate authorities in need of instruction. But even Confucius himself doubted whether he had convinced anybody in his efforts.

The famous anecdote wherein Confucius meets hermits presents the notion of the possibility of reforming society. Confucius was traveling between provinces and was lost. Stopping his carriage, he asked his attendant to get directions from a man plowing a field. The attendant introduced himself and the old man replied, “Why is your master traveling about trying to convince others? He should be fleeing the world instead of wasting time engaging it.” When the attendant returned to inform Confucius of what the man had told him, Confucius nodded and replied, “That was a hermit.”

Later, the Taoists presented an autonomous view of society, including Lao-tzu, Chuang-tzu, and the intriguing Tillers and Farmers school of thought. The latter promoted the (mythical) first king of China, Shennong, who was also the founder of agriculture and medicine, an herbalist and healer, befitting the notion of a perfect ruler because of Shennong’s high ethical standards. What greater king than one who governed so benignly that his subjects were content and prosperous, who governed so discretely that he was seldom seen but known through wise edicts, who governed so deferentially as to work shoulder to shoulder with the people plowing in the fields with them.

This was the sort of non-authoritarianism that could be labeled “the politics of eremitism,” that is, autarky. Autarky rejects authoritarianism that is domineering but also authoritarianism that is governance by a superior. Just as when Rousseau tells us that the notion of property is derived from the moment an obnoxious man stood on land and declared it to belong to him alone – so, too, is this how authoirty came to be. The concept of autarky is based not on the imposition of history, convention, or power, but on the values of the simple and natural, not grasping or covetous. As a society it would naturally follow “the Way,” would inevitably ensure wise action without institutionalization.

A famous Taoist saying is that the universe accomplishes its tasks through non-action (wu-wei). This is not a modern Stirner-egoism nor libertarian indifference, not celebration of self, as the West expresses antipathy for order versus power, for naturalness versus contrivance. Taoism envisions a society that functions with ethics derived from nature itself, not from a subjective attitude of individualism and not from existing political relations, institutions, or culture, which have historically and invariably devolved into a chronicle of suffering, exploitation, greed, and violence.

The American essayist and poet Gary Snyder found the philosophy of benignity in Zen Buddhism, itself an amalgam of Buddhism and Taoism. Snyder’s 1961 essay – anticipating a generation of Eastern thought that was to affect the West – is titled “Buddhist Anarchism,” and derives from the thought of the eighth-century Chinese hermit Han Shan (or Hanshan) among many other sources. The conformity to nature and the Way produces the manner of life and social association which Snyder calls “anarchism.” But Snyder does not derive this notion of anarchism from its historical advocates Proudhon, Kropotkin, or Bakunin. With Zen Buddhism there is no need for specifically Western inputs. In later years, Snyder refines the notion of anarchism with anthropological study of indigenous peoples, peoples with close relationship with nature, land, mountains, and rivers (including hermits described by the Japanese Zen master Dogen and poets of the “rivers and mountains” school in China).

The cultures Snyder references forged a constructive and benign social structure of mutual aid and self-sufficiency. The eremitical inputs might conjure benign elders, or shamans and sages, as Bill Porter has observed of the latter in ancient China. The hermits are the true sages in the maturing cultures of ancient Asia. Snyder saw the natural process as “wilding,” pursuit of a benign relationship with the natural world as a source of personal and social values. Especially in the “rivers and mountains” poetic tradition among Chinese hermits already alluded to, Snyder saw the connection to nature as both a revelation of insight and a source of physical and psychological livelihood.

Even in more societal and urban contexts, the historical hermits always reserved a “backroom” – as Montaigne put it – where they could commune freely with God, the Way, or nature, as they preferred, as was constituted their personal autarchy. Meanwhile, the rest of society would have to recognize these values or observe them percolate through sages if it aspired to this benign self-sufficiency.

Many books and media discuss Stoicism, its tenets, its historical advocates in ancient Greece and Rome, its ethical components, its life advice. In the history of Stoicism there is no longer any controversy about meaning. Thinkers like Montaigne extended and adapted Stoic ideas to contemporary circumstances, to varying degrees of success. The Stoic attitude or point of view towards the pursuit of eudemonia not as hedonic pleasure but as methods of reconciliation towards a world of imperfection, disappointment, and suffering, is well understood and often recommended. The author acknowledges the well-known centurie-long identification of Stoic methods with current thought:

“While these beliefs about daily life rested on a foundation of physical and metaphysical theory, the attraction of Stoicism was, and is, in the therapeutic element of its exercises: cognitive behavioural therapy, or Buddhism, for guys in togas.”

With this consenssus, therefore, it is startling, perhaps, to see one commentator at Psyche declare that:

“Despite the benefits of Stoic spiritual exercise, you should not become a stoic. Stoic exercises, and the wise sayings that can be so appealing in moments of trouble, conceal a pernicious philosophy. Stoicism may seem a solution to many of our individual problems, but a society that is run by stoics, or filled with stoics, is a worse society for us to live in. While the stoic individual may feel less pain, that is because they have become dulled to, and accept, the injustices of the world.”

A few important points are to be made:

1. The first fallacy of this comment is the assumption that an adherent of a philosophy will automatically or intentionally convince others to blindly – if not intelligently – practice that philosophy. This is the obverse of omnism, the common view that most religions, philosophies, and psychologies already contain the same core of tenets simply expressed according to culture, society, and historical and psychological circumstances of the expressed tenet.

2. A subtle (or not so subtle) shift is made from an individual studying Stoic ideas to the prospect of “a society that is run by stoics.” This assumes that everyone will begin following stoic ideas blindly and take over society and run it! So if you read about hermits suddenly everyone will want to become a hermit? or learning about a celib will turn everyone celibate? And soon the whole of society will be run or overrun by hermits? Or celibates? Nonsense. Human nature doen’t work that way.

What needs to be done in reflecting upon philosophies and their merits in applying them is to recognize the many circumstances that surround our circumstances. That philosophies are applied only by degrees, by situations, by appropriate strengths they bring or backd away from or modified when the proponent was speaking of another time, another era, another culture, other material and social conditions. All philosophies arise from this ground and are most fully understood when presented in this context.Ethics is always a measure of successful transference of an idea, but even ethics is a cultural and social product of evolution that requires reason and understanding to reconcile with the winds of one’s era.

3. That the goal of the Stoic is the diminution of pain does not mean that the Stoic is indifferent to the suffering of others. But who can propose a remedy who has not used it to cure themselves? Are we to put off assuaging pain in our personal lives because pain and suffering continue in the society around us? Rather, we must clearly and unflinchingly consider the causes of pain and suffering and build methods of addressing them. In this the usual Stoic is competent because not an abstract philosopher but ond who has actually suffered pain. Having suffered is sufficient for asking the right questions and pursuing the most helpful courses or exercises. This is both a personal quest and a collective social one. The awareness of the intelligent observer can take in both the indivual and social demands around us. No one can afford to be indifferent to the suffering of others, nor to postpone addressing their own suffering.

URL:”Don’t Be Stoic” https://psyche.co/ideas/dont-be-stoic-roman-stoicisms-origins-show-its-perniciousness

Reigen Eto (1721-1785) was a student of the renowned Zen Master Hakuin. At one point, Reigen left Hakuin’s temple to pursue the solitude of the mountains as a hermit. He remained in mountain solitude for ten years, pursuing the teaching and practice of his master. One day, he learned that Hakuin was giving a lecture at a nearby retreat. Reigen Eto left the mountains to attend, and was so inspired by the talk that he resumed his studies with Hakuin. Eventually, Hakuin declared Reigen’s enlightenment. Reigen eventually became head of a Kyoto temple, where he introduced Hakuin’s teaching, the popularity of which spread.

Hakuin was also a painter, and Reigen Eto became one, too. Painting was a precise art suited to Zen single-mindedness of expression. Reigen pursued standard themes, depicting Bodhidharma, Hotei, Mount Fuji, and natural objects like crows and pine trees. A lesser known work and its object, however, may be his most persuasive.

In 1543, the Western world intruded upon Japan. A Portuguese warship landed on the island of Tanegashima, and two sailors armed with guns alighted. Eventually, the island became the chief stopoff for Portuguese trade — the Westerners concept of trade being extortion, violence, and force then visited on hapless Japan. The Japanese remembered the metal objcect that was the source of the intruders’ power: the gun. Having no knowledge or experience with this weapon, the name of the island — the word “tanegashima” — became synonymous with “gun.” And this is the topic of Reigen Eto’s painting titled “The Gun,” a work strangely obscure among his own works and among historical Zen paintings.

The work, which is not reprinted on the Web at this writing — was painted in stylized form, with a haiku at the top and an object (in this case a gun) at the bottom. The gun is painted in swift brushstrokes, quick enough to represent the streaks of faded black ink callled “flying white.” The haiku reads: “The sound of the gun / is the entrance / to hell.”

The late John Daido Loori, co-editor of The Zen Art Book, remarks in that text on Reigen Eto’s painting: “Here we stand over two and a half centuries later and the only difference is that our instruments of destruction have become more sophisticated and efficient while our way of perceiving the universe and ourselves has remained virtually static.”

“Blindness is not darkness; it is a form of solitude.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, “August 25, 1983” in his Shakespeare’s Memory

The unsentimental view from earliest history judges blindness to be a curse or punishment. The view is represented in an anecdote related in the Gospel of John (9, 1-23), wherein Jesus and his disciples encounter a blind man, born into the condition of blindness, a man “born blind.” The disciples ask Jesus: “Teacher, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus replies: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned… but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

This reply is designed to set the scene for a miracle showcasing the divinity of Jesus, but,in fact, exemplifies an essential biblical notion of God. The passage suggests the arbitrariness and capriciousness of Yahweh that Kierkegaard observes in the command to Abraham to kill his son, as much as in the divine attitude toward the treatment of the suffering Job. Accursedness is arbitrary punishment.

In the biblical Book of Tobit, the protagonist Tobit is blinded even while performing a good deed, burying the dead – but the dead man was proscribed by the authorities. For this God punishes Tobit, blinding him. After winding moral lessons, Tobit’s eyesight is restored – not by God but by a sympathetic angel.

When the French-born explorer Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) visited the Himalaya Mountains in an early twentieth-century search for hermits, she encountered one old hermit who revealed that his vision was nearly gone. The explorer asked what he would do. When I am blind, he replied matter-of-factly, then I will die. No sense that blindness was exceptional, a curse, or a punishment.

Blind characters in literature have often been presented as a foil to and contrast with the sighted, conjuring contrasting images of wisdom preserved (in the sighted) and wisdom lost (in the blind). In the Oedipus plays of Sophocles, the hapless Oedipus blinds himself in tortuous guilt over his twin crimes of murder and incest. The blinding of the Earl of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s King Lear is presented as a metaphor, blindness considered to be a lack of discernment, a lack of insight, literslly a lack of sight. Even today one can speak of a foolish blunderer as “blind.” The English novelist Samuel Butler (1835-1902) cound writein his Hudibras that: “A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog, but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.”

Gloucester’s blinding in King Lear merely completes the presentation of the man lacking judgment, therefore “blind.” Butler uses physical blindness as a foil to psychological or spiritual incapacity. Later, Kierkegaard’s notion of faith would be summed up as “blind faith,” or a leap, avoiding the real ramifications of physical blindness or the ubiquitously pernicious metaphor.

The famous author of the ancient Greek epic ballads The Iliad and The Odyssey is the well-known blind bard Homer. While even his existence can be questioned, why is “Homer” presented as blind at all? Perhaps an allusion in The Odyssey to a blind poet Demodokus suggests the identity of the anonymous Homer, but as likely it is the assumed fulsome character of the blind, attuned to voices and moods, assigned by fate to a secret insight, makes blindness here an attractive literary device, adding to the skill of the author Homer’s talent for lyric song and prodigious memory. Here blindness is an ironic gift, salvaging, even redeeming, the blind from curse.

We know less of the reaction of early and familiar historical figures to being left blind. We know the famous for their redeeming intelligence, less for their curse or what they thought of their blindness. Galileo (1564-1642) suffered from a mucocoele in one eye and progressive glaucoma leading to blindness. The fate of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is tragic, based on the era’s wide-spread practice of “cataract couching.” Bach underwent the surgery on both eyes by a traveling surgeon. The surgeon destroyed not only the presumed cataracts and the lenses, but inevitably much of the eye structure, provoking copious bleeding, and blindness. Bach was left in agonizing pain for days before he died.

The notion of blindness as punishment, reverberating through the centuries, is addressed by the English poet John Milton(1608-1674), who was blind by his fifties from glaucoma or cataracts. In “Sonnet 19,” the poet laments the loss of his eyesight more for the loss of the creativity that would have led to composing so many more literary works. In the poem Patience replies:

“God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Nor was blindness a complete solitude for Milton. He was not isolated from his work nor from his circle of colleagues. Indeed, Milton wrote his masterful Paradise Lost after losing his sight. He happily enjoyed the attentiveness of many amanuenses.

In our time, similarly, the blind Argentinian short story writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) enjoyed the company of many literati, functioning as a public intellectual. He was even named director of the National Library of Argentina in 1955, the very year of his definitive blindness. His mother, who lived to the age of 91, dutifully transcribed her son’s stories and essays for publication throughout her life. Like Milton, Borges thrived as a creative figure.

Borges is perhaps the most articulate describer of blindness. He sympathized with those who lost their sight suddenly, without a transition. He tells us that he knew he would one day lose his sight, as had his father, his paternal grandmother, and his great-grandfather, all of whom suffered cataracts. After multiple eye surgeries in youth, Borges had lost vision in one eye and the vision in his other eye continued to deteriorate. In 1955, while walking with friends in Buenos Aires, he tripped and fell, rising to discover himself blind, due to retinal detachment. But Borges never rued his blindness, writing once that “A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument, everything has been given for an end.” He adds that “If a blind man thinks this way, he is saved. Blindness is a gift.” And Borges was accommodating, recognizing all who had helped him along the way. “Blindness has made me feel surrounded by the kindness of others. People always feel good will toward the blind.” Borges, like Milton, left a poem of benign sentiment concerning blindness, titled “On His Blindness.”

In the fullness of the years, like it or not,
a luminous mist surrounds me, unvarying,
that breaks things down into a single thing,
colorless, formless. Almost into a thought.
The elemental, vast night and the day
teeming with people have become that fog
of constant, tentative light that does not flag,
and lies in wait at dawn. I longed to see
just once a human face. Unknown to me
the closed encyclopedia, the sweet play
in volumes I can do no more than hold,
the tiny soaring birds, the moons of gold.
Others have the world, for better or worse;
I have this half-dark, and the toil of verse.

Those born blind are seldom remembered, unless, like Milton or Borges, they overcome their blindness to excel in another venture. Yet there are wuch exemplars. The social reformer and activist Helen Keller (1880-1968), became blind before two years of age, and deaf as well, due to diphtheria. The famous Spanish classical composer Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999) suffered the same fate of diphtheria at age three. Rodrigo also surmounted his incapacity to enjoy a career in composition, among his works the popularly-received “Concierto de Aranjuez.” Like Milton, Rodrigo enjoyed the strong support of family and creative colleagues. Another well-received musical figure is the contemporary opera and pop singer Andrea Bocelli (b. 1958), who lost much of his eyesight from congenital cataracts, and become blind in youth from a sport accident.

Controvertialist and artist-writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was afflicted by a pituitary tumor that incapacitated his optic nerve. The artist lost his command of color in 1937, and was completely blind in 1951. He acknowledged the event in the short story “The Sea Mists of Winter,” the title describing his eyesight. Like Borges, his blindness culminated in misty greens and blues, not blackness or profound darkness. Lewis completed several additional books with the help of transcribers and editors.

Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941) is famous for his original diction, invented vocabulary, made-up sound words, and run-on phrases. His characters and subplots were often pursuing dead-end and tortuous self-reflections. Joyce is the character Stephen Dedalus, suggestively called the “blind stripling” in his novels Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By age thirty Joyce was blind. He had from youth undergone multiple surgeries for eye inflammation (leading to anterior uveitis), for iridectomies for closed-angle glaucoma, and for removal of cataracts. Today, these and many of Joyce’s other non-ocular medical symptoms such as abscesses, partial paralysis, and psychological instabilities — plus Joyce’s use of prescription Galyl, an arsenic-phosphorus drug with debilitating eye effects — point to syphilis as the cause of his blindness. Joyce himself acknowledged an understanding of his blindness (and all his other maladies) as curse or punishment.

American cartoonist and humorist James Thurber (1894-1961) was popularized by his contributions to The New Yorker magazine. As a child of seven he was playing with an older brother who had just acquired a bow and arrow set — and shot an arrow towards James, blinding his right eye. Inflammation spread to the left eye, leading to significant loss of vision. As an adult plagued by diminishing vision, Thurber consulted a New York eye surgeon who diagnosed cataracts and iritis (uveitus), pursuing both failed surgeries successively, reducing Thurber’s vision to about seven percent. Perhaps Thurber’s vivid imagination was due in part to the visual hallucinations experienced by victims of Charles Bonnet syndrome. Towards the end of his life Thurber expressed to friends the notion that his blindness was perhaps after all a punishment for mocking other with his humor and sarcasm.

Erasmus wrote that “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” In a short story with a similar title, H. G.Wells (1866-1946) extrapolated the saying to try to reproduce in fiction the logic in a “real” setting. Wells only deepened the paradox. For among the blind, no one is king. And among the half-blind and among kings, none has sight. Nor can a pretender share the curse or fate – nor dare to empathize with a curse. Blindness remains a solitude.