{"id":18888,"date":"2017-05-25T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-25T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=611"},"modified":"2017-05-25T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-05-25T00:00:00","slug":"wager","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2017\/05\/wager\/","title":{"rendered":"Wager"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

R<\/span>aymond Barfield\u2019s Wager<\/a> <\/em>is a lovely meditation on beauty, suffering, and the variety of philosophical \u201cstyles.\u201d Everyone, not only philosophers, has a \u201cphilosophical style\u201d: \u201cConstructing a life is a philosophical act. Philosophical acts that are shaped by a life, and that shape a life, constitute philosophical style<\/em>. . . . Philosophical style is not primarily about the sentences we create to state ideas, though the way we tell others about our experience is certainly part of it. Philosophical style is fundamentally about the way we live in the world through our bodies, our reason, our imagination, and our virtue.\u00a0It is about what we love and how we are loved\u201d (x).<\/p>\n

Philosophical styles arise within\u00a0\u201clocal universes,\u201d that is, not the universe as such, nor in the worlds created by post-Cartesian philosophers who deliberately philosophize in detachment from lived worlds. We develop a way of living within the experience of living, in the universe that is evident on the surface of life.\u00a0A local universe is\u00a0<\/p>\n

lived as grass beneath my feet, breathlessness after running up a hill, a glass of wine, a kiss, distant mountains, the moon, and pleasures or pains felt in my body. The local universe is lived<\/em> through our minds that are able to explore, experiment, tell stories, argue, write poems, pray, hate, believe, woo, rend, make music, and breed dogs with exactly the shape and behavior that will win a prize. . . . From within our lived<\/em> experience we seem to encounter truth, beauty, virtue, justice, love, hope, gratitude, and a sense that our impending death is somehow important, strange, and mysterious. (27)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Barfield knows that he can\u2019t offer certainty about that grand list\u2014truth, beauty, justice, love, etc.\u2014not the kind of certainty that Cartesians demand.\u00a0Hence the \u201cwager\u201d of the title. A philosophical stance that acknowledges the beauty of the world is inevitably risky. But he insists that his consciousness of beauty, truth, love is real.\u00a0We may try to account for beauty and love as part of an uncreated, meaningless universe, but the experience of beauty and love is \u201ca real part of our experience,\u201d even a \u201cbrute fact\u201d (24).\u00a0It seems rather nonsensical to cultivate a philosophical style that rules out such experiences from the outset.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The wager seems a decent bet: \u201cWe get inklings of such unseen things in the thrill of then uncanny, and in the joy that erupts when we find hints on the path toward the highest object of human longing, whatever that may be\u201d (4). Grant that certainty is impossible here, but \u201cthe existence of God lends a glow and glory to the universe that is inaccessible to the methods of the natural sciences, a radiance that thrills me.\u201d In one of the most elegant lines in a book full of beauties, Barfield writes, \u201cthe dam doesn\u2019t have to break for me to suspect that the water seeping through a crack is from the ten million gallons on the other side\u201d (xii).<\/p>\n

The alternative position\u2014that it\u2019s all meaningless matter, accidentally assembled\u2014works with a truncated version of the ontological question. The question is not \u201cWhy is there something rather than nothing?\u201d but \u201cWhy this<\/em> universe rather than nothing?\u201d: \u201cWe want to explain the existence of the universe as it is, complete with conscious, loving, longing, moral, creative persons, as well as suffering and moral evil\u201d (28).<\/p>\n

Beauty takes up on corner of Barfield\u2019s palette; suffering takes up another. Not one or the other, not a beauty that negates the \u201cmaybe not\u201d of suffering, nor suffering blind to the \u201cmaybe so\u201d of beauty. Rather, his style brings suffering and beauty together in a way that refuses easy reconciliation. At one point, Barfield makes the point by reference to divine providence: \u201cProvidence changes everything because everything in creation is either intended, or else is the unintended consequence of something that is intended.\u201d This intention comes from \u201ca God who in some fundamentally important way is a person<\/em>\u201d (9). Providence means that \u201clove\u201d is at the very heart of the universe.\u00a0Providence doesn\u2019t soften the problem of evil, but exaggerates it; if love is the deep-down of things, then evil and suffering are simply \u201cbaffling\u201d (10).<\/p>\n

The clash of suffering and beauty produces a philosophical style of praise and prayer:\u00a0<\/p>\n

This form of philosophical style is above all the pursuit of the very person of God, and all that follows from the mind and will and love of God. Death continues to shape philosophical style . . . because it has been overcome by love and made a servant of God\u2019s purposes. This servant is not passive or weak.\u00a0It has teeth, and it is a hound that will bare its teeth and growl if the child tries to escape into the darkness unprepared for danger.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this style, \u201cwe let go of every certainty, every familiar crook in the universe\u201d while at the same time \u201creaching inward and upward through the mysteries of faith, hope, and love.\u201d It\u2019s the philosophical style of St.\u00a0Francis, who greeted wind, air, moon, stars, sun and death<\/em> as sisters and brothers (10-11).<\/p>\n

I have quibbles here and there, but only one main complaint: If we deflate \u201ccertainty,\u201d it seems that we can rehabilitate it. Barfield provides much of the ammunition: Can an atheistic account of the universe answer the ontological question in its specific form, explain this<\/em> world as it is actually constituted? Can it explain our experience of meaning and love and beauty and suffering, even of the beauty and meaning of<\/em> suffering? There\u2019s room here for an existentialized version of what Cornelius van Til, following Kant, called a \u201ctranscendental\u201d argument: A personal God is the condition for the possibility of human experience as we actually experience in the local universes that make up our homes. If that\u2019s not \u201ccertainty\u201d enough, there\u2019s just no pleasing some people.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Raymond Barfield\u2019s Wager is a lovely meditation on beauty, suffering, and the variety of philosophical \u201cstyles.\u201d Everyone, not only philosophers, has a \u201cphilosophical style\u201d: \u201cConstructing a life is a philosophical act. Philosophical acts that are shaped by a life, and that shape a life, constitute philosophical style. . . . Philosophical style is not primarily […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"yoast_head":"\nWager<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Raymond Barfield's Wager is a lovely meditation on beauty, suffering, and the variety of philosophical \u201cstyles.\u201d Everyone, not only philosophers, has a\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2017\/05\/wager\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wager\" \/>\n<meta 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