CUSTOM FROM DEATH TO LIFE
Custom can be deadly. When the ethos of a people perpetuates verbal and physical violence, only a revolution of spirit can save them. Socrates and Plato, who lived through Athens’ self-deconstruction during the Peloponnesian War, agreed: the custom of repaying harm with harm and good for good, injuring enemies and helping friends, was a disaster. It was customary for the Athenian upper class to be overt in expressing disdain and contempt, to trade insults, and to join in factional fighting. As the philosophers failed to bring about any widespread conversion of mind, the unity needed for Athenian survival was out of reach, and Sparta was able to prevail in the war. Years later, when the Greek city-states faced a threat from the growing imperial power of Philip II of Macedon, they continued to indulge their habit of retaliating against one another. They jeopardized their unity and collective security, thus preparing the way for their conqueror. Custom is deep-rooted, recalcitrant to persuasion.
European philosophical attitudes toward custom
Plato’s lucid challenge to the custom of repaying harm for harm may be read in the Crito. As the dialogue opens, Crito has come to offer Socrates the chance to break out of prison, to escape the death imposed by the Athenian jury. Crito is doing a favor for his friend, and retaliating against the harmful judgment of the jury. As Crito presents his reasons for proposing that Socrates should escape, he manifests the confused nature of his thinking. Socrates responds by re-orienting Crito to the pursuit of what is true and right regardless of what “the many” think; and then Socrates begins the path of reasoning designed to lead Crito to see his error. In the past, says Socrates, we have repeatedly committed ourselves to living justly, beautifully, in accord with goodness. Shall we reaffirm that commitment now? Crito agrees to do so, and he agrees further with Socrates that if we are committed to live in justice, we may never permit ourselves to descend to injustice, even in return for injustice done to us. Socrates continues the line of reasoning, beginning to spell out its implications for the present situation, but Crito fails to grasp the point, so the dialogue shifts to a more popular plane.
Plato’s revolutionary response to disastrous custom derives, in part, from his pessimistic philosophy of history. Having seen Socrates put to death by the representatives of the very people whom he had devoted his life to improving, Plato in the Allegory of the Cave has Socrates remark, when the liberated prisoner returns from the sunlight into the shadows and tries to persuade others to follow the difficult path toward knowledge and insight, that the other prisoners “would kill him if they could.” The Republic proposes a radical fantasy of state reform: begin again, starting with the children. Take them off to help found a city where order will be arranged by those who are knowers of reality. Inevitably, however, this rule of the best will decline, stage by stage, and the gradual corruption of individual character and political order will end in tyranny.
Of course Plato also knew that custom may be ennobling and beautiful. In the Symposium Diotima presents a ladder to beauty, a series of levels of things that participate in beauty. If the seeker is truly willing to pursue beauty, the ladder leads to the summit of realization. Beautiful customs occupy a surprisingly high level on the ladder (210c4). Since nomos, means “law” as well as “custom,” we must tread with hermeneutic care. The Greeks supremely honored wise lawgivers, and it is plausible that the meaning “law” might predominate over the meaning “custom” in this context. Nevertheless, a fine constitution gives the ideal framework for custom. Socrates had a customary way of engaging people in philosophic conversation, and it is arguable that he found the comparatively democratic ethos sponsored by the laws of Athens the best available place for his life of cooperative inquiry. In response to the perennial question of how to raise one’s children, an ancient Greek answer was, “Make them citizens of a city with good laws.” Clearly the nomoi at their best had an uplifting and pervasive influence quite remote from the modern notion of law as a set of formal constraints designed to be neutral toward differing conceptions of the good life.
The beauty of a fine nomos may be its social, unitive function, whether one thinks of law or of custom. (Recall that society, etymologically, stems from socius, comrade or ally.) The unitive function is suggested by the momentum of the preceding steps on the ladder. The first step is to fall in love with a single attractive body, then with many, and thence to realize that the beautiful bodies have something in common, that they share in a single eidos (form): beauty. After intuiting beauty through the level of physical things that participate in beauty, one moves next to the level of the psyche (soul), realizing that psyche can participate in beauty to a higher degree than can a body. The nomoi immediately follow the psyche as a theme for reflective appreciation. Note that fine nomoi do not represent merely a plurality of souls but an effective way of integrating them, guiding their interaction.
Plato guides the sincere seeker beyond everything that the mind can grasp and comprehend and adequately express, insisting that beauty itself transcends the things that have beauty. In particular, the vision of beauty transcends the activity of philosophy. To elaborate this theme by drawing on the Republic, those who know transcendent beauty (and goodness!) will be most able to fashion mature laws-and-customs and to live them.
The critical approach to custom is typified in modern Western philosophy, which proposed, in reaction to the totalitarian tendencies of the medieval church, to examine everything through the lens of reason. Descartes proposed to set aside every uncertain opinion and to start over to rebuild a sturdy philosophy; and Kant attempted to use reason to attain a complete and definitive self-critique. However, as Hans-Georg Gadamer pointed out, revolutionary critique never manages to be universal, nor is reason without its own set of historically shaped customs. In many circumstances, an evolutionary attitude toward custom is more suitable. One thinks of Hegel’s return to Aristotle.
Aristotle, the well-traveled and broadly learned family man, had an attitude toward custom that was more conservative, though hardly uncritical. He held that without proper upbringing, without enculturation into customs that are fine (kalos, beautiful, noble), a person lacks the foundation for the study of ethics, which orders thinking to the end of becoming good. The good habits of the child form the pre-reflective basis for the conscious habits of adult praxis. Aristotle maps out the path from (1) careless disregard for the norms of excellent character through (2) the intermediate zone of conflict, where one must struggle to acquire the habits of the new and better way, to (3) the reliable acquisition of the habit of joining alertness, fine motivation, good deliberation, and skilled execution, so that the exercise of virtue becomes enjoyable. Despite his analysis of the path to the cultivation of virtue, Aristotle accords such great importance to childhood formation that at one point in the Nicomachean Ethics he despairs of anyone’s attaining an excellent character who did not have a good beginning in childhood.
Hegel, mixing a philosophy of universal reason with a politics of the clash of nations, taught custom (Sitte) as evolving from barbarian and unconscious practices to the pervading ethical norms and laws of a mature modern nation. Commenting on the emergence of the clarity of universal law from the heritage of custom, Hegel explains that in the less articulate stage, customary rights “are known in a subjective and contingent manner, so that they are less determinate for themselves and the universality of thought is more obscure”; they are “a mere collection . . . characterized by formlessness, indeterminacy, and incompleteness” (Hegel 1821/1991, section 211). The Addition to this section expands on the thought.
Barbarians are governed by drives, customs [Sitten], and feelings, but they have no consciousness of these. When right is posited and known, all the contingencies of feeling and opinion and the forms of revenge, compassion, and selfishness fall away, so that right only then attains its true determinacy and is duly honoured. Only through the discipline of being apprehended does it become capable of universality.
For Hegel, in the mature state, “the habit of the ethical . . . appears as a second nature which takes the place of the original and purely natural will and is the all-pervading soul, significance, and actuality of individual existence. It is spirit living and present as a world . . . .” (Hegel 1821/1991, section 151) Remember that “spirit” translates Geist, which for Hegel is also often appropriately rendered “mind” or “culture”; the religious connotations of the term Geist are present but subordinate in Hegel’s usage. The addition to this section includes the following.
Just as nature has its laws, and as animals, trees, and the sun obey their law, so is custom the law appropriate to the spirit of freedom. . . . Education is the art of making human beings ethical: it considers them as natural beings and shows them how they can be reborn, and how their original nature can be transformed into a second, spiritual nature so that this spirituality becomes habitual to them.
Hegel acknowledges that habit can become deadly in persons in whom no vital contrasts and struggles for attainment persist. It is partly for this reason that Hegel accepts continuing warfare as the inevitable fate of nations, rejecting Kant’s hope for a world government to outlaw war. “National customs . . . are the universal aspect of behaviour which is preserved under all circumstances” (Hegel 1821/1991, section 339). The Addition gives reasons why the resulting condition is better than a Hobbesian war of all (nations) against all.
The European nations form a family with respect to the universal principle of their legislation, customs, and culture, so that their conduct in terms of international law is modified accordingly in a situation which is otherwise dominated by the mutual infliction of evils. The relations between states are unstable, and there is no praetor to settle disputes; the higher praetor is simply the universal spirit which has being in and for itself, i.e., the world spirit.
In sum, Hegel takes custom as the basis for education and law and as the ethos of a nation’s life. The particularities of national customs are so deep and persistent as to defeat Kant’s rational, critical hope of enduring planetary peace.
European philosophy thus includes a rational critique of some customs and a rational appropriation of other customs, sustaining custom while reinterpreting it and placing mature life and political order on a more conscious foundation satisfying to thought.
The Chinese secret of keeping custom alive
Confucius, like Plato, faced a disintegrating political condition during the Warring States period in China, and his efforts to offer advice to political leaders were likewise rebuffed. However, Confucius’ philosophy of history was neither pessimistic nor idealistic-progressive; and his solution to political disorder was to return to the ancient ways of propriety. The customs of the greatest age of the ancestors can be re-established by a social order based on on correct relationships and on a philosophy of living oriented toward character growth. The autobiography attributed to Confucius in Analects (Lun yü) II.4 (here translated synthesizing the work of various scholars) sketches a pattern of stages of growth. “At fifteen I set my heart-and-mind upon learning. At thirty I had established my resolve. At forty I had no more perplexities. At fifty, I knew the Mandate of Heaven. At sixty, I heard it with my ear at ease. At seventy, I could follow the leadings of my heart-and-mind without transgressing the boundaries of right.” The spontaneity of the last stage became the goal of Confucian self-cultivation. For thousands of years, the standard idea was that we gradually acquire noble character by going through years of discipline that is more or less external, imposed, and lacking in grace; but since the customs in question are precisely those required by respect for people’s humanity, when these customs become second nature, we flourish indeed. Moreover, the idea later developed that since a set of rules of proper conduct cannot be complete or adequate to every situation, a certain moral creativity is needed, which emerges in the sage.
The tradition of Confucian cultivation culminates in experience and vision that we can glimpse in Wang Yangming (1472-1529). He taught that mind, original mind, is replete with an innate knowledge of the good that naturally expresses itself rightly. However, we need cultivation to become free of the obstruction of selfish ideas. The studied practice of custom, understood as a set of restraints, is a path leading beyond itself to dynamic and translucent action. Wang’s Instructions on Practical Learning elucidate the process (Wang 1963). Section 9 speaks of how that cultivation proceeds. I shall intersperse comments.
I said, “You regard the extensive study of literature (wen) as the work of restraining oneself with rules of propriety. I have thought over the matter carefully and have not been able to understand. Kindly enlighten me.”
The Teacher [Wang] said, “The word li (meaning propriety, ceremonies) means the same as li (meaning principle). When principles become manifested and can be seen, we call them patterns (wen, also meaning literature) and when patterns are hidden and abstruse and cannot be seen, we call them li (principle). They are the same thing. Restraining oneself with rules of propriety means that this mind must become completely identified with the Principle of Nature. In order to become completely identified with the Principle of Nature, one must direct one’s effort to wherever principle is manifested.
Thus custom as embracing the rules of propriety is metaphysically rooted in the “Principle of Nature.” Moreover, the realization of the simplicity of the Principle does not lead to mysticism, inasmuch as reality is understood to include a plurality of specific principles. Principle is thus both singular and plural, and the study of the many principles, manifest as patterns, facilitates our expressing the specific realizations required by the situation. If the student is wholehearted and persistent, the sagely way will become actualized. There follow some of the most important expressions of principled living for Confucianism.
For example, if principle is manifested in the serving of one’s parents, one should learn to preserve it in the very act of serving one’s parents. If principle is manifested in the serving of one’s ruler, one should learn to preserve it in the very act of serving one’s ruler. If principle is manifested in one’s living in riches or poverty or in noble or humble station, one should learn to preserve it in these situations. And if principle is manifested in one’s being in difficulty and danger or being in the midst of barbarous tribes, one should learn to preserve it in these situations. And one should do the same whether working or resting, speaking or silent.
Wang hints at a way of study that prepares the diligent student to “preserve principle” in action.
No matter where principle may be manifested, one should learn right then and there to preserve it. This is what is meant by the extensive study of literature. This is the work of restraining oneself with the rules of propriety. To study literature extensively means to be refined in one’s mind and to restrain oneself with the rules of propriety means to have singleness in one’s mind.
Of course study cannot prepare one for every emerging circumstance, as Wang acknowledges (Wang 1963, section 21).
“I asked, “A sage’s response to changing conditions is unlimited. Does he have to study beforehand?”
The Teacher said, “How can he study everything? The mind of the sage is like a clear mirror. Since it is all clarity, it responds to all stimuli as they come and reflects everything. . . . The study of changing conditions and events is to be done at the time of response. However, a student must be engaged in brightening up the mirror. He should worry only about his mind’s not being clear, and not about the inability to respond to all changing conditions.
In a final selection, a narrative of a teaching encounter reveals the link between constraining rules of propriety or custom, and the cosmic reality of one’s mind, one’s own true nature (Wang 1963, section 122). Again I will interpose comments.
Hui said, “Having made up my mind to be a good man, I thought I had the determination to do something for myself. As I think of it, I realize that I merely wanted to do something for my bodily self, not for my true self.”
The Teacher said, “Has the true self ever been separated from the bodily self? I am afraid you have not even done anything for your bodily self. . . .
The Teacher (Wang) then remarks that a certain kind of gratification blunts the senses. In the line of teachers who impose an initial ascetic stage, he continues.
Beautiful color causes one’s eyes to be bind. Beautiful sound causes one’s ears to be deaf. Good taste causes one’s palate to be spoiled, and racing and hunting cause one to be mad. All these are harmful to your ears, eyes, mouth, nose, and four limbs. How can this be considered as doing something for them? If you are really doing something for them, you must reflect upon the manner in which the ears listen, the eyes look, the mouth speaks, and the four limbs move.
Now Wang is ready to introduce the restraints of custom, the rules of propriety.
If it is not in accord with the rules of propriety, you must not look, listen, speak, or move. Only then can you fully realize the function of eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and the four limbs, and only in this way can you do something for them. Now all day long you chase after external things and direct yourself to fame and profit. All this is for things external to the body. . . .
Notice Wang’s concept of mind which operates as the basis for the student’s evolving practice in observing the customs of restraint.
The ability must come from your mind. These activities of seeing, listening, speaking, and moving are all of your mind. The sight of your mind emanates through the channel of the eyes, the hearing of your mind through the channel of the ears, the speech of your mind through the channel of the mouth, and the movement of your mind through the channel of your four limbs. If there were no mind, there would be no ears, eyes, mouth, or nose. What is called your mind is not merely that lump of blood and flesh. If it were so, why is it that the dead man, whose lump of blood and flesh is still present, cannot see, listen, speak, or move? What is called your mind is that which makes seeing, listening, speaking, and moving possible. It is the nature of man and things; it is the Principle of Nature. Only with this nature can there be the principle of regeneration, which is called jen (humanity, also meaning seed).
To expand on jen a bit more: etymologically, it is the character for person joined with the character for two. Jen is love, the person-to-person virtue par excellence, short of sagehood, but a high attainment of character in Confucian self-cultivation.
When this creative principle of the nature of man and things emanates through the eye, the eye can speak; and through the four limbs, they can move. All this is the growth and development of the Principle of Nature. In its capacity as the master of the body, it is called the mind. Basically the original substance of the mind is none other than the Principle of Nature, and is never out of accord with propriety. This is your true self. This true self is the master of the body. If there is no true self, there will be no body. Truly, with the true self, one lives; without it, one dies.
To fulfill Neo-Confucian norms of custom, the “rules of propriety,” thus requires the height of self-mastery, integrating mind and body. The study of literature—and of the situations in which principle has become manifest in nature and in action—leads to the knowledge of Principle. At first, conformity to custom is the awkward effort of the conscientious student. Moving through the stages of growth, however, the mind becomes saturated with the understanding of Principle, which eventually comes to permeate the whole of life, including sense perception. For the sage, however, proper conduct is no longer an affair of self-conscious effort, but a spontaneous response to emerging circumstance. From the sage’s superb self-mastery flows the creative response. Custom is alive, since conduct mediates the application of cosmic Principle to circumstance.
One more point should be made, in the wake of the dispute between Kant and Hegel about nationalism and war. For Confucianism, custom at its height bonds all humankind. Confucius had taught that “all within the four seas” are brothers, and that the propriety must be observed even when one is among barbarians (Confucius 1979, XII.5 and XIII.19). And Wang Yangming taught that the sage “regards all the people of the world as his brothers and children” (Wang 1963, section 142). The Confucian and Neo-Confucian experience of spontaneity in loving consideration toward others went hand in hand with the concept of humankind as members in a universal family (Wattles 1996, chapter 2).
The life-giving custom of bread and wine
We have seen varieties of custom through implicit or explicit pairs of opposites: destructive versus integrative, ignoble versus beautiful, barbarian versus civilized, uncritical versus rational, unconscious versus conscious, restrained versus spontaneous, national versus global. One suspects that all these oppositions figure in the histories of the custom of serving bread and wine.
When Melchizedek brought forth bread and wine as he went out to meet Abraham (Genesis 14), what was he doing? When Jesus of Nazareth used bread and wine to inaugurate the custom of the remembrance supper (Mark 14), what was actually transpiring? When battles raged over the interpretation of these symbols, what was being sacrificed? What is really present for us in the bread and wine today?
Martin Heidegger (1959/1971, 189-210) hinted at a post-Christian answer in his commentary on the function of language manifest in the following poem by Georg Trakl.
Window with falling snow is arrayed,
Long tolls the vesper bell,
The house is provided well,
The table is for many laid.
Wandering ones, more than a few,
Come to the door on darksome courses.
Golden blooms the tree of graces
Drawing up the earth’s cool dew.
Wanderer quietly steps within;
Pain has turned the threshold to stone.
There lie, in limpid brightness shown,
Upon the table bread and wine.
Rather than trace Heidegger’s interpretation of the pure speaking of language that in this poem transcends deliberate human self-expression, I will offer an alternative comment. The poem conveys harmony between the vesper bell tolling in the distance and the house where bread and wine are on the table. At the same time, as Heidegger remarks, there is no “intermediary” in the service of the bread and wine where the wanderers have entered; the marvelous partaking is not mediated by a priest (Heidegger 1959/1971, 205). Closeness (of the sound of the vesper bells) and distance (the difference between free partaking and mediated partaking) are themselves side by side; and this may be the poem’s leading message. There is no polemic against traditional custom, and yet a new custom—or a renewal of custom—springs up alongside it.
The threshold was once wooden, once organic, once alive. It is no longer alive; but what is wondrous is that the pain of the laying down of life and the pain of religious war have not corrupted or decayed or rotted the threshold. It has instead been turned to stone, petrified wood. The way is now even more resolutely open to the seeker, more stably accessible.
When we receive bread and wine, gifts of nature and labor, as originating in the First Source and Center, they bring us together as a universal family. If the symbols are restrained by dogma, how shall they be symbols of life? How much can we still discover of the heritage of these symbols?
Partaking of the life symbolized in the bread and wine should refresh custom generally—enabling us to let go of destructive custom, to be flexible with static custom, and to awaken to the interpersonal potentials in conventional custom. In times of communion, we let go of egoism without yet having to engage the gears of altruism. How much hope of peace rests in our learning to welcome one another in the custom of bread and wine? Criticizing dogmatic custom, reason keeps open the door to hospitality in the universal family. In wonder we appropriate an ancient custom whose higher meanings remain largely concealed. The language that speaks in silence or in words spans meanings that are human and more than human.
REFERENCES
Hegel, G.W.F. 1821/1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1959/1971. Language. In Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row.
Wang Yang-ming. 1963. Instructions for Practical Living. Trans. Wing-tsit Chan. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wattles, Jeffrey. 1996. The Golden Rule. New York: Oxford University Press.