We are not used to feeling strong affects without their having any ideational contents, and therefore, if the content is missing, we seize as a substitute upon another content which is in some way or other suitable, much as our police, when they cannot catch the right murderer, arrest a wrong one instead.
— Freud
I invite you to entertain the idea that attributive thinking arises from, and in a sense is nothing but, the attempt to address the very absence of any adequate, ultimate reasons or grounds for thinking itself.
— “Thinking Addiction,” (invited talk I gave in Vancouver in 2006)
Perhaps I will always live in questions more than answers.
— Rebecca Solnit
If questioning, as Heidegger once said, is the very piety of thinking, then we perhaps need above all to question the ordinary understanding of piety. From the perspective—or lack of it—wherein piety appears to be unquestioning adherence to some presumed orthodoxy, which is to say “right-thinking” (from Greek ortho-, “right, correct,” plus doxa, “opinion”), a thinking that persists in questioning cannot but be considered an utterly impious thinking.
Thus, for example, in the third of the quotes at the beginning of this post, taken from her recent, revealing autobiography, Rebecca Solnit exposes herself to the charge of heresy. So, of course, does Heidegger in his testimony that questioning is itself the piety of thinking.
To put the point paradoxically, if questioning it the very piety of thinking, then all right-thinking persons must regard thinking itself as impious. That is why they avoid it so strenuously, no doubt.
* * *
Just before confessing she may be guilty of the impiety of living in questions, Solnit sins against orthodoxy by asking what it would be like not to live in a perpetual state of war, either actual or potential, as do we all in this age of global consumerist capitalism. “What does it mean” — she asks on her own behalf and on behalf of all women and others denied a place of their own to stand in our war-set contemporary global situation — “neither to advance, like a soldier waging a war, nor to retreat?”
What would it be like to feel you have that right to be there, when there is nothing more nor less than the space you inhabit? What does it mean to own some space and feel that it’s yours all the way down to your deepest reflexes and emotions? What does it mean not to live in wartime, to not have to be ready for war?
Some of it comes from your position in society, and all the usual factors of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and more that come into play, some from a quality for which confidence is too glib a word. Perhaps conviction or faith is better. Faith in yourself and your rights. Faith in your own versions of truth and in your own responses and needs. Faith that where you stand is your place. Faith that you matter. Those people who have it in full seem rare to me, and clear in a way the rest of us aren’t; they know who and where they are, how and when to respond, what they do and don’t owe others. Neither retreating nor attacking, they reside in a place that doesn’t exist for the rest of us, and it’s not where the overconfident who take up too much space and take space away from others reside.
What, indeed, would it be like to have such a truly and fully human place to stand — what ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle called the polis, the place where genuine politics, so unlike what passes for politics around our globe today, takes place?
Maybe that place just shows itself, upon questioning, to be an utterly open place, one even utterly without grounds, since it consists of questioning rather than of asserting any claims to some enclosed property, either of opinion or of land. Is it perhaps only by falling head over heels and without any defense into such a groundless abyss that we at last for the very first time find our place? Maybe our common human place, the place where human beings can finally find a true home “with and for one another,” as Paul Ricoeur liked to say, is precisely and only in such complete free-fall.
Maybe it is only such impious thinking as perpetual questioning that defines what it is to be human.
It may be only in such impiety that we should place our trust, our faith.
At any rate, impious as it may be, the question of whether that may be so is worth asking. After all, isn’t that what it is to think?
Note: This post was occasioned by my reading of Rebecca Solnit’s recent autobiography, Recollections of My Nonexistence (New York : Viking, 2020), from which the third epigraph and the longer quotation in the body of the post are both taken.