On Being Contrary for its Own Sake

by James V. Schall, S. J.

“The mind of man is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it….”

–Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, March 24, 1750

THE INITIAL choice that each of us has to make in life is whether we think the world and ourselves already exist with some intelligible content to define what we are or whether there is nothing there but what we put there. The former position, it would seem, is rather demanding on us. It suggests that we are not our own self-creators, that what we are is something for us to discover, not make out of our own imaginary resources. But we are seemingly freer if there is nothing there in the first place, if we are solely responsible for our world and our own being. The trouble with being so absolutely free that nothing is presupposed, however, is that what is finally put there is also only ourselves. In such a view, everyone’s world is identical, full of only themselves, with their own laws enforced by no one but themselves. On this premise, no reason can be found not to be something else tomorrow. A world full of nothing but Schall, it strikes me, as utterly boring. A world in which Schall is never the same is even worse.

“Adolescent Love #4” by Scott Kolbo
Polyester Plate Lithography

A student recently sent me a copy of Being a Dog Is a Full-Time Job (Andrews and McMeel, 1994). Charlie Brown and Linus are on a teeter-totter. As he rises to its height, Charlie, rather panic-stricken, yells, “It’s her!” A confused Linus responds, “Her who?” Up again, Charlie, smitten, explains, “Look, it’s the little red-haired girl!” They both get off the teeter-totter. Charlie makes a deal with Linus, “Do me a favor. Go over and talk to her. Say you know me. Try to find out if she likes me.” This is the great question – “Does someone else like us?” Do they “know that we exist or care?” We next see Linus determinedly walking towards the girl as Charlie cunningly tells him, “I’ll hide here behind this trash thing and listen.”

In the next scene, we see a pleased Charlie duly hidden but listening. “Hi there. My name is Linus. I believe we have a friend in common.” Charlie’s mood suddenly becomes more sober as Linus tries to describe him to the little red-haired girl, who evidently has never heard of him. “His name is Charlie Brown. He sits across the room from you in school…. No, by the windows, near the pencil sharpener. No, in the last row.” Charlie’s face droops even lower as Linus continues his description of him. “Well, kind of blond, I guess. No, you’re thinking of Mike. No, not as tall.”

By this time Charlie has slumped down into a kind of stupor, but he still hopelessly listens for some spark of encouragement. “A shirt with sort of a jagged stripe. No, not John, John is a lot bigger.” Finally, Charlie is flat on his back as he helplessly hears the final words that prove that the little red-haired girl has no clue about who he is, has never so much as noticed him, and does not “like” him.

“Sort of a round face,” Linus continues. “Doesn’t ring a bell, huh? No, Brown. Like in town. Just doesn’t ring a bell, huh? Nothing, huh?” In the end, we only hear Charlie, now reduced to “nothing,” muttering forlornly to himself, “I can’t stand it!”

That may be the saddest piece of modern literature I ever read. I cannot stand it either.

No one has to love us, not even the little red-haired girl. Love does not really use the form “has to” but “wants to,” “chooses to.” And because of this undetermined freedom, because Charlie is not even noticed, there can be romance and risk and excitement in the world. Some day she might choose to notice. The story of Charlie Brown and the red-haired girl would be even more poignant if the girl did not exist. But Charlie did not give her being. She is just there, in the school room. Created being does not cause itself to be. It is seen, encountered, across crowded rooms, even school rooms.

Josef Pieper remarked someplace that we cannot know that we are loveable unless we are first loved. He meant loved “unconditionally,” not for something we have or possess. And no one can see anyone as loveable who is concerned only with himself. In the beginning, we must suddenly discover that what is not ourselves also exists and is there before us. We are struck by it. Something unknown comes crashing into our world. Suddenly our world includes a newness that we did not imagine, could not imagine. Yet, like the little red-haired girl, many wonderful things pass our notice. We are beings not given to know everyone intimately but only some few, as Aristotle told us. The friend of everyone is the friend of no one, as the ancients also knew.

“Adolescent Love #5” by Scott Kolbo
Polyester Plate Lithography

The most important thing in the world to know is whether we can freely give a gift to someone. Behind the gift lies the question of sacrifice: whether we can give ourselves and yet remain ourselves. We never just “give” gifts either. No gift is simply a gift. It is an effort to give the giver. But we do not want the giver, in his giving, to cease being the one who gives. Love does not consume but preserves the beloved as other. The what is of the other we want to remain, for that is what astounds us and opens us to more than ourselves.

I have entitled these brief reflections, “on being contrary for its own sake.” There is a certain romance to the word “contrary” – Mary, Mary, quite contrary. The word itself is reminiscent of St. Thomas’s sed contra by which he thinks it necessary to state accurately what he does not hold. He wants to see what truth there is in what seems not true, for there is always something. We cannot be wrong without also having something right. It is not possible to hold something in which there is absolutely no truth. This is why falsity and error are worth pursuing. We better know the truth, Aristotle told us, when we can explain why an error about it is possible.

But we ought not to be contrary for its own sake, that is, just to be contrary. We should be contrary to examine the truth of things. That is what our contrariness seeks. And it is not futile to seek the truth of things, including the truth of the claim that there is no truth, only contrariness, only our own free constructs presupposed to nothing but ourselves.

Aristotle also tells us that there are two very different kinds of things: those which exist for their own sakes, which cannot be “otherwise” and those which can be otherwise. Everything that we do or make in our lives can be otherwise, yet when we do something, it happens. We are not determined beings until we determine ourselves, until what we do has been permanently finished.

The great Samuel Johnson two and a half centuries ago told us told us that we are “never satisfied with the objects before us.” “Why is this?” we wonder. Plato’s excursions into the highest things always had about them a sense of soaring, that we find the best only by finding first what is less than the best. Yet, we begin from what is, from what is clearly less than the best. It is all right that less than the best also exists. Yet, the best can sometimes, often, prevent us from seeing that what is not the best still really is good. The best is not apart from the least, even in the least.

What indeed are “the objects before us?” Do we notice that they are there, before us? Our minds wonder if it is all right not to be “all things.” Is it all right that I am I and not someone else, the problem of the irreducible being of substance? But surely what I am is finite, clearly not the wholeness of being. By being myself, am I deprived of what is not myself?

We are given the power to know what is not ourselves so that we do not, in being ourselves, miss out on all that is not ourselves. It is all right to be a human being, a finite human being, because we, by being ourselves, know what is not ourselves. Yet, we want to know things “for their own sakes.” We have a power that simply wants to know what is, to know that it is, to delight in it. We become what we are not and remain what we are in so doing.

To be “contrary” means that we are aware of the inadequacy of our knowing, without doubting that we do know or that what we know is true. A limited knowledge is not no knowledge. It is only false if we affirm something that is not so.

“Adolescent Love #6” by Scott Kolbo
Polyester Plate Lithography

The strangest part of our being is rooted in a certain unsettlement that reaches its most poignant stage when we are closest to real being and real knowing. We sense that our alternative is not being and nothingness but what is and everything else. We cannot begin in nothingness. To know nothing, as it were, we have first to know something and deny it. We have to be “contrary” even to imagine nothingness.

Is it, after all, all right to be a finite human being? If we are made, are we poorly made? If we make ourselves, what are we but ourselves? Is this enough? We know that we did not cause ourselves to stand outside of nothingness. We begin in medias res, amidst things that already are in spite of us. Our mode of being is discovery and gift. If it were necessary that we existed, we would not wonder why we exist. But if we wonder why we exist, we seem to be asking a question. Why would we ask a question if we make ourselves to be what we are?

The little red-haired girl did not see Charlie Brown in the classroom or in the world. His very existence was upset because she not only did not “like him” but, even worse, she did not even notice him. What does this suggest to us? It suggests that the completion of our being is not simply that we exist. Being is not complete unless it is acknowledged. And it cannot be acknowledged if what is is only ourselves. We know we do not give the being of things to themselves. As Eric Voegelin asked so often, “Why is there something, not nothing?” “Why is this thing not that thing?” If this thing were that thing, there can be no order in the world for contradiction does not hold things in place if this thing can be that thing.

What is it about our existence that we cannot “stand?” We cannot stand that it is unknown to others. “No one, “Aristotle tells us, “would be happy if he had all the goods and riches of the world but lacked friends.” Why not? Because the highest things of which we are capable exist in conversation with others about what is true and about how we live in this world. But conversation is not simply conversation for its own sake–chatter and contrariness just to be contrary.

We exist so that what is true can be affirmed. We affirm what is true best when we affirm it among friends on the basis of what is in fact true for them irrespective of our own self-made worlds. Descartes once suggested that we can imagine that what is is merely an illusion of the devil. He thought that he had to prove the existence of God in order to disprove the illusion. But we do not start in illusion. We can only be “illuded” if we first encounter something that we cannot doubt. We do not begin in theories, but in what is. But beginning there, we are “not wholly satisfied with the objects immediately before us,” as Dr. Johnson said.

Were we “contrary for its own sake,” we could never discover the world in which we exist. We would, like the sophists, imagine that we did not exist for the simple reason that we can imagine it. What calls us out of ourselves is our infinite perplexity that we are not the only things that exist. What calls for our gratitude is that what exists is there and that it is more admirable than anything we could make ourselves. If we are struck in amazement by what is, no matter how small, even “a little red-haired girl,” we can begin the only adventure that is worthwhile. This is the adventure that begins by our first wondering whether we are first loved and then come to be, or whether we are by ourselves to find a world containing only ourselves, our own imaginations and illusions.

We all need to send out a Linus to see if we are noticed. It is, as I say, the saddest story in our literature to find out that we are not liked or even acknowledged. Nothing tells us more about our own being than this upsetting experience of awaiting the recognition and love of someone else. But this is not a tractate in despair. Quite the contrary, we are loveable because we are first loved. That is what constitutes our being. Our freedom does not make the world, but allows us to accept it as already what it is, because what it is already is so much more than anything we could ourselves imagine or make.

Song of Childhood :: Lied vom Kindsein

by Peter Handke