Pascal, Hunting over Poetry III

Pascal’s use of hunting in his argument will not convince those who still hunt. Few would confuse today's hunter with royalty. And while some hunters do run beagles after rabbits or retrieve birds with birddogs, many others do not. Those who hunt deer and turkey often sit in an enclosed ground-blind, or perhaps a tree-stand, for hours on end. That is, the hunter is now perhaps the only person in the modern world who will gladly "sit alone in their room." Hunters now pass Pascal’s test better than anyone else in our society. Who else sits for an entire day in one place just watching? Sitting on an uncomfortable platform with few comforts, without working on a computer, talking on a cell-phone, or -- name any of numerous technological wonders that truly do illistrate Pascal's analysis of diversion? Today's hunters may, by Pascal's own analysis, be happy, and not just be diverting themselves from unhappiness.

Two questions emerge: If hunting is not diversion from ourselves and our unhappiness, what is it? What might this revised account of hunting reveal about the human condition?

Pascal, Hunting over Poetry II

So why are ordinary people correct to prefer hunting to poetry? (324) First, Pascal says, poets are at least as confused as hunters: hunters do not know why hunting makes them happy and poets do not know why some poetry is good and other poetry bad.

“We do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry. We do not know the natural model which we ought to imitate; and through lack of this knowledge, we have coined fantastic terms, "The golden age," "The wonder of our times," "Fatal," etc., and call this jargon poetical beauty. But whoever imagines a woman after this model, which consists in saying little things in big words, will see a pretty girl adorned with mirrors and chains, at whom he will smile; because we know better wherein consists the charm of woman than the charm of verse” (33).

But, though hunters may be as confused as poets, the amusement of hunting successfully distracts us from our unhappiness, and so produces at least a relief from our condition. Poetry initially distracts us from ourselves, but then it presents us with bad models, and when we seek to imitate those models, we plunge even more deeply into unhappiness. After a hunt, we may at least be well-fed.

Pascal, Hunting over Poetry I

One hundred and forty years before Jeremy Bentham declared that “push-pin is as good as poetry,” Blaise Pascal was intrigued by those who preferred hunting to poetry (324). For both, the question concerned “what will make us happy?” Tetris and Halo have supplanted push-pin. But hunting and poetry still survive to pledge and promise.

When Pascal writes of hunting, he refers to boars and hares as the game with dogs and horses included among the means and royalty playing the part of the hunters. Hunting, as with Plato, is a group activity chasing quick, elusive game; the location, the means, and the actors have all changed.

Pascal claims that hunting and philosophy (and perhaps poetry too) share the same goal – happiness – but they differ radically in the means employed.

Hunting pursues happiness through diversion. Humans suffer from boredom and from the fright of facing into their own condition. “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber” (139). Of course, the inability also arises from the unhappiness. So, the hunter leaves his room and goes out to hunt. It gets him out of his room, and it will make him happy.

But what, exactly about the hunt makes the hunter happy? Here, Pascal believes, both the hunters and anti-hunters make a mistake. The hunter thinks that getting possession of a hare will make him happy. The anti-hunter (“those who philosophize on the matter”) cannot see why the scrawny, mangy hare, which the hunter “would not take as a gift” could possibly be worth spending a day hunting. Neither know that “it is the chase, and not the quarry, which they seek.” The chase has the capacity to distract us from ourselves.

“Whence comes it that this man, who lost his only son a few months ago, or who this morning was in such trouble through being distressed by lawsuits and quarrels, now no longer thinks of them? Do not wonder; he is quite taken up in looking out for the boar which his dogs have been hunting so hotly for the last six hours. He requires nothing more…. Without amusement there is no joy; with amusement there is no sadness.”

Plato on Hunting II

Does the analogy still hold between hunting and philosophy?

Plato's image of hunting strikes us as strange today. Our methods have changed. And natural selection would work against hunters who tote guns and form a tight ring around a thicket. So, we don’t run deer off cliffs or into an ambush; we sit in tree-stands drinking coffee and hope for one to walk by. We don’t shoot at moving targets; we devise ways to get deer to stop so that we can get our gadgets set and line up our sights. And for all intents and purposes, we hunt, or rather, each one hunts alone.

Our practices are determined more by our technologies than by the nature and habitat of our quarry or by our own skills. Those with means can even purchase a “hunt,” that is, pay to have themselves inserted in a locale where they have spent no time, to harvest game whose patterns they have not studied, with equipment built and adjusted by people they do not know.

By many measures our practices appear to be progress. Have you ever tried to chase a deer through a thicket while carrying a bow in one hand and a quiver full or arrows strapped to your back? But perhaps the activities have become so dissimilar that the change marks not progress but an equivocation in the word “hunt.”

This image of hunting, so dissimilar from the one employed by Socrates, may, nevertheless, still provide an analogue for the activity of philosophizing. For most of us in modern universities it is all we have ever known. We sit alone in offices drinking coffee and hope for a concept to float by.

Plato on Hunting I

Philosophers are hunters after true concepts. Socrates employs this image of himself and Glaucon while tracking the concept of justice in The Politea.[1]

S: Now then Gaucon, we must post ourselves like a ring of hunters around a thicket, with very alert minds, so that justice does not escape us by evaporating before us. It is evident that it must be there somewhere. Look out then and do your best to get a glimpse of it before me and drive it toward me.
G: I only wish I could! It will be enough if I can see what you point out as you guide me.
S: Come on, then, I’ll encourage you!
G: That I will, provided that you lead me.
S: Very well, but, by heaven! Look how obstructed and overgrown the woods are. What a dark and hard-to-see place! But there’s nothing to do but go forward.
G: Let’s go then!
S: By the devil! I think we have a track, and I don’t think it will escape us now.

Here we have hunting as a communal activity in search of quick, elusive game probably with the use of nets. And so the analogy to philosophy works -- if philosophy is a communal activity among friends chasing close-by concepts.

[1] Politea, 432 b. Translation from Jose Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting. Wilderness Adventures Press, 2007, p. 139.

Getting Started

Do a series of small steps eventually get you to the top of a mountain?
Do a series of small breaths add up so that you could go for a whole day without breathing?
Will a series of incoherent thoughts add up to something that appears coherent as a whole?
When does an argument from composition become a fallacy -- in this case, wishful thinking?
That is my experiment.
To write a paragraph or two...
with some regularity.

My topic: Hunting. Hunting is currently out of season. Not only in that I write in the month of March rather than October. Hunting is always out of season in Chicago and in urban modernity.