Photo of Rhossili beach, Gower Photo: Marcus Woodbridge on Unsplash
Thought for the week: Neil Morgan is in the thin of it
‘Perhaps the quintessentially thin experience is the act of human kindness at its spontaneous, miraculous, best.’
We all have some idea of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ places. ‘Thick’ places are intrusive, irritating and bothersome. We have to fit in to them, to change, and accommodate ourselves to them. For me that’s noisy cities, especially busy train stations. By contrast, ‘thin’ places are those where what is – what is physically real, what we can get hold of – somehow thins out, to allow access to another world. We sense this spiritual dimension alongside, or behind, the physical reality of a place, in the same way as we might find a backing to a picture.
Most of us can all think of examples of thin places. They seem to have this signalling or revelatory quality to them, leading to an extra dimension of depth behind the everyday world. The Gower Peninsula is one of mine. The Irish and the Welsh (thin places: lleoedd tenau), have been said to be especially sensitive to them.
Alongside thick and thin places, we can also think of thick and thin experiences. Anger and anxiety, in this way, might be thought of as thick personal experiences, which blot out other aspects of reality. Thin experiences are the exact opposite. Notable thin experiences are those times that we appreciate something extra, beyond what is simply functional in any particular sensory experience. The beauty of birdsong is a good example of such an ‘extra’, beyond the survival or practical value to the bird. So are the amazing weaving movements and colours of butterflies, as recently described in a poem in these pages by Jonathan Wooding. Other examples are the extra gratuitous beauty – sometimes quite overwhelmingly so – of flowers or music.
In this way, beauty, or value, is a very basic ‘thin’ experience. Perhaps the quintessentially thin experience is the act of human kindness at its spontaneous, miraculous, best. Emmanuel Levinas wrote a great deal about this aspect of ethics, as did Plato, many centuries earlier. Aspects of nature, on one level, and the Good in human experience, on another, have this thin quality, and provide an experience of revelation.
Thin experience is a pointer to the spiritually transcendent. These experiences do not shoehorn easily into a scientistic frame of reference. The transcendent can be described as an extra aspect of the world and humanity, which touches, at moments, our existential human situation. How might we explain it? Many people try to grasp it in terms of the sacred, or divine.
But however we try to grapple with it, it exists. Levinas and Plato, and bird- and butterfly-watchers, are simply describing it. Thin experience is substantially different to the hidden God of Isaiah, so familiar to the poet RS Thomas. It is not something absent, but something present. It need not be effaced or eradicated by logic. The ‘thin’ adds quality to life, and to life’s meaning, and remains utterly mysterious.
Comments
As I see it we have to ‘fit in’ ‘to change, and accommodate ourselves’ to any space or place or relationship. It is just that some are easier than others. Rhossili Bay is easy in some ways (I’ve been there and it’s magical), but harder in others, and perhaps it’s easiness belies the work required to really accommodate ourselves to such a place, especially if you do not get to be there all that often.
The same is true of relationships with people - some are easier to get alongside than others, but perhaps the really fulfilling and uplifting relationships are those that require some work, such as being with a lifetime partner, or your neighbours, whom you cannot choose - but you will only know if you put the effort in.
I live in a city - Sheffield - and I first realised that the effort pays off back around 1990. We stopped driving to ‘easy’ places, such as the nearby Peak District, and started really getting to know where we physically were - the run down semi-derelict east end. A few years later we gave up the car through lack of use.
Aristotle tells us that we need to pursue excellence, which takes practice and leads to virtue. The virtuous life, the life that enables us to accommodate ourselves to the otherness of the other; what Levinas calls the infinity of the face of the other, as opposed to the totality of that which is merely the same or easy; is what is required of us.
By GordonF on 14th January 2021 - 13:22
Gordon , thank you for this interesting reflection . As you say ,for Levinas the face of the other can sometimes be both a challenge ,that calls for a response ,at the same time it is an expression of the Transcendent, and a gift.Gabriel Marcel ,who influenced Levinas,felt the same way ,I think?.
By Neil M on 14th January 2021 - 14:40
Neil, Thank you for your reply. As I see it, for Levinas (and me) the ‘face of the other’ is ALWAYS a challenge, and is the very expression of transcendence. I have not read Marcel, but from what little I know, am not surprised he would agree.
The Quaker philosopher John Macmurray has this to say about transcendence:
“… we are both transcendent of experience and immanent in it. This union of transcendence and immanence is, then, the full fact about human personality. It is an empirical fact and a natural fact. We are accustomed to find it applied in theology to God, and it is usually assumed to be a peculiar and distinguishing attribute of Deity. We see now that this is a mistake. The union of immanence and transcendence is a peculiar and defining characteristic of all personality, human or divine; but it is primarily a natural, empirical fact of common human experience. Religious reflection applies it to God as a defining characteristic of universal personality because it finds it in experience as a given fact of all finite personal experience.” (‘The Structure of Religious Experience’ 1936)
Macmurray talks of the ‘resistance’ of the other, but I prefer Levinas’ ‘challenge’ since we all too easily use our technology to overcome resistance and so stay the ‘same’, whereas ‘challenge’ demands a response and so forces us to come out, naked, from behind the supposed defence of our technology and so become aware of that transcendence.
By GordonF on 27th January 2021 - 13:56
Please login to add a comment
