Reading Lessing’s play Nathan
the Wise was interesting. I read the first couple of chapters aloud.
Lessing was a talented writer. His play reminds me qualitatively of
Shakespeare’s work. As a literary work it is worthy of better
analysis than mine. I am not sure that it is especially relevant
today philosophically for understanding more than the history of
literature; if it is, the primary value is as an early work of
abstract existential analysis (18th century).
The Ring Parable is part of the
play. It may be said to be central and the central point for the play
and occurs in the third of five acts. The leading dramatis
personae are
Nathan, Saladin, the Templar, and Nathan’s daughter Recha. There
are a few supporting characters. The play involves two interwoven
themes and perhaps a greater unifying theme. The plotting is
excellent and pace of story development excellent with increasing
disclosure and revelation right unto the end.
I have a different philosophical
point of view about language, theology, philosophy and history than
did Lessing or skeptics that a priori dismiss the veracity of
religions with an assumption of equality (like algebra literals) in
order to be tolerant. I regard language as data used to communicate
information. It has an epistemological role in the way pointillism
has in painting for semiotic value for others and for oneself. One
does not to be Mihail Tal to evaluate chess positions over-the-board.
Quick wits and deep learning helps win games. Evaluating religious
veracity is comparable to chess. Lessing uses the analogy. It is
perhaps the underlying truth for Lessing about things-an interesting
game. Some pawns are not very thoughtful, have deep biases inertially
and can only move forward in space-time while rulers (Queens and
etc.) have more complex possibilities like the King's Gambit.
I don’t tend to regard
religious content as a literary narrative or history as incapable of
providing the possibility of confirming or falsifying religious
content. Neither would I place all religions upon an equal abstract
footing without the prospect for objective evaluation of inherent
true meaning any more than I would say that physical theories cannot
be evaluated or confirmed for accuracy, or historical essays for
accuracy. Lessing didn’t have the benefit of much of the scholastic
material available today for critical analysis in the field of
comparative religion. It is easy to read the Talmud and Cabala, Koran
and Pentateuch in addition to the New Testament, The Tales of
Gilgamesh, of Pure Land Buddhism, Shinto, The Analects of Confucius
and Lao Tzu and think about the content and how it fits into history.
One can read the Bhagavad Gita and Buddha’s noble eightfold path
and consider how military and social structure have a co-evolutionary
dialectic with religiosity. The Ring Parable is used to consider
three religions as bacteria in petri dishes of equal value for
research and of implicit use for inoculation against social
psychological maladies that may or may not work and that could only
be found to have worked or not after a thousand years of generations
reproducing. The great doctor examiner at the Level Four religious
facility could examine the three dishes of bacteria for himself then
and find how the inoculations had worked out.
Of course some or all of the
religion-bacteria could have been placebos. If the Doctor-god had an
evil streak; possibly Zoroastrian or even the Demi-Urge of Arthur
Schopenhauer, the inoculation may really have been a malevolent virus
(that is my inference about false religions being allowed to be
created).
Lessing’s play nearly turns out
to be a tragedy with the Templar interested in wedding Nathan’s
daughter who really was adopted and is the Templar’s sister, yet
luckily for Nathan who might have been burned by the Christian
patriarch for kidnapping a Christian child (he didn’t-the infant
was given by the Patriarch’s friar who was a friend of the father
of the kid who was a Templar killed in war who in turn was given the
child when the mother died), Saladin who was the slaughterer of
Crusaders and filled Acre with their blood had spared the life of the
young Templar after capturing him because he looked like his diseased
brother and turned out to be a son of his dead brother, Saladin and
the wise Nathan were able to clear matters up to all the interested
parties. They learned that they were all inter-related and so should
love one another.
Blood and adoption are thicker
than religion, yet maybe not baptismal water. Infant baptism was
another issue of the era (and still is). Illiteracy was also a large
issue in the era of the Crusades yet most people couldn’t read
about the problems it presented to society in that time.
Feudalism and social organization
around religion, land and loyalty to rulers didn’t place a great
need on individuals besides clerics being literate. Only slowly did
literacy arise after the invention of the printing press. In Germany
during the second year of book publishing 400 copies of the Bible
went out and the numbers went up markedly each year. That was
hundreds of years after the conclusion of the crusades though.
Today the widespread profusion of
cheap scholastic material hasn’t coincided with a necessary
increase in social wisdom so far as to overcome the domination of
certain thematic directions given by the preference of the most
wealthy. Nathan was quite wealthy as was Saladin. Today they might be
billionaires. Those with worldly wealth may place philosophical and
spiritual concerns as minor concerns. Today, Sunday, Google feature
hand prints of paint made with little dinosaurs. That is a rather
evolutionary anti-religion theme for a Sabbath day; one of a zillion
trivial and sometimes sharp jibes against Christianity and people of
faith generally.
Maybe the best value of Lessing’s
Ring Parable is in its facility for forming an abstract way of
viewing major concepts and hence all concepts. Knowledge is
conditional and comprised of data and some is accurate and meaningful
and other not so. Pierce’s [pragmatic approach applied to
epistemology might be in one form evaluated by the actual use of it.
Can a map for instance actually lead one to water to drink in a
desert; can Christianity and faith in Jesus Christ actually lead one
to salvation, etc. Europe in Lessing's time was a tensioned,
boundaried collective of cells with membranes jostling about the
body. I believe Sartre wrote much of the Critique of Dialectical
Reason after visiting the Soviet Union. He had been a prisoner of
war; like the Templar and was liberated by his captors. A collection
of his essays was named; 'Between Existentialism and Marxism'. I
think he felt the same sort of tension East-West as Lessing felt of
Europe, beliefs,epistemology and war in the abstract.
Prejudices are a belief about
data. Data is however conditional and its validity follows its use.
Consider writing artificial intelligence programs without prejudices
or pre-written modules that perform various functions. They are the
equivalent of automobile engine parts and it is difficult to get
anywhere in a vehicle without them. Prejudices are like actualized
D.N.A. and stem cells that have taken form into becoming a body that
can’t morph into something else. Good programs can be made to adapt
to new information though and perhaps even rewrite code. Human bodies
have a tougher time with that although Bruce Jenner tried for some
reason. Philosophers need to have some concepts in language that
work, as must all language have structure to carry meaning. One needs
to know what it is that one knows and its relevance for one’s
personal being.
One may develop personal values
about moral issues that are simply a matter of will, and that is
valid if one knows that it is personal will though one may wonder why
one wills something. One needs to construct data values with as much
accurate content as possible (in physics or mathematics for instance)
if logic and language are to be of practical utility for-oneself and
for-others. It is wrong to leave everything in a Symphonists paradigm
and deny the value of data constructs altogether as if words could
not present accurate word-pictures of the world of experience more
often than not (if it is less often than 51% language would be rather
challenging to use for much besides making good sounds like music).
In Lessing’s story the Ring
Parable might give Saladin a better insight into Nathan’s
character. It's a nice story yet no other people heard it and the
narrative plays out as it would have as fate or god would have it. I
don't think it brought Saladin to act differently. In a sense he
seems to be Nathan’s brother in wisdom already. It’s too bad that
the west never actually gave a Kurdish homeland to the Kurds as they
were promised after the end of the First World War. A small piece of
Syria would be a place to start. Saladin's brother Assad fought as a
Templar himself, and lost his life and his order Acre too. People of
Germany in the 1930s did not view things in a terribly religious way
and the romanticism and skepticism may have led to the holocaust and
the annexations of the Sudetenland and as much of Eastern Europe as
possible. That was about money, race and super-power; winners and
losers. Saladin didn’t care much about money in the play. In real
life maybe he was not so detached from wealth and public accounts.
