Our Selves
By Martin Versfeld
(Protea, R160)
‘For me making soup is rather like writing; my mind is a rag-bag, bits occasionally cohering to form some sort of unity,” philo-sopher Martin Versfeld said in his Philosopher Cookbook in 1983. “The art of preparing and eating food is inextricably intertwined with the meaning of life.”
This “all-rounder” is a philosopher (one of very few in our country), keen cook, gardener, handyman, outdoor-man, baker, father of nine. He constantly contemplated the meaning of life for this book – 10 of his most important essays written over two decades – and compiled them into a valuable work with the significant title Our Selves. This new edition by Protea is introduced by Ernst Wolff of the University of Pretoria.
In these essays Versfeld shows his scepticism towards some of the most revered thinkers of the Western world (such as Descartes) and finds a promise of wholeness in the teachings of St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Buddha.
“The author continually attempted to make sense of his own situatedness and in this way persistently affirmed the soundness of aspiring to find ‘a stability’,” Wolff writes in the introduction.
“Philosophy ought to start with anthropology in the Continental use of the term. What comes first is not theory of knowledge, but the problem of the being of man,” Versfeld writes in the essay The importance of being human. He roots philosophy in the problem of being human – how one sees oneself and in the ways one has your self with others. “By the desire for the real self we live in a common world, a concreated world, free of grasping desire, a world very different from our own, and for which no blueprint is possible… ”
In the essay The Ego in Indian Thought, Versfeld reminds his reader that Buddhism rises out of Hinduism and that at the centre of Upanishad teaching is the belief that Atman is the soul or self of all things and that Ego, or the small self, must be supplanted by the great Self, or Atman. “As St Paul says, we must put off the… ego tattered by sin and ignorance, and enter into the joy of our Lord. Union with Atman brings what is real in ourselves to fruition.”
He also brings Christian teaching in harmony with Buddhism. “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee,” said St Augustine, and Versfeld reckons this passage will remain alive when all the linguistic analysers of God-talk are forgotten.
“But what I find so very important in St Augustine is his teaching that at the heart of every desire, no matter how sinful, there is a seed of the divine… ”
So in The Desirability of Desire he reflects on this dilemma that’s as old as mankind: “grasping desire” leads people to become tyrants, to wars, colonialism or pornography in puritan countries.
His statement that “government has a vested interest in private vice and exploitation, insofar as there is an overlap between governmental power and money power” rings so true if one reads the daily news.
“Detachment requires that we lose ourselves, losing the world, only to experience they are given anew. This is not extirpation of desire, but transformation into a love which has no feat that it may lose its object. When the Buddhist says: let your samsara be your nirvana, or when Plato speaks of the intuition of beauty, this is what they appear to me to mean.”
Detachment is an issue Versfeld has addressed often before (as in his book Die neukery met die appelboom en ander essays), to make one aware of the futility of possessions – in physical or abstract form.
In his latest essays Versfeld confronts us with ourselves and the world we live in: The Yin and the Yang in Christian Culture; Idealism and Materialism in Ethics; On Justice and Human Rights; and Reflections on Evolutionary Knowledge.
In his introduction Wolff highlights the most striking themes that run through the book and interprets their interconnection.
The book can only be properly evaluated by considering it in all its complex and intricate details – an uplifting and pleasurable exercise. This book will stay on the bedside table for regular reference.