by Iris Murdoch
There’s nothing serious in mortality:
All is but toys — renown and grace is dead.
Another approach is to say that suffering is good for the soul, the experience of desolation can be a kind of teaching. This may be so, though perhaps (how can one know) more often not so. Any reflection shows that one is dealing, at a roughly recognisable level, with a lot of different states. Jim and Macbeth felt intense guilty remorse without hope of either forgiveness or healing repentance. Norman Malcolm spoke of a guilt so great that it forced us toward belief in God. Kierkegaard thought that sin and guilt could prompt the leap from ethics to religion. Despair induced by sin may be relieved, with or without religious aid, by repentance and restitution. On the other hand, the condition (for instance as humiliation) may, almost automatically, be ‘alleviated’ by hatred, vindictive fantasies, plans of revenge, reprisal, a new use of energy. There is, which can be no less agonising, a guiltless remorse when some innocent action has produced an unforeseeable catastrophe. A common cause of void is bereavement, which may be accompanied by guilt feelings, or may be productive of a ‘clean’ pain. In such cases there is a sense of emptiness, a loss of personality, a loss of energy and motivation, a sense of being stripped, the world is utterly charmless and without attraction. Guiltless bereavement can occasion most intense pain, but is often followed by recovery, when, it is said, ‘nature’ reasserts itself. Duties perceived in this emptiness may be a source of healing. There is no one there, but the pain is there and the tasks. In time the annihilated personality reappears, the victim returns from the strange absolute country of death which he has visited, and resumes his ordinary interests, which in his grief he found senseless. He is made by merciful nature to forget what it was like. Disappointed love or the effortful ending of a relationship may have a similar history. Even extreme guilt may be clouded over as ubiquitous nature prompts the conclusion ‘Why bother’. The more terrible pictures are of solitary prisoners with no term of release. Religious belief or a secular equivalent may bring some light. Or a religious faith, strong at first, gradually fades away. In such despairing the idea of death and non-being is made real.
But, it may be said, surely in many cases something good can be retained or learnt from the experience of emptiness and non-being? Should it not be taken as a spiritual icon or subject for meditation? There is nothing that cannot be broken or taken from us. Ultimately we are nothing. A reminder of our mortality, a recognition of contingency, must at least make us humble. Are we not then closer to the deep mystery of being human? When we find our ordinary pursuits trivial and senseless are we not right to do so? The experience of emptiness may be a shock soon forgotten, or a lifelong reminder, a moral inspiration, even a liberation, a kind of joy. Of course one’s persona or self-protective personality or ‘life illusion’ is part of one’s working gear as a human being; yet, as we are occasionally given to perceive, it is extremely fragile. Anyone can be destroyed. There is no one there. Loss of personality is loss of ego. Buddhism teaches the unreality of the world of appearance, including the apparent person. (Phaedo 67E. Practise dying.) Kafka: ‘Es gibt ein Ziel, aber keinen Weg, was wir Weg nennen ist Zögern.’ ‘There is an end, but no way, what we call the way is vacillation.’ (Hesitation, messing about.) People locked in closed religious houses think longingly of the fruitful happy lives they might have had, and which they have given up for nothing. This is, it must be, a familiar phenomenon. It is also, potentially, the dark night spoken of by St John of the Cross, wherein, beyond all images of God, lies the abyss of faith into which one falls. (Perhaps as into Eckhart’s seething cauldron.) So, we may be told, the experience, whatever its cause, may be an education, may be made use of for good. The victim may be receiving an enforced enlightenment. And even the exempt spectator ought to think: I too could be there; and if so, what am I? (Perhaps the Greeks thought in this way about slavery: a memento mori.) Yes, it is possible, but very often just too difficult, to ‘learn’ from deep despair. One may remind oneself that human beings are remarkably good at surviving and people make jokes in dark situations which would appal the outsider. All the same one’s thoughts return (hopelessly) to the imprisoned and the starving and to experiences of loss, ignominy, or extreme guilt.
Simone Weil on this subject. For the extreme state she uses the term malheur, meaning not just unhappiness or sorrow. One might translate it as ‘affliction’. It is marked (‘the mark of slavery’) by physical symptoms, ‘difficulty of breathing, a vice closing about the heart’. (Pensées sans ordre concernant l‘amour de Dieu, ‘L‘Amour de Dieu et le malheur’.) From the Notebooks:
‘To lose somebody: we suffer at the thought that the dead one, the absent one, should have become something imaginary, something false. But the longing we have for him is not imaginary. We must go down into ourselves where the desire which is not imaginary resides ... The loss of contact with reality — there lies evil, there lies grief ... The remedy is to use the loss itself as an intermediary for attaining reality. The presence of the dead one is imaginary, but his absence is real, it is henceforth his manner of appearing.’
(p. 28.)
‘To forgive. (Valéry.) One is unable to. When someone has done us harm, reactions are set up. The desire for vengeance is the desire for balance. To accept the lack of balance. To see therein the essential lack of balance.’
(p. 136.)
‘Valéry — adherence of painful thoughts (comparison with a burn). So much the better. It makes them real. Let the love of good adhere in this way. See to it that the love of good passes through such a process.’
(P. 51.)
This is joyless imagery. The image of burning is good. Remorse is said to bite, but better said to burn: an adherence of burning stuff. We must experience the reality of pain, and not fill the void with fantasy. The image of balance: the void as the anguished experience of lack of balance. We have been unjustly treated, insulted, humiliated: we want to get our own back, to get even, if need be to hurt innocent people as we have been hurt. We console ourselves with fantasies of ‘bouncing back’. We yield to the natural gravity (pesanteur) which automatically degrades our thoughts and feelings. (Imagery of the mechanical, in Simone Weil, in Wittgenstein, in Freud, in Canetti’s Crowds and Power.) Instead of this surrender to natural necessity we must hold on to what has really happened and not cover it with imagining how we are to unhappen it. Void makes loss a reality. Do not think about righting the balance, but live close to the painful reality and try to relate it to what is good. What is needed here, and is so difficult to achieve, is a new orientation of our desires, a re-education of our instinctive feelings. We may think here of Plato’s image of the soul as a charioteer with a good horse and a bad horse, struggling with the bad horse and pulling him up violently, ‘covering his jaws with blood’. Phaedrus 254E.
This partly metaphorical description of malheur may be readily recognised as what, in some sense, we have experienced. More difficult to imagine is the reorientation and the relation to good. It may be said that there are many ways out of affliction, the support of friends, the ability to make restitution, or to start a new life elsewhere, or just to rely on forgetting. But a deep, or a real, or a proper, recovery demands, it may be replied, some sort of moral activity, a making a spiritual use of one’s desolation. Simone Weil speaks of good and of love. Loving is an orientation, a direction of energy, not just a state of mind. Emptiness: absence of God, absence of Good. This may be felt as the senselessness of everything, the loss of any discrimination or sense of value, a giddy feeling of total relativism, even a cynical hatred of virtue and the virtuous: a total absence of love. Here anything may help, any person, any pure or innocent thing which could attract love and revive hope. The inhibition of unworthy fantasies is perhaps the most accessible discipline. In extreme cases the negative effort of this inhibition may come as a kind of shock, when one is ‘brought up short’ (like the bad horse). There may be a place here for the idea of an effort of will. T
his sort of asceticism can of course be an everyday matter, practised at various levels, as when one guards one’s tongue or expels bad thoughts. We have (gravity, necessity) a natural impulse to derealise our world and surround ourselves with fantasy. Simply stopping this, refraining from filling voids with lies and falsity, is progress. Equally in the more obscure labyrinths of personal relations it may be necessary to make the move which makes the void appear.
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Metaphysics: a Summary
Metaphysical images, in their travels from obscure books through religious and aesthetic imagery into the daily consciousness of all sorts of people, undergo, in this ‘do-it-yourself’ process, many changes and reveal many ambiguities. Ambiguity, or call it flexibility, belongs to these curious processes. The idea of void or emptiness, thought of in a moral and religious context, can be seen in various ways and can do various kinds of work. The emptiness can be a ‘moment’ in a dialectic, as in Kierkegaard’s image of creative despair, or in a Platonic iconoclastic pilgrimage. If void continues there can be real ordinary familiar despair. Or this can be made into the kind of asceticism envisaged by Simone Weil, wherein the sufferer, refusing the consolations of fantasy, takes a firm hold upon the painful reality: as in the case of bereavement, for example, or in the terrible situation of waiting for the inevitable death of a loved person. Extreme suffering, from one cause or another, is likely to be the lot of everyone at some time in life; and innumerable lives are hideously darkened throughout by hunger, poverty and persecution, or by remorse or guilt or abandoned loneliness and lack of love. Here every individual is ultimately alone, and in relation to actual cases it seems impertinent to consider what use is made of religious consolation. Theological truth is abstract. Out on the battle-front of human suffering people will use such devices as they have for survival. Experiences of void can also, sometimes perhaps ‘in the long run’ when they have been lived with, be put to more positive and creative use, or as one may put it, assume a different meaning. The ‘dead’ void may become ‘live’, or ‘magnetic’. Here I want to look back to, or return toward, the Ontological Proof of which Simone Weil said that it ‘is mysterious because it does not address itself to the intelligence, but to love’. (Notebooks, p. 375.) I spoke earlier of situations where what is wholly transcendent and invisible becomes partially, perhaps surprisingly, visible at points where the ‘frame’ does not quite ‘meet’. This image describes certain kinds of experience where it is as if, to use another image, the curtain blows in the wind (of spirit maybe), and we see more than we are supposed to. Plato’s myths indicate such visions. Here again the activity of the artist or thinker may be taken as an image (or analogy) of, or a case of, the moral life. So deep is imagery in life that one may not always realise or know whether one is regarding something as itself, or as an image. We are all artists and thinkers. We are all poets. Well, surely one will empty the concept by such treatment! If we are all poets, what about real poets? Oddly enough we can manage to think without confusion in these ways, it is a very usual way of thinking. I quoted Simone Weil earlier on the subject of patient attention which waits for the insight which has not yet been given. The artist or thinker concentrates on the problem, grasps it as a problem with some degree of clarity, and waits. Something is apprehended as there which is not yet known. Then something comes; as we sometimes say from the unconscious. It comes to us out of the dark of non-being, as a reward for loving attention. An insuperable difficulty is a sun. Simone Weil, speaking of anamnesis, calls it ‘an orientation of the soul toward something which one does not know, but whose reality one does know’. The empty space, to pursue one (not the only) picture of the matter, may be found to be full of forms, boiling and seething like Eckhart’s God, or like the innumerable divine forms of India, whose proliferation shocks the more puritanical religious of the north. (Perhaps the ‘so many’ of Philebus 16d, as noted by Simone Weil, Notebooks , p. 20.) The energy of the attentive scholar or artist is spiritual energy. The energy of the bereaved person trying to survive in the best way, or of the mother thinking about her delinquent son (and so on and so on) is spiritual. One uses this word with a certain purpose, to set up certain pictures, to draw attention to similarities and to explain and clarify the obscure by the familiar. Plato calls such energy Eros, love. Zeus became Eros to create the world. Parmenides said that Genesis (the Creator) invented Love first of all gods. (Symposium 178B.) The Timaeus Demiurge is inspired to create by love of the Good. Concentrated attention (‘loving care’) is easily distinguished from the hazy muddled unclarified states of mind wherein one is content with a second best. The second best should be exchanged for void. (Try again. Wait.) We intuitively know about perfection. Art and high thought and difficult moral discernment appear as creation ex nihilo, as grace. The Meno concludes that virtue does not come by nature, nor is it teachable, but comes by divine dispensation. Keats says that ‘what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not.’ It must be truth. Simone Weil quotes Valéry: ‘The proper, unique and perpetual object of thought is that which does not exist.’ Here we may make sense of the idea of loving good. ‘At its highest point, love is a determination to create the being which it has taken for its object.’ Here indeed we come back to the Ontological Proof in its simpler version, a proof by perfection, by a certainty derived from love. The good artist, the true lover, the dedicated thinker, the unselfish moral agent solving his problem: they can create the object of love. The dog’s tooth, when sincerely venerated, glows with light. Compare, God cannot be thought of except as real.
The Platonic relation between the different levels of the soul, whereby the higher controls the lower, is not to be understood in a Jungian, Manichaean or Heraclitean way. There is a kind of ‘concession’ involved in the, in so many ways obviously ‘realistic’, image of the divided soul. We are divided creatures who must perhaps hope at best to control, not remove, our evil impulses. On the other hand the vision of perfection which condemns them as evil is never absent and there can be no pact between good and evil, they are irreconcilable enemies, and condemned to everlasting war, but not in Heraclitus’ sense. There is no harmonious balance whereby we suddenly find that evil is just a ‘dark side’ which is not only harmless to good, but actually enhances it. Evil may have to be lived with, but remains evil, and we live too with the real possibility of improvement. This Platonic inspiration is like the absolutism of Kant who will not allow that any man lacks the means to be perfectly rational. Common-sense may protest against such a requirement. If we insist on keeping the picture we might be said to have asserted a religious view of the world. This would be one point at which, in the continuity which (as I see it) exists between morality and religion, we might feel that we had crossed the border. The absolute demand remains. As Simone Weil puts it, exposure to God condemns the evil in ourselves not to suffering but to death: a saying worth reflecting upon in relation to a psychology which explores the pleasures of suffering. A characteristically religious saying. The Christian God has been found to be a lovable figure, by believers who are not simply afraid of him. Christ of course is lovable. (So is the Platonic Socrates.) The mystic Christ who is an image of Good is lovable. That we can and do love Good and are drawn towards it is something that we have to learn from our experience, as we move all the time in the continuum between good and bad. This is our everyday existence where spiritual energy, Eros, is all the time active at a variety of levels. Our emotions and desires are as good as their objects and are constantly being modified in relation to their objects. What is good purifies the desire that seeks it, the good beloved ennobles the lover. There is no unattached will as a prime source of value. There is only the working of the human spirit in the morass of existence in which it always at every moment finds itself immersed. We live in an ‘intermediate’ world. Good as absolute, above courage and generosity and all the plural virtues, is to be seen as unshadowed and separate, a pure source, the principle which creatively rela
tes the virtues to each other in our moral lives. In the iconoclastic pilgrimage, through the progressive destruction of false images, we experience the distance which separates us from perfection and are led to place our idea of it in a figurative sense outside the turmoil of existent being. The concept is thus ‘forced upon us’. The transcendental proof of it is from all the world, all of our extremely various experience. The Form of the Good, herein like Kant’s call of duty, may be seen as enlightening particular scenes and setting the specialised moral virtues and insights into their required particular patterns. This is how the phenomena are saved and the particulars redeemed, in this light. Plato’s Good resembles Kant’s Reason, but is a better image, since, by contrast, reason too, if we are to keep any force in the concept, is a specialised instrument. The sovereign Good is not an empty receptacle into which the arbitrary will places objects of its choice. It is something which we all experience as a creative force. This is metaphysics, which sets up a picture which it then offers as an appeal to us all to see if we cannot find just this in our deepest experience. The word ‘deep’, or some such metaphor, will come in here as part of the essence of the appeal. In this respect metaphysical and religious pictures resemble each other.
