Chapter III: The Need for Transcendence in The Mystery of Being: Reflection and Mystery 1948–1950 by Gabriel Marcel

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The Mystery of Being: Reflection and Mystery 1948–1950

Gabriel Marcel

Chapter III: The Need for Transcendence

This sort of circular panorama of our subject has not yet made very clear to us the real significance and nature of this investigation. We have found out what it is not; also, what conditions are likely to freeze its growth. We must now seek to grasp more directly what such an investigation is: and first of all we must ask ourselves what is the nature of that urgent inner need, of which I have spoken so often as being, in a way, the mainspring of such investigations.

I should like to call it a need for transcendence. Unfortunately, that word has been lately much abused both by contemporary German philosophers and some of their French pupils. I should like to lay it down in principle that ‘transcendence’ cannot merely mean ‘going beyond’. There are various ways of ‘going beyond’, for instance, for which ‘transcendence’ is an inappropriate word. There is going beyond in space: encroaching, as the explorer does, on some surface that lies beyond a commonly accepted limit.  But there is also going beyond in time: I am thinking particularly of the notion of the ‘project’, the sort of moral claim upon the future, which plays such an important part in Sartre's thinking.  If we call these ‘transcendence’, we are extending the meaning of the word in a way which may be grammatically permissible, but which is philosophically confusing. I would rather cling to the traditional antithesis [reversal of an initial conviction] between the immanent and the transcendent as it is presented to us in textbooks of metaphysics and theology. And, though I know there will be objections to this, I should even like to make a distinction between a horizontal and a vertical ‘going beyond’, the latter of which is more truly transcendence. We have already met with the main objections; they have to do with the use in an abstract metaphysical argument of categories that seem to belong exclusively to our individual perception of space. But really our way of evaluating certain experiences as ‘high’ and others as ‘low’ appears in a sense to be a fundamental thing, linked, as it were, to our very mode of existence as incarnate beings. I should like to mention in passing the important researches on such spatial metaphors that have been carried out separately by Dr. Minkowski and M. Robert Desoille. Their level of approach is rather different; both are psychiatrists, but Dr. Minkowski has the advantage of being specially trained in philosophy and the phenomenologic method, as M. Desoille is not. 2

[Note
In his extremely interesting book, Vers une Cosmologie, (Paris, Fernand Aubier, 1936), Dr. Minkowski speaks of a primitive space of experience in which our thoughts and ideas, as well as our bodies, can be said to move. The nature of this primitive space varies according to exactly what is moving through it; thus Dr. Minkowski suggests that we can contrast our inner with our outer, our mental with our physical space. He gives an example that perhaps may make his drift clearer. I am saying goodbye on a station platform to someone I care for deeply; the train moves off, my friend is still leaning out of the window, and instinctively I run after the train, stretching out my hands towards him. At the end of the platform, as the train disappears from sight, I do actually stop running, but nevertheless, in my inner space, I am still pursuing it; my thought follows the train and participates, so to speak, in the movement which is carrying away part of my being. Dr. Minkowski observes that, according to our usual way of thinking, the only real motion is bodily motion; but this, he says, is a false way of thinking, for thought moves, too. And possibly, on my way out of the station, lost in the thought that is still following my friend as he is carried away from me, I may bump into somebody. ‘I am sorry,’ I shall say, ‘I didn't notice where I was going, my thoughts were somewhere else… This is a striking illustration of what inner space, lived space, the space of experience, means; and later in this series of lectures we shall have, I fancy, to remember this notion and to make use of it.]

I think, however, that these objections should not simply be thrust aside, but rather taken up, and transformed into an argument on our own behalf. The argument might also be illustrated by an analysis bearing on the inevitable ambiguity which attaches, today, to the notion of ‘the heavens above’. In France, we have known rationalists who have expended a great deal of exuberant irony in lucid demonstrations of the pre-copernican character of the theological idea of heaven: they have insisted at length, and in a rather laborious way, on the absurdity of clinging to the traditional notions of an absolute ‘height’ and an absolute ‘depths’, a real ‘up’ and a real ‘down’, in a world that has been enlightened by mathematical physics. But strangely enough, it is the rationalists who in the end seem simple-minded; they fail, it seems, to grasp that there are categories of lived experience that cannot be transformed by any scientific discoveries, even those of an Einstein. We feel the earth below us, we see the sky above; the ways of expressing ourselves that derive from that situation could be changed only if the actual mode of our insertion into the universe could be changed; and there is no chance at present of that. When we are dealing, indeed, with such a simple matter as the correspondence of certain postures of the human body to certain contrasting emotions, we have to clench our minds to grasp what the problem is. I am using the rather vague word ‘correspondence’ on purpose in order not to bring in the questionable idea of a strictly causal relationship. When we think, for instance, of the quite precise and concrete emotional realities that translate themselves in French into a noun like ‘abattement’ and in English into a phrase like ‘feeling cast down’, is it not by an unnatural and, indeed, by a barren effort that we try to separate the facts themselves from the metaphor, rooted in language and hardly any longer felt as a metaphor, that fits them like a glove? I may add that the whole drift of such remarks will become clear only when we have got further on our way.

Therefore, we have now to ask ourselves what this urgent inner need for transcendence exactly consists of. I think we must first of all try to map it out in relation to life as it is concretely lived, and not to outline its shape in the high void of ‘pure thought’; for my method of advance does invariably consist, as the reader will have noticed already, in working my way up from life to thought and then down from thought to life again, so that I may try to throw more light upon life. But it would be a hopeless undertaking, I think, to attempt to ensconce oneself, once and for all, in the realm of pure thought. Or rather such an attempt is not legitimate except in one or two quite specialized disciplines, above all, of course, in the mathematical sciences; even so, it is a moot and rather troublesome question whether the mathematician can develop his speculations in a world quite totally cut off from experience, that is to say, fundamentally, from life. We shall have, later on, to go in more detail into the exact relations between these two important notions of ‘experience’ and of ‘life’ and to dissipate a confusion about these relations which prevails in certain realms of philosophic thought.

Let us notice in the first place that the need for transcendence presents itself above all, is deeply experienced above all, as a kind of dissatisfaction. But the converse does not seem to be true, it does not seem that one would be in the right in saying that every kind of dissatisfaction implies an aspiration towards transcendence. It is important, I think, at this point to be as concrete as possible, that is to say to dramatize, that is, to imagine, as precisely as possible, the situation, the sort of situation in which I may find myself involved. The personal pronoun ‘I’ should, in addition, be taken here in its widest sense. For it is not a matter only of that finite individuality that I myself am, but of every individuality with which I can sympathize in a lively enough way to represent its inner attitudes to myself. I have no difficulty for instance in putting myself in the place of somebody who suffers from having to lead a narrow life, a life whose development is embarrassed because all its expenses have to be kept at the lowest level, and who dreams of an easier and larger existence; let us imagine the case for instance of a young girl who, so that she may obtain the satisfactions of which she feels herself deprived, marries for money. Let us notice clearly that she perhaps frees herself from certain religious and moral prejudices, and in this sense one might, it seems, properly speak of a ‘going beyond’. On the other hand, we have a very clear sense indeed that the need to which the girl has yielded cannot properly be called a need for transcendence. That is enough to justify the distinction which I made at the beginning of the lecture.

We can now imagine a quite different case: the dissatisfaction of somebody who is on the contrary leading an easy life, full of material satisfactions, but who wants to break with this existence in order to commit himself to some spiritual adventure. We should have to go on to an analysis of these two types of dissatisfaction. The first, the girl's, is linked to the idea or, more exactly, to the image of a certain number of goods to which it seems to me that I have the right, or of which I feel myself deprived. Yet it is not, as it seems to me, the idea of possession as such which one should here chiefly stress. I would say, roughly and generally, that the person who suffers from poverty aspires above all to a liberty of movement which is denied to him. Whatever he wants to do, he is brought up short by the question of what it costs, and always he sees himself forced to renounce his purpose. It would be quite unjust to suppose that the girl who marries for money is necessarily inspired by cupidity, that she loves money for its own sake. Perhaps she is even a generous being who suffers particularly from not being able to help those she loves. In this connection, it is thus possible to conceive a hierarchy of satisfactions, some low and vulgar, others on the contrary highly spiritual. Let us note in passing that at this point the antithesis between the ‘high’ and the ‘low’ has cropped up again. These satisfactions, though hierarchically arranged, have, however, a common characteristic. They are all organically linked with the fact of possessing a certain power which does not fundamentally belong to me, a power which is not, strictly speaking, myself. The dissatisfaction has to do with the absence of something which is properly speaking external to me, though I can assimilate it to myself and in consequence make it mine. Let us not, at this point, bring in any moral judgments; we have not to ask ourselves whether marrying for money is in fact equivalent to selling oneself, or if it ought to be considered as blameworthy. We are moving at the level of description, and at that level only.

It seems to me then that the first type of dissatisfaction ceases at the moment when I have obtained the external help that assures for me that freedom of movement that I need. But the strange thing is, or so it seems, that the other type of dissatisfaction is directed precisely against satisfactions of this first type. It is just as if—and we shall have to remember this point later on—this liberty of movement which has been granted to us were to reveal itself as meaningless or quite worthless. Perhaps meaningless or worthless, just because its principle lies not in the self, but outside the self. From that moment, it is as if another sort of yearning arose in me, directed not outwards, but inwards. Naturally, the first example of this sort of yearning that presents itself to our minds is the yearning for sanctity; but it is not the only example, and we can also think, at this point, of the case of the creative artist. We can reflect upon the weariness that grips the man who has read too many books, heard too many concerts, visited too many galleries. If there is still enough life left in him, that weariness will tend to transform itself into a desire to create. Certainly, there is no guarantee that this new yearning will be satisfied. It does not lie within my own choice to be a creator, even if I genuinely aspire to creation. In other words, one would be guilty of an indefensible simplification if one asserted that the first kind of dissatisfaction is linked to the absence of something that does not depend on me—such as wealth—but that in the case of the second kind of dissatisfaction, it is up to myself to put an end to it. The truth is infinitely more subtle and complicated, and we cannot fall back here on the famous Stoic distinction—between things that lie within our power, and things that fall outside it—at least in its simple original form.

We shall have to come back to this point later on when we shall be trying to discern in what sense man is in the right in considering himself as a free agent, but even now we can see that the fact of a man's managing to fulfill his vocation, however high (and this is even truer, the higher his vocation is) could not be explained away as being the result of a simple decree of his will. There is, on the contrary, every reason to suppose that this fulfillment of a high vocation involves a kind of co-operation from a whole swarm of conditions over which the person with the vocation has no direct control. This is a point of the greatest importance and it shows that the problem of the vocation is essentially a metaphysical one, and that its solution transcends the scope of any psychological system whatsoever. It is not by mere chance that the verb ‘to transcend’ has here intruded itself, quite unexpectedly, into our discussion. We are already caught up, as it were, within the poles of that transcendence which we attempted to define in the first part of this lecture. Might it not be said that to create is always to create at a level above oneself? And is it not exactly, also, in this sort of connection that the word ‘above’ assumes its specific value?

It is true that the great Swiss novelist, Ramuz, in whom we must salute a thinker of profound power, seems, in his memories of Stravinsky, to say precisely the contrary. ‘I do not know why,’ he says, ‘but I was reminded of that sentence of Nietzsche: “I love the man who wants to create something higher than himself and so perishes.” But what I loved at that time in you was the man who, on the contrary, creates something lower than himself and does not perish.’ But there is, it seems to me, a confusion here, a confusion of which Jean Wahl is also perhaps guilty in attempting to distinguish, in one of his essays, between transcendence and transdescendence. What Ramuz is trying to say here, and what he has asserted many times, for instance in his book Salutation Paysanne [Paris, 1929] is that one can only make poetry with the antipoetic, that art must be grafted on a wild stock, or rather that the artist must start off from the rawest and most familiar reality, contemplated in all its thickness, its primitive density. It is extremely probable that Ramuz is right in saying this. But there is no reason at all for denying a certain character of transcendence to this raw, familiar reality, always allowing that we insist on one point, which is as follows, and which is very important. There would be no meaning in treating transcendence as a sort of predicate which could belong to one determinate reality and not to another. On the contrary, the reference of the idea to the general human condition is fundamental; but it must be added that it is not a reference arrived at by way of abstract thought, but rather one that is grasped through intimate lived experience—experience, in the sort of case I am talking about, intimately lived in the inner awareness of the poet or the artist. We should notice, however, that we have now raised a difficulty which we must not evade. From the moment when the idea of transcendence is evoked in relation to the human condition in general, is it not negated as transcendence and in some sense absorbed back into experience, that is to say, in a word, brought back to the status of immanence? But in that case what becomes of the urgent inner need for transcendence, properly so called?

Let us proceed in this case as we always ought to in cases of this sort; that is to say, reflectively, asking ourselves whether the objection does not presuppose a postulate or rather an implicit image which ought to be erased? What is in question here is the very idea that we form of experience; have we not an unjustifiable tendency to think of experience as a sort of given, more or less shapeless substance, something like a sea whose shores are hidden by a thick fog, and we have just been speaking as if the transcendent was a sort of misty cloud which would by and by melt away; but we have only to reflect upon what experience really is, to realize that this metaphor is grossly inadequate. But we must, I think, go further still, and this remark will apply, in a certain sense, to all our future investigations. One cannot protest too energetically not only against this particular way of representing the idea of experience, but against the claim that experience can possibly be represented, in any way at all. Experience is not an object, and I am here taking the word ‘object’, as I shall always be taking it, in its strictly etymological (from Greek: etumos ‘true’) sense, which is also the sense of the German word gegenstand (subject), of something flung in my way, something placed before me, facing me, in my path. We must ask ourselves if some confused representation of experience as an object is not really involved when, in the manner of the Kantian philosophy if that is taken quite literally, one speaks of what lies outside, what lies beyond the limits of, experience. That, in the last analysis, can mean nothing, since the judging of something to be outside experience is itself empirical, that is to say it is a judgment made from within experience.

These very simple remarks lead us to an important conclusion, one of which we must never lose sight, especially during the second series of these lectures, when we shall be touching on more strictly metaphysical questions. Not only does the word ‘transcendent’ not mean ‘transcending experience’, but on the contrary there must exist a possibility of having an experience of the transcendent as such, and unless that possibility exists the word can have no meaning. One must not shirk the admission that, at a first glance, such an assertion runs the risk of appearing to contradict itself. But may not this be due to the fact that we tend, without realizing it, to form far too restrictive an idea of experience? A typical example of experience, taking the idea of experience in a narrow sense, would be a sensation of taste; in that case, experience appears to be linked to the presence of something for me, and in me, and we interpret it as part of the act of ingesting something. But it is obvious that this act of ingestion is not part of the essence of experience as such, and that in other cases, experience is not so much an absorbing into oneself of something as a straining oneself towards something, as when, for instance, during the night, we attempt to get a distinct perception of some far-off noise. I am still confining myself to examples belonging to the field of sensation. But we know very well that experience goes far beyond the domain of the external senses; and it is also very obvious that in what we call the ‘inner life’ experience can express itself through attitudes that may be diametrically opposed to each other.

Moreover, I am not allowing myself to forget that in the language of contemporary phenomenology the word ‘transcendence’ is understood in a much wider sense than that in which, up to the present, I have been understanding it; every object, as such, being considered, in that system, as a transcendent object. However, as I have already said, I prefer to stick to the traditional sense of the word, probing into it, however, more deeply than it has been usual to do. Let us admit, for that matter, that for a topic of this kind it is always very difficult to find an adequate vocabulary. To say that the transcendent is still immanent in experience, is to persist in objectifying experience and in imagining it as a sort of space of which the transcendent would be, so to say, one dimension. One can avoid such confusions only by keeping continually present to one's thought the spiritual meaning which one is stressing. Naturally, there is no possibility of doing without symbols; nevertheless, symbols should always be recognized as such and should never encroach on the ideas that one is straining to elucidate [explain, make clear] through their use.

Thus, I repeat, the urgent inner need for transcendence should never be interpreted as a need to pass beyond all experience whatsoever; for beyond all experience, there is nothing; I do not say merely nothing that can be thought, but nothing that can be felt. It would be much more true to say that what is our problem here is how to substitute a certain mode of experience for other modes. Here again we have to battle against a distorting symbolization which would represent these modes of experiences as physical spaces separated by some kind of partition. But it is sufficient, if we want to get rid of this misleading picture, to turn to a concrete and precise example: let us think, if you are willing, of the kind of inner transformation that can take place within a personal relationship. Here, for instance, is a husband who has begun by considering his wife in relation to himself, in relation to the sensual enjoyments she can give him, or even simply in relation to her services as an unpaid cook and charwoman. Let us suppose that he is gradually led into discovering that this woman has a reality, a value of her own, and that, without realizing it, he gradually comes to treat her as a creature existing in her own right; it may be that he will finally become capable of sacrificing for her sake a taste or a purpose which he would formerly have regarded as having an unconditional importance. In this case, we are witnesses of a change in the mode of experience, which provides a direct illustration of my argument. This change revolves upon the center of an experiencing self; or, to speak more exactly, let us say that the progress of the husband's thought gradually substitutes one center for another; and of course the word ‘thought’ is not quite exactly the right word here, for we are dealing with a change in the attitude of a human being considered as a whole, and with that change, also, in so far as it embodies itself in that human being's acts. I hope this example gives us a glimpse, at least, of the direction in which we must set ourselves to move if we want to give a meaning to these words that are certainly obscure in themselves: urgent inner need for transcendence.

It will be objected, nevertheless, that the term ‘transcendence’ taken in its full metaphysical sense seems essentially to denote an otherness, and even an absolute otherness, and people will ask how an experience of otherness as such can even be conceived. Does not the other, qua (in the capacity of; as being) other, fall by definition outside my experience? Again, in this case, we must ask ourselves whether the objection does not mask a preconceived idea which we must bring to the surface before we can expose it to criticism. Here again it is our conception, or again I would rather say our image, of experience that is in question. The point is so important at this juncture that we must be allowed to insist on it.

It may be said that the philosophy of the last century was in a very large measure dominated by a prejudice which tried to assume the dignity of a principle. The prejudice consisted in admitting that all experience in the end comes down to a self's experience of its own internal states. Let us notice, in passing, that what we have here is a paradoxical conjunction, or osmosis, of two contrasting elements—on the one hand a philosophy which had originally been based purely on the reality of sensation, and on the other hand an idealism whose nature was essentially different. The first of these philosophies, so long as it remained faithful to its first roots, was forced, for that matter, to deny to the self all autonomous reality; one can even say, it seems to me, that from this point of view (the point of view of Hume, for instance) the self is built up out of its own states, or out of something which is only an abstract and uncertain outcome of these states. It was quite another matter for idealism (and Descartes is the obvious name to mention in this connection), for which, on the contrary, the thinking self possesses an indubitable existence, and even a real priority. I mean that for idealism the thinking self stands as the necessary postulate without which any kind of experience at all is inconceivable. One might be tempted to say that for idealism it was rather the self's states of consciousness that had a wavering and doubtful metaphysical status. Moreover, in this connection, one recalls, of course, the difficulties that arise in Kant's doctrine about the relation between transcendental awareness and ordinary, everyday psychological awareness. How can the Ich denke (I think) become an Ich fühle (I feel) or an Ich erlebe (I experience)? It could not be a matter, in this case, of course, of postulating a separateness, like the separateness of physical objects, between the thinking self and the feeling self, that is, of claiming that the one was not the same thing as the other. Such an affirmation would result in the end in idealism's once more thingifying the self. To avoid that impasse, idealism will be forced to speak of functional differences between the self that thinks and the self that feels. But by this sort of schematism (from Greek skhēmatismos ‘assumption of a certain form') does one not risk distorting the nature of experience as a single lived reality? This is a serious problem, to which we shall have to come back. Can feeling be properly considered as a function of the self? Or is it not rather the case that every function presupposes feeling as anterior (nearer the front) to it and other than it?

This mass of difficulties is bound to make us reflect, and to force us to call in question the whole notion of ‘a state of consciousness’. But we must get a clear grasp of the meaning of this problem.

The notion of a state, taken in its most general sense, is one that we cannot do without when we are thinking of bodies submitted to all sorts of modifications that appertain to their physical nature. I am not at this moment seeking to raise the difficult metaphysical problem of just what the relations between a body, considered in itself, and its modifications are, or more exactly whether the phrase ‘considered in itself' can in such an instance have a precise meaning. That question, for the moment, is not relevant. What is beyond doubt is that we cannot afford to dispense with the idea of a state, if we want to describe the modifications suffered by any body whatsoever under the influence of external agencies. But then, when we speak of states of consciousness, is it not the case that, without being aware of it, we are treating consciousness as a sort of bodiless body, which is capable of suffering an analogous series of modifications? Let us understand each other; in so far as I am myself a body—later, we shall have to consider at length the implications of this equivocal assertion—it is all too clear that I pass through an infinity of successive states. In so far as I am a body: but not at all in so far as I am a consciousness. For, in a word, whatever the ultimate nature of consciousness may be, it obviously cannot be considered as a body, even a bodiless one. On this point, Descartes was right and with him all the forms of idealism that are derived from his thinking. Consciousness is essentially something that is the contrary of a body, of a thing, of whatever thing one likes to imagine, and given that fact it is permissible to think that the expression ‘state of consciousness’ involves a contradiction in terms.

One might be tempted to resolve the contradiction, as Spinoza resolved it, by formulating the following observations: might not one say that what we call a state of consciousness is the state of a body at a given moment in so far as it is represented? Represented, in this technical sense, means something like seen in a mirror. Consciousness, on this theory, would be nothing else than the fashion in which a body looks at itself. But this solution raises innumerable difficulties and insoluble difficulties, too. The most serious of these have to do with the word ‘consciousness’ itself. The word implies something permanent which can only exist ideally, and it does not seem that one can attribute this permanence to body as such. What seems to be proper to a body, by reason of its very mutability (liable to change : the mutable nature of fashion), is to have no self. It is selfless by definition. But that is not all: we must be wary of the tendency that leads us to place ourselves as it were outside consciousness in order to represent it to ourselves (here, as a mirror), for all this can only be an illusory advance, since it is an intrinsic quality of consciousness that it cannot be detached, contemplated, and considered in this way. What we believe we are looking at from the outside is no longer consciousness, and perhaps it is not even anything at all. It is necessary then to reject at this point the conception according to which the so-called states of consciousness would be simply bodily states looking at themselves or becoming objects for themselves. But this refusal entails important consequences; it is not difficult to see, for instance, that it must lead us to reject the theory of psycho-physical parallelism. [physicalism: Belief that all mental properties, states, and events can be wholly explained in terms of physical properties, states, and events. Versions of this position—usually focused on type rather than token identity—predominate in contemporary application of materialist principles to the philosophy of mind.]  I do not think, for that matter, that Bergson's criticism of that theory has ever been refuted.

We are led, then, to this negative but very important conclusion that it is not possible to treat all experience as coming down in the end to a self's experience of its own states. The path that we should follow here is rather that first explored and mapped out by phenomenologists of the school of Husserl. I shall therefore lay it down as a principle, to be accepted in the whole of my subsequent argument, that, before it is anything else, consciousness is above all consciousness of something which is other than itself, what we call self-consciousness being on the contrary a derivative act whose essential nature is, indeed, rather uncertain; for we shall see in the sequel how difficult it is to succeed in getting a direct glimpse of whatever it is that we mean by self. Even at this point, let us notice that I cannot know myself or even make an effort to know myself without passing beyond this given self which I claim to know, and this ‘passing beyond’ appears to be characteristic of consciousness, which is enough in itself to dispose of the idea of consciousness as a mere mirror. Perhaps there are reasons for supposing that epiphenomenalism, that is, the idea of consciousness as a mere surface encrustation on matter, has penetrated today far beyond the bounds of materialism properly so called, and that all modern minds need to make a painful effort if they are to free themselves of this theory. Science and technique in general have, after all, stressed very strongly in our time the idea of a purely objective reality, a reality to which we all tend to attribute, though falsely, an internal coherence.

But from the moment when one has understood that consciousness is consciousness of something other than itself, we can easily overcome the temptation of epiphenomenalism [epiphenomenalism: Belief that consciousness is an incidental side-effect ("epiphenomenon") or by-product of physical or mechanical reality. On this view, although mental events are in some sense real they have no causal efficacy (virtue, usefulness) in the material realm.], and at the same time the objection against which the idea of transcendence was hammering loses all its massive strength. It is necessary also, at this point, to notice how much we must be on our guard against all these metaphors which have been incorporated into the very flesh of language and which consist in assimilating the fact of being conscious to modes of physically gathering or taking. Such verbs as ‘seize’ and ‘grasp’ are very revealing from this point of view. Of course, it is not merely an unlucky chance if, even in an investigation of this sort, we find ourselves making a spontaneous use of them; we can hardly prevent ourselves from practicing this sort of transposition of elusive notions into familiar, palpable terms, but it is important that we should not be deceived by the habit, and that we should be able to recognize within what limits this kind of transposition can be properly and legitimately exercised—limits outside of which it becomes illegitimate and degenerates into something meaningless.

I should be inclined to say in a very general fashion that the closer we get to the topic of intellection (the action or process of understanding, as opposed to imagination) properly so called, the more these metaphors centered on the acts of plucking, taking, or grasping become really useless. One might admit that they are suitable enough for all those acts of the mind which still partake of habit. To form a habit is really to take, or seize, or grasp something, for it is an acquisition; but to discover an intelligible relation, for example some mathematical relation whose eternal validity one suddenly recognizes, that is not in any sense to grasp something; it is to be illuminated, or rather, to have a sudden access to some reality's revelation of itself to us. What we should notice here, however, is the impossibility of making a radical distinction between acquisition and illumination; for if illumination is to be communicated it must inevitably become language, and from the moment it has passed into a sentence it runs, in some degree, the risk of blinding itself and of sharing in the sad destiny of the sentence itself, which in the end will be repeated mechanically, without the person who repeats it any longer recognizing its meaning.  Let us observe, moreover, that this danger is not only one which attends a communication from myself to another person, but that it also attends, if I may be allowed to put it in this way, a communication from me to myself. There is always the risk of the hardened, transmissible expression of the illumination growing over the illumination like a sort of shell and gradually taking its place. This is true at all levels, true wherever anything has been revealed, for instance about a work of art, a landscape, and so on… It is just as if the initial, living experience could survive only on condition of degrading itself to a certain extent, or rather of shutting itself up in its own simulacrum; but this simulacrum, which should only be there on sufferance (absence of objection rather than genuine approval; toleration), as a kind of locum tenens (a person who stands in temporarily for someone else of the same profession, esp. a cleric or doctor), is always threatening to free itself from its proper subordinate position and to claim a kind of independence to which it has no right; and the serious danger to which thought itself is exposed is that of starting off from the simulacrum (an unsatisfactory imitation or substitute), as an existing basis, instead of referring itself perpetually to that invisible and gradually less and less palpable presence, to indicate which (and to recall it to our memories) is the sole justification of the simulacrum's existence. This is a very general observation and it opens out in all sorts of diverse directions.  For the moment, I will illustrate it by a single example which anticipates a good deal that we shall see more clearly later on.

Here is a person of whom we have a detailed knowledge, with whom we have lived, whom we have seen in many different situations. But it may happen that we are asked to say something about him, to answer questions about him, to offer a necessarily simplified opinion of his character; we offer a few adjectives, ready-made, rather than made to measure. This summary, inexact judgment of our friend then, within ourselves, begins to form what I have called a simulacrum. For it may paradoxically happen that this simulacrum obstructs or dims the fundamentally far more concrete idea we have formed of this person, an idea fundamentally incommunicable, an idea which we cannot even communicate in its pure essence to ourselves. And it is quite possible for the simulacrum we have formed of our friend to change our attitude to him, and even our behavior towards him, for the worse. Though it may be, of course, that some circumstance will arise which will enable us to thrust aside this obstacle we have placed in the path of a true human relationship, without realizing we have done so.

There is, unfortunately, all too much reason to think that many a philosophy of the past—before Bergson's time, who in this field was a liberator whose beneficent activities can never be too highly celebrated—has been built up not on experience but on a waste product of experience that had taken experience's name. For a philosopher worthy of the name there is no more important undertaking than that of reinstating experience in the place of such bad substitutes for it.

But, it will be asked, what is the relationship—or is there even a relationship?—between the urgent inner need for transcendence and such a preoccupation? On a first impulse, one would be tempted to answer in the negative: but why? Because one would like to imagine, in accordance with a vicious fashion of philosophizing, that transcendence is fundamentally the direction in which we move away from experience. But the views that have been put forward in the first part of this lecture have prepared us to understand that this is false and that it presupposes an idea of experience which robs experience of its true nature.

Here, it seems to me, is the anatomy of this error. One cannot insist too strongly that what traditional empiricism failed to see was that experience is not, in any sense, something which resembles an impermeable (watertight, waterproof) mass.  I would rather say that experience is receptive to very different degrees of saturation; I employ this expression from chemistry (where one talks, for instance, of a saturated solution, meaning one into which no new substance can be dissolved) with regret, and I shall seek for other expressions, so that our thought may not become fixed on a necessarily inadequate simile.  One might, say, for example, that experience has varying degrees of purity, that in certain cases, for example, it is distilled, and it is now of water that I am thinking. What I ask myself, at this point, is whether the urgent inner need for transcendence might not, in its most fundamental nature, coincide with an aspiration towards a purer and purer mode of experience.  I can quite see, of course, that the two metaphors of which I have made use appear to be contradictory—the metaphors of saturation and purity.  But it is just this kind of opposition, linked to the material world, that tends to disappear at the spiritual level.  We have only, if I may put it so, to dematerialize the initial comparison to see how it can fit in with the second.  Let us think, for instance, not of a heavy body like salt, saturating a solution, but of radiations; one can imagine some liquid at once very pure and very radioactive; and, of course, even the notion of radioactivity is still borrowed from the physical world.  Let us now imagine in an even vaguer fashion whatever sort of thing an intelligible essence might be, and we can easily conceive that the experience most fully charged with these imponderable elements, intelligible essences, might at the same time be the purest. We shall have to bear in mind the connection between plenitude and purity when we attempt to throw light, later on, upon how we ought, and above all upon how we ought not, to conceive an essence.

But even if we cling to the notion of saturation, we should have no difficulty in understanding that two completely opposite kinds of saturation of experience can be imagined. An experience can be saturated with prejudices: but this means that the prejudice which obstructs it at the same time prevents it from being fully an experience.  Often, for instance, when we are traveling in a strange country, it is precisely so; we are unable to free ourselves from a certain number of preconceived ideas which we have brought with us without being distinctly aware of having done so; they are like distorting spectacles (glasses) through which we look at everything that is presented to us. The other type of saturation is the opposite; one might say, to recall an old notion of the Greeks, that the eye must become light in order to comport (conduct) itself properly in the face of light, and that this is not true only of the eye; the intelligence must become at once pure ardor and pure receptivity.  It is necessary to put these two words together, the process I am imagining is a simultaneous one.  If we put the stress exclusively on ardor, we cease to see how the intelligence is able to understand things; it seems that it is no longer properly intelligence, but merely enthusiasm; but if we insist only on receptivity, we are already the dupes of that material image which I have already taken note of; we persuade ourselves falsely that to understand, for the mind, is like, for a vessel, being filled with a certain content.  But the intelligence can never be properly compared to a content, and it is of this that we shall convince ourselves in our next lecture when we attempt to sound the depths of what is to be understood by the notion of truth.

* * * *
  
The Mystery of Being: Reflection and Mystery 1948–1950

Gabriel Marcel

Table of Contents

Chapter I: Introduction
Chapter II: A Broken World
Chapter III: The Need for Transcendence
Chapter IV: Truth as a Value: The Intelligible Background
Chapter V: Primary and Secondary Reflection: The Existential Fulcrum
Chapter VI: Feeling as a Mode of Participation
Chapter VII: Being in a Situation
Chapter VIII: ‘My Life’
Chapter IX: Togetherness: Identity and Depth
Chapter X: Presence as a Mystery

* * * *

Chapter II: A Broken World in The Mystery of Being: Reflection and Mystery 1948–1950 by Gabriel Marcel

From http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcel/ :

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The Mystery of Being: Reflection and Mystery 1948–1950

Gabriel Marcel

Chapter II:  A Broken World

Before pressing further forward, I feel it necessary to go back a little, to consider certain objections that will have undoubtedly occurred to many of my listeners.

I assert that an investigation of the sort in which we are engaged, an investigation of an eminently theoretical kind, can appeal only to minds of a certain sort, to minds that have already a special bias. Is there not something strange and almost shocking in such an assertion? Does it not imply a perversion of the very notion of truth? The ordinary idea of truth, the normal idea of truth, surely involves a universal reference—what is true, that is to say, is true for anybody and everybody.  Are we not risking a great deal in wrenching apart, in this way, the two notions of the true and the universally valid?  Or more exactly, in making this distinction, are we not substituting for the notion of truth some other notion—some value which may have its place in the practical, the moral, or the aesthetic order, but for which truth is not the proper term?

Later in this course of lectures we shall have to look very deeply into the meaning, or meanings, of the word ‘truth’, but we have not yet reached a stage where such an investigation would have practical use.  We must at this stage simply attempt to disentangle, to lay bare the presupposition which is implied in this objection, and to ask ourselves what this presupposition, as a postulate, is really worth.  What the objection implies, in fact, is that we know in advance, and perhaps even know in a quite schematic (of a diagram) fashion, what the relation between the self and the truth it recognizes must be.

In the last two or three centuries, and indeed since much more remote periods, there has been a great deal of critical reflection on the subject of truth.  Nevertheless, there is every reason to suppose that, in our everyday thinking, we remain dominated by an image of truth as something extracted—extracted or smelted out, exactly as a pure metal is extracted from a mixed ore.  It seems obvious to us that there are universally effective smelting processes: or, more fundamentally, that there are established, legitimate ways of arriving at truth; and we have a confused feeling that the man who steps aside from these ways, or even from the idea of these ways, is in danger of losing himself in a sort of no man's land where the difference between truth and error—even between reality and dream—tends to vanish away. It is, however, this very image of truth as something smelted out that we must encounter critically if we want to grasp clearly the gross error on which it rests. What we must above all reject is the idea that we are forced to make a choice between a genuine truth (so to call it) which has been extracted, and a false, a lying truth which has been fabricated.  Both horns of this dilemma, it should be noted, are metaphorically modelled on physical processes; and there is, on the face of it, every reason to suppose that the subtle labour involved in the search for truth cannot ever be properly assimilated to such physical manipulations of physical objects. But truth is not a thing; whatever definition we may in the end be induced to give to the notion of truth, we can affirm even now that truth is not a physical object, that the search for truth is not a physical process, that no generalizations that apply to physical objects and processes can apply also to truth.

Teaching, or rather certain traditional inadequate ways of conceiving the teacher's function, have encouraged the general acceptance of such gross images of truth.  In Dickens's novel, Hard Times, there is a character called Mr. Gradgrind, for whom anybody and everybody can be treated as a vessel capable of containing truths (such as, ‘The horse is a graminivorous (of an animal feeding on grass) quadruped’) extracted from the crude ore of experience, divided, and evenly dealt out.  Mr. Gradgrind is aware, certainly, that one vessel is not so sound as another; some are leaky, some are fragile, and so on… I believe I am not exaggerating when I say that the educational system, even in countries that think of themselves as rather advanced, has still something in common with the coarseness and absurdity of Dickens's satirical picture of it.  The interesting question is, under what conditions does this illusory image of truth as a physical substance, even as the stuff contained in a vessel, present itself naturally to the mind?  It is obvious that the use of fixed forms of words in teaching plays a prominent part in fostering the illusion. A history teacher, for instance, has to din (drill) dates into his pupils. They have to give back just what they have been given, unchanged by any mental process, and they have to memorize the dates in a quite mechanical way.  It is very natural in this case to think of the pupil as a vessel, into which a certain measure of liquid is poured, so that it may be poured out again; an even apter metaphor would be that of the gramophone record.  Such metaphors, however, cease to apply in the case where, having explained some idea to a pupil, I ask him to explain it back to me in his own words and if possible with his own illustrations; the idea certainly may still be thought of as a content, but it is a content that has to be grasped by the intelligence; it cannot be reduced, like the history master's dates, to some exact, particular formula. It is this irreducibility that we must keep a grip on if we want to get beyond the illusory image of truth as a physical object, a substance, the contents of a vessel, a mere thing, and to recognize the impossibility of adequately representing by material images those processes by which I can both conceive a true proposition and affirm it to be true.

But perhaps there is a principle that we can already postulate (hypothesize) (though reserving our right to expatiate (expand) more largely on this important topic at a later stage). The principle is this. On the one hand, everything that can be properly called technique is comparable to a kind of manipulation, if not always necessarily of physical objects, at least of mental elements (mathematical symbols would be an example) comparable in some respects to physical objects; and I suggest on the other hand, that the validity for anybody and everybody, which has been claimed for truth, is certainly deeply implied (though even here, subject to certain provisos (conditions)) in the very notion of technique, as we have conceived that notion here. Subject to certain provisos, I say, since every technical manipulation, even the simplest, implies the possession by the manipulator of certain minimal aptitudes, without which it is not practicable. There is a story, for instance, that I often tell, of how I had to pass an examination in physics which included, as a practical test, an experiment to determine one of the simpler electrical formulae—I forget which now, let us say the laws of electrolysis—and I found myself quite incapable of joining up my wires properly; so no current came through.  All I could do was write on my paper, ‘I cannot join up my wires, so there is no current; if there were a current, it would produce such and such a phenomenon, and I would deduce…’ My own clumsiness appeared to me, and it must have appeared to the examiner, as a purely contingent fact. It remains true in principle that anybody and everybody can join up the wires, enable the current to pass through, and so on.

Conversely, we must say that the further the intelligence passes beyond the limits of a purely technical activity, the less the reference to the ‘no matter whom’, the ‘anybody at all’, is applicable; and that in the extreme case there will be no sense at all in saying that such and such a task of lofty reflection could have been carried out by anybody whatsoever.  One might even say, as I indicated in my first chapter, that the philosopher's task involves not only unusual mental aptitudes but an unusual sense of inner urgent need; and as I have already suggested, towards the end of that chapter, we shall have to face the fact that in such a world as we live in urgent inner needs of this type are almost systematically misunderstood, are even deliberately discredited. Our world today really gathers itself together against these needs, it tugs in the other direction like, as it were, a sort of counterweight; it does so, also, to the very extent to which technical processes have emancipated themselves today from the ends to which they ought normally to remain subordinate, and have staked a claim to an autonomous reality, or an autonomous value.

‘Don't you feel sometimes that we are living… if you can call it living… in a broken world?  Yes, broken like a broken watch. The mainspring has stopped working. Just to look at it, nothing has changed. Everything is in place. But put the watch to your ear, and you don't hear any ticking. You know what I'm talking about, the world, what we call the world, the world of human creatures… it seems to me it must have had a heart at one time, but today you would say the heart had stopped beating’.

That is a speech by the heroine of one of my plays, and from time to time I shall be quoting from my own plays in this way.  For it is in these imaginative works of mine that my thought is to be found in its virgin state, in, as it were, its first gushings from the source. I shall try later on to explain why this is so and how the drama, as a mode of expression, has forced itself upon me, and become intimately linked with my properly philosophical work. The young woman who makes this speech is not intended to rank among what we usually call intellectuals. She is a fashionable lady, smart, witty, flattered by her friends, but the busy, rushing life that she seems so much at home in obviously masks an inner grief, an anguish, and it is that anguish which breaks through to the surface in the speech I have just quoted.

A broken world? Can we really endorse these words? And are we being the dupes of a myth when we imagine that there was a time when the world had a heart?  We must be careful here. Certainly, it would be rash to attempt to put one's finger on some epoch in history when the unity of the world was something directly felt by men in general. But could we feel the division of the world today, or could some of us at least feel it so strongly, if we had not within us, I will not say the memory of such a united world, but at least the nostalgia of it. What is even more important is to grasp the fact that this feeling of a world divided grows stronger and stronger at a time when the surface unification of the world (I mean of the earth, of this planet) appears to be proceeding apace. Some people make a great deal of this unification; they think they see in it something like the quickening in the womb of a higher conscience, they would say a planetary conscience. Much later in these lectures we shall have to face that possibility, and finally to make a judgment on the real worth of such hopes.  But for the moment we have only to ask ourselves about the particular, personal anguish felt today by people like Christiane in my Le Monde Cassé. What is the substance of that anguish? And, in the first place, have we any grounds for attributing a general relevance to such personal experience?

There is one preliminary point that must occur to all of us; we live today in a world at war with itself, and this state of world-war is being pushed so far that it runs the risk of ending in something that could properly be described as world-suicide. This is something one cannot be over-emphatic about. Suicide, until our own times, was an individual possibility, it seemed to apply only to the individual case. It seems now to apply to the case of the whole human world. Of course, one may be tempted to say that this new possibility is only part of the price we pay for the amazing progress of our times. The world today is, in a sense, at once whole and single in a way which, even quite recently, it was not. It is from this very unity and totality that it draws its sinister new power of self-destruction. The connection between the new unity and the new power is something we ought to concentrate on very carefully.  Let us postpone, for the time being, a consideration of the conditions that make world-suicide possible and their significance; we are still forced to recognize that the existence of the new power implies something vicious in the new unity.  It is not enough, I think, to say that the new unity is still mixed with diversity, or at least ‘mixed’ is a weak and inadequate word for what we mean. Mixture is in itself a certain mode of unity, but we must recognize that it is a mode which in a certain sense betrays the very need that has called it into existence.  And this suffices to show, as we shall see by and by much more clearly, that unity is a profoundly ambiguous idea, and that it is certainly not correct to take the scholastic line and to regard unity and goodness as purely and simply convertible terms. There is every reason to suppose that the kind of unity which makes the self-destruction of our world possible (and by possible, I mean perfectly conceivable) cannot be other than bad in itself, and it is easy to perceive where the badness lies. It is linked to the existence of a will to power which occurs under aspects that cannot be reconciled with each other, and which assume opposite ideological characters.  On this topic, I cannot do better than recommend to you Raymond Aron's book, The Great Schism. [1]   But it is clear also that from a strictly philosophical point of view we must ask certain questions which fall outside the field of the political writer as such.

From the philosophical point of view, the fundamental question is whether it is a mere contingent fact that the will to power always presents this character of discordance (disagreeing), or whether there is a necessary connection between this discordance and the essential notion of the will to power itself.  It should also be our business, indeed, not to content ourselves with a mere analysis of the notion of the will to power, comparing that with the notion of discordance, but to reflect in the light of history, whose lessons, in this instance, have a strict coherence, on the inevitable destiny of alliances, which, when they are instituted for purposes of conquest, are inevitably fated to dissolve and to transform themselves into enmities (hostilities). It is, alas, true that one can imagine the possibility of a single conqueror's gaining possession, today, of the technical equipment that would render both rebellion and opposition futile; and, in principle at least, it seems that a government based on slavery and terror might last for an indefinite period. But it is all too clear that such a government would be only another form of the state of war, and indeed perhaps the most odious form of that state that we can imagine. Besides, if one refuses to let oneself be deceived by mere fictitious abstractions, one soon sees that the victor, far from himself being an indissoluble unity, is always in fact a certain group of men in the midst of whom there must always arise the same sort of rupture which, as we have seen, always menaces alliances; so that at the end of the day, it is still to war, and to war in a more obvious form than that of a perpetual despotism, that the triumphant will to power is likely to lead. It could only be otherwise—and yet this is a real possibility, and should not be passed over in silence—in a mechanized world, a world deprived of passion, a world in which the slave ceased to feel himself a slave, and perhaps even ceased to feel anything, and where the masters themselves became perfectly apathetic: I mean, where they no longer felt the greed and the ambition which are today the mainsprings of every conquest, whatever it may be. It is very important to notice that this hypothesis is by no means entirely a fantastic one; it is, at bottom, the hypothesis of those who imagine human society as transformed into a sort of ant-hill.  I would even be tempted to say that the possibility of such a society is implicit in, and that its coming into existence would be a logical development of, certain given factors in our own society. There are sectors of human life in the present world where the process of automatization applies not only, for instance, to certain definite techniques, but to what one would have formerly called the inner life, a life which today, on the contrary, is becoming as outer as possible. Only, it must be noticed that in a world of this sort (supposing, which is not proved, that it would really come into existence) it would no longer be proper to speak of the will to power; or rather that expression would tend to lose its precise psychological significance and would in the end stand merely, as in Nietzsche, for some indistinct metaphysical something.  Our thinking tends to get lost, in fact, at this point, in the more or less fictitious notion of a Nature considered as the expression of pure Energy.  I will quote, on this topic, a very characteristic passage from Nietzsche's great work, The Will to Power—a great work which is, in fact, nothing more than a heap of fragments (fragment suggests that breakage has occurred).

‘And’, says Nietzsche, do you know what the world is for me?  Would you like me to show you it in my mirror? This world, a monster of energy, without beginning or end: a fixed sum of energy, hard as bronze, which is never either augmented or diminished, which does not use itself up but merely changes its shape; as a whole it has always the same invariable bulk, it is an exchequer (Exchequer from the checkered tablecloth on which accounts were kept by means of counters) in which there are no expenses and no losses, but similarly no gains through interest or new deposits; shut up in the nothingness that acts as its limit, with nothing vaguely floating, with nothing squandered, it has no quality of infinite extension, but is gripped like a definite quantum of energy in a limited space, a space that has no room for voids. An energy present everywhere, one and multiple like the play of forces and waves of force within a kinetic field that gather at one point if they slacken at another; a sea of energies in stormy perpetual flux, eternally in motion, with gigantic years of regular return, an ebb and a flowing in again of all its forces, going from the more simple to the more complex, from the more calm, the more fixed, the more frigid, to the more ardent, the more violent, the more contradictory, but only to return in due course from multiplicity to simplicity, from the play of contrasts to the assuagement (make an unpleasant feeling less intense) of harmony, perpetually affirming its essence in the regularity of cycles and of years, and glorying in the sanctity of its eternal return as a becoming which knows neither satiety, nor lassitude, nor disgust… Do you want a name for this universe, an answer to all these urgent riddles, a light even for yourselves, you of the fellest (full of) darkness, you the most secret, the strongest, the most intrepid (fearless) of all human spirits? This world is the world of the Will to Power and no other, and you yourselves, you are also the Will to Power, and nothing else.’

To whom is Nietzsche addressing himself here, if not to the Masters whose advent he is announcing? Certainly, these masters, as he conceived them, are far from resembling the dictators we have known, or know still. The case really is, as Gustave Thibon has shown beautifully in the fine book on Nietzsche he brought out a few months ago, that a confusion tended to arise in Nietzsche's thinking between two categories which cannot really be reduced to each other. [2]   Let us put it this way, that he was hypnotized by a role, a purely lyrical role, which he wished however to assume as his own role in real life, but with which he was incapable of effectively identifying his actual self. This purely personal yearning was enough to vitiate (spoil or impair the quality of) his philosophy of history; nevertheless there is something, in the sort of glimpse of an imaginary cosmos which I have just quoted, that does retain its worth and its weight.  Otherwise, I would not have quoted that page. It does remain true that, in the ‘broken world’ we live in, it is difficult indeed for the mind to withdraw itself from the dizzying edge of these gulfs; there is a fascination in that absolute dynamism. One would be tempted to call Nietzsche's picture of the world ‘self-contained’, in the sense that his ‘monster of energy’ does not refer outwards to anything else that sustains or dominates it; except that for Nietzsche this ‘self-contained’ world is essentially a mode of escape from the real self, in its pure ungraspability. Let us note also in passing that if our world really were such a world as Nietzsche here has described it to be, one has no notion at all of how it could give birth to the thinker, or the thought, which would conceive it as a whole and delineate its characteristics.  It always seems to happen so; when a ‘realistic’ attitude of this sort is pushed to the very limit with brutal, unbridled logic, the ‘idealistic’ impulse rises to the surface again and reduces the whole structure to dust.  But let us notice that, at the level of dialectics (inquiry into metaphysical contradictions and their solutions), it is this very process which makes manifest the disruption of the world. The world of the Will to Power, as Nietzsche describes it—and it would be easy to show that this world today provides the obscure and still indistinct background of everything in contemporary thought that rejects God and particularly the God of Christianity—that world cannot be reconciled with the fundamental direction of the will that underlies every investigation bearing upon what is intelligible and what is true.  Or rather, when, like Nietzsche, one does attempt to reconcile the intention of the philosopher and that picture of the world, one can only succeed in doing so by a systematic discrediting and devaluation of intelligibility and truth as such; but in discrediting these, one is undermining oneself, for, after all, every philosophy, in so far as it can be properly called a philosophy at all, must claim to be true.

These general remarks may help us to see in what sense the world we live in today really is a broken world.  Yet they are not enough to enable us to recognize and acknowledge how deep and how wide the break really goes. The truth of the matter is that, by a strange paradox and one which will not cease to exercise us during the course of these lectures, in the more and more collectivized (organize something on the basis of ownership by the people or the state, abolishing private ownership or involvement) world that we are now living in, the idea of any real community becomes more and more inconceivable. Gustave Thibon, to whom I referred just now in connection with Nietzsche, had very good grounds indeed for saying that the two processes of atomization (reduce something to atoms) and collectivization, far from excluding each other as a superficial logic might be led to suppose, go hand in hand, and are two essentially inseparable aspects of the same process of devitalization (deprive of strength and vigor).

To put it in quite general terms, and in simpler language than Thibon's, I would say that we are living in a world in which the preposition ‘with’—and I might also mention Whitehead's noun, ‘togetherness’—seems more and more to be losing its meaning; one might put the same idea in another way by saying that the very idea of a close human relationship (the intimate relationship of large families, of old friends, of old neighbours, for instance) is becoming increasingly hard to put into practice, and is even being rather disparaged (regard or represent as being of little worth).  And no doubt it is what lies behind this disparagement that we ought to bring out.  Here I come to one of the central themes of these lectures; but I shall confine myself, for the moment, to treating the matter merely in terms of a superficial description of the known facts.

It is, or so it seems to me, by starting from the fact of the growingly complex and unified social organization of human life today, that one can see most clearly what lies behind the loss, for individuals, of life's old intimate quality.  In what does this growingly complex organization—this socialization of life, as we may call it—really consist?  Primarily, in the fact that each one of us is being treated today more and more as an agent, whose behaviour ought to contribute towards the progress of a certain social whole, a something rather distant, rather oppressive, let us even frankly say rather tyrannical. This presupposes a registration, an enrolment, not once and for all, like that of the new-born child in the registrar's office, but again and again, repeatedly, while life lasts. In countries like ours, where totalitarianism so far is merely a threat, there are many gaps in this continuous enrolment; but there is nothing more easy than to imagine it as coextensive (extending over the same space or time) with the whole span of the individual life. That is what happens in states governed by a police dictatorship; in passing, I should like to make the point that a police dictatorship is (for many reasons, there is not time to go into them now) merely the extreme limit towards which a bureaucracy that has attained a certain degree of power inevitably tends. But the essential point to grasp now, is that in the end I am in some danger of confusing myself, my real personality, with the State's official record of my activities; and we ought to be really frightened of what is implied in such an identification. This is all exemplified in a book called The Twenty-Fifth Hour by a young Rumanian called C. Virgil Gheorgiu. In this extraordinary novel, we see a young man who has been falsely denounced to the Germans by his father-in-law and is sent to a deportation camp as being a Jew; he has no means of proving that he is not a Jew. He is labelled as such. Later on, in another camp in Germany he attracts the attention of a prominent Nazi leader, who discovers in him the pure Aryan type; he is taken out of the camp and has to join the S.S.  He is now docketed as ‘Pure Aryan, member of the S.S’.  He contrives to escape from this other sort of camp with a few French prisoners and joins the Americans; he is at first hailed as a friend, and stuffed with rich food; but a few days later he is put into prison; according to his passport, he is a Rumanian subject.  Rumanians are enemies; ergo… Not the least account is taken of what the young man himself thinks and feels. This is all simply and fundamentally discounted.  At the end of the book, he has managed to get back to his wife, who has meanwhile been raped by the Russians; there is a child, not his, of course; still, the family hope to enjoy a happy reunion. Then the curtain rises for the Third World War, and husband, wife, and child are all put into a camp again by the Americans, as belonging to a nation beyond the Iron Curtain. But the small family group appeals to American sentimentality, and a photograph is taken. ‘Keep smiling’, in fact, are the last words of this interesting novel, [3]  which summarizes graphically almost everything I have tried to explain in this lecture. [4]

The point, here, is not only to recognize that the human, all too human, powers that make up my life no longer sustain any practical distinction between myself and the abstract individual all of whose ‘particulars’ can be contained on the few sheets of an official dossier, but that this strange reduction of a personality to an official identity must have an inevitable repercussion on the way I am forced to grasp myself; what is going to become of this inner life, on which we have been concentrating so much of our attention? What does a creature who is thus pushed about from pillar to post, ticketed, docketed, labelled, become, for himself and in himself? One might almost speak, in this connection, of a social nudity, a social stripping, and one might ask oneself what sort of shame this exposure is likely to excite among those who see themselves condemned to undergo it?

To be honest, it does not seem to me that there is any real deep analogy between this social nakedness and actual physical nakedness, with the sense of slight shame which normally accompanies such nakedness in man—a sense of shame on which the Russian thinker, Soloviev, has some deep and original observations. On the other hand, it is, I think, highly significant to compare the state of a man in his social nakedness—stripped, by society, of all his protections—to that in which a man finds himself who believes himself exposed to the observation of an omnipresent and omniscient God. This comparison is all the more necessary and important because the Moloch (a Canaanite idol to whom children were sacrificed) State of totalitarian countries does tend to confer on itself a sort of burlesque analogue of the Divine prerogatives.  Only the essential is lacking (that is to say, the State is not in fact God, or a God), and this fundamental lack lies at the basis of the evils from which any society must suffer that seeks to enchain itself by submitting to the yoke of the Moloch State. The common factor in the two types of nakedness—nakedness under the eyes of the State, nakedness under the eyes of God—is, most assuredly, fear. But in the presence of a real God, I mean a God who is not reduced to the status of a mere savage idol, this fear has a note of reverence, it is linked to our feeling for the sacred, and the sacred only is such in and through our adoration of it.  In the case of nakedness under the eyes of the State, it is clear, on the other hand, that an adoration, worthy properly to be called adoration, is impossible, unless it attaches itself to the person of a Leader; it is then pure fanaticism, and it is enough to recall the hysterical cult of which Hitler was the object to understand what fanaticism means, and what great gulfs of temptation are masked by that word.  But between the Moloch State and such figures as Hitler the relationships that can be established are uncertain, unstable, threatening either to the Leader or the State—if only because of the envy and hate that Leaders must arouse in others who either would covet their position for themselves or at any rate could not think of somebody other than themselves enjoying it without impatience and rage. It is all too clear that the state of universal continuous registration and enrolment, from birth to death, to which I have already alluded, can only be brought into being in the bosom of an anonymous bureaucracy; now, such a bureaucracy cannot hope to inspire any other sentiment than a vague fear—the same feeling that takes possession of me personally every time I have to deal in a government office with some impersonal official who identifies himself with his job. One cannot avoid, at this point, bringing in the familiar metaphor of the administrative machine: but it is important to notice that the workings of this machine are not something I can contemplate, its presence is simply something I feel: if I could contemplate its workings, I might be forced to feel a certain reluctant admiration for it—as it is, as a person who is being governed, who is being taxed, for instance, my sentiments when the machine has been in contact with me must be purely negative. To make them positive I would need a chance to get to the other side of the counter and become myself one of those privileged beings who contain a morsel of this mysterious power. Thus it is quite natural that, in countries where a bureaucratic system prevails, there should be a tendency towards the general bureaucratization of life; that is to say, really, towards the abandonment of concrete and creative activities in favour of abstract, depersonalized, uncreative tasks and even—one could illustrate this point easily—an active opposition to all kinds of creativity.

Let us take it, though it is by no means certain, that in such a bureaucratized world a certain social equality would prevail. It would be an equality obtained by levelling down, down to the very level where the creative impulse fails. But this kind of equality—and perhaps every kind of equality—is (though in my own country the opposite has for long been thought to be the case) in the last analysis rigorously incompatible with any sort of fraternity; it appeals to a different need, at a different level of human nature. One could prove this point in various ways. In particular, it is easy to see that the very idea of fraternity implies the idea of a father, and is not really separable, indeed, from the idea of a transcendent Being who has created me but has also created you. It is exactly at this point that we see the yawning central gap, which I mentioned earlier, in the claims of the Moloch State to be treated as a sort of God.  One can see clearly enough that the State can in no case be treated as a creator or a father. Yet almost unconsciously here I have stumbled on an ambiguity. There are different levels at which men understand the word God. It is true that the State in our time, even in countries where it has not reached the totalitarian phase, has become more and more the engrosser and dispenser of all sorts of favours, which must be snatched from it by whatever means are available, including even blackmail. In this respect the State is properly comparable to a God, but to the God of degraded cults on whom the sorcerer claims to exercise his magic powers.

From the moment, however, when the ties of fraternity are snapped—and there is nothing that can take their place except a Nietzschean ‘resentment’ or, at the very best, some working social agreement strictly subordinated to definite materialistic purposes, as in the social theories, say, of the early English utilitarians—the state of social atomization, of which I spoke earlier, inevitably tends to appear.  All this, of course, cannot be taken literally as the expression of a state of affairs which has been, by now, established for once and for all.  In different countries, this state of affairs is established to different degrees, and even sometimes in different parts of the same country; and in any case, wherever there are men, there are certain vital persisting elements. Using the histological (the study of the microscopic structure of tissues)simile (e.g., as brave as a lion, crazy like a fox) which always seems to crop up in this sort of discussion, I would say that there are some kinds of tissue that have a good resistance to this contagion, or rather to this malignant growth.  But the main point is to see that here we have what is really the general prevailing tendency today in most countries that we usually think of as civilized. I am not talking merely about the states, for instance, that follow in the path of Soviet Communism. We can show, and in fact it has already been shown (I am thinking particularly of the remarkable books by Arnaud Dandieu and Robert Aron [5])  that large-scale capitalism exposes the countries in which it is a controlling factor to similar risks.  In any case, it is not the usual antithesis between the Communists and the enemies of the Communists that is our point here; no doubt I shall come back to this at the end of these lectures, when I shall try to make clear the conclusions towards which this investigation has led us.

‘But’, you may feel inclined to say to me at this point, ‘we do not see exactly in what sense our world can be called a broken world, since you yourself admit that it is on the way to being unified, though you have added that the unification is probably the pleasing stamp on a coin that rings false.’  The answer, it seems to me, is that—even given a degree of atomization of which we have as yet no direct experience, and which can only be conceived entirely in the abstract—it seems impossible that man should reduce himself to that mere expression of an official dossier (case history), that passive enrolled (officially registered) agent, with which some seek to confuse his essential nature.

Let us notice this fact: even if, as is certainly the case, there should be a tendency for a sinister alliance to be concluded between the masters of scientific technique and the men who are working for complete state-control, the real conditions under which a human creature appears in the world and develops there remain, in spite of everything, out of reach of this strange coalition—even though certain experiments which are now being carried out in laboratories give us reason to fear that this relative immunity may not be of long duration. But what we can affirm with absolute certainty is that there is within the human creature as we know him something that protests against the sort of rape or violation of which he is the victim; and this torn, protesting state of the human creature is enough to justify us in asserting that the world in which we live is a broken world. That is not all. Our world is more and more given over to the power of words, and of words that have been in a great measure emptied of their authentic content.  Such words as liberty, person, democracy, are being more and more lavishly used, and are becoming slogans, in a world in which they are tending more and more to lose their authentic significance.  It is even hard to resist the impression that just because the realities for which these words stand are dwindling away, the words themselves are suffering an inflation, which is just like the inflation of money when goods are scarce. It may be, indeed, that between the development of tokens of meaning, and that of tokens of purchasing power, there is some obscure connection, easier to feel in a general and indistinct way than to work out in detail. But certainly that break in the world which I have been trying, all through this lecture, to make you feel, is broad and gaping here. The depreciation, today, both of words and of currency corresponds to a general failure of trust, of confidence, of (both in the banker's sense of the word and in the strongest general sense) credit.

There is, however, one more question which we must examine, and which might be put from a strictly religious point of view. If anybody accepts the dogma of the Fall, is there not implicit in that acceptance an admission that the world is, in fact, broken? In other words, is it not the case that the world is essentially broken… not merely historically broken, as we have seemed to be saying, basing ourselves, as we have done, on a certain number of facts about the contemporary world? Does not our talk about a broken world imply that there have been periods when the world was intact, though this implication contradicts both the teachings of the Church and all the showings of history?

For my own part, I would certainly answer, without any hesitation, that this break in the world cannot be considered as something that has come about in recent years, or even during recent centuries, in a world originally unbroken. To say so would not only be contrary, I repeat, to all historical likelihood but even metaphysically (transcending physical matter or the laws of nature : Good and Evil are inextricably linked in a metaphysical battle across space and time) indefensible.  For we should be forced in that case to admit that some incomprehensible external action or other has been brought to bear on the world; but it is all too clear that the world itself must have already contained the possibility of being broken. But what we can say, without contradicting either the recorded facts of history or the more obvious principles of metaphysics, is that in our time the broken state of the world has become a much more obvious thing than it would have been for, say, a seventeenth-century philosopher. In general, such a philosopher would have recognized that broken state only on a theological plane; a man like Pascal, who came to such a recognition through a long process of psychological and moral analysis, anticipating the thought of a much later day, was an exception. In the eighteenth century, the optimism which was common among non-Christian philosophers suffices to show that this feeling of living in a broken world was not, on the whole, widely diffused; even those who, like Rousseau, insisted that the time was out of joint, felt that a certain combination of rationality and sensibility might set them right. It is clear enough that this belief in the possibility of benevolently readjusting human affairs persisted throughout the nineteenth century among various schools of rationalists, and that it has not entirely disappeared even today.  Marxism itself might be considered, in its beginnings, as an optimistic philosophy, though today the general darkening of the historical horizon makes that element of optimism in it less and less perceptible. Besides, it is becoming more and more clear that there is nothing in Marxism that would serve to dissipate that deep sense of inner disquiet that lies at the very roots of metaphysics. At the most, the Marxist can hope to numb that, as one numbs a pain. There is nothing easier than to imagine an analgesic technique for this purpose; metaphysical uneasiness would be considered as a psychosomatic malady and would be treated according to the appropriate medical rules. Thus, for Marxists in general, the problem of death as such must no longer be faced, or rather they consider that the problem will cease to have its present agonizing character for an individual who is fully integrated with his community. But integration conceived after this fashion runs the risk, as we shall see later on when we discuss the nature of liberty, of reducing itself to mere automatization.

Why, it may be well asked at this point, have we lingered so long, in this lecture, over topics which at a first glance seem quite foreign to the proper themes of a metaphysical investigation? Simply because it was necessary to describe those conditions, in our life today, which are the conditions most unpropitious (unfavorable) to such an investigation; so unpropitious, indeed, that in countries where these conditions are fully operative, metaphysical thinking loses its meaning and even ceases to be a practicable possibility.  Perhaps it may not be wholly useless to enlarge a little on this point.

The world which I have just been sketching for you, and which is tending to become the world we live in, which is already indeed the world we live in, in so far as that world is exposed to the possibility of self-destruction, rests wholly on an immense refusal, into whose nature we shall have to search much more deeply, but which seems to be above all the refusal to reflect and at the same time the refusal to imagine—for there is a much closer connection between reflecting and imagining than is usually admitted. If the unimaginable evils which a new world war would bring upon us were genuinely imagined, to any extent at all, that new world war would become impossible. But do not let us be led into supposing that this failure to reflect and to imagine is merely the fault of a comparatively few individuals in positions of power and responsibility; these few individuals are nothing at all without the millions of others who place a blind trust in them. But this failure to reflect and imagine is bound up, also, with a radical incapacity to draw conclusions from the sort of thing that has been happening for at least fifty years. Was it not already incredible, in 1939, that men should be found ready to launch another war when the ruins piled up by the previous war had not yet been wholly rebuilt, and when events themselves had demonstrated in the most peremptory (irreversible) fashion that war does not pay? Possibly somebody may feel that such remarks smack of journalism and are hardly worthy of a qualified philosopher.  But I fear that any such criticism would merely be an expression of a gravely erroneous conception of philosophy, a conception which for too long has weighed heavily on philosophy itself, and has helped to strike it with barrenness; this erroneous conception consists in imagining that the philosopher as such ought not to concern himself with passing events, that his job on the contrary is to give laws in a timeless realm, and to consider contemporary occurrences with the same indifference with which a stroller through a wood considers the bustlings of an ant-hill.  One might be tempted, indeed, to suppose that both Hegelianism and Marxism have considerably modified this traditional way of looking at philosophy; but that is true only up to a certain point, at least in the case of present-day representatives of these doctrines.  An orthodox Marxist accepts without any real criticism the daring extrapolation by which Marx treated as quite universal those conditions which had been revealed to him by an analysis of the social situation of his own time in those countries which had just been transformed by the Industrial Revolution. Let us add that the Marxist sets out to criticize existing societies using as his yardstick the indeterminate (vague, unclear) and psychologically empty idea of a classless society. In this respect, it would be no exaggeration to say that the Marxist places himself in the worst sort of timeless realm, an historical timeless realm, and that it is his stance on this non-existent point of vantage that enables him to decide so confidently whether such and such an event, or such and such an institution, is or is not in keeping with ‘the meaning of history’.  I, for my part, think on the contrary that a philosophy worthy of the name ought to attach itself to a given concrete situation in order to grasp what that situation implies; and I think it should not fail to acknowledge the almost inconceivable multiplicity of combinations of events that may arise from the factors it has laid bare by its analysis.

In a very general way, one may say that the refusal to reflect (think about, give thought to, contemplate), which lies at the root of a great many contemporary evils, is linked to the grip which desire and especially fear have on men.  On this topic, of the baleful (destructive) effect of the passions if the reasonable will does not control them, it is all too sadly clear that the great intellectualist doctrines of philosophy (those, above all, of Spinoza) are being grimly borne out. To desire and fear we ought, certainly, to add vanity, above all the vanity of specialists, of those who set themselves up as experts. This is true, for instance, in the educational world; in France to my own knowledge, but not only in France. I have often said that if one were rash enough to ask what will remain, under any form at all, in the minds of children, of all that has been painfully taught them, what will be the final positive result of the effort that is demanded from them, the whole system would fall to bits, for it is absolutely certain that as regards most of the subjects taught this final positive result will be precisely nothing. Those who are responsible for our educational programmes have not the elementary shrewdness of the industrialist who, before undertaking a new enterprise, ascertains what will be the initial outlay, what are the probable yearly profits, and whether the proportion between these two figures makes the whole thing worth his while. One is careful not to ask such a question of educational experts; would one not be insulting a noble profession? Yet fine words butter no parsnips. They are simply taking advantage of the fact that in teaching the outlay is less visible, less easily definable than in the case of an industrial enterprise; hence a waste of time and strength whose remoter consequences are beyond all calculation.

We shall be starting off, in the lectures that are to follow, from the double observation that nothing is more necessary than that one should reflect; but that on the other hand reflection is not a task like other tasks; in reality it is not a task at all, since it is reflection that enables us to set about any task whatsoever, in an orderly fashion.  We should be quite clear about the very nature of reflection; or, to express myself in more exact terms, it is necessary that reflection, by its own efforts, should make itself transparent to itself. It may be, nevertheless, that this process of reflective self-clarification cannot be pushed to the last extreme; it may be, as we shall see, that reflection, interrogating itself about its own essential nature, will be led to acknowledge that it inevitably bases itself on something that is not itself, something from which it has to draw its strength.  And, as I said above, it may be that an intuition, given in advance, of supra-reflective unity is at the root of the criticism reflection is able to exert upon itself.

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The Gifford Lectures Authors Page, maintained by The Gifford Lectures, University of Glasgow.

Gabriel Marcel

1889 - 1973

Writer and Philosopher

Here is the Summary of The Mystery of Being 1948–1950 by Gabriel Marcel

Gabriel Marcel delivered two series of ten lectures on the ‘mystery of being’, comprised of ordered reflections on nature and the goal of philosophy from an existentialist standpoint. In the first volume, Reflection and Mystery, he explains that rather than proceeding by expounding a system, his philosophy proceeds in a fashion more akin to a journey. First, he examines the need for philosophy as arising from a certain exigence or disquiet in the seeker, through lived situations, expectations and truth. The lectures go on to explore the distinction between truth and universal validity alongside the relation of a sense of the ego to feeling and to situations in what he describes as our broken world. Volume I concludes with a discussion of the quality of mystery, which not only prompts philosophical enquiry but also coincides with the depths it reaches. Volume II takes the significance of mystery as its starting point, and Faith and Reality as its title. In the first four lectures, Marcel presents an existentialist response to metaphysics, outlining his understanding of existence and being and the value and purpose of ontology.  He then distinguishes opinion and faith, characterising faith as ‘believing in’ rather than ‘believing that’. This leads neatly to his existentialist interpretation of Christian themes such as prayer and humility, freedom and grace, and then testimony, death and hope. He concludes by showing the boundaries of philosophy as he sees it, past which the ‘fires of revelation’ can take over.

Sam Addison

University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK

Chapter 3 Old and an excerpt from Chapter 2 The Last Time from the book The Force of Character by James Hillman

From the book "The force of character: and the lasting life".  Copyright © 1999 by James Hillman. Published by Random House, Inc., New York, NY.  website: www.atrandom.com

Part I:  Lasting

Chapter 3  Old

. . . what terrifying teachers we are for that part of creation which loves its eternally childish state.  (Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 11:14)

I want now to study the idea of "old" all on its own, independent of aging.  'Distinction between Aging and Old' should be printed in bold letters---as would have been the case in the old and ageless books of other centuries---for the difference is as important as the one between aging and death, discussed in the first preface.  When we muddle these three terms, we miss the importance of each.  For "old" is a category unto itself, not necessarily implying either the process of aging or the approach of death.

When we begin to inquire into old---old cut free from the downward drag of aging and the fearsome bogey of death---we find right off that what we value most about things called old is precisely their deathless and ageless character.  Old masters' paintings, old manuscripts, old gardens, old walls do not bring to mind dying but everlastingness.  Paleontology, archaeology, geology---studies of the old.  We visit Old Towns, preserve old sites, collect old silver, glass, cars, instruments, toys.  These old things and places seem more potent guarantors of a tomorrow than do the young bodies of marines and adolescent girls---who, for all their hope and bloom, seem more susceptible to fast fading and death than the bent old woman marching to her bus stop and the veterans wheeling around the hospital.

Old is a visible condition, independent of years.  There are old children with old eyes, whose oldness displays their distinctive character, not that they are near to dying; old souls, who seem to be waiting for time to catch up so they can finally come into their own.  Estranged in childhood, distressed in youth, they have been old from the beginning.  In fact, "old" and "soul" cannot do without each other.  There are old words so packed with connotations that they grow more significant instead of aging into obsolescence.  (connotation: noun  an idea or feeling that a word invokes person in addition to its literal or primary meaning)  There are old texts, like those of Homer and Ovid, Heraclitus and Sophocles, that require new translations every generation: The translations age, but never the texts.

What about the old things you live with?  Are they aging, dying?  The old chair the cat prefers; the old fork your hand enjoys holding for your evening prunes.  "I love this knife; I couldn't do without it."  We say "love" more often about things---tools, shoes, hats---than about persons.  Old is one of the deepest sources of pleasure humans know.  Part of the misery of disasters like floods and fires is the irrecoverable loss of the old, just as one of the causes of suburban subdivision depression---and aging and death---is the similar loss of the old, exchanged for a brand-new house and yard.  Old things afford a supporting vitality; without them, we find it harder to be alive.  Moved from the old place to the new, deprived of their old things, old people more easily let go.  What is old has slowed their aging and postponed their death.  We need the old pleasure-giving things, which reciprocate our love with their handiness and undemanding compatibility.

"Old" is itself a very old word, supposedly deriving from an Indo-European root that means "to nourish."  Tracing the word into Gothic, Old Norse, and Old English, we find that something "old" is fully nourished, grown up, matured.  Today, when we inquire into someone's age, even if that someone is a small child, we ask, "How old is she?" and are told, "She is four years old."  At whatever age we are we identify ourselves with a specific quantity of oldness, having and being,"old."

Old English manuscripts love 'eald' (old); it is one of the fifty most frequently appearing words in the medieval corpus of legal, medical, religious, and literary texts and occasional scribbles.  And it mainly carries a positive meaning.  Of forty-nine compound words that incorporate 'eald,' only eight are clearly negative, like "old devil."  To include 'eald' in a compound generally brings benefits: trustworthiness, venerability, proverbiality, value.

A goodly portion of the English language descends from the eighth-century epic poem 'Beowulf,' which, some scholars contend, places oldness among such virtues as nobility, mercy, esteem, and power.  With the daring adventure and revolutionary thought of the Renaissance, however, "old" begins its decline.  Shakespeare used "old" as an instrument of insult and ridicule and he frequently disparaged the word by coupling it with unpleasant partners:  "old and foul," "old and wicked," "old and miserable," "old and deformed."  "Reading modern idioms using 'old,'" writes the medievalist scholar Ashley Crandell Amos, "is a lowering experience, and a drastic contrast to the old English patterns."  Since "words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind," as Virginia Woolf put it, the old mind is lowered by the lowering of "old" to its present undesirable condition: old maid, old-fashioned, old guard, old boys, old witch, old fogey, old fart.

Some of this contempt comes from a superficial habit of mind that can grasp meanings only with the tool of contrasts.  "Old" then suffers from cliched comparisons with "new," "fresh," "young," and "of the future"; its meaning, narrows to the stale, the worn, the dying, and the past.  When "old" gains its definition only by pairing, it loses its value.  In a culture that has identified with "new" ever since Columbus, "old" gets the short end of the comparative stick, and it becomes ever more difficult to imagine oldness as a phenomenon apart from the lazy simplicities of conventional wisdom.  To escape from the negativity of "old," don't leap for the new, which reviles the old as its opposite.  Don't fall for thinking in opposites.  That mistake continues to curses the New World of the American continents with its basic syndrome: addiction to newness and futurism, which makes anything "old" retro, passe---"a bucket of ashes," as America's American poet, Carl Sandburg, wrote.  To escape the spell that the new casts on the old, dive into the old every which way you can: old ideas, old meanings, old faces, old things.

Oldness is an adventure. Stepping from the bathtub, hurrying to the phone, or just going down the stairs presents as much risk as traveling camelback in the Gobi desert.  Once we were down the stairs and out the door way ahead of our feet.  Now who knows when the trick knee will give out or the foot miss the tread.  Once we learned from the fox and the hawk; now the walrus, the tortoise, and the moose in a dark bog are our mentors.  The adventure of slowness

                                              ____

The appreciation of any phenomenon calls for a phenomenological method.  To know your mother, study 'her,' don't compare her with your father, or her sister, or the mother of someone else.  Our approach tries to penetrate the phenomenon itself.  We walk around it from many sides (circumambulation), expand it by turning up its volume (amplification), distinguish among its everyday appearances (differentiation).  We want more of its character to shine forth; epiphanies, revelations.  To inquire into oldness by thinking also about youth and freshness and the future diverts the inquiry into a study of opposites, rather than bringing us closer to the nature of oldness---that quality we feel in old things and places, meeting old friends, going to old movies, watching a pair of old hands at work.

The world nourishes when we feel its oldness.  The human soul cannot draw very much from the New World of discoveries or from futurism's Brave New World, which makes nothing that lasts and whose swiftly obsolescent generations are far shorter than those humans enjoy.  Not those worlds, but this old, old world; the very word "world" was once spelled 'wereald,' 'weorold': this nourishing place, so full of 'eald.'

It is as if "old" were hidden inside "world" much as the Gnostics' Sophia and the Kabbalists' Shekhinah were the soul concealed within the created world.  Sophia and Shekhinah are figures of ageless wisdom, the intelligence of soul abiding in all things.  As the soul of the world is an old soul, we cannot understand soul without a sense of old, or old without a sense of soul. . . .

Even when chipped, blunted, and threadbare from overuse, old things have acquired character---from familiarity, from utility, and sometimes from the beauty of luster, patina (a green or brown film) or design.  Or simply from being old, the being of oldness.  Without this sense of old as a state of being beyond beauty and utility, we cannot come easily into older years.  Instead of the lasting that oldness signifies, the richness of accumulations coupled with the shedding of inessentials, we moderns take old only as the result of destructive time, as a last stage linked to death rather than to lastingness.

Old brings out character, gives character, and often substitutes for character in our common feelings.  "That old house" means a house with a strong character, and "my old dog" refers to her character traits that are evident and familiar.  I do not call the house old simply because it was built in 1851, or the dog because of her sixteen years.  Numbers are impartial, applicable without feeling, and therefore are so useful for the uninvolved stance, whereas the adjective "old" bears emotions, and so I say "old" for things deeply loved and just as deeply reviled.  The best I can say of someone, and the worst, is that he is old.

My granddaughter picks up a plate and I say, "Take care; that belonged to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother!"  I am telling her that the plate is dear, rare, valuable, vulnerable.  I am asking her to accommodate her young hands to its oldness.  She has to adjust to its pace, handle it gently, walk it slowly across the room, feel its fragility.  I am telling her that it has lasted and that it is valuable because it has lasted, proving its sturdy reliability and also its frailty.  History has layered the plate with years of time, but it is not time alone that gives the feeling; it is the oldness as character, character as layering, a complexity that makes the plate unique and calls from us respect.

Aging opens the door to "old," and old age opens it yet wider.  That could be its point.  Can we know the world's oldness or enter into the character of anything until we are ourselves old?  That the old are burdened with wisdom means that they know the ways of the world because they are old, as it is.  They share the same state of being.

Wearing thin and wearing out, of course, but old also holds time affectionately.  It loves years, decades, centuries.  Old holds off change, bringing all old things nearer to permanence.

Time is not only destructive; it toughens as well as weakens.  Time lasts; it keeps on going and going and going and therefore is no enemy of age or of old.  But time is indeed destructive to youth, which it eats away and finally stops dead.  So when we hear of the corruption caused by time, we are listening to youth speaking, not age.

The desert monks of early pious Christianity kept youth at a distance, warning of its danger to the older person's purpose.  Youth brought in the demonic.  The monks' warnings focused not merely on youthful unruly behavior, sexual attraction, and lack of studious knowledge.  The pedophobia (fear of children) of the older monks acknowledged that the perspectives of youth were poison to the tasks of constructing their character, which required silence, compunction, self-control, endurance, vigilance, patience, and discretion.

The habits of the early English language seldom put youth and age together in the same phrase.  Today, we compliment the elderly on their youthfulness, bringing the two archetypal kinds of existence in closest proximity and letting the empire of young colonize the old.  But in Old English, the old and the new will rarely be found side by side.  A hard line between the two must be kept: "Don't try to judge the old and the young, the sick and the healthy, the rich and the poor, or the learned and the lewd by the same rules," advises a psychology text of the time.  To realize that old is like a species of its own, study an aged elephant or horse, your house cat or dog.  See it for itself, as if the young of the species were of another breed.

What does an old monk have to say to an old person today?  To stand as we are in our character as older people we need to keep youthful attitudes at arm's length.  Maybe young people, too---not because their fresh bodies and vacant minds lure us toward them, but because we expend into their lives too much of our spiritual substance.  If "old men ought to be explorers" because "here and there does not matter," as T. S. Eliot said, that exploration is of oldness itself, mapping that terrain and entering that kingdom.

We have a huge business to tend to, and with little profit.  Reviewing our life for its character costs more than passing out free advice to young people as their supposed mentors.  Mentors and elders are recognized for their character; they have character, are characters.  Otherwise they are simply oldsters, a term that is derived from "youngsters" and that collapses old and young into a sterile hybrid of cheerful consumerism.

The plight of youth in contemporary culture energizes our compassion. The destitution of children and the exploitation of adolescents call us to step in and take part, for we are not ancient desert monks but living citizens. But what is our part?  It is to incorporate oldness rather than to go along with a hypocritical culture that extols youthfulness while neglecting, trivializing, manipulating, and even imprisoning actual young people.  We play the part the old have always played: preserving and transmitting knowledge and modeling on the ramparts of actual life the force of character.

Only if it's right to stick to our own last can I make sense of the terrifying, spontaneous pedophobia rising up in me at the noise of boys, their chase of fun and sleep and brand-new stuff; at a gaggle of girls, their breathy intonations and sullen reluctance; at the ignorance of youth that comes on as innocence; at the clothing, the manners, the music.  I can so quickly become a crank, cruel, mean, and hateful, ruining every direct engagement with young people.  If the task of old people is to enter civilization in young people's behalf, why does the old soul harbor this pocket of hatred?  Must it not be purged?

I think blessed, instead.  As with any symptom, we need to see its possible purpose.  Pedophobia leaps up like an instinctual reaction.  It functions protectively, keeping youth away.  The monks say youth tempts the old from our principal occupations: character and our aging fate.  Rather than blurring the distinctions between old and young, and confusing their different tasks, the sudden hatred says that companionship with youth, except in rare cases, cannot be our calling and leveling cannot be our mode; sharing is altogether illusory.  Attending upon the character development of the young, important though it may be, is less our daily job than uncovering our own.  To be fully old, authentic in our being and available in our presence with its 'gravitas' and eccentricity, indirectly affects the public good and thereby their good.  This makes oldness a full-time job from which we may not retire.

This word or idea "old" that we old ones enact is more than a word and an idea.  It is an image of compacted layers.  The mind's eye can imagine old in the elephant, gnarled trees, Great-Aunt Evelyn wrapped in a blanket, the neighborhood alley before it was redeveloped.  Images spring to mind.  That is why "old" is the appropriate term for people in late life.  They are called "old" not simply because of their aging, but because of their value as images of oldness.

On the one hand, life review is the study of one's personal biography and its main character who lived it, tells it as a story, and now reviews it as critic, appraiser, judge, inquisitor, and defendant.  Life review is an activity that separates the strands of "old"---the aged sensibility, the olden times, the tottering body, the accumulated richness of days, the whitened head of the authoritative elder, the forgetful fumbling foolishness that lapses into fantasy.  These strands of complexity give "old" its substance and present themselves together "in an instant of time," fulfilling Pound's definition of "image."  Old age means arrival at the condition of an image, that unique image that is your character.

Far better than comparing "old" with external ideas like "fresh" and "young" would be teasing apart the web of ideas stuffed into that one short syllable.  The Bible needs at least nine different Hebrew terms plus many variations, while our English language compacts them all together.

Olam = ancient olden times.  Gedem = days of old, as before time.  Rachoq = old as far away and long ago.  For old people like Sarah and Job and for old counselors there is zagen.  Ziqnah = old age.  "Cast me not off in the time of old age;/When my strength faileth"---a theme restored in our time and reduced to personal love in the Beatles' line: "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four."

There is sebah, a good old age of gray hairs, full of days; balah, a sad one, worn out like old clothes.  Then there is athaq, to be removed (advanced in years):  "Wherefore do the wicked live,/Become old, yea, wax mighty in power?"  Also, y'shiysh, to become very old, and yashan, which is said of old things like stored fruits, gates, pools.

These kinds of old, and more, course through us.  These are the strands and rhythms of human complexity.  One morning we feel we are a bag of bones, a tattered coat upon a stick; on another day, we belong to a time before time began, an anachronism as old as Methuselah.  Some days we know ourselves as a number only: 76, 81, 91.

I am a forgotten castaway, a sharp-eyed wise man, still standing like an old gate, immersed in reminiscence of long ago and far away, enjoying wickedness and power, an old plaything of God like Sarah or Job.  On yet another morning I awaken in fullness of my character and all the days of my life, tearful, grateful, and satisfied.  My complexity cannot be reduced to any one of these strands.  To be only a mean old man, or always a list of complaints, or a record-breaking centenarian of 105, or a head flowing with long white hair and issuing long tales of cautionary experiences is to reduce the uniqueness of character to the unity of a caricature.  The Bible does not allow that monistic mistake.  

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From Dictionary (Copyright © 2005 Apple Computer, Inc.):

caricature 

noun

a picture, description, or imitation of a person or thing in which certain striking characteristics are exaggerated in order to create a comic or grotesque effect.

• the art or style of such exaggerated representation : there are elements of caricature in the portrayal of the hero.

• a ludicrous or grotesque version of someone or something : he looked like a caricature of his normal self.

verb [ transitive ] (usually: be caricatured)

make or give a comically or grotesquely exaggerated representation of (someone or something) : he was caricatured on the cover of TV Guide | a play that caricatures the legal profession.

DERIVATIVES

caricatural  adjective

caricaturist  noun

ORIGIN  mid 18th cent.: from French, from Italian caricatura, from caricare ‘load, exaggerate,’ from Latin carricare (see charge).

 

THE RIGHT WORD

Skilled writers and artists who want to poke fun at someone or something have a number of weapons at their disposal.

An artist might come up with a caricature, which is a drawing or written piece that exaggerates its subject's distinguishing features or peculiarities (: the cartoonist's caricature of the presidential candidate).

A parody is similar to a caricature in purpose, but is used of written work or performances that ridicule an author or performer's work by imitating its language and style for comic effect (: a parody of the scene between Romeo and Juliet). While a parody concentrates on distorting the content of the original work, a travesty retains the subject matter but imitates the style in a grotesque or absurd way ( their version of the Greek tragedy was a travesty).

A lampoon is a strongly satirical piece of writing that attacks or ridicules a person or an institution; it is more commonly used as a verb (: to lampoon the government in a local newspaper).

While a caricature, a parody, and a travesty must have a specific original to imitate, a burlesque can be an independent creation or composition; it is a broad comic or satiric imitation, often a theatrical one, that treats a serious subject lightly or a trivial subject with mock seriousness (: the play was a burlesque of ancient Rome).

Mimicry is something you don't have to be an artist, a writer, or an actor to be good at. Anyone who successfully imitates another person's speech or gestures is a good mimic or impressionist, whether the intent is playful or mocking (: he showed an early talent for mimicry, entertaining his parents with imitations of their friends).

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From Thesaurus:

caricature

noun

a caricature of the Baldwin brothers cartoon, parody, satire, lampoon, burlesque; informal:  sendup, takeoff.

Verb

she has turned to caricaturing her fellow actors parody, satirize, lampoon, make fun of, burlesque, mimic; informal: send up, take off.

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monism 

noun  Philosophy & Theology

a theory or doctrine that denies the existence of a distinction or duality in some sphere, such as that between matter and mind, or God and the world.

• the doctrine that only one supreme being exists. Compare with pluralism.

DERIVATIVES

monist   noun & adjective

monistic  adjective

ORIGIN  mid 19th cent.: from modern Latin monismus, from Greek monos ‘single.’

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Chapter 2  The Last Time

Last time I saw Chaplin, all he said was, "Stay warm.  Stay warm." (Groucho Marx in conversation with Woody Allen)

Last chance, last minute, last round, Last inning, last exit, last ditch.  Last rites, Last Supper, last days, Last Judgment.  Last words, last breath. Last word, last laugh, last dance, last rose of summer, last good-bye.  What an enormously weighty word!  Why does it give such importance to the words it qualifies? And how does "last" bear on character?  We shall have to find out.

Already I can tell you this: Our inquiry will aim deeper than the evident meaning of "the last time" as the end and therefore death.  If that were all, the inquiry could stop here, satisfied with this banal result.  Remember, we are eluding death all through this book, trying to prevent death from swallowing into its impenetrable darkness the light of intelligent inquiry.  Death is a single stupefying generality that puts an end to our thinking about life. The idea of death robs inquiry of its passionate vitality and empties our efforts of their purpose by coming to one predestined conclusion, death. Why inquire if you already know the answer?

If a pair of socks helped us in the previous chapter, the fiction of a couple may help in this one.

"She just got into her car and drove off.  That was the last time I saw her." How casually the moment slips by, blurring into the everyday. But when the simple action is marked by "last," the event becomes an indelible image. "Last" makes an event eventful, elevates it beyond the everyday, leaves a lasting impression. Last words become "famous," last moments enigmatic emblems to ponder for years to come.

Why? Because what happens at the end of a sequence stamps its closure, gives it finality. Reverberations of fate. The events that composed the marriage, the love affair, the life together become essentialized into the last scene. She gets into her car and drives off.  To her death in an accident?  To another city and a new start?  To another lover?  Home to Mother? Back to her husband and children?  Where she drives to belongs more to the next story than to the last scene of this fiction of a jointly attempted life.

Had she returned later as on any other day, the image of her getting into her car would have no significance and therefore would not last.  But now it tells of character: The abiding character of the relationship---its commitment to casualness; its apparent openness, which conceals truth. Or it reveals her rebellious independence; or her adventurous courage; or her failure of nerve; or her diffident coldness. . . .  It says something about his character, too---the unspoken feelings; the dulled sensitivity that cannot perceive and does not foresee.  Their character together, his, hers---all compressed and expressed, at last, as she drives off.

So the last time is more than information for a detective's report.  "Just the facts."  She does, in fact, just get into her car and drive away.  But the last time transforms the facts into an image.  The impression of her at the curb as the ignition catches lasts because it is compressed into a significant image, a poetic moment.  Other times are held captive by the last time and everlastingly signified.

Poetry depends on compression for its impact. The word for poet in German is 'Dichter,' one who makes things 'dicht' (thick, dense, compact). A poetic image compresses into a snapshot a particular moment characteristic of a larger whole, capturing its depth, complexity, and importance.  By putting closure to a series of events that otherwise could run on and on, the last time is outside serial time, transcendent.

This kind of moment is hard to bear and hard to relinquish.  It feeds nostalgia, coming back to mind, a refrain that will not let go.  Older age makes room for what T. S. Eliot refers to as "the evening with the photograph album," snapshots that bring back a world.  Gerontology names these evenings "life review" and claims that they are the main calling of later years.  Since anyone at any age can slip into nostalgic reverie, "later years" can be taken less literally, to mean a poetic state of soul favored by the old but not exclusive to them.

The last time turns love, pain, despair, and habit into poetry.  It puts a stop to, arrests forward motion, and lifts life out of itself.  This is transcendence.  We feel shaken to the bones, as if the gods had stepped into the middle of our lives.

Transcendence of the daily does not occur until the epiphany of the last time.  She got into her car every day. The last time becomes utterly different.  In no succession of events do we imagine any one moment to be the last.  We can always come back another time, do this again. "The last time" says there is no "again."  The last time is unique, singular, fateful.  Pop lyrics play on this poetic moment: "The days dwindle down to a precious few, September. . . ." (Maxwell Anderson); "The last time we saw you . . ." (Leonard Cohen); "The last time I saw Paris" (Oscar Hammerstein); "Last time I saw him" (Pamela Sawyer); "This could be the last time . . ." (Jagger and Richards---the Rolling Stones); "The last time I saw George alive . . ." (Rod Stewart).  "Again, this couldn't happen again. . ."; etc.  Each scene of life may be a last time, like the morning she drove off in her car.

To call the last time unique, singular, and fateful makes it sound inevitable and necessary, as if she drove off because it was determined by her character.  If character is fate, as Heraclitus said, then this was her day to die.  Or she had to cut out, because "that's just the kind of freewheeling person she was; we should have expected it." Yet it might have been a spontaneous impulse to which her character gave in: "Enough is enough; I'm out of here."  A whim, seemingly out of character.  We can't know.  For us the story stops as the car pulls away.

Right here, we have to be careful.  Character could become an iron law, permitting only those acts that are "in character."  In that case, the idea of character engenders little waves of repression.  "It's not my nature to do this, think that, want those, behave like this."  Is there no room for the spontaneous, for moments of speaking, thinking, and feeling quite "out of character"?  The answer depends on how we think about character.

I would claim that nothing is out of character. Character is inescapable; if anything were truly out of character, what would its source be?  What stands behind a whim?  Who pushes the urge and ignites an impulse?  Whence do stray thoughts arise?  Whims emerge from the same soul as choices and are as much part of your character as any habit.  That last time belonged to her just as all the other times did.  Belonged to her?  Which "her"?

Her character must consist in 'several' characters---"partial personalities," as psychology calls these figures who stir your impulses and enter your dreams, figures who would dare what you would not, who push and pull you off the beaten track, whose truth breaks through after a carafe of wine in a strange town.  Character is characters; our nature is a plural complexity, a multiphasic polysemous weave, a bundle, a tangle, a sleeve.  That's why we need a long old age: to ravel out the snarls and set things straight.

I like to imagine a person's psyche to be like a boardinghouse full of characters.  The ones who show up regularly and who habitually follow the house rules may not have met other long-term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only appear at night.  An adequate theory of character must make room for character actors, for the stuntmen and animal handlers, for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts.  They often make the show fateful, or tragic, or farcically absurd.

Fitting them in is called by Jungian psychologists integration of the shadow personalities.  Fitting them in, however, means first of all finding them fitting, suitable to your idea of your character. The Jungian ideal calls for a more integrated character, for the full boardinghouse with no exclusions.  This may require conversion of the more disreputable and obstreperous (unruly, rowdy) to the morals of the majority, an integration leading to the integrity of the matured character.

These noble ideals are better in the recipe than on the table, for old people, as Yeats wrote and Pound demonstrated, are often disheveled, intemperate, whimsical, and closer to chaos than to the sober well-honed wisdom that the idea of integration suggests.  The integrity of character is probably not so unitary; rather, the full company is onstage as at the end of the opera, when the chorus, the dancers, the leads, and the conductor take their uncoordinated bows.  Life wants the whole ensemble, in flagrante delicto (adverb: in the very act of wrongdoing, esp. in an act of sexual misconduct).  Even the cover-ups belong to the character.

The study of how each of these characters belongs is a main activity of later years, when "life review" consumes more and more of our hours.  Whether going through piles of papers and closets of things, or regaling grandchildren with stories, or attempting to write autobiography, obituary, and history, we try to compress life's meanders and accidents into a "character study."  That's why we need so many later years and why, as the days shorten, more and more evenings are absorbed in the photograph album.  Regardless of whether contrition (remorse), nostalgia, or vindictiveness marks our feeling as we turn the pages, we are as engrossed in study as if for a final exam.