Nothing More True a new dialectic of first world problems

A Pamphlet by Siri Hipstegaard

... like the bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it from me.

The West places an enormous emphasis on self-discipline and is harshly critical of those who lack the discipline to keep thin, make money and not get sick. But the Western way of discipline is to choose an objective and then set a complex system of reward and punishment driving one to that goal. Look at the runner who feels terrible guilt and disgust when he sleeps in past the time for the morning jog, how he feels listless and grouchy all day, and look at the elation he feels when he completes the run. Pushing through frantic and mindless pain finally to become calm or failing to do so and being wracked with guilt? These are the behaviours not of the enlightened but of the addicted. You have a situation in which a stable but unproductive indolence is disrupted by fear and an addiction to action. A society in which bearing a galvanising mixture of neurosis and greed is thought to be a balanced lifestyle is not an enlightened society but one that needs help. - Foe Nee Gyatso

How to read this book I wouldnt dream of telling you what to do. But heres how I understand what Im up to. This is a work of self-help. Though it proceeds by querying the assumptions of the self-help genre, its intentions are by and large the same as other works belonging to that peculiar and pervasive species. Like you, I find being earnest embarrassing, but Ive tried to suppress my habitual irony. This I was more successful at in Part I, after which my mind wandered. Part II also confronts less directly the everyday concerns of my target audience of yuppies, hipsters and other disaffected members of the affluent classes. In short, you and me. I have no original ideas. But I believe that the ideas that follow deserve repeating, and that, in the order presented, they pose a challenge to the norms and assumptions of the hucksters of motivational literature. My case is rhetorical and suggestive but some of that suggestion emerges from arguments about facts of the matter. My subtitle is a joke, but clearly it is not a good one, or I wouldnt feel obliged to point out that its a joke. The last section would need to be expanded to be defended. But I am not giving an answer, Im trying to ask a question. Theres a negligible risk that the concluding section will inspire somebody to withdraw from the world of action, to quit her good works and, I dont know, read back copies of the TLS for twelve hours a day. Please dont do that. Oscar Wilde said that moral grounds are the refuge of people who have no sense of beauty. Look how things turned out for him.

Part I

FAITH

Why should you be happy? And what do I mean by 'should'? These questions are asked all the time by people with a special interest in asking them, but are curiously missing from everyday conversation about self-improvement. I think that's strange, but not inexplicable. Whatever the deficiencies of the unexamined life, it leaves more time for playing golf. Not that our lives are really unexamined. It sometimes feels like all we do is examine our lives. Log onto Facebook for just a couple of minutes to learn: how to tell who your true friends are, how interesting your life must be if others are gossiping about you, why you should always be yourself. This is too paranoid to be solipsism: you may be the centre of the universe, but you're orbited by an endless rotation of people bringing you down. Hell, Sartre might have tweeted, is other people speaking behind your back. There's a logical difficulty with the directive to be yourself. It begs two questions: one philosophical, the other practical. The first assumption is that there is a self - some authentic essence - to be. The second is that your true self isn't a complete asshole. After all, we're products of nature. Sometimes recognition of our primal nature is invoked to justify questionable behaviour. Plenty of guys, ashamed by an urge to cheat their girlfriends, resort to some variant of the 'at the end of the day, we're just animals' defence to question the very idea of monogamy. Not by accident, these tend to be men who anticipate reasonable sexual success on the savannah.a But barely anyone takes our animality as reason to debase ourselves by discarding our clothes, taking food wherever we see it, and throwing out the constraints of law and order. We appreciate the effects of civilisation. We recognise the need to compromise on certain liberties in exchange for security and prosperity. We are producers and products of culture as well as products of raw nature. This is fine as a general principle, but the effective reason most people accept most of civilisation most of the time is that their needs feel pretty well met. The normal intercourse of
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Jonathan Franzen: Were simply experiencing the anxiety of a free market. Contraception and the ease of divorce have removed the fetters from the economy of sex, and, like the citizens of present-day Dresden and Leipzig, we all want to believe were better off under a regime in which even the poorest man can dream of wealth. But as the old walls of repression tumble down, many Americans - discarded first wives, who are like the workers displaced from a Trabant factory; or sexually inept men, who are the equivalent of command-economy bureaucrats - have grown nostalgic for the old state monopolies. Quoted in Elaine Blairs invaluable post in the NYRB, Great American Losers, to which everything I write is a footnote.http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/mar/09/great-american-losers/

civilised life keeps us reliably fed and sheltered. The bonds of civilised matrimony, for example, offer security and stability that does not exist out in the wilderness or in the singles bar. We excel at self-delusion. We are animals when it serves our self-image and a little lower than the angels when we can keep it in our pants. The danger of self-delusion is a frequent theme of the self-help genre. We are warned to watch out for self-sabotage. Failure to be honest with yourself is holding you back! The barrier to your success is you! Confront your problems and resolve them! This delusion goes both ways: either you suppress knowledge of your real failings to avoid the hassle of resolving them or you are wracked by unhealthy and misplaced guilt and self-loathing. It is no accident that the sharpest contrast to our self-delusion is largely overlooked: our uncompromising and clear-eyed assessment of others. I said that most people feel no serious compulsion to eliminate society as we know it. By most people I mean most of the people most of us interact with meaningfully from day to day. What about the poor and the dispossessed? When they resort to violent protest they are labelled animals, in a wholly pejorative sense. What does this bleeding heart digression have to do with your happiness? I will suggest that charity of understanding is the essence of charity. Whether you want to be charitable or not is your business, but I will suggest that the truth about others, in some essential way, is not that different from the truth about yourself. This comes into sharper focus when we ask what we are holding ourselves back from, what are we succeeding in?

What should we be? Here are three habits of highly successful people: they drink coffee; they own expensive cars; they send assistants to collect their dry-cleaning. Pedantic readers will object that at least some of those habits are the consequences, not the causes, of success. (Really successful people are in the habit of making the Forbes rich list.) Put like that, it seems obvious. But it's easy to forget how often what we do is because of who we are, instead of the other way around. To discover the traits of the successful man or women, we can be more reliably guided if we look at the character of successful people before they became successes. In our entrepreneurial age, these might include: being focused, taking risks, persisting through failure, self-belief, ambition, a strong work ethic, moral clarity. If we were to perform a survey of high-achievers and discovered a large proportion shared some of these qualities, we could reasonably conclude that those were qualities that made being successful more likely. We have become fairly savvy at interpreting data. Courtroom and forensic lab dramas remind us that 'correlation does not imply causation'. We are satisfied that taking risks can lead to business success because we understand the mechanism that rewards risk-taking behaviour. But another factor is often glossed over in the literature of making it big. We may accurately conclude that certain qualities are useful, or even necessary, for the successful pursuit of prosperity. Yet they may not be sufficient: one may possess the drive and enthusiasm of a captain of industry and never become a captain of industry. Great entrepreneurs often take risks, but risk-taking, by definition, implies the possibility of failure. We rarely see profiles of entrepreneurs who didn't make it, unless their ideas are amusing or instructively terrible. That may be a loaded example, so consider another: two people may be equally ambitious and driven and yet it is not uncommon for one to climb higher up the corporate ladder than the other. It's a plausible claim that many of the habits of the most successful are also the habits of the most spectacular failures. Practically-minded readers will accuse my outline of two fatal shortcomings: banality and whining. The banal point I may be accused of making is this: You can't win unless you play. Unless you work hard and take chances (very lucky or very privileged exceptions

notwithstanding) you won't make it anywhere near the top. But you might play and not win. Another perfectly reasonable response might go something like this: Boo hoo, life isn't fair. Toughen up, set goals, and kick butt. This is not bad conventional advice, though it's open to conventional criticisms. The common Hollywood theme of the busy executive whose epiphany leads him to spend more time with his children is emblematic of this kind of critique. I call these criticisms conventional not because they're commonplace, but because they're so far from revolutionary. A shift of emphasis is called for: more balance, more moderation: think about what's really important. A conventional reading of a well-known comment by Albert Einstein encapsulates this view: "Perfection of means and confusion of goals seemin my opinionto characterize our age." Moderation, balance, harmony. These are terms of high praise from new age communities to newspaper lifestyle sections to management manuals. But they're not very helpful. Balance between what and what? How much is too much? This kind of advice can only take us so far: a balanced lifestyle is invariably a kinder, gentler version of the one you already have. I'm concerned with a more essential question. Let's return to the habits of the rich and famous. We are told to adopt certain behaviours because these help us get ahead in life. This appears to be a no brainer. It's good to be successful, so it's good to be the kind of person who is successful. But sometimes those behaviours lead to success and sometimes they don't. This means that according to the best practice guidelines for living in the 21st century, sometimes it makes sense to be the person we ought to be and sometimes it doesn't. One of the great questions of religion, philosophy and literature is 'how are we to be?' Our current answer is ... lucky. * Does it follow that hard work and ambition are bad? No. The point is that very often the characteristics we consider virtues make sense as such only in consideration of our larger social values. And we operate according to a bunch of social assumptions that to a large extent make what we consider personal fulfilment dependent on luck. The diligent and uncomplaining labourers who exemplified the Protestant work ethic could plausibly (lets pretend) understand work and discipline as, if perhaps not quite virtues in themselves, adjuncts to virtue, of markers of obeisance. One would hope to achieve worldly success from effort, but regardless of attainment, to be a hard worker was, in certain respects, to be a good man.

That sociological cartoon is intended to clarify the following point: our pop psychologies can only tell us something meaningful about ourselves if they recognise our pop philosophies. Our self-conception is not separate from our overarching normative framework. In our hyperproductive age, taking part is not enough; you have to win. Even when you do win, there is always the risk that you have succeeded at nothing more interesting than success. Every so often a newspaper article will appear often about someone, usually a woman, who has a fabulous career but is somehow, incomprehensibly, unfulfilled. I'm the deputy head of the HR department of a medium sized international company, she tells us, yet I don't ecstatically waltz into the office, and I sometimes suffer from self-doubt. An obvious and justified response is this: well, duh. But the elaboration of that response can be unhelpfully tedious, a variant on the Hollywood objection mentioned above. Life needs balance, a rich variety of goals, and etcetera. An attendant point: A great source of anxiety, a quintessential first-world problem, is people's constant fear that they are not happy enough. This is worth recognising, but being so tangled up in our conception of ourselves and our place in the world, is not dispelled by that recognition alone. We risk merely displacing our anxiety, becoming afraid of being afraid of not being happy enough. But there are more comprehensive responses that address, and in their way resolve, the root causes of our meaningless lives. These take two basic forms: let's call them a) value-rich and b) value-neutral (or value-sceptical). Let's look at value-rich answers. Organised religion is the obvious example, but there are others. These are often conservative or reactionary, looking to entrench or re-establish sacred values, but they can also be revolutionary. Your life is low on value, goes this idea, because you lack values. These kinds of answers can look like this: Of course you are not fulfilled, madam: as a woman your true purpose is making babies and cooking for your long-suffering husband. Or they might look something like this: You are defying history in your complicity with the bourgeoisie. These systems can certainly provide guidance. Some are especially handy maps for navigating the world because they have been time-tested and slowly adapted to changing circumstances. The problem is that we may not accept any or all of the values proposed by these authorities. We might recognise that some of them inhibit us and lead to unacceptable inequities. We might think others have unintended consequences that outweigh their noble intentions, or are

just plain wrong. Here are some examples of the anti-value answers: Zen, nihilism, punk rock; each exhibiting varying degrees of complexity, subtlety and scepticism. I think this pattern of thinking can be interesting and fruitful. But I think it has limitations. One is that these ideas only go as far as we are prepared to take them, and I'm not sure we want to take them all that far. This leaves those of us balanced somewhere between faith and resignation pretty confused. Yet we do not exist in a state of anarchy. Unmoored from the safe harbour of faith or right thinking, we yet find ourselves burdened by inescapable (often implicit) judgements. Besides work, the obvious sphere defined by contemporary dogma is love. Watching an episode of a popular TV show like Friends is a reliable way of gauging the public mood on the subject. The basic idea: we're all looking for love; finding love is necessary for self-fulfilment; the right partner will excite your passion; true love transcends practical consideration (within reason); an authentic romantic relationship is between two people (in the past this would always have been a man and a woman, but there has been progress). These programmes don't only relate public opinion, they also reinforce (and to some extent) create public opinion. If theres little reflection by viewers about whether these opinions are worth accepting, its largely because they consider the shows as simply an accurate depiction (though distorted for comic effect) of their own hopes and struggles, either already existing or in potential.a There's no shortage of hysteria over the way video games are supposed to encourage violent behaviour by those who play them, without a clear account of the idea that these games convey that would lead young people to think that random violence was a good thing. The hysteria also ignores the countervailing messages gamers receive from other sources. Light-entertainment TV shows, especially to the extent that they are 'wholesome', largely escape popular critical analysis. Indeed, their lightness resists critical engagement. Theres probably nothing wrong with wanting our amusements amusing, to bathe us in a numbing warmth, without making us think too hard. But that doesnt make them ideologically neutral. Success, we learn, often depends on making the right decision, though sometimes fate saves us from our stupidity.

When I was fourteen, how could any show's depiction of choosing a long-term romantic partner possibly reflect my experience, or even aspirations? And how could it not offer a model for my future development? A model which I might replicate with more or less success.

Romantic love is taken to be urgent and transcendent. It will dissolve mundane troubles. Yet it's still presented largely as a means to personal well-being; about making the right consumer choice. For ultimate satisfaction, choose love. This might work as a super-refined hedonism: the greatest pleasure, though it is subtle and needs discipline, comes from investing in a relationship rather than fleeting dalliances. A kind of slow-food movement for couples, reflected in the popular apology for not cheating: 'Why go out for hamburger when I have steak at home?' One can imagine relationship counsellor Michael Pollan telling people to make love the way their grandmothers did. The difficulty is that love is not presented purely as a vehicle for complex pleasure. On the contrary, while love has come to be seen as properly the domain of personal choice, it remains loaded with value judgements. Finding love is now a marker of moral attainment and worldly success. The compromises that have to be made to sustain a relationship are virtues in themselves, as well as signs of maturity; not unlike sustaining a successful career. But this is not enough. It must be a passionate relationship, or you are not the fulfilled person you ought to be. Do we have our priorities in order? As always, Anthony Lane said it best. Reviewing the Sex in the City movie, Lane wrote: "Almost sixty years after All About Eve, which also featured four major female roles, there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and friends defining themselves not as Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter did - by their talents, their hats, and the swordplay of their wits - but purely by their ability to snare and keep a man. Believe me, ladies, were not worth it."1 In a film ostensibly celebrating female autonomy, the women not only aim too low but assess their own value - define themselves - by their capacity to make themselves lovable. Its like aiming to be bought by the best consumer rather than being the best product; a triumph of PR over manufacturing. That dual message again: it is up to you to find love, and your happiness depends on the success of that pursuit. And the correspondent double loss: without love you have lost the pleasure of the relationship, and are unsuccessful for want of succeeding. We are, in effect, told to make ourselves happy and taught to be miserable if we fail. It is an irony that we have dissolved the institutional support, and many of the explicit social rules, for creating prudent relationships without making the apparent need to form a relationship less urgent, or eradicating implicit social rules and personal obligations. Note that for all our libertarian intuitions, there are social limits on what an acceptable relationship looks like (relationships can now cross racial and class boundaries, and be

comprised of people of the same gender, but the fundamental permutation remains: two members, both living humans, both above a minimum age). Were we better off considering marriage as a mechanism of social utility? Nobody who has read Edith Wharton will think that's likely. Free love? Christ, just read Houellebecq.2 And being as liable to bourgeois sentimentality as the next guy, I'm not here to dispute that relationships in their contemporary form can be rather nice. Can't we outsource our love life to Kolkata? Or perhaps securing our domestic happiness should be the ultimate function of the welfare state. Dr Johnson was probably serious when he said marriages chosen by the Lord Chancellor would be more successful than matches freely chosen. That's impossible for us not because Johnson was naive or utopian, but because, on the contrary, he was a social conservative who wanted to honour and preserve a hierarchy would no longer tolerate. Maybe the internet will save us. * A popular contemporary self-criticism is that one 'over-analyses. People are constantly blaming their neuroses on thinking too much. But what is the proper quantity of thought? And why are we so sure we're doing the right thing, that only pesky doubt is corrupting our emotional stability? Certainly, some have a genius for obsessing over the unanswerable. But most of us bear from the more prosaic imperfection of making mistakes. Perhaps we suffer not from too much analysis but from faulty analysis? (Which is it? If we stop analysing, we will never know.) Hamlet's problem, Harold Bloom wrote, is not that he thinks too much, but that he thinks too well.3 We tend to think pretty badly, and it's not surprising. Without a clear frame of reference for placing ourselves in connection to the world and to others, without clearly defined values, we either have to invent or uncritically accept ways of judging our decorum and accomplishment. Bloom's Hamlet is "unable to rest in illusions of any kind, he thinks his way through to the truth, which may be a pure nihilism". I hope it is apparent that the aim of this work is to separate disillusion from despair. If man is condemned to be free, is he also sentenced to a meaningless life? Can we harness Hamlet's penetrating vision and stay sane? Notice that people only over-analyse their own emotions, failings and humiliations. I've never heard anyone worry about overanalysing the future of Africa's water reserves, though they are open to the possibility that their analysis is mistaken.

I have suggested that much of this anxiety is the product of imperfect disillusionment. We still believe in true love and that a pauper can become a prince. Yet we also believe that these can both be reduced to markers of personal achievement. This is thinking badly. * The Catcher in the Rye isnt the book it was when you were fifteen: A guy came out in a tuxedo and roller skates on, and started skating under a bunch of little tables, and telling jokes while he did it. He was a very good skater and all, but I couldn't enjoy it much because I kept picturing him practicing to be a guy that roller-skates on the stage. It seemed so stupid.4 * David Foster Wallace: "Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself."5 Who are we? My biggest fear is that I'll play golf. This sounds silly, but it's connected to a deep question about personal identity. Right now, I think that golf is a past-time for the bored and pampered, and anyone who enjoys walking around a lawn hitting a ball with a stick must have had a tedious childhood. My fear isn't that government overlords will someday force me to play. My anxiety is more subtle; I worry that I will choose to play golf. Even more terrifying: I'll like it. My anxiety doesn't end there. The me who plays golf will look back at these concerns with bemusement, even mild contempt. Golf is amazing, he'll say, and only an arrogant upstart would think he knows better. I'll be patronised by the type of person who plays golf on the weekend. And that is something I will not countenance. For many of us, there is a feeling of weirdness when we think of ourselves in the past, or how we imagine ourselves in the future. This weirdness is related to the sense that on the one hand there is a degree of discontinuity, a chasm separating the person we are at different moments in time. On the other hand, the anxiety or bemusement occurs because these changes keep happening because of the me who keeps changing, because I won't keep still. Some people feel this more strongly than others. Some don't sense much discontinuity. Perhaps they have a strong sense of the evolution and rational progression of their world-view, of their sense of identity over time. *

Maybe the self is an illusion? That's a hard claim to make work. Philosopher Galen Strawson points out that the reason we talk of a self is because we sense that there is a self and phrases like 'the self' are employed to describe the perception.6 Even at our most passively conscious, there is no diminishing of subjectivity. I think of Christopher Isherwood's self-consciously uncritical gaze: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." Not thinking here surely means a concentration of thought, upon but not beyond immediate experience. At minimum, we are conscious of 'passively' being the I experiencing the world. How we come to be conscious is one of the great unknowns of our age - perhaps the mystery7. But learning how consciousness arises - nothing more than neurons firing in your brain; the meeting of soul and matter - would likely not upset our sense of a coherent self. Suppose, says Strawson: Someone fully convinces you (perhaps by hypnosis) that your current mental life with all its familiar characteristics, which incorporates your current sense of the single mental self, depends on the activity of three spatially separated brains in three different bodies. Will this immediately annihilate your natural sense of your mental singleness? Surely not. Your thought is likely to be Wow, I have got three brains - I, the single thing or person that I am8 * The Master was seated around the fire with his inner circle. The Master's question was always the same: What vexes you tonight? Said the youngest, 'what if it is as Bertrand Russell claimed: that there is nothing in logic to stop us believing the universe and our memories were created just minutes ago.' 'What of it,' asked the Master? 'From outside, a person is good or bad according to his deeds. The man who steals is more worthy of punishment than the man who dreams he steals'.' That may be,' said the Master. But, said the student, 'from the inside, the man who steals is not different from the man who only remembers stealing. There is no difference of hope and guilt or hunger and understanding between them. And it is the same with the righteous man. Seen from the soul looking out, the man who merely imagines achieving virtue would attain the same perfection as he who had struggled with evil and overcome.' 'What is your real question?' the Master requested. 'Why would the Creator subject his creation to the reality of evil when he might equally have created only an illusion of suffering?' Answered the Master: 'Who says He didn't?' *

You are the only perfect observer of your passions. Imagination can narrow the gap between you and another, but she remains other because she is not you. We have no direct route inside the mind of others, we cannot see as they see or feel as they feel. William Hazlitt described this vividly: "I have no nerves communicating with another's brain, and transmitting to me either the glow of pleasure or the agony of pain which he may feel at the present moment by means of his senses. So far, therefore, namely, so far as my present self or immediate sensations are concerned, I am cut off from all sympathy with others." I've plucked that passage from Hazlitt's essay 'Self-love and Benevolence'. Hazlitt's acute picture of existential isolation looks set to be a case study in self-interest. It's a mark of the essay's genius that it can evoke the subjective experience so powerfully in order to show where it ends. It is true that, while we can learn the causes and patterns of other people's happiness and suffering, that "glow of pleasure" is only their own; we can do no more than imaginatively extend our own similar (we hope) sensations to match theirs. By contrast, our own pleasure and pain are simply present. There is need to know the reasons for our own emotions to experience them in full. This counts for immediate sensation, but we can also think back to our past. We can look back at our previous inner life with incomparable clarity and intensity, if with imperfect recall. Regarding others, says Hazlitt, "I can only see into their real history darkly and by reflection." We can imagine the pain of others, but we can never, so to speak, remember it. The intimacy of our relation to our past is unsurpassable, as "in relation to my former self and past feelings, I do possess a faculty which serves to unite me more especially with my own being, and at the same time draws a distinct and impassable line around that being, separating it from every other". We can understand the thread of memory connecting who we are at any moment with whoever we have been. With intimacy there is obligation. What do we owe ourselves? Hazlitt reasons that our conduct can only be directed towards the future. We cannot reach back into our past and change our previous circumstances. The only function of regret is to change the future. "All action, all passion, all morality and self-interest, is prospective." This is so even for apparently instantaneous reflex actions: you snatch your hand from a flame to ensure consequent, though near-immediate, relief from pain. When we choose to act your reasoning is informed by speculation about the future. But the future is closed to us. (Though not entirely closed: we can speculate about much of it, make very reasonable inferences about some of it, and imagine without limit.)

We have noted a powerful distinction between our experience of our personal past and the past lives of others. How do we anticipate our future? In essentially the same way as we anticipate anyone else's. We may possess especially fine-tuned foresight about our distant desire and concerns, but we nonetheless reason them, we do not directly perceive our future interior life. "The interests of others are no more chimerical, visionary, fantastic than my own, being founded in truth, and both are brought home to my bosom in the same way by the force of imagination and sympathy." Sometimes we are wrong about the interest of others. But sometimes we're wrong about our own interests. The possibility that I might one day lose my enthusiasm for heavy metal was laughable to my fourteen-year-old self. That notion seems quaint to me now, but it was founded on limited reasoning and inexperience, not an infirm grasp of my sensibilities. I cannot know my future self, and my future self cannot affect me, "what I am does not depend on what I am to be". This is not to deny a duty to oneself, but to question the primacy of self-interest. Is this the secret of Hillels overfamous injunction, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I?"a Hazlitt's essay is sensitive to the sources of self-interest. We naturally care more about those we know well, and care especially about those we know best. Fellow-feeling is deepened by intimacy and repeated acquaintance. This is the truth described by Adam Smith when he said a man would be more distressed by an injury to his little finger than news of a tragedy in a faraway land: not that man is naturally callous, but that he always risks incuriosity, which can amount to the same thing. It doesnt follow that empathy must be unalloyed. Almost anyone would take greater pains to prevent distress to someone he knew and disliked than an anonymous saint. The essay does not deny the strength of fellow-feeling; it denies that we have privileged access to knowledge of our future desires and needs. The claim is a powerful one: in the realm of action, and therefore of ethics, you are no less connected to any other than you are to yourself. * "Time has such colours as blue, yellow, red, and white. Spring draws in flowers and flowers draw
We are presented with a way of looking at Kierkegaard's lament that 'life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward'. Who you are, conceived as a single entity, a person, only exists once you have ceased to be. That is the life distilled in a eulogy. But unity comes at an incalculable cost. During life you are, at any time, a moment of consciousness with a memory. After that, you are history without consciousness.
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in spring." - Dogen9 "Because you drowned others they drowned you; and those that drowned you will eventually be drowned." - Hillel Preliminary comments Free will, as we normally understand it, refers to actions that we freely choose to perform. Reflex actions, like jerking your knee when a doctor taps it, are neither here nor there when considering free will. The distinction between free and unfree action is not always so clear cut. Confessing during torture may not count as a free choice. Alternatively, it may merely demonstrate the frailty of the will. Do mentally-hardened soldiers, trained to endure pain, have freer wills than the rest of us? Or are you only free when you're in a reasonable position in which to make a free choice? (In which cases, those soldiers might be free more often than the rest of us.) There are also more subtle influences on our behaviour. Advertising, peer-pressure, works of art - these all influence our ideas, often in ways were barely aware of. I've already mentioned the ideological snares of the beloved sitcom Friends. And then there are the inscrutable workings of the unconscious. But while it may be true that we often cannot trace the source of our beliefs and desires, they are still our beliefs and desires, producing our decisions. I am free to choose that particular cola beverage, whatever the source of my preference. An embarrassingly simple argument that should change everything but so far hasn't When you choose to do something based on your own beliefs and desires, without coercion, we can comfortably call that an act of free will. You can't always tell where those beliefs come from, but you probably don't need to. And many desires are innate; we can resist them up to a point, but it would be unrealistic to suggest that to be free is to transcend nature. This is a modest account of freedom. We are as free as can reasonably be expected of animals with the capacity for rational thought, raised with values, bombarded with branding and beset on all sides by false consciousness. But when did you choose to become the person you are? More to the point, when did you

decide to become the person who made the decisions you make?a Why, at each moment prior to the decision in question. Who you are now is determined, among other things, by the decisions you have made in the past. You are, in the present moment, the accumulation of your actions through time. But when did you choose to be the person making these decisions? The answer is: you didn't. Of course you didn't, you no more created yourself than you chose to be created. So far our intuitions are barely ruffled. Sure, you didn't choose to be, but at each moment you choose to do or not to do. But at each moment we make decisions based on who we are, and these, plus influences beyond our control, determine who we are to become, which in turn determines our actions, which in turn...b Unless you are somehow responsible for choosing the conditions that cause your subsequent decisions, you cannot be responsible for the actions that follow. But you cannot be the cause of yourself, and it is that self that decides what to do. When you came to exist you came into a world that you didn't choose with a mind that you didn't choose. And at any moment after that, who you are (and therefore how you are react to things outside of your control) determines what you will become.c Who you are defines not only what your decisions will be, but how likely you are to act on those decisions. It also defines how successfully you will implement those decisions. The stunning realisation is not that each of us is born with different amounts of resolution and ambition (though we may be) but that each of us is born into the conditions that will lead us to act in ways that cause us, at any moment, to be as ambitious and resolute as we are. The truth is, taking the blame or the credit for what you do no different from taking credit or blame for the colour of your skin or the length of your arms. I have adopted what Galen Strawson call the Basic Argument about moral responsibility. It
a

I base the following on Galen Strawson's work. For an entertaining and persuasive overview, see his interview with the Believer http://www.believermag.com/issues/200303/?read=interview_strawson. For more detail, see 'The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility', Philosophical Studies 75, 1994. b It may be simplistic to use the word 'determined'. Maybe there is an element of randomness due to quantum indeterminacy or whatever. But is hard to see how we are any more responsible for variations in behaviour caused by random physical events. c Even if you could create yourself, what would that decision be based on? On something other than what you believed and desired? Imagine a mystical pre-birth state of pure reason: how could your pure and rational decision be other than it was? Is an infinitely rational God ultimately responsible for his actions? Theodicies are an admission that He cannot not be.

appears to be so obviously true that it's worth thinking about why most of us are unable to accept it. * "You must change your life" Rilke's poem tells us. But we feel the force of it the same way the poet feels it, through the force of that ancient statue, under the influence of art. You must change your life, this is not a choice, not an 'ought to', but the force of art as force of nature. Art of greatness can have the power to make your life change course, not as a moral requirement, but brute fact. Of course, this may also be true of Triumph of the Will and vodka ads. Does belief in free will necessarily belong in what Daniel Dennett refers to as "the familiar class of life-enabling or life-enhancing illusions"? I don't believe it does. Rather, free will's indispensability stems from its status as a civilization-enabling or civilization-as-we-know-it-enabling illusion. To deny responsibility seems like a forfeit of our personal autonomy, but when we think about personal responsibility we are usually thinking about what is legitimate to do to others. Considerations about individual responsibility are considerations of social power. To hold someone responsible is justification to condemn, to imprison, to execute. Strip away the sanction of ultimate responsibility and our structures of justice lose their moral purity. Faith in personal responsibility offers moral justification of our systems of reward and punishment, of some economic inequalities, of meritocracy. Can we really bear to face squarely the illusion of freedom? You did not create yourself, but you remain who you are, you have still have done what you have done and you will continue to do what you will do - for better or worse. Those whom we love we love no less and those who love us love us no less. Only our self-regard, at least the basest aspect of our self-regard, must necessarily suffer. * Is it possible for a society to face this truth without disintegrating? I think it's important to realise the senses in which we already do. The starkest example is the way we tend to think of our systems of law and order. Nearly everyone accepts the need to punish criminals. Some think that there is a moral obligation to make people pay for their transgressions. Others are more squeamish about causing harm to individuals, even to violent criminals, but recognise the need for incarceration or other measures in order to prevent anarchy and wrong-doing. In other words, some people think that

the penalties inflicted by the justice system are inherently justified, and some think that punishment is justified because of the good consequences: reduced crime, greater personal safety, a more stable society, etc. But even the confirmed sceptic of justice, someone who believes state-sanctioned punishment is a necessary evil, only a little more desirable than anarchy, even she will tell you that it's more just to punish those who do wrong than those who do not. Show her evidence that the arbitrary detention of one person per month will cause violent crime to plummet and she will recoil.a And yet in practice concessions to contingency are woven into the fabric of the justice system. The person who drives drunk and makes it home without incident bears less guilt in the eyes of the law (is less culpable) than the person who drives drunk and hits a pedestrian. The doctor who gives her patient terrible advice is guiltier of grosser malpractice if the patient takes the advice and suffers harm than if the patient forgets to take the advice. The negligence in either case is identical, but the sanction is more severe where the harm happens to be worse.b There may be plausible utilitarian reasons for running the system this way, and you have to have done something bad in order to bear responsibility for bad consequences - but the point at which we draw the line is, if not arbitrary, a matter of managing luck.10 If you think about it, that's a weird place for contingency to play a leading role. We are condemned by externalities. You'd think that if any acknowledged contingencies were to save us by mitigating our culpability, they'd be the contingencies that cause us to act, not that cause our actions to have the effects they do. And yet, if you are insane or deprived or traumatised in the right way, and you live in a reasonably progressive country, you might look forward to the favour of the court. Character is fate, but not if you have a good excuse. My aim is not to work out a jurisprudence of luck. Rather, I am curious about our perception of ourselves in relation to the rules and norms that govern us. *
Maybe that's because she realises utilitarian arithmetic of that sort won't produce the desired ends. Arbitrary detention might create a climate of fear, not permit the predictable society we want, etc. But if choosing the right person to throw in prison depends on these types of facts about the world, then justice is not what most of us think it is. Even those among the democratically inclined who accept the necessity of torture see it as an aberration, outside the workings of everyday justice. b Here's a way of explaining this: any person who acts without due care is ultimately guilty of the worst possible consequences of that action. Reserving the more severe punishment in the case of actual harm is not being unduly severe to the actor, it is being lenient. In this way, the law can be seen to be taking exceptional pains to minimise imposing punishment. (This is an almost theological argument: we are all guilty of the deepest sin but the Lord or Lord Justice - is merciful.) But it would still be the case that the law privileges some over others because of contingent outcomes.
a

The Gateless Gate tells the story of Hyakujo's Fox. Master Hyakujo was expounding whatever masters of Zen expound. One day he approached an old man who had attended Hyakujo's sermons unobserved by the other monks and asked him who he was. The old man tells that he was once a human, a Zen master, but he is no longer human. "At that time one of my students asked me whether the enlightened man is subject to the law of causation. I answered him: "The enlightened man is not subject to the law of causation." For this answer evidencing a clinging to absoluteness I became a fox for five hundred rebirths, and I am still a fox. Will you save me from this condition with your Zen words and let me get out of a fox's body? Now may I ask you: Is the enlightened man subject to the law of causation?'11 Many questions may be asked. Isn't truth the reality beyond the illusion? And what is the man clinging to who wishes to rise above cause and effect? Why is he punished for his answer? And how can the words of another end the cycle? The fox is associated with trickery or cunning, but also with confusion, with self-deceit. If we take 'for this answer to mean the crystallisation of the concept in the man's own mind, then by answering he has defined his position and committed himself to an ideal. If there is a part of man that is beyond time, there is an unvarying truth about him that must define his role in time. For this answer there was a consequence - not a sanction, but a reaction. The words that will free him are not magic, they create right thinking. "Hyakujo said: `The enlightened man is one with the law of causation.' At the words of Hyakujo the old man was enlightened. `I am emancipated,' he said, paying homage with a deep bow." The enlightened man is not subordinate to causation, nor does he rise above it. Now is a cause and now is an effect. We do not ask at each moment what moves a twig through a stream, we see it carried by the current. Still, the twig is not part of that current; the flow would be no different without the twig. Time is the river and time is the current and we are the river and we are the current. We are the cause and we are the effect. The fox is a symbol, but the fox also is a wild animal. The fox may know many things, but it has no belief. A fox only has fox thoughts. We do not consider the false consciousness of a fox. The truth about how one is cannot be separated from what one knows - especially what one knows about what one is.a Do we control nature or does it control us? A fox can only say yes or no. "Controlled or not controlled? / The same dice shows two faces."
Our ontological status and our epistemological status are dialectically connected. To the enlightened, are these separate categories?
a

* Considering the flow of time, we think of the Heraclitus - "no man steps in the same river twice." As Borges reminds us, it is not only the river that changes. "I admire his dialectical skill, for the facility with which we accept the first meaning (The river is another) covertly imposes upon us the second meaning (I am another)12. Time is the process of becoming of which we are a part. Time, Borges concedes, is no illusion; perhaps it seems that way because it is too close to perceive, because we cannot separate ourselves from it. "Our destiny ... is not terrifying because it is unreal; it is terrifying because it is irreversible and iron-bound. Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river". The absurdity of being in time is that our history is permanent but finite. The story of how we have lived is immutable and it has a conclusion. That is the iron law of time, from which there exists distraction, and for which there is perhaps consolation, but ultimately no relief. Yet whose everyday life is a confrontation with the void? Far from being terrified, we persist in mere anxiety. Will this latte make me fat? How do I know it's really decaf? What about all those hormones in the milk? Those are the manageable worries, part of the practical negotiation of modern life. Not only do they distract from what's real and terrible, they deny it. How can it matter if you put on a couple of pounds if nothing matters? Why persevere in a world without transcendence when by a sleep we end the heart-ache? As with the dialectical hop from Heraclitus's river to ourselves and back, we seem condemned to afford the most ordinary mishap with eternal significance in order to fasten significance to eternity. (Even the conventional critique of this overreaction 'chill out, it's not a matter of life and death' - is the logical next dialectical step, for the relative insignificance of the inessential imposes a recognition of the inestimable value of the truly life and death determining act.) But our most common and deepest, certainly the most harmful, anxieties have less to do with distracting us from the fate we all ultimately know we share than from upholding the deception of the ego. I mean 'ego', loosely, to denote a commitment to personal agency, the desire for belief in, to some extent, self-determination and, more deeply felt, self possession. Any dime-store guru will tell you to let go of your ego. Make sure they get the reasoning right. The truth is not that you are unimportant - you are the entire universe - but that you did not choose your life. And the true mystery is what to do about it.

I don't expect guilt, self-loathing, regret and embarrassment to dissolve upon consideration of this reality. It takes (I hear) a lifetime of mental discipline. But stop and think about this seriously: how might you relate to yourself if you understood your history as given rather than chosen? This is as much a cultural orientation as a psychological one. The central neuroses of our lives are the product not of some unblinking metaphysical solipsism so much as garden variety selfishness, a cultural dedication to autonomy over fate. And what has this cultural commitment produced? The tackiness of positive thinking, personal empowerment, daytime television talk shows; a tawdry milieu in which ordinary people have to face personal and devastating dissatisfaction and secondary self-condemnation for not properly 'dealing' with their 'issues'.a Denialism is a kind of low-brow nihilism; we should aim higher. Freud said he would consider substantial progress "turning hysterical misery into common unhappiness". I submit that we will have advanced by exchanging common neurosis for good old fashioned existential despair. What does it mean that the enlightened person is one with causation? By my reading, it cant just be the trivial fact that she knows time is real, that a cause has an effect. To be one with causation is to know that you are yourself a cause and an effect and to let go of the futile pursuit of transcendence and the futile grief of regret. Its a recognition not that you ought to live in the moment, but that you do live moment by moment, that you are a part of each moment, each moment flowing into the next. It is a refusal of false comforts, of the too-easy hope that there exists a divinity that shapes our ends or the devastating and perversely reassuring (the reassurance of certainty) contrary: to fail to comply is to be damned. Most important, it is the willingness to let go of your guilt and disappointment at the cost of your possession of your success and self-development. Not because doing so will make you feel better, but because it is true.b Paradoxically, there may be reason to take this idea as a demand to take responsibility for the process of being and becoming. But that will depend on what we think about a bunch of other stuff.

Everyone should be permitted his Alan Bloom moment. In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we'd all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I realised that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives. It wasn't a punishment but a new wrinkle. It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn't proof of our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence." Bolao
b

* I would like to know what completeness can be found in things made by chance, for such things are by no means better than their opposites Ibn Rushd If God does not exist, everything is permitted, as Dostoevsky didn't quite say, and without responsibility, one might equally say anything goes. Neither of those arguments holds much water. Sure, everything is permitted, in the sense that there is no ultimate authority to forbid. And sure, without ultimate responsibility you cannot be ultimately accountable. But if we accept that some things are good and some things are bad, the loss of authority and autonomy makes them no more or less good or bad.a As we learn from Lucky Jim, nice things are nicer than nasty ones, and the fact remains that good things are better than bad ones. I am the river, and sometimes I bring life-giving irrigation and sometimes I overflow and destroy. ("Love the sinner, hate the sin" may be a prescription to act compassionately, but if it has any real meaning it is to decouple the evil of an action from the culpability of the actor. On that reading, we can understand divine benevolence in a new light. For how else could compassion be infinite? Infinite forgiveness for the harm done to others would otherwise be tantamount to endless indifference. It's also worth considering that if the self does not persist through time we can understand repentance as permitting us to evaluate the disposition and beliefs of the person who has repented at any given moment compared with her dispositions and beliefs at any moment before repenting. The insight is not that repentance causes her to become a different person, for she becomes a different person anyway, but that transience is what permits us literally to become a better person, if not to undo what we have done.) When I suggest to people that they have no free will (a surprisingly ineffective chat up line) the immediate reaction is a kind of despairing resignation, 'then it makes no difference what we do'. (The despair is limited by the extent to which, pre-reflectively, they believe me, which usually ranges from not very much to not at all.) But it doesn't take much imagination to see that the force of our actions does not depend on what causes them. Suppose a hurricane threatened to descend on a town, hurting people and damaging property. Suppose this would have no material effect on your life. Would you be indifferent to whether the hurricane struck directly or passed safely by? I don't ask whether you would choose to stop it or not. The question is: would you rather this event did happen or did
Unless the claim is that morality depends on, or is equivalent to, God's word. But the anxiety of the question indicates that this is not the claim, or it would be an expression of relief, of freedom. Instead it is a question of how we would be entitled to condemn apparent evil.
a

not happen? If you care enough to despair about an amoral world, you will care, at least in abstract, about the harm caused by the storm. I am not looking to persuade you to prefer good over bad, or even to attempt a description of what good or bad is, but to point out that we prefer the good to the bad even if we cannot pinpoint who owns that good, who is to be blamed for the bad. The question is: would you prefer to be a devastating storm or life-giving rain? The Talmud teaches that "the reward for a good deed is a good deed; the reward of one transgression is another transgression." Once we perceive moral accomplishment as a gift of contingency, it becomes non-trivial to see acting well as its own reward. And we can connect this notion to Aristotle's idea that virtue is habitual; that our actions accustom us to patterns of behaviour that come to define our character and thus our future actions. * The highest emanation of the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah is Keter, the Crown. Keter is entirely beyond human comprehension (and thus transcends reason) and is, so to speak, the ultimate point of impetus for creation. Keter is identified with the creative desire of Ein Sof, the Endless. But why the will to create? Because it is logically necessary to produce the best of all possible worlds? There's a tradition that the inner aspect of Keter is pleasure, that the stimulus underlying the Infinte's will to create is the pleasure of creating and the pleasure taken in the creation. Keter is the highest point of the will of Ein Sof and its light contracts to produce the lower emanations of the Tree. Thus sublime pleasure as manifested in supernal desire is channelled into the lower light of, so to speak, the consciousness of the creator, which is created prior to the creation of the world. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" - the opening line of the bible. The Zohar permits a reading of those initial words, Breishit barah Elohim, not as 'in the beginning Elohim created' but 'in the beginning was created Elohim', that is, an aspect of God as perceived by us is a result of the contraction of infinite light of the Ein Sof. In the beginning, God was created. This is a dramatic inversion of the understanding that emotion is subordinate to reason; more fundamentally, that emotion is subordinate to reality. What is real, moreover what is possible, is produced by, and of, pleasure in being. This is a model of radical freedom: creation is not dictated by pure reason: that which is derives not from what ought to be, but from a whim. It also takes a stand on what freedom means: that you do what you ultimately want to do, rather than acting on an external standard of what ought to be done. This variety of mystical reading serves less to aid understanding than to define the boundaries

of rational enquiry. If man is created in God's image, we can understand that image to be the reflected light of the infinite, God's 'attributes' as we can apprehend them mirrored in our own powers of discernment, mercy, etc. Beyond that no speculation is possible, and rational theology can concern itself only with an examination of contracted light.a Reason being thus domesticated, we retain the power to connect with the infinite. It is taught that the highest aspect of our souls is equivalent to Keter, that at root our soul is connected to the endless source of existence. By subjugating ourselves to the law we align our behaviour with own fundamental desire, for the ultimate will of the creator and ourselves is equivalent. At root, the distinction between duty and fulfilment is erased. The ultimate desire of creation and the ultimate desire of the created person are equivalent because they are identical, they come from the same source. When Gautama Buddha was close to death, he imparted to his disciplines two pieces of advice. Rely on yourselves, he told them and seek salvation alone in the dharma. Masao Abe teaches that these statements are complementary, not contradictory. The self that it is proper to rely on, the self that will guide you, is not your ego but your true self through which dharma comes into the world.13b "The reward for a good deed is a good deed". If we translate mitzvah as commandment, we can take the lesson to be that the reward for following the law is that your actions match your essence, true self-expression as harmony of will and deed.c Again, we encounter the interplay of knowledge and freedom; knowing what you ultimately want as the condition of authentic action, and disharmony between thought and deed distorting true desire: the reward of a transgression is another transgression. But ultimate freedom here derives not from knowing 'the good', or rational enquiry, but unclouded perception of what is truly desired. However, as what you think you want is not a reliable guide to what you really want, some desires need to be suppressed or modified. Self-expression demands self-renunciation.
To maintain that the meaning of existence is ultimately inexplicable may seem flippant or callous, but it seems less unpalatable to me than insisting that evil must be rationally justified. b Richard Tarnas: Through Christs grace the old, separate and false self died to allow the birth of a new self, the true self at one with God. For Christ was the true self, the deepest core of the human personality. (The Passion of the Western Mind, p.127) c It's awfully convenient that what you really want to do is follow the law. But if we recognise that mysticism is often a reinterpretation of orthodoxy by true believers, we can take this reading as less an apology for the status quo than an assertion of individual value. (It can also be seen to be doing the opposite. See Joseph Dan, Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction, p70. This is, incidentally, the best and clearest introductory overview of the subject I know of.) (And lets not ignore that redefining freedom is a frequent cover for its opposite. Isaiah Berlin was confronted, during his 1945 visit to Moscow, by a woman who questioned permitting free thinking in light of the discovery of Marxist truth: Freedom to be wrong is not freedom. (Chernisss intro to PIRA, xxixn) Also, of course, Rousseaus forced to be free; Cicero: Legum denique idcirco omnes servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus)
a

Rabban Gamaliel taught: "Do His will as if it were your will that He may do your will as if it were His will." The plain sense here is of a reciprocal relationship, you scratch my back, etc. But that leaves room for divergence, for a conflict of will that can leave you unsatisfied. To close that gap needs an alignment of will, so that His will is your will, so that you want what ultimately is. If His will is limited to dogma or divine authority, then the kabbalistic tradition might be understood as a clarification of what ought to be done. But the point of this explanation can't be to tell you what to do, because true believers already know what to do; they possess the law. Rather, by reading the law as the vehicle for desire, the distance from the creator is bridged, and normativity is connected with a kind of spiritual depth psychology - and ultimate existential questions can be decoupled from practice. If knowledge is freedom, it is not because knowledge changes reality, but because it changes our understanding of our relation to reality and obligation. I think this is a powerful insight into what freedom means, not only because it is realistically attainable but because it deflates the value of mere power. Ein Sof - the infinite, without end, no limits - is alternatively called Ayin: nothing. The common root of human transcendence is not some thing, it is nothing. In other words, transcendence means letting go of the merely existing. It follows that states of affairs, facts about the world, are not to be taken as determining the perfection of the human condition. The world is everything that happens to be the case, but that doesn't have to be our problem.a This is a theology of sublime nihilism in which nothingness implies freedom and joy. "Humans follow the Earth. Earth follows Heaven. Heaven follows the Tao. The Tao follows the way things are." One imagines the author of the Tao Te Ching's utopian republic would not be run by evolutionary-psychologist kings. How we happen to be will of course influence how we can be, but we can learn the difference between the lamentable friction of resisting nature and identifying a state of affairs with truth. Perhaps that is wisdom. * In practice, the conservative radicalism of the faithful produces an internal revolution; it does little to reform real world power. Change can be internalised, but praxis is not altered. Maybe that is the more important revolution (and maybe understanding that is the most important insight) but it only goes so far. But we are in the world, a state of affairs that is not ideal but beats the alternative. How are we to be, not just in thought but in action? The double bind of politics is that there is a kind of
a

A nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing can be said. The Kabbalists agree with Wittgenstein, and turn him on his head.

freedom in the absolute that also steals our liberty. The lure of fascism or extreme nationalism or even subjugation to dogma is a submission to power that is also a kind of identification with power. "Purity of heart is to will one thing" - but what is the singular object of desire? For what is moral clarity other than prejudice, than moral chauvinism?a The law connects us to infinity when the law is itself the substance of infinity. But without purity of infinite law, how can we have the confidence to go outside of ourselves? Is ethical fulfilment possible when we are in the world, at one with time, acting with imperfect knowledge? I want to gesture towards an ethics - or more properly a sensibility - of ambivalence. * In his magnificent essay In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki rhapsodises over the everyday ritual of a eating a bowl of soup partially submerged in darkness. Taking soup from a lacquer bowl in a dim room "there is a beauty in that moment between removing the lid and lifting the bowl to the mouth when one gazes at the still, silent liquid in the dark depths of the bowl, its colour hardly differing from that of the bowl itself. What lies within the darkness one cannot distinguish ... a moment of mystery, it might almost be called a moment of trance."14 The lacquerware bowl, gaudy in full light, softens and deepens in shadow. "Its florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of overtones but partly suggested." For Tanizaki, shadows have their own beauty, and also the beauty of traditional Japanese objects is brought out in darkness. Under electric light, silver and gold embellishment can appear "unsettlingly garish" and vulgar, but lit only by a lantern or candle, "suddenly those garish objects turn sombre, refined, dignified". Tanizaki does not say, as in some cheesy aesthetic theodicyb, that we need the dark to appreciate the light. Nor that the sanitised glare of the industrialised West is too much of a good thing. But that just as we need light to see at all, we need the shadow to perceive the beauty of objects conceived in the dark.

Amelie Rorty: "When we deplore what we regard as misplaced loyalty or highly focused concentration that resists expansion or correction we pejoratively classify it as self-deception. But when we admire persistent and dedicated single-minded attention that systematically resists the distraction of fringe phenomena, we call it courage or purposeful resolution." b Ive never understood the idea of perfection as an aesthetic virtue; why not a universe formed upon wabi sabi principles?

I think of a traditional description of the torah: black fire on white fire. Here the darkness, the black ink on parchment, is the light of knowledge, wisdom made legible. The shadow does not bring meaning to the foreground, it is the meaning. These are not accidental shadows flickering on a cave wall, but the plan of creation, rooted in the deepest truth. It is said that the space around the text, the 'white fire', is the esoteric truth of creation, too sublime for direct apprehension. The case for reverent wonder unclouded by the disillusioning touch of cold philosophy is made beautifully in Martin Buber's rendering of a Hasidic tale. We are told that Rabbi Israel of Rizhin is sitting with men of great wisdom. He asks why people are opposed to the great philosopher Maimonides. Because, a sage answers, at one point Maimonides asserts that Aristotle knew more about the heavens than the prophet Ezekiel. "'Rabbi Israel then said: "It is just as our master Maimonides says. Two men came into the palace of a king. One of them concentrated on each room, admired with a connoisseur's eye the precious materials and the jewels and could not have enough of examining. The other whisked through the rooms, continually saying to himself: 'This is the house of the king, this is the king's garment, only a few more steps and I shall behold my lord the king.'"'15 This is not anti-intellectual so much as a case for getting to the point. The function of good thinking is to produce good action. The faithful should not allow intellectual games to distract them from the work at hand. That sounds like a fair account of Maimonides's view of irreverent sophists, if not of the prince of philosophers himself. Nachman of Breslov, maybe the paradigmatic Romantic dogmatist, warned that philosophy and sophistication of thought were unnecessary at best, even harmful to spiritual progress. Nachman also embodies the tension of Hasidism as a popular movement centred on the rebbe in which the mythological and ritualistic procedures of religion and community are based on the outpouring of emotion, especially joy, but where those procedures are strictly defined by an individual with the knowledge, charisma and divine inspiration necessary to radically interpret the law. If the Buber tale is taken as a paean to mystical knowledge - clinging to white fire, ascending to behold the king - then we must recognise that the thrill of radical truth is open only to an elite circle of the elect, while the rest of us can only hope to do what we're told in a more or less predictable way. This is a common view of the highest form of enlightened faith, challenged in an amazing and subtle way in the Lubavitch tradition.

The Babylonian Talmud, the primary corpus of codified Jewish oral law, makes the bold and apparently self-defeating claim that when Jeremiah says "He causes me to dwell in darkness", the prophet is referring to the Babylonian Talmud. The Jerusalem Talmud makes a ruling and gets on with it, while its exilic counterpart is a tangled web of back-and-forth question and answer and a mish-mash of myth, legend and tortured jurisprudence. And yet not only is the Babylonian Talmud the more commonly cited and studied, when there is a legal dispute between the two, the Babylonian Talmud takes precedence. The last Lubavitch rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, offers his followers a counterintuitive explanation. The authors of the Jerusalem Talmud were located at a site of holiness and thus had less mediated access to divine reality. The exiled Babylonian sages, by contrast, were reasoning in the shadows, dependent more on dialectical reasoning than the white fire of revealed truth. The law follows the Babylonian ruling not despite that fact, but because of it. For in the process of grasping blindly, of considering and reconsidering and picturing every argument and counterargument of each position, the mystery of the partially revealed is most fully assimilated. In the very process of reaching for the truth, knowledge and truth become unified. "What a world of difference there is between this moment," Tanizaki writes of sitting down to his soup in the depth of the shadow, "and the moment when soup is served Western style, in a pale, shallow bowl." If the Jerusalem Talmud is the pale, shallow bowl - you can eat quickly and be nourished and satisfied without ceremony - then Babylonian hairsplitting represents the depth and mystery of the obscured.a There is value to both, but only one possesses value beyond its immediate function. Lubavitch Hasidism is no less utopian than other flavours of messianism, but it does not perceive exile and darkness as a logical necessity (or a contingent accident). In grasping towards Bethlehem, to mix monotheisms, we are blessed with a holy confusion that is part of our inheritance on earth and the reason for being in time. Felix culpa! This remains elitist in the sense that some interpreters define the rules for the rest, but everyone has the privilege of being confused to her own ability.

It's worth noting that Maimonides the Aristotelian wanted to give people a prcis of the law to save them the hassle of tortured Talmudic study so they could focus on attaining philosophical and worldly wisdom

Part II

DOUBT

Death of the author as a kind of present The Depressed Person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror. Thats the opening sentence of David Foster Wallaces story The Depressed Person, from which we might expect to follow an investigation into the obstacles to full interpersonal communication and the corresponding merits of candid discussion. If sharing this pain is impossible, and the impossibility magnifies the pain, then it follows that the nearer an empathetic connection, the fuller the disclosure, the more the horror may be moderated. And it doesnt need a daring interpretive leap to see talking and listening as symbols of communication more broadly and of writing in particular. To expect an account of, maybe, the artistic process faltering, a writers block that immobilises the writers most important emotion-management resources, i.e. writing. On such an expectation, the failure may not be the writers only. Sharing is impossible also because the reader is slapdash, or unsuitably educated, or under pressure from her hectic work and family life and doesnt have time to scrutinise every sentence for subtleties of authorial intent. The story as anticipated could do a number of things. A life account of the pitiable depressed person and her struggle to communicate her suffering is at least an indirect articulation of what the depressed person herself is unable to express. Performed sensitively, explaining clearly that to tell the story of the depressed persons diminished powers of communication with regard to this particular area of discussion, i.e. her depression and the consequences of not fully expressing the extent and character of this pain, for reasons linked to the depression itself and therefore for which reasons the depressed person cannot be criticised or even condescended to, is not to make a judgment on the depressed persons talent for articulate discussion in general or even to claim special insight into the particulars of the depressed persons depression, reiterating the near-certainty that an outside observer is not directly privy to the emotional and mental states which are the subject of description, but that in this case, for previously described reasons relating to the depressed persons self-confessed inability to describe this particular, if singularly significant and pervasive, feature of her identity, the storyteller is in the best, or at least sufficiently adequate and therefore justifiable aesthetically and on an emotional/moral basis, position for communicating this central aspect of the depressed persons emotional life, without presuming ownership of the depressed person, to reduce her to an weapon in the fiction writers belle lettristic armourya but to express,

In the sense of the relevant moral-aesthetic construction that gives weight and a particular analytical sense to the story, which does not imply taking on the delusion that the depressed person is not in fact a fictional character, although she may be based on a real life person. [The probability that the author of the currently-discussed story has based this character on, to some extent, himself does not change the moral/aesthetic relationship of the author of the story to the character of the depressed person, i.e. the depressed person named as such in the

self-consciously not on the depressed persons behalf, an attempt at the most adequate articulation possible of a variety of emotional experience. The articulation of which, while of indirect if any benefit to the depressed person herselfa, has obvious if not incontrovertible value, at least according to the narrative expectation I have been leading you towards, specifically (not an exhaustive list) the by now conventionally recognised expansion of empathy for which imaginative art is, probably justifiablyb treasured as well as the brute aesthetic value of, depending on your narratological preferences, advances in mimetic precision or creative novelty. Failing which sympathetic depiction of interior experiencec, the nuanced description of the failure of articulation and the vivid presentation of the compounding effect of that failure on the depressed persons interior well-being has maybe a cathartic value that a neatly realisable artwork couldntd. * Whew. The most powerful anxiety Wallaces writing produces may be fear of insufficient influence. How can such dense prose be so animated and so controlled? Wallace was careful to leave out what he called puff words (why say utilise when use exists?). But he was motivated as much by enthusiasm for the language as by high-minded considerations of style.e And his earlier stories16 are as affecting as anything in our culture. The peculiar anxiety produced by Wallaces influence is connected to knowledge and vigilance. As much as anyone, Wallace was immune to the fallacy that alertness might free us from illusion. He rejected complacent scepticism, as if scepticism doesnt itself bear a burden of social and personal cultural meanings, or at least can be disentangled from distorting smugness. Not that Wallace believed we were not not disillusioned disillusionment characterises our age but that our cultural legacy is to accept an error (that disillusionment is truth) or to recognise that we can identify our private and public ideologies only by adopting an alternate pose of knowingness.

David Foster Wallace story The Depressed Person, putting aside literary theory problems raised by this line of thinking. a And here the fictional status of the depressed person is emotionally/morally relevant b Taking care as sophisticated and self-aware readers not to take morbid pleasure in imagined pain or falling for bathetic or unearned emotional gimmicks c A failure of intention which might not be discounted in terms of aesthetic success d Not excluding the possibility that even a failure of artistic resolution can be a distraction, which, what the hell, all art may ultimately be, allowing for quantum leaps of difference of subtlety, narrative power and canonical endurance, and that if we are to be honest with ourselves what we call catharsis is in fact an especially refined variety of distraction. e DFWs Oxford American Writers Thesaurus entry for pulchritude: Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves. (Im taking this website on trust: http://blog.oup.com/2008/11/writers-thesaurus/)

Re-reading The Depressed Person, it is hard not see it at some level to be concerned with art-making and the authors voice and the relationship between writer and reader. But of course it departs violently from the expectation that I needed you suppress your literary intuition and familiarity with the canon and late 20th to early 21st century North American fiction in order to entertain; namely, a tight correspondence between i) full and authentic interpersonal expression, ii) fully realised art and iii) emotional-cultural well-being, plus a description of the consolation, when the artist fails adequately to convey the quote unquote emotional kernel of her art, of the mitigating and possibly emancipatory effect of honestly expressing that inadequacy. Instead, the story is quicksand. Each flailing movement towards solid ground pulls us deeper underground. Despairing of describing her suffering to others, the depressed person resorts to describing the apparent sources of her pain, to its aetiology and cause including her parents divorce and their guilt-making fight over paying for her orthodontic care. Thats a promising approach; if we cannot grasp the thing in itself, a good empiricist will make educated inferences from cause17 and effect, a continual process of examination, closing in on the thing with more detail and clarity. Finding it impossible to communicate fully what it is like to be the depressed person, she tries during her chronic phone calls to her support network of friends, as per her therapists advice, to share at least the contextual shape of her unceasing psychic agony. But the depressed person knows how this will seem; she is acutely, if not unerringly, self-aware. Not wanting to be one of those people who are obsessed with childhood dysfunction, always blaming their past for present problems, the depressed person averaged four interpolated apologies during each call to a friend. She knows how dreary or self-pitying people of that sort sound. Its clear that self-pitying isnt an ethical category in this case, but a perceptual one. Its about how one is seen. And there is, unfortunately, no moral sanction for being dull, making the function of the apologies not so much about atonement as image control. Specifically, by signalling to the listener that the depressed person is aware of how she is almost certainly coming across, she confirms that she is not naive to the trope of the self-loathing neurotic who blames everyone else for her shortcomings; she knows the type. The contrast between the control and unselfishness (however begrudging we may deduce it to be) of the support network members and the depressed persons desperate imposition is obvious, sometimes grotesquely so. The depressed person is grateful that one especially valuable listener, a divorced mother, is more frequently available to sympathise with the depressed person because she is recuperating at home from a course of chemotherapy. If the irony isnt subtle, thats because the point is not about grasping fine distinctions, tiny lapses of

judgment, emotional blind spots that must be worked through before they destroy precious relationships. Et cetera. The depressed person knows that she is a burden and a bore, and it pains her. The deeper sin is that she is more distressed about being seen as a burden and a bore than about the tedium and emotional fatigue she imposes on her invaluable support network. But she recognises that too, and it distresses her.a The depressed person is addicted to empathy, or the formal configuration of empathetic interactionb, and the fallout from initiating those engagements will always be secondary, or posterior, to the compulsion to call. At the same time she is scrupulous not to look for cheap excuses or to outsource blame so not to be the tiresome problem friend who refuses responsibility for her well-being; and also because she realises that our private reasoning is complicit with our desire, i.e. rationalising failure in the pejorative sense that self-serving reasoning has acquired. Two barriers to the pursuit of knowledge become evident: a) awareness that explanations are self-serving and b) the habitual refusal of explanation for the self-serving reason of not wanting to be perceived in a certain way. Questions of aetiology are both impossible and undesirable, for contrasting reasons. Beyond this is the meta-knowledge of that inescapable contradiction. At this point even patient readers will tire of the depressed person. What a piece of work. After a while its difficult to extend sympathy to an addict; how much more so when she is addicted to empathy? Especially when the pursuit of empathy is prescribed as part of the cure (a cure doomed never to work). But then what is the difference between the indifference of the depressed person to the suffering of her confidants and the indifference that desensitises us to the depressed persons pain? That pain forms the root of the depressed persons compulsion to call her friends and to inflict her tedium on them - and it is the cause of our antipathy to the depressed person and the reason we cannot guiltlessly despise her. A sure-fire way to sidestep infuriation is simply not to pay attention; a slap in the face of the idea of serious reading and a mockery of the ideal of fictions role in extending empathetic sensibilities. (Complicated by the David Foster Wallace system of interlocking footnotes: either you are concentrating or you are literally missing high percentages of what is on the page.) Another way - a cheap way - of taking the depressed person seriously and maintaining emotional dignity is to displace our resentment to the fictional author of her treatment regimen, if not to the literal author of her anxiety. That seems prima facie to be not entirely fair. Managing compulsion is a losing game; and it would not be saying much if we charged the
a

The black holes gravitational pull is infinite: the supportive friends chemo and ensuing convalescence has greatly reduced the number of responsibilities in her full, functional, vibrantly other-directed adult life. The depressed person at some level both resents her friends success while concurrently excusing her own imposition of tedium upon what she reassures herself is an otherwise full and happy life. b More precisely, with the formal configuration of being empathised with.

depressed person's therapist with ineffectiveness. A charge that, in the grand scheme of things, is not grave. But ignore for a moment what therapy is supposed to do and what it is for. Let's look at how this therapeutic relationship plays out. The therapist "was always extremely careful to avoid appearing to judge or blame the depressed person ... or to suggest that the depressed person had in any way consciously chosen or chosen to cling to a chronic depression". Nonetheless, it becomes clear during the therapeutic process that the depressed person is holding on to defence mechanisms formed in childhood that are no longer appropriate, that are in fact now counterproductive to the point of exacerbating the trauma feeding the depressed persons self-hatred. But without reference to the depressed persons decision-making processes, its hard to imagine a story comprehensive enough to explain not just the origin of these defence mechanisms but also the reason for their persistence. The avoidance of blame is unavoidably, to some point, an evasion of aetiology. Thats ok. We can change things that we didnt choose.18 And the therapist gives practical advice (for example, sustaining a telephone network of trusted confidants) and she does not equivocate about the need for change; at least, she explains the necessary steps towards change. For example, a measure of success in treatment would be the depressed persons learning, to a modest extent (if were to be realistic about this) to let go of those now deeply ingrained but counterproductive childhood defence mechanisms. But profound emotional transformation cannot be forced, and the therapist "made it clear from the outset that she was in no way going to pressure, hector, cajole, argue, persuade, flummox, trick, harangue, shame or manipulate the depressed person into letting go of her vestigial defences" before she was ready to do so "freely". The depressed person must make the choice and the corresponding effort; the therapist is, at best, facilitator of change. We might forgive the depressed person if she detected a strain of, to use one of pop psychology's more onerous catchphrases, passive aggression in her therapist. A caricature of the treatment method could sound like this: 'Oh, I'm not telling you what to do, I'm merely stating what ought to be done." Coupled with this: "Of course you didn't choose your problems, but only you can choose to end them." We could explain and defend the therapist's tone with reference to the defensive steps that are all but inevitable given the absurdities and difficulties of trying to dampen the feedback loop of self-loathing affecting the depressed person and appreciating how compelling it must be for an expensively-educated high-prestige professional whose life work is the amelioration of incurable turmoil to on at least an unconscious level refuse to take responsibility for the inevitability of failure while at the same time refusing to relinquish the authority that is her vocational raison dtre.

How much, I wonder, does this reflect the way David Foster Wallace came to view the relationship between author and reader, and about even the possibility of writing? In the stories collected in 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men', Wallace's chronic fascination with the post-everything anxiety about self-identity seems to have progressed from theory to method, from subject to form. The characters are self-defeating in a peculiar way; frequently self-knowledge becomes a kind of weapon to defeat understanding. For instance, the men briefly interviewed throughout Brief Interviews with Hideous Men are truly hideous, but not in neatly definable ways, and behave in ways that (the recurring difficulty) are not neatly differentiated from non-hideous, even occasionally exemplary, behaviour. One interviewee distinguishes standard players, "your basic smoothie-type fellows", from the "Great Lover". The Great Lover is a category of hideous man identified by a hideous man, and the will to identification will be enough for us to damn the latter.a The Regular Joe smoothie is a crude, if effective, operator. He just wants to mount his conquest and get his kicks, "roll on and roll off and that's all she wrote". The Great Lover, by contrast, holds an annotated Kama Sutra in his memory, "going down on her yinyang for hours on hours", etc. It's not enough for the Great Lover to get his rocks off; he needs his partner to experience pleasure, too. That sounds commendable, but the interviewee has not set out to record instances of altruism. The Great Lover, in fact, is pursuing a more complex pleasure, a rarer conquest than his less refined counterpart. The regular player is like an animal, but he's not fooling anybody. Great Lovers aim to please, maybe put their partners pleasure above their own, but "the catch is they're selfish about being generous. They're no better than the pig is, they're just sneakier about it." The thing is, the interviewee explains, they're both "notchers"; but the regular player puts down a notch for each woman he nails, while the more exacting GL puts down a notch each time he makes his partner come. Now I ask you, what's the problem here? It's reasonable to assume the interviewee has been sketching a psychological critique of some sort, a case study of emotion stunted by egoism, or whatever. But the criticism is pointed against not so much the motive force of the Great Lover's sexual performances as his method. The interviewee is contemptuous of the Great Lover's technique. For the GL may know all the moves, but he fails to recognise that his partner wants to feel needed too, that being compelled to "just lie there and get worked on like a Porsche" can be more tedious than the predictable and unfussy selfishness of the regular player. "Who wants to lie there feeling all ungenerous and greedy while some Yuppie with a Porsche shows
a

What do our conclusions about this hideous man say about us?

off his Tantric Clouds and Rain Half-Lotus on you and mentally notching off how many times you come?" If the Great Lover's lovers find his lavish attention burdensome, whom is he being sneaky to? Possibly to us; to we ordinary lovers who are, if not quite admirers then envious of the prowess of the Great Lover. The interviewee is at pains to show he is under no such illusion. The Great Lover is sneaky not, as we might have thought, because his actions mask his intentions, but because his methodology appears, to outsiders, to offer something that it does not. And here the interviewee reveals the secret. The key is to the offer your partner the chance to give you pleasure in equal quantity to the pleasure you offer her. At least, she must believe that to be the case. "That's if a fellow wants to be a genuine great lover and think of her for one damn second." "Think of her" means, of course, refine your sexual theory of mind, know what she feels in order more precisely to calibrate your technique to her desire, not least her desire to please and feel generous. He may, in fact, be a True Great Lover but he is no Great Guy. The True Great Lover desires, and his desires are met by giving his partner exactly (as far as we can tell) what she wants. But he is deceiving her! He is treating her as nothing more than an end! He does not respect her dignity! He doesn't really care for her, he only cares about his own satisfaction! How so? By considering his own success, and therefore taking pleasure, according to the degree to which he gives her what she wants. Were she wise to his method (and she probably at some level is) she would probably see him as no more than a notcher himself, one of subtle psychological penetration. And she (and we) might think him worst of all; the most invidious manipulator of his partner's desires for no more than boosting his own sense of achievement. Is he truly worse for taking a universal pattern of behaviour to its logical conclusion? Ultimately, how is 'true love' fully manifested but through the desire for the well-being of the loved? Love is only as possible as altruism: that is, it's possible, but it's probably not safe to think about it too much. This hideous man is less of a conundrum than the depressed person. We can imagine him reformed, as maybe a less superficially effective but more authentic (however we take that) lover. But there's a complication. Reform here means abnegation; either the hideous man or his desires must go. The simplest solution, if he is struck by an attack of moral neurosis, is to remove himself from all offending relationships; in effect, to commit to abstinence. In that case there is no offence, but there is no good. There is nothing. What kind of a life (what kind of a moral principle) is that? A second solution: he can suppress his desire (maybe through years of disciplined ascetic practice). In the unlikely event that he is successful, he will no longer be liable to charges of exploiting a women's pleasure merely for his own. But nobody, as the hideous man has made clear, "wants to lie there feeling all ungenerous and greedy" and without desire he cannot take part in the wholesome reciprocal relationship we have taken as the ideal. (If the purpose the relationship is now to bolster the hideous man's sense of

abstemious virtue, that only restates the original problem.)a A third way: the hideous man can ignore his own desires and, for reason of high moral principle, choose to deceive his partner in a way that, seen from outside, is identical to the deception effected for the hideous man's sexual-psychological gratification, but undertaken for completely different, refined, ethical motivations. A virtuous programme, maybe, but one that jars with our intuitions about authenticity. The point is not that desire complicates everything (which it obviously does) but that intentions, desires and virtues, one's own and others, are often entangled in a way that makes the effort to unknot them risk unspooling the whole damn thing. And that the consequent temptation is to give up, to run away. Lets return to the Depressed Person. We learn that the depressed person's therapist has suddenly died, the result of a lethal interaction of medications. The death is shocking and unexpected, but "given the therapists extensive medical background and knowledge of chemical interactions, only a person in very deep denial indeed could fail to see must have been, on some level, intentional". The therapist literally annuls herself. She is no longer able to not quite give instructions that won't quite be followed. If the view from nowhere is impossible, and the effort to modulate the illusion of detachment pathologises disillusionment, the neat way to terminate misreading is to eliminate the messenger. In practice, the depressed person is not just unmoored and bewildered, she also blames herself for failing to notice, for being too self-absorbed to notice, the therapists own distress. The spiral doesnt deepen, perhaps, but it persists. If we believe that expression is a de facto form of prescription, that description is never innocent (and that metafictional gimmicks are no less loaded) then sincerity is not enough, nor are good intentions: ethical expression needs responsibility. Self-annihilation is responsibility inverted.b The sure way never to pressure, hector or cajole the reader is never to write, but that is no less than the purest renunciation of responsibility. How can you be responsible with so much doubt? An idealistic answer: If we think literature is necessary, and that commitment is necessary for literature, then the need for necessity without certainty makes our commitment, so to speak, authentic. *

What does the need to acknowledge his partners desire to be unselfish say about the hideousness of women? Why not take nihilism to its own logical conclusion and annul everything? Im not sure theres a straightforward logical answer, but thered be nowhere to get decent espresso.
b

Richard Rorty's reading of Nabokov presents a paradigmatic case of the inauthentic relationship. To underwrite his reading, Rorty chooses to use Judith Shklar's definition of a liberal: that "liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do."19 Part of his programme is to explore books that might make us less cruel. A class of such books are "works of fiction which exhibit the blindness of a certain type of person to the pain of another kind of person."20 We can imagine untendentious cases: books that sensitise us to cultural difference or simply to emotional idiosyncrasies, and to the ways that we unwittingly trespass on their sensitivities. Those books expand our frame of reference and might even change our attitudes. Anyone aspiring to cosmopolitanism would have reason to read at least some such works. Focusing on what we often take to be the special province of fiction, there are books that we might take to show the way individual attitudes and behaviours can cause pain to other individuals.a Rorty points to a line in Lolita that, despite Nabokov's avowal that his novel has no moral, crystallises how indifference is the essence of cruelty. Humbert Humbert procures a "very mediocre" haircut from an old barber who "babbles of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easelled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the moustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years." Humbert Humbert does not see what does not feed is monomania. (He also suffers from cold narcissism: the revelation about the dead child is preceded by a criticism of his haircut.) Humbert is similarly inattentive to any mention of Lolita's dead brother. His indifference in each instance is to the fate of the child, but also to the suffering of the parent. How callous, then, is his dismissal of Charlotte Haze's description of her dead son, for it is precisely through wilful indifference to Lolita's mother's despair at the loss of her son that Humbert Humbert is able to conquer her daughter. Charlotte Haze becomes the means to an end par excellence, and Humbert needs to know enough about her to get what he wants and exactly no more. Ellen Pifer (on whose work Rorty builds) shows that Humbert's ignorance is no accident. Humbert chooses not to know: a plausible description of what cruelty is.

There is, of course, no reason to think any one book only does one thing.

Humbert's obsession, according to Pifer , forms "an irony that gradually reveals its tragic dimensions: having explored every particle of his nymphet's face and body ... he remains blind to the child's inner life and being."21 Does this mean Humbert's obsession is circumscribed or that his desires are base and no more than that? The opposite may be the case. Humbert's blindness, Pifer explains, "is both deliberate and self-serving". The few instances he considers Lolita's inner life are a torment for him. Pifer highlights a moment when Humbert admits that for a fleeting instant "I knew how she felt, and it was hell to know it".22 Humbert's need to suppress empathy does not reveal his humanity, it damns him. He knows that to get what he wants he needs to inflict pain, worse he senses the sting of that pain, and he pursues his desires anyway. But the problem with Humbert is not just that hes a bastard. Humbert Humbert, intellectual and artist manqu, does not hold American sensibilities in the highest esteem. Charlotte Haze's aspirational middlebrow home encapsulates part of Humbert's vision of the American scene (and marks Mrs Haze as a useful philistine). The rest is the landscape of pop sensibilities and mass production; advertising and motels. Humbert doesn't quite see what isn't there, but what is there must be imagined to fit the heroic sensibilities of a man of the (old) world. The tale, retold in romantic isolation from a prison cell, is the story of the mythical nymphet Lolita. The rift in the fantasy occurs when Lolita is gone; only then "does Humbert begin to recognise the autonomous being - the 'North American girl-child named Dolores Haze,' as he ultimately identifies her - whose tender flesh was sacrificed on the altar of his obsession."23 Humbert has no curiosity about Charlotte's daughter Dolores and her humdrum school life and friendships because his obsession is with the mythic Lolita. And Dolores's dead brother doesn't figure in the tale not simply because he does not feed Humbert's obsession, but because he barely even exists in the romantic tale of Humbert Humbert and Lolita. Pifer observes, with pointed acuity: That Humbert consummates his passion for the nymphet in the Enchanted Hunters hotel is apt, for he is the enchanted hunter of his own romantic tale."24 Wallace's anti-irony shows that the power of solipsism, even involuntary, is that we can enact the form of considering others and still be the divas of our own reality TV show. Pifer's moral is that even the gesture of High Romance transfigures our relationship to those around us, with more or less baleful consequences.

If we take malignant indifference and obsession as both rooted in solipsism (its interesting how often seeming opposites are expressions of the same phenomenon) we can appreciate the worst distortions of the imagination not as overcorrection to apathy, but as a twinned narcissism. Maybe the difference is about culpability. The depressed person deserves sympathy; Humbert is to be despised. "Dolores Haze is trapped in within the nymphic guise conjured by Humbert's imagination."25 Unlike the depressed person, Humberts withdrawal from the real is less a defence against guilt than a pretext for it. Dolores Haze would be the collateral damage in Humberts grubby biography, but Lolita is the supporting starlet. "Only the power of imagination can 'fill the gap' between the ideal and the actual."26 * Rortys ironic liberalism licences us to put aside metaphysical commitments (or simply to shut up about metaphysics) and try to be less cruel. Thats great, but its obligatory, venturing through this territory, to remember Sydney Morgenbesser's priceless maxim: pragmatism is great in theory, but it doesn't work in practice. A promise of art may be that it offers a map without a destination. The problem is that when you somehow still get lost, theres nowhere to return to.a Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. David Foster Wallaces characterization is the one that ultimately matters. But just imaginative force and discrimination are not sufficient for an admirable lifeb, doubt about living is by no means inevitably resolved in fiction. I claimed that Wallace was hyperaware of the fallacy that vigilance frees us from illusion. The hard work is to distinguish between corrosive uncertainty and therapeutic awareness of contingency. But merely to state this (merely even to believe it) is, at best, a platitude or tautology, and at worst is the cause and pretext for the destructive solipsism detailed in Wallaces later fiction. Before veering into book chat, I was concerned with the emancipatory power of negative capability; the power not necessarily of scepticism but of being honest about separating the ideas of ourselves that we need to make our social systems work and those that are, you know, true. The implicit question was, in part, who are the pragmatists, those who say that facts

Compare Addisons sharp essay on superstition, in which he pinpoints the self-defeating character of common superstition, preserving his own equanimity by securing to my self the Friendship and Protection of that Being, who disposes of Events, and governs Futurity. b Though Nabokov would say Humberts imagination is feeble or defective.

about ourselves must be understood according to how we need them to be, or those who are suspicious of merely convenient thinking?27 I rejected the antique notion than an erosion of authority must lead to chaos. The consequence, we have come to learn, is not that everything is permitted but that we dont know what to permit ourselves to be. The dilemma is private, not public. Of course well be good, or pretty good - empathy tends to curtail our excess. But without clear principles of how to realise ourselves we inexorably depend on received ideas of self-expression. A consequence is that we risk inhabiting an atomised society, rather than a society of individuals. Nabokov, Rorty and Pifer teach us that its not enough to imagine the life you want. Wallace teaches us that unless you can imagine your life on your own terms, your may have to hold yourself to a standard you have no hope of reaching. It helps to distinguish between irony that is a reaction against value in toto, and commitment that acknowledges the contingency of our beliefs and desires. Sincere commitment is tantamount to authentic action, but that doesnt make it true in some difficult way. My hope in the preceding overview was to scratch away some of the accumulated dross encrusting our self-conceptions, especially assumptions about obligation, liability and personal value. A lesson of the prose of maladjustment, I believe, is that therapeutic irony the clearing away of unhelpful assumptions - should be conceptually prior to the investigation of our condition. Rorty: "The generic task of the ironist is the one Coleridge recommended to the great and original poet: to create the taste by which he will be judged. But the judge the ironist has in mind is himself. He wants to be able to sum up his life on his own terms."28a Wallaces depressed persons problem is not that shes too much an individual, its that shes a card-carrying member of a community of solipsists. She is self-absorbed but examines her life according to received opinion. And what distresses her more than anything is the probability that others will recognise her inadequacy when measured by this light (and that she must expose that weakness in attempting to surmount it). Rortys recommendation is private advice, and whether a community of individualist ironists is desirable even in principle is an open question. The distinction it should help emphasise is that between the pleasures and dangers of the romantic heros reinvention of taste and of the general phenomenon of self-criticism according to inherited categories.

If that sounds antisocial, note that if we only consider irony and contingency, were neglecting a third of the book.

Heres an inspirational message that shot across my social media feed, attributed to evangelist Joyce Meyer: What others say about you is not nearly as important as what God says. He says you're valuable, loved and accepted! No one should be too surprised when God turns out to be Oprah, but it would be interesting to account for the social currents that turned theology into a self-esteem programme. This is no doubt an improvement on talk of hellfire and damnation, but one wonders about a relationship that swings between the push of retribution and the pull of sublime, transcendent non-bitchiness. The earth will shake at the wrath of the Almighty, but He doesnt think youre annoying or too clingy or fat. * El texto que las llamas perdonaron goz de una veneracin especial y quienes lo leyeron y releyeron en esa remota provincia dieron en olvidar que el autor slo declar esa doctrina para poder mejor confutarla. Haters gonna hate. In Hazlitts even more resonant phrasing, without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Two assumptions we cant shake: hating is inevitable and there are few more effective motivators than the hard edge of hatred. Avarice and ambition define the goals, antipathy is the kick that gets you down to business. We hate not because me must but because we enjoy it. Or we must hate because we enjoy it. Which is, at best, a mixed blessing. Hazlitts diagnosis remains sound: "The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands". And see here how love and hate are mixed up in the usual way. Even the warmest connections risk sliding into disgruntlement. Hazlitt concedes in the same essay, On the Pleasure of Hating, that the only intimacy I never found to flinch or fade was a purely intellectual one. And though this relationship was honest, intellectually beautiful and free of the whine of mawkish sensibility, one doubts that for impulsive Bonaparte fanboy William Hazlitt such detachment would be enough. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all is the relevant platitude, and the corresponding question is something like this: Is it better sometimes to hate your friends than never to have friends at all? Ill try to give that a bit of weight: Is emotional intimacy worth it given the probable accompanying emotional turmoil and that turmoils potentially destructive fallout? If the question seems trivial, I think its because we dont seriously consider the power and consequences of disciplined detachment. If an antidote to the poisonous mineral exists, why not take it? And because it is also the cure, lets suppose, to the impulses that make

detachment unacceptable, that make not hating intolerable, we consequently uproot the sources of hating and of the suffering of wanting to hate. Buddhism reveals a trinity of poisons. Hatred is one, desire and delusion the others.29 The side effects of this toxic cocktail are harmful and self-destructive behaviours. We have no compunction attacking what we hate to get the things we want, the things we are deluded in believing will fulfil us. The things we think will make us happy only cause suffering, and, of course, failing to get what we want is also a cause of suffering. Is love hatred's cure? Well, not exactly. For what is love but the desire for intimacy and security and understanding coupled with the delusion that intimacy is the key to happiness? Better never to love than to perpetuate suffering. * Two considerations. a) Is this true? b) If it is true, so what? Do we want not to want? Do we desire not to desire? Less heroically, is it worth the fuss? The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes that some flavour of the Buddhist projecta is the likeliest method for achieving an interesting life of reduced suffering and self-deception. Not an easy or necessarily comfortable life but one of focus and purpose and, potentially, great cognitive depth. That claim needs to be defended and expanded. But put that aside. Im not trying to convince you to follow the path of Gautama Buddha, but to find the reasons not to. For few things will better help us to value the way we find ourselves living than consciously rejecting the best candidate for our salvation from that life. I propose that how we answer question (b) is edifying regardless of the truth value of (a). A defensible rejection of (my characterisation) of detachment is the best defence of the mess and fuss of a life of desire. And failing to find those reasons will be no less instructive. The significant reasons arent religious or cultural or about the drag of authority. Not because those reasons arent legitimate, but because deferring to them may not tell us much about the alternatives. There is also, of course, the practical risk that ones attempt at a new kind of life will fail, and fail disastrously, which may be reason enough not to try.b But put that aside, too. Interesting questions reveal themselves when we suspend prior objections and practical doubts.
a

If it chimes with your sensibilities, strip Buddhism down to an historical tradition of acute phenomenology with normative conclusions. But the results will be watered down. b A scene from some documentary about Buddhism in Sri Lanka haunts me. A young British man somehow found himself bewildered in a jungle wearing saffron robes. He was obviously isolated and very unhappy, and hinted, but could not quite concede, that hed made a terrible mistake. It was heartbreaking.

One more preliminary doubt, which Ill try to dispatch quickly. Some may wonder if it is in principle okay to suppress our primal urges. This objection is refuted without difficulty. If we take evolution as our guide then, as Flanagan reminds us,30not all adaptations that conferred an advantage in the past will still be useful. Traits advantageous in the face of surprise sabre tooth tiger attacks may prove hindrances in crowded cities. Note also that not all characteristics are direct adaptations; some may be by-products of evolutionary processes and thus provide no advantage, or do so only incidentally.a (There is no need to continue stuffing this straw man, but it is worth noting the difference between the contemporary understanding of innate beliefs (whatever those may be) and the claims of earlier innatists. The original claims of empiricism were not politically innocent. For example, part of Lockes historical project was to demonstrate that beliefs are acquired rather than divinely given and that, it follows, its not enough to defend the political status quo with reference to whatever people happen to believe. Its unlikely, then, that Locke would have difficulty reconciling adaptive behaviour (biological rather than divine in origin) with progressive toleration31.) * Assuming no principled difficulty with transforming our nature, we can consider particular cases. Eliminating anger is a Buddhist virtue. Not merely to keep one's anger under control, not to channel one's anger productively, but to consider the emergence of anger as error and to seek to eradicate it. Eliminating a primal instinct will strike many as incredible, but Tibetan Buddhist tradition assures us that it is possible - and that it has been done.32 Anger management, like other kinds of management, is about productivity gains. The Tibetan tradition acknowledges the benefits of living without anger but it goes further, holding that the emotion is intrinsically destructive, toxic at any dose. It would be a caricature to describe the alternative view as bluntly instrumental ('good anger is effective, bad anger is destructive'). The popular and institutional psychologies of the West recognise that rage is frequently 'about' something other than the purported object of ire. Why
a

Those complications notwithstanding, surely our natural behaviour is a blueprint for how we are supposed to be? To answer life's-meaning conundrums, one need only find the relevant episode of House, M.D. While examining a patient who participates in an open marriage, the chronically unfaithful Dr Chris Taub is reassured by a colleague that a certain genetic inheritance predisposes men to infidelity. In other words, he is determined by nature to cheat and needn't blame himself. "I'm 5'6" and I have a receding hairline," Taub replies, "I hate genetics." Nature might explain why we do what we do, but it doesn't make it right (or wrong).

did the vein on that driver's forehead start throbbing when he was cut off, because of a deep commitment to automotive decorum, or because his boss undermines him in front of clients? Most of us would have no trouble imagining a cluster of sources for any given eruption of anger. According to this line of thinking, people may not generally choose to be angry, but there is a distinction between reasonable outbursts and uncontrolled rage. In our time, it's in no way counterintuitive that psychology eases the moral pressure on the latter. To take an extreme example, people with intermittent explosive disorder (appropriately truncated to IED) get an entry in the DSM precisely because they lack impulse control. If they had better control of their rage, and nonetheless lost their cool at the slightest provocation, we might categorise them, less sympathetically, according to some criminological description or, in the vernacular taxonomy, as assholes.a Whatever the acceptable severity and frequency of angerb, does it have a functional role in social relations? And does retribution count if we don't really mean it? If we take the idea of radical non-culpability seriously, and assimilate the lessons of contingency, then it's easy to see anger in the face of other people's misbehaviour as irrational. It's like being angry at a hurricane. But there is a difference. Hurricanes don't care if we're upset at them. They're impossible to reform. Punishment exists to prevent crime, but not only (or once the framework is in place, we have ulterior expectations). We fail the fallen if we cannot guide them to repentance; and for guilty not to affect contrition is the penultimate sin. The unforgivable act is to be indifferent to the sting of punishment.c I think thats a sufficiently suggestive assertion. It just needs to be noted that from the view from detachment there is no tension, because there is nothing to reconcile.

Of course, it is possible simultaneously to suffer from a psychological disorder and to be an asshole, with the former possibly explaining and thereby mitigating the latter. b A working analysis of reasonable anger might go like this: the subject must be angry about what he says he is angry about, he should be able to regulate his anger to a reasonable extent, and his anger and its expression must not be excessive. If you are mugged and you waste a day dreaming up revenge fantasies, and you swear at the newspaper and you don't kick your dog and next day you've calmed down, well that's cool. But some expressions of anger are bad for us or are symptoms of an underlying problem. c To idealise justice as blind is to celebrate the mitigating padding built into that system: that the legal system is designed to be disinterested and rigidly principled (fair) in achieving the end for which it was developed. But the qualifications of due process are what temper the system, they dont comprise its essence. The justice system does not exist to be just but to enact retribution (justice). Doesn't retribution in some sense get its meaning from how it quells and provokes? This is perhaps a question of sentiment, whatever the actual jurisprudence. If law and order is effectively utilitarian, why do we tolerate just so much injustice but not more? Is the balance defined by principle or by what we can stomach?

* The Dalai Lama tells us that the Buddha authorised anger for the sake of others, though it is too toxic to employ for ones own good. The Buddha said that although excrement is dirty in the town, it is helpful when used as fertilizer in the field.33 I think of the Hasidic idea of descent for the sake of ascent, by which sages were authorised apparently to debase themselves in the pursuit of the spiritual uplift of their flock. Alternatively, we learn in the Lotus Sutra that there are varieties of confusion, partial truths, that may be stepping stones to enlightenment34. These measures are either compromises, concessions to our fallibility, or risky spiritual moves, entrusted to a disciplined elite. The latter needs focus and lucid purpose to choose anger; the result is not so much a loss of cool as a controlled explosion. There is good reason to be careful: deliberately placed fertilizer nourishes crops, but its still shita. Contrast Camille Paglia's understanding of what she calls Coleridges aesthetic theory: Romantic inspiration is sporadic, volcanic, and explosive. Art making draws on primitive, amoral, erotic energies, whose unpredictable, occult workings surprise even the artist.35 Art making is not living, and we don't have to do one well to excel at the other; the two may even be mutually incompatible. But one needn't even buy this theory of art to be moved by the current of dark energy below the surface. Surely Sol LeWitt liked to get down now and again? Still, are not precision, range, calm and clarity the tools of the able critic and maybe the superior artist? The definitive statement is Hazlitt's, discussing the relation of Wordsworth's human flaws to his artistry: "We think ... that if Mr Wordsworth had been a more liberal and candid critic, he would have been a more sterling writer. If a greater number of sources of pleasure had been open to him, he would have communicated pleasure to the world more frequently. Had he been less fastidious in pronouncing sentence on the works of others, his own would have been received more favourably, and treated more leniently. The current of his feelings is deep, but narrow; the range of his understanding is lofty and aspiring rather than discursive. The force, the originality, the absolute truth and identity, with which he feels some things, makes him indifferent to so many others. The simplicity and enthusiasm of his feelings, with respect to nature, render him bigoted and intolerant in his judgments of men and things. But it happens to him, as to others, that his strength lies in his weakness; and perhaps we have no right to
a

Though there is a tradition, certainly in post-Lurianic thought, that authorises us to conceive of the act of correction as returning darkness to its source, literally transforming evil into good (into the good which was always its ultimate purpose).

complain. We might get rid of the cynic and the egotist, and find in his stead a common-place man." Wordsworths limitations lead to narrowness, but they are rooted in intolerance, caprice, tempestuousness, impulsiveness. Not unlike how we want our rock stars (safely, hermetically) to be. Hazlitt nicely shows how narrowness and depth are here connected, that the very intensity of passion makes it exclusive. Its amusing to imagine William Wordsworth as an ineffectual country gent, mucking about the flowers without much to say. It doesnt sound like a bad life, and we might ask who the loser would be in that scenario.a To trade the pleasure of hating for the peace of equanimity is not an obvious insult to fulfilment. Job satisfaction aside, Wordsworth's success is not his, it's ours; and the posthumous evolution of 'Wordsworth', the subject of study and veneration, has no effect of Mr Wordsworth. Dr Johnson on the proper moral stance of the critic to the deceased writer: ... there can surely be no exemptions pleaded to secure them from criticism, who can no longer suffer by reproach, and of whom nothing now remains but their writings and their names. Upon these authours the critick is undoubtedly at full liberty to exercise the strictest severity, since he endangers only his own fame, and, like Aeneas when he drew his sword in the infernal regions, encounters phantoms which cannot be wounded." The critic can approach the dead artist without compunction; indeed, this is only proper form because the harm of a poor misreading would be to himself, to his critical reputation, and reticence is thus symptomatic of excessive self-regard, or at least cowardice. The artists legacy is our legacy, the readers. To interpret is to conjure a phantom of meaning; whatever secrets are exposed, we move our own hand across the Ouija board. We create the author even while (as Harold Bloom says of Shakespeare) the author creates us; indeed, reading and writing are in this sense connected. The death of the author is a statement about the reader and the limitlessness of reading, not about whomever wrote the text, who, after the fact

Coleridge would serve better for the counterfactual than Wordsworth about whom wrote Walter Pater: His life of eighty years is divided by no very profoundly felt incidents: its changes are almost wholly inward, and it falls into broad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous spaces. What it most resembles is the life of one of those early Italian or Flemish painters, who, just because their minds were full of heavenly visions, passed, some of them, the better part of sixty years in quiet, systematic industry. Not that Pater would necessarily take a serene Coleridge as a deficient artist. (The philosophic critic, at least, will value, even in works of imagination, seemingly the most intuitive, the power of the understanding in them, their logical process of construction, the spectacle of a supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.)

of her life, is unchanged by our reading.a (Duchamps claim that art history has consistently decided upon the virtues of a work of art through considerations completely divorced from the rationalised explanations of the artist is probably true of any artist other than Duchamp.) But the will to read and interpret proceeds from absence - what we take to be missing in ourselves, or the knowledge we lack about the world. Think of the Mayan priest in Borgess story The Writing of the God who, when he finally unlocks the text, refuses to pronounce the sentence that will free him, refuses, in effect, to read and reinterpret reality. There is no need; He who has glimpsed the universe, he who has glimpsed the burning designs of the universe, can have no thought for a man, for a man's trivial joys or calamities, though he himself be that man. He has completed himself by abnegation; by denying the value of the particular with reference to the sublime whole.b One must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star36 And it is surely proper to read the chaotic artist deeply, i.e. chaotically, or we content ourselves with what? the vulgar attenuated romanticism of the celebrity overdose: that is, the spectacle. And there is the risk that spectacles diminish us as readers, reducing us to spectators. A commitment to chaos means the depth of reading is uncontained. Paglias warning, tinctured by admiration: Complete self-realisation: was this not sought by Nero? Attila the Hun? Hitler? Late Romanticisms extremism remains uncomfortably avant-garde.37 We might look to moderate antisocial extremes by, say, debating Rortys tension between public good and private perfection. But that line of thought licences us to demarcate each
This same is true for arts subjects. When Oscar Wilde talks in The Critic as Artist of the figures of legend who have been immortalised by literature, this is an achievement of nothing more than art, which is as far as he'd have us go. ("When man acts he is a puppet. When he describes he is a poet.") "What of those who gave them reality, and made them live for ever? Are they not greater than the men and women they sing of?" To be 'immortalised' in this sense is to be superseded; art, even biographical art, is not (for Wilde, should not be; "any one can play accurately") simple mimesis, or life, though fleeting, would be superior to its representation. (And anyway even faithful mimesis creates something new; this is not a pipe, etc.) Two other Borges compositions spring to mind (though we might choose any others). Kafka and his Precursors: The poem, 'Fears and Scruples' by Browning foretells Kafka's work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now ... The fact is the every writer creates his own precursors. And the fragment Everything and Nothing, wherein the bard, who had been so many (archetypally, all) men, was thereby not any particular man - as, indeed, is the lament of creator of all, of Berkeleys God: "among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one." Again we are reminded that the Kabbalists Ayin and Ein Sof Nothing and Endless are two sides of the same impossible coin. Keep in mind that Ein Sof is the complement to Ayin, but it is nothing like the striving of heroic self-perfection. The one expands even beyond itself and renders finite existence as null (from the perspective of the infinite, creation is illusory), dissolving the boundaries of solipsism, whereas the other is defined by that boundary and ranks itself in relation to what it is not.
b a

spherea - which is implicitly to have chosen chaos. And the work that follows is the private and public struggle to channel and balance that chaos.b But to read deeply doesnt entail alignment or submission or ordinary repudiation. Blooms visionc of overwhelming admiration and resistance producing strong misreading, of agon between individual strong poets, helps us see literary production as family quarrel. Is it not enough to suffer with or against the artist, a kind of solidarity of the anguished pleasure of deep reading? And does it follow that there is moral equilibrium, assuming a chaotic aesthetic theory, in striving to be strong (mis)readers? To be subject to emotions and passions is probably always an illness of mind because both emotions and passions exclude the sovereignty of reason. Thats not an extract from Hallmarks least successful Valentines card, but late Kant. Not to get all Foucauldian, but what is illness? Nobody takes seriously the notion that we shouldnt try to eradicate serious depression because of a supposed link to creativity any more than they would a suggestion to promote tuberculosis in order to secure a steady flow of consumptive poets wasting away in their garretsd. (The latter seems a fairly common reductio of an argument Im not sure anyones ever made.)e But are there mental or corporeal deviances we might choose to celebrate?

Though Im more and more doubtful these are separable categories. We may remind ourselves of the limits of moderation as an analytical concept. How similar would be communities founded upon Gautama Buddhas Noble Eightfold Path (which is called the Middle Way) and some derivative of the Aristotelian Golden Mean? (The Mahayana tradition uses middle way to refer to a conception of existence from which normative principles would be reasoned. Though not without overlap, these would tend to be quite different from the moderate ethics of a moderate Christian polity.) c Gosh, him again. How strange that I cant escape the Bloomian trope, no matter how much Id want to.
b

One can only avoid Illness as Metaphor for so long: Surely everyone in the nineteenth century knew about, for example, the stench in the breath of the consumptive person. Yet all the evidence indicates that the cult of TB was not simply an invention of romantic poets and opera librettists but a widespread attitude, and that the person dying (young) of TB really was perceived as a romantic personality ... One must suppose that the reality of this terrible disease was no match for the importance of new ideas - particularly about individuality. Its probable that nobody had the fortitude to ask Sontag what all the evidence consisted in, but its interesting to compare the artist, or even the enthusiast, aspiring to consumptive chic with what one imagines is a less widespread contemporary identification with neurosis and alcohol poisoning or the self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head; the unlikelihood of aspiring, knowing the sordid details, to the squalid misery of substance overuse. (Though perhaps rehab has not yet been successfully demythologised.) The 27 club is more meme than myth, and one might admire Joplin, Cobain and Winehouse, and see their pain and art as connected, and not want to be counted among them. Keith Richards stands out, but he is heroic for surviving against the odds, like the speculator who bets everything and wins; a late-capitalist heroism suitable for our times.

Today the doctors would give him lithium and tranquilisers, Robert Hughes did permit himself to say of van Gogh, and we would probably not have the paintings: had the obsessions been banished, the exorcising power of the art could well have leaked away. However, the paintings were not the work of a madman, they were done by

The Kant line is quoted by Alan Stone, who suggests that Kant anticipated the modern concern with self-deception. Kant, I am sure, believed that the tearing away would be done by a rational moral philosophy, but psychiatrys attribution of self-deception to the unconscious suggested that the veil must be lifted in some other manner.38 Psychiatry also suggests that what is unveiled might not be so pretty. A nice observation by Richard Hayes: One of the principal obstacles to progress, Buddhists hold, is sila-vrata-paramarsa, a misguided belief in devotional rituals. As Buddhism grew as an institutionalised religion, this term naturally came to be interpreted as addiction to customs and rituals of any religion other than Buddhism, but there is evidence to suggest that in its earliest usage it referred to the addiction to rituals of any kind. How marvellous to note self-deception about a principle designed to evade deception, within a programme of disillusionment!39 What is literature but a self-perpetuating system of illusionment? (Even especially? when it aims to tell the truth. And never more than when it tells us our suffering is real.) What if art making is a collective disease and we are bonded in illness for the sake of something that goes beyond each of us and even all of us? A game of shadows pretending to guide us out of a labyrinth of its own making. Each reader the disenchanted hunter in an inescapable romantic quest. Its embarrassing to say out loud what should be submerged, but it is occasionally necessary to make explicit the question for which art making is obliquely, maybe unwillingly, searching an answer. To have great poems, there must be great audiences, too, Whitman had declared in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass. His poetic depended on a close connection, even an erotic one, with his imagined listeners: he not only wished to be their spokesman, he wanted them to call out to him to be their spokesman, thereby legitimating his writing. Thats Helen Vendler talking. I take that legitimation to realise itself not only by rapturous assent but no less often through tension, frustration, aversion, fury, jealousy, despair, disgust the frictions of passion. While this erotic activity is initiated in the poets head (not inappropriately for Walt Whitman) it must be consummated in communion with the public, which constrains form and substance. The value-system of an original poet - and therefore of his or her poems - will be in part consonant with, in part in dispute with, the contemporary values of the society from which he, and they, issue. Were the poetry not intelligible with respect to those social values, it could not be read; were it not at a distance from them in some way, it would not be original.40

an ecstatic who was also a great formal artist. Brando is I guess the emblematic contemporary whose neurosis was a cause of, and refracted by, but never quite the subject of, his art. (You dont have to be Jewish, but it helps.)

An interesting poem could be written about a masterpiece that has never been read, but a masterpiece that has never been read cannot really exist and certainly could not be interesting.a Richard Rorty tells us that Nabokov, along with Heidegger, dreamed of coming up with words and books which were so unclassifiable, fell so clearly outside any known way of grouping resemblances and differences, that they would not suffer ... banalisation. But ... no individual achievement of importance escapes such banalisation, because importance is determined precisely by the degree of effort it takes to bring the particular under the universal, to synthesise the idiosyncratic with the social. The most important achievements are those which make such a synthesis extraordinarily difficult, while nevertheless not making it impossible.41 We readers enable the widening and deepening of the catalogue of art an act that is significant in direct proportion to the amount that we resist that expansion. Great audiences feel narrowly, as well as deeply, resisting the all too assimilable. How narrowly? What is the difference between taste and conservatism? There is no generic answer, just as there is no algorithm to tell us the worth of a book. In this sense, writing and reading are destructive rather than creative. To see the world in a grain of sand is strictly to define the whole for which a given thing is part, for to behold infinity is not to see what is the case. The key to the Library of Babylon is not to extract coherence, but to resist meaninglessness. All possible meaning is encoded in any one thing, but until whatever is extraneous is destroyed, it stands for no particular thing, not even something very immense. The greatest reader is by no means the most resistant, she may in fact be curiously receptive, but she cannot be indiscriminate. A relationship is defined by exclusivity. Arts pulse may be taken by measuring the tension at the borderline of what can be subsumed, the later banalisation of the avant garde, and the tension (innovative or reactionary) that follows ... Each false clearing apparently leading us out of the labyrinth actually taking us one further step into the dark. That story cannot be separated from the more banal patterns of institutional intransigence and the complications of the market, but it also describes, I think, something private and true. The trouble is that to really choose the collective paroxysm model of art making would need a cool objectivity that forecloses the possibility of, and need for, chaotic art. One doesnt choose

Things that purport to be art do not function, do not exist, as art, Clement Greenberg (what?) once said, until they are experienced through taste. Until then they exist only as empirical phenomena, as aesthetically arbitrary objects or facts.

chaos without already having submitted to it; there may be, after all, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. How dare we proclaim to revel in what has been thrust upon us? Johnson said of Pope that when he professes contempt of fame, when he speaks of riches and poverty, of success and disappointment, with negligent indifference, he certainly does not express his habitual and settled sentiments, but either wilfully disguises his own character, or, what is more likely, invests himself with temporary qualities, and sallies out in the colours of the present moment. What is life if not investing ourselves with temporary qualities and sallying out?

Note on referencing. I have tried not to be too consistent, but have not tried very strenuously.
New Yorker, 9 June 2008. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/06/09/080609crci_cinema_lane Again, see Elaine Blair. Work, Not Sex, At Last. NYRB 8 March 2012 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/08/work-not-sex-at-last/ 3 He says this in William Shakespeares Hamlet, but its Harold Bloom, so he says it in lots of other places too. 4 Louis Menand: The later Catcher in the Rye rewrites ... are not yet canonical ... People dont read them because their parents recommended them. They read them for the same reason they listen to alternative rock or go to see Pulp Fiction six timesbecause these are things that teach them an attitude. They are sensibility manuals; they show what sort of unhappiness is in style this decade. Holden at Fifty, New Yorker, 1 October 2001. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/10/01/011001fa_FACT3 5 If you really want to read a hatchet job of Updike, start with Gore Vidals Rabbits Own Burrow. http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article758410.ece 6 Strawson, The Self, J. Consciousness Studies, 4, 5/6 (1997) 7 Colin McGinn has embraced the charge of mysterianism laid by Owen Flanagan. See http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2012/02/consciousness-mind-brain (Thomas Nagel, in 'Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False', claims that our failure to account for consciousness reveals the neo-Darwinian paradigm to be ultimately defective. Critical responses have been predictably (and probably correctly) severe.) 8 Strawson (1997) 9 Masunaga Reihos translation, I think 10 The relevant text is Bernard Williams, Moral Luck. 11 God knows whose translation this is. Assume these things are unreliable until proven otherwise. 12 Borges, New Refutation of Time. Trans. Harold Morland. 13 Introduction to Zen and Buddhism 14 1977 translation 15 Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: Later Master. Trans. Olga Marx. 16 Maybe high school should consist of reading Little Expressionless Animals every day. 17 What is the difference between cause and aetiology? Does DFW intend something by using both? 18 See above, pp 1 onwards. 19 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xv 20 Ibid., 141 21 Ellen Pifer, 'Nabokov's Novel Offspring' in Lolita: A Casebook (Pifer ed.), 97 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 85
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Ibid. Ibid., 99 26 Ibid., 86 27 TM Scanlon says in an interview: "... I offer this relationship-based idea that to blame somebody is to decide that what hes done impairs your relation with him in a way that justifies you changing your intentions about how youre going to behave toward him, and how youre going to understand your relation with that person." Sure; the insuperable divide occurs when he asks what more could there be to blame? Wed both say, well, nothing and draw opposite conclusions. (Interview in The Utopian, July 2012. http://www.the-utopian.org/T.M.-Scanlon-Interview-1) 28 Rorty, CIS, 99 29 Owen Flanagan, Buddhist Persons, 663 30 Flanagan, Destructive Emotions. Consciousness & Emotion 1:2 2000. Online at http://people.duke.edu/~ojf/DestructiveEmotions.pdf 31 Jonathan Lowe makes this point in the Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Locke on Human Understanding, 31 32 Flanagan, Destructive Emotions, 260 33 The End of Suffering and the Discovery of Happiness, p38. Dont be misled by the hokey title, this one tough-minded guidebook. The subtitle, The Path of Tibetan Buddhism, gives a better idea of its contents. 34 See Gene Reeves, The Stories of the Lotus Sutra, pp 97-98 When I know they have reached nirvana / And all have become arhats, / Then I gather everyone together / And teach the real Dharma. A Zen practitioner would presumably respond to this proposal with a slap to the face. 35 Break, Blow Burn, 81 36 Hollingdale's translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 37 Sexual Personae, 567; Richard Brody on Lars von Triers frivolous and insensitive remark about the Nazi aesthetic: But when von Trier spoke there of Hitler I think I understand the man. Hes not what you would call a good guy but I understand much about him, and I sympathize with him a little bit, yes- and about his admiration (artistic, not personal or political) for Albert Speer, he did indeed seem to be acknowledging something substantial and deeply considered: that he recognizes a link from German romanticism through Nazi aesthetics to von Triers own. It involves purification through destruction, an awesome and overwhelming monumentality that arises together with a taste for apocalyptic devastation (of course, in von Triers case, only in images, not in reality)- an excess of aesthetic purity that goes together with a vehement repudiation - a horror - of mere ordinariness. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2011/10/lars-von-trier-melancholia-and-the-remarks.html 38 Alan A Stone, Tanner Lectures, 1982. Stone quotes from Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. 39 Inevitably, my representation is too hasty. See the rest of Richard P Hayes, Ritual, Self-deception and Make-Believe: A Classical Buddhist Perspective for how acceptable Buddhist rituals aim to foster proper beliefs and how participation is tailored to the adherents particular needs. Consider also note 34 above. 40 Helen Vendler, Tanner Lectures, 1999 41 CIS, 161n
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