Immanent spirituality

Great article, Patrick. I second you on your conclusion regarding psychoanalysis as “…the richest modern practice—developed over a century in the laboratory of the clinical office and the voluminous literature of the trade—for performing this work on ourselves…” As for re-thinking “the emotions,” I think you’ll have to be more specific in your complaint. If I can assume you mean that psychoanalysts need to re-think the perhaps excessive weight they place on the emotions, then Lacan has already laid the ground-work for working through the obsession with the transference/counter-transference that seemed to mark the post-Freudian psychoanalytic establishment, and American psychotherapy in general. The Symbolic is where Lacan showed that the proper work of analysis is done, while the transference remains at the Imaginary level. Even with Freud though, the emotions or affects were not as prominent as popular psychology and psychoanalysis have it.

I, too, enjoyed this piece . . . and if I read him correctly, Eric Santner’s On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life proposes psychoanalysis as a basis for an interpersonal ethics.

“Do I detect a sympathy for the Rays in this scenario?”

If only I were that subtle!

Two points. First, it’s true that I assume rather than argue that, as you put it, “untimely ends undermine the meaning of activities.” I just want to make it clear that I mean not that meaning is undermined completely, but rather that global meaning is attenuated. So for all the local drama in the third inning of your exemplary game, I presume that the game itself as a whole is still less meaningful for having ended prematurely. (Would you disagree?)

Second, the stipulation that an incomplete game can indeed have meaningful, local pockets of drama seems to undermine the claim that an unending activity is necessarily without drama. The drama of the third is a fait accompli, independent of whether the game ends prematurely in the sixth, on schedule in the ninth, or goes into extra innings. In principle, infinitely many innings will contain infinitely many episodes of drama (subject only to the Borgesian argument that constraints on combinatorial possibility circumscribe the time horizon of novel experience, of which I will blog presently…).

Winni Sullivan:

I have not read Santner’s work, but now wish to thanks to this recommendation. With all the books out there to be read, it is no wonder we academics fantasize about immortality.

Michael Drake (2):

Drake has helpfully introduced a distinction I neglected between two ways death might “undermine” meaning: first, by eliminating it altogether; or second, by merely diminishing it somewhat. I understood Taylor in the first sense, perhaps mistakenly; in any case, it was against this sense that my critique was aimed. I sought to show that death does not preclude meaning, but is instead a prerequisite of meaning. On the question of whether untimely death diminishes meaning, even when it does not eliminate it completely, I do not have any settled views yet. To begin to think through this question, it seems to me, we must at least distinguish meaning for the person who dies and meaning for those who survive. Respecting this distinction, we could ask the following sorts of questions. Did the death of Virgil before he finished the Aeneid diminish the meaning of his life or the meaning of the poem he left to us? Did the assassination of JFK diminish the meaning of his life—for him, for us? Was the meaning of Madelyn Dunham’s life diminished because she died on the eve of her grandson’s presidential election? I do not know what to say, but invite the thoughts of others as I give my own time to settle.

Even if untimely death does diminish meaning, however, I still wish to maintain that death (whether untimely or otherwise) is nonetheless a prerequisite of any meaning in life. To illustrate the logic of this more complex relationship between death and meaning, here is another analogy: the government may diminish your wealth when it taxes you, but without any government you would have no wealth at all. In other words, a meaningful immortal life is as incoherent as a fat bank statement in the anarchic state of nature. The argument underwriting this new analogy is in my earlier analogies between life and various activities, so it falls with them if they cannot withstand objections. Drake marshals subtle objections against these earlier analogies, both above in his second comment on this blog and on his own blog, where he treats the subject in more detail. So I shall try to answer both succinctly.

First of all: the objection in his second comment above, which addresses a point in my first reply. I argued there that a baseball game may be meaningful in the third inning even if it is abbreviated by rain in the sixth, so that a life may similarly be meaningful even if it is abbreviated by untimely death. Drake now objects that if there can be pockets of meaning (like the third inning in this baseball scenario) that are indifferent to a range of outcomes later—whether the game is abbreviated, goes the full nine innings, or goes into extra-innings—then there can be pockets of meaning that are indifferent to any outcome later, including the outcome in which the game goes on forever. If this is right, then my conclusion that meaning is impossible in eternity would be invalid. But there is a fallacy in Drake’s new objection; it slips from a range of outcomes (a range limited by certain conditions) to any outcome whatsoever. These certain conditions are the conditions under which a baseball game comes to an end, as stipulated by the rules of baseball. Without any conditions whatsoever under which a game would come to an end, every game would lose its drama and meaning, for the reasons discussed in my original post. Now, to recall the matter at hand—human life, the activity of activities—it becomes meaningless unless there are certain conditions under which it likewise comes to an end. These rules are nowhere stipulated, but collectively we know them as death.

Secondly, let us consider the objection on Drake’s own blog *here*. He shifts his critical attention to my attempt to explain Borges’ mysterious comment that in eternity “no one is someone; a single immortal man is all men.” I suggested that “perhaps the boredom provoked by eternity would even require you to seek the relief of novelty,” since infinite time would permit you “enough time to live not only your own life any number of times, but also the lives of others, all others, likewise infinitely.” I now wish to revise my claim, not to attenuate it in the face of this objection, however, but instead to bolster it with my reply to the first objection above. Boredom, I wish to say now, would beset the ‘blessed’ in eternity not only after they had been there awhile, but immediately. For if my above reply is correct, and the ‘blessed’ would be living a life that is equivalent to a game that has no conditions under which it comes to an end, they would tire of it in the heavenly equivalent of the top of the first. Drake has thus led me to see now for the first time that my interpretation of Borges’ mysterious claim is strengthened by my earlier argument about meaning and drama.

In any case, he should hope that the rest of his second objection—a point about forgetfulness—is not needed to save eternity from my critique. Because Ronald Baumiller adopts this same point in his comment here, I shall now turn to him, hoping my reply answers both objections.

Ronald Baumiller:

If forgetfulness is needed to redeem eternity from being a damnation to boredom, then heaven appears but a pitiable dotage. We would be saved from boredom there, it seems, by repeating what we had already done but forgotten—not once or twice, but infinitely many times—the way a victim of Alzheimer’s syndrome repeats the same task with renewed interest. Eternity thus becomes a nightmare of senseless repetition.

I am so pleased that Baumiller and others above have enjoyed my piece. My own enjoyment in reading and answering their objections is no less. But this is a peculiar joy we are experiencing, and it is worth our attention for a moment. We are taking joy in the contemplation of our demise. Is this is a humble version of the tragic joy celebrated by Nietzsche and the Greeks: a joy stemming from our enhanced appreciation of our fragile and thus dramatic lives?

At the heart of this discussion is a paradox: while we sorely desire eternal life, it seems like a boring nightmare whenever we try to picture it. Why?

As Patrick makes clear, we think of eternal life in temporal terms, either as infinitely extended time or as one everlasting “moment” wherein all temporal moments are superimposed. But eternity, if it’s anything, is unimaginably unlike time, so imagining interminable baseball games, or all the moves of an Astaire/Rogers dance happening “at once,” gets us nowhere near it. Eternity seems to rob everything of meaning because (a) we can’t conceive of a kind of meaning beyond what life in time affords, and (b) if it went on forever, or if it happened all at once, life in time would be meaningless.

Aristotle’s idea may get us a little closer: eternal life is like a contemplative one, not a life of action. What would we contemplate? Think of it this way: after death, we get to inhabit our whole selves instead of just one thin temporal slice at a time as we do while the clock is ticking. We finally get to be who we ultimately are, encompassing our temporal life as a whole. (This would be our “soul.”) But we’d be outside the temporal stream, so we’d also “see” our life from a god’s-eye point of view. We’d see it as part of the whole of time, how it fits, what it means in the big picture, which would likewise be present to our gaze — all-at-once (there’s no escaping time-words!). There’d be communion too, since everyone else who ever lived and died would be eternally alive to all this.

The meaning of our lives, the richness of the big picture with our own small but essential roles in it, would be inexhaustibly rewarding to contemplate. All suffering, tragedy and death would be redeemed without being denied, in endlessly fascinating, emotionally fulfilling ways. We wouldn’t need a “break” from contemplation, as we do in time. No repetition, no tedium, no enervating idleness – all these are temporal concepts. And no hunger for a final inning, since all final innings would be there for us to enjoy in their full significance.

A feeble effort to make eternity sound attractive, needless to say. But there’s an air of special pleading in our talk of “meaningful finitude.” Let’s face it, we’d rather have immortal life. What’s desirable about it will always remain unimaginable to us, but what would it be worth if it were nothing more than something mortal creatures could imagine?

Patrick,

Thanks for this… a very sensitive and moving discussion of time. My questions are: how is what you call immanent spirituality, which starts with an awareness of human finitude, different from what I might more plainly call a sense of urgency? Is it elevated by the fact that you accept the desire for eternity? And wouldn’t that sense of urgency in the face of time’s inexorable power, coupled with the desire for eternity (which is, you seem to say, universal) lead anyone moved by both to become consumed by a Napoleonic self-obsessed ambition? Like a Julien Sorel, who sanctifies his own will to overcome his class & ultimately himself, all in a quest to be remembered. What I mean is, isn’t the desire to be remembered, i.e., to have historical effect, the same as the desire for eternity for the immanent spiritualist?

The next two comments take the discussion in a new direction. The early objections to my post largely contested its basic argument that a meaningful immortal life is incoherent, whether eternity be understood as infinite duration or as an eternal moment. If my replies to these objections were successful, and it is granted that such a life cannot conceivably be meaningful, one can believe in it nonetheless, as Richard McKim proposes; or, rejecting immortality, one can consider alternate spiritual practices for dealing with its summons, as David U. B. Liu suggests. I do not mean to foreclose the earlier debate about the conceivability of a meaningful immortal life, which anyone is welcome to revive with a fresh objection, but provisionally granting the success of my basic argument, allow me to turn to each of these new comments in turn.

Richard McKim:

McKim summarizes the status of the argument quite nicely with these two points: “(a) we can’t conceive of a kind of meaning beyond what life in time affords, and (b) if it went on forever, or if it happened all at once, life in time would be meaningless.” We both accept both of these claims, but whereas I then reject any meaning beyond what life in time affords, because such a meaning is inconceivable, McKim accepts that there is an inconceivable meaning in life “outside of time.” I must confess straightaway that I cannot distinguish between such a life and life in an eternal moment, which he also considers meaningless. Whether or not this distinction can be made, however, he is sympathetic with my conceptual frustration, admitting straightforwardly that life outside of time—his preferred description of immortality—is “unimaginable.”

This approach recalls St. Paul in 1 Cor. 15, who prefaces his hymn to immortal life with these enchanting words: “Behold, I tell you mystery.” I shall return to this approach in a moment, after discussing the very different approach of Aristotle, whom McKim explicitly invokes. Eschewing all mystery, Aristotle deduces an eternally meaningful life, one without interruption or tedium, by arguing that divine contemplation lacks nothing. Alone of all activities, he argues, it has its end within itself, so that it may continue indefinitely without losing any of its sense. The full argument for this conclusion is among the most intricate in all philosophy, but we can entertain its main point by making Aristotle’s distinction between an activity, properly speaking, and a mere process (an energeia versus a kinēsis). Building a temple is a process, he believes, because it moves toward a goal which it lacks at every moment short of its end. The moment of laying the foundation thus differs from the moment of installing the pediment; the latter is closer than the former to the finished temple, but each differs from this goal. For at this moment of perfection, the process of building itself must come to an end. A process seeks something outside of itself.

Contemplation, for Aristotle, is an activity (properly speaking) because at every moment it has its goal: the very activity of contemplation itself. As peculiar as this may seem, it makes good sense within the ambit of Aristotle’s philosophy. According to him, and the Platonic tradition of which he is a member, there are finitely many objects of knowledge, or forms, they are all immutable, and we come to know them by conforming our minds to them. With these ontological and epistemological assumptions granted, a divine life whose goal is to know all these forms outside time becomes intelligible. God can conform his contemplation to all of the forms, because they are finite; he can do so completely for each one, because they are each immutable; and his contemplation remains its own goal, because its conformity with its objects is so perfect that it amounts to identity with them. God’s thinking is a self-contemplation; his “thinking,” Aristotle writes, is a “thinking of thinking.” This pure contemplation is even outside of time, thanks to Aristotle’s doctrine of time, which ties its passage to the distinguishable moments of process. For our humble part, here in impure bodies of process, we can participate imperfectly in this contemplation by thinking of God whenever possible. Our fondest hope, moreover, is for a perfect identification with divine contemplation once we shuffle off this mortal coil. Thus we shall know everlasting joy outside of time.

This is a complex conceptual scaffolding upon which to hang the simplest of all longings, the longing for eternity, but something like it is required to make sense of the enchanting picture of heaven provided by McKim and others who subscribe to a similarly meaningful immortal life. Christian theology was forged in the smithy of Platonism, we must remember, and so not surprisingly many Platonic assumptions are still needed to undergird Christian theological claims, especially those about the afterlife. Christians still use notions such as contemplation to illustrate heaven, but they rarely do so acknowledging the commitment of these notions to an obsolete ontology and epistemology. For even if an ontology of forms is defensible nowadays, it cannot pretend to immutability after the modern revolutions in biology and cosmology. Species are constantly changing, as is the world itself. Indeed, to my mind, these revolutions effected the biggest difference between our worldview and that of most ancients: they often assumed a static world, or occasionally one in decline from a golden age, whereas ours is growing, innovating, creating.

Nietzsche explores this worldview better than any modern philosopher, I believe. For example, he recognizes the obsolescence of much of the Platonic tradition, returning to a pre-Platonic philosopher, Heraclitus, in order to recover the idea that the world is always exceeding itself, growing, creating. This is no less true for the selves that inhabit the world, according to Nietzsche, and this activity of creation is their joy. There is still room for contemplation in this worldview, and it remains for some—including Nietzsche, as well as many readers of this contemplative blog—the greatest joy. But to remain joyous the activity of contemplation must preserve an element of exploration, of discovery, of openness to the cosmic creativity it contemplates. (I have developed these thoughts in my recent paper, “Psychoanalysis as Spirituality,” which can be found here.) Static conformity of mind and form will no longer do, no matter how comprehensive it be, for even the most capacious contemplation will be exceeded by the innovation that arises just as it secures its wisdom. Our hearts are restless—Augustine was right about that—but they rest in no one, thank God.

The meaning of the creative life makes perfect sense within time, where successive moments differ from their predecessors by the growth of something new; outside of time, however, it becomes incoherent. Aristotle would agree, since outside of time there can be no distinction of moments. At this point, then, McKim departs from Athens and travels the road to Damascus. Here is his own evocation of the mysterious life of eternity: “Suffering, tragedy, and death would be redeemed without being denied”; lest we fear boredom, he assures us that this redemption would happen “in endlessly fascinating, emotionally fulfilling ways.” But notice: we are not told what any of these ways would be, nor do we learn how redemption would be achieved without denial of suffering, tragedy, and death. To be fair, none of this could be made clear to us, as McKim admits, for its method—if not also, somehow, its result—is unimaginable.

Three features of McKim’s particular version of this common admission stand out to my eyes, not because they are peculiar to his version, but because they so often arise in others as well. The first two evoke Nietzsche; the third, Freud. First of all, McKim’s description of heaven bears a remarkable resemblance to Nietzsche’s Eternal Return. Excepting the provision that redemption happen outside of time, Zarathustra likewise preaches that “the meaning of our lives, the richness of the big picture with our own small but essential roles in it, would be inexhaustibly rewarding to contemplate.” Zarathustra preaches the loving contemplation of the world, of all its stories, and thus of all the times in which those stories unfold. Rather than focusing on McKim’s resemblance to Nietzsche, however, I suggest that we reverse the order and focus on Nietzsche’s appropriation of Christianity. In my view, the most profound chapter of Zarathustra is “On Redemption,” where Nietzsche self-consciously longs for a temporal alternative to the atemporal salvation of Christian heaven.

McKim’s version thus removes time from the Eternal Return; by doing so, secondly, it surrounds this present life with a miasma of asceticism, in Nietzsche’s sense. Thinking of heaven, McKim writes: “What’s desirable about it will always remain unimaginable to us, but what would it be worth if it were nothing more than something mortal creatures could imagine?” The implication of this rhetorical question is that whatever we mortal creatures imagine must be worthless. Could there be a starker statement of the covert self-loathing that Nietzsche saw in the nihilism of his century, a nihilism that apparently persists into our own?

Thirdly, and most importantly, McKim’s enchanting description of heaven, combined with his frank admission that it is unimaginable, makes very clear the difference between an advocate of transcendence, and an advocate of immanence, especially a Freudian. Told that there is a place that is not really a place, outside of time and unimaginable, where everything will be good and nothing bad, the practitioner of immanent spirituality becomes instantly suspicious. Feeling the summons of such a fantasy even within herself, she does not ignore it, knowing it cannot be ignored; instead, she disciplines herself to work through it, howsoever that working-through be understood. If her instant suspicion seems foreign to you, imagine this simple analogy: all of your experiences with romantic relationships hitherto have been a mix of good and bad, but now someone promises a blind date that will lead to a relationship that is all good, with no bad whatsoever. Faced with such a promise, you would be wise to stay home and watch TV. The hallmark of emotional maturity, after all, is an ability to see everything in life as a mixture of wheat and tares; the promise of heaven, not to mention the threat of hell, invites you to regress from this achievement.

David U. B. Liu:

This comment raises two separate issues. The first is the prospect of alternate spiritual practices, such as Zen, for working-through the longing for eternity. The second is the high cost of psychoanalysis, the spiritual practice I advocate for this working-through. I would like to treat these briefly in reverse order.

Different psychoanalysts charge different fees, and different psychoanalyses require different frequencies and durations. With that proviso in mind, and only anecdotal evidence at hand, we can conjure an average figure for an analysis: $100,000. That is a lot of money; there is no getting around it. But nothing is more expensive than illness, as Freud said, and psychoanalyses do prevent or alleviate some very common and costly psychosomatic conditions, not to mention the risky and costly behaviors of borderline personalities . Also, the neurotic can profit tangibly and quickly from an analysis that permits him to work productively and creatively, emboldening him to seek appropriate work without inhibition, to innovate in his workplace with all the energy liberated from former conflicts, to ask for a raise without guilt, and so on. Only a few years out from my own analysis, it has paid for itself as much as twice over.

More interesting to me than these standard replies is the assumption that often lurks behind the objection they aim to meet. Without much protest, we spend $100,000 for the education of our intellects—consider the cost of a college degree at most private institutions—whereas the thought of spending the same amount, or even half of that, for the education of our emotions horrifies. How indulgent! Don’t get me wrong: the education of the intellect is very important, maybe more so now than ever amid the rising tide of anti-intellectualism. For a satisfying life, however, nothing is more important than the education of the emotions. Someone who lacks a college education but is emotionally mature, on one hand, can find happiness; on the other hand, the emotional child who holds the terminal degree in his field from an elite university is more unlikely than anyone else to do so. So what determines our expenditures, if not the prudent search for happiness? That is a question that begs for an analysis.

Liu suggests Zen not just because it is cheaper than psychoanalysis, but because he finds in it an older spiritual practice that is “no less serious, efficacious, or profound.” Here I must confess that I know Zen only by second-hand, but I can also boast that I am eager to learn more about it. In my customary spirit, though, I will come to this learning with a few skeptical questions that Liu or others could perhaps answer for me in the meantime. Does Zen give due weight to the emotions, making their education its primary goal, as psychoanalysis does, in order to avoid the intellectualist error of confusing impersonal doctrines with wisdom? Does Zen recognize the individuality of each person, seeing every human life as a unique trajectory that requires its own improvised treatment, as psychoanalysis does, in order to avoid the creation of false selves in the pursuit of spuriously universal truths? Finally, does Zen elicit and digest transferences in an intimate but disciplined relationship with another person, as psychoanalysis does, in order to avoid the confusion of narcissistic gratification with genuine emotional maturity? If so, the monetary savings may very well be worth it.

The next two comments are on different subjects. In the first, Ravi Rajakumar takes up a new line, inviting me to consider Nietzschean passages about the Eternal Return that I may have ignored. In the second, Richard McKim resumes a discussion already underway between us, making a spirited rejoinder to my reply to his first comment.

Ravi Rajakumar:

Rajakumar provides some helpful links, and is right that Nietzsche writes of the Eternal Return not only in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but also in The Joyful Science and in his unpublished notes, posthumously redacted and published by his anti-semitic sister under the title Will to Power.

I did not discuss the passages from the unpublished notes because, with Robert Solomon, I do not give them much weight. Here is why. Imagine if someone with whom you disagreed vehemently found your own notes after your death and published them, not before first arranging them according to a design not your own. Even if your notes were published by a sympathetic editor, there would be an injustice were they granted the same weight as works which you had crafted with consummate artistry before publishing. As Solomon observes, philosophers write down notes for all sorts of reasons: sometimes as preparation for published material, but often for the elaboration of an opposing position, or simply for amusement and to pass the time. When the doctrines of the unpublished notes diverge from those of the published works, additionally, there is good reason to ignore them, as I have.

The passage from The Joyful Science (341) is indeed very stirring, and I would be more careful to mention it were I to write this again. Thanks to Rajakumar for calling the omission to my attention. Despite my equal admiration for its eloquence, though, I do not find anything in it that does not also appear in the fuller treatment of Zarathustra. In fact, the following thought from 341 summarizes my interpretation of the Eternal Return rather nicely: “how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” Here as much as anywhere else, it seems to me, Nietzsche is enjoining us to love—ourselves and life itself. As I argued in my post, he elaborates that injunction in Zarathustra, which he wrote shortly after finishing the first four books of The Joyful Science. In fact, as Rajakumar likely knows, the next section in The Joyful Science itself, 342, anticipates and greatly condenses the prologue of Zarathustra, which Nietzsche was conceiving at the time.

Richard McKim (2):

I am delighted by McKim’s second comment and hope to receive many more in the same lively and generous spirit. This comment colours in the arguments of his first one and thereby contrasts our alternatives more vividly. I will thus try to return the favour, adding a new argument or two, and sometimes repeating my previous arguments, but even then adding some shading and highlights to make our competing options still clearer. (With those quirky spellings, by the way, I am trying to hint to McKim that I share not only his love of Greek philosophy, but also his ability to make love in a canoe. Now if that’s possible, surely we can make headway on the question of eternal life?)

The most urgent matter between us, because it is the most disquieting, is our complementary but not complimentary diagnoses of the each other’s unconscious motives. I saw hints of asceticism in McKim’s rhetorical question (“What’s desirable about [heaven] will always remain unimaginable to us, but what would it be worth if it were nothing more than something mortal creatures could imagine?”). McKim, for his part, detected a “whiff of desperation” in my efforts to develop a mortal spirituality. Since I feel no more desperate in the articulation of my view than McKim feels ascetic in the articulation of his, these diagnoses cannot persuade; indeed, they can sting, making persuasion even less likely. But it is good that we have made them, just once, and still better that we have been able to make them without jeopardizing the civility of the debate. After all, someone who adopts Nietzschean spirituality must see asceticism in his transcendent rivals, just as someone who adopts Christian spirituality must see quiet desperation in his immanent rivals. Those diagnoses are integral to the respective positions, and we would not be forthright if we neglected to mention them. That said, there is little further point in developing them, since they can never convince someone who does not already accept their premises, the very premises that are the subject of our present debate. So I propose that we focus instead on these premises.

Before doing so, however, I would like to clear up a misunderstanding that I caused by referring to “my basic argument” without stating explicitly what that was. My original post had two components: first, a critical one, which aimed to show that immortal life could not imaginably be meaningful; and second, a positive one, which discussed what we should do in the face of this critique. McKim confirms in his second comment that he accepts my critique—which is what I meant by “my basic argument”—not only when he repeats that his position is paradoxical, but also when he admits that “advocates of eternal life are at a disadvantage if they insist (as I do) that the concept they’re advocating is — inconceivable!” That was all I tried to show in my critique. In no way did I mean in my reply to McKim that by accepting this, “my basic argument,” he therefore accepted the reasoning of my post’s positive component. Rather than following me in the articulation of an immanent spirituality that attempts to work-through a frustrated longing for eternity, I recognize, McKim prefers to believe that this longing can be satisfied, even though its satisfaction is inconceivable. That is where our present disagreement occurs. I shall thus illustrate that disagreement further by aiming my objections at particular sentences from McKim’s second comment.

McKim begins by comparing my critical argument to recent screeds by atheist intellectuals. “Dismissing the idea of eternal life because an endless life in time would be boring,” he writes, “is like dismissing the idea of God because there’s no bearded old man in the sky.” He adds: “Call it the Dawkins/Hitchens Attack, critique by cartooning.” But there is an important difference between my critique and theirs, I think, although I must confess I have not read their books. I gather that they criticize the bearded old man in the sky, so to speak, and then call it a day, ignoring more sophisticated theologies. In my case, however, after my critique of the versions of heaven that McKim considers cartoonish—the one of infinite duration, and the one of the eternal moment—I remain open to alternate versions as well. Indeed, I hoped to demonstrate this openness in my treatment of the Thomistic-Aristotelian version in my first reply to McKim. I am not content simply to say that heaven seems boring, or even simply to offer some analogies to baseball and dancing to show this. I am ready to consider any serious version of heaven available. Or, switching analogies now to the one McKim crafts to criticize Dawkins/Hitchens, when it comes to the notion of heaven, I reject the bearded old man, but also the bearded lady, the beardless youth, and the bearded-not-bearded One.

In this spirit of skeptical openness to alternate versions of heaven, then, I am happily obliged to address McKim’s additional comments about his own version. Let us call it, with McKim, the “block universe” version. If time is like a block, he invites us to imagine, each of its moments exists, but separately, the way each of the parts of a block exists separately. Now, just as we move through parts of space without annihilating them, so too do moments of time persist after we pass through them. In fact, moments of future time exist before we get to them, just as places in space exist before we get to them. They are all there, in a block as it were, and when we are in heaven we can revisit them all: at once, by surveying the whole block; or individually, by “zooming in” and exploring an individual moment. In this way—“paradoxically,” according to McKim himself—we shall inhabit each of our time-slices fully while we also inhabit a perspective outside of time. I hope I have this right, and will eagerly accept corrections to my rendition of it. But presuming that I do, three objections arise immediately.

First of all, this is once again a paradoxical and unimaginable version. It seems to make a certain sense, the way the word ‘square-circle’ seems to make a certain sense, but the moment we examine it carefully the illusion of sense dissipates. How, after all, can we inhabit not only multiple time-slices but also a perspective outside of time? How, by analogy, can the ladle be everywhere in the soup, but also outside the pot? Even if that were possible, McKim wishes to preserve for heaven an element of discovery and creativity. This admission is a relief, it must be said, from the otherwise static versions of heaven we inherit from the Aristotelian tradition. McKim allows that we can zoom in or out of our time-lives, exploring them in as much detail as our curiosity affords. But this creates two more problems.

Secondly, this meta-activity of exploration, of zooming in and out of our lives for eternity, becomes vulnerable to all of the objections I raised to activities of infinite duration, both in my original post, but more particularly in my debate with Michael Drake above (who cleverly raised the possibility of meta-activities, activities of activities). McKim could reply that this meta-activity is taking place outside of time, so it is not susceptible to these objections. But then I refer him to my comments on Aristotle, in my first reply to him, where I discussed the only intelligible version I know of an atemporal activity. McKim’s subsequent comment makes it clear that he does not want to go the route of Aristotle, even if the Philosopher’s notion of activity could be saved from the obsolescence of his ontology and epistemology. “The road to Damascus separates us from the Greeks as much as science does,” writes McKim, and “I want an eternity much more personal (and interpersonal) than theirs.” The problem, however, is that we cannot make sense of a meaningful eternity with any personality at all. Only the impersonal version makes sense, if any does, and its philosophical assumptions are obsolete. Thomas Aquinas grafted the personal version of Christian heaven onto the impersonal version Aristotelian heaven, and made it appear meaningful. Now that the graft has failed, though, the appearance of meaning can no longer be sustained.

Thirdly, and finally, as I argued in my reply to his first comment, the notions of discovery and creativity, not to mention zooming in and out, all require time: a moment of discovery, of more or less zoom, must have something that a previous moment did not have. McKim anticipates something like this objection by admitting that these “analogy words” are “temporal.” These are all just “words about the ineffable,” so we are back upon the basic impasse: McKim credits something inconceivable, and I do not. I shall return to this impasse at the end of this reply, repeating my particular—and particularly Freudian—critique of any position that credits something inconceivable that promises to be all good, without any bad.

Before coming again to that impasse, but nonetheless on the subject of psychology, McKim writes: “We do have that désir d’éternité, we’d all jump at the chance for eternal life if we thought we had one, and the rosiest of mortal alternatives is second-best at best.” I agree that we do all begin with that désir d’éternité, but I believe that there are many techniques for working through this desire. David U. B. Liu reminds us, in his comment above, that Zen is such a technique. My own preference is for psychoanalysis, and I explain why here. “As for psychoanalysis,” writes McKim, “I don’t disparage it in the least, but proposing it as a substitute for immortality seems to invite Woody Allen to chime in with a punchline.” No one laughs harder at Woody Allen’s cracks about psychoanalysis than I do; indeed, my favorite joke of all time is the following: “I was in analysis. I was suicidal as a matter of fact and would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian, and, if you kill yourself, they make you pay for the sessions you miss.” If you don’t find that funny, you’ve never been in analysis with a strict Freudian! All joking aside, I await an argument from McKim that objects to my specific claims about the power of psychoanalysis to work-through our frustrated longings, especially the longing for eternity.

In the meantime, I reject McKim’s claim that “we’d all jump at the chance for eternal life if we thought we had one” because it begs the question (in the technical philosophical sense, petitio principii, of presuming the very point at issue). I provided an argument that a meaningful eternal life is inconceivable, and McKim has several times conceded the soundness of its conclusion. Thus, were we faced with the chance for an eternal life, McKim grants that we would be jumping into an abyss, summoned by inconceivable promise. He would jump, and for the reasons I adduced (especially in my reply to this first comment) I would not. He thinks the landing would be soft; I do not. He may doubt that I have the courage of my convictions, and he may be right—so enchanting is the siren song of immortality—but he cannot presume that the convictions themselves are false.

(Notice how a diagnosis of the rival surfaces again in this debate: McKim likely means that anyone who claims to believe in immanence does not really believe it when push comes to shove—into the abyss. As I mentioned above, that is as it should be. This is a debate ultimately about human nature, and what truly satisfies it, so we should not be surprised that the opposing positions in the debate insinuate occasionally that the opponent is not looking transparently through to his own nature. That said, I propose again that we put aside diagnoses in the interests of persuasion, although I do not myself mind if we find that this is impossible. It likely is.)

McKim next writes: “We’re all in the same boat, trying to talk ourselves into what we find comforting”. This is incorrect, and even contradicts what McKim says elsewhere about the proponent of immanence trying “to be brave in the face of the abyss.” If proponents of immanence, on one hand, were trying to talk themselves into what they find comforting, why would they need to be brave? On the other hand, the enchanting promise of a place-no-place outside of time where all tragedy will be redeemed, where all will be good and nothing bad…this is something comforting—so long as you accept that it is possible, even though it is admitted to be inconceivable. By contrast, the proponent of immanent spirituality finds it difficult to keep himself lashed to the mast when he hears whispers of this promise. He resists what he finds comforting rather than talking himself into it. He lives with the discomfort at first, but eventually applies himself to a practice—Zen, psychoanalysis, what have you—that promises to work-through this discomfort.

There is an important difference between these two promises: the one is a practical promise of relieving discomfort; the other is a promise of comforting immortality. Also, as we cannot emphasize enough, the former is conceivable, the latter inconceivable. Many have elaborated versions of this practical promise in order to make it not just conceivable, but even plausible, not to mention persuasive. Here, again, is my own version. It could very well be false, and there are likely to be some infelicities in my presentation of it, but the difference between these imperfect efforts and those of the proponents of transcendent spirituality is that the one invites rational inquiry while the other makes it impossible. The shimmering vision of heaven turns out to be a mirage of inconceivability every time our rational inquiries approach too near it.

After writing that we are all “trying to talk ourselves into what we find comforting,” McKim correctly asserts that “the fact that we want to believe something doesn’t mean it can’t be true!” The subjectivist fallacy is to infer that something is true from the fact that we want it to be true. The converse fallacy—which lacks a name, so far as I know, but which McKim rightly warns against—is to infer that something is false from the fact that we want it to be true. To my knowledge, I did not commit either fallacy. What I did do is to argue that meaningful immortality is inconceivable, and then, to McKim’s objection that it could nonetheless be true, to adduce the prudent approach to similar scenarios in every known circumstance of life. That is: if someone promises you something by advertising that it will be all good, without any bad, then you should wisely decline.

If Woody Allen jokes are acceptable refutations, finally, I recommend the scene in Stardust Memories where his character performs a personality transplant operation on two women, à la Frankenstein . One woman has a winning personality but he does not find her attractive; the other is sexy but difficult. The idea is to create the perfect woman. The joke is that this is obviously the fantasy of an immature man. (The punchline is even better: when the operation succeeds, he chooses the difficult homely woman.) For all the absurdity, this operation is at least conceivable after a fashion. The scenario would be still more absurd, however, were the transplant inconceivable. So when the proponent of transcendent spirituality promises an outcome that is not only all good but altogether inconceivable, should we find it still funnier? Perhaps we would, were we not drawn to it so deeply. And yet heaven is as repugnant to reason as it is to the mature emotions. Here, then, we return to the impasse discussed above, but with a clearer sense of the dispute. With conceivability and prudence on my side, I reject heaven. With an admission of inconceivability and an imprudent strategy on his, McKim accepts it.

I’m glad, Patrick, that you find the conversation engaging. Just two points this time in response to your last:

(1) Existential courage. I understand the appeal of being brave in face of the abyss, resolving to soldier on in a merely material universe, finding meaning where we can. I was part of that army for a long time. Good company – like physicist Steven Weinberg, who in his recent NYRB piece joins Patrick in attributing courage to those who (like them) try to make the best of things in the belief that there’s no hereafter and no God. A noble calling, but I became uneasy about its unavoidable air of self-congratulation. I’m not sure they’re as different from the pro-eternal-life brigade as they think.

Patrick takes natural pride in braving the “discomfort” of his worldview, but admits that the non-believer’s goal is to “work through” it – in other words, to dispel it. So there’s the same search for comfort on both sides. Neither, if we’re honest with ourselves, can escape the nagging & scary thought that life may really be absurd and meaningless as well as nasty brutish and short — the nice parts vanish without a trace, you go through a lot of hassle & suffering for nothing, and then you’re dead.

Pro-eternal-lifers can paint as rosy & self-persuasive a picture of immortality as they like, but the suspicion persists that it may well be a bunch of feel-good hokum. Honest non-believers have the same problem. They can’t entirely shake the fear that the consolations afforded by “Zen or psychoanalysis or what-have-you” may be hokum too, attempts to fool ourselves into believing that life has meaning when it doesn’t. Both sides seek to still that fear, or at least keep it reasonably at bay. I’m not convinced that one is more courageous than the other, but if it’s cowardly to feel that there must be more to life than mortality, so be it.

(2) That “must” brings us to a disagreement on the role of reason in all this. Patrick seems to think that if eternal life, or at least an attractive one, is “inconceivable” via reasoning (which I’ve agreed it is), then it’s ruled out of court. Reason is the final authority, the limit-setter on what can be true. Again, he’s in good company.

I take the Platonic/Wittgensteinian view of reason, that it’s a tool for getting beyond itself – an essential tool for approaching ultimate truth, but not enough to get us there. For Plato, you reason your way up to the point where you’re ready for enlightenment, but enlightenment itself is a leap beyond, the transcendence of reasoning about reality by the direct mystical vision of it. Wittgenstein used reason to clear a space for silence, so we could stop talking about the unsayable, stop trying to use reason to arrive at truths beyond its scope, and dwell in peace in that sacred space where reasoning can’t intrude.

Eternal life, if it’s anything, is one of those things whereof we cannot speak (except in inadequate time-language and time-analogies). But so, ultimately, is the belief that our lives have meaning even though they’re merely mortal. You can’t reason someone else all the way into feeling that; it has to be experienced in a deeply private space. We all share a sense, I think, that “reason demands” that our lives have some sort of meaning, since otherwise reason can’t make sense of them. But there’s a leap from the conclusion that life must have meaning to a vision or experience of what that meaning is. And that’s a leap of faith, whichever side of this debate you’re on.

It might bear saying that Christian eschatology has always (well, except maybe in the version Nietzsche is satirizing!) included care of the body and creation. It’s the resurrection of the body we look forward to, the city of God descending from heaven (not simply going ‘to’ heaven), God’s completion of creation in the 8th day of resurrection. The church has at times floated off into simply concerning ourselves with spirits and a purely ethereal heaven, but at our best we’ve remembered the eschaton in as earthy a terms as our own bodies, Christ’s risen flesh, and the promised political kingdom we’re still waiting for.

It also may be the Protestant in me, vs. Taylor, that I don’t put much stock in what seems to be a ‘natural’ desire, in this case the one for eternity. The fact that a desire seems ‘natural’ may simply mean its a deeply ingrained sin.

Let me make two comments, and then ask a question.

First, I am very happy with Patrick Miller’s reading of Nietzsche, whose anti-Platonist and anti-Christian diatribes are, it seems to me, less destructive than constructive; they are exercises in clearing the intellectual and emotional ground so that we humans can love the world and our lives in it, even with all the contingencies and tragedies involved.

Second, I also really like Patrick’s philosophizing on the necessity of time to value: no time, no value, strikes me as right.

One problem I continue to struggle with is the related problem of what we might call “judgment.” Transcendence, after all, is not just the promise of immortality. It is also the promise of a source of absolute goodness and right that can serve to criticize our present and immanent ethical, religious, emotional, intellectual, and political modes of life. Dostoevsky, at least in one of his voices, seemed to think along these lines. Along this thought, I would say that part of loving the world is undertaking the work of repairing the world. But where do we get our principles to guide this work of repair? Are there purely immanent sources that can be untainted by the very brokenness of the immanent world they try to heal? So the question I would enjoy seeing Patrick Miller wrestle with might be: do we still need God (or perhaps the Platonic Forms), not to give us eternal life, but to give us the guidance necessary to live as well and as humanely as we can in this life?

Jeffrey McCurry:

“Part of loving the world,” writes McCurry, “is undertaking the work of repairing the world.” This claim, although controversial, introduces a new subject that cannot be ignored: moral judgment. The claim is controversial because it presupposes that the world, now broken, once worked, a presupposition redolent of the Fall. While rejecting that evaluation of the world, we advocates of immanent spirituality must nevertheless acknowledge that without an account of moral judgment our alternate worldview could never hope to be complete. For as McCurry correctly observes, transcendence has promised to do more than underwrite our desire for eternity; it has also seemed to underwrite our moral prescriptions and proscriptions. Think only of the Ten Commandments, and the movement in this country to inscribe them in the public square as a bulwark against the encroachment of “relativism.” If immanent spirituality surrenders the pretense to immortality, must it also surrender moral standards? In a word: yes. But so much the better for immanence.

In my original post, I argued that the question of a meaningful life—a question which proponents of transcendence have complacently put to proponents of immanence, as if there were no such problem with their own worldview—belongs instead at the feet of the interrogators. Although proponents of transcendence have assumed that only a guarantor of meaning elsewhere can secure meaning here, I argued that this infinite deferral subverts meaning altogether, rendering life absurd. Proponents of immanence must struggle to create meaning for their lives, no doubt, but at least they have a fighting chance of succeeding. Indeed, creativity may just be this meaning after all. Meaningful immortality, by contrast, is impossible. Such a reversal of the question is the approach I wish to take now with McCurry’s parallel question about morality. For it assumes a similar logic: proponents of immanence must supply a guarantor of morality, assume the proponents of transcendence, lest human life become rudderless and inhumane.

Not for a moment do I suppose that McCurry himself is putting this question to immanence complacently; on the contrary, he raises it with evident sincerity and a concern to investigate the contours of its moral alternative to transcendence. Needless to say, I am grateful for his invitation to make a provisional sketch of these contours. Before accepting this invitation, however, I wish to expose the vulnerability of transcendence when it comes to moral judgment. With such a critique in hand, it is hoped, we may be more generous toward immanent accounts of judgment; for even if they fail, they have at least a fighting chance of succeeding. Indeed, immanent judgment may just be the essence of morality after all. Transcendent moral judgments, by contrast, may prove impossible.

McCurry wonders whether moral judgment requires God or, perhaps, the Platonic Forms, so let us consider each of these transcendent candidates in turn, beginning with the Forms. In order to succeed as guides to judgment in this world, despite the fact that they exist in another, they must bear a relation to our world, and this relation must be discernible by us. Each Form there must bear a relation to its particular instances here, so that we may judge these mutable instances by reference to an immutable paradigm. Thus, for example, if I am unsure whether it is good to stand my ground on the battlefield (here and now), I need only look to the Form of Goodness. Granted that I can do this—and it is by no means clear that I can, since it is by no means clear what it means to ‘look to the Form of Goodness’—if standing my ground on the battlefield (here and now) appears to be related to this Form, then I should judge it good; if not, not. Judgment in our changing world thus remains anchored to unchanging standards in a world beyond ours.

There are many serious problems with this strategy. To begin with, everything in this changing world is good in some way, bad in others. This truth is as inherent in the Platonic view of the material world as it is in Christ’s parable of the wheat and the tares. Recognizing this truth, however, the person who looks to the Form of Goodness must concede that everything is related in some way to that Form. If Goodness be any guide to judgment, then, the judge must ensure that the instance he judges good be related to the Form of Goodness in the right way. Nowhere to my knowledge, either in Plato or elsewhere in philosophy, is that special relationship explained; but howsoever it be explained, it will set the judge off on an infinite regress. For in order to judge that some instance to be judged is related to the Form of Goodness in the right way, the judge must now make a meta-judgment about the relationship of this relationship to the Form of Rightness. And so on ad infinitum.

In his Parmenides, Plato himself recognized many serious problems with transcendent paradigms. Indeed, Platonists seem to take Forms far more seriously than he did. For his own character argues that these paradigms bear no relevant relation to this world. In the example from this dialogue, the Form of Master is not the master of any worldly slave, but instead the master of the Form of Slave. Correlatively, the Form of Slave is not slave to any worldly master, but instead to the Form of Master. For their part, worldly masters are related to worldly slaves, and vice versa. Yet without any relation between these two realms—the Formal and the material, the transcendent and the immanent—these paradigms are useless, both ontologically and epistemologically. They cannot make anything be what it is, and they cannot help us to know what anything is. In terms of the example, the Form of Master does not make a master be a master, and if you want to know about being a master, the Form cannot help you. You would be better served, in fact, by a study of the ante-bellum South, with all its change and corruption. Similarly, if you want to know whether it is good for you to stand your ground in battle (here and now), you would be better served by a glance toward your field officer—that is to say, your worldly circumstances—than to the Form of Goodness.

On a historical note, Aristotle adopted this same criticism in the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics, inheriting the credit for a thought that was first Plato’s. Wherever the credit properly lies, however, the Christian version of transcendence must succeed where these Greeks thought it failed. But perhaps there is more hope in Christian transcendence than in the Greek attempt. Few people faced with a moral judgment turn to the Form of Goodness, after all, whereas billions turn to God and his commandments. Yet similar philosophical problems resurface in religion, depending on how these commandments are understood. If they be understood as natural law—something that could have emerged without divine authorship, as prudent rules that any community must respect if it is to flourish—then there is no problem, if only because there is no appeal to the transcendent. You obey the Decalogue, say, because you wish to flourish, and you believe only someone who respects these commandments can do so. This is an immanent understanding of moral judgment, however, and not the transcendent alternative its theological trappings might make it appear to be.

What more must be added to the Decalogue, then, to make it that special sort of guarantee sought by the proponents of transcendence? I invite McCurry, or any proponent of transcendence, to answer this question. In the meantime, I would like to consider a few possible answers to it. According to one such answer, the Decalogue (or any other divine law) requires a transcendent guarantee because it is not something we could deduce from our immanent circumstances, as conditions for our flourishing. Two reasons might be given for this shortcoming: either (a) our ability to legislate properly to ourselves here is imperfect, or (b) the law speaks more properly to our lives in a perfect condition elsewhere. The Christian story underwrites both of these reasons: we cannot legislate properly to ourselves here because the Fall has crippled our judgment; or, the law speaks more properly to our lives elsewhere, our lives in the perfect condition of Grace once lost but someday regained. Both of these responses bring us back into the orbit of Jason Byassee’s comment, although I do not know that they are responses he himself would offer.

With (b)—that the law speaks more properly to our lives elsewhere—the problem of Platonic Forms discussed above arises again. Tailoring that problem to fit these Christian terms, we should object: what relevance does our perfect condition there have for us in our imperfect condition here? When I must make a judgment about life here, where tares grow among the wheat, what value is there in looking to life there, where the wheat is pure and the tares have all been burned? Taking the metaphor literally, the farmer who used the perfect as his standard for the imperfect, treating tares and wheat as nothing but wheat, would throw his imperfect harvest indiscriminately into his silo, ruining his store. Dropping the metaphor, can we make any sense of this perfect condition? At this point, all of my criticisms of heaven, both in the original post and in the subsequent commentary, become apposite.

If (b) fails so quickly, what about (a)—that we cannot legislate for ourselves here because the Fall has crippled our judgment? According to many Christians, our judgment is so badly crippled that we must rely on divine authority. You do not obey the Decalogue because you judge it to be a condition of human flourishing. No, you obey the Decalogue because God has commanded it. This is the transcendent element missing from the immanent understanding of moral judgment. But it incurs more problems than did the other response. For instance, faced with all ten commandments, how can you be sure that God has commanded each one? Whatever evidence you supply to warrant your certainty here, moreover, how can you be sure that it has not been tainted with the sinfulness that corrupts your judgments elsewhere?

If these questions can be answered, and you are confident that these commandments should regulate moral judgments in particular circumstances, others follow closely on their heels: how will you apply their simple statements to complex and ambiguous reality? Take the commandment against adultery, and presume that you accept it as a transcendent standard by which to guide your conduct. Now you wish to marry someone who is divorced. Can you square this wish with your beliefs? Imagine that this person had married very young, and may not have been fully aware of the obligations undertaken in matrimony. If not, there is a case to be made—at least in the canon law of the Catholic Church—that this person has not yet been married; an annulment is available. But what is it, really, to be fully aware of the obligations of matrimony? Are there any but those who have been married their whole lives, those who have understood very concretely what these obligations mean in a complex world, who are fully aware of them? Short of that concrete awareness, what level of awareness should count as sufficient, and how should it be determined whether this level was reached in the case of this real person?

Canon lawyers often dispute such questions—there are an infinite number, I believe, for every commandment—because neither the Decalogue nor any other deceptively simple transcendent standard speaks directly to our moral lives. An interpreter is needed, and the Church is supposed to perform this role. But which denomination, which congregation, which priest? For those whose role in the Church is to do the interpreting, where exactly to turn? To which ecumenical council, to which theologian, to which text? The iterations are endless, which is not an argument for relativism; rather, it exposes a deep truth about moral judgment: it requires choice. At every point of their submission, in fact, even those who wish to surrender their freedom to an authority must make a choice, consciously or unconsciously. If they choose to surrender their choice, their inescapable freedom frustrates them; if they persist in the pretense of submission, they choose hypocrisy more precisely than submission. We are now brought face-to-face with the failure of transcendence to secure moral judgment. It cannot do so because its strategy of submission cannot recognize the most basic requirement of moral judgment: freedom. In Sartre’s memorable dictum, we are “condemned to be free.”

And yet, in the words of Dostoevsky, the very author McCurry invoked in his comment, “nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom.” This premise undergirds the argument of the notorious Grand Inquisitor, who concludes from it that a true love of humanity and a true compassion for our suffering require relieving us of the burden of our freedom. The Church alone provides this relief, according to the Inquisitor, enchanting us with promises of miracles and mysteries, if not compelling us by its authority. While Dostoevsky himself seems to reject that conclusion—after all, the Inquisitor is arraigning Christ, whom Dostoevsky worshipped—he nonetheless seems to accept the premise. Rather than relieving us of our freedom, Dostoevsky seems to believe, Christ turns customary habits of submissive worship on their head, inviting us to revere him freely, without enticement of worldly reward, the enchantment of mystery, or the coercion of authority. That is why He refused the three temptations of Satan.

As McCurry reminds us, however, the same character who crafts the story of the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan, admits at the end of it that “everything is lawful.” It is no easy admission—either for Ivan or for me—but it must be made, and will just as surely be misunderstood. How, then, should it be understood? It does not mean that we should connive at the Holocaust or, more likely, the bully next door sitting comfortably in an endowed chair. It does mean that we should come to love the world as it is, not as our immature fantasies would have it be. One common fantasy, to which degenerate faiths and philosophies alike appeal, as I have argued above, is the fantasy of a perfect paradigm, a comprehensive code, an authority who will relieve us ultimately of the burden of our freedom. This is the fantasy of a transcendent guarantor for moral judgment, and I believe Dostoevsky was as harsh critic of it as Sartre was.

Without such a guarantor, a proponent of immanent spirituality must explain how it does not retreat into quietism, a passive contemplation of the world, rather than the passionate engagement with it that we find celebrated in Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Sartre, not to mention the Stoics so often and unfairly caricatured as quietists. In my post, I asked whether this posture was not just quietist, but further, masochistic. Please permit me to quote that question and its abbreviated response: “Why, if I love this one moment of joy, must I love all the other moments of pain that come before and after it? A moment is joyful because it is meaningful, extraordinarily meaningful…But these moments of joy are so meaningful because they are moments in a narrative…meaningful moments must be embedded in finite narratives, narratives of risk and therefore tragedy, circumscribed by death. To love such a moment fully is to love the narrative that constitutes it; and to love such a narrative fully is to love the world in which that narrative unfolds.”

Invoking Nietzsche’s character, I next wrote: “If Zarathustra be believed, if he be followed as a prophet of immanent spirituality, we must love the whole world, with its pain, illness, betrayal, death.” I shall try in my third post, on Heraclitean spirituality, to elaborate this cosmic thought. For now, I wish only briefly to review my argument that psychoanalysis is an ethics as well as a spirituality. Married to the latest research in neuroscience, and a host of related disciplines, psychoanalysis investigates human flourishing while also diagnosing and attempting to overcome its impediments. As such, it is squarely in the tradition of ancient philosophy epitomized by Aristotle, who married his curiosity about everything with a rigorous effort to live the best life. He placed a transcendent deity at the summit of this effort, but was logically required to do so by his ontology and epistemology. Since these theories have been surpassed by immanent alternatives, we remain most faithful to his curiosity and his effort by elaborating an immanent ethics. This cannot be an ethics of transcendent paradigms, rules, or authorities, for the existentialist reasons already canvassed; but it can be an ethics—a methodical quest for the best life—nonetheless.

My own quest has brought me thus far to believe that at the summit of ethics are love and creativity, whose greatest impediments are resentment and repetition. Each of these vices is born of the insecurity of the infant, altogether appropriate insecurity for that stage of life, but an insecurity that soon outlives its utility. In the worst emotional maladies, infantile fears become fossilized as fantasies that turn our otherwise supple organism into an obsolete machine. Scratch the surface of any bully, I suspect, and you will find a baby trying desperately and repetitively—the only way it knows how, futile though it be—to achieve security. No ethics of transcendent regulation can speak to such a baby, except in the language of intimidation it knows so well. Only the master-craft of converting the infant into an adult can bring good out of this evil. There may be transcendent practitioners of this craft—Dostoevsky hints as much in his story, since only the kiss of a silent Christ softens the heart of the Inquisitor—but immanent technique demonstrably delivers what transcendent regulations vainly promise. To speak bluntly now: everything is permitted, yes, but it is a whole lot better for you and those around you if you grow up.

The argument for this blunt conclusion is somewhat more subtle, I hope, and I have begun to make it here, in a paper called “Psychoanalysis as Spirituality” (see especially its second through fourth sections, on “Emotions and Meaning,” “Love versus Resentment,” and “The Therapeutic Action”). But I do not pretend to any originality in this argument. On the contrary, with the help of several recent scholars, I am trying only to bring psychoanalysis and existentialism into contact with the ancient philosophical tradition of which, I believe, these modern movements are today the most faithful—which is to say the most creative—exponents.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/09/3qd-philosophy-prize-2009-finalists.html