by Colin Wilson
And here, at last, we have come to grips with the very heart of the problem: the tendency of intellect to confirm our negative judgements on life. A child can feel just as depressed and miserable as an adult, yet a child seldom commits suicide. Why? Because he merely feels depressed. The adult thinks depressed, and — if he happens to be a Sartre or Samuel Beckett — tells himself that life is meaningless and futile anyway.
In an amusing story called ‘The Unknown’ Maupassant provides an illustration of the workings of this ‘negative mechanism’. A young man-about-town describes his acute embarrassment at being overtaken by sexual impotence. He has frequently passed a dazzlingly attractive girl in the street and wondered how to make her acquaintance — once even trying to follow her home. One day he summons up his courage to speak to her and, to his surprise, finds that she has no objection to coming to his apartment. (This already begins to worry him — it is a little too easy.) A few caresses, and she begins to take off her clothes — asking him, as she does so, not to look at her. He glances at her naked back — and sees that she has a curious black stain between the shoulder blades. Absurd ideas flash through his mind — of fatal enchantresses in the Arabian Nights who lure men into their clutches. And when it comes to the time to ‘sing his song of love’, he finds he has no voice. The girl looks at him with mild contempt, says, ‘It seems a pity to have put me to so much trouble’, and walks out on him.
Maupassant’s story only underlines a mechanism with which we are all familiar. The machine I am using to type these words has an erase key, a highly convenient modern development. If I strike the wrong key or write ‘hte’ instead of ‘the’, I merely press the erase key, and the mistake vanishes. Our brains already have an erase key, so that we can correct our conversation as we go along. It will even cancel something I am about to say or do: if I am about to make a tactless remark, I can catch myself just in time and say something else. If I am feeling very nervous or embarrassed, my finger hovers permanently over this erase key, to the great detriment of my spontaneity. The sight of the black birthmark causes Maupassant’s hero to press the erase key and destroy his own sexual desire. And Sartre’s hero is in such a permanent state of nausea that he keeps his finger on the erase key most of the time.
Let us look a little more closely at the way this mechanism works, for it is obviously the key to the question, what prevents us from experiencing ‘duo-consciousness’ at will?
What actually happens when Maupassant’s hero suddenly loses his potency or Roquentin feels that a chestnut root has become frightening and menacing? The answer is obvious: the intellect has been overruled by a negative emotion. This is the basic mechanism of nausea and mistrust. Or to put it another way, his intellectual values have been overruled by his emotional values. (A value, of course, is simply a feeling that something is good or bad.)
We have, in fact, three distinct sets of values: physical, emotional and intellectual. And of these three, the intellectual values are by far the most reliable. My physical values have a nasty habit of changing from one hour to the next, so that I can feel marvellous at nine in the morning and utterly miserable by ten, merely because I feel hungry, or tired, or have a headache. There is an excellent example of the awful power of our physical values in C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, when the demon Screwtape explains to his nephew Wormwood one of his most effective techniques for preventing human beings from thinking clearly:
I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy [i.e. Jesus], of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a rational argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion … that this was more important than lunch … . When I said, ‘Quite, in fact much too important to tackle at the end of the morning,’ the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added, ‘Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind’, he was already halfway to the door.
The first major obstacle to our powers of insight is the body itself, with its continually changing moods.
The second set of obstacles was clearly recognized by Anne Bancroft. ‘I saw that I had become really futile, so much a slave to my emotions, so involved with my own feelings … that my life had narrowed down to the compulsive behaviour of a zombie.’ This sounds like a contradiction in terms — surely feelings should make you feel more alive, not less? Yet we all know precisely what she means. When we are truly happy, there is a blissful sense of being free of our emotions. Emotions are like heavy mist, while real happiness is like being surrounded by clean, pure air.
But my intellect stands above these physical and emotional values. For example, when I am feeling angry or jealous or upset, another part of me looks down on it all with cool detachment and tells me not to be such a fool. On the whole my intellect tells me the truth — or at least does its best. My physical and emotional values tend to distort my perception of reality and often assure me that life is horrible or futile or meaningless. My rational self tells me that I am lucky to be alive.
The central problem of human existence is that our lives are dominated by these ‘trivial’ values of the body and the emotions, so that we are in a permanent state of confusion — like someone who is blindfolded at the beginning of a game of blind man’s buff, then whirled round a dozen times until he is dizzy. There are times when our ‘trivial’ values and our rational values fight a duel to the death. William James tells the story of a man who suddenly fell out of love. For two years he had been violently enamoured of a girl who was a coquette. His reason told him that she was simply not the right person for him but his emotions — and no doubt his physical desires — were so involved that he remained a slave. Then one day, on his way to work, he felt as if ‘some outside power lay hold of me’, and he rushed home and burned all her letters and photographs, feeling ‘as if a load of disease had suddenly been removed from me’ — as, in a sense, it had. It is significant that he felt as though some ‘outside power’ had laid hold of him, when it was merely his common sense that had revolted. He had come to so identify himself with his ‘trivial’ values that he could not recognize that it was his own mind that had intervened to release him from his slavery. All that had happened was that his mind had resumed its rightful place as the ruler and controller of his emotions.
Sartre once remarked that he had never felt so free as during the war when he was in the French Resistance and in constant danger of arrest. The reason is obvious. With the threat of danger hanging over him he could not afford to allow trivial emotions to dominate his judgement. The same is true of Graham Greene when he placed the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. In the surge of alarm, all his negative emotions were scattered to the four winds and a more mature ‘self’ took charge.
Maslow’s story of the young mother makes the same point. As she watched her husband and children eating breakfast, she was preoccupied with immediate problems — getting her husband off to work and the children off to school — and therefore with ‘trivial’ values. Then, in a flash, her mind rose above such trivialities, and she grasped her situation objectively, as if she were coolly assessing someone else’s life. The result was a perception, ‘My God, aren’t I lucky!’, and a surge of joy. Here we can see that the peak experience is simply the experience of grasping the world clearly and rationally. The real trouble with physical and emotional values is that they are so short-sighted. And when we feel tired or depressed or bored — or simply passive and indifferent — it is because we are allowing our ‘trivial’ values to dominate our intellectual values. In effect we are holding our values upside-down.
This is a recognition
of vital importance. When a clear state of rationality is suddenly overcast by heavy clouds of emotion and we allow ourselves to be taken in by them, it is exactly as if our feet have turned into gas-filled balloons and we are suddenly floating upside-down. And when we come to recognize this state we realize with horror that most human beings spend their lives ‘upside-down’. It applies even to philosophers, which is why the history of philosophy is so full of pessimism and confusion.
We might turn this insight into a parable in the manner of Confucius, and say that when the intellect is the emperor and emotion is the grand vizier, the kingdom is harmonious and happy. But when emotion usurps the throne and forces intellect to become its servant, the kingdom falls into chaos and misery.
The chief problem of being ‘upside-down’ is that the ‘trivial’ values are so short-sighted and tend to plunge us into a state in which the difficulties of life seem just not worth the effort. ‘Trivial’ values induce the ‘Ecclesiastes effect’. When I am driven by a powerful sense of purpose, my intellect tells me that it is worth making tremendous efforts and I summon my vital energies accordingly — or rather, Stan summons them for me. When emotional values are allowed to dominate, my vitality sinks — for it is Ollie who suddenly feels that life is just not worth the effort and whose pessimism infects Stan.
It is important to emphasize that we are not now talking about some relatively rare state of anger or jealousy or self pity. The ‘upside-down’ state happens to us a hundred times a day, so that we literally forget whether we are on our head or our heels. Most of us recognize the problem and do our best to fight against it. But we all know people who have allowed themselves to become completely dominated by envy or self-pity or a sense of defeat, and who seem bent on ruining their own lives and the lives of everyone they come into contact with. Permanent ‘upside-downers’ are the most dangerous people in the world.
Yet our proneness to ‘upside-down’ states is an inevitable consequence of human evolution. Human beings can cope with more complexity than any other animal. To cope with this complexity we have developed a ‘microscopic’ vision, rather like a watchmaker’s eyeglass. But the eyeglass condemns us to ‘close-upness’, and close-upness (another name for nausea) deprives us of meaning. Nausea is a kind of ‘collapsed consciousness’, a consciousness minus a dimension of meaning. And once we recognize that, we have to face the depressing insight that ‘normal’ human consciousness is a form of nausea. And human beings who are stuck in this narrow, ‘collapsed’ consciousness are particularly prone to ‘upside-down’ states — for ‘close-upness’ also makes us easily discouraged.
Now we have grasped the true nature of our everyday consciousness, we can see that far from being ‘normal’, it is actually subnormal. It lacks a whole dimension of meaning, like the television with the sound turned down. On the other hand we can also see that Toynbee’s glimpses of Faculty X at Mistra or Pharsalus were ‘everyday consciousness’ plus a dimension of meaning. In other words Toynbee was experiencing a brief flash of genuinely normal consciousness.
This recognition is the all-important first step in answering the question, how can human beings set about achieving Faculty X at will? We must recognize precisely what is wrong with our subnormal everyday consciousness. We must also recognize that our tendency to ‘upside-downness’ constitutes a major obstacle to learning to achieve genuinely normal consciousness. ‘Upside-downness’ blinds us to reality. A philosopher who tries to understand the ‘meaning of life’ without grasping this insight is in the position of a matador who tries to give a good performance even though his hat keeps slipping over his eyes.
The first step towards achieving normal consciousness is to grasp the precise mechanisms of ‘upside-downness’. When Maupassant’s hero glimpsed the black birthmark between the girl’s shoulders he instantly turned ‘upside-down’, and the result was impotence. Five minutes before he had been quite certain that he wanted the girl: now he suddenly felt it was a mistake. But at least this was only a temporary reversal. The character in Thomas Mann’s ‘Disillusionment’ is in a permanent state of ‘upside-downness’, for he has decided that life is one long disappointment. He has ratified the ‘upside-down’ state with his intellect. It is rather as if the emperor decided that he had never had any right to the throne after all, and that the grand vizier and his descendants should be emperors in perpetuity. (This is why writers like Sartre, Graham Greene and Samuel Beckett are so dangerous — they have ratified ‘upside-downness’ with the intellect, and their negative vision is passed on to adolescent students with all the authority of a modern classic.)
Another example of the ‘upside-down’ mechanism is to be found in Arthur Koestler’s autobiography Arrow in the Blue. He had spent an afternoon playing poker and lost far more than he could afford. At a party that evening he got drunk, then discovered that his car radiator had frozen and the engine block had burst. A girl he did not like offered him the hospitality of her flat. When he woke up the next morning with a hangover, lying beside a girl he found unattractive, and remembered that he had no money and no car, he experienced a wave of violent indignation with life in general that led to the decision to join the Communist Party. There was no logic in the decision: simply the desire we all feel, when goaded beyond endurance, to go and do something spectacular. It took another seven years of bitter experience to make him realize that he had walked into an intellectual cul-de-sac, and to undo the consequences of a single day’s ‘upside-downness’.
The way in which this subsequent reversal took place is equally instructive. In 1937 Koestler was a foreign correspondent in Spain; he was recognized as a member of the Communist Party and thrown into a fascist prison. Executions took place every day, and Koestler had no doubt that his turn would come soon. The crisis caused what he described as ‘a loosening up of psychic strata close to rock bottom’. He passed the time scratching mathematical problems on the wall of his cell with a broken bed-spring, and one day tried hard to remember Euclid’s proof that there is no greatest prime number — in other words that the number of primes (numbers that cannot be divided exactly) is infinite. As he scratched the proof on the wall he experienced a sense of enchantment, and recognized the reason:
… the scribbled symbols on the wall represented one of the rare cases where a meaningful and comprehensible statement about the infinite is arrived at by precise and finite means … . The significance of this swept over me like a wave. The wave had originated in an articulate verbal insight; but this had evaporated at once, leaving in its wake only a wordless essence, a fragrance of eternity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue. I must have stood there for some minutes, entranced, with a wordless awareness that ‘this is perfect — perfect’; until I noticed some slight mental discomfort nagging at the back of my mind — some trivial circumstance that marred the perfection of the moment. Then I remembered the nature of this annoyance: I was, of course, in prison and might be shot. But this was immediately answered by a feeling whose verbal translation would be, ‘So what? is that all? Have you nothing more serious to worry about?’ — an answer so spontaneous, fresh and amused as if the intruding annoyance had been the loss of a collar-stud. Then I was floating on my back in a river of peace, under bridges of silence. It came from nowhere and flowed nowhere. Then there was no river and no I. The I had ceased to exist.
The experience was a turning point in Koestler’s life, the beginning of his rejection of Marxism.
It is interesting that the essence of the experience is a purely rational and logical insight. He is in prison, waiting to be shot — an experience that would turn anyone into an ‘upside-downer’. But the crisis arouses deep reserves of vital energy. And when the mathematical insight brings a sudden recognition of the sheer power of reason, the result — as in the case of Maslow’s young mother — is an almost blissful sense of objectivity, of the power of the human mind to grasp the world clearly and rationally.
Another example from Koestler’s autobiography
makes the point even more effectively. Koestler tells how he was sitting on a park bench in Vienna with a pile of books beside him; he was reading a pamphlet about atrocities against Jewish pioneers in Palestine and was overcome with a feeling of impotent rage. Then he picked up a book on Einstein and read the comment that relativity had led the imagination ‘across the peaks of glaciers never explored before by any human being’. The phrase brought an image of Einstein’s relativity formula hovering in a kind of haze over snow-covered peaks, and the feeling of rage dissolved into a ‘sense of infinite tranquillity and peace’.
Einstein himself had said something very similar. He declared that his supreme aim was the ‘perception of this world by thought, leaving out everything that is subjective’. He also wrote that ‘one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is to escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever-shifting desires [my italics]. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman’s irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains … .’ Here we can see precisely the same feeling that swept Koestler away as he worked out Euclid’s proof on the wall of his prison cell: a longing to escape from the stifling world of personal emotions and anxieties and into a world of objective contemplation.