Of all these minorities, no doubt the most important politically are the ethnic groups. In terms of numbers—and often because of their religious identities—this means that in the foreseeable future they will be the world’s major concern and remain the bitterest sources of conflict. In terms of psychological and philosophical adjustment, on the other hand, the most important development in the future may be what some have called a switch to female values. Nietzsche called truth a woman; James Joyce foresaw, with pleasure and optimism, a world where hope lay with the female side of men. Andrea Dworkin has emphasized that the world we have now is “man-made,” a term by no means complimentary. Wallace Stevens admonished us to “embrace an idea like a woman.” Politically, too, this is a highly relevant issue; who can doubt that one of the ways in which Islam is most backward is in its (often disgraceful) treatment of women.
TRIVIALITY AND CONSEQUENTIALITY
These issues are not unimportant and are part of a larger picture, but in a sense they skirt around the main concern of this book.
On this issue, how we are to live without God, it seems clear that the crux is the moral life. Philosophers of all stripes (except Thomas Nagel, especially lately) are in agreement with the evolutionary biologists that morality has evolved, along good Darwinian principles. (David Sloan Wilson’s recent exploration of the evolution of catechisms and forgiveness is a tantalizing step forward.) Not only is God not needed to explain this, but evolution is a better authority so far as morals are concerned. It is experimentally confirmed that evolution shows rationally why morality is justified, identifies the benefits, and highlights what is lost when the rules aren’t adhered to. In particular—and this may be the most important point of all—the studies show how the requirements of the “selfish gene” lead to the need for, and justification of, cooperation. Biology links ethics to morals.
Ronald Dworkin writes most clearly about the distinction between ethics and morals. Ethics refers to the way we lead our own lives, reflects our responsibility to ourselves, not in a narcissistic way but by understanding life as a performance which we can carry through either well or not so well. He invites us to reflect on our lives—conceivably along the lines that Robert Nozick exemplified in his book The Examined Life—to construct a narrative that is coherent, moral and non-trivial. The idea that there is a narrative to a life is very powerful for many people. Dworkin thinks our aim should be a narrative that allows us to marvel at the universe and gives us dignity and self-respect. For him, this is being religious without God. There is nothing deeper, or grander.
If that is our first duty, our second is to other people, to accord them respect so as to preserve their dignity, and the people to whom we should show respect include an ever-expanding group until, eventually, it will include everyone. This is one aim of life, what Bruce Robbins calls “the metanarrative of emancipation.”
The need to be “consequential” is more controversial, given that not everyone can be equally consequential, and if we judged a life solely by its consequences most people would be found to lead inconsequential lives, or lives that are only accidentally consequential. Dworkin’s point about life being a performance, which can be carried out either well or not so well, is surely another aspect of consequence: we construct the performance of our own lives to have a coherence, a coherence that is in some sense non-trivial and truthful—those two qualities together giving us self-respect and dignity—and allows us, as Nozick said, to become a vehicle for beauty as well as truth, coherence itself being a form of beauty.
SECULAR REVELATION: WHAT WE DIDN’T KNOW WE HAD WITHIN US
To this we can add an idea of Seamus Heaney’s. Heaney is endlessly quotable: poetry adds to the volume of good in the world; a new rhythm is a new life given to the world; poetry produces a sense of at-homeness and trust in the world; poetry is a natural process, simultaneously proffered by the phenomena of the world and engendered by the frolic of language; it is the transmission of intuited knowledge; poetry is to keep on coming into a fuller life, it is an experience of enlargement; poems stand like cathedrals in the wilderness; they offer an infrangible dignity, unconsoled clarity, unfenced existence, they are the outward sign of an inner grace; they are examples of self-conquest; they show that the reality of the world should not be underprized; they offer a sense of sufficiency, and a spurt of abundance from a source within.
It is this last that we focus on here. In one of his essays, Heaney quotes from Czesław Miłosz’s The Estate of Poetry:
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
A thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had within us10
Isn’t that second line a secular equivalent of a revelation and a profound guide to leading a life? To keep on coming into a fuller life, to not underprize the reality of the world, to explore our unfenced existence, don’t we have to bring forth something that “we didn’t know we had within us”? And how are we to do that? What criteria can we use by which we will know that we have achieved that aim, that our activities—like those of Dworkin’s matchbook-cover collector—are not trivial?
There is almost certainly no one criterion that would fit the bill to everyone’s satisfaction, but there is one poet who has influenced many philosophers and other writers precisely because he made a determined and imaginative stab at it, and whose life certainly had a distinctive narrative.
NAMING THE WORLD
Rainer Maria Rilke thought that what lends sense to life is the act of “saying,” of transforming into language all that is in danger of being lost in our hurry to move ahead. In particular, he felt that the details and glories of nature were under threat and that Christianity’s emphasis on the afterlife had prevented us from experiencing this earth—which is all there is—as fully as we might, and that it is the post-Christian recovery of this experience that gives “sense to life,” making sheer wondering inquiry the “central sane activity.”
O happy earth, O Earth on holiday,
Play with your children! Let us try
To catch you . . .
In one sonnet he spoke of a “boundless inner sky”—words that sit happily on a page with Seamus Heaney. What Rilke was trying to do in his poetry was not dissimilar to what Cézanne had sought to do in his painting, to approach nature—the earth—in an unmediated way, trying to dispense with the accumulated practices of the past, notably Christianity, which have hindered a true appreciation of the earth and the sheer joyfulness of existence. Rilke also thought that the earth could be best enjoyed by singing, singing being unique to humans, and with music weaving a line through the present, “lyrics uniting the time-based events of our words by recalling them back into the presence of one another through the repetition of their sounds.” For him, saying and singing overlapped.
And that is the point. In his Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Charles Taylor says that we have lost the power to name things. Taylor is surely as way off the mark here as Weber was earlier. For with the advent of science, our ability to name things has increased exponentially. And this, too, is the point, or a large part of it, because naming, saying, singing the world constitute the very criterion by which, it is being suggested here, we may judge whether that something we have within us which we bring forth is to be assessed as a success, even consequential. And along the way, of course, singing the world is—literally—enchantment.
Identifying the electron, the double-helix structure of DNA, the process of natural selection or cosmic background radiation—all this is naming the world. So is identifying viruses and the identification of the ice ages, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age. So is the identification of the formula E=mc2, or the principle of flight, or the phenomena of sea-floor spreading and tectonic plates. But so, too, are these lines of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop:
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over
Bishop, who described herself in childhood as “full of hymns,” was a fervent admirer of Darwin. She thought he had built up a “solid case” based on “heroic observations,” and on her visit to Britain in the 1960s she journeyed by Green Line bus to Darwin’s house. She continued to return to his “beautiful books” because she was convinced, as she knew he was, that, as he confided to his notebooks, “the sublime is reached through the commonplace,” the “slow accretion of facts.” This made her, according to Guy Rotella, “a religious poet without religious faith.”
Rebecca Stott highlights these lines of Bishop’s about a meandering bus journey along the Nova Scotia coastline:
A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
Stott describes this episode as a collective epiphany of the bus passengers, “locked in the otherworldly stare of the moose who is ‘high as a church.’” It is a Darwinian sublime, a secular enchantment, but it is not an apotheosis—“the bus departs, leaving only the smell of gasoline behind.” In Bishop’s work, Stott says, the sublime moment is “giddying” but there is no transcendence, no significance that is above; it is instead a fall, a falling back into the smell of the gasoline, or the memory of the smell, an immersion (Stott’s preferred word) in this world.11
Or consider “beautifell,” “As it is uneven,” “beauhind” from Finnegans Wake: seemingly inconsequential, but they are not just puns—clever or irritating or juvenile as the case may be: they enable and encourage us to see the world in new ways; or they clarify and crystallize thoughts we have almost had, that we wish we had had, or would have had, had we slowed down enough and honed our own observations a bit more. At the same time, and ironically and paradoxically, they recall George Steiner’s words, that aesthetic truths quicken our life, linking temporality and eternity in a way unavailable elsewhere. And remind us of Dworkin’s claim that performance itself has value, is part of the point. Throughout this book, it has been not just what has been said, but the style and force with which it has been said that counts equally.
That phrase of Elizabeth Bishop’s about the sea “considering spilling over” is also a thought we have all almost had, that we grasp immediately and silently thank her for, with a nod of the head—silver words that extend our world, underlining our uncertain and unfinished relationship with the sea and its unfathomable behavior. Zbigniew Herbert’s poem about a pebble, cited earlier, could be set alongside Brâncuşi’s sculpture of an egg, which, as Robert Hughes said, draws much of its expressive power from its “eloquent material presence” and resists analysis because “it does not seem to be put together.” It has a patient entityhood.
These words may not have changed the world as much as, say, the quantum, the electron or the gene (who was it who said no poem ever stopped a tank?). But they don’t need to, to be consequential, if they enlarge the experience of other people, and enchant us. If there is one thing that the thinkers discussed in this book are agreed upon it is that there is no one overbearing benchmark by which the world may be judged, so let us relish that truth, not continually try to deny it. Observation of the world can be heroic. That is what the people in this book have taught us. Observation can be liberating, enlarging—that is what we thank them for.
“WE WILL GRIEVE NOT, RATHER FIND / STRENGTH IN WHAT REMAINS BEHIND”
Which brings us back again to that most underrated movement of the twentieth century, the philosophy of phenomenology, the idea that life is made up of les minutes heureuses. And the notion that in a world no longer illumined by God or reason, all attempts to reduce its infinite variety (the universe, experience) to concepts, ideas or essences—whether religious or scientific, whether they involve the “soul,” or “nature,” or “particles” or the “afterlife”—diminish the actual variety of reality which is part, and maybe the biggest part, or even the whole, of its meaning.
Religious people can approach the world as phenomenologists every bit as much as the secular can. But how, exactly, are they to calibrate their response? In his Proof of Heaven: A Neurologist’s Journey to the Afterlife, referred to in the introduction, Eben Alexander describes the heaven he visited during his coma as containing butterflies and flowers. Were these more beautiful than the butterflies and flowers on earth? If so, how are we to regard the ones we see in this life?—as inferior? If the flowers and butterflies in heaven are not more beautiful, does that not take away part of the purpose of heaven? Alexander also said that heaven was “populated” by angels and souls and that the whole experience was blissful. Does this mean that the people we see on earth are, again, in some way inferior, imperfect? If so, how can we fully enjoy what we have on earth, knowing something better is to come? No wonder John Gray snorts: “What could be more dreary than the perfection of mankind?”12
With a little effort, armed only with imagination, the great majority of us can surely “name” the world in some fashion, or try to. Rilke, Santayana, Stevens, Lawrence, Steiner, Rorty, Scruton and many others have extolled the unrivaled importance of imagination. The beauty of naming lies in the fact that we need no great undertaking—like a war, the Large Hadron Collider built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland or a politico-social project like building a new town or a nuclear submarine—to achieve something consequential, in the sense that naming the world extends it and fulfills us and helps engender a greater sense of community. That is, in other words, a success both ethically and morally.
And this is perhaps the greatest achievement of contemporary moral philosophers. Probably, everyone of a secular inclination has always known, deep within themselves, that the aim to bring about a wider, more inclusive sense of community—as a reflection of greater equality, liberty and fairness—is the best and, indeed, only way forward. But that this cannot be achieved without a sense of responsibility to ourselves, without dignity, without a sense of life as a performance, without avoiding triviality, without a personal narrative, needed clarifying. This puts into context Thomas Nagel’s admonition that we cannot find meaning by helping others. That is, not only by helping others.
The central role of ethics and morals leads us to divide life into three realms: the realm of science, which most of us can’t escape and which has brought us so many advances, technological, intellectual and in terms of expanded understanding; the phenomenological world, the world of Sartre’s petites heureuses, of art and poetry, the world of small, patient, non-competitive entityhood, which is its own form of understanding and so complements science. And the world of desire.
Not enough has been made of desire, perhaps, since Nietzsche made his pronouncement, though he was himself very much alive to the difference between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Advances have been made in this realm to widen the acceptable arenas of desire: for instance, homosexuals and women have had their lives, if not transformed, at least eased.
But there have been losses, setbacks and stalemates, too, one being in the matter of female circumcision, barbarically still practiced in several regions of the world.
James Joyce, back in the 1920s and ’30s, identified losses too (in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake). Joyce saw that with all the changes taking place around him, in Europe in particular, in terms of the family, living conditions, education, contraception, greater mobility and in the mass media, the great casualty in life would be enduring love; that this intimate form of fulfillment, available to everyone, would be much harder to achieve.
As the latest divorce figures would seem to show, not only do most people not achieve enduring love, they don’t expect it anymore; many may not think it worth ach
ieving, or even be aware that it is an available goal. The recent French film L’Amour tells the story of an old couple who have experienced an enduring love and a life rich in music, but now in old age the wife has a stroke, then a second, and eventually becomes incapable of anything at all, let alone love. For her husband there is nothing left to love. Music is no consolation. He smothers her, out of enduring love, and commits suicide.
In this one sense, then, modern life is impoverished, is harder for us to find meaning within. Religious people might claim that they experience an enduring love for the church, or their God, but can a church or a God reciprocate like a wife, a husband or a partner? Is reciprocity not the essence, the pleasure of desire, the heart of its desirability? Is there anything more consoling, satisfying, fulfilling than to be desired, and to go on being desired? The many child-abuse scandals involving priests would seem to suggest that even a life spent in the church does not offer the kind of fulfillment of desire that adult human reciprocity bestows.
But the religious life also suffers greatly by comparison when it comes to naming. Religions—at least the great monotheisms—look back, by definition. Habermas is right, that many aspects of religious doctrine and ritual are rational, designed to ease the human condition; and this is the aim, too, of the new rituals Alain de Botton has suggested for atheists. But the greatest advance, if it can be called that, made by religion since Nietzsche is the idea that God is totally “other,” defined by . . . well, by being unnamable. By being, in a sense, nothing.
The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God Page 65