The Aristos

by John Fowles

  56 All our concepts of God are concepts of our own potentialities. The charity and compassion that have been universally attributed to the finest – under their different outward masks – of such God-concepts are the qualities we are striving to establish in ourselves. They have nothing to do with any external ‘absolute’ reality; they are reflections of our hopes.

  57 We cannot in ordinary life easily separate self-interested motives from the ‘hygienic’ one I propose. But the hygienic motive can always be used to assess the others. It constitutes a check upon them, and especially in that sadly wide category where the action seems good in the enactor’s mind but is clearly evil in its effects. There were certainly members of the Inquisition, there were Protestant witch-burners, there were perhaps even Nazi race-exterminators who genuinely and disinterestedly believed in the goodness of what they were doing. But even if one gives them every benefit of every doubt, they were all impelled by spurious rewards for their ‘good’ actions. They hoped for a better world to come for themselves and their co-believers, not for the heretics, witches and Jews they destroyed. They acted not for greater freedom, but for greater pleasure.

  58 Freedom of will in a world without freedom is like a fish in a world without water. It cannot exist because it cannot use itself. The greatest fallacy of political tyranny has always been that the tyrant is free while his subjects are enslaved; but he is enslaved by his own enslaving, tyrannized by his own tyranny. He is not free to act as he wishes because what he wishes is determined, and generally very narrowly, by the demands of maintaining tyranny. And this political truth is true on a personal level. If the intention of a good action is not finally to institute more freedom (therefore, more justice and equality) for all, it will be partly evil not only to the object of the action but to the enactor, since its evil aspects will limit his own freedom. In terms of functional pleasure, it will be similar to unexcreted food, whose nutritional goodness is progressively counteracted by the damage it will do if its harmful elements are not passed out of the organism.

  59 Over the last two hundred years there has been a great improvement in personal and public hygiene and cleanliness; and this was largely brought about by persuading people that the results of being dirty and apathetic in the face of disease were not acts of God, but preventable acts of nature; not the sheer misery in things, but the controllable mechanisms of life.

  60 We have had the first, the physical, phase of the hygienic revolution; it is time we went to the barricades for the second, the mental. Not doing good when you usefully could is not immoral; it is going about with excrement on the hands.

  6

  THE TENSIONAL NATURE OF HUMAN REALITY

  1 Because of our powers of reasoning, imagining and supposing, we exist mentally in a world of opposites, converses, negatives. There may be some kind of absolute reality that is not like this. There may be other relative realities. But this tensional, or polar, reality is the one we humans inhabit.

  2 Anything that exists or can be imagined to exist is a pole. All feelings, ideas, thoughts, are poles; and each pole has counterpoles.

  3 There are two categories of counterpole. One is nothingness, the non-existence of the pole. The other is whatever denies, attacks, diminishes, stands contrary to or diverts from the pole.

  4 The obvious counterpole of an idea is the contrary idea. The world is round; the world is not round. But whatever else stands between my mind and its continuous concentration on the idea (The world is round) is also a counterpole. Now the contrary idea (The world is not round) is at first sight the most dangerous enemy of the pole idea; but all those subsidiary counterpoles (other concerns, other events, other exigencies, other ideas) that distract the mind from the pole idea endanger it far more; in fact, to the extent that they do not signal it, but submerge it, they reduce it to nothingness. There is thus a paradoxical sense in which the contrary idea signals and supports the idea to which it is superficially most opposed.

  5 Even when contrary propositions are meaningless or demonstrably false they contribute life and meaning to the propositions they oppose; just as the nonexistence, in human terms of existing, of ‘God’ gives life and meaning to all that exists.

  6 Our first and most direct apprehension of this polarity is got from our experience of our own self – our body and then our mind.

  THE COUNTERPOLES OF THE ‘I’

  7 I am made constantly aware of the otherness of things. They are all in some sense my counterpoles. A Sartrean existentialist would say that they hedge me in, they tyrannize me, they encroach on my selfhood. But they define me, they tell me what I am, and if I am not told what I am, I do not know what I am. I am aware too that all other objects are in exactly the same situation as myself: minute pole in a vast ocean of counterpoles, I am infinitely isolated, but my situation is infinitely repeated.

  8 All parts of my body are objects external to me: my hands, my tongue, my digestive mechanism. The words I speak are counterpoles. There is no mental activity I cannot stand back from and be towards as to a counterpole. So I am a tissue of counterpoles. My body and my thoughts and my words are like the garden and the rooms and the furniture of my house. Certainly they seem to me more mine than your garden or the room you read in at this moment; but a moment’s analysis tells me that they are not mine in any total or scientific sense. They are mine in the artificiality of the law, and in the illogicality (or biologicality) of emotion. My garden is this collection of grass, earth, plants, trees that I possess in law and can enjoy while I live; it is not mine. Nothing, not even what I call my self, is mine; individuality and counter-polarity separate me from all.

  9 I see these strange tools, my hands, at the end of my arms; I see these strange tools, my arms, that hang from my shoulders; I see these strange tools, my shoulders, that curve from my neck; I see this strange tool, my neck, that carries my head; I see this strange tool, my head, that holds my brain; I see this strange tool, my brain, that sees itself and calls itself a tool and tries to find in itself a thing not a tool that it is a tool for.

  10 Where then is the ultimate pole? Where is the T that permits me to make these descriptions? Which claims that everything, both in and outside me, is other? Plainly, it is no more than a recording of phenomena; a colourless mechanism distinguished from other such mechanisms only by its position in space and time. Ultimately T is simply the common condition of all human mentality.

  11 The description we habitually make is this: ‘I am aware of this disturbance that has happened in my brain.’ But it is more accurate to say: ‘This disturbance disturbed and the disturbing took place in the particular field of experience that the reflector of the disturbance, the stater of this statement, exists in.’ I is thus a convenient geographical description, not an absolute entity.

  THE TENSIONAL NATURE OF HUMAN REALITY

  12 If the T pole is anything it is the sum of reflected (and recollected) disturbances in this field. If there had been no disturbances there would be no ‘mirror’; no T. In short, T is constituted by its counterpoles; without them it is nothing.

  13 There is however a sense in which each counterpole must seem hostile to the ‘ghost’ called T that has been constituted by all other counterpoles. The directly contrary counterpole to I am is I am not. That is paradoxically not the most hostile since my death (as tombstones remind us) at least signals my existence. The way in which we ordinarily think of our own death is not morbid; on the contrary, one of the simplest ways of assuring ourselves that we live. But the counterpoles that are external to my body and my immediate surroundings and possessions are’ all in effect submergers of me. They distract my (and other people’s) concentration from myself. They diminish me. And thus they give rise to my personal sense of nemo.

  14 What we consciously or subconsciously require of a counterpole is that it in some way signals and confirms our existence; because we own it in law, because it loves us or hates us or needs us or acknowledges us; because we can identify ourselves
either with it or, by the process of countersupporting, against it. The more we are aware of the nothingness at the still centre of our being – that nothingness we mask by talking of T – the more we look for these ego-reflective (or nemo-destructive) qualities in the counterpoles with which we can choose to furnish our lives.

  15 Between all these counterpoles, both choosable and inevitable, and the T pole there exists a relationship; but since the counterpoles are in themselves poles and have their own counterpoles (one of which is constituted by T) the situation of the T pole is analogous to a kind of complex tug-of-war. We must imagine countless teams all of whose ropes are knotted at a centre; of differing strength, some directly combining, others obliquely affecting, many diametrically opposed. This central knot is the T; and the diverse forces pulling at it make the state of tension.

  TENSION

  16 Tension is the effect on the individual of conflicting feelings, ideas, desires and events. Sometimes the tug-of-war will be one-sided, in the sense that the individual will know quite clearly which ‘side’ he wishes to win. In most political and social contexts this is so. A Jew-hater is not attracted by pro-semitism, a pacifist by armed intervention. There is still tension, since the individual knows that in society the opposing point of view is held. But in many other situations the conflict will be in the individual. He will be pulled first one way, then the other. This can form a rhythmic and comfortable pattern, as in normal sexual relationships; it can become a torture on the rack; and in extreme cases the knotted ropes, the individual mind, may break under the strain.

  17 The effect of a tension may be good or bad: a game or an anxiety. Tension, like every other mechanism in the universal process, is indifferent to the organisms it affects. It may ravish them, or it may destroy them.

  18 Each of us, and each society, and each world, is the centre of a web of such tensions; and what we call progress is simply the effect of its opposing forces. To be human, or to be a human institution, is like being obliged to be a man on a tightrope. He must balance; and he must move.

  19 We shall never attain a state of perfect balance. For us, the only perfect balance can be the living balance. Even if perfect balance is momentarily achieved, time ensures it will not be sustained. It is time that makes this balancing real.

  20 Evolution changes in order to remain the same; but we change in order to become different. Time passes, from our human point of view, in order that each moment shall be in hazard and needing balance.

  21 Our pleasure and our pain, our happiness and our envy, tell us each hour whether we balance or we fall. We live in the best of all possible worlds for mankind because we have been so adapted and developed that this world cannot be anything else to us; we are best and happiest in a tensional, tightrope situation, but one in which we can gain increasing skill as we go higher. Height in this situation is principally definable by our ability to destroy ourselves. The higher we go, the steadier – and what is steadiness if not a form of equality? – we must become. Or we fall.

  THE MECHANISM OF THE TENSION

  22 The fundamental tension is between pleasure and pain; and the three chief fields in which pleasure-pain operates are in the subsidiary tensions formed by good-evil, beauty-ugliness and security-insecurity. The fundamental truth about all these tensions is that their ‘good’ poles are totally dependent for their ‘goodness’ – their value to us – on their ‘bad’ counterpoles. We all know this: that too much beauty can become ugliness, pain can become a profound pleasure… and so with all the rest.

  23 Beauty-ugliness may serve as a model for the mechanism of the other tensions. Just as there are two modes of pleasure, intended and fortuitous, so are there two similar modes in our apprehension of beauty: objective and actual The objective beauty of an object or experience is immutable, in parenthesis from all the subjective reactions and feelings of the experiencer. The actual beauty is what I happen to feel on a given occasion; it is the effect of the object or experience on my being at that moment.

  24 We are taught as children to think about great art (and indeed many other things, such as religion) in the objective way, as if every actual experience of a great painting should produce the same effect on us. We see the results of this in any famous art gallery during the holiday season: the gaping, wooden-faced crowds who stare at great art and cannot understand why they are not having great-art reactions, because they have been so conditioned that they cannot accept that in actuality a Coca-Cola advertisement may be more beautiful than the sublimest Michelangelo.

  25 Objective beauty is, of course, a myth – a very convenient myth, without which education in art and the ‘science’ of artistic appreciation would be impossible, and also a very human myth, since to search for the objective beauty in an object is to attempt to see it with the finer feelings of one’s fellow-men. All great works of art are secular ikons; and seeing them objectively is a secular act of communion.

  26 But the objective beauty has two great enemies: reality and familiarity. The total reality of an aesthetic experience is what we actually feel both in and out of the parenthesis. Familiarity breeds contempt, that is, boredom with the parenthesis. Seeing the objective beauty becomes a duty, and we all know that the concepts of duty and pleasure are rarely sympathetic; the second visit to a gallery is also a visit to the first visit. This is not to say that all repetitions of beautiful experiences diminish the original beauty. It is often not true of art, and is certainly not generally true of many other activities – such as lovemaking. Nonetheless, there is a deep and archetypal hatred of routine in man, caused by the demands of survival (survival is the correct performance of drills, whether they be the hunting-planting drills of primitive man or the wage-seeking labour drills of industrial man). Pleasure is associated strongly with the unexpected (the fortuitous mode) and the fresh, or previously unexperienced, beauty.

  27 It is of course possible to experience this beauty, which I will call virgin, in familiar objects, just as a metaphorical virginity can be found in a lover long after the literal virginity has passed. Such virgin beauty is commonly felt by almost all children, by poets and artists, and sometimes as an effect of certain drugs, like alcohol and lysergic acid. But to the vast majority of adults it can be found only in the new experience.

  28 It is true that we find substitutes for the loss of the virgin beauty of an object. This picture is beautiful because it is mine; because I own it, or remember it, or understand its secrets. The thing becomes my thing; not the thing in itself. Experience cedes to possession.

  29 The whole trend of modern society is to force the objective beauty down our throats. It is this beauty that concerns critics; and we are an age of critics. It is this beauty that concerns commerce. Mass communications, vulgarizing techniques, the substitution of twentieth-century didactic culture for nineteenth-century didactic morality as a proof that the propagating organ ‘serves’ the public, the spread of museums and art galleries, the flood of books of information – all these things force us, fundamentally actual beings, to see the world in a parenthetically objective way.

  30 The great contemporary attraction of the drugs and philosophies – such as Zen Buddhism – that facilitate the discovery of virgin beauty in familiar objects is explicable by our resentment of this pressure modern society puts on us. There are genuine and important uses for the objective beauty; but sometimes we want less of names, less of labels, less of analysis and historical placing – in a word, less ‘culture’. We want nothing to stand between the object or experience now and the mind and senses now. We want the thing in itself.

  31 In wanting this, and in being forced to search for the previously unexperienced, we put ourselves in the same situation as Midas. Everything he touched turned to gold, and from then on became useless to him. We crave the virgin beauty, but as soon as we experience it, it turns to gold… or boredom. We have to move on. The satisfaction of the desire is the creation of a new desire.

  32 But there is of cour
se a further element in our pursuit of the virgin experience of beauty. Even the most unobservant must have noticed that the same inexorable law applies here as applies with hunger: the evil or apparently hostile state is necessary for our enjoyment of the good or ‘friendly’ one.

  33 Hunger and appetite are exactly the same thing. Have you got an appetite? Yes, I am hungry. Are you hungry? Yes, I have an appetite.

  34 The same is true of all the other great tensions. A pleasure is all the more pleasurable for coming after a period of pain. Security, for following insecurity. Good, for following evil. It is true that we may not actively seek the ‘bad’ counterpoles and our swing away from the ‘good’ ones may be characterized more by apathy than by actually inflicting pain on ourselves, or risking our lives meaninglessly, or engaging in crime. Nevertheless we cannot do without the alternation of these opposed states, and we will encourage the alternation to the extent that we feel deprived, by the defects of society and education, by the unnecessary inequality in our world, of the virgin experiences we need.

  35 In our present unhappy stage of civilization – come so far, so little learned – it is natural that many should regard the essential thing to be the virgin experience, whether it occurs among the socially ‘good’ or ‘bad’ poles. They will find a justification for crime (a case brilliantly put by Jean Genet), for non-criminal evil (persistent adultery, ruthless commercial practice and so on) and for insecurity (the pursuit of dangerous interests and professions, such as mountaineering and car-racing).