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On the Authority of the Senses
MICHAEL LENNON: You’ve spoken of the authority of the senses many times, quoting St. Thomas Aquinas or quoting Hemingway. What exactly is this authority based on? What empowers it? If God is your answer, then to complicate the question, can’t we say that evil in all cultures has almost always been associated with the flesh and the senses?
NORMAN MAILER: My basic premise proposes that there’s a different mixture of God and the Devil in every one of us. Some of that variety creates the shape of our character. You’ll hear one person say about another, “He’s a good guy, he’s stand-up, but he sure can be a son of a bitch.” In ourselves and others, we find this constant interplay of good and bad.
If we are going to talk about these matters, I think we would do well to approach them with the confidence that humans have the right to explore anything and everything—at our spiritual peril, but we do have the right. It seems to me—how to put it?—I see no reason for a divinity to put everything into a Book and expect that to be our only guide. He gave us free will. Or She gave us free will. Once again, let’s leave gender out of it. If we were given free will, then the Book is the first obstacle to it.
What’s the role of the senses?
I would say the senses were given to us by God. If I’m ready to go in for speculations such as these, I would even go so far as to say that mind may have been the contribution of the Devil—or, at least, more so than God. How can I justify such a remark? Animals seem to function extraordinarily well on their instincts and their senses. To a large degree, they have community—ants, bees, all the way up to primates. There is an extraordinary amount of communication we can witness in animals, and they are undeniably superior to us in one manner: They don’t go around slaughtering one another in huge numbers. If, by every other mode of moral judgment, we see ourselves as superior, still we know that animals left to themselves are not going to destroy the universe. But we could. So it may be a true question: Did the Devil invent mind? Or is this still God’s domain? Or, more likely, does the search for dominance there become the field of battle?
There is no question in my mind that the Devil did enter mind. And, not being the first Creator, did His best to invade the senses as well, to corrupt the senses. But the question is sufficiently complex to assume that the senses are neither wholly God given nor Devil ridden.
But the line you quoted, which has puzzled me for decades, is “Trust the authority of the senses.”
St. Thomas Aquinas said that, and Hemingway, in his way: “If it feels good, it is good.” I’ve never read Aquinas in depth, but I was taken with the notion that the most formal of the Catholic philosophers had presented this rule of thumb. What I think it means—leave Aquinas out of it—is that we must trust the authority of the senses because that is the closest contact we have to the Creator; however, it is a most treacherous undertaking. As anyone who’s ever enjoyed a drink knows, the authority of the senses on a boozy spree is exceptional. You feel so much, see so much—and that’s even more true on marijuana. You trust the authority of the senses until, perhaps, they become so intense that God and the Devil seem to be there working with you full-time. We’ve all had the experience of an extraordinary trip on drink and/or pot, but what I know is that the end result is as often disaster as happiness. I won’t pretend that every time you get drunk beyond measure nothing good will happen. It occurred to me at a certain point in my life that I had never, up to that moment, gone to bed with a woman for the first time without being drunk. Since some of the most important experiences of my life occurred that way, I can hardly wish to argue that drink serves the Devil alone. Given the rigors of modern society, it’s possible we’d never get anywhere without liquor or pot.
You have me thinking of Blake’s line: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
It’s implicit in what I just said, but I think I’d be happier if the line had gone: “The road of excess can lead to wisdom.” I’m not in favor of excess because I’ve ruined too much in just that way. Blake did have an apocalyptic mind, which he served manfully, full-time. It’s one of the reasons his remarks inspire the highest flights of fancy. But on the other hand, he is seen by our modern spirit as signally impractical.
The other thing you said that gave me pause was how the Devil invades mind. On more than one occasion you have suggested that scientific thinking undercuts metaphoric, intuitive thinking, and I wonder if that is what you see as the invasion of mind by the Devil. Scientific method, logic, linear thinking is opposed to the leaps of intuition in metaphor.
Often. It seems to me our minds work on two disparate systems. One is based on the senses. Metaphor, for example, is almost impossible without being somewhat attuned to nature, to its often subtle shifts of mood. That depends so much on one’s senses. But then there is another faculty of mind that can be as cold as the polar cap. Indeed, it is a readiness to repel the senses, distrust them, even calumniate them as powers of distortion. This readiness to free oneself from the senses may be exercised most by the Devil.
Almost everything I dislike in the modern world is super-rational: the corporation, the notion that we can improve upon nature, to tinker with it egregiously, dramatically, extravagantly. Nuclear bombs, as one example, came out of reason. It’s not that scientists, filled with an acute sense of their own senses, brought their creative intimations to the atom bomb. On the contrary, it was an abstraction away from the senses, a pure flight of mind that came to the conclusion that it was possible to make the bomb—and then, that it had to be done, not only to defeat Japan but for the furtherance of science itself.
This may be related. I’d like to talk about Thomas’s Gospel, where it’s made clear that human beings have the obligation to bring forth what is within.
You had better say what this particular Gospel is.
Thomas’s Gospel is, of course, not in the Bible but is a suppressed apocrypha, discussed most recently by Elaine Pagels. In her book, Thomas’s Gospel states that as human beings, we all have the obligation to “bring forth what is within.” And if we do, it will save us. If you keep in what is in, repress it, whatever it is—it will destroy you.
I used to believe that entirely. I now think it to be generally true but risky. Because what does it mean to bring forth what is within? I work on the notion that there’s godliness within us and diabolism as well. So to bring forth what is within you, it is necessary, very often, to send out the worst elements of yourself. Because if they stay within, they can poison you. That is much more complex than saying, “Get it out! Act it out. Be free, man! Liberate yourself.” Because very often what comes out is so bad that it injures others, sometimes dreadfully. You could say that every crime of violence is a way of getting the ugliness in oneself out, acting it out, doing it. You could even advance the argument that there are people who will contain what is ugly within them—and that’s their honor. It’s a complex matter—often there are people who will sacrifice themselves in order not to injure others. For example, if you act out something dreadful in yourself—if, for example, the need to get falling-in-the-gutter drunk thereby intensifies the miseries of everyone in your family—it is doing nothing good for others. Or excessive gambling. Or beating children. Or entering sexual relations with them. To the degree that certain ugly emotions are acted out, others are injured terribly by your freedom to do so. I could argue that it is often a Devil’s urge you are expressing.
You have to ask yourself at a given moment, “Who is speaking within me?”
How do you answer that?
Well, I can give you one story; it’s fascinated me for years. At a certain time in my life, I was feeling rocky. My third wife had decided she didn’t want to go on with our marriage at a time when I had been hoping, “Maybe this time I can start to build a life.” She was a very interesting woman but easily as difficult as myself. So when she broke it up, I didn’t know where I was. And I remember one night, wanderi
ng around Brooklyn through some semi-slums—not the hard slums but some of the tougher neighborhoods a mile or two out from my house in Brooklyn—not even knowing what I was looking for, but going out, drinking in a bar, sizing up the bar, going to another bar, looking…this is ironic, but in those days, you actually would go to a bar and look for a woman. I think you still can, but it’s been so long now since I did it that I can no longer speak with authority. Anyway, I found no woman. I went into an all-night diner—because I realized I was hungry, not only drunk but hungry—and ordered a doughnut and coffee, finished it. Then a voice spoke to me. I think it’s one of the very few times I felt God was speaking to me. Now, of course, one can be dead wrong. I go back to Kierkegaard—just when you think you’re being saintly, you’re being evil; when you think you’re being evil, you might be fulfilling or abetting God’s will at that point. In any event, this voice spoke to me and said, “Leave without paying.”
It was a minor sum—twenty-five cents for coffee and a doughnut in those days. I was aghast, because I’d been brought up properly. One thing you didn’t do was steal. And never from strangers! How awful! I said, “I can’t do it.” And the voice—it was most amused—said, “Go ahead and do it,” quietly, firmly, laughing at me. So I got up, slipped out of the restaurant, and didn’t pay the quarter. And I thought about this endlessly. If it was God…as I said, this was the closest I ever came to trusting the authority of my senses. My senses told me this was a divine voice, not a diabolical one. It seemed to me that I was so locked into petty injunctions on how to behave, that on the one hand I wanted to be a wild man, yet I couldn’t even steal a cup of coffee. To this day, I think it was God’s amusement to say, “You little prig. Just walk out of there. Don’t pay for the coffee. They’ll survive, and this’ll be good for you.”
Now, I’ve thought about this often because it’s a perfect example of how difficult it is for us to know at a given moment whether we’re near to God or to Satan, which is why Fundamentalists can drive you up the wall—their sense of certainty is the most misleading element in their lives. It demands, intellectually speaking, spiritually speaking, that one must remain at a fixed level of mediocrity. It’s a great irony, because many of them who are good Christians, or Orthodox Jews, are compassionate. I don’t know much about Islam, but I’m sure the same is true there. You can have fine people, wonderful people, Fundamentalists full of compassion…can say in passing, If God was ever going to mingle in our affairs, Christ is more than a metaphor. Compassion is probably the finest emotion we humans can have. When tears come to our eyes for the sorrow of someone else, that may be as close as we get to reaching the best element in ourselves. But, there again, it’s difficult to know how pure any moment of compassion is. And any false variety of it can be toxic. When it is manufactured by constant adjurations applied to the daily habits of Fundamentalists, compassion can become the opposite of itself, and turn into an instrument for power. “Follow me because I feel compassion for you.”
Speaking crudely, if half the Fundamentalists in the world are truly compassionate, the other half are on an egregious power-trip.
You know, this always stops me. I try to think how you would translate your metaphysics, your cosmology, into an ethical system. It’s not just the Fundamentalists. Most religious systems say: “OK, we have the theology, now let us show you how that translates into ethics.” But what you tell me over and over again is, “We can’t be sure.” It would be very difficult to construct an ethical system by which to live one’s life based on your scheme of beliefs. Have you thought of that?
I accept your point. I do search for an ethic I can believe in. And that is where I go back to trusting the authority of my senses. They can also be—what’s the word I’m looking for?—traduced. To the degree that the Devil may affect our senses, they can become a perfect place for Him to get to us. That would be the Devil’s aim exactly—to enter our senses, make us feel we are having a godly emotion, when in fact we are being inspired by the Devil.
So I hope I never construct an ethic by offering a few bones. The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. If a good dog is upset, give it a treat.
Fundamentalism is comfortable.
It’s comfortable, but it is limiting. I keep going back to Kierkegaard, who, for my money, was probably the most profound Christian. He searched into the complexity of our relation not only to divinity but to diabolism as well. He knew that we must take nothing for granted in the moral firmament. We cannot kneel forever before the neon sign that purports to be God’s mystery: “Don’t ask, just obey!”
We can, of course, for the sake of this argument, pay another visit to the subject of Fundamentalism. After all, a good many Fundamentalists do function with vigor. Their lives have been simplified. They don’t worry over questions that are debilitating. They function very well—at their medium level. No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist. To my knowledge, very few talented actors came out of Fundamentalism—or stayed with it for long. Never a genius of any kind, not since Augustine and Aquinas.
So perhaps Fundamentalism is for the less daring, the less bold, the less gifted? But aren’t you living on an ethical razor’s edge, listening to inner voices to find the right word? That’s not something everyone can emulate.
Yes, people want to live in such a way that they will feel secure. But there may be no such security available. Right now, parenthetically, we are living in a time where we have to wonder if we will even see the end of the twenty-first century. Or will we destroy ourselves? In that sense, directly, there is no spiritual security.
So the Fundamentalists, beneath everything else, feel the same fears that existential thinkers suffer—that the whole thing can come to an end. Fundamentalists look to alleviate that fear by way of what I would call their desperate belief that it’s “God’s will” and at the end they will be transported to Heaven. Well, once again, this supposes that God is All-Good and All-Powerful and will carry the righteous right up there. Of course, that offers nothing to the idiocies of human history, particularly that the more we develop as humans, the worse we are able to treat one another. Why? Because we now have the power to destroy one another at higher, more unfeeling levels. This can be epitomized again and again by repeating the familiar example I take from the concentration camps—telling poor wretches that they’re going to have a shower to get rid of lice, and instead they die with a curse in their hearts. That’s more hideous, in a certain sense, than dropping a bomb on one hundred thousand people—on people you know nothing about. And yet you have Fundamentalists carrying on about abortion, speaking of it as thwarting God’s will. What does it have to do with God’s will if you kill a thousand people in one minute with gas? Or destroy hundreds of thousands in an instant of atomic manmade lightning from the sky? What does that do to God’s will?
We might assume that God, like us, is doing the best that can be done under the circumstances. God is our Creator. God put us here. We are God’s artistic vision, we are God’s children, if you will, and it’s not a good parent who looks always to control the child. The mark of a good parent is that he or she can take joy in the moment when a developing child begins to outstrip the parent. God is immensely powerful but is not All-Powerful. God is powerful enough to give us lightning and thunder and extraordinary sunsets, incredible moments where we appreciate God’s sense of beauty. But if God is All-Powerful, then how can you begin to explain the monstrosities of modern history? There are theological arguments by great theologians that these horrors are to test us. But this reduces our concept of God to a stage director who says, “Let the actors follow the script. Do not give them access to the playwright.”
In one of our earlier conversations, you said humans were created by someone or something not unlike ourselves. So we are then, in some way, created in the image of God?
Yes. I believe that.
Doesn’t that suggest we are
more good than evil?
Potentially more good. When a good man and a good woman have a child, there’s every reason to believe that child will be a good person. But it’s not guaranteed. Good parents can have evil children.
If we’re created in God’s image and we’re potentially good but then choose evil, perhaps we were evil all along.
Look at your phrase—“evil all along.” If, at Creation, the Devil was present and entered us as well, then what we speak of as original sin can be seen as God’s obligatory collaboration with the Devil. We were born good and evil.
Fifty-fifty?
The point is, whether it’s fifty-fifty, sixty-forty, seventy-thirty, the odds change in each of us because there’s an intense war that goes on forever, not only between God and the Devil but—I’ve said this before—God and the Devil as they war within us. We make our own bargains with Them. God and the Devil do not have the resources to be in complete control of us all the time. It isn’t as if we walk through a normal day, and there’s God on one shoulder and the Devil on the other—not at all. They come to us when we attract their attention, because it affects Their interest as well as ours. What I use as the notion behind these assumptions that divine energy is analogous to human energy—it is not inexhaustible. God and the Devil are each obliged to manage their own economies of energy, which is to say that they will give more attention to certain elements of human behavior than to others. Very often, they withdraw from certain people. Too much is being given, too little is coming back.
Given this supposition, I feel more ready to make an approach to the question of ethics. It must be obvious in all I’ve said so far that I not only am an existentialist but would go so far as to say that we do not know our nature. We only find out about ourselves as we proceed through life. And as we do, we open more questions.
On God: An Uncommon Conversation Page 6