by Holt, Jason
Hypatia and Joan of Arc
Hypatia . . . who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time . . . fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. Some . . . therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal . . . waylaid her returning home . . . completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.
—SOCRATES OF CONSTANTINOPLE
As we’ve seen, the Hellenistic philosophers believed strongly that practicing philosophy was a key element in a happy, meaningful life. However, doing philosophy could also be dangerous, as Socrates (among others) painfully discovered. Cohen’s song “Joan of Arc” illustrates a similar point: while many of us long for the clarity of “love and light,” a life dedicated to the pursuit of such lofty goals can, at times, be both lonely and painful.
While there is no universally accepted “end point” of Hellenistic philosophy, the ideas of Greek philosophy were slowly supplanted by the emergence of Christianity as the dominant ideology in the late Roman Empire. One of the last remaining strongholds of Hellenistic thought was Alexandria, Egypt, which for hundreds of years was home to the largest library in the Western world, and which had been founded at the very beginning of the Hellenistic period. As the Hellenists’ valuing of literature, science, and philosophy fell out of favor, the library was left to decay. Finally, in 391 CE, what remained of the library was destroyed by the order of the Christian bishops. Thousands of books, including many by notable Hellenistic philosophers, were lost forever—say goodbye to Alexandria lost.
In an ending that would seem to fit in a Leonard Cohen song, the Hellenistic era ended as it began: with a philosopher dying for unpopular beliefs. In this case, the victim was Hypatia of Alexandria, a famous mathematician, astronomer, and teacher of Hellenistic philosophy. All of her writings have been lost, and it seems that she fell victim to both political intrigue and religious persecution. In an event whose exact causes are still debated, she was brutally killed by a mob of local Christians in 405 CE, who may (or may not) have been acting with the complicity of the local bishops.
Her story bears close similarities to Catherine of Alexandria, the Catholic “patron saint of philosophy,” who Joan of Arc would later claim to see in visions, and it is at least possible that Catherine was in fact simply a fictionalized version of Hypatia herself. In any case, Cohen’s description of the celibate, fiercely committed Joan of Arc resonates with what we know of Hypatia. For her, as for the Hellenistic philosophers that preceded her, philosophy was not simply a collection of theories and arguments learned in the classroom, or a hobby that could be picked up briefly and then forgotten. It was instead an all-consuming passion that demanded total commitment, and which in turn promised the reward of a meaningful, fulfilling life.
It is this basic idea—that leading a meaningful, examined life requires both reflection and effort—that links Cohen’s songs so closely with the ideas of the philosophers discussed in this chapter. For many Cohen fans, this is among the many aspects of his music that make it worthwhile for us to return to it again and again. It illustrates beautifully both how difficult the examined life can be, and why it is so worthwhile to continue to strive after it.
2
The Existential Cohen
AGUST MAGNUSSON
They call him the “High Priest of Pathos,” “Grand Master of Melancholia,” and the amazingly awesome “Spin Doctor for the Apocalypse.” The stereotypical image of Leonard Cohen is that of a man primarily concerned with the darker aspects of the human condition. The enormous (and hilarious) array of aliases given to him by the press mostly label him as an artist whose stock-in-trade seemingly consists of little else than making people feel miserable.
This popular conception of Cohen as a peddler of doom has always bothered his devotees, and rightly so, for what is immediately apparent to anyone with ears to truly hear Cohen’s music and poetry is that there’s an immense amount of grace, beauty, and joy to be found in his songs. In fact, one might say that the darkness in his works (and there is, indeed, a great deal of darkness) throws into sharp relief the light that permeates human existence. This may be why it’s so common to hear people speak of Cohen’s music as a source of healing and comfort in times of suffering and despair, which is the exact opposite of the Cohen cliché perpetuated in popular culture which mostly evokes images of unhappy and angst-ridden depressives wallowing in their pain.
Even though Cohen has been famously hesitant to admit to any cohesive philosophy behind his artistic output he has, on more than one occasion, alluded to this fundamental element of finding the light in the darkness as a kind of spiritual signpost for a great deal of his work. This philosophy is perhaps most explicitly articulated in the chorus of the beautiful song “Anthem” which appears on Cohen’s 1992 masterpiece The Future: “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” In an interview given shortly after the album’s release Cohen said that these lines are “The closest thing I can describe to a credo. That idea is one of the foundations, one of the fundamental positions behind a lot of the songs” (“Sincerely, L. Cohen”).
This notion of the light coming in through the cracks in many ways goes against the prevailing philosophy of our age which tells us that we are to fill up the cracks as best we can, no matter the cost. Cohen’s insistence in “Anthem” that we must forget our “perfect offering” stands in stark contrast to a culture where one’s value as a human being is measured by material success and the extent to which we have attained a perfection (physical and otherwise) which is, ultimately, unattainable. Many people fall prey to depression, drug addiction, and sometimes even suicide in their attempt to fit into predefined societal norms which have little or nothing to do with who they truly are, reminding us that no sacrifice is too great on the altar of perfection.
Cohen’s artistic output is, in many ways, a rebellious cry against this point of view, a celebration of the beautiful losers (as his second novel was so aptly titled), those who resign themselves to the brokenness and suffering of the human condition and in doing so find great reserves of compassion, goodness, grace, and joy.
This notion of finding compassion through suffering, life through death, is a central philosophical tenet in almost all of the great spiritual traditions. Zen Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity all contain a great deal of wisdom on the insight so beautifully conveyed by Cohen in “Anthem,” and all three of these traditions have been deep sources of inspiration and guidance for Cohen’s art and life. I will not be focusing on these religious sources of inspiration for Cohen (some of which are covered elsewhere in this book) but would instead like to use the next few pages to examine a different parallel to Cohen’s thought on this subject, one which is found in the philosophical tradition of existentialism, one of the most important philosophical movements of the past two centuries.
Waiting for the Miracle: Cohen and Camus on the Absurd
What is existentialism? French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his work Existentialism Is a Humanism claimed that all the philosophers under this peculiar heading share the belief that “existence comes before essence—or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective” (p. 348). What this means is that philosophy, and our thinking about human existence, must be grounded in the lived experience of the individual human person and not in some abstract theory or system. This is not to say that existentialism opposes all attempts at systematically understanding the world (through natural science, for example) but rather that such methods of understanding reality are never complete and that they indeed often fail to address the most pressing concerns of human beings.
Though existentialism dates back to the nineteenth century it rose to prominence during and after World War II. This period represents one of the great spiritual crises of human civilization, an era where the promise and hope of
technology, science, and civilization were shattered in the unspeakable brutality and horror of genocide and war. Traditional ways of thinking about good and evil, man and God, were no longer possible following Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The old systems had failed.
It’s in this dark period of history that Albert Camus wrote his famous essay The Myth of Sisyphus, first published in 1942. Camus, much like Sartre, wanted to develop a philosophy that could address the terror that so many people were feeling in their lives. He centered his essay on the Greek myth of Sisyphus, which tells the story of a man who defies the gods and frees human beings from the domain of death. This was to commit the greatest of all sins in Greek culture, that of hubris, of trying to be like the gods, so the deities of Mount Olympus devised a particularly horrendous punishment for Sisyphus which was to last all eternity: He was to roll an enormous boulder up a hill and just as he was about to reach the top, after much pain and sweat, the boulder would roll back to the bottom, forcing Sisyphus to descend the mountain and begin all over again.
The reason why this punishment is so horrifying to us is because the gods effectively rob Sisyphus’s life of all meaning. His life becomes absurd, a bad joke, filled with strife and suffering from which there seems no escape. Camus, living through the horrors of the war, saw Sisyphus’s predicament as mirroring human existence. Human life, he wrote, is fundamentally absurd (pp. 5–6). All of our efforts throughout history to overcome this absurdity and to infuse our life with meaning by appealing to some transcendent, absolute Truth—whether through art, love, religion, philosophy, or science—have ultimately failed. The horrors of World War II represented for Camus the chilling realization that underneath the surface of human invention, advancement, and progress lay the unavoidable reality of the absurd, waiting to break forth in the form of suffering, alienation, and despair.
Leonard Cohen’s “Waiting for the Miracle” from the album The Future is an ironic echo of Camus’s insight that if we base our life on the hope of some transcendent reality, some higher power, system, or science that will somehow make sense of everything, we’re simply out of luck. It’s obvious that the narrator of “Waiting for the Miracle” might as well be waiting for Godot. There is no miracle, so you might as well stop waiting and get on with your life.
Cohen is reminding us in this song of a real danger, the danger of missing the beauty and grace right in front of our noses because we have our heads in the clouds, worshipping idols of our own creation and thereby losing sight of the divine. If you obsess about perfection everything becomes ugly; the maestro will sound like bubblegum and the beautiful woman (or man) in front of you who tells you that she loves you will be lost to the sands of time, unnoticed because she didn’t fit some ideal notion of what a woman is supposed to be like.
Like Moses with his hammer, shattering Aaron’s idol, Cohen brings us down to earth, because that’s where the difficult but astoundingly beautiful business of being alive has to take place. As Cohen’s teacher Roshi used to say: Heaven sounds like a great place but it doesn’t have any restaurants or toilets.
Camus’s philosophy is, to say the least, not exactly the most cheerful view of human existence (if Cohen is the High Priest of Pathos then Camus is the Pope of Doom). Yet he, just like Cohen, ultimately espouses a very life-affirming philosophy. Not content with diagnosing human suffering, Camus also suggests a way to overcome it. He claims that the more we run away from despair, the more we pretend that the absurd isn’t there, the worse off we become. The absurd is, for Camus, like a quicksand, where the more you struggle and fight the more you are engulfed. The only answer is to let go, to stop fighting, and to stand still in the predicament.
The most traditional way by which we run away from the absurd is by trying to devise some belief system intended to make all of our fears and anxieties go away. This could include science, philosophy, entertainment, religion, art, or politics; whatever it is that makes us think we’ve got it all figured out, that we’ve found The Answer to life’s great questions. Camus was deeply frightened by people who claim to have The Answer, given the fact that he had experienced Nazi occupation, and insistently claimed that there is no such thing, that our happiness, in fact, is dependent upon our resigning ourselves to the absurdity of life and to embrace its essential mystery.
When Cohen’s narrator at the end of “Waiting for the Miracle” finally breaks, accepts love, and suggests marriage, it’s not a breakdown at all but rather a building up. He (she?) says to hell with perfection and accepts that the messy reality we live in is what is truly beautiful and that the idealized beauty he sought is actually monstrously ugly, as all idols ultimately are. This acceptance, as Camus and other existentialists tell us, is ultimately self-acceptance, choosing to be who we truly are instead of obsessing over some ridiculous, idealized notion of who we should be.
Camus, in the famous closing lines of The Myth of Sisyphus, says that we must imagine Sisyphus to be happy. If Sisyphus realizes the absurdity of his condition and embraces it, instead of gnashing his teeth or trying to escape the situation, he will be free. Make no mistake; he’s still forced to roll the rock up the hill over and over again. There is, after all, no way to put an end to human strife or suffering in this life. Yet he is free to make of this situation whatever he wants. There is no absolute meaning behind what Sisyphus is doing so he himself must make it meaningful. Instead of feeling sorry for himself Sisyphus can light a cigarette, tighten up his gut, flip the gods off (sanctimonious bastards that they are), and roll that rock up the hill with a spring in his step and a smile on his face.
Democracy Is Coming
Yet this is not to say that any of this is easy. Resignation is serious business, something that we strive for throughout our lives. We inevitably have ambiguous feelings about giving up on the old absolutes, the beliefs that have anchored us and given guidance throughout the ages. Cohen’s song “The Future” is both a hilarious and a frightening reminder of this dilemma. Either we cling to ideologies that often result in (spiritual and physical) war and destruction or we fall into the dark seas of relativism where there are no absolutes and anything goes. The narrator of “The Future” is sickened by this modern age, plaintively crying out for Christ or Hiroshima, Stalin or Saint Paul, true good and evil, right and wrong, anything but this age of mediocrity and in-betweens.
This specter of relativism is among the most common objections to existentialist philosophy. Both Camus and Sartre blackened many a page attempting to exorcize it, arguing that existentialism is a kind of humanism, a belief that goodness is not dependent on the old gods but rather the solicitude of human beings. “‘Everything is permitted’ does not mean nothing is forbidden” (p. 67) Camus says, hoping to put to rest the fear so profoundly expressed by Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov that a world without God is a world without meaning; any meaning, human or otherwise.
Cohen’s album The Future is a profound discussion of this issue, a dialectic, a back and forth where the horrifying chaos of “The Future” (where things become so unhinged that even white men start dancing) finds its resolution in the hopefulness of “Democracy.” There is sorrow in the streets indeed, and some people (the homeless and the gay, to name a few) are ostracized and forgotten, a fact that runs like an ugly scar over the sickening smile of the American dream. Yet from this chaos, rising out of its ashes like a Phoenix, comes hope for truth and community, which is what this mythical concept “democracy” symbolizes for us. We may not understand the Sermon on the Mount, and we shouldn’t even pretend to, because it’s an invitation to a mystery, an invitation to a resignation where we let go of our prejudices and fears and abandon the entrenched beliefs that create inequality and hate. To embrace the absurd is to be neither left nor right. It is to recognize that the true greatness of a nation comes not from the might of its military or its political power but rather from a society that is open to all and where people embrace each other in their suffering.
Even though there are m
any existentialist themes in “Democracy,” the song also points to a problematic element found in many of the existentialist writers, Camus included, namely that they often seem to be advocating a kind of individualism where we must seek meaning and truth apart from our fellow human beings, lone, tortured, Sisyphean heroes that we are. Even though Camus admirably went to great lengths to give an account of the social nature of the absurd hero, he never quite overcame this irritatingly macho tendency towards glorifying the lone wolf, the man apart (and I mean man).
Cohen, in songs such as “Democracy” and “Anthem” and especially in his famous “Hallelujah,” seems to be hinting at a communion which extends beyond the cocky meaning-making grittiness of Camus. If love is “the only engine of survival,” as Cohen says (“The Future”), then Kierkegaard, with his dark honesty and profound meditation on love, will help illustrate why Cohen’s poetry and song are uplifting even in their sadness.
The Hallelujah of Resignation
Søren Kierkegaard wrote his dark ruminations on God and human despair a good century before Camus faced the absurd. This melancholy Dane is generally considered the founding father of existentialism and his primary philosophical motivation was to critique what he saw as the spiritless and mechanical nature of the modern world, especially what he saw as the modern obsession with systematic thinking, of trying to devise some economic system, philosophy, or science that provides The Answer. Kierkegaard believed that the messy business of being human was much too complex to be contained within any system and thus suggested that we start our philosophizing with the subjective lived experience of the “poor existing individuals.” Even though fancy systems can be pretty great they really aren’t that much help on Boogie Street.
In one of his most famous works, Fear and Trembling, written under the pseudonym “Johannes de Silentio,” Kierkegaard touches on many of the same issues we previously discussed from Camus’s essay on Sisyphus. Yet Kierkegaard’s absurd hero is not a figure from Greek mythology but rather the Old Testament figure Abraham, the father of faith, who was asked by God to sacrifice his only son Isaac on Mount Moriah. (Cohen’s “Story of Isaac” explores the familiar story in an uncharacteristic way, from the son’s perspective.) As Bob Dylan pointed out in his song “Highway 61,” Abraham’s initial answer to god was probably: “Man, you must be putting me on.” But after that, being the mensch that he was, Abraham said “Yes” to God’s command, proving his absolute faith and dedication.