Forwards and Upwards
Notes on the possibility of spiritual progress
Dear reader,
A few days ago marked the one-year anniversary of The Extremely Difficult Realisation.1 In lieu of a full retrospective, I offer some occult fragments for your contemplation.
I remain sincerely grateful for your attention,
M.J.E.
Imagine a triangle
The longing expressed in Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, first published in German in 1912, sounds eerily familiar:
Our soul, which is only now stirring from the dormancy that has endured throughout this long period of materialism, has despair at its core, an anguish born of our lack of faith, lack of purpose, lack of aspiration. We have still not fully awoken from our materialistic coma, which has reduced the life of the universe to a malevolent game bereft of purpose. The stirring soul is still trapped firmly in this deep sleep, this enduring nightmare. The dawn glows faintly like a tiny speck of light amidst the huge vault of black. This faint glow is but an inkling, a suggestion of something the soul barely dares to recognize, for fear that its luminance may be the dream, while the vast vault of black is the reality.
In opposition to material darkness, Kandinsky posits ‘spiritual life’, which he describes as ‘a compelling motion forwards and upwards’. Fittingly for a pioneer of abstract painting, Kandinsky’s central metaphor for this hierarchical but progressive vision is geometric:2
Picture, if you will, a slender triangle pointing upwards, divided into unequal horizontal bands, with the sharpest angle and the narrowest band at its peak: this is a graphical representation of the spiritual life of a society. The lower down in the triangle, the broader and taller are the bands into which the triangle is subdivided and the larger the area within them.
The entire triangle is slowly moving forwards and upwards, its motion so gradual that it is barely perceptible. What is at the peak today will shift to the next section tomorrow. This means that that today only those at the highest point can fathom, and what is unintelligible nonsense to everyone in the rest of the triangle, will tomorrow become a meaningful and soulful part of life for those in the next band down.
After Auschwitz, the optimistic Hegelian image of society as a whole making slow, but inexorable spiritual progress seems absurd.3 Liberal modernity has individualised the spiritual quest: we are each trapped in our own little triangle, trying to find our bearings in a universe with no This Way Up sign, with nothing to follow but our bliss.
Furthermore, we have a shallow understanding of bliss, says Christopher Wallis in Near Enemies of the Truth.4 He traces the origin of the mantra Follow Your Bliss to the Jungian mythologist Joseph Campbell’s riff on a Sanskrit word:
In contemplative meditation on the Sanskrit compound saccidānanda (a Vedantic description of the nature of ultimate reality in terms of sat [being], cit [consciousness], and ānanda [bliss or rapture]), Campbell realized that he didn’t know the true nature of his being or his consciousness, but he knew what rapture was, so he decided to follow that. In this moment of insight, he intuited (correctly, I would say) that successful contemplative investigation of any one of the three elements would lead to an understanding of the other two.
Wallis blames the hippies for degrading the notion to mean do whatever feels good. He suggests that Coleman Barke’s Rumi is closer to the truth:
Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you truly love. It will not lead you astray.
Wallis is still worried about possible misinterpretations of the concept of ‘love’ so he introduces his own complicated metaphor of a golden thread that we can learn to discern through the messy tapestry of our lives.
For our present purposes it may be sufficient to observe that the force that compels the triangle forward seems at least in part to reside outside the triangle.
Kandinsky points to the novelist Henryk Sienkiewisz’s comparison between spirituality and swimming: ‘unless we work tirelessly, constantly struggling against gravity, we will certainly be dragged under’. The image of gravity recalls Weil, but she did not believe that this force could be overcome by human effort:
There are those people who try to elevate their souls like someone who continually jumps from a standing position in the hope that forcing oneself to jump all day— and higher every day— they would no longer fall back down, but rise to heaven. Thus occupied, they no longer look to heaven. We cannot even take one step toward heaven. The vertical direction is forbidden to us. But if we look to heaven long-term, God descends and lifts us up. God lifts us up easily. As Aeschylus says, ‘That which is divine is without effort.’ There is an ease in salvation more difficult for us than all efforts. In one of Grimm’s accounts, there is a competition of strength between a giant and a little tailor. The giant throws a stone so high that it takes a very long time before falling back down. The little tailor throws a bird that never comes back down. That which does not have wings always comes back down in the end.
I disagree vehemently with those critics who found James Macdonalds’s delightful production of Waiting for Godot too funny, no doubt yearning for the relentlessly grim catharsis of the three-hour trauma-porn-athon staging of A Little Life. In contrast to the creeping miserabilism that Blake Smith diagnoses in the so-called liberalism of both Judith Butler and Marilynne Robinson, the cheerful nihilism inherent in Beckett dares the audience to own up to our Schadenfreude. Of course we can identify with the absurdity of Vladimir’s and Estragon’s existence, with their victim mentality and their bickering, with their procrastination and their wishful thinking, with their jumping at any distraction to pass the time (isn’t that what we in the audience are doing?) But laughing at these poor sods creates a distance not just between us and them, but between the parts of ourselves looking forwards and upwards and those parts of ourselves that are content to remain prostrate in the mud. Il faut imaginer Didi et Gogo heureux.5
Wassily Kandinsky, Intersecting Lines, 1923 That being said, waiting for God is not an altogether passive exercise for Weil. In a short but illuminating essay Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies in View of the Love of God, she writes that the true goal of all studies is the ‘formation of the faculty of attention’:
If someone searches with true attention for the solution to a geometric problem, and if after about an hour has advanced no further than from where they started, they nevertheless advance, during each minute of that hour, in another more mysterious dimension. Without sensing it, without knowing it, this effort that appeared sterile and fruitless has deposited more light in the soul. The fruit will be found later, one day in prayer.
Murdoch attempts to secularise this further in On ‘God’ and Good by identifying the true purpose of prayer (emphasis in the original):
Prayer is properly not petition but simply an attention to God which is a form of love. With it goes the idea of grace, of a supernatural assistance to human endeavour which overcomes empirical limitations of personality.
[…]
God was (or is) a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention.
A flock of birds flying in formation suggests a middle way between a totalitarian triangle and a set of totally individualised ones. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. Hence the little platoons that Scruton-style conservatives get misty-eyed about or the intentional communities that never seem to work out quite as intended. A curious feature of geometry is that a bunch of small triangles can form one big triangle, but only if some of them are upside down. As one adds more triangles, the proportion of triangles that need to point in the opposite direction keeps growing. Would it be a stretch to infer from such trivia that tolerance of dissent from progressive ideals is an essential ingredient to sustained progress towards such ideals? Shelley with a leaven of Burke, perhaps?
From The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy & Mysticism by Alexander Room Après Kant, Hegel. Après Hegel, le déluge…
The tragedy is not that we sought truth and couldn’t find it — it’s that we discovered that the truth has little to do with us and therefore lost interest in it.
The linguistic turn in philosophy was one of several wrong ones: rather than getting under the net, we got caught in it. But in order to see that which our phallogocentrism has made it impossible for us to see, it’s no use waxing nostalgic about our purported Goddess-worshipping ancestors (even if these angelic creatures did exist, we would still be the descendants of the demonic hordes who replaced them). In Trip, Tao Lin writes about the need to go beyond existentialism. I agree, but would go further and suggest that we need to go beyond humanism, which is to say we need to move towards a more-than-humanism6 rather than the less-than-humanism that we seem to be settling for.
In The Sublime and the Good, Murdoch synthesises elements from Kant and Hegel to construct her own theory of tragedy, freedom and love:
Kant connects sublimity with the dream of an empty non-historical totality which is not given. We have only a segment of the circle.
[...]
Whereas Hegel connects tragedy with a human historical social totality which is given, within which we see a conflict the resolution and reconciliation of which is the totality itself. We have not just a segment, but the whole circle.
[…]
The true view of tragedy is a combination of Kantian and Hegelian elements. To use an awkward mixed metaphor, the circle must be humanised but it must not be given.
[…]
The tragic freedom implied by love is this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the beings of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves. Nor is there any social totality within which we can come to comprehend differences as placed and reconciled. We have only a segment of the circle. Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.
Keeping body and soul together
A few days ago while walking the dogs I came across a pigeon I first mistook for dead. When I picked it up, its head was dangling from a broken neck and I knew it wasn't long for this world. I recalled when I was five or six in the churchyard with a youth group and we found a baby bird on the ground. The group leader said that the baby bird would not be able to survive, so the merciful thing to do would be to wring its neck, which he quickly proceeded to do. It was one of the experiences that shocked me out of my childhood Eden: How could a loving God leave this defenceless creature suffering, without even offering it the dignity of a swift demise? Feeling the pigeon’s heartbeat in my hand, I knew I had the power to end its suffering, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So I gently placed it behind a bush and let nature take her bloody course.
Do we have any idea of what we are talking about? Although we often refer to spirit and soul interchangeably, the anti-Platonist Ludwig Klages7, considered them to be adversaries. Spirit (Geist, pneuma) is a product of History whereas the Soul (Seele, psyche) is the fruit of Nature, perhaps mapping onto the roles of the left- and right-hemispheres in McGilchrist’s typology.8
In Beast and Man, Mary Midgley similarly criticises Plato for justifying a rejection of our animal nature by recasting the gods as ideals:
I do not think it is any accident that Plato, the first Greek who consistently wrote of the gods as good, was also the first active exponent of the Beast Within. Black horses, wolves, lions, hawks, asses and pigs recur every time he mentions the subject of evil; they provide the only terms in which he can talk about it. This is not a an idle stylistic device: there is no such thing in Plato. His serious view is that evil is something alien to the soul; something Other, the debasing effect of matter seeping in through the instinctive nature.
In her philosophy if not her fiction, one could accuse Murdoch of straying too close to Plato’s perfectionism, worrying about how to be selfless in a concentration camp, rather than how to prevent the construction of these camps in the first place. Even her best Nietzschean (or perhaps Schopenhaurian) riposte is giving de trop:
perhaps indeed all is vanity, all is vanity and there is no respectable intellectual way of protecting people for despair. The world is hopelessly evil and should you, who speak of realism, not go all the way towards being realistic about this?
But why should realism be the standard? A world where people need their stupid little rituals and superstitions to sustain faith in the Good may not be an Ideal world, but it hardly makes it ‘hopelessly evil’. I tend to agree with Sam J:
Imagine seeing a tree and believing the world is evil.
my gen z boyfriend (not pictured), wishes you a demure autumn Nevertheless, the goal of individual spiritual progress is hampered by the inconvenient matter of our mortality. We can try getting around this problem by disidentifying from the body (here a belief in reincarnation or an afterlife comes in handy), but the mind (even a brilliant mind such as Murdoch’s) often decays even quicker than the body. 9
The altered state of choice for most is not transcendence, but dissociation.
What is the difference between a mystic and a fantasist?
I was surprised to discover that my first post was on that date.
Kandinsky also warns against what we would now call ‘audience capture’:
It happens too often that the spiritual bread that is appropriate to one band of the triangle becomes sustenance for the inhabitants of a higher band. For them, this bread is a toxin: in small doses, it causes the soul to sink gradually from a higher band to a lower one; consumed in large doses, this poison causes a violent fall, hurling the soul deeper and deeper through layers of the triangle.
Although nothing is too absurd for the true believer.
See also Krishna’s exhortations of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, or John Pistelli’s call for “an acceptance of your self-implication in all that you wish to undo, and a willingness to undo it anyway.”
Which, inter alia, implies the recognition of the non-absolute right of the rest of the natural world to exist independent of human utility.
I don’t support the criminalisation of German philosophy, but I do think we need some harm reduction.
Meghan Bell wrote an interesting piece using McGilchrist’s concepts to analyse Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. She does a thorough job of scrutinising Shlain’s wilder claims and has some intriguing speculations on the role of neurodiversity and gender on philosophy. On the margin, I think gender as an interpretative lens has become overrated on all sides.
The Substance (2024) is an excellent example of natural horror in its portrayal of our futile attempts to forestall our planned obsolescence. Like with Barbie (2023), critics are wont to get distracted by the gendered aspects of this modern-day fable, but I don’t think the film suggests that the male gaze is solely responsible for the heroine’s tragic self-absorption. Never mind being childless, this lady doesn’t even have a cat to distract her from the fact that she is no longer the centre of attention.
I feel like you and several others on this site are moving toward a form of discourse where there's so much multiplicity, symbolism, and allusion, that it might as well just take on its true form as philosophical theater.
I love that Weil quote! And agree vehemently with what you said about MacDonald’s production of waiting for Godot