The Weekly Weil #4

actually, love is all you need

Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture.

- Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics and Ethics

In arguing that we should take a wide range of so-called spiritual beliefs and practices seriously, if not literally, I have repeatedly referred to Murdoch’s existentialist/mystic dichotomy. However, reflecting on Blake Smith’s uncharitably apt description of Becca Rothfeld’s guiding ideology as “dumb liberalism”¹, it struck me that Murdoch’s picture was missing a dimension! So I took the liberty of expanding the mental map by amalgamating various taxonomies floating around in our ever-thinning intellectual ether²:

A random selection of people and objects that one might encounter in various spots on the map³:

• Dumb liberalism: Ben Lerner, The Guardian, Owen Jones, The Progress Pride flag⁴, flexitarianism, Oprah, brat as a cultural phenomenon⁵, Joe Biden; parts of my super-ego and id.

• Dumb conservatism: John Podhoretz, National Review, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson’s diet, , Donald Trump; the other parts of my super-ego and id

• Dumb conservatism with a dose of mysticism: Patrick Deenen, Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeulen⁶

• Reactionary centrism: Tyler Cowen, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Richard Hanania, Louise Perry, Mary Harrington⁷; my ego (workaday)

• Reactionary centrism with an extra helping of mysticism: Andrew Sullivan; my ego (stoned)

• Existentialism (sad): Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, Michel Houellebecq, veganism; my ego (on a comedown)

• Existentialism (horny): Lucifer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ayn Rand, Andrea Long Chu, BAP, gourmandise; my ego (on an upswing)

• Existentialism (on speed): Nick Land

• Existentialism (on acid): Timothy Leary, Terrence McKenna

• Mysticism (on acid): Ram Dass, Aldous Huxley

• Mysticism (skimming the surface): whitegirl yoga, cartomancy, astrology, Orientalist poetry attributed to Rumi

• Mysticism (delving deeper): the Upanishads, the Gospels, Julian of Norwich

• Romantic Realism (a marriage between existentialism and romanticism)⁸: William Shakespeare, Carl Jung, Iris Murdoch, Tara Isabella Burton⁹, Sam Kriss, Justin Smith-Ruiu; my ego ideal.

• Romantic Realism (dark mode)¹⁰: Marxist-Leninism, national socialism, Aleister Crowley; my shadow.

• Mysticism (the real thing): the Void.

I‘ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to pinpoint Weil on the map. It is not as straightforward as it may at first seem

Those eager to find political inspiration from Weil’s insistence on the need for roots need to think carefully about what distinguishes her theocratic vision from that of Mussolini (from The doctrine of fascism):

Fascism sees in the world not only those superficial, material aspects in which man appears as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self- sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.

Weil herselfs anticipates this danger when she warns of “le gros animal” in her notebooks:

Une seule chose ici-bas peut être prise pour fin, car elle possède une espèce de transcendance à l'égard de la personne humaine : c'est le collectif. Le collectif est l'objet de toute idolâtrie, c'est lui qui nous enchaîne à la terre. L'avarice : l'or est du social. L'ambition - le pouvoir est du social. La science, l'art aussi. Et l'amour ? L'amour fait plus ou moins exception ; c'est pourquoi on peut aller à Dieu par l'amour, non par l'avarice ou l'ambition. Mais pourtant le social n'est pas absent de l'amour (passions excitées par les princes, les gens célèbres, tous ceux qui ont du prestige...).

Weil may well be considered the greatest female philosopher by conservative Catholic and proud sexist Anthony M. Esolen, but she is also the patron saint of the twink who stopped taking his HIV meds in protest against the war in Gaza.

In Murdoch’s essay On ‘God’ and ‘Good’, first published in 1969 and, inter alia, an attempt to secularise Weil’s thought, she returns again and again to the moral obligation to see the world as it really is. It is perhaps surprising then that she concludes the essay not only claiming that art is more important than philosophy for the “collective and individual salvation of the human race” but also urging that we generate concepts from the areas of art and ethics “to guide and check the growing power of science”. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Isn’t science, despite the so-called “replication crisis” and alleged “politicisation” of scientific questions during the pandemic, still our best (indeed, our only) hope of finding out something true about the world as it really is in an objective sense, cleansed from the distortions of our subjective experience? Who but religious fanatics, anti-vaxxers, New Age kooks, Nazi philosophers and critical theorists can object to the growing power of science?

Considering the publication date, fear of nuclear holocaust, or perhaps of the exhaustion of the earth’s resources, may have played on Murdoch’s mind. I don’t know whether she feared that science might bring about the end of the world, or merely degrade it. From my vantage point, it seems that the terminus of unchecked scientific progress is more likely to be the repugnant conclusion of Parfitt than that of Malthus: billions of babies are born from artificial wombs, are fed some GM potatoes with all the macro and micro nutrients a human infant requires, are played some AI-generated muzak and are then invited to provide informed consent to being euthanised, which most of them do without hesitation, because after all, life is pretty grim.¹¹

In The Myths We Live By, Murdoch’s life-long friend Mary Midgley explores the consequences of believing that the only valid way of knowing the world is through this thing we call science — that is, various -ologies which can ultimately be reduced to biology, which can ultimately be reduced to physics, which can ultimately be reduced to mathematics. It is a perennial temptation to believe that because you named something, you can control it. (Although it has to be admitted that it can be very satisfying to draw a map of the world and attempt to put everything and everyone in their place).¹²

Of all the sciences, psychology, with its promise of self-knowledge, is perhaps the most seductive of all. (It can feel especially satisfying to deconstruct yourself, especially daring greatly to be authentically vulnerable in public). Although Murdoch admonishes existentialist philosophers for not updating their over-optimistic view of human nature with the insights offered by Freud¹³, she takes a dim view of psychoanalysis as route to seeing the real:

What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called will or willing belongs to the system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.

[...]

In such a picture, sincerity and self-knowledge, those popular merits, seem less important. It is an attachment to what lies outside the fantasy mechanism and not a scrutiny of the mechanism itself that liberates. Close scrutiny of the mechanism often merely strengthens its power. Self-knowledge in the sense of a minute understanding of one's own machinery seems to me, except at a fairly simple level, usually a delusion. A sense of such self-knowledge may of course be induced in analysis for therapeutic reasons, but "the cure" does not prove the alleged knowledge genuine. Self is as hard to see justly as other things, and when clear vision has been achieved, self is a correspondingly smaller and less interesting object.

Such thoughts are echoed Sam J ‘s rousing series of posts entitled The Place of The Artist at the Aesthetic Turn¹⁴. In Part II, he discusses the lure of psychology in rather Midgleyan terms:

Yet to risk an even greater blasphemy: contemporary human psychology is largely myth, too. The Unconscious is a myth, Selfhood is a myth, and all our thoughts are finally stories. That is: they are symbols, which always stand in the end for the mystery of Being itself. All aspects of the psyche are at bottom pure figures, are purely tropological. All of them are ultimately metonyms for a mystery beyond our ability to name or represent. 

Speaking of mysteries beyond our ability to name or represent, friend of the blog SkinShallow left an insightful reply to the previous edition of the The Weekly Weil (reproduced without the excessively modest footnote):

Likely not at all relevant to Weil (or asceticism/excesses of the mystics*) but while at first the I-it/thou/nothing dimension seemed like a very apt distinction, on second thoughts the idea that "seeking love" (or even seeking to love) is not a version of objectifying Another as some form (even if elevated) of "it" feels dangerous; seeking anything is probably impossible without wanting, and might often change to needing (and needing is definitionally objectifying, it's impossible to need another human or anything from them without treating them instrumentally; thus need obliterates the possibility of love understood in this way -- and yes, on this account children can only love parents more gradually as they become less dependent on them with age), and when it's labelled or internally perceived as "love" it becomes often more insidious because full of righteous sanctimony. Desire/want are at least honest in way that someone seeking a love object or to be loved struggle with.

And I'm not saying the "thou" perspective is impossible in principle; I feel it mustn't come from seeking anything, but could occur in an encounter that's not sought and that's entered and conducted with no expectation of receiving anything.

I conceded that “seeking” love was the wrong choice of verb when talking about I-Thou consciousness. For a more comprehensive reply, please look out for the forthcoming special SEX ISSUE of The Weekly Weil.¹⁵

with love, as ever ambivalently,

m.j.e

xcx

1. You could say that chastising Smith for being a bitch whilst also indulging the bitch within me is analogous to having a cake and eating it, too. That’s right, darlings, I like to have it both ways!

2. But never forget the title of the Houellebecq’s fifth novel.

3. Temperament probably plays a role in pinpointing one’s comfort zone on the map, but many people travel between zones over the course of their lives, often diagonally. For my readers (also?) on the spectrum: I am aware that my labelling of the upper-left quadrant “dumb conservatism” and of the upper-right quadrant “dumb liberalism” implies logically that the y-axis represents intelligence rather than depth. However, the term “dumb” here refers not to a deficiency in cognitive ability but to a shallow engagement with texts, including the text that is the world. It is often a smart decision to stay in the shallows — especially if one is aiming for material success. The depths offer their own riches, but these tend to be of a more ambiguous nature, and the search is not without peril (see footnote 12 of my review of Pistelli’s Major Arcana).

4. Since the eternal recurrence of Pride discourse is my personal vision of saṃsāra right now, I’ll plead with dumb conservatives to make peace with the fact that the queers have annexed one whole calendar month (which will soon be an underrepresentation of the LGBTQ+ portion of the population if we can trust reports about the success of evangelisation efforts among generations Z and A). And maybe dumb liberals can compromise by making space on the Imperial Calendar to commemorate the cultural achievements of West Eurasian cultures (perhaps in conjunction with Veganuary).

5. Deliberate trolling of my long-suffering gen z boyfriends.

6. See Mark Lilla’s thoughtful response to these putative post-liberals..

7. For those who would place Perry and Harrington firmly in the ‘dumb conservative’ camp, I would recommend this conversation in which they are both in good spirits as well as Perry’s interview with Tom Holland, whose forthcoming book inspired the subtitle of this post.

8. I’m not sure if this is exactly what Pistelli meant by “romantic realism” in Major Arcana, but I don’t think it’s too far off.

9. Although she maintains a tribal loyalty to dumb liberalism.

10. To distinguish between the light and dark versions of “romantic realism”, Pistelli'‘s fascism-anarchy axis might be helpful.

11. I think most people, even those committed to a purely scientific view of the world, would agree that such is conclusion is ‘repugnant’, but the basis for this non-utilitarian judgement can be hard to pinpoint. In his new book Liberalism as a Way of Life, Alexandre Lefebvre argues that, at least in the post-religious Anglosphere, this basis is liberalism. After posting his too-hot-for-publication review of Rothfeld’s book, Smith posted a long but useful (since deleted) overview of this own written engagement with what he termed Cold-War liberalism. (Given Smith’s preternatural prolificacy, he has since published a dozen posts which I have not had the capacity to read, much less engage with). I agree with Smith that we might as well accept liberalism as the de facto state religion and act accordingly, although this raises questions about how it should best be institutionalised. Presumably Smith’s preferred model is an even gayer form of Anglicanism*. Personally this would suit me just fine, but I maintain that the priority should be to formulate some sort of liberal Shahada that a broad swathe of the population would be willing to espouse — and for this I’d argue contra Smith we need the clarity of Shklar’s The Liberalism of Fear rather than her more nuanced writing. This might clock me as a dinosaur, but I believe in the old liberal principle of an absolute, legally enforced, prohibition on physical cruelty, with questions of moral cruelty left to social norms and the Impartial Spectator residing in the breast of every man, woman and non-binary individual.

*I appear to have developed the unfortunate tendency to start antagonising a famous writer as soon as they subscribe to The Extremely Difficult Realisation. Blame my undiagnosed BPD. Or The Anxiety of Influence. So if you happen to be a writer with sadomasochistic tendencies (as all writers inevitably do, at least on a spiritual level), please consider subscribing to my humble little Substack to be included in a future reading.

Despite claims by dumb conservatives, I submit that gay culture has not yet penetrated straight culture nearly deep enough. Writers of all genders and sexualities can learn from our drag foremothers that conflict is not abuse and to roast each other Drag Race style. Make liberalism fun again!

12. Scientism is often blamed on “Eurocentrism”, but this misses the point, I think. After all, didn’t the Persians invent mathematics with numbers they borrowed from the Indians, or something like that? (I’m not an historian of mathematics.) Every civilisation has its equivalent of Athens and Jerusalem, Confucius and Laozi etc.

A feminist spin may be more credible. Perhaps the original original sin was a case of phallogocentrism: when Adam “gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field” (this was before Eve was formed out of his rib to nag him to take out the trash). It was Adam who named Eve ‘woman’, under the illusion she was another thing that he could control. When the world turned out to be more complicated than the neat little picture he had formed in his head, he blamed her (and Satan) for the ensuing chaos. Such a retelling is compatible with the myths Tao Lin purports to believe about Goddess-worshipping “partnership societies” that were supplanted by “dominator societies”.

However, before we all pray to let Mother into our hearts, I can’t but make a Paglian insinuation about misplaced motherly tendencies chez those with a Marie Kondo-like zeal for tidying up (a zeal which, as Rothfeld argues convincingly in the first essay of All Things Are Too Small, risks ridding the world of its glorious excesses and redundancies).

13. Arguably, similar insights can be derived from Darwin. or Shakespeare.

14. It strikes me that me that my diagram could perhaps be improved by turning the sad/horny divide into a separate dimension of moralism/aestheticism, since every quadrant has its censors and its sensualists.

15. Isn’t every issue a sex issue with me? Honey, you don’t know the depths of depravity that I am willing to plummet.