I have never read anything by Carol Gilligan although I am somewhat familiar with her book, In a Different Voice. How could anyone who was in college in the mid-80s not be? She did sort of start a revolution. Almost all of my female professors were talking about it. Men focus on rules, women on relationships so how we make moral decisions is different. Men are not morally superior to women, they simply have a different approach to morality. That was truly huge back in the day! Especially having grown up in a heavily fundamentalist Christian area where women were expected to submit to men because the Bible had deemed them morally inferior.

Potential Spoiler Warning!

Kyra is about a woman whose husband was murdered 10 years or so ago by her half-brother. She’s had no interest in other men, considering herself to be still married. But she meets Andreas, a Director of Opera and she falls in love and begins letting go of her first marriage. But then Andreas suddenly leaves without warning and Kyra falls apart. She no longer knows what is real - the typical existential crisis.

To help her through the crisis, she goes into therapy with Greta, an older woman. Like Gilligan, Greta believes therapy is “tragically” flawed - especially for women who are asked to submit themselves to the rules. At some point in the therapy, woman cease to make progress. They hit a wall with the therapy that men do not and Greta offers a lecture explaining that this is very likely thanks to the difference in men and women.

Andreas leave Kyra without telling her because he fully expects her to understand that he cannot stay. He has internal rules he must obey and he thinks Kyra is as obedient to those rules as she is. But being female, she is far more tuned into the relationship than to the rules so is devastated when he leaves. She is likewise troubled by the “ending” in therapy. Therapy is a sort of “love” relationship but when it is over. This understandably frustrates Kyra and she and her therapist courageously work through ways to break through the old, masculine structure.

I had a very difficult time connecting to the characters. I didn’t really like Kyra or Andreas, in part because I had a very difficult time picturing them. I’d have an image and then Gilligan would add something that would dash it. But Gilligan’s not a novelist and I’m sure her intention was not to create the next great novel. She was trying to convey something through story telling and I think it worked, however awkward the story. (I don’t understand why we didn’t get to travel to Thailand with Kyra and experience the shift she experienced there - it seemed important but goes, has some sort of enlightening experience, but we don’t get to share it with her. We have to hear about it in a lecture.)

Going through some of what I highlighted:

Kyra to Andreas talking about her first husband, Simon: “I don’t think you can fall in love with a man unless you fall in love with his work.” Do you think this is true? I am not at all in love with my husband’s work. I have major issues with it and sometimes it bothers me a lot - it would be nice to be married to someone who is really passionate about what he does and is making a difference in the world through his work. But for the most part, my husband likes what he does and feels that he makes a difference in the small circles he inhabits at work by just being who he is and not fully buying into the corporate mentality. But I couldn’t do what he does - it would be like death to me. Of course, I’m not so sure Kyra is so in love with Andreas’ work even though she admires it so perhaps this comment is really more about being reliant upon the structures that have been created by man. Kyra realizes much later in the book that her relationship to Simon isn’t perfect and that he required a subtle submission she hadn’t noticed until her work in therapy.

Kyra to Greta (the therapist): “But the problem is not just that women need to discover they can change the structures in which they living. That’s what my work is about, changing the structure. It’s why do you set up this situation, this structure, in the irst place. Why wet up a relationship with an ending built in? You’re asking women to buy this, but my question is, why have you bought it?” This makes the therapist mad. What Kyra recognizes is that therapy is structured in such a way that the patients problem is really just their problem and exists separately from the therapist. If the therapist withholds her feelings or manipulates them, it’s confuses Kyra’s feelings. Greta’s answer? This is the way she knows how to work. It was how she was trained - she knows therapy is inherently flawed, but she hadn’t questioned the structure in the way Kyra is questioning it and she now fully realizes. Which, of course, always makes us angry at first. It’s terrifying to take away those railings.

Speaking of railings, my husband and I had an interesting discussion about Kyra’s dream of walking out on the narrow bridge and realizing there are no railings but she’s too far out to go back. My husband asked me what it felt like to me to have the railings taken away and I said it felt like freedom. He said for him, it felt like chaos. I really do think Gilligan is on to something here. We women are used to a structure of submission and that submission is built into the structures of society - physical and idealogical. Submitting yourself to something greater than yourself generally requires an absence of railings. But submission to the so-called “stronger gender” is a different baby altogether. It’s a sort of bondage - not the freedom inherent in the paradoxical, mystical submission “to God”, wisdom, trust, etc.

The idea of wanting to know what is real makes a lot of sense to me. I could see cutting myself, like Kyra did, to try and figure that out - especially when what seems to be so connected turns out to be yet another superficiality. It gets extremely tiresome to have parents and societal authorities tell us who it is we are and who we are supposed to be. There is almost no concern whatsoever about who it is we are.

My parents sent me to college to ensure that I’d meet a man who would be able to take care of me financially.   Going to school had nothing to do with getting a degree in something that interested me.   When I married a man who didn’t have a college degree, they didn’t show up to the wedding. I got a telegram from them on my wedding day, and then didn’t hear from them again for 6 months. I didn’t submit to their rules.    From their perspective, I’d been disloyal.  But from my perspective, I was being loyal to myself.  And even though the marriage ended unhappily, I learned far more about myself through that troubled marriage than had I followed their rules.

At some point, when you begin to trust yourself, the reigning rules and structures do begin to feel incredibly superficial.   It’s easy to think reality is based upon the structures we are born into or are trained with.  But do a bit of interior digging.  You soon realize that structure influences the experience of reality, but otherwise has very little to do with it. AND! It’s the relationship of the individual to the structure that creates the experience of reality.  We can’t know reality in any other way except through relationship.  That’s why both Kyra and Andreas were trying to a develop a fluidity within their respective structures rather than a structure that requires submission to it’s rules.

Possible Spoiler Warning

A few years back I read one of Saramago’s most popular books, Blindness. It won a Nobel Prize for Literature and was excellent. It’s a thought experiment that considers what might happen if a whole entire city of people were plagued by blindness, except one.

I stumbled upon the sequel to Blindness, Seeing, in the Barnes and Noble bargain section. This is another interesting thought experiment that links the previous plague of blindness, now that the country has recovered it’s sight, to what the government calls a plague of blank votes. The citizens all did their civic, democratic duty and voted, but over 80% of the citizens turned in a blank ballet. Another election is held and the exact same thing happens again. The government considers this a subversive organized plot and in order to punish the citizens, declares the city under seige. All governmental employees are evacuated assuming the city will soon self-destruct without governmental aid.

Nobody knows why so many citizens have voted this way. Was it organized? Perhaps. But when the citizens are closely examined, it seems they share the notion that it is not illegal to cast a blank vote and came up with the idea on their own. In a democracy, we tend to think we vote for one of two opposing factions (and maybe a third that very few vote for). But that isn’t actually the case. We can voice our opinion through a blank vote. It is not surprise that the government views the large number of blank votes as an act of terrorism. It’s a direct attack on the government whether it has been an organized attack or not.

The Government soon discovers the citizens of the city are not so easily thrown off balance. For instance, the refuse collectors voluntarily begin collecting garbage and are reprimanded and ordered not to collect garbage, but they do so anyway by resigning from their civic post. Everyone takes care of their own little patch of area, and the city continues to go on cheerfully and peacefully without government intervention.

Of course, this won’t do from the government’s perspective so it plants a bomb made to look like it was planned by subversive citizens to try and restore patriotic duty. But it likewise has no affect. A beautiful, peaceful demonstration in honor of the dead spontaneously arises with no disruptions to the peace whatsoever. The government continues to make attempts to convince the people of the error of their ways and sinks to lower and lower depths to do so.

Shortly after, an evacuation of those who had patriotically marked their ballots attempt an escape and are told they will be well-received. But at the last moment, there is a change of decision and they are not allowed to leave the capital city and are forced to return to their homes. The government is certain that those who had attempted to evacuate will be dealt with severely by those who casted blank votes. But when these vote casters return, there is no violence. People come out to help them get their things back in their homes.

Ursula LeGuin points out that when Saramago accepted the Nobel Prize for Blindness, he said, “The apprentice thought [Saramago calls himself the apprentice], ‘we are blind’, and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures.”

From The Culture of Counter-Culture:

One ordinarily feels that one is a separate individual in confrontation with a world that is foreign to one’s self that is “not me”. In the mystical kind of experience, though, that separate individual finds itself to be of one and the same nature or identity as the outside world. In other words, the individual suddenly no longer feels like a stranger in the world; rather, the external world feels as if it were his or her own body.

The next aspect of the mystical feeling is even more difficult to assimilate into our ordinary practical intelligence. It is the overwhelming sense that everything that happens - everything that I or anybody else has ever done - is part of a harmonious design and that there is no error at all.

Now, I am not talking about philosophy; I am not talking about a rationalization or some sort of theory that somebody cooked up in order to explain the world and make it seem a tolerable place in which to live. I am talking about a rather whimsical, unpredictable experience that suddenly hits people - an experience that includes this feeling of the total harmoniousness of everything.

I realize that those words - the total harmoniousness of everything - can carry with them a sort of sentimental or pollyanna feeling. There are various religions in our society today that try to inculcate the belief that everything is harmonious unity. They want, in a sense, to propogandize the belief that everything is harmonious.

To my mind, that is a kind of pseudomysticism. It is an attempt to make the tail wag the dog or to make the effect produce the cause - because the authentic sensation of the true harmony of things is never brought about by insisting that everything is harmonious. When you do that - when you say to yourself, “All things are light, all things are God, all things are beautiful” - you are actually implying that they are not, because you wouldn’t be saying it if you really knew it to be true.

So the sensation of universal harmony cannot come to us when it is sought or when we look for it as an escape from the way we actually feel or as compensation for the way we actually feel. It comes out of the blue. And when it does, it is overwhelmingly, convincing. It is the foundation for most of mankind’s profound philosophical, mystical, metaphysical, and religious ideas. Someone who has experienced this sort of thing cannot restrain himself. He has to get up and tell everybody about it. And, alas, he becomes the founder of religion, because people say, “Look at that man, how happy he is, what conviction he has. He has no doubts. He seems so sure in everything he does.”

…..

And so, in the same way when somebody has an authentic mystical experience, it just comes forth. He just has to tell everybody about it, because he notices everybody around him looking dreadfully serious. Looking as if they had a problem. Looking as if the act of living were extremely difficult. But from the standpoint of the person who has had this experience, they look funny. They don’t understand that there isn’t any problem at all.

The mystic has seen that the meaning of being alive is just to be alive… It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves. The funny thing is, they are not even quite sure what they need to achieve, but they are devilishly intent on achieving it.

Philip Novak wrote the text my professor used for a World Religions class I took about 10 years ago. Later, I discovered that Novak is a Buddhist when I bought a book he co-authored with Huston Smith on Buddhism. So when I was at my favorite Half Price Bookstore and happened upon a book about Nietzsche by him, I immediately bought it.

The vast majority of the book is a collection of aphorisms written by Nietzsche organized around specific topics to show his progression of though so very little of the book is actually written by Novak. But he has an interesting Afterward that compares Nietzsche and Buddha. He writes that even though Nietzsche looked with suspicion upon spiritual teachings of the traditional sort, “was in spite of himself an embodiment of the archetype of the religious prophet and the philosophical seer - not only because of what he said, but also because of the form in which he said it. Nietzsche’s teaching has a familiar soteriological structure [soteriology is theology dealing with salvation]. First, he diagnoses a fallen state: human beings in their normal, untransformed situation are in a radically unsatisfactory condition. They live diminished, benighted lives, embracing illusions as truth. Second, he provides a prescription for salvation: human beings have within themselves the potential for self-transformation, for conversion to a limitlessly better condition, a fulfilled, enlightened life. Every teaching that presupposes such redemptive possibilities must also entail, as Nietzsche’s teaching does, destructive and constructive tasks; first errors must be destroyed, ignorant modes of living must be abandoned; second, new ways of life in accord with the new aim must be envisioned and adopted.”

Many wisdom traditions claim that false self-assessment is the most pernicious error that needs to be destroyed. We overestimate what we, thinking we already possess the fullness of human potential when our lives are more impoverished than they are full. Wisdom traditions attack self-complacency, ignorance, and unfreedom (that is thought to be freedom) in the same way Nietzsche does. But you can’t just attack, you must also provide general blue prints for a new way of being. Nietzsche does attempt to provide a blue print but Novak says Nietzsche’s redemptive vision doesn’t fulfill it’s promise to “bring glad tidings such as there have never been.” But, Nietzsche’s vision did make room in Western thought for the ancient ideas of self-transformation that had originally been rejected in the Western world as “Eastern”.

The viability of his positive vision relies on the viability of the Ubermensch. Solomon is always very clear to say that the Ubermensch is an ideal and not something we should take literally. But Novak says the idea of the Ubermensch is very similar to Buddha’s awakened being. Both Buddha and Nietzsche did something unusual in that “they offered their teachings on the psycho-spiritual refinement of the human person without recourse to theism.” In the case of both the Ubermensch and the awakened being…

1. the emphasis is on disciplined self-mastery;
2. the idea of lifelong overcoming is involved;
3. inner freedom is cherished as a high aim;
4. contemplation is not about fleeing reality but penetrating into it in order to see the true nature of what lies before it;
5. a psycho-physical training that aims at deconditioning the self, freeing it from automatic reactivity, and draining the poisons of enmity and ressentiment are recommended to provide it with access to life’s free flow of quality and the concomitant blessings of freedom, plenitude and gratitude.

But there are definitely differences. For instance, Novak points out Nietzsche’s repudiation of pity. Solomon would say that Nietzsche repudiates a very specific type of pity and compassion (Christian pity) and not the sort Buddhism espouses. When compassion and pity are undertaken in terms of a belief in external morality, the “help” being offered doesn’t take into account the values those being helped might hold and becomes oppressive. Without realizing it, the Christian has placed himself as superior to the person he claims to have compassion for. I wonder of Nietzsche would have been troubled by an understanding of Compassion that takes into account interconnectedness and is not based on a belief in an external morality? It is the belief in an external morality that makes loving your neighbor as yourself narcissistic rather than truly compassionate. In order to truly be compassionate, we must be able to see “the other” as “other”. To think we are helping someone based on our own value system and what we would want to happen to us without also taking into account that the person we are helping may not share our value system is narcissistic. This sort of compassion isn’t really compassion at all and I think Nietzsche was right to reject it.

Nietzsche does reject Buddhist compassion, but both Novak and Solomon claim this is based on long-held Western biases that say Buddhism is life-denying. (Buddhism is definitely about self-control and self-mastery. But the purpose for this is not to deny life. According to N.P. Jacobson, it’s purpose is to provide the means by which we celebrate the wonder of being alive every day.)

It does seem doubtful that Nietzsche’s Ubermensch will be able to stand the test of time as a means to live a joyful life. But I think Novak is definitely right. What Nietzsche has provided us is a way out of a belief system that created the most violent century in history (which Nietzsche accurately predicted). There are many among us who wonder if we are about to kill off the entire planet and a very typical response people have is to laugh and say that if the planet is going to come to an end, they’ll go down in style. (They don’t want to give up their products and comforts). That’s the complacency of Nietzsche’s Last Man who only exists for safety and comfort. It’s mediocrity and is definitely not life affirming! There is a growing group of Christians who want to actively bring about “the end of the world” because for them it means the chance to go to an even better world. We are in dire need of creating new meaning that values life - this life, this world, now!!

Buddhism has become a really big deal in America. Supposedly, it was a dying religion and America has revived it. It’s a very flexible religion so American Buddhism looks very different than Eastern Buddhism. We’ve made it our own and much of it’s teachings have been incorporated into all sectors of our culture. Mindfulness training shows up in Christianity as does meditation. Medicine has been making extensive studies on meditation with interesting results showing it has a positive affect it has on our well-being.)

Novak concludes:

There is a sense in which Nietzsche sacrificed his life for us, offered it as an experiment to test the consequences of sailing on a sea where all Gods have died. His books, written in the blood of this sacrifice, constitute a school through which everyone who wishes to think deeply about life’s enduring questions should pass - but only if they can afford the tuition: the exposure of all cherished convictions to Nietzsche’s relentless hammer. And if our above remarks have any validity, Nietzsche has given us at least one other gift. He has made a western clearing for an ancient path of self-transformation now freed of its commitments to premodern Asian cultures.

Last month, while reading Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, I remembered that I had bought a book several years ago called Dark Nights of the Soul by Thomas Moore that I had never gotten around to reading. I think it is probably good I waited to read it because I think I probably got far more out of it having read it now than had I read it earlier. I feel like I’ve spent the last 3 years working through a “Dark Night” and have definitely concluded it is much better to go through it than to try and resist it through religion, depression medication, or other distractions. It’s ironic, but I do think when we give up our fear of it and accept the Dark Night, it makes us better able to trust.

It’s so confusing in our society, though. We are told that happy is good and sad is bad. Sad has to be “fixed”. This leads to the tendency to either blame our sadness on others or an inherent flaw. What we don’t realize is how healing sadness and dark nights of the soul can be. We tend to think in terms of progress and personal growth. The western idea of enlightenment is understood in terms of this progress. It’s understood to be a state of being we reach where nothing can bother us any more. But that’s not what enlightenment is about. There is the Buddhist saying, “Before enlightenment, depression. After enlightenment, depression.” Enlightenment doesn’t “heal” our emotions, it gives us a different perspective on them. It allows us to understand that dark nights are instructive and that sadness isn’t something to fear. It is every bit as “good” as happiness. What dark nights do is help us to become who it is we are by making us deal with the delusions of the ego. Moore says that the end result of our dark nights is not a final victory or an end to suffering. It is a moral development that allows us to engage life more energetically and helps us discover a level of meaning that dissolves discontent.

Moore says, “contemporary America values opinion over reflection. It always wants to know who is right, and not who has the most interesting and suggestive ideas.” The dark nights of the soul, I think, are somewhat akin to Nietzsche’s lion stage. We’re thrown off balance and have to slay the dragon. But we can’t do this if we are convinced that sadness is bad. Instead, we will do everything we can to distract ourselves from the stage so that we can remain a camel - dutifully following the dictates of culture. That’s nihilism. It’s the stuff of the Last Man who only wants safety and comfort. Moore says that Ancient societies focused their attention on the unfolding self. We favor the practical self. But the self is always becoming. It is always evolving. To focus on the practical is definitely practical, but it’s not imaginative. We are told to get past our mood and get on with life. But art understands the depth and character that comes with sadness.

The dark night is a cleansing of perception that allows us to move into the deeper life of the soul. Moore writes, “A society is like an individual: in the face of a dark night it can either become defensive and avoid the challenge of new life, or it can reform itself and discover in the darkness where it has gone wrong. It takes a strong heart, a steady intelligence, and a visionary imagination to go in the direction of life. Sometimes society moves in the right direction; often it retrenches and gets worse. There appears to be no middle ground.”

The best way to deal with a dark night of the soul is to be made luminous by it. Not enlightened, but translucent. He writes: “You are not the eye seeing in the dark, you are the candle being burnt for its luminosity. It is not your luminosity that issues from a dark night, but the dim light of existence itself. Your dark night tells you that life is never as bright and successful and meaningful as you might imagine. If you never learn this lesson, the essential moonlight, the Claire de Lune, will forever be hidden from you.”

Scintilla was a term used by medieval theologians to describe personal brilliance. It is the spark that lies at the heart of a person. Moore says, “When that inner genius shows itself in personality; way of life, values, and expression, mediocrity disappears. It is a cloud that prevents the spark from being seen. Mediocrity is the attitude of “do only what is necessary and sufficient,” the feeling of not having an essence worth showing. It involves giving up on the possibility of living an outstanding life.” But there is something deep in us that perceives something of immense value in the world even if it is clouded by mediocrity.

I think this is very similar to what Nietzsche has in mind when he says we can open ourselves to “the ideal of the most high spirited, energetic, world affirming man who has not only come to terms with and assimilated with what it is but wants to have it again as it was and is for all eternity - insatiably calling out, ‘Once more’.” We have to be willing to go through our dark nights in order to recognize who it is we are. We have to be willing to suffer and through this suffering, we discover that our discontent is an illusion. (James Hillman said that depression is a special problem in a society hell-bent on happiness.)

Spirituality for the Skeptic is an interesting little book by Robert Solomon defending what he calls a naturalistic spirituality (spirituality for the atheist). I took lots and lots of notes for future reference…

Naturalized spirituality is the thoughtful love of life and is based on these presumptions:

1. the idea that spirituality has a lot to do with thoughtfulness;
2. that spirituality is not at odds with science but in cahoots with it;
3. that spirituality is by no means limited to religion much less sectarian, authoritarian religion.

Solomon grew up with a nominal affiliation to Judaism in a Protestant neighborhood so always saw religion as a hateful threat. But over the years, he became increasingly frustrated that the notion of spirituality had been hijacked by organized religion, New Age eccentrics and divisive sectarian. Instead of being thoughtful, it had become associated with something mindless. For Solomon, spirituality is what philosophy (the love of wisdom) is all about. If spirituality means anything at all, it means thoughtfulness. The self is a process and spirituality is the process of transforming the self, not an abandonment of the self.

Spirit is social. It represents our sense of participation and membership in a humanity and world much larger than our individual selves. The spiritual world is “here”. We are Spirit. The spirit is in us when we have drunk our lives to the fullest. Spirituality is all-embracing, including much (if not all) of Nature and the natural world. It is the passionate sense of self-awareness in which the very distinction between selfishness and selflessness disappears. Spirituality and wisdom are one and the same. (”Science is the organization of knowledge, but wisdom is the organization of life.” Kant)

The meaning of life is life itself. Life’s purpose is not the pursuit of some further life. Nor is life the meaningless struggle for survival and existence lamented by particularly sourpuss Darwinians and pessimists like Arthur Schopenhauer. For Nietzsche, the larger purpose was the transcendence (self-overcoming) of the individual in the realization of higher goals and ideals. Rather than thinking in terms of transcending life, think in terms of transcending ourselves in life. Life is an ongoing work of art.

Without spirituality, philosophy is nothing but tantalizing puzzles alienated from its larger audience and devoid of personal feeling. Philosophy, like theology, needs to regain some of the personal charm of myth and mythology.

Spirituality is neither rational nor emotional but both at once, both Apollonian and Dionysian (as Nietzsche puts it). Spirituality is living beyond oneself, discovering a larger self or the “no self”. What opposes spirituality is not naturalism or secularism. It is petty egoism, vanity and vulgarity. Philosophy becomes spirituality when it learns how to listen.

Reverence, trust and love are the very essence of spirituality. To be awe-struck is to be paralyzed. To be reverent is to be moved to action. Reverence is not an awareness of one’s insignificance. It is the contrary. To be responsible is to be significant. The opposite of reverence is hubris. Reverence is a kind of confidence in our limited powers and our ability to use them wisely.

The guiding metaphor of Nietzsche’s spirituality is overflowing. The more one has to struggle to give, the less virtuous one is. Nietzsche, like Aristotle, insists that the performance of virtues is always pleasurable. Too often we think of forgiveness as a sort of personal sacrifice. But for Nietzsche, forgiveness is likewise a sort of overflowing. It’s not a sacrifice at all.

If our trust is based on entitlement, it isn’t trust at all. The opposite of trust is distrust and alienation. Trust is a way of being in the world. It is a stance to conceive of the world as trustworthy. Trust includes the acceptance of a lack of control and the acceptance of one’s own vulnerability. (It is well-confirmed in the social science literature that people who have a more accurate estimate of the likelihood of failure and betrayal do far worse than people who are overly optimistic.)

Authentic trust is a wizened confidence in the world and one’s role in it. It is not simply trust or naive trust that has been unchallenged or untested. And it is not stubborn trust. It is trust that has been reflected upon - distrust held in balance. To trust the world is to take responsibility for one’s role and actions, in part by acknowledging that the outcome is never wholly in one’s hands. Trust is something we do and for which we must take responsibility. Authentic trust is primarily concerned with the integrity of relationship, not with personal advantage.

Resentment reduces the world to our own impotence. This is the problem with Camus’ Sisyphus who slides from happy existentialism to shaking his fists at the gods. Nietzsche says however clever resentment may be (and there is no emotion more clever), from the point of view of living well, it is a stupid emotion. Forgiveness is the way beyond resentment. But to forgive thinking God will take care of the punishment is not forgiveness. That is doubly not to forgive. It’s like hiring a hit man to keep your own hands clean. Forgiveness is instrumental for spirituality. What we forgive is the fact that the world did not meet with our expectations. This was where Camus went wrong with Sisyphus. He had an unforgiving view of the world. To say, “I forgive you, world” is a surprisingly effective ritual.

Forgiving is not the same as forgetting. Forgetting involves denial. Forgiving is about putting the betrayal behind us but not out of mind. We forgive the world for the misfortunes it inevitably inflicts upon us. Spirituality is about moving on, not forgetting.

Emotions constitute the framework (or frameworks) of rationality itself. What is rational is what fits best into our emotional world. Rationality is not the defining structure of human experience, and emotions are not just reactions. Rationality is the product not only of thought but of caring, and although the emotions undoubtedly have an evolutionary history that precedes the arrival of the human species by hundreds of millions of years, they evolved not only along with but inseperably from the evolution of reason and rationality.

Aesthetic attitudes are essential to science at its best. Scientific experiments and mathematical formulas are celebrated as elegant and even beautiful. A conception of science that rejects such values as unscientific opposes itself to spirituality. This is not only contrary to the view of the very best scientists, but cold, corrupt, and self-defeating. But any form of spirituality that rejects science (but not scientism) is an impoverished quest.

Solomon wants to get away from Camus’ and Unamuno’s opposition of philosophy/reason with spirituality/faith and the mock-heroic stance of rebellion that is associated with this forced opposition. He agrees with Unamuno’s line on personal responsibility and the importance of personal commitment. We make meaning by way of our commitments. This suggests that by refusing to make such commitments we can avoid tragedy. But Solomon says the opposite is the case. It is by making meaning in life that we free ourselves from the meaninglessness of suffering. Tragedy is real and undeniable. Our lives are not entirely in our hands. Unamano is right, passion can never escape or eclipse our reason, but not for the reason he supposes. There is no passion without rationality. Camus is right, too. There is no viable alternative to the absurd confrontation between our rational, demanding minds and an indifferent universe. But confrontation can be turned into acceptance. We are even capable of embracing the opposition. Spirituality begins with that acceptance.

We tend to think we are entitled, but none of us is entitled to anything. We’re not even entitled to happiness (which is not to say happiness is not worth having - even the Declaration of Independence only says we are entitled to the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself). That we expect fair play is what creates the problem of evil. This doesn’t require a belief in God or an after life. It’s the problem of evil that created Camus’ idea of “the Absurd” and Camus was an atheist. There is a problem of evil only for those who expect the world to be good.

In Western culture, blaming the victim is a long-standing, popular metaphysical and theological doctrine based on the idea of free will. It is important that we take responsibility for our own flaws and failures, but it is medieval to blame the victim. An example is illness - we have a medieval tendency to interpret all illness as a sign, a punishment or a payback. (The person didn’t eat right, was too fat, was living an indecent lifestyle, etc.) But sometimes people just get sick. It isn’t necessarily a punishment. The same is true of tragedy. Sometimes bad things just happen. Anyone who reduces tragedy to blame lacks wisdom.

It’s important that we don’t deny tragedy, but embrace it as an essential part of the life we love and for which we should be grateful. Spirituality at its best is a combination of gratitude and humor, a dash of that mock-heroic Camusian confrontation with the Absurd, and a passionate engagement with the details and the people in our lives. Suffering has meaning because life has meaning. We have no right to demand any more than this from the world.

Belief and acceptance of fate has to do with embracing a larger narrative in which one’s actions and fortunes have meaning and make sense of one’s life. Part of that meaning and making sense, an essential aspect of that acceptance, is our willingness to feel and show gratitude. Whenever we ask “Why me?” we should go one step further and ask, “Why is there a me at all?” We should feel gratitude for, if nothing else, life itself.

Death is not the ultimate tragedy. Nietzsche said the great virtue of the Greeks was their fatalistic acceptance of death and suffering as the ground of human existence. It was this acceptance that made him proclaim the Greeks were beautiful. (Those before Socrates and Plato, of course.) The belief in an afterlife, any afterlife, is a denial of death. Even if there is an afterlife, to wonder “What happens after death?” is no substitute for “What is death and how should I think about it?” To think that life after death answers our questions of death is just a denial of death, whatever it is that happens after death.

Death is not the focal point of our existence. We often hear that death is nothing because when we die, we no longer have sensual experience. But this is problematic because if we view life as suffering and pain, then death becomes a sought after release from life which is life. To think of death as nothing implies that life is nothing, too. The real question is this: “What is my death to me?” Ultimately, the meaning of death comes down to the meaning of life.

We fear death because it brings an end to our lives. But we can appreciate death insofar as we identify with the people around us, with our culture, with humanity and with life. To the extent to which we can do so, death is not the end at all so long as we do not cheapen our spirituality with the idea that as individuals we will in the end cheat death and gain some sort of eternal personal life.

The most important reason to “believe” in the soul is not the possibility of life continuing after death but rather the posibility of an essential transformation of the self during life. The self that is too caught up in its personal ambitions and interests isn’t the real self. It’s a deluded self - one that isn’t at peace with itself. It’s a mistake to say that this self should be sacrificed or replaced with another self. But it can be transformed through discipline and spirituality.

I found Camus & Sartre: The Story of the Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It at the HalfPrice Bookstore. Couldn’t even believe it. I had wanted to read it since I first started researching Sartre and Camus but it wasn’t available through our library and was quite expensive so I decided to forgo it (especially since there are so many other books I’ve read that I haven’t gotten to yet.) Glad I found it because it was quite helpful.

Doing a decent summary of the book would be far too time consuming because it involves a lot of history. So here is a quick and dirty summary…

Camus and Sartre were great friends. They were both becoming famous about the same time and shared philosophical and literary interests. There were definitely differences, but nothing friendship threatening. For the most part, they were able to laugh with each other about them. With the occupation of France, Camus swung into action and joined the Resistance movement. He took huge personal risks. Sartre admired this in Camus and tried to do the same but couldn’t quite bring himself to do so. It took him several years to work through his philosophy before he could figure out how to act on it.

Both he and Camus became involved with the Communist party because it seemed to be the only means of supporting the working class. But Camus became disillusioned early on because of it’s violent nature and decided that he did not want to be a part of a system that used violence as a means of control. Sartre, on the other hand, became a spokesman for the Communist party saying that Camus no longer knew what it iwas he stood for. Passivism wasn’t a stance.

The problem was the Cold War. It drew a line in the sand and people had to choose - are you Communist anti-Communist. Camus and Sartre had both desperately attempted to come up with a third option. But there was no room for that third option at that time so the choice was either/or. Camus chose anti-Communism (although at one point he spoke harshly against anti-Communism) and Sartre chose Communism.

But Sartre wasn’t actually a Communist and Camus wasn’t actually an anti-Communist, either although those were the sides they chose. What it boiled down to was that Camus didn’t want to get his hands dirty and Sartre did. Camus had been born into a working class family in Algiers and already felt that his hands were dirty. He wanted to do the humane thing and could no longer condone violence. Sartre had been born into a well-to-do bourgeoisie family. What Sartre wanted to do was “come down” and be a spokesman for the working class. He felt the only way he could do this was through Communism because anti-Communism wasn’t speaking for the working class.

The division began after Camus published The Rebel which was his bomb dropped on Communism, linking it with violence and pointing it at Sartre. Many took the book to say that if Camus was right, Sartre was wrong. Camus expected to see Sartre’s review in Sartre’s Magazine but it didn’t come for months. When it finally did come, the review wasn’t by Sartre, it was by one of Sartre’s assistants and it slammed Camus’ book. This was insulting to Camus (because of the condemning review but primarily because it was not Sartre who reviewed the book.) Sartre replied to Camus through his newspaper and a very public quarrel was on with each man representing one side of the two sides of the Cold War division. Infact, they each became the main spokepersons for anti-Communism and Communism in France.

By keeping his hands clean, Camus’ completely lost sight of the Algerian struggles even though he became a spokesperson for Algerian issues. He was more hindrance than help. By wanting to get his hands dirty, Sartre got in touch with the people he wanted to get in touch with, but failed to notice the horrors that were being committed in the name of Communism.

It is very likely that without the divisive nature of the Cold War, Camus and Sartre would have remained friends despite their differences. But the world had moved into “either/or” thinking and it didn’t allow for dialogue. It demanded a militant stance. Aronson contends we are still living with that “either/or” thinking from the Cold War and that it is time we find a way out of it.

Both Camus and Sartre were ultimately in bad faith. Both were concerned ultimately with France - even Camus, who claimed to be so interested in Algiers, always made France the audience for his books. (He wrote to be read in France, not in Algiers.)

Aronson writes: “The deepest issues motivating and dividing Camus and Sartre are still with us…the time is ripe for a new type of political intellectual who might bring together each man’s strengths and avoid each man’s weaknesses. We can imagine someone speaking the truth at all times, and opposing oppression everywhere, uniting each man’s characteristic power of insight under a single moral standard. Such an intellectual would illuminate today’s systemic violence while accepting the challenge of mounting an effective struggle against it without creating new evils.” Aronson admits this might be like asking for an angel (as Sartre once said). “Angels do not exist, but they can be a yardstick for human beings.”

I read The Castle because Thomas Merton had highly recommended it in connection with with Camus. In Myth of Sisyphus, Camus devotes a chapter to “Hope and the Absurd in Kafka”. But it is Camus’ The Plague where Merton makes the comparison. He says that both The Castle and The Plague “deal symbolically with the relation between and and the inscrutable powers that influence his destiny without his being able to understand them.” Merton seems to take it for granted that K. has been summoned by the Castle. But I’m not so sure I agree.

For me it was difficult to tell whether K. was actually summoned by the Castle or if he, for whatever reason, decided he wanted to leave his hometown and find a new place to live so made up the summons. He clearly has no intention to go back home and frequently says he plans to make the village his home. It’s very ambiguous. Whatever the case may be, he is given the run around and cannot penetrate The Castle no matter how hard he tries.

Merton says that Kafka is speaking about religious alienation: “man’s struggle to bridge the gap between himself and a realm of utterly inaccessible transcendence.” The problem is that man attempts to “imagine and understand grace in terms of hierarchic organization, that is to say, in terms of “law”‘. For anyone who understands the New Testament, it is clear that this involves a contradiction that is beyond any solution. But for anyone who knows church history, it is also clear that the contradiction is in fact, inevitable. They cannot understand grace in any other terms.”

For Merton, the hero of The Castle is Amalia. She refuses an insulting summons from the Castle and she and her family are disgraced by this refusal. The Castle is always to be obeyed but she chooses to do what is “wrong” (yet she is in the right). She is Sisyphus. “She refuses unquestioning obedience to an arbitrary and revolting command. Her act is precisely the kind of choice which Camus describes as “revolt” against the arbitrary and the absurd, in affirmation of one’s personal life, one’s own authenticity and existential truth.” A significant point: it is not the Castle who ostracizes Amalia’s family, it is the villagers. Also, Irving Howe points out that part of what makes Amalia heroic is that she does not challenge the Castle’s dominance or criticize it. She simply refuses to have any connection with it. She is sustained by suffering and a quiet resolve. (Olga calls Amalia’s refusal “the original cause” of the family being despised. (Original sin that creates the fall?)

K. is “the stranger” to the village. He doesn’t understand the internal workings of the society and is constantly bungling his efforts to get into the Castle. The administrators of the Castle seem to be unsure what it is he has come to the village for but because they never make an error, they assume he is there to do land surveying, as he says. But rather than employ him, they do what they can to keep him somewhat complacent while giving him the runaround. On the one hand, he is standing against the system. On the other, he’s trying to figure out how to become a part of it. He’s no hero like Amalia is a hero. But that he wants to reach the heart of The Castle puts him in stark contrast to most of humanity is prefers comfort and complacency to struggle.

Max Brod was a friend of Kafka’s who pieced the book together after Kafka’s death. He, like Merton, put a strong emphasis on the religious aspects. He said the Castle represents a wish “to get clear about ultimate things” with the recognition that it is impossible to get clear about ultimate things because the world will not yield to lucidity.

Kafka wrote, “Man cannot live without permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, and at the same time that indestructible something as well as his trust in it may remain permanently concealed from him.” K. searches for a way to penetrate the castle, completely exhausts himself, but his lifelong quest does not lead to a conclusion.

Kafka was Jewish so it is possible the book could also have to do with being displaced from your home and trying to fit into a totally different culture. There are many instances where it is clear that people don’t really want him in the village but simply tolerate his being there. Even the Chambermaid claims that K. is lower, socially, than she is. But at the same time, several people look to K. to help them break out of the system.

It could be specifically about a Jewish experience, but this experience has now become common within all of modern man. Irving Howe writes, “No other writer of our century has so strongly evoked the caustral sensations of modern experience, sensations of bewilderment, loss, guilt, dispossession. These are sensations known to millions of people quite unaware of Kafka’s writings and without any claim to philosophical reflection.” Robert Atler says that the distinctive quandaries of Jewish existence have become quandaries for all mankind. Kafka merely recognizes them. (He’s not out to convert anyone.)

I found the book to be incredibly tedious in parts which was very likely intentional on Kafka’s part. When K. falls asleep during Brugel’s advice, I thought I might fall asleep, too! It just went on and on and on and on… And you never know, is Brugel offering something of value? Should I be paying closer attention to his ramblings? Or is this just more of the same old runaround K. comes up against at every turn.

The book actually ends mid-sentence. Max Brod said he once asked Kafka how he intended to end the book and Kafka replied:

The ostensible land surveyor was to find partial satisfaction at least. He was not to relax his struggle, but was to die worn out by it. Round his deathbed the villagers were to assemble, and from the Castle itself word was to come that though K.’s legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was to e permitted to live and work there.

So Kafka never intended to have K. reach the castle.

Just a few quotes I found interesting:

After Freida has allowed K. to look through the peephole at Klamm (the Castle authority), the landlady chastises him: “But just tell me, how did you have the face to look at Klamm? You needn’t answer, I know you think you were quite equal to the occasion. You’re not even capable of seeing Klamm as he really is; that is not merely an exaggeration, for I myself am not capable of it either.” (This from a woman who was summoned by Klamm so apparently has slept with him.)

The Mayor: “Is there a Control Authority? There are only Control authorities. Frankly, it isn’t their function to hunt out errors in the vulgar sense, for errors don’t happen, and even when once in a while an error does happen, as in your case, who can say finally that it’s an error?”

K. to the teacher: “…but that I had other things to think of than polite behavior is true enough, for my existence is at stake, which is trheatened by a scandalous official bureaucracy whose particular failings I needn’t mention to you, seeing that you are an acting member of it yourself.”

Olga to K. on getting official appointment in the Castle: “…let us say someone like that [someone wanting to seize an opportunity for Castle promotion] goes in for the examination, for years he waits in fear and trembling for the result, from the very first day everybody asks him in amazement how he could have dared to do anything so wild, but he still goes on hoping - how else could he keep alive?” (Kierkegaard?)

The movie presented Steppenwolf as though it was one long drug trip after another and perhaps that is what it was. But if Hesse had been involved in Buddhist meditation and Jungian dream interpretation (he knew Carl Jung personally), I’m not sure it is completely accurate to conclude the book is about a drug trip even though some of our best literary works come to us via the drug trips of authors.

In the intro. to my copy of the book, Hesse says Steppenwolf has been more misunderstood than any of his other novels. In fact, he says it has been violently misunderstood by those who are most enthusiastic about it - especially his younger readers. He wrote this book about his problems when he was 50 and the younger individuals who read it tend to completely misunderstand it. And as for those of us who are his age now when he wrote the book, he wants us to know it is not about a man despairing, but a man believing. “May everyone find in it what strikes a chord in him and is of some use to him! But I would be happy if many of them were to realize that the story of the Steppenwolf pictures a disease and crisis - but not one leading to death and destruction, on the contrary - to healing.”

It’s like a dark night of the soul, like in Martin Scorcese’s After Hours. The imagination is heightened in our dark nights. But dark nights are always cleansing if we allow them to be.

The person who introduces the story Haller left to him says, “I have no doubt that they are for the most part fictitious, not, however, in the sense of arbitrary invention. They are rather the deeply lived spiritual events which he has attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experience.” He goes on, “I see them as a document of the times, for Haller’s sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but a sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.”

Haller said, “Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage would in our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally, everyone doesn’t feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.”

The rest of the book is Harry Haller’s records which doesn’t play out as a formula. It isn’t 2+2=4. It’s the realization that the self is comprised of onion layers, not a Cartesian split self between lived experience and rational understanding (wolf and man). Rather, the self is comprised of an infinity of selves which is the same as saying there is “no-self”. Instead of thinking in terms of Cartesian dualism, he comes to understand himself in terms of an onion where layer after layer can be pealed away until at last there is nothing (or everything).

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 and died at the age of 40 (1924) by starvation (he had tuberculosis which made it painful to eat). He came from a middle class Jewish family in Prague.

According to Joachim Neugroschel, in the nineteenth century, traditional absolutes were being replaced with scientific and technological absolutes. With this shift, the concept of “nature” and “natural” shifted.

Neugroschel writes, “For Christianity and European civilization, “nature” has always been something to overcome, conquered, tamed, domesticated - subdued and subjugated for human use. The West draws an artificial line between “nature” and “human” or “man-made” - as if a beaver’s “natural dam” and an engineer’s technological dam were not subject to the same physical laws, the same “natural” laws.” But “natural” was also used to uphold the ethical. Some forms of behavior were attacked for being natural while others are upheld, like men’s dominion over women, Europe’s domination over the rest of the world, the nuclear family, family values, etc. To make things more confusing, “unnatural” is considered to be a put down. Fascism saw itself as lending mother nature a helping hand by killing anyone that the fascist state declared unnatural.

Kafka uses “nature” in an almost sort of divine sense. His protaganists very often have to pay a terrible price when they go against “nature” (like Gregor Samsa turning into a bug). The punishment is as severe as the punishment meted out by a vengeful deity in a Greek tragedy.

So the question becomes, how natural are these systems that have been deemed natural? Kafka wants to expose the destructive basis of systems but at the same time wants to restore things back to their “natural” order in some way.

My favorite stories in The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories (translated by Joachim Neugroschel) are: “The Judgment”, “The Metamorphosis”, “In the Penal Colony”, and “A Report for an Academy”.

Kafka wrote “The Judgment” when he was 29. I think the story has to do with the changing times. The father held the punitive patriarchal role of the family, but the mother has died which has subdued him somewhat and the son has stepped in and assumed increasing responsibility of the family business. It seems to him the natural progression. But as the son has become more powerful, the father has become less powerful and sees this as a threat. The father is hugely judgmental, critical, says his mother’s death was harder on him than on the son and ultimately condemns his son to death. The minute the father starts lashing out at his son in this way, the son immediately cowers and reverts back to the original father-son relationship with father as all-powerful and son at his mercy. The son obeys his father and throws himself over a bridge.

Psychologically speaking (which would only be a very shallow interpretation) it is extremely difficult in households with controlling, judgmental parents for children to establish their own power and control. The individual is subjected to the judgment of the parent which declares the individual non-existent until he judges him as existent. Even as an adult, it is very difficult to establish a sense of self-mastery when the value of individual existence is left up to an authority figure.

In “The Metamorphosis”, the father has lost a lot of money so the son which has depleted his strength and so the son has stepped in to become the sole income earner of the family and does a good job. This increases the power of the son and decreases the power of the father. When the son becomes a bug, the fathers power slowly increases and rapidly increases when he lodges the apple in Gregor’s back that leads to Gregor’s death.

“In the Penal Colony” has a slightly different theme, but I think it’s in the same ballpark. An officer has been maintaining an inhumane, elaborate execution system that his previous Commander built. People are judged as guilty without being able to defend themselves and without even being told that they have been judged. The apparatus works by writing the nature of the crime into the skin of the judged over and over again. By the 6th hour the judged finally realizes that he has been judged (enlightenment comes) and likewise recognizes the judgment. The officer explains the observance of the judge at this point an almost spiritual experience. But a new commander is now in place and he is not in favor of this execution system. So the officer is trying to talk the traveler into telling the Commander that it is a beautiful system. The traveler says he can’t do this so the officer tells the condemned man to get off of the apparatus and places himself there instead. The apparatus malfunctions and stabs the officer through the forehead. There is no spiritual experience that takes place - no look of enlightenment. The expression the officer had before he was on the apparatus is the same as in death.

I think this story could be understood on many different levels. But what I keep seeing in Kafka’s stories is this idea of judgment.

In a patriarchal system, the father who is head of the household and a Commander of a penal colony hold similar positions. They both function very much like the traditional abstract punitive God. In all of these stories, there is the sense that a new understanding is taking hold but this new understanding cannot be understood by those who still exist within the patriarchal system. (Gregor in “The Metamorphosis” can’t make himself understood, Georg in “The Judgment” realizes his father is senile and so cannot understand Georg.)

In “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis”, a shift is taking place that is disallowed by the power structure currently in place. In both stories, the father figure is waning (God is dying), but in a last burst of energy, manages to denounce the son and the son accepts this denouncement and dies. The old system remains in place, however tentatively. But clearly, this system is nihilistic rather than life giving.

“In the Penal Colony”, a new system is likewise taking the place of the old. A more humane view is replacing the previous, inhumane view.

God, in a patriarchal system, represented a deity who could give or take on whim. Disobedience was punished and very often, the punished didn’t know what it was he was being punished for. The same is true in the family structure. A child is affected for life by the punitive judgments of the father in a patriarchal household. It’s as though this judgment is being written over and over again into the child so that it is always with the child through adulthood and until death. The child must walk a slippery slope into adulthood because what he perceives to be the natural progression is perceived by the father as disobedience. This is true of patriarchal societies as well.

But in “In the Penal Colony”, the commander is dead. (God is dead) and has been replaced. There is a young officer fanatically trying to uphold the system that his Commander put in place, but he knows the system is no longer powerful. His apparatus is in disrepair and he suspects that it is scheduled to be destroyed altogether. But he is still a part of the system and cannot go on without it. As though the Commander (a potential father figure to the young officer) is judging him from his death bed, the officer intends to place himself on the apparatus and his judgment is simply “Be Just”. But rather than have this written on his body and having enlightenment come to him at the 6th hour, the apparatus malfunctions and he is killed immediately.

What does it mean to “be just”? Especially if God (the patriarchal system) has died or is dying and the system that had been based on this God is now malfunctioning?

In “A Report to an Academy”, and ape has become human and is making a report to a scientific academy. He was caged and pinned down and realized there was no way out. His only choice was to be stuck in a zoo or to become human. He decided it would be better to become human so he learned to imitate humans (which he found to be quite easy) and became quite successful at it that he was able to perform on the Vaudeville stage. His only freedom existed in becoming something he wasn’t. The ape says, “I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I needed a way out, and for no other reason.”

At night he comes home to a half-trained female ape. But during the day, he doesn’t want to see her because her gaze has the madness of a bewildered trained animal that only he can see. He can’t stand to look at that gaze because it pains him too much.

This is another story that can be understood on many levels. But I think it still has to do with the idea of judgment. In a patriarchal society, it isn’t enough that we exist, we have to justify our existence in some way. And if we can’t justify it, then we die, either figuratively or physically. At the end of the story, the ape says, “In any case, I don’t want any man’s judgment. I only want to expand knowledge. I simply report. Even to you, esteemed gentlemen of the Academy, I have only made a report.”

So another question: Does modern man truly live? Or does he simply report? Is he just more data to add to the formula Dostoevsky talks about in Notes from Underground? We’ve gotten rid of the punitive God, but are we now caged by our reason?