Reason’s Virgin
A connoisseur lays out a gem from his collection. I pick up Simone Weil, put her in the palm of my hand, screw the loupe into an eye-socket, and peer at the craftsman’s excellence. It is a beautiful cut. Those sharp delicate features. Eureka’s spark of light…
______________
Extracts are treacherous. And so beguiling. There they lie like biscuits on a plate; we reach out and grab one! Crunch crunch crunch. We lose the rhythm of the conversation to the workings of our jaw; an argument slips past as we wipe the crumbs from our cheek. Oh, what; sorry I missed that. Is it ok if I have another…
We eat the dessert before the waiter brings in the first two courses.
An extract. It encourages us to play, when really, we should be at home, finishing our studies.
But hey, let’s not be a puritan about this. Art. Literature. Ideas. Are they allowed no fun? And we. Can we not jump up and down on a concept, use it as our trampoline? Oh, you agree? That’s good! Come on then, bring your friends along…
______________
The extract, in isolating the thought, the paraphernalia of argument and example having fallen away, concentrates a writer’s corpus in one compelling idea, arresting our attention that now speculates about that larger body of work. A car rusts in a field. And we sit down upon the grass, in a tiny clearing of wild flowers, where we look and contemplate and draw a sketch; it is for that large painting, we’ll complete later, in the studio; the fragments of one object to become the brushstrokes of another yet to be made. An extract, by distilling a life’s thought into aphorism, can, if worked hard enough, be transmuted into the writer’s portrait; an entire oeuvre read from a single sentence.
The thing we believe to be our self is as ephemeral and automatic a product of external circumstances as the form of a sea wave.
We are lucky that this statement is false. If true we would suffer the same terrible fate as Karel Kopfrkingl, the tragic hero of Juraj Herz’s The Cremator. For given this idea, it is quite natural, in fact it is right and proper, that he becomes a Nazi when the Nazis overrun Czechoslovakia. A victim of circumstance, to which Kopfrkingl adapts himself so willingly; whatever the regime he is keen to adopt its identity, shape-shifting to every changing scene - Austrian, Czech, and finally a German of the Third Reich. A successful man, of course… You need to be told?
Although educated in the classical French tradition, Simone Weil, in this extract, posits a thoroughly British philosophy of mind. It is a tradition that conceives thought as the product of impulses - they are atoms of perception - stimulated by external stimuli; the mind, in David Hume’s classic formulation, a stage where actors hardly stay for a scene; passers-by to their own drama. To which we add our own flourish: these actors are instructed by an audience that itself is forever entering and leaving the auditorium. Richard Sennett summarises beautifully.
In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke wrote, “Self is that conscious thinking thing…which is sensible or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness and misery…” Whereas in the “Treatise of Human Nature” Hume asserts that “when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.” For Locke the self is that “conscious thinking thing” which disciplines sensation; reason is master in the house. For Hume the key word is “stumble”— by accident, by force of circumstance, unbidden sensations flood us. The self then becomes animated in treating the stumble as an opportunity rather than a threat to self control.
Hume’s theory of the self generates an acute sense of insecurity. Every day we stand on a cliff’s edge waiting for someone to push us over…
Classical Liberalism…[did not] suppose the rational self to be well-balanced in desire or well-coordinated in action. Mill writes somewhere of experience as a relentless ringing of alarm bells… (Both quotes from Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality. My italics in the second quotation.)
Before we fall over the cliff…
Although Hume believed this picture - unstable, ever-changing, chaotic - to be the true nature of the human mind he wasn't convinced it showed the whole story; this conception of the self too volatile to capture our lived experience, so complacently secure, so habitually (even obdurately) sturdy: burghers vastly outnumbering poets, Hogarth closer to us than Kirchner. It is a puzzle. A truth of knowledge conflicts with the facts of experience. Something conceptually true turns out to be experientially false. This was Hume’s most profound discovery, so deep that many have overlooked it.
Hume recognised - our philosopher was both sharp and honest - that it is possible to live the mercurial life. Indeed, there is a simple way to do this. By giving ourselves up to Reason, with its non-stop questioning of reality, so making life ever-present to consciousness, we generate powerful mental intensities, with their effervescing excitements, new discoveries popping up like salmon in a fast moving stream. But… there is a high price to be paid… We become extremely fragile, prey to obsession and conceptual fears that seep into and take over the sensibility; Rousseau, and his collapse into paranoia, the paradigmatic case. It is there in his The Confessions. Rousseau a man made mad by mind; it is why he hated it so, advocating the feelings, celebrating the affections, recommending the Will: all escapes from his too consuming all too clever Reason. In Hume intense rational inquiry led to a breakdown; his personality unable to cope with the insecurities his explorations uncovered; the mineshaft goes down and the house falls in and follows it. His response? To put aside Reason’s pen and return to the dinner table, to eat and talk and laugh with friends. We are saved by habit and custom and conviviality. Reason (or to be precise: critical Reason) should only ever be a part of the human psyche; never its raison d’être.
Now if that most quicksilver of qualities - Reason - destroys the human personality then, contra Simone Weil, it cannot be the essential quality of the self, into which grows a sense of order and continuity; such order helping us navigate the day. How else do we get from our bed to the kitchen’s kettle? Reason, insouciant about this necessary part of the psyche, is shown, when subjected to the deepest of investigations, to be but a useful though dangerous tool; think of sulphuric acid or a chainsaw….
Hume reasoned that at the core of ourselves is flux. Nevertheless, in our everyday lives we live on a surface that is flat, solid and stable; it is only on holidays we take the rollercoaster ride… Hume shakes his head, jealous of this metaphor: they should have invented the damned thing in my time, he says. Only on a holiday - or when we take a wonder drug: Ed Avery in Bigger Than Life - can we enjoy the madness of life. But these are exceptions, and we require a controlled environment to satisfy them. Afterwards we return always to the everyday routines. We are safe again. Everything is order. All is predictable. There is a gap between our nature and our experience. Existence contradicts knowledge. Here was the puzzle for which Hume had no answer; and with equanimity he accepted the mystery, our sense of a secure and permanent self at best a happy accident.
Simone Weil comes after Kant - that solver of all mysteries - and is quintessentially French: she thus prioritises Reason. For her it embodies human reality, which she then projects onto ordinary experience, thereby ridding it of solidity and security. A British philosopher’s problem is turned into a French intellectual’s concept, which, when tinged with an incipient existentialism, is given a normative value: to be a good person is to embrace the essential ephemerality of existence by actively choosing each moment in time.
She defined liberty as being neither absence of constraint nor a relationship between desire and its satisfaction, but as a relationship between thought and action. The free person is he or she whose every action proceeds from a preliminary judgement concerning the end which he or she has set and the sequence of means suitable for attaining this end. S Pétrement in Simone Weil: An Anthology, edited and introduced by Siân Miles.)
The result of this free choice, carefully thought out, planned and executed…
…the situation itself automatically banishes rebellious feelings: to work with irritation would be to work badly and so condemn oneself to starvation; and leaving aside the work, there is no target to be a target for one’s irritation. One dare not be insolent to the foreman…
As I worked in the factory, indistinguishable to all eyes, including my own, from the anonymous mass, the affliction of others entered into my flesh and soul. Nothing separated me from it for I had already forgotten my past and I looked forward to no future, finding it difficult to imagine the possibility of surviving all the fatigue. What I went through there marked me in so lasting a manner that still to-day when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I cannot help having the impression that there must be a mistake and that unfortunately the mistake will in all probability disappear. There I received for ever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron which the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves. Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave.
Free rational choice slips the irons onto Simone’s wrist, and she is led off into an open cage… Hume, in letting his Reason run free, came close to madness as his sense of self disintegrated under its interrogations. So too Weil, who, in converting her Reason into action, experiences her mind fall away, her identity tumbling down with it. The difference between the two, and it says much about their quality, is that Hume crumpled under his own intellectual pressure while Weil had to succumb to external contingencies: the physical hardships of the factory. It was the frailty of her body - not the genius of intellect - that exposed the limits of her mind.
Hume, a far more powerful thinker than Weil, in recognising a problem with his theory of the mind concluded - by, significantly, acting the solution out: he leaves his desk for the dining room - that we must place a limit on the rational faculty. Thought, using imagination’s rocket, can fly into the empyrean; it can also, with analytic scalpel in hand, dissect identity until nothing remains on the surgeon’s table. Yes. It is capable of doing these things. Yet life is richer than this; David Hume more than a philosopher’s mind, marvellous though that is (it is my turn to be envious now). Reason, ultimately, can not be the arbiter of the human personality; it must give way to experience; Hume anchoring the self to custom, habit and the feelings of each individual human being. It is the physicality of the human body and soul, in the last analysis, that defines us: we must pay the proper respect to our biology and cultural conditioning; we are grounded by our existence, both social and physical. This is a hard theory for philosophers to accept. Because of the power of the mind, especially strong in intellectuals, Simone Weil the archetypical case, we apt to overlook these unpleasant facts. Hume was a radical in the eighteenth century - that Reason drunk time - and is still outré today, as once more we suffer the naiveties of the Enlightenment; partly the consequence of another French invasion - those rational irrationalists of the 1960s - and partly the result of an expanded university sector that is turning us all into Reason’s innocents.
Weil, in her typically French way (we think of the later and lesser Deleuze) takes Hume’s theory of experience and intellectualises it, thereby evacuating it of meaning; nature’s flux and flow becoming the idea of flow and flux. You see what she has done? Weil has transformed a natural process into an idea, thereby turning it into something permanent: a woman running becomes a photograph of a woman running. Ideas, those extremely odd products of the human mind, which - we go back to Plato - have long been known for their propensity to permanency, are a natural aspect of the personality and its conception of the self; always we are turning fleeting perceptions into permanent or semi-permanent concepts; day on day, on and on and on, we cannot help ourselves; even our idea of flux freezes like ice and will not be melted, not even by the heat of the mind’s workings as it tries to prove me wrong; the steam puffs, the belt strains, the cogs sweat out oil…and still the idea sits coldly atop the machine’s engine; it is untouchable, it will not be moved. Any theory of mind and action has to puzzle over this anomaly. Weil is too rational for that. And so suffers the consequences. She becomes a fascinating illustration of Hume’s central problem; a transitory period of her life - that torture of the assembly line - is turned into the abiding feature of her soul: “[s]ince then I have always regarded myself as a slave.” Our natural tendency is to create enduring ideas; the body changing every micro-second yet these ideas can remain the same for years… It is this conceptual activity - this continual transformation of flux into fixity - that underpins the sense of ourselves as solid and sane. Continuity is built into the very processes of the human mind, the way it goes about conceiving itself and the world. It’s like there are two strangers inside our being, each doing their own thing. Odd isn’t it? And a little unnerving. Yes. Yes, indeed. It is too odd for respectable Reason, that old puritan, who believes everything should dress suitably for Sunday…there will be no shorts, tracksuits or trainers in his church. Yet yobs do exist, while not every woman wears her best skirt and blouse… When pushed beyond the brink even a French intellectual knows that the idea is not everything, that some things in life never change.
Hardship and danger are essential because of my particular mentality. Luckily, it is not universal, because it would make all organised activities impossible, but as far as I am concerned I cannot change it; I know this by experience.
In her sober moments Weil does recognise that our characters have borders. And these differ from person to person. Though we add that it is precisely the differences that these borders encourage that makes life interesting: imagine a country where everyone was a factory worker. Yet Weil, more extreme than most - it is her Reason that makes her so - while recognising the benefits of boundaries remains forever uncomfortable with the geography of her own soul. Always she wants to transcend it.
Our personality seems to us a sort of limit, and we love to figure that some day in an undetermined future we can get around it in one direction or another, or in many. But it also appears to us as a support and we wish to believe there are things we would never be capable of doing or saying or thinking because it is not in our character. That often proves false.
This is reasonable. The entirety of our character is not a simple biological and social given; there is room for expansion; there is much to be explored, a few things to discover, changes to be made. Nevertheless, in arguing that our character grows and adapts, it does not follow that we are completely plastic; we are not wet clay on a potter’s wheel to be moulded to any shape the potter chooses. Humans are not pots, no matter how beautiful a pot can be… This idea is absurd:
The thing we believe to be our self is as ephemeral and automatic a product of external circumstances as the form of a sea wave.
In common with many intellectuals - it is why we must be wary of them - Simone Weil’s judgement was extremely poor; the obvious case her industrial martyrdom. In choosing to be a martyr Weil did not grasp the nature of either the work or her own self; misled by her Reason she had no feel for the material existence of the assembly line, while she didn't seriously consider the limits to her physical strength. The factory and her body had become simply an idea, manipulable by Reason, which, like a malicious friend, kept whispering in her ear, you can do anything, my love, anything at all. Go on, yes! go on, go and do it, you know that you can. It will be fine. And the good you will do. You are so wonderful! my love. I will be there for you always. The decision…
…a preliminary judgement concerning the end which he or she has set and the sequence of means suitable for attaining this end…
…is an unnerving bloodless affair, and is proven to be catastrophically mistaken, though Weil appears unaware of this: she is blind to own poor judgement. A middle class intellectual could not turn herself into an industrial worker: the experiment fated to fail from its very conception. Yet rather than admit the whole idea was wrong, Weil, and this is typical of the caste, for it comes out of the very nature of Reason itself, the caste’s lifeblood and legitimacy, universalises her experience, arguing that all factory workers are pain-racked slaves. This is a young lady who cannot see over the glass-topped walls that enclose her home and school.
Contrast Weil’s account with those literary works that come directly out of the working classes; such as Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Neil M. Gunn’s The Silver Darlings and Lewis Jones’ Cwmardy. What we find in these novels is pain and hardship; but also freedom and joy, much of this joy arising out of hard manual labour, the core of a man’s identity, whether in a factory, on a fishing boat or down a coal mine. These experiences are beyond Weil. But rather than accepting her limitations, recognising her own weak capacity, she condemns what she doesn't understand and finds impossible to feel.
Physical labour is a daily death. To labour is to place one’s own being, body and soul, in the circuit of inert matter, turn it into an intermediary between one state and another of a fragment of matter, make of it an instrument. The labourer turns his body and soul into an appendix of the tool which he handles.
She is out of her depth. Wanting to be close to the workers - to share in their existence -Weil made the mistake of thinking she could become one. So typical of the rational mind that reduces all forms of life to an epistemological equality; unique individuals melted down into universal units, a kind of human atom, that can be transformed and moved around at will - that “anonymous mass” says everything. Contrast with the individuals that work in Sillitoe’s factory and labour down the mines of Lewis Jones. Everyone is the same! Mistress Reason sings. Everyone - whoopee! - can be substituted for everyone else. Mr Existence sounds a duller more factual note: no! we cannot. This is not to say that a bourgeois intellectual is unable to connect with a manual worker; it is possible, providing they have the right spirit, exercise the necessary talent and show a respect that includes an honest acceptance of their own privileges, those realities of class and education that generate insuperable differences between professors and factory operatives (Richard Sennett is the master here: in Respect he outlines what has to be done).
Simone Weill is not humble. She cannot accept an alien form of life. When the factory defeats her she pronounces it evil. We are reminded of another middle class intellectual - Karel Reisz - who unable to grasp the celebratory theme of Sillitoe’s classic novel turned it into an angst ridden movie, the workers’ existence forever overshadowed by that massive brooding factory: an obese brute squatting on the valley floor smoking his foul cigarettes. The joy, which Sillitoe and Gunn so marvellously describe, disappears in the middle class version of the working class life. Weil, being an extremist, shows far less humanity than Reisz, thus that “physical labour is a daily death”. What an egotist! The condescension is appalling. The superior soul looks down at the natives and feels the deepest pity… We don’t want it Simone. You cannot be like us. You will never comprehend our lives; our joy, our liberty, our very identity is beyond you. Yes it is. And think about this, feel it if you can: it is we who pity you! The mind: what is that! A mad merry-go-round that makes you ill. And never getting off it. Round and round and round you go. Every day a jolly ride! Words. Words, that’s all you have. Mistress Reason, of course, will not accept such an insulting truth. No. I’ll get rid of these factories. It’s how I’ll save those poor sad people working inside them. Reason. It destroys what it cannot feel.
________
A Christmas-sized thank you to Time’s Flow Stemmed for the hard work in reading, finding and, finally, presenting this extract. I’ve hitched a free ride in the boot of your car! Will you let me out now please….
Further Reading
The Good Bourgeois: Watching The Cremator.
In Pieces: David Hume shares a bed with Katherine Anne Porter.
Professional Amateurs: Philosophers getting Hume wrong.
The Conformist & Found You!: The search for identity in the company of Christa Wolf. Though beware, an invisible man wanders by our side: Mr Nation State. I’ve thought a lot about him since.
The Boss: Hotel Foucault, where today we all take our holidays.
The Zone: Be careful of good intentions.
A Broken Fairy Tale: Tolstoy kills off the individual. A long walk through The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Critic as Clerk: Using another critic’s car, which, oh dear oh dear, doesn't survive the journey, I take a road trip around Resnais’ Muriel.
Russian Climate: Schopenhauer, scourge of the intellectuals.
Dynamite is Divine: No saints here!
Dropout Boogie: Can academics really be rebels? I investigate the case of Deleuze and Guattari.
Comments
Post a Comment