The New Criterion

Recently I read a short polemical book by a political philosopher in which he claimed that the works of Shakespeare, while entertaining and emotionally engaging, lacked intellectual content by comparison with the works of the great philosophers. If it were wisdom and knowledge that one was after, it was to the latter that one would turn. Literature was for entertainment, intelligent or not as the case might be. What applied to Shakespeare must, a fortiori, apply to all other literature, for by general consent the works of Shakespeare contain the richest description of the human condition ever written. Nor do we seriously expect that body of work ever to be surpassed. This being the case, philosophy was for thinkers, literature for those in need of light relief from the hard work of genuine thought.

This view, with which I am not sympathetic, supposes that everything truly important can be said, or is best said, in straightforwardly propositional fashion. It is to suppose that the mind always works best and deepest in explicit rather than in implicit mode. The greatest chess player is the one who is capable of calculating the greatest number of the consequences of the greatest number of moves ahead, rather than the one who takes the situation in at a glance. I find this view almost Gradgrindian in spirit, even though it must be admitted that there are few facts in Plato or Kant.

The question of the relative strength of the illumination provided by philosophy and literature had recently been in my mind even before I read the political philosopher’s tract. One of the few perquisites of being a minor scribbler is that publishers sometimes send you books connected with something that you have written; and not long ago, having published an article in defense of religion from its recent detractors, though myself without religious belief, a publisher kindly sent me Owen Flanagan’s The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World. As at the time I was also reading Eugene Ionesco’s play Le roi se meurt (usually translated as The King Departs), I had an opportunity to compare the depth of the philosophical and literary approach to the vexed question of the meaning of life.

Owen Flanagan is Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, and distinguished in his field. He writes clearly, though not always elegantly, and occasionally resorts to expressions, such as “high-stakes psycho-poetic performance,” that beg several questions. “We are,” he says early on, “embodied conscious beings engaged in high-stakes psycho-poetic performances.” However generously we interpret the lives of people to constitute “psycho-poetic performances,” the question of whether anything at all is “high-stakes” is precisely what is at issue. Is life full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, or is it not? That is the question.

Professor Flanagan puts the issue clearly in his opening sentence. “What sense,” he asks, “can be made of my wish to live in a genuinely meaningfully [sic] way, to live a life that really matters, that makes a positive and lasting contribution, if my life is exhausted by my prospects as a finite material being living in a material world?” In his opinion, this is the really hard question of philosophy, much harder than that of consciousness. He is a physicalist, and believes that consciousness is an emergent property of matter arranged in a certain way. The question of how it does so is not yet settled, but that it does so is for him settled beyond reasonable doubt. In other words, the metaphysical status of consciousness is no longer a serious question to be pondered.

Whatever the precise metaphysical relation between brain and mind, I am forced as a doctor (and against my wishes) to agree with him. Let me illustrate why. When a patient in my hospital began to behave in a bizarre and aggressive way, as a consequence of paranoid ideas and hallucinations, that was uncharacteristic of him, and he was found to have a low level of sodium in his blood, the fact that he calmed down when that level returned to normal meant that we doctors felt that his bizarre behavior had been sufficiently explained. Of course, we wanted to find out why his sodium level had declined to an abnormally low level in the first place; and the precise mechanism by which such a low level resulted in his bizarre behavior was still not fully explained. But just as the police sometimes say when an accused is acquitted that they are not looking for anyone else who might have committed the crime, so we did not feel that anything else was necessary, at least at the metaphysical level, to explain the odd behavior.

Now of course there is the question of whether all human thought and conduct whatsoever is explicable in physicalist terms, but there seems no obvious reason why it should be that only bizarre and abnormal thought and conduct should be so.

The fact that consciousness is explained metaphysically, at least grosso modo, however, does not answer two questions: the first is whether every state of mind will ever be explained scientifically, and the second is whether it would be desirable if they were to be so explained. My answer to both these questions is no, but my reasons for this are not now relevant.

Professor Flanagan is honest enough to acknowledge that this physicalist account of man’s consciousness does not dispose of certain traditional philosophical questions. Howsoever man may have been endowed with the search for truth, beauty, goodness, and meaning, it appears that he was and is so endowed; he cannot escape the search. But in what metaphysical realm do truth, beauty, goodness, and meaning reside?

As far as meaning is concerned, he tries to find a naturalistic source, for he is opposed to all transcendent religious sources, which he thinks are childish and unworthy of mature conscious, self-aware beings. (Does that mean that, inter alia, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Pascal, and Kierkegaard were immature and childish?) He asks what is necessary for human beings to flourish in the Aristotelian sense, terming the empirical evidence eudaimonics. Once we have found the answer to this question, we have found the meaning of life.

Having started life as a Catholic, Professor Flanagan is now something of a Buddhist, or at least much influenced by Buddhist thought, which, like many a Hopi ear-candle-burning, therapeutic crystal-wearing New Ageist, he considers spiritual without resorting to the supernatural. Though not a philosopher, and untrained in logic, I confess that I found his philosophy both shallow and logically inconsistent.

He believes that it is metaphysically irresponsible to make assertions without evidential warrant for them (it seems to me that some kind of reflection on Gödel’s proof might be appropriate here). He also believes that Hume was right in stating that no statement of value could be derived from any statement of fact. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that no one has ever been so foolish as to commit Hume’s fallacy, while proceeding very shortly afterwards to do so himself.

Toward the end of his book he quotes the Dalai Lama:

In generating compassion, you start by recognizing that you do not want suffering and that you have a right to have happiness. This can be verified or validated by your own experience. You then recognize that other people, just like yourself, do not want to suffer and that they have a right to happiness.

To which Professor Flanagan appends two words: “Simple empiricism.”

For myself, I cannot see much empirical content in the Dalai Lama’s words. They seem to me Pecksniffian in their unctuousness, as indeed do almost all the extensive quotes he uses from the Dalai Lama, almost as unctuous as Professor Flanagan’s habitual use of the feminine as the impersonal pronoun, no doubt to appease or ingratiate himself with the harpies and the harridans.

Now Professor Flanagan then goes on, in the very next sentence, to state that “this rationale is not logically demonstrative.” It is not demonstrative in any way whatsoever, though he nonetheless approves of it. But what happens, then, to his belief that it is metaphysically irresponsible to assert anything without warrant—which is surely a throwback to an outdated logical positivism? In short, he applies his belief only to those unprovable statements that he does not like. He is, of course, far from the only person to do this, but it does mean that he cannot claim to have solved any philosophical problem or to have provided what he set out to provide, a purely naturalistic account of the meaning of life. Personally, I doubt very much that it can be provided.

Extensive shallows surround the philosophical reefs in this book. “Why be moral?” asks Professor Flanagan. “Because living morally is a condition for a meaningful life,” he replies.

Really? Is this a necessary or an empirical truth? If the latter it is empty, but if the former it seems to me by no means true. If we had interviewed Stalin just before his death, or Hitler after the downfall of France, would either of them have said that their lives had been meaningless? By what transcendent yet metaphysically responsible criterion could we have proved to them that, objectively speaking, their lives had been meaningless? It seems also to follow from Professor Flanagan’s statement that if, as a matter of fact, immorality is perfectly compatible with a meaningful life, there is no reason to be moral: in other words, he is inadvertently providing a psychopath’s charter.

One subject is almost totally absent from his book: death. Call me superficial, but man’s mortality seems to me to be a matter of some importance when talking about the meaning of life. Very few are those post-religious people—Hume was a rare exception—who can contemplate their own deaths with anything like equanimity on the grounds that, once you are dead, there is no you left to experience anything horrible. The fact that human life, absent the possibility of an afterlife, is a brief flare of consciousness between two eternities of oblivion lends it a certain patina of insignificance.

It could, of course, be said in death’s favor that it is death that gives meaning, or at least impetus, to all our projects: if I had a deadline for this article some time in the year 3785 it is unlikely that it would have got written within the next one and a half millennia. A deadline is not called a deadline for nothing.

On turning to Ionesco, one feels at once that one is moving on to an altogether higher plane of thought, feeling, understanding, and mode of expression. Man’s mortality had been a particular obsession of his since childhood. In one of his interviews with the literary journalist Claude Bonnefoy, he said about his childhood in Romania:

When I saw burials, corteges passing under the windows of the house where I lived, I asked my mother what it meant for someone to be dead. “Why is he dead?” “He’s dead because he was ill.” I ended up believing that one died because one had had an illness, or an accident, at any rate that death was accidental, and that, on taking care not to be ill, to be well-behaved, in wearing a scarf, in taking medicines properly, in paying attention to traffic, one would never die. That worried me, because I could see that one grew older. I said to myself, “Up till when can one continue to age? Where can it lead to?” I imagined a man growing older, I saw him growing up, becoming tall, his beard becoming white, that his beard growing whiter and whiter, and longer and longer and that it dragged in the street, that he himself was more and more bent over. I said to myself, “No, it must come to an end, it’s not possible for it to go on.” One day I asked my mother, “Are we all going to die? Tell me the truth.” She said, “Yes.” I must have been four, five years old, I was sitting on the ground, she was standing in front of me. I can still see her. When she saw me sob—because all of a sudden I started to cry—she looked at me, disarmed, powerless. I was very frightened. Above all, I thought it was certain that she would die one day, that haunted me.

And if his mother died, he too would die.

The transience of human life, its lack of permanent significance, certainly haunted Ionesco, and no doubt was the foundation of the theater of the absurd, of which he was both the founder and by far the most talented practitioner (in him it was no pose or affectation).

This did not mean that he had absolutely no engagement with the day-to-day world around him. Of the three great Romanian intellectual exiles—the deeply vicious Eliade, the slippery, dishonest, and evasive Cioran, and him—he was the only one with nothing to hide. Profoundly unideological, he was nevertheless capable of making the most piercing comments on his times. For example, in Les chaises (The Chairs), first performed in 1952, the old man, speaking to a purely imaginary colonel, says:

Mon Colonel, mon Colonel, I’ve forgotten. The last war, did you lose it or win it?

When you recall that France, officially, was one of the victors of the Second World War, but it was occupied throughout most of it, often with the collaboration of much of the population, this question could hardly have been more pointed, the intellectual stiletto more finely honed. Indeed, in a couple of short sentences Ionesco goes to the essence of the country’s historical problem, whose effects are still detectable more than half a century later. Not many philosophers could imply so much in so few words.

There are six characters in Le roi se meurt, the King Beranger I, his first wife Queen Marguerite, his second wife Queen Marie, the Royal Physician, who is also the royal surgeon, executioner, bacteriologist, and astrologer, Juliette, the Cleaning Lady who is also the nurse to their majesties, and the Guard, who acts as a kind of ridiculous Greek chorus throughout. This dramatis personae is sufficient in itself to punc- ture human self-importance—a specialty of Ionesco’s.

Beranger’s kingdom has been reduced to a rump, the palace is falling into ruins, and Beranger is dying, though no one has told him and he doesn’t know it yet when the play opens. The absurdity is captured in the first exchange between the imperious Queen Marguerite and Juliette and the Guard:

MARGUERITE: There’s dust everywhere. And fag-ends on the floor. JULIETTE: I’ve come from the stable, from milking the cow, Majesty. She has hardly any more milk. I haven’t had time to clean the living-room. MARGUERITE: This isn’t a living-room. It’s the throne room. How many times do I have to tell you. JULIETTE: All right, the throne room, if that’s what your Majesty wants. I haven’t had time to clean the living-room. MARGUERITE: It’s cold. GUARD: I’ve tried to turn the heating on, Majesty. The radiators don’t want to co-operate. The sky is covered, the clouds don’t seem to want to break up easily. The sun is late. However, I’ve heard the King order it to appear.

The court tries to tell the King that he is going to die. He responds:

KING: Yes, of course I know that. We all know that. You’ll let me know when it’s the time.

The physician/surgeon/executioner/bacteriologist/astrologer confirms that he is dying.

DOCTOR: Majesty, Queen Marguerite has spoken the truth, you’re going to die. KING: Still going on about it? You’re annoying me. I’ll die. Yes, I’ll die. In forty years, fifty, in three hundred years. Later. When I want, when I have the time, when I decide to do so. In the meantime, let us think about the affairs of the kingdom. (He mounts the steps to the throne.) Aaagh! My legs, my kidneys. I’ve caught cold in this badly heated palace, with its broken window-panes that let gales and draughts in.

This is both hilarious and deeply disconcerting. It forces us to think about our own little ruses to avoid contemplating our own mortality: a mortality that is terrifying without belief in the afterlife.

The doctor tries again:

PHYSICIAN: Yes, Sire, you are going to die. You won’t have your breakfast tomorrow. No dinner this evening either. The cook has turned off the gas. He’s given back his apron. He’s put the tablecloths and napkins in the cupboard for ever. KING: Who’s given such orders without my consent? I feel perfectly well. You’re joking. Lies. (To Marguerite.) You’ve always wanted me dead. (To Marie.) She’s always wanted me dead. (To Marguerite.) I’ll die when I like, I’m the King, it’s me who decides.

I doubt that there has ever been a sharper expression of post-religious man’s futile revolt against his existential limitations, a revolt that doctors encounter every day. There is no such thing as a good death now.

The King is eventually persuaded of his imminent demise. He says he thought that, as a king, he was immortal, but Queen Marguerite tells him that his immortality was only provisional. Is not a belief in his own immortality, that is provisional and therefore illusory, the only way a man without religious belief can live?

The King asks for time to prepare:

KING: If only I had a century in front of me perhaps I would have the time.

The doctor makes a point about the worth of life not being commensurate with its length, though he reduces it to a reductio ad absurdum:

PHYSICIAN: A well-spent hour is worth more than centuries of forgetfulness and negligence. Five minutes suffice, ten seconds of real consciousness. We’ve given him an hour, sixty minutes, three thousand six hundred seconds. He’s lucky.

The King faces his oblivion with egotistical bitterness, and utters a speech that, for its complete desolation, equals Macbeth’s:

KING: Without me, without me. They’re going to laugh, they’re going to eat, they’re going to dance on my grave. I might as well never have existed. Ah, let them remember me. Let them cry, let them despair. Let them perpetuate my memory in all the manuals of history. Let all the world know my history by heart. Let everyone relive it. Let all the pupils and scholars have no subject but me, my kingdom, my exploits. Let them burn all other books, destroy all statues, put mine in all the public squares. My picture in all the ministries, all the county offices, tax collectors, in all the hospitals. Let them give my name to all the aeroplanes, all the ships, all the vehicles. Let all the other kings, warriors, poets, tenors, philosophers be forgotten, and let there be nothing else but me in everyone’s mind. A sole baptismal name, a sole surname for everyone. Let them learn to read by spelling my name: B-e, Be, Beranger. Let me be on all the icons, on all the crosses in all the churches. Let them say masses for me, let me be the Host. Let all the windows have the form and colour of my eyes, let the rivers on the plain draw the profile of my face! Let them appeal to me eternally, let them supplicate me, let them implore me.

This ridiculous egotism, personal and collective, is the almost inevitable end result when man begins to worship himself, and thinks his current life is all-sufficient. As in Macbeth, the King begs the doctor for help:

KING: You, the suicides, teach me what I must do to acquire a disgust for existence. Teach me indifference. What drug must I take for that? PHYSICIAN: I can prescribe some euphoriant pills, or tranquilizers.

The ridiculous insufficiency and pretentiousness of technical, or naturalistic, solutions to man’s existential problems is here put beyond all appeal.

Ionesco doesn’t offer us a solution, and while one laughs one also cries internally, deep inside one’s being, terrified by the mirror he holds up to our lives and their inherent limitations—unless, that is, one has deep religious faith. Ionesco cuts straight to the heart of the matter, deeply, wittily, poignantly, as Flanagan does not. Philosophy will never be a substitute for literature, which has an ability not merely to assert, but to enter the very fiber of our being.