Further, is immanent spirituality a faith? It relies on a particular vision of the effects on immanence of death and other existential realities as the source of meaning, which need not be shared by e.g. nontheists.

“Part of loving the world,” writes McCurry, “is undertaking the work of repairing the world.” This claim, although controversial, introduces a new subject that cannot be ignored: moral judgment. The claim is controversial because it presupposes that the world, now broken, once worked, a presupposition redolent of the Fall. While rejecting that evaluation of the world, we advocates of immanent spirituality must nevertheless acknowledge that without an account of moral judgment our alternate worldview could never hope to be complete. For as McCurry correctly observes, transcendence has promised to do more than underwrite our desire for eternity; it has also seemed to underwrite our moral prescriptions and proscriptions. Think only of the Ten Commandments, and the movement in this country to inscribe them in the public square as a bulwark against the encroachment of “relativism.” If immanent spirituality surrenders the pretense to immortality, must it also surrender moral standards? In a word: yes. But so much the better for immanence.

In my original post, I argued that the question of a meaningful life—a question which proponents of transcendence have complacently put to proponents of immanence, as if there were no such problem with their own worldview—belongs instead at the feet of the interrogators. Although proponents of transcendence have assumed that only a guarantor of meaning elsewhere can secure meaning here, I argued that this infinite deferral subverts meaning altogether, rendering life absurd. Proponents of immanence must struggle to create meaning for their lives, no doubt, but at least they have a fighting chance of succeeding. Indeed, creativity may just be this meaning after all. Meaningful immortality, by contrast, is impossible. Such a reversal of the question is the approach I wish to take now with McCurry’s parallel question about morality. For it assumes a similar logic: proponents of immanence must supply a guarantor of morality, assume the proponents of transcendence, lest human life become rudderless and inhumane.

Not for a moment do I suppose that McCurry himself is putting this question to immanence complacently; on the contrary, he raises it with evident sincerity and a concern to investigate the contours of its moral alternative to transcendence. Needless to say, I am grateful for his invitation to make a provisional sketch of these contours. Before accepting this invitation, however, I wish to expose the vulnerability of transcendence when it comes to moral judgment. With such a critique in hand, it is hoped, we may be more generous toward immanent accounts of judgment; for even if they fail, they have at least a fighting chance of succeeding. Indeed, immanent judgment may just be the essence of morality after all. Transcendent moral judgments, by contrast, may prove impossible.

McCurry wonders whether moral judgment requires God or, perhaps, the Platonic Forms, so let us consider each of these transcendent candidates in turn, beginning with the Forms. In order to succeed as guides to judgment in this world, despite the fact that they exist in another, they must bear a relation to our world, and this relation must be discernible by us. Each Form there must bear a relation to its particular instances here, so that we may judge these mutable instances by reference to an immutable paradigm. Thus, for example, if I am unsure whether it is good to stand my ground on the battlefield (here and now), I need only look to the Form of Goodness. Granted that I can do this—and it is by no means clear that I can, since it is by no means clear what it means to ‘look to the Form of Goodness’—if standing my ground on the battlefield (here and now) appears to be related to this Form, then I should judge it good; if not, not. Judgment in our changing world thus remains anchored to unchanging standards in a world beyond ours.

There are many serious problems with this strategy. To begin with, everything in this changing world is good in some way, bad in others. This truth is as inherent in the Platonic view of the material world as it is in Christ’s parable of the wheat and the tares. Recognizing this truth, however, the person who looks to the Form of Goodness must concede that everything is related in some way to that Form. If Goodness be any guide to judgment, then, the judge must ensure that the instance he judges good be related to the Form of Goodness in the right way. Nowhere to my knowledge, either in Plato or elsewhere in philosophy, is that special relationship explained; but howsoever it be explained, it will set the judge off on an infinite regress. For in order to judge that some instance to be judged is related to the Form of Goodness in the right way, the judge must now make a meta-judgment about the relationship of this relationship to the Form of Rightness. And so on ad infinitum.

In his Parmenides, Plato himself recognized many serious problems with transcendent paradigms. Indeed, Platonists seem to take Forms far more seriously than he did. For his own character argues that these paradigms bear no relevant relation to this world. In the example from this dialogue, the Form of Master is not the master of any worldly slave, but instead the master of the Form of Slave. Correlatively, the Form of Slave is not slave to any worldly master, but instead to the Form of Master. For their part, worldly masters are related to worldly slaves, and vice versa. Yet without any relation between these two realms—the Formal and the material, the transcendent and the immanent—these paradigms are useless, both ontologically and epistemologically. They cannot make anything be what it is, and they cannot help us to know what anything is. In terms of the example, the Form of Master does not make a master be a master, and if you want to know about being a master, the Form cannot help you. You would be better served, in fact, by a study of the ante-bellum South, with all its change and corruption. Similarly, if you want to know whether it is good for you to stand your ground in battle (here and now), you would be better served by a glance toward your field officer—that is to say, your worldly circumstances—than to the Form of Goodness.

On a historical note, Aristotle adopted this same criticism in the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics, inheriting the credit for a thought that was first Plato’s. Wherever the credit properly lies, however, the Christian version of transcendence must succeed where these Greeks thought it failed. But perhaps there is more hope in Christian transcendence than in the Greek attempt. Few people faced with a moral judgment turn to the Form of Goodness, after all, whereas billions turn to God and his commandments. Yet similar philosophical problems resurface in religion, depending on how these commandments are understood. If they be understood as natural law—something that could have emerged without divine authorship, as prudent rules that any community must respect if it is to flourish—then there is no problem, if only because there is no appeal to the transcendent. You obey the Decalogue, say, because you wish to flourish, and you believe only someone who respects these commandments can do so. This is an immanent understanding of moral judgment, however, and not the transcendent alternative its theological trappings might make it appear to be.

What more must be added to the Decalogue, then, to make it that special sort of guarantee sought by the proponents of transcendence? I invite McCurry, or any proponent of transcendence, to answer this question. In the meantime, I would like to consider a few possible answers to it. According to one such answer, the Decalogue (or any other divine law) requires a transcendent guarantee because it is not something we could deduce from our immanent circumstances, as conditions for our flourishing. Two reasons might be given for this shortcoming: either (a) our ability to legislate properly to ourselves here is imperfect, or (b) the law speaks more properly to our lives in a perfect condition elsewhere. The Christian story underwrites both of these reasons: we cannot legislate properly to ourselves here because the Fall has crippled our judgment; or, the law speaks more properly to our lives elsewhere, our lives in the perfect condition of Grace once lost but someday regained. Both of these responses bring us back into the orbit of Jason Byassee’s comment, although I do not know that they are responses he himself would offer.

With (b)—that the law speaks more properly to our lives elsewhere—the problem of Platonic Forms discussed above arises again. Tailoring that problem to fit these Christian terms, we should object: what relevance does our perfect condition there have for us in our imperfect condition here? When I must make a judgment about life here, where tares grow among the wheat, what value is there in looking to life there, where the wheat is pure and the tares have all been burned? Taking the metaphor literally, the farmer who used the perfect as his standard for the imperfect, treating tares and wheat as nothing but wheat, would throw his imperfect harvest indiscriminately into his silo, ruining his store. Dropping the metaphor, can we make any sense of this perfect condition? At this point, all of my criticisms of heaven, both in the original post and in the subsequent commentary, become apposite.

If (b) fails so quickly, what about (a)—that we cannot legislate for ourselves here because the Fall has crippled our judgment? According to many Christians, our judgment is so badly crippled that we must rely on divine authority. You do not obey the Decalogue because you judge it to be a condition of human flourishing. No, you obey the Decalogue because God has commanded it. This is the transcendent element missing from the immanent understanding of moral judgment. But it incurs more problems than did the other response. For instance, faced with all ten commandments, how can you be sure that God has commanded each one? Whatever evidence you supply to warrant your certainty here, moreover, how can you be sure that it has not been tainted with the sinfulness that corrupts your judgments elsewhere?

If these questions can be answered, and you are confident that these commandments should regulate moral judgments in particular circumstances, others follow closely on their heels: how will you apply their simple statements to complex and ambiguous reality? Take the commandment against adultery, and presume that you accept it as a transcendent standard by which to guide your conduct. Now you wish to marry someone who is divorced. Can you square this wish with your beliefs? Imagine that this person had married very young, and may not have been fully aware of the obligations undertaken in matrimony. If not, there is a case to be made—at least in the canon law of the Catholic Church—that this person has not yet been married; an annulment is available. But what is it, really, to be fully aware of the obligations of matrimony? Are there any but those who have been married their whole lives, those who have understood very concretely what these obligations mean in a complex world, who are fully aware of them? Short of that concrete awareness, what level of awareness should count as sufficient, and how should it be determined whether this level was reached in the case of this real person?

Canon lawyers often dispute such questions—there are an infinite number, I believe, for every commandment—because neither the Decalogue nor any other deceptively simple transcendent standard speaks directly to our moral lives. An interpreter is needed, and the Church is supposed to perform this role. But which denomination, which congregation, which priest? For those whose role in the Church is to do the interpreting, where exactly to turn? To which ecumenical council, to which theologian, to which text? The iterations are endless, which is not an argument for relativism; rather, it exposes a deep truth about moral judgment: it requires choice. At every point of their submission, in fact, even those who wish to surrender their freedom to an authority must make a choice, consciously or unconsciously. If they choose to surrender their choice, their inescapable freedom frustrates them; if they persist in the pretense of submission, they choose hypocrisy more precisely than submission. We are now brought face-to-face with the failure of transcendence to secure moral judgment. It cannot do so because its strategy of submission cannot recognize the most basic requirement of moral judgment: freedom. In Sartre’s memorable dictum, we are “condemned to be free.”

And yet, in the words of Dostoevsky, the very author McCurry invoked in his comment, “nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom.” This premise undergirds the argument of the notorious Grand Inquisitor, who concludes from it that a true love of humanity and a true compassion for our suffering require relieving us of the burden of our freedom. The Church alone provides this relief, according to the Inquisitor, enchanting us with promises of miracles and mysteries, if not compelling us by its authority. While Dostoevsky himself seems to reject that conclusion—after all, the Inquisitor is arraigning Christ, whom Dostoevsky worshipped—he nonetheless seems to accept the premise. Rather than relieving us of our freedom, Dostoevsky seems to believe, Christ turns customary habits of submissive worship on their head, inviting us to revere him freely, without enticement of worldly reward, the enchantment of mystery, or the coercion of authority. That is why He refused the three temptations of Satan.

As McCurry reminds us, however, the same character who crafts the story of the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan, admits at the end of it that “everything is lawful.” It is no easy admission—either for Ivan or for me—but it must be made, and will just as surely be misunderstood. How, then, should it be understood? It does not mean that we should connive at the Holocaust or, more likely, the bully next door sitting comfortably in an endowed chair. It does mean that we should come to love the world as it is, not as our immature fantasies would have it be. One common fantasy, to which degenerate faiths and philosophies alike appeal, as I have argued above, is the fantasy of a perfect paradigm, a comprehensive code, an authority who will relieve us ultimately of the burden of our freedom. This is the fantasy of a transcendent guarantor for moral judgment, and I believe Dostoevsky was as harsh critic of it as Sartre was.

Without such a guarantor, a proponent of immanent spirituality must explain how it does not retreat into quietism, a passive contemplation of the world, rather than the passionate engagement with it that we find celebrated in Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Sartre, not to mention the Stoics so often and unfairly caricatured as quietists. In my post, I asked whether this posture was not just quietist, but further, masochistic. Please permit me to quote that question and its abbreviated response: “Why, if I love this one moment of joy, must I love all the other moments of pain that come before and after it? A moment is joyful because it is meaningful, extraordinarily meaningful…But these moments of joy are so meaningful because they are moments in a narrative…meaningful moments must be embedded in finite narratives, narratives of risk and therefore tragedy, circumscribed by death. To love such a moment fully is to love the narrative that constitutes it; and to love such a narrative fully is to love the world in which that narrative unfolds.”

Invoking Nietzsche’s character, I next wrote: “If Zarathustra be believed, if he be followed as a prophet of immanent spirituality, we must love the whole world, with its pain, illness, betrayal, death.” I shall try in my third post, on Heraclitean spirituality, to elaborate this cosmic thought. For now, I wish only briefly to review my argument that psychoanalysis is an ethics as well as a spirituality. Married to the latest research in neuroscience, and a host of related disciplines, psychoanalysis investigates human flourishing while also diagnosing and attempting to overcome its impediments. As such, it is squarely in the tradition of ancient philosophy epitomized by Aristotle, who married his curiosity about everything with a rigorous effort to live the best life. He placed a transcendent deity at the summit of this effort, but was logically required to do so by his ontology and epistemology. Since these theories have been surpassed by immanent alternatives, we remain most faithful to his curiosity and his effort by elaborating an immanent ethics. This cannot be an ethics of transcendent paradigms, rules, or authorities, for the existentialist reasons already canvassed; but it can be an ethics—a methodical quest for the best life—nonetheless.

My own quest has brought me thus far to believe that at the summit of ethics are love and creativity, whose greatest impediments are resentment and repetition. Each of these vices is born of the insecurity of the infant, altogether appropriate insecurity for that stage of life, but an insecurity that soon outlives its utility. In the worst emotional maladies, infantile fears become fossilized as fantasies that turn our otherwise supple organism into an obsolete machine. Scratch the surface of any bully, I suspect, and you will find a baby trying desperately and repetitively—the only way it knows how, futile though it be—to achieve security. No ethics of transcendent regulation can speak to such a baby, except in the language of intimidation it knows so well. Only the master-craft of converting the infant into an adult can bring good out of this evil. There may be transcendent practitioners of this craft—Dostoevsky hints as much in his story, since only the kiss of a silent Christ softens the heart of the Inquisitor—but immanent technique demonstrably delivers what transcendent regulations vainly promise. To speak bluntly now: everything is permitted, yes, but it is a whole lot better for you and those around you if you grow up.

The argument for this blunt conclusion is somewhat more subtle, I hope, and I have begun to make it here, in a paper called “Psychoanalysis as Spirituality” (see especially its second through fourth sections, on “Emotions and Meaning,” “Love versus Resentment,” and “The Therapeutic Action”). But I do not pretend to any originality in this argument. On the contrary, with the help of several recent scholars, I am trying only to bring psychoanalysis and existentialism into contact with the ancient philosophical tradition of which, I believe, these modern movements are today the most faithful—which is to say the most creative—exponents.

Richard McKim (4):

McKim rightly asserts that the main differences between our two positions have by now been thoroughly laid out for inspection. The choice between transcendence and immanence is now clearer thanks largely to his pokes and points. My only remaining qualification is to his assertion that “while Patrick says we can express ‘mortal meaning’ in words, he (wisely) doesn’t try.” My second post did try to express this meaning in Nietzschean terms, and my first began to do so in Freudian terms. These expressions were admittedly incomplete, because of the limitations of space as well as the difficulty of the topic, but I have also been directing the curious to my fuller attempt here. That is a rather long paper, so for anyone interested in a briefer expression of this meaning I beg your patience. I am preparing a third post on this subject, hoping to have it ready by the new year. Behind both Nietzsche and Freud, I believe, are the Stoics, and behind them—the true maestro di color che sanno—is Heraclitus. On this much, it seems, McKim and I can agree. I hope nonetheless that he will criticize that future post with the same vim he has brought to the present.

Jason Byassee:

Now the conversation takes a more explicitly Christian turn. Byassee issues a timely reminder to Christians who would turn their eschatology into an ethereal cycle of thinking about thinking. Heaven is supposed to be a place of bodies; not a departure from earth, but a renewed earth. This should immediately rule out the Aristotelian, or even the Augustinian, solution to the problem of meaningful immortality. How, after all, can there be bodies outside of time? A body outside of time makes about as much sense as a frozen fire. The virtue of orthodox Christianity on this score is honesty; its vice, incoherence. Nor does incoherence appear a vice to those who follow Tertullian and believe quia absurdum. Yet my critique of heaven did not rest on reason alone. (For a fuller version of my critique, I refer Byassee and other Christians to my exchange with Richard McKim above.) Its second, emotional component argued that any incoherent vision that also tantalizes immature longings for all-good-without-any-bad should be subject to the deepest suspicion. And perhaps the orthodox Christian likes it that way. This religion is supposed to be a scandal to the Jews and nonsense to the Greeks. As a Greek, I remain nonplussed. Nonplussed, but not hostile: I consider myself a member of His Highness’s loyal opposition.

Byassee’s next point—a suspicion of natural desires, such as the desir d’éternité, as products of deeply ingrained sin—introduces a skepticism about our constitution that is unavailable to more Pelagian versions of Christianity. Beginning with this brand of suspicion, the Christian can refuse to promise any satisfaction to our deepest longings; she can even refuse to work-through those longings, as I recommend. But in my post above I warned that the price of such a refusal may prove dear. This longing “cannot be simply denied,” I wrote, “the way so many anti-clerical and utopian fantasies of modernity have tried to do.” Byassee’s suspicion reminds us that those who would deny this longing are not always opponents of Christianity, but sometimes ardent Christians themselves. The anti-clerical forces “have produced,” as I wrote, “no paradise but instead hell on earth, ‘a victory for darkness,’ where the longing for eternity found perverse expression in guillotines, concentration camps, and gulags.” What has been the cost of the Christian, and especially the Calvinist, suspicion of our deepest longings? High, it seems to me, although in the more psychological currency not recorded by military history. One need only think of Christendom’s condemnations of everything from heresy to homosexuality to the theater.

Whatever this price of Christian suspicion, however, I now recognize an irony of my critique: have I not presupposed my own suspicion of our deepest longing? I have. I have called immature our longing for a place where everything is good and nothing bad. I have also recommended the Freudian education of this longing into maturity, the recognition that in this world the wheat will always be mixed with tares. Perhaps, one might therefore object, there is not much of a difference between Calvin and Freud on this score after all. But there is. The Calvinist suspicion, on one hand, is global: our nature is totally depraved, and so all our deepest longings become suspicious. None but mythical reasons are given for this global suspicion. The Freudian suspicion, on the other hand, is both specific and grounded in empirical evidence: our nature is neither good nor bad, but begins in an infancy whose ways of feeling not even the adult leaves entirely behind.

The goal of Freudian psychoanalysis is not to envision an altogether different nature, in the manner of Calvinism, but to facilitate the maturation of the nature we already have. For our mature selves can tolerate the world as it is, with its ambiguity and complexity, without shrinking into the simplistic and unambiguous fantasies of the world our immature selves would prefer. We must not simply ignore those fantasies, in the manner of repression as common among Calvinists as Communists, since that would be to alienate us from ourselves. Instead, we must work-through these fantasies and the longings that provoke them. The technique and efficiency of this working-through (Freud’s durcharbeiten) requires explanation, to be sure, and I have essayed my own explanation here. Howsoever it be explained, though, the goal of psychoanalysis is always to free us from the repetitive and simplistic fantasies of our childhood, allowing us thereby to engage a complex reality with the creativity it demands.

First, I am very happy with Patrick Miller’s reading of Nietzsche, whose anti-Platonist and anti-Christian diatribes are, it seems to me, less destructive than constructive; they are exercises in clearing the intellectual and emotional ground so that we humans can love the world and our lives in it, even with all the contingencies and tragedies involved.

Second, I also really like Patrick’s philosophizing on the necessity of time to value: no time, no value, strikes me as right.

One problem I continue to struggle with is the related problem of what we might call “judgment.” Transcendence, after all, is not just the promise of immortality. It is also the promise of a source of absolute goodness and right that can serve to criticize our present and immanent ethical, religious, emotional, intellectual, and political modes of life. Dostoevsky, at least in one of his voices, seemed to think along these lines. Along this thought, I would say that part of loving the world is undertaking the work of repairing the world. But where do we get our principles to guide this work of repair? Are there purely immanent sources that can be untainted by the very brokenness of the immanent world they try to heal? So the question I would enjoy seeing Patrick Miller wrestle with might be: do we still need God (or perhaps the Platonic Forms), not to give us eternal life, but to give us the guidance necessary to live as well and as humanely as we can in this life?

I’ll just say that Patrick’s distinction between dispelling discomfort and working through it may in the end be one without a difference. Even if we grant it and express the result of working-through as “understanding,” with some comfort as a by-the-way bonus, it’s still the case in my view that fans of immanent meaning and of eternal life alike are in the same leaky boat on a sea of existential anxiety. We plug the leaks differently, but the thing will never be waterproof.

The risk of wishful thinking to satisfy immature emotions also seems the same for both, as does the hope that we’re not merely hiding that objective from ourselves beneath a lot of rationalization. But I don’t subscribe to any doctrine of the “irrational,” a rightly pejorative term. The ineffable, yes, with reason as the royal road to it. I consider myself a disciple of Heraclitus in this, if not Freud. And I note that, while Patrick says we can express “mortal meaning” in words, he (wisely) doesn’t try.

It also may be the Protestant in me, vs. Taylor, that I don’t put much stock in what seems to be a ‘natural’ desire, in this case the one for eternity. The fact that a desire seems ‘natural’ may simply mean its a deeply ingrained sin.

Ravi Rajakumar (2):

Rajakumar should feel no hesitation about commenting again, whether he aims to refute or merely to elaborate an alternative. Each of his comments has forced me to clarify my interpretation of the Eternal Return, and for that I am grateful. In this most recent comment, he claims that I have been too dismissive of some of the references to the Eternal Return in Nietzsche’s writings, specifically the ones outside of Zarathustra.

Without any specific objection to my alliance with Solomon in ignoring the testimony of the so-called Will to Power, I assume that the arguments supporting our common neglect stand. If we must consider that testimony, however, I should say that I find its mechanistic argument an amusing diversion—as I believe Nietzsche himself found it—but little more. According to this diversion, “a certain definite quantity of force and as certain a definite number of centers of force” require, over infinite time, an infinite repetition. “In infinite time,” Nietzsche argued, “every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times.” The weakness in this valid argument is its scientifically vulnerable premises. Thanks to the Big Bang theory, for instance, we no longer assume so glibly that time is infinite. Time came into being with the cosmos, we are told by the physicists, and will be extinguished with the cosmos when it dies.

There are deep problems with this view of time, it must be admitted, and ironically these problems may snare the materialist in the same thickets as the Christian. Here is one question that arises quickly: “What was happening before the cosmos came into being, prompting its causes to effect its being?” This problem recapitulates one ancient pagan objection to the creation of the world: “What was God doing before he created the world?” Augustine was aware of the following witty retort to this objection: “Fashioning Hell for people who ask such impious questions!” Fortunately he did not rely on wit alone to exculpate his cosmology, and his answer is now available to the materialist in slightly altered form: God exists outside of time; or, the physical causes that are supposed to bring the world and its time into being exist outside of time. Pick your poison: once causes are outside of time, be they divine or physical, it is not at all clear how they can influence anything in time. Perhaps this odd confluence of theological and physical cosmologies will now bring my discussion with Rajakumar into the orbit of my discussion with McKim about activities outside of time.

Returning to the broader point at issue in this particular discussion, though, when it comes time to interpret Nietzsche we must remember that he remained as skeptical of science as he was fascinated by it. He saw the objectivity cultivated by scientists as but the most recent manifestation of the ascetic ideal he fought, so we should beware of making his writings too beholden to scientists. That said, we should also recognize how he exploited their findings in the battle. For him, however, this battle remained ever psychological, a struggle for the souls of the European culture he saw in decline. Rajakumar is thus right to remind us that the Eternal Return was, for Nietzsche, a sort of hypothetical thought-experiment, a spiritual exercise aimed to help his followers cultivate the most meaningful and joyful life, a life that had been repressed by the oppressive guilt of the linear and eschatological narrative of Christianity. But what is the precise nature of the exercise? This is our current disagreement.

Rajakumar is also correct to remind us that in The Joyful Science, as in Zarathustra, Nietzsche presents the doctrine of the Eternal Return as a double-edged sword, a heaven or a hell, depending on how you receive it. If your life were to repeat infinitely many times, were you not living now a fulfilling life, you would fail to do so infinitely many times over as well. This is the greatest weight indeed; a condemnation to a sort of hell. Yet the reason I wish to resist this version of the doctrine—and perhaps I must ultimately depart from Nietzsche in order to do so—is that no matter how it be received it could not be a heaven. Under the weight of the doctrine thus understood, you may choose to live a fuller life, but the recognition that even this apparently fuller life will be nothing but an infinite repetition will soon enervate you. I cannot see how Nietzsche, with his persistent celebration of creativity, could have overlooked this problem.

Here is the interpretive problem as I see it: how to square Nietzsche’s philosophy of creativity with the doctrine of infinite repetition at which he occasionally hints? I suggest that we see through the doctrine’s appearance of repetition to Nietzsche’s neglected injunction to love. Nietzscheans have neglected this injunction, it seems to me, maybe because its Christian echoes are so loud. Maybe they prefer to criticize decadence than to create new values. If so, they resemble no one so closely as Zarathustra’s ape. Turning our attention to these new values, this immanent spirituality, and feeling no shame about its appropriations of Christianity, we can also see its anticipations of Freudian psychoanalysis. Instead of a life of indefinitely repetitive neurosis, psychoanalysis promises liberation to a life of creative joy. Nietzsche’s terrifying thought-experiment and vivid injunctions to overcome resentment thus become, in Freud’s hands, a rigorous technique for living the meaningful mortal life sought by philosophers since antiquity.

Richard McKim (3):

Two issues remain from my very profitable exchange with McKim. The first concerns “existential courage,” the virtue celebrated by many proponents of immanence—although not by me, as I shall try to make clear. In this celebration McKim perceives a symptom of pride. The second concerns reason’s repugnance to the idea of heaven. Must reason be the court of final appeal, he asks, or may emotional experience surpass rational scrutiny in the pursuit of truth? By boiling the discussion down to these points, McKim has isolated the two most important elements of the dispute: reason and emotion.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus famously made existential courage the chief dignity of human life. We have been condemned to a futile existence—the cosmic equivalent of rolling a rock up a hill, only to watch it roll back down the moment we reach the summit—but we can raise our fists in the air and curse this condemnation, Camus argued, resolving to roll the rock back up the hill for no other purpose than defiance of this very futility. This is not my position, although I was responsible in my last reply for allowing it to seem as if it were. When I wrote of beginning with existential discomfort, but then engaging in a spiritual practice in order to “dissipate” this discomfort, I must have made it seem as though anything that dissipates this discomfort will do. If so, Zen meditation or psychoanalysis would be no better than an anti-depressant or a bottle of whiskey. Nothing could be farther from my position, as my earlier post on this subject argued. I wrote that post in an effort, simply put, to correct Charles Taylor’s misunderstanding of psychoanalysis as no more a spiritual source than medicine.

Rather than dissipate this discomfort, in the manner of a pharmacologist such as Peter Kramer, or merely brave it in a proud act of defiance, in the manner of an existentialist such as Camus, I have been recommending all along the strategy of working-through it. McKim slides too easily between working-through and dissipating, and he is not to blame. The concept of working-through (Freud’s durcharbeiten) is very difficult to grasp, and I admit that it often slips through my own fingers, even at the very moment I am celebrating it. For the best account of working-through, in my view, is to be found in the deliberately slippery aphorisms of Heraclitus. I have tried here to use these aphorisms, and the subtle philosophy of time they express, to underwrite the activity of psychoanalysis, supplying this activity with the goal it rarely acknowledges it needs. Now ironically, thanks to McKim’s challenging objections, I find myself wondering whether this activity may turn out to be an immanent approximation of Aristotle’s energeia (which I rejected in my first reply to McKim). In any case, the Heraclitean version of psychoanalysis makes its process of self-inquiry, properly understood, its very own goal. Free-association, in short, is both means and end.

My correlative understanding of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis (which I also endeavor to explain here, and again more fully here) makes it out to be understanding ourselves—not dissipating our discomfort—even if relief from discomfort is understanding’s happy consequence. With this distinction in hand, we can pinpoint the illicit move in McKim’s following objection: “Patrick takes natural pride in braving the “discomfort” of his worldview, but admits that the non-believer’s goal is to ‘work through’ it – in other words, to dispel it. So there’s the same search for comfort on both sides.” Distinguishing a search for comfort, on one hand, from a search for understanding whose byproduct is comfort, on the other, we can now see how immanent spirituality, at least in the psychoanalytic version I favor, seeks not comfort, but rather understanding—of oneself, but therefore also of the cosmos one inhabits. To summarize: immanent spirituality is no more a search for comfort than it is a proud existential courage in the face of discomfort; it is instead a search for understanding that expects to convert discomfort into peace of mind, though it never makes this conversion its goal.

McKim is right that neither camp—neither those who favor immanent spirituality, nor those “pro-eternal-lifers,” as McKim calls them—can escape the nagging suspicion that there is no meaning to life at all. That is the price, I believe, of living authentically with either position in a fragile human body, with a limited human intellect, and a broken human heart, where the hints of truth are but whispers coded in bewildering signals amid the static of everyday life. Thus, as a final comment on this subject of existential courage, and as a final reassurance of my respect for the rival camp, I do not wish to accuse “pro-eternal-lifers” of being cowardly. The faithful Christians among them, after all, must be prepared to suffer gruesome martyrdom before betraying their Truth. Each side has its own claim to courage, and there are brave practitioners on both sides. The important question is not who is more brave, but rather who is closer to decoding the signals.

The second disagreement McKim stresses in his third comment is “the role of reason in all this.” As above, I need to clarify my position before repeating my argument for it. I do not claim, as he writes, that “if eternal life, or at least an attractive one, is ‘inconceivable’ via reasoning (which I’ve agreed it is), then it’s ruled out of court.” Nor do I maintain, at least in the matter at hand, that “Reason is the final authority, the limit-setter on what can be true.” My position is more complex than that: when an idea, such as heaven, is both inconceivable via reasoning and the paradigm of emotional immaturity, then we should reject it. In other words, my critical argument has both a rational and an emotional component. My first reply to McKim elaborated the first, and my second reply elaborated the second, but permit me now to explain how they work together.

Whether because of Plato or Kant or Wittgenstein, or simply because of my own history of error, I am critical enough of human reason to recognize that there may be truths which it cannot conceive. As such, it should recognize that not all inconceivable ideas should be ruled out; some of them may be true. But there is a difference between recognizing this in the abstract, and determining which inconceivable ideas should be trusted as nonetheless possibly true. In order to eliminate the innumerable candidates, I suggest, we should examine the emotions motivating us to support these candidates, ever vigilant against inconceivable scenarios that also happen to satisfy our most immature emotional longings. For I am also critical enough of human emotions to recognize that there are fantasies so powerful—the immature ones more powerful than most, and the fantasy of pure goodness being the most immature and powerful of them all—that they should be approached with extraordinary suspicion.

Reason enables us to analyze our fantasies, to subject them to reliable tests, to measure them against experience and reality. Anyone who has ever been misled by a powerful but irrational emotion—an unjustified anger based upon a foolish misunderstanding, an infatuation with someone obviously ill-suited to companionship—knows the importance of this scrutiny. The Attic tragedians no less than their philosophic rivals saw the danger of primitive passions and each in their own way warned against their dangers. Euripides’ Hippolytus in one way, Plato’s Republic in another, admonish us to check our passions with prudence. In this estimable tradition, then, if an idea presents itself as both inconceivable to reason and perfectly tailored to satisfy all our immature longings, we should reject it—unless it can somehow dispel either presentation. That is how heaven presents itself to me at the moment, and this is why I must reject it for now. However, were anyone to convince me that it is either conceivable or the longing of a mature heart, then I would hope to overcome my pride and suspend judgment, if not also believe.

In the meantime, I do not agree with McKim that a meaningful eternal life and a meaningful mortal life are evenly balanced in doubt, each requiring a “leap of faith.” He is right to begin this final argument with the premise that “Eternal life, if it’s anything, is one of those things whereof we cannot speak (except in inadequate time-language and time-analogies).” But in the sentences that follow, he moves between the ineffable and the irrational, occluding an important distinction between them. Speaking still of the ineffable, he adds: “But so, ultimately, is the belief that our lives have meaning even though they’re merely mortal. You can’t reason someone else all the way into feeling that; it has to be experienced in a deeply private space.” I could not agree more that meaning must be experienced to be believed, and that not even the soundest rational deduction will convince the suicidal patient, for example, that her life is meaningful. But it does not follow from this psychological truth about conviction that the meaning of mortal lives, preached by philosophers from Heraclitus to Freud, is therefore ineffable. Unlike the meaning of eternal lives, we can express this mortal meaning in words; we can even examine it with reason. Like immortal meaning, though, we cannot fully feel it until we have made it our own.

(1) Existential courage. I understand the appeal of being brave in face of the abyss, resolving to soldier on in a merely material universe, finding meaning where we can. I was part of that army for a long time. Good company – like physicist Steven Weinberg, who in his recent NYRB piece joins Patrick in attributing courage to those who (like them) try to make the best of things in the belief that there’s no hereafter and no God. A noble calling, but I became uneasy about its unavoidable air of self-congratulation. I’m not sure they’re as different from the pro-eternal-life brigade as they think.

Patrick takes natural pride in braving the “discomfort” of his worldview, but admits that the non-believer’s goal is to “work through” it – in other words, to dispel it. So there’s the same search for comfort on both sides. Neither, if we’re honest with ourselves, can escape the nagging & scary thought that life may really be absurd and meaningless as well as nasty brutish and short — the nice parts vanish without a trace, you go through a lot of hassle & suffering for nothing, and then you’re dead.

Pro-eternal-lifers can paint as rosy & self-persuasive a picture of immortality as they like, but the suspicion persists that it may well be a bunch of feel-good hokum. Honest non-believers have the same problem. They can’t entirely shake the fear that the consolations afforded by “Zen or psychoanalysis or what-have-you” may be hokum too, attempts to fool ourselves into believing that life has meaning when it doesn’t. Both sides seek to still that fear, or at least keep it reasonably at bay. I’m not convinced that one is more courageous than the other, but if it’s cowardly to feel that there must be more to life than mortality, so be it.

(2) That “must” brings us to a disagreement on the role of reason in all this. Patrick seems to think that if eternal life, or at least an attractive one, is “inconceivable” via reasoning (which I’ve agreed it is), then it’s ruled out of court. Reason is the final authority, the limit-setter on what can be true. Again, he’s in good company.

I take the Platonic/Wittgensteinian view of reason, that it’s a tool for getting beyond itself – an essential tool for approaching ultimate truth, but not enough to get us there. For Plato, you reason your way up to the point where you’re ready for enlightenment, but enlightenment itself is a leap beyond, the transcendence of reasoning about reality by the direct mystical vision of it. Wittgenstein used reason to clear a space for silence, so we could stop talking about the unsayable, stop trying to use reason to arrive at truths beyond its scope, and dwell in peace in that sacred space where reasoning can’t intrude.

Eternal life, if it’s anything, is one of those things whereof we cannot speak (except in inadequate time-language and time-analogies). But so, ultimately, is the belief that our lives have meaning even though they’re merely mortal. You can’t reason someone else all the way into feeling that; it has to be experienced in a deeply private space. We all share a sense, I think, that “reason demands” that our lives have some sort of meaning, since otherwise reason can’t make sense of them. But there’s a leap from the conclusion that life must have meaning to a vision or experience of what that meaning is. And that’s a leap of faith, whichever side of this debate you’re on.