The Tragic View of Life v. Spirituality

Experience

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a more philosophically-minded/meditative piece.

Best,

Sam

THE TRAGIC VIEW OF LIFE V. SPIRITUALITY

Recently, I had a conversation with another Substacker in which I found myself passionately defending spirituality. It was a bit of a a surprise to me since it seemed as if that view of my life had already passed, but in the face of a materialist sensibility I really wanted to make that argument.

The argument for spirituality, as I’ve come to understand it, is a sense that there is an intelligence guiding us just as it guides the entirety of the universe. People — even ostensibly secular people — express spiritual ideas all the time when they say things like, “It wasn’t meant to be,” or “There’s someone for everyone,” or “Everything happens for a reason,” or “I felt that my time had come,” etc, etc. These kinds of things are so deep in idiomatic speech that the mechanism being assumed goes unexamined — although people always get a peculiar sombre look when they say something like this, as if they’ve suddenly been turned into an oracle — but what’s being stated is some belief in an intelligence wending its way through everything in a person’s life. And those who are spiritually professional tend to posit a sort of puzzle ethic to going through your life — that your task is to learn your lessons as much as possible, which often means bravely facing hard truths. As Osho, for instance, put it: “There is no good or bad, only more or less stupid.” What he meant is that everybody has a karmic journey towards enlightenment: the more you face, i.e. the braver you are, the faster your journey will be towards your destination.

That is the spiritual sensibility and I, so to speak, resonate it with it deeply. I do have a sense of fate, I do have a sense that what’s important in my life seems not to be exactly in my control — that I seem to be led around by some force other than myself — but that there are critical crossroads moments where that force, whatever it is, holds back, forces me to choose, and those rare moments are my karmic balance, are the true evaluation of my self.

That’s the spiritual view. The other side of it — as the fellow Substacker expressed it to me — is, basically, to knock it off. Not only is it fairly obvious that there is no intelligence guiding everything — and it’s pretty self-indulgent to think that there is — but it’s fundamentally a weak-willed view of the world. Probably Nietzsche has the clearest articulation of the tragic view of life. In The Birth of Tragedy, he writes, “Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for what is hard, awful, evil, problematic in existence.”

This is the view that was philosophically fashionable in the early part of the 20th century. It’s in Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus — and it’s in Jens Peter Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne, with its depiction of the life and death of an atheist bravely refusing the consolations of religion: “And at last he died the death, the difficult death.” In this view it is precisely the absurdity, the non-intelligence in life, that gives it its meaning — courage comes from that cheerful pessimism, from facing the abyss with all of oneself.

The question becomes if the two perspectives are compatible. The Greeks of course believed strongly in fate. And the spiritual community tends to describe atheism as being a critical stage — moving past the hand-me-down religious sentiments of one’s childhood before reaching a truer faith.

But it seems actually that there is a choice that has to be made. Either you believe in a guiding intelligence and try to align yourself with it; or you accept the underlying absurdity of existence and find your strength through that recognition. At different points of my life I have been anchored in those very different sentiments. There is more joy, certainly, in the sense of faith — and it can be very pleasurable to lose oneself in the divine puzzles. But that faith can crumble very easily; it is hard to escape the conviction that one has been had. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve encountered anyone who genuinely has the cheerful pessimism that Nietzsche describes. The existential types always seem so careworn and, frankly, scared.

Spiritual life in the West seems to me as if it passed dramatically from one point of view to another. Existential thought dominated the early part of the 20th century, reaching its peak in the 1940s. The social revolutions of the 1960s were animated by a different sensibility — much more faith-oriented, with a belief in spiritual journeys and the new age. Among thoughtful people I meet now the tendency seems to be towards some variation of spirituality — towards there being “something,” or towards believing in a “higher intelligence.” There is little trace of the combative atheism of Niels Lyhne. But that may be shifting again. So much of spirituality collapses into platitudes, if not charlatanism. Speaking personally, I think I’ve found myself reoriented more towards the tragic view of life. It’s not necessary to look for a design in order to find meaning. And the search for design can ultimately confuse and weaken oneself. It’s better to just keep one’s head down, put one foot in front of the other, find a sort of cheerful pessimism. Even if there is a design — as I have often felt — that seems to be, in any case, what the design wants us to do with ourselves.