The Quality of Emotional Response Reveals our Quality

 

     Three crude sketches. Imagine a child, born into a life of wealth and privilege, spoiled from birth rather than really loved, never able to leap out of a purely ego-centered perspective on the world, valuing other people and things only to the extent it elevates him over others, respecting only people who seem to have more stature in the celebrity and financial marketplace than himself (e.g. Donald Trump). One more sketch: that of a similar person who psychologists classify has having narcissistic personality disorder: a person whose mode of self-consciousness involves a “pattern of self-centered, arrogant thinking and behavior, a lack of empathy and consideration for other people, and an excessive need for admiration. Others often describe people with narcissistic personality disorder as cocky, manipulative, selfish, patronizing, and demanding.” Often this narcissism had its beginnings as a coping mechanism to protect the fragile child-ego from pain caused by a parent incapable of giving the child the love it needed. (You can fill out the details of these sketches yourself.)

       What both these cases have in common I think I can illustrate with this: imagine that these people were grade school teachers who, when confronted with a child they considered cheeky or disrespectful of their authority, get so angry the call the child names like ‘jerk.’ Anger: anger is anger at someone because the angry person feels that someone has said or done something that unjustly injures them in some way. Imagine the cause of anger a note passed between pupils that said ‘so boring.’ The angry response contains a judgment about the content of the note and about the child. Of course, if the teachers discovered the ‘boring’ applied to another pupil, the cause of the anger would go away, but otherwise the anger expresses a conviction that the passing of that note unjustly damaged her – say, she feels attacked in her self-worth as a teacher, disrespected as a woman, and lowered in status below her actual rank. Her anger also contains a judgment about the child: that a respect and decency is absence in the child which should be there, and that the child is somehow ‘rotten’ (i.e. responsible) – the anger contains a judgment that the child is a responsible moral agent. The anger also reveals that the way the class perceives her is very important to her as is her sense of status and self-worth. The expression of the anger (pleasurable) is a kind of payback that restores their sense of status and self by putting the child down to a level below them. Imagine the teachers (assuming no official consequences follow) have no second-thoughts about calling the child a ‘jerk.’

        Now I guess we would agree the anger was misplaced and the expression of the anger wrong. The child’s behavior may have been inappropriate. There are different appropriate ways to respond to and deal with it, but not that way. To respond and deal appropriately to the child’s behavior, however, required a person capable of not only understanding the behavior of the child with the intellect but also with the feelings – I am not even sure our habit of separating the two does justice to either, though of course there are situations in which heart and head can be at variance. But my point: the two characters I have sketched – and a multitude of others I could sketch – cannot see the child and cannot understand the significance of the note due to the way their emotional-intellectual life has been formed by a character that was damaged in important ways. This is not a matter of “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”; this is a case where the complex thought-feeling-action is out of tune with reality itself due to a kind of meaning-blindness. And the over-valuation of status and self-worth gave rise to and expressed the anger. Indeed, the personality disorder distorts the entire value structure.

       My point: the interconnected ways we think and feel contain judgments about the way the world is and what is important. These judgments cannot be lucid unless the ways we think and feel have been educated and formed in ways that allow us to be in tune with the world around us. When education fails – and it is rarely ever completely successful with anyone in any social form, but especially not in capitalism – emotion-thoughts and thought-emotions will never reach their objects, will always be reflections of damaged ego, like living in a room full of mirrors, a prison, a cave. Such a child-become-adult will have no experience of things outside this mirror room or cave. Thus the philosophy of 'nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so' itself has deep roots in the psychic reality of most of us, and this in turn has deep social causes. Admitting that one’s character is properly judged by realities (e.g. children) it doesn’t construct itself can be threatening – an odd root of the value of ‘autonomy.’

        Also odd: the person who is to some extent locked in their cave of mirrors is in a way pre-moral to the extent they are so locked in. Moral judgment proper can only properly be applied to those outside the cave because only they are capable of self-knowledge and thus responsibility – only in degrees, never absolutely.

The Master of Yourself - Tradition vs. Modern Autonomy 

   In the Purgatorio, the second cantica of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Virgil’s final words to Dante encapsulate a classical view of autonomy: “I crown and miter you over yourself.” With this declaration, Virgil marks the end of his mentorship and the beginning of Dante’s own self-rule. This moment captures the classical idea that true freedom comes from mastery — over oneself and one’s desires, and over the skills and virtues that lead to a good life. Autonomy, in this sense, is not simply the power to make choices but the capacity to govern oneself in accordance with reason and virtue.

   In the classical tradition, freedom is not defined by the absence of constraints or the rejection of external authority. Rather, it is the result of a disciplined process of training and education aimed at achieving excellence (or arete). This kind of freedom requires self-mastery, which is cultivated through the development of virtues — habits that align our desires with reason and guide our actions toward the good. Virgil’s pronouncement to Dante reflects this view: it is only after Dante has undergone the trials of Purgatory, confronting his disordered desires and learning to master them, that he is declared “master of himself.” Virgil’s mentorship is no longer needed because Dante has internalized the principles of virtuous living.

    This concept of autonomy contrasts with modern notions that emphasize self-determination or the power to create one’s own values. In the classical view, autonomy is not about creating a personal reality but about aligning oneself with an objective moral and rational order. The goal of education is not to encourage individuals to invent their own truths but to help them develop the skills and virtues necessary to discern the truth and act according to it. Whether in the arts, athletics, or politics, true freedom comes only after the mastery of the relevant discipline. A pianist who has achieved technical and interpretive excellence can play freely, with no need for external guidance. A basketball player who has mastered the fundamentals of the game moves freely on the court, making split-second decisions with skill and confidence. Similarly, a person who has mastered the virtues required for living in a political community can act freely, making choices that contribute to the common good rather than being driven by selfish impulses.

     Without this kind of mastery, freedom is not true autonomy but a form of license that can easily become destructive. A person who lacks self-control may believe they are free when they act on every impulse or desire, but this kind of freedom is illusory. It leads to chaos and disorder, both in the individual soul and in the community. Plato illustrates this idea in the Republic with the image of the ship of state: if the crew, lacking training and discipline, seizes control of the ship, they may think they are free, but they are, in fact, in great danger. True freedom belongs to the skilled navigator who has mastered the art of steering the ship according to the stars and the conditions of the sea.

      In Dante’s journey, Purgatory represents this process of training and self-discipline. Each terrace of Purgatory is dedicated to the correction of a specific vice, through practices that cultivate the opposite virtue. The souls in Purgatory are not free to indulge their desires; they willingly submit to discipline because they understand that true freedom lies on the other side of self-mastery. When Virgil finally releases Dante from his guidance, it is not because Dante is free from all constraints but because he has achieved the internal discipline needed to guide himself according to the principles of virtue.

      This view of autonomy emphasizes the role of education and mentorship. The goal of education, in this framework, is to lead the student toward mastery and excellence so that they no longer need external guidance. It is a process of forming the soul and the character, aligning desires and actions with reason. Autonomy, then, is not the rejection of mentorship or tradition but the fulfillment of it. The mentor’s role is to lead the student to the point where they can internalize the principles of the discipline and apply them independently.

     Virgil’s pronouncement to Dante captures a classical understanding of autonomy as the result of mastery. True freedom is achieved not by rejecting external authority or creating one’s own values but by developing the virtues that allow one to govern oneself by reason and the good. This view of autonomy conflicts with modern ideas of self-determination or self-invention. It suggests that without the discipline of mastery, freedom is not a positive good but a potential danger, leading to chaos rather than excellence. The autonomy of the self-mastered individual is the freedom to act well, to realize one’s potential in a way that contributes to the good of the self and the community.

. . .

The Modern Program - Three Examples

    In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the character of Satan embodies a form of autonomy that is both rebellious and self-defining. Autonomy (understood in a certain way) is the essence of the Satanic. In Book 1, Satan declares, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” For Milton, through Satan, autonomy is an assertion of the mind's power to create its own reality, independent of external conditions. Satan rejects God's authority, rejects reality as God (pure Being, Goodness, and Love) created it, choosing instead to govern his own inner world. Yet, this autonomy is ultimately self-defeating; Satan's independence is self-destructive because it is rooted in pride and defiance rather than true freedom. Evil is contradictory because it is (by definition in a Christian metaphysical reality anyway) contrary to reality; that is what makes evil evil; that is the evilness of evil.

     Sartre posits that in a godless universe (axiomatic for him) it must follow argues that “existence precedes essence.” Humans are free because they have no pre-determined nature – how could they if they had not been created according to an idea in the mind of a Creator? (The philosophical idea of human nature depends on God.)  This radical freedom, however, comes with the burden of choice. Sartre’s autonomy is about the lack of any fixed criteria guiding our actions because reality itself is meaning- and valueless. Individuals must choose without guidance from any inherent essence or real (and thus objectively binding) moral obligations. This leads to what Sartre calls “bad faith” when individuals attempt to escape the anxiety of freedom by pretending their choices are determined by external factors. Unlike Milton’s Satan, who consciously defies an external God, Sartre’s autonomous individual struggles with the internal absence of any guiding meaningful reality.

Rather than focusing on the individual’s inner world or existential freedom, Foucault looks at how power structures shape our sense of self. Autonomy is a product of power relations. He argues that our identities are formed through socially constructed areas languages (discourses), roles, and identities that we internalize. What seems like self-rule or autonomy is often the result of subtle forms of social control. In Discipline and Punish, he describes how institutions like prisons, schools, and hospitals create “docile bodies” that regulate themselves according to the norms imposed by society. Thus, autonomy for Foucault seems illusory; it is not a real, self-determined freedom but the internalization of external control. But while the self is shaped by power relations and social discourses, it is not entirely static or fixed. He believes that individuals can resist, reinterpret, and reshape the norms and practices imposed on them. Foucault’s later work explores the concept of "technologies of the self," where individuals can engage in self-formation and transformation. This involves a kind of critical autonomy — the ability to recognize and question the ways we have been shaped by power and to enact changes in our own lives. He acknowledges a limited, context-dependent freedom that emerges when we become aware of how power operates. Unlike Sartre’s idea of total, criterionless freedom, Foucault's reconstructed self is not free in an absolute sense but can exercise a form of agency within constraints, by redefining aspects of its own subjectivity in opposition to the prevailing social constructs by which it had previously defined itself – a girl can become a ‘non-binary,’ for example.

. . .

    Comparing these three views.... Milton’s Satan represents autonomy as a powerful, yet ultimately flawed, act of defiance. Sartre sees autonomy as the heavy burden of total freedom without any inherent guidelines. Foucault questions whether autonomy exists at all; it is a construct shaped by the systems of power that govern us. For Milton and Sartre, autonomy is an inner state or choice, even if it leads to inner conflict or existential angst. For Foucault, autonomy is a false idea, a mask for the deeper ways that society    shapes and limits the self.

    Despite their differences, all three reject the classical and medieval ideal that human beings should strive to conform their will and intellect to an objective reality, often conceived as a divine order or a fixed human nature that can be realized through virtue and self-mastery. Instead, they place emphasis on the self as the arbiter of meaning and reality, challenging the traditional view that freedom is the outcome of aligning oneself with a moral and rational order.

     In Paradise Lost, Satan’s declaration that “The mind is its own place” signifies a rejection of the idea that the mind should conform to God’s order or reality. Instead, Satan asserts a self-creating power, where autonomy is about refusing any external standard of goodness or truth. Satan’s autonomy does not seek the realization of a higher human nature or the cultivation of virtue; it is the assertion of independence from all external authority, even if that independence leads to self-contradiction and ruin. Thus, Satan embodies a refusal to strive for the classical ideal of freedom through self-mastery. Instead, he sees freedom as self-determination, even at the cost of defying objective reality.

    Sartre takes this idea further by denying any inherent human nature altogether. In his view, “existence precedes essence,” which means that humans are not born with a predefined purpose or nature that they must actualize. Instead, individuals are radically free to define their own essence through their choices. Sartre’s rejection of any essential human nature aligns with the rejection of education as a process of conforming to a rational or moral order. For Sartre, freedom is not about mastering oneself in accordance with virtue; it is about the radical responsibility to create one’s own values and identity without guidance from any objective standard. Education, in this framework, would not aim at shaping a virtuous character but at recognizing the individual’s freedom to choose their own path.

     Foucault’s critique of power relations also rejects the classical idea of aligning oneself with an objective truth or nature. For Foucault, the very concepts of “truth” and “human nature” are constructs shaped by historical power dynamics. He views education, traditionally understood as a way of cultivating rational and moral capacities, as a tool for producing compliant subjects who fit within established norms. In his later work on “technologies of the self,” Foucault does suggest that individuals can engage in practices of self-formation, but this is not a return to the classical idea of self-mastery. Instead, it is about resisting and redefining the norms imposed by society. Foucault’s self is not striving for virtue in the classical sense but is engaged in a project of ongoing self-invention and critique, often in opposition to any notion of an objective human nature.

     All three thinkers, then, share a vision of autonomy that contrasts sharply with the classical ideal of education as the cultivation of virtue and the alignment of the self with a rational order. In the classical and medieval tradition, freedom is the result of becoming master of oneself through the exercise of reason and the cultivation of virtues, thus aligning one’s desires and actions with an objective human nature and reality. Autonomy, in this view, is not self-creation but self-realization according to a given nature.

      Milton’s Satan, Sartre, and Foucault each reject this ideal. They do not see freedom as the outcome of conforming to reality but as self-assertion as the creator and judge of what is real and therefore good. For Milton’s Satan, this autonomy is an act of defiance against divine order; for Sartre, it is the existential project of creating meaning in an indifferent universe; and for Foucault, it is the critical task of deconstructing the norms and power relations that shape our sense of self. While their views differ in important ways, they share a rejection of the idea that education should lead us to conform our minds and wills to a pre-given reality. Instead, they place the individual in the position of self-legislator, responsible for constructing their own meaning and values. This is the very thing that condemns souls to the Inferno in Dante. Modernity is a transvaluation of values (“Umwertung der Werte” in Nietzsche’s memorable phrase) in which Satan’s philosophy replaces traditional Catholic teaching. It is the ideological expression of the revolutions in science, technology, and capitalism that took off in the 17th century. The end product was a regime featuring the fusion of these three into a single unholy trinity – SCIENCE-TECHNOLOGY-CAPITALISM – with ‘autonomy’ against the backdrop of a meaningless, valueless nature as the prime human value. In the end autonomy comes to mean to power of elites to form the masses according to its own images. (see C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man). The shift in the understanding of autonomy: from a classical view that sees freedom as the result of conforming to objective reality and actualizing potentials, to a modern view that treats freedom as the power to define one’s own reality, even against the structures of nature, tradition, or social norms.

. . .

  In a way Kant is the arch-Satanist i.e. the thinker whose "Copernican Revolution" legitimated this way of thinking: that reality is a construct of the mind, the mind not an imprint of reality. That reality is not intelligible. That the mind is cut off from reality as it is in itself and constructs its own world by projecting its fantasies, discourses, ideologies, world versions onto the indifferent background of the universe.

 Who is rational?

                                                           Geoffrey Warnock 1923-1995

 

     A passage from the analytic philosophy Geoffrey Warnock – which could have been from Bertrand Russell as well, sums up the most forceful argument against everything I believe:

 

To be clear-headed rather than confused; lucid rather than obscure; rational rather than otherwise; and to be neither more, nor less, sure of things than is justifiable by argument or evidence. That is worth trying for.

 

The being clear-headed rather than confused and lucid rather than obscure I affirm, unconditionally. Being ‘rational’ is fine, though depending on what you mean by that term I think it is over-rated. My focus here is on the last norm: being “neither more, nor less, sure of things than is justifiable by argument or evidence.” That is a definition of much of philosophy for a long time now. It implies the divorce between philosophy and theology. It implies the divorce between philosophy and literature (poetry, all art). It moves philosophy closer to math and science.

     If I believed only what is justifiable by argument or evidence, I must understand all these terms. I can affirm the value statement, but only if I can understand the terms in a way that makes most sense to me. I assume Warnock would not share my understanding. By ‘evidence’ he surely means ‘facts’ that all people, Christian, Muslim, or Jew; naturalist, Buddhist, or Hindu – anybody in their right mind – that all people must be able to affirm. That rules out the sources of most people’s core beliefs in trust, authority, personal experience, conceptual understandings, attitudes towards the world, loves, and so on. It’s like our beliefs are on trial; only “objective” evidence can be admitted in a court of Reason. I am not sure how ‘value’ fits in. Our ethical judgments rely on emotion-laden judgments – through our emotions we learn what is important, evil, or good. Perhaps if all agreed on values, no issue would arise. Presumably, if different value judgments were involved, we would be called on to support them with ‘facts.’ As for argument, would everyone have to agree the argument is sound for me to be justified in embracing the conclusion? When do we know the argument is sound: 1) then all the terms are clear and agreed on; 2) when the premises are factually or logically true; 3) when the conclusion follows logically. You can see that this model of reason fits in well with math, science, courts – and any practice that involves purely factual or mathematical reasoning. I assume that gardeners the world round, however different otherwise, are bound by the realities of soil and plant biology, whoever they are, whatever they believe. Disagreements about what tomatoes thrive where and under what conditions can be worked out independent of the gardener’s religion or worldview. This is admittedly a simple picture, but I assume well known to you.

     So what am I justified in believing, according to this model of reason? Certainly not in fairies, Santa Claus, angels, or God. No empirical evidence exists for any of them. Well, as I child I did see with my own eyes Santa’s bag and boots in the living room. Despite the eye witness testimony, my audience of rational people would doubt what I saw since they have decided in advance that Santa cannot exist. Why? As an invented figure, it would be absurd to look for empirical evidence. What I saw was obviously a hallucination. I agree. Some logical arguments seem to at least create doubt about the rationality of excluding the possibility that God exists. That seems a thin justification, since such ‘proofs’ have only seemed intelligible to those who already bring their faith to thinking about the proof. Of course, people don’t have faith in God because of a rational proof. People trust revelation, scripture, their experience of people who have lived authoritative lives. Their faith is supported by prayer and perhaps poetry or painting. Their faith conditions their attitude toward life – seeing the empirical world in light of a certain image like ‘Creation through love.’ The meaning and significance of their lives – their love of family, of the land they live on, etc.  – makes sense within the language (conceptualizations) and practices formed within this attitude. I could go on. The point: none of this justifies their beliefs within the demand to be no surer of things than the factual and logical evidence supports.

   What would be left of most people’s belief system? Not much. Hamlet exclaims to Horatio: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy!’ Wait, Warnock would say. Can you justify that? If we accept Warnock’s model or reason as the one neutral and best method to get to truth, we will find that we are not justified in believing there are more things – though for all we know, there just might be! We would be justified in believing only that there are exactly those things that we do know through our science and logical philosophy – or perhaps even fewer things, since many experiences may be reduced to more simple ones. Warnock and philosophers like him would have no problem with this. Indeed, they would say: this is what is rational to believe. Anything more than what is known in our science and analytical philosophy, well, it’s like believing in fairies. The method determines in advance what it is rational to believe. If we define ‘marriage’ as a union between man and woman, then in advance a lesbian marriage is not really a ‘marriage.’ I think: we must let reality itself test our method, test the concepts of ‘reason’ that informs our method.

    I love my children. If my love is not purely sentimental, if my love is fitting to the thing (or person) loved, then my children are inherently loveable. It would be irrational to love something – love including at bottom the judgment ‘wonderful that they exist! – that had no value whatsoever. If the universe is an indifferent mix of matter and force without meaning or purpose – a view of the universe that seems compatible with what science reveals it to be – then all love is sentimental: a subjective projection of goodness onto a blank (valueless) screen. What objective evidence do I have that they are intrinsically loveable? None. Just the common experience of mankind. But, of course, common experience like personal experiences could be wrong! Just because most of us experience our children in such a way is not proof that such an experience is rational! Show me some evidence that your children are loveable. Show me some evidence that Bach’s music is wonderful. Show me some evidence that the waterfall is sublime. Show me some evidence that I should affirm life and the world rather than wish it undone.

    Either most of what makes life meaningful is unjustified or the criteria of justification make no sense. I am not sure you can resolve this definitively – certainly not by presupposing the very picture of reason that I believe to be the problem. The picture of reason is too narrow. Theoretical folk rip out a form of reasoning from areas of life in which it works fine, and make it absolute, hold it up as it were to all of life from the outside as definitive and beyond challenge. Why? Why do people usually try to make a conception immune from the test of experience? Why make the concept of ‘marriage’ necessarily a union between man and woman only? To protect a belief system to which one is committed. The making absolute of the simple picture of reason sketched by Warnock promotes the Enlightenment / naturalist rejection of myth and religion. It makes the Enlightenment safe.

    It is the common experience of humanity – admittedly, not perfectly stable – to which models of reason must be referred, and not the other way around. Of course, the loss of this common sense – reaching down very deep, even to the conceptions of babies – that make ‘theoretical’ impositions attractive. This and the fear of opening up to a reality that transcends our ability to conceptualize it in any logically definitive way.

Guilt and Remorse

 

     What I mainly don’t like about the widespread attempt to replace the serious exercise of religion with some vague ‘spirituality’ aimed at ‘peace and harmony’ is that it (narcissistically?) seems an attempt to ban conceptual space for guilt, remorse, sin – in a world that is full of it. It’s all around me in the very cultural air I breathe: that guilt, the painful, remorseful recognition that one has done someone wrong and that one has in a sense ceased to be the person one was and has now become something different, a wrong-doer of whatever kind (e.g. a betrayer) – that guilt implies a distortion at best, a kind of narcissism or masochism at worst. This drives me crazy as the opposite: the hyper-guilt some think I should feel because I am a ‘white’ man (I am not really ‘white’). Obviously, as with all responses of the heart, when guilt is filtered through the experience of a narcissistic or a masochistic psyche, the guilt will not reach its object. If I betrayed a friend or a spouse in some serious way, and my exclusive focus was on ME, my suffering, my ‘guilt’, that would imply that the person I betrayed hardly enters into the ‘guilt’, is not real in a way. But that is not guilt; that is the corruption of guilt. Sentimental guilt idealizes the person and the wrong in order to perversely elevate the self to a ‘tragic’ dimension – a shallow, self-gratifying or self-consoling response all the way down. But why should anyone believe that captures the essence of guilt? That guilt can only be experienced in this way? That this description fits all possible experiences of guilt, from Rodion Raskolnikov to Judas (Matthew 27) to the expression of remorse by a man about to be executed for murder - ‘I love ya’ll, ya’ll take care. I am so sorry.’ (William Kitchens, executed 9 May 2000) . . . . I could go on and on. Of course, even a man about to be executed may be sentimental, narcissistic, or masochistic, but must he necessarily be?

      Or this: the pain of guilt (remorse) is focused on the past deed; it does no positive good to the victim. It is a kind of self-punishing anger that will not make the deed undone and will only get in the way of positive contributions to healing one could make. The best philosophical attack on guilt and remorse comes from Nussbaum: the focus is on the future, making things right to the extent possible. Obviously, a remorse that did not make future relationship central would be corrupt, but then that relationship is what it is because of the past wrong. But whether an emotional response to a wrong done ‘does any good or not’ in some practical way is the only criterion for her. “If one retains the correct focus on the other, one may feel guilt and have a wish for one’s own suffering, but one will quickly realize the futility of that project and move toward the Transition [i.e. doing what can be done positively to help deal with the harm].” Anger at the self contributes nothing positive; thus we should leave it behind.  Again, I agree that the willingness to engage with the person one has wrong and do what one can is a necessary part of a lucid remorse – but not sufficient.

      Remorse is just the attunement of the self to the reality that has been brought about by the wrong; it is a form of understanding, an often pained, bewildered realization of the true meaning of what one has done (Gaita). ‘Oh my God, what I have done!’ Only through pain does the full significance get translated into one’s spiritual life: one feels (empathetically) the pain of the person wronged, a pain that the wrong-doer cannot be indifferent to since he caused it. Sharing the pain is a kind of solidarity, a refusal to distance one’s inner life from it – and this is part of any positive contribution to overcoming it. And anyone who understood the full meaning of what it is to betray another person – and the pain of the victim allows this full-understanding – would feel pain when forced to confront the fact: ‘I am now a betrayer; I betrayed my friend.’ This is on a different plane that any consequences or implications of the act, however important they are. Nussbaum represents the entire culture by denying the reality of this other plane.

      A man (‘Silvio’) a while back kidnapped to children 4 and 6 years old; he sexually assaulted and killed them. I have no idea whether the man is capable of lucid remorse. Of course, we can imagine with Nussbaum the man wallowing in narcissistic self-pity and self-abasement. But imagine for the sake of argument he was able to clearly understand what he did; that he could feel the whole terror of the children he sexually assaulted and murdered; that he could feel the full pain of grief of their friends, teachers, and families; that he understood that there is no bringing them back or undoing what he did – now whether it would ‘do any good’ at all, the idea that he could just ‘put it behind it’ and try to be reasonably happy and ‘decent’ for the rest of his life: something is missing from that picture of things: the meaning of the wrong done and the lives of the victims.

      Betrayals of wives, husbands, and friends do not reach that horrible depth, but there is still something wrong with the idea that the betrayer damages the life of one whose life was deeply intertwined with his and who trusted much of her life to him, and then that betrayer rides off into the sunset and lives happily ever after. Nussbaum is right: the victim’s wish for payback, however understandable, is self-destructive. And of course, the self-anger and self-loathing of the betrayer can also be out of tune with the meaning of the situation, and for this reason hinder one from doing what the situation calls for. Healing to the extent possible is the goal. But to judge guilt and remorse solely on the basis of pragmatic considerations of what needs to be done – as though the fact that ‘I betrayed her’ (and not someone else) and ‘I am a betrayer’ were incidental –  is like judging animals with categories appropriate to plant life. And there are asymmetries between the first and third person here: I agree with Gandalf: do not be too hasty to deal out condemnation to others. I have betrayed; I have been betrayed. As the victim, I do not desire But, say I betray a loving wife, and my response is ‘Oh well, I’m human after all, and I have a right to be happy! I’ll be a friend to her in the future, and is good.’ Nay. Such a response is a willful failure to understand, and a shallow rationalization; just as much a corruption as the narcissistic guilt trip.

       The guilt should probably not define us in this case (as opposed to the murderer of children), but it is part of who we are; it situates us relative to the person we wronged and as the person we have thus become. This culture, or one dominant strand in it, says ‘my personal happiness is the highest good; the only limit to this is the respect for other’s pursuit of personal happiness; and if I damage someone else’s pursuit of happiness, then I must also see that damage solely in terms of our mutual pursuit of happiness.’ Through this lens some things can be recognized about guilt and remorse, but not what goes deep in them. ‘Happiness’ and ‘flourishing’ (to take Martha Nussbaum’s preferred term) are not moral concepts. 

 The Last Circle of Hell

                                                        Dante

                                                 If you imagine

                                                 others are there,

                                                you are there yourself. 

                                                                     -Wendell Berry

       

   I know a woman, very well in fact, who was as a young teen the victim (‘willing’ in an attenuated sense) of a sexual predator. The man was a teacher in a Catholic Gymnasium (German academically elevated high school to prepare students for university) who came to a city in the former German Democratic Republic from the West German state Bavaria to teach, returning to his wife and children on the weekend. This man came into a situation of great dislocation and disorientation in the new federal states. He projected a very likeable and caring image, and was correspondingly popular, acquiring great authority as a representative of the new system. Many of his students were from families falling apart during this time. The woman I know was first deprived of a father when he broke his marriage and family to be with another woman; his ex-wife complicated matters by doing everything she could to cut him off from his daughter. Compounding this (and part of it) was the tragedy of having lost a three year old daughter to disease. The mother then married a man who beat her – a terrible place for the girl to be in. Add to that the fact that the mother worked for a theater, and thus was often gone in the evening, that alcohol abuse was part of that world.

        This is just a brief sketch to indicate the woman had less than an ideal situation to grow up in, and indeed suffered lifelong damage (who would not have). How he made his move on this girl, 14 at the time, I cannot recall, but managed to create an emotional and sexual dependence that lasted about three years, and in a way still continues in different ways as the woman cannot really confront what happened in its ugly truth as it would expose her to the full extent of her exploitation and defilement. The man projected a lying image, and used his power over an extremely vulnerable adolescent to sexually violate her when as a teacher and indeed a public “Christian” it was his sacred obligation to do good to her who was in his care. There is something sickening in this sustained evil. That she fights with personality disorders to this day, that her life has not exactly gone smoothly, and that she has hurt people along the way is no surprise. The man returned to Bavaria, became principal of an all-girls school, and lived happily ever after – or that is the problem.  The man was never caught, and in all probability refined his technique and continued to exploit vulnerable adolescents as long as he was able, though even if he has been a model teacher, husband, and father after this would not undo the evil he did and the evil man he thereby became.

     Now imagine how a parent (or anyone who loved the woman) would respond on learning what happened. This following reaction would be at least understandable to all of us: outrage that the man did that and got away with it; a strong desire to see him suffer for his crimes; anger and a wish for payback; a desire to take him out of circulation to protect other vulnerable girls. It is almost unbearable the thought that this monster did what he did and gets away with it. And to his wife, daughter, colleagues, perhaps also to the pupils he is responsible for he is this lying image of a caring, Christian, charismatic teacher, a force for good in the world. Thus the familiar theme: the evil living happily ever after, if they can get away with it. The ‘If the Nazis had won the war, future generations would have a very different understanding of World War II’ theme.

      In this connection, I recall Socrates’ conversation with Polus in Plato’s Gorgias. Polus, a student of the reputable Sophist and teacher of rhetoric, Gorgias, is incredulous that Socrates believes that precisely the evil-doer is most miserable and pitiable who does not get punished and indeed in his or her own mind sees themselves as ‘happy’ precisely because they got what they wanted by placing themselves beyond good and evil. Polus cites as his example a Macedonian tyrant, Archelaus, who is in the (for Polus) enviable position of having absolute power to fulfill his desires without fear of punishment or opposition. He came to that power by betrayal and murder, and maintains it with fear and violence. Polus more or less assumes that if any of us were free of the fear of punishment, then ‘moral’ restraints would lose their force (be revealed as mere social constructs to protect us from the ill-will of others, perhaps ingrained as taboos) and our true ‘nature’ would be revealed – an infantile self that lusts for precisely the license to fulfill every desire and wish, sexual and otherwise (a very Freudian picture). He asserts everyone secretly admires men like Archelaus whether or not they are too ashamed to admit it in public or even acknowledge it to themselves. Thus he can only understand Socrates’ view that evil-doers are the most miserable and pitiable people of all, even more so when they appear to others to be wonderful human beings and do not get punished.

     Why does Socrates think this? Because such people are in truth base and wretched, however they appear to others or to themselves. It is a contradiction to be base, wicked, and truly happy. This is obviously a different conception of ‘happiness’ than Polus’ understanding of it as the power to get all you want according to your ‘nature.’ He finds it absurd that anyone could think Archelaus would be happy suffering the punishment for his crimes rather than having all his wishes fulfilled and being admired by the masses; indeed, for Polus it would be extremely terrible for him to be punished, since the penalty would be death. The idea of being better off with pain and death being inflicted on him in punishment than being admired and free to pursue his every whim makes no sense to him precisely because he can only see morality as a pragmatic restraint on human nature, which is revealed in all its truth precisely when someone has absolute power. Remorse, then, or bad conscience could only be understood by Polus as regret at getting caught or limited in one’s ‘pursuit of happiness.’ He prides himself on having the courage to openly acknowledge this, which he thinks everyone believes in their hearts – basically agreeing with Voldemort from the Harry Potter stories that ‘there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.’ He assumes that suffering pain is bad, and experiencing pleasure is good; the evil-doer who can fulfill his desires with impunity experiences pleasure; the victim suffers pain and damage – therefore, the evil-doer is in a more enviable position than the victim. If the evil-doer must be punished (meaning suffer pain), then to that extent he is not ‘happy’ or enviable – and more or less enviable than the victim depending on who suffers the most pain.

     Now think back to the woman who was sexually victimized by the predatory teacher who ought to have cared for her and helped her to the extent to was able, and think back to the understandable response that most of us would have: we want him to suffer more than she did; that would define ‘justice’ for us, and ‘punishment.’ Given that her life probably can never be whole again, one might wish for drastic punishments – burning the son-of-a-bitch at the stake, for example. That may appeal to one’s righteous anger. What Plato’s Socrates in a sense discovers in the Gorgias is a whole other dimension than pain and pleasure, and the weighing and balancing of each. The grounds for pitying the wretchedness of the evil-doer is not the pain he suffers (or should suffer): “to do evil is worse than to suffer it through an excess of evil (Gorgias, 475c).” The distinctive evil of what the predatory teacher did to his victim cannot be understood in categories of pain, pleasure, reward, retribution – or any social category. The teacher has become evil, has revealed himself to be evil, the kind of man who would abuse a sacred trust and exploit a most vulnerable adolescent girl to live out some perverse sexual fantasy. This is so whether or not anyone knows it, including himself (people are experts at self-deception) – and not just according to some social norm in place to make social life possible or some taboo from deep in our prehistory.

     And for Socrates there is only one help – just punishment, which includes recognizing the truth of the monster he has become: I say ‘monster’ because such a man has in a way separated himself from humanity, has shown that he is willing to prey on humanity to fulfill some perverted infantile desires. Or as another great teacher said: the truth will set you free. Of course, it is a terribly painful truth; but not all pain is evil. The pain of pulling a tooth is necessary to relieve an underlying, permanent source of suffering –though that metaphor doesn’t quite capture what I am after here. As Socrates puts it: only justice will remove the evil from the man’s soul. And by implication: the worst thing that could happen to him would be not removing the evil, which would then completely take him over and cut him off from any source of good, of salvation. I could try to describe with other words what this evil involves – perverting his true nature by destroying his capacity truly to love, to be just, and so on. It could be described in different ways, but no explanation does any more than say with different words (more abstract, i.e. farther away from the evil done) what we mean when we say the man has become evil. If he ever really came to understand what he did and what he had become he would suffer remorse and seek penance: ‘Oh my God, what have I done!’

       Now the understandable reaction to the teacher – anger, the wish for payback, he should suffer! – also reveals itself to be on the same plane as the evil doer himself. The horror and fear that he ‘lives happily ever after’ and escapes punishment turns out to make sense only if one assumes that the good is the happy and the happy is the pleasure of fulfilled desires (uninformed by any higher standard) and evil is unhappiness and unhappiness is pain. The outrageous injustice is the belief that the evil-doer made himself happy at the cost of making another, one we love, unhappy. Thus we want to balance the scales in her favor. The problem for ‘us’ is that we in effect become complicit in the same evil attitude. By judging things according to this scale, we give it legitimacy, and somehow mask the distinctiveness of the evil involved. The evil-doer who gets paid back, with interest, might rightly think our vindictiveness expresses the resentment of the weak; or a secret wish to do what he dared; or that the desire for revenge shows that deep in our hearts we do not believe in the reality of good and evil, but only pleasures and pains. In a way, it is a nihilistic response. Wendell Berry wrote a little poem on Dante’s Inferno: “If you imagine/ others are there,/ you are there yourself.”

       Something else altogether is going on. The distinctive terribleness of what it means for that predatory man to do that to that vulnerable girl is not reducible to or explainable solely by the pain or corrupt pleasure involved – if that were the case, then it would be no different from, say, him accidentally doing something that damaged her (e.g. through his inattention during an excursion she was badly injured and disabled for life). That a person would suffer over that is also intelligible, but it is a very different kind of thing than evil done to the vulnerable girl by that teacher. In addition to the damage, or rather part of the emotional damage is that he did evil to her: he abused his position of trust and authority and exploited her vulnerability to slake a base lust, and thereby transformed himself into a wicked, base human being. That his wife at home, his daughter, the pupils at that school still all believe he is the most wonderful man in the world just deepened the shamefulness and wickedness of what he did and who he has become. Even if nobody knows it, he at some level knows it. Can he ever really go back to the person he was before the crime? He can rationalize, he can concoct an ideology like Voldemort’s, he can construct some kind of sentimental love story, it was meant to be, or society’s prejudices as made us into star-crossed lovers, or our souls were joined in another life – whatever it takes to hide.  Perhaps he can even train himself to believe whatever lie he tells himself and in a corrupt sense ‘live happily ever after.’

    I think Plato and Jesus would both think: that would be the worst possible thing that could happen to any human being; a human being thus reaches the bottom of wretchedness; he is defined by the crime;  he has truly lost his soul; the voice of God in him has been silenced forever; he is cut off from reality, unhinged from what supports us – that, and not some form of pain inflicted by someone else on him, be it through God or man,  is the last circle of Hell. It is life situations like this that give force to Plato’s insight (and presumably Socrates’) that evil essentially involves ignorance – a willful ignorance, a not wanting or caring about truth.

        The lesson is not: ok, now my thirst for ‘justice’ or revenge is satisfied; he is in the last circle of Hell; I am comforted. This is the lesson I want to learn from Plato’s Socrates and Jesus: Hell is not vicarious revenge –when it becomes that, then it is the person who however subconsciously enjoys the idea of the criminal being in Hell that, as Berry grasped, is already there themselves. ‘I wish he would burn in Hell’ – then evil has drug another person down with the first. Pity is the right response – Aquinas and Dante were wrong: the response of love for the damned is pity, though an unsentimental pity that does not mask the reality of the evil-doer beyond redemption. Or perhaps no one is absolutely beyond redemption? We must indeed hope Hell is in the end empty (I certainly do for very personal reasons!). For the evil-doer, coming out of the closet is the only chance.            

 Childhood and Adulthood

 Paul James is moving closer and closer to the cliff, from which we must all either jump or fall, away from childhood, falling all through our teenage years, and hopefully landing on new ground, on an honorable adulthood. I’m having to deal with it. We once read Jostein Gaardner’s Through a Glass, Darkly. The angel Ariel tells Cecilia that Adam and Eve were children. What good is a garden with no children to run and play in it. Adults exist for the sake of children – of making more children to experience the beauty and wonder of creation. Most adults lose that capacity, and so become uninteresting. Children are close to angels, who are also innocent (unless fallen, I guess) and thus capable of joy and wonder. I also listened again to Neil Young’s song “Sugar Mountain”: 

Oh to live on Sugar Mountain

With the barkers and the colored balloons

You can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain

Though you're thinking that you're leaving there too soon

You're leaving there too soon

 

Wordsworth’s Ode has long held nearly scriptural status for me: 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

       The earth, and every common sight,

                          To me did seem

                      Apparelled in celestial light,

            The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

                      Turn wheresoe'er I may,

                          By night or day.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

                            ...

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,                    

 Hath had elsewhere its setting,                        

 And cometh from afar:

 Not in entire forgetfulness,                      

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away

And fade into the light of common day.

     

      All this speaks directly to my heart, and I feel it all points to an important life-truth. I honestly believe that if the child dies, the soul dies, or at least becomes seriously ill. Growing up can’t be bad, but I can say this only if the child-like capacity of joy and wonder, and that special longing for “I know not what” somehow survives puberty and adulthood. I see it as almost Satanic, my society’s will to cut the teen off from their childhood – through the cult of “cool” (defined as anti-child), its raw sexual music, its cynical films targeted at teen audiences, etc. The whole of what Christopher Lasch called “the culture of narcissism” is premised on what Neil Postman called “the death of childhood.” Such societal dysfunction makes me feel just like Neil Young or the angel Ariel – leaving childhood is leaving paradise; is entering a fallen, sinful world. I also know it can be like that; that if Satan exists, that precisely would be what he would wish for human life.    

    But this is too bleak for me to live with without qualification. In its pure form, it does the dirt on life. The inner circles of the growing tree may be the most pure, the cleanest, the strongest. But the outer rings may also draw goodness from the soil of the earth (Creation). Every stage of life can be good – adding onto, not substituted for, childhood. C. S. Lewis is my teacher here, and he gets the thought just right when he is talking about his taste in literature: 

I never met The Wind in the Willows or the Bastable books till I was in my late twenties, and I do not think I have enjoyed them any the less on that account. I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz. . . . Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things?

 

As so often, I read Lewis and see a truth that seems so obvious, and yet somehow it had always just eluded me. The child in us must live. But every other stage of life, connected to and nourished by the previous stages, are also part of the Creation, and thus “good, very good.” I will end with a song that understands this, The Circle, by Joni Mitchell. 

                       So the years spin by and now the boy is 20

                       Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true

                       There'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty

                       Before the last revolving year is through

                       And the seasons, they go round and round

                       And the painted ponies go up and down

                       We're captive on the carousel of time

                       We can't return, we can only look

                       Behind, from where we came

                       And go round and round and round, in the circle game.

We can't stay children forever, especially children that never learned to educate and control their desires. But if the child in us dies as we age, something of our soul also dies.