Negative Pleasures

Negative pleasures seem to be the pleasures of old age, but then I think back...and then I’m not so sure. Anyway, what am I talking about? I’m talking about the absence of stress. But absence of stress is equivalent to an absence of stimulus. And if one is quite readily stimulated, the absence of stimulus is in itself a pleasure.

Reading Berdyaev’s The Beginning and End again after a long stretch of years, I find him speaking of the passionate life. He doesn’t mean the life of the flesh, but nevertheless he is much taken with “passion” and with “dynamism.” At one point he is exploring the German mystic Boehme’s writings about the Ungrund. That is a kind of Nothingness out of which God creates. Berdyaev is also influenced by Hegel—not enough to agree with Hegel that God is evolving in history, but the dynamic view in Hegel appeals to him.

Now reading quotes from Boehme in that book (not included in the compilation that I own, perhaps because of their seemingly heterodox flavor) it occurred to me that Boehme’s inward experiences are ultimately the same as other “unitive” experiences of great mystics. In these there is some kind of experience of the rootings of the self but projected onto God (in my view). The mystics experience energy and take it to be God. But it might very well be the life-force that they feel. Boehme looked deeper than most and hence experienced Nothingness and, arising out of it, a powerful desire. But that may be the experience of an origination, not an experience of God or of God feeling desires; or it may be an apperception of his own fallen state—and the desire to escape it.

The object of that desire I see as something Berdyaev may have viewed as a passive sort of state. I call it sovereignty—the state in which I am above passion taken positively (a drive) or negatively (a suffering).

If stimulus is associated with life in the physical realm then its absence enables us to experience what lies above that realm. That absence frees the attention. Something of value may “flow down” from above; and if we perceive it, we will cultivate the “negative pleasure” in order to enable ourselves to capture it.

An observation that seems to come to all explorers of the Borderzone is that feelings common in bodily life have a two-tiered character. There is pleasure and then there’s joy, for instance. There is eros and then caritas. There is grasp and there is understanding. There is stimulus and there is intuition. The second in these pairings is always more subtle. Berdyaev’s book, referred to above, is filled with such distinctions, although not presented systematically. There is being and non-being in his own philosophy, for instance, and it is non-being which gets the favorable nod. The state of “being” is the fallen state. Words, words, words. Why not just say “the spiritual.” That nothingness, that negativity, is actually a much higher and very real value. And the negative pleasures are higher values that become accessible when a kind of equilibrium between the lower and higher is achieved—the state of “sovereignty.”

There would seems to be a big difference between this dimension and the one where we are going—but yet it will be a familiar sort of place. Things here will correspond to things there—but what a difference. We can experience that difference by contemplating the difference between stimuli and intuitions. Here everything is mixed up and it is tough to sort things out.

Wearing a Dunce Cap

I have been wandering of late in the company of a distinct minority within the Age of Christendom. By and large it is the company I’ve kept throughout my life even if, quite often, sometimes for years on end, I’ve been socializing with the same minorities in other cultures—Persian (Mazdaism), Arab (Sufism), but also touching the Chinese (in Taoism). This walk, of late, began with Duns Scotus whom I met, in my childhood, by way of the dunce cap and, growing up, I never questioned the prevalent but mildly expressed view among my teachers in Catholic schools from lowest to highest that Scotus was a rather dim light, if not a small shadow-thrower, in the vast brilliance of St. Thomas Aquinas. Dunce cap? Worn by those who do not get it. You can make one out of some sheets of newspaper, making them into a cone. For the origin of that shape I show a fifteenth century painting of Scotus (who himself lived mostly in the blessed thirteenth century, 1266-1308); the Flemish painter was Justus van Gent (link).

Scotus belongs to the Platonic line traceable backwards by way of St. Augustine (354-430). Augustine himself was part of this minority, close to Manichaeism in youth, a gnostic view which itself has links back to Mazdaism. He lived in a time when the New Dark Age of the Roman Realm was up and running in a serious way. The Visigoths sacked Rome when he was 56 in 410 AD. Therefore his view was darker and more pessimistic than that of Aquinas (1225-1274) who lived as the light of the Renaissance began to signal its own coming with a faint rosy color beneath the horizon. And Aquinas’ great influence was Aristotle who lived just as the Old Modernism, Hellenism, was about to be launched by his pupil, Alexander the Great.  

Let me capture these distinctions in cartoon-like fashion, as it were. Plato stood in relation to Aristotle as Scotus stood to Aquinas. In Plato we see the mature philosophy of a passing religious age, in Aristotle the foreshadowing of a modern time. The same may be said of Scotus and Aquinas, with the small but not very important difference that Aquinas was 41 years older than Scotus whereas Plato was 43 years older than Aristotle. In inwardly-directed religious ages, awareness of the fallen nature of humanity is to the fore. In outwardly-directed secular ages, self-assertion rises. The feeling tone derives from the focus of attention.

So I was reading Berdyaev. He proclaims himself a Platonist, Christian existentialist, and he viewed Duns Scotus as the greatest of the Scholastics. It was the kind of statement that caught my eye, surprised me. I underlined it heavily, adding exclamation marks in the margin—the last time I had read the Russian sage some decades ago with great approval.

So here we have a minority strain of pessimism and a majority dominance of optimism—both within an almost invisibly small cluster of communities that even think about permanent transcendence. I’m still of the pessimistic camp but getting there, in age, I mean. And the odd thing is that, well past the three-score-and-ten, I am feeling optimistic now. If one goes deep enough in any direction with a kind of junk-yard-dog persistence, amazingly the light begins to dawn. I wonder. Does the light eventually dim for the really persistent optimists? If so, my intuition guided me correctly in my gloomy youth.

On Being and Meaning

The aim of philosophical knowledge certainly does not consist in the knowledge of being, in a reflection of reality in the mind of the person who knows. Its aim is the knowledge of truth, the discovery of meaning, its purpose is to give an intelligible sense to reality. Philosophical knowledge, therefore, is not passive reflection, it is an active break-through, it is victory in the conflict with the meaninglessness of world reality. What I want to know is not reality but the truth about it, and I can recognize this truth only because there is in me myself, in the knowing subject, a source of truth, and union with truth is a possibility. The fact that there is in front of me a writing-table and I am writing with a pen on paper is not truth. It is something received by the senses and a statement of fact. The problem of truth is already posed in my writing. There is no truth of any sort of object; truth is only in the subject.

  [Nicolai Berdyaev, The Beginning & The End, Harper Torchbook, 1957, p. 42]

Berdyaev (1874-1948) was a Russian philosopher usually grouped with Christian existentialists. I got to know him in the 1950s. He is also sometimes called the philosopher of creativeness. In the following sixty some odd years, I’ve never had occasion to question his intuition. All harmony. He has this to say on the next page:

Truth is a creative act of spirit in which meaning is brought to birth. Truth stands higher than the reality which exercises compulsion upon us, higher than the “real” world. But still higher than truth is God, or to put it more truly—God is Truth.

Going with the Flow

The Russian philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) pictured time as a horizontal flow—and eternity abruptly intersecting it from above like the strike of a lightning bolt. I think I read that in The Beginning and the End. I’ve always appreciated near-poetic imagery in place of abstract expressions. Here Berdyaev captures the almost ungraspable dimensional differences between this world and another by using a vivid image. Not surprisingly, Berdyaev was also a philosopher of creativity. We can better picture it, but there is also a way to experience that difference in our ordinary here and now.

The Naqshbandi order of the Sufis has long taught eleven rules or practices intended to advance human development. Of these the ninth is called “Temporal Pause” or “Pause of Time.” In more abbreviated form it is known as “Stop.”  What the practice intends is that, for a moment, long or short, we remove ourselves from that much-lauded activity, going with the flow. That last phrase is used to describe pleasurable spontaneous activity, but in truth we’re always going with the flow. We’re creatures of habits and impulses, impulses arising from associations and habits guiding their satisfaction. Examining a whole day will reveal just how automatic all of our actions have been, no matter how complex and “intellectual” they might have been in content. Even when we are engaged in quite purposive activities, the purposes themselves are part of our habituation. We might look long and hard before we encounter a “temporal pause,” and if we meet it at all, it will itself have been caused by some (usually negative) news. The “pause in time,” however, to be effective, must be deliberate. Another aspect of it is that it should, for all intents and purposes, be unwelcome to our personality, our habit self, what the Sufis call the Commanding Self. It is nothing other than our programming. It might have elements within it introduced by actual deliberate effort long ago, but these have been, as it were, automated.

We shouldn’t want to do it—but we do it anyway. When I’m engaged in something (e.g., writing this) and the telephone rings—that irritates me; I feel an inner violence I have to bring under control; that too, of course, becomes habitual, sublimated into a sigh. It is an unwanted Stop. But when I get up from the keyboard to take a sheet of paper at my desk and settle to half-an-hour’s diary writing, my personality is still resistant—but not quite in the same way. After all, it is the boss who wants to do this boring thing. Other forms of the temporal pause are prayer, meditation, going on walks (especially when these are of some duration and it’s hot or cold), other forms of strenuous exercise, and, for some people, sitting down and reading a book.

That pause in time, when the necessary conditions are present, thus when I’d rather be doing something else, when my motive is precisely to interrupt the flow, then it yields unusual results. Can such things become habitual? Not if I don’t really want to do them. The paradox is that the pause only works when it is resistance to the flow. The results show that.

Stopping time—and this sort of action is actually stopping time—because what we call time is the flow—suddenly changes our usual perspective. In a while the body begins to reflect this new state. It calms down. Anxieties recede. Important things become less so. The boredom we anticipated dissipates. We’re still in time, but no longer of it. The exercise, in various forms, does something for me, always positive. Whereas three or four days spent in the flow exclusively produces quite different atmospherics; therefore I know that it is time to Stop. We don’t have the eyes to let us see what actually happens when we remove ourselves from time into eternity. But there is a feeling there. Years ago, trying to find a word for it, I began to call it sovereignty. All genuinely deliberate thought and action arises from this central something. The flow temps us incessantly, but we shy from making use of a great gift that is entirely within our grasp.