Detachment and compassion

What does it mean to live a good life? The question has run through philosophy since at least the ancient Greeks. The 1960s was a period of foment for the question, as the hippie movement saw a burst of energy around the idea of redefining human fulfillment, with such fuel as the sudden abundance of LSD, anti-war and other resistance movements hacking away at the established order, the rise of self-sufficient communes and movable music festivals, etc. One feature of the movement was the infusion of ideas from Eastern religions and philosophies, led in part by figures like Baba Ram Dass and Alan Watts.

There are lots of ways to look at how that infusion from the East affected Western ideas, at least in the counterculture, of what it means to live a good life, but for today’s bold lecture, I want to look at two elements that seem to generate some tension between them: detachment and compassion. From Ram Dass to Watts to the proliferation of New Age books, there’s a lot of talk about how our attachment to the material world keeps us bogged down in the ego, impedes spiritual growth and happiness. If your happiness depends on material possessions or pleasures, you’ll never be content. There is always the next possession or pleasure to be pursued. For spiritual growth and deeper happiness, you need to detach from the world of the ego’s dependencies.

But what about compassion? Per the Dalai Lama: “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion; if you want to be happy, practice compassion.” Compassion is a big deal in living the good life, as it should be (sorry, Ayn Rand). But isn’t compassion a form of emotional investment? Isn’t it attachment? If you get better and better at detachment, wouldn’t that make you less and less capable of compassion?

Paradoxically, the opposite is true. The philosophers in question speak not only of compassion but of unconditional compassion. Applied to the political dissent of those countercultural hippies, Ram Dass says, ““You can only protest effectively when you love the person whose ideas you are protesting against as much as you love yourself.”

There is nothing wrong with emotional investment in a loved one. But compassion channeled in that way is of a local form. It is a form of attachment. And attachment always includes an element of self-interest. You have an “interest” in the well-being of that person. Nothing wrong with that, but such an emotional investment is local, is conditional. Wherever you have an “interest,” your judgment or your feeling is not universal, is not unconditional.

Since I am now in full-on lecture mode, let’s go all-out pedantic and bring in Kant, imho the most important philosopher since Plato. Kant goes on at length about how for a judgment to be universally valid, it must be “disinterested.” Applied to beauty, “a judgment about beauty in which the least interest mingles, is very partial and not a pure judgment” (Critique of Judgment, 1790). This makes sense to us when talking about beauty or art. Someone with a material interest in an art work is likely to have their judgment swayed somewhat by that interest. Someone with absolutely no material interest in the art work is likelier to form a judgment that is more pure, untainted. In Kant’s terms, because this viewer is “disinterested” (not in the sense of apathetic but in the sense that they have no vested interest one way or the other), their judgment is likelier to be universally valid.

Back to our terms about compassion, let’s swap out “disinterested” for “detached.” A “detached” viewer of the art work is likelier to see its beauty from a purer, less tainted (more universal) point of view than a viewer who has some attachment or interest in that particular work of art.

When we shift from beauty to compassion, the application of these terms is less intuitive but the truth still holds. Where compassion is linked to our “attachment” to or “interest” in the beloved person, it is limited by the condition of that interest. This is not to say that it is bad or selfish, just that it is conditional. Only with detachment can we transcend the conditions of this or that personal connection and manifest an unconditional compassion.

Perhaps is it for a reason such as this that Plato put romantic/sexual love below what we call “platonic” love in that ladder of love he builds in The Symposium. It’s worth noting that Plato doesn’t denigrate romantic/sexual love as if were somehow sinful – no, we can leave that for the Christians who would come thereafter – nothing wrong with sexual love in Plato, it is simply a more limited, less fulfilling form of love than “platonic” love. In Plato’s terms, that highest form was the love of philosophy, but for us, today, in the context of this post, we might just call it “transcendental” – a form of love or compassion that transcends the interest, the ego, the attachments incumbent upon surface lives in the everyday material world.

Me, I’m not so sure. I can see how my own discourse has unknotted the paradox of how detachment is a prerequisite for unconditional compassion. But this dyad – with conditional love (say, romantic/sexual love) on one side and unconditional love/compassion (detachment-based) on the other – does the dualism really hold? I’ll make a final reference to D. H. Lawrence to deconstruct my own argument. In Lawrence, that romantic/sexual love is itself transcendental – it brings us beyond ourselves into some eternal connection to the cosmos. In a kind of paradox very different from the one with which I started this essay, sensuality IS transcendence for Lawrence; sensuality is the pathway to the cosmic, the eternal, the infinite, the transcendental. Get rid of all that abstractness, all that intellectuality, and tune in – sensually.

So, if I were invested in what we normally call “spirituality,” I could unravel the paradox of how detachment is the precondition for unconditional compassion/love, with a little thought and a little help from Plato, Kant, and ideas from Eastern religions/philosophy. But then, if I were a romantic at heart, I could sidle up to D. H. Lawrence and say that what we normally call “spirituality” is just the dry, abstract crust of the truth, that we need to rediscover the flesh and blood, the sensual as the transcendental element. Or finally, to keep the name-dropping going ad nauseum, if I were a Hegelian, maybe, just maybe, I could see these two contrary positions as thesis and antithesis and push the dialectic toward some new synthesis. But the new synthesis would just be the thesis of the next cycle, and my neighbor just invited me over for a handmade Negroni, so I think I’d better end here.

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A brief history of space

If Stephen Hawking could write A Brief History of Time, I can surely write a brief history of space. Indeed, I’ll one-up Hawking and make my monograph actually, and not just putatively, brief.

At first glance in our little history of space, we can follow a trajectory from Democritus and Plato’s view of space as a container, to a view of space as a relation between things rather than a container (Leibniz), and finally to a view of space as a purely subjective construct – a way of organizing the world rather than a thing in the world (Kant – and I’ll welcome comments from expert readers like the ever-helpful STEVE MORRIS on the extent to which this continues into Einstein and modern physics).

Democritus and Plato both saw space as a receptacle but in quite different ways. Democritus (5^th century BC) famously said, “Nothing exists except atoms and empty space.” This sense of space as a universal void is perhaps still the most common sense of the term. In Timaeus, Plato specifically calls space “a receptacle,” but he seems to mean it in a more local sense, as that which houses a series of shapes. In a weird way, space is matter to Plato, per his example of gold. You see now a pyramid of gold, then a cube of gold, then a sphere of gold. The gold is the receptacle space inhabited by the succession of different shapes. Idiosyncratic maybe, but more of that later.

As we move toward what I perhaps simplistically call the Leibniz position, space is not a receptacle at all – not the local matter that houses shapes nor the void. It is rather a relation between things, and it has no existence other than as a relation between things. Then onto Kant, and space as purely a subjective way of organizing the world. It seems at this point that we’ve come a long way from Plato, but the canny Greek has a way of coming back (nb. Alfred North Whitehead’s comment that all of Western philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Plato”).

I’ll step back to Plato by way of a convenient half-way point – Boethius (late 5^th/early 6^th century, on the cusp between classical and post-classical culture, roughly 1000 years after Plato and 1500 before us). To quote my fine former post on Boethius, who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while in prison pondering his forthcoming execution, “The relationship between the ever-changing course of Fate and the stable simplicity of Providence is like that between reasoning and understanding … or between the moving circle and the still point in the middle.”

That image of the circle, of seeing reality from two points of view – the still point in the middle and the moving point along the perimeter – can be applied to both time and space. Here, it more directly applies to time. From the point of view of eternity (the still point in the middle), all things are simultaneous. From the temporal point of view (moving along the perimeter), we see reality in its aspect of “always becoming,” as philosophers have called it.

To extrapolate, from the eternal point of view, time does not exist; similarly, from the infinite point of view, space does not exist. Rather, space only exists where that dynamical relation between things exists – distance and extension only make sense within the scope of finite reality.

So is Boethius the great Hegelian synthesizer who can push the dialectic between Plato and Kant forward (thesis – antithesis – synthesis)? Or is the double vision of Boethius merely an indicator of his historical moment, one foot dancing with the wine-bibbing Greek and the other tiptoeing toward the finicky Prussian? Is he just a midway point toward our more accurate modern view?

No, the midpoint reading won’t do. On some level, Plato anticipated the whole circus. Or, to further twist the metaphor, we have circled back to Plato. In the Timaeus, Plato, like Boethius, has a double view, though it plays out a little differently. In Plato, there are two primary levels of reality (which can be further subdivided, as in the myth of the cave): “that which always is and has no becoming” and “that which is always becoming and never is.” The realm of eternal, unchanging ideals (being) is the subject of rational knowledge, whereas the visible world of the senses (reality in its aspect of “always becoming”) is the subject of empirical knowledge. Plato notably privileges the rational side, but he at least here grants the empirical its purview. And this turns out to be crucial to our present argument.

If we focus the history of ideas on the world of becoming – the physical world, we might call it – we can, to recap, follow a movement from space as a container to space as a relation between things  and finally to Kant’s purely subjective construct.

But if we look at the other realm in Plato, the realm of being, the intellectual realm of the unchanging ideals, rather than the realm of becoming, we see that he had already recognized space as an imaginary construct.

He quite explicitly says that the concept of “space” does not apply in the intellectual realm, but is only needed to accommodate the dynamics in the realm of becoming.

Indeed, some time after introducing those two realms (the realm of being and the realm of becoming), he refers back to the two natures corresponding to the two realms: “one … was a pattern intelligible and always the same; and the second was only the imitation of the pattern, generated and visible.” Then he adds: “Now a third must be revealed … the receptacle, and in a manner the nurse, of all generation,” insofar it enables all the processes of generation or becoming to happen.

The “receptacle,” whether you call it space or matter, is only introduced as a way of explaining processes in the realm of becoming.  But the realm of becoming for Plato is the realm of more-or-less degraded knock-offs from the realm of being. When reality is seen in it most true and stable aspect, the ontologically prior realm of being, space (or matter) does not exist.

Now, one could argue that the spaceless, timeless, immaterial zone of true reality (prior to all the knock-offs in the realm of becoming) in Plato is not truly subjective as in Kant, that Plato imagines this reality as objective reality. To which I say, maybe. I’m not sure how truly significant that distinction is. I don’t think Plato would call it objective in the modern sense of objective (which implies physical, spatial reality). All Plato postulates is that the spaceless, timeless realm of pure being, pure forms, is the true base of reality. That he treats it as an intellectual realm as opposed to the sensible is clear – so does that imply that it IS subjective, as in Kant? I’m not sure but, back to Alfred North Whitehead: we are quibbling about footnotes here. Face it, everyone (especially angst-ridden academics seeking tenure) wants to find the next ground-breaking idea, but it’s still hard to beat the old Greeks. See my other fine post on Aristotle, Wittgenstein, and Identity Politics if you don’t believe me.

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ISIS/Suspension of Ethics

The recent beheadings and crucifixions in Syria and Iraq in the name of religion is atrocious in its own right, but raises a larger philosophical comparison between secular ethics and religion-based ethics, to the advantage of the secular. Of course, most religious people are horrified by ISIS’s actions and consider them to have no basis in religion whatsoever. I will grant the justice of that position, but it leaves open the question of whether a religion-based ethics is more risky in principle than a secular ethics.

To judge the risk requires pinpointing the essential difference between a religion-based and a secular ethics. The Christian theologian and proto-existentialist, Kierkegaard, is most helpful here. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard sees ethics as fundamentally a secular issue, a derivative of universal rational principles. Religious persons can follow those principles but that is not essentially a function of their religious nature. It simply means that they are following a set of rational principles in addition to being a religious person. The key difference is centered on Kierkegaard’s pointed question: “Can there be a teleological suspension of the ethical?” I.e., can the inscrutable commandments of God overrule “normal” ethical principles?

The paradigmatic case for Kierkegaard is when God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. “The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac.” So Abraham is forced to choose between the universal principles of ethics (against murdering your son) or accepting the “teleological suspension of ethics,” in which he suspends the rules of ethics to satisfy a higher end.

This to me is the fundamental difference between a secular ethics and an ethics based on religion (at least on the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Religion allows for the possibility that we might suspend normal ethics in light of a higher commandment from an inscrutable God. Otherwise, it is no different from a secular ethics based on rational principles alone (holding God himself subordinate to the laws of ethics).

Although the acts of ISIS are condemned by people of all faiths, the dangers of a “teleological suspension of ethics” can be generalized to some extent, as a risk inherent in religion-based models. In pre-modern Europe, under the hegemonic rule of the Church, we saw the widespread development of those implements that today fill the torture museums of Europe, implements ingeniously designed to create more and more exquisite pain for the ill-fated heretic.  Then we had the brutality of the Spanish Inquisition, brazenly carried on in the name of Church and the states under its authority.

With the 18th century Enlightenment, that largely changed. From the explicitly anti-Church philosophes to Kant, the hegemonic control of the Church gave way to a more humanist ethics grounded in rational principles. The ethics of Western culture today is primarily secular, a product of the Enlightenment. And although far from perfect, it has shaken off the worst abuses of the pre-Enlightenment theocratic ethic. At least now, one cannot break out the torture devices and flaunt them publicly as a general strategy of subjection. At least now, one cannot publicly suspend the normal rules of ethics because an inscrutable God has commanded it.

Now back to Kierkegaard, and to Abraham and Isaac. Although Kierkegaard is a Christian and I am unambiguous in my preference for a secular ethics, Kierkegaard may agree with me up to a point. He himself is almost Kantian in his emphasis that ethics is based on rational principles (unrelated to faith) and is therefore universal. The “ethical” and the “religious” are simply incommensurate categories for Kierkegaard. The ethical has to do with social relations and universal principles. The religious concerns only the individual in relation to the absolute. For Kierkegaard, the “religious moment” occurs when an individual, perhaps like Abraham, lives out his or her life among others, bound by the universal principles of ethics, and then one day something ruptures the plane of that living, and the individual’s identity shoots out in a perpendicular line to the absolute. His relation to the absolute (religious) and his relation to others (ethical) “cannot be mediated,” says Kierkegaard, in a jibe at Hegel and his understudies. Abraham cannot be justified on the ethical plane. He is up against an either/or crisis of the sort that most interested Kierkegaard. There is no gray area. Either you do something completely unethical in honor of God, or you reject God.

Kierkegaard may also agree with me that any social order would do best with a secular ethics based on rational principles. He certainly had no patience for state religion, and often disparaged the Christian state of Denmark and “Christendom” in general for their deployments of Christianity into the political or social arena. But he leaves room for Abraham, the “knight of faith” – not as a model of good citizenship or social order, but as a model of the individual wrenched away from his social identity by a connection to the absolute.

I finally disagree with Kierkegaard and reject the “teleological suspension of ethics” in all of its forms; however, I find Kierkegaard well worth reading and I myself have only scratched the surface of his thought. Moreover, no sound reading of Kierkegaard can ever use the “teleological suspension of ethics” to justify the behavior of ISIS or the Spanish Inquisition. In Kierkegaard, that suspension can never be applied as a public practice, but can only occur as a relation between the individual and the absolute. The problem is that so many groups at so many times and places have used a variant of the idea (God’s commandment allows me to overrule ethics) to vicious ends. In the case of the Middle East, this is further complicated by a historical trajectory quite different from Europe. Whereas the Enlightenment – the rise of secular ethics and secular democracies – in Europe can be seen as a liberation from the hegemonic oppression of the Church, in the Middle East of the past half-century, religion (in the form of a resurgent Islam) is often seen as the liberating force that can throw off the shackles of oppressive Western democracies. This inversion of the role of religion is historically explicable, but the ethical dangers are apparent when we see how easily ethical norms can be discarded when religious zeal is in full cry. Better to have a secular ethics based on rational principles. If you want to layer a religious faith on top of that ethics, fine, but don’t start believing that your faith trumps ethics or you become a danger to yourself and others.