More Old Flannel . . .

Earlier in these mailings, I mentioned the story of cattle in the Himalayas who follow travelers in order to lick their sweat, there being an apparent dearth of salt in the region. Now one must surmise that the cattle do not realize that they are suffering from a deficiency, nor what it actually is that they are deficient in. It is the smell or whatever of salt that compels them to automatic action to compensate for their unconscious lack.

Likewise one might imagine a similar situation in relation to religion or philosophy or love. In the film Godfather I, Al Pacino is smitten at first sight—‘hit by the thunderbolt’—by the appearance of the girl, Apollonia. In some sense, she either triggers or fulfils something in himself that he was not even aware of.

I am suspicious of pure reason—of reason unseasoned by emotional insight. Starting off from first premises (which in any event can never be proven to be true) and working purely through logic can lead one to some strange places. But then I don’t believe there is such a thing as a pure process of reason—dig deep enough and you will always find an emotional component involved.

Thomas Aquinas’s five cosmological proofs of God have, for example, always left me cold. They have been incapable of proving anything to me—which may be more a reflection on me than on them. Yet at the same time one has to realize that Aquinas did not formulate them in order to convince himself of the existence of God. He already believed in God, setting out on the process.

Nor am I denying reason a role in the pursuit of truth. Reason is as essential to the outcome as emotion. Emotion (and I am not at all sure where is the dividing line between emotion and spirit) on its own, unballasted by reason, is just as capable of leading one astray as is untrammeled logic.

Indeed, it may be possible to arrive at truth by the purely intellectual path. The thing is, I don’t know. I can’t know. All I can know is that it is a way that doesn’t work for me. The ultimate egoism is to take oneself as representative man (or representative woman) and think that because one thinks or feels in this particular way, so then must the rest of the world. At best we can only know ourselves—and even that is a somewhat dubious proposition. And arguably there are perhaps as many potential paths to God or Truth or whatever as there are people in the world.

Imagine a man who knows in theory what shoes are, but has never owned a pair or seen a pair (we will allow that he takes a size eleven, although he would have no idea what this means). Put him into a shoe shop and watch him randomly try on and discard the various samples. Suddenly he finds and tries on a pair of size nines, then a pair of size tens, and thinks to himself: ‘Now I’m getting somewhere!’

This analogy might best explain my attitude to Simone Weil. Her writings make me feel that I am getting somewhere, without ever providing quite the exact fit. There is much that I am uncertain about in Weil—not least the question (academic, given that she died in 1943) of how her characterization of necessity would have stood up under evidence of the murder of the Jews in Europe during the war. But the fact is, nonetheless, that she touches some internal receptor in me in a way that, say, Aquinas could not.

To date we have looked at different suggested possibilities for approaching the idea (or the reality) of Truth. One is mainly intellectual, via the use of reason. Another is, if you like, akin to Pacino’s ‘thunderbolt’, a sudden and transformative experience, best seen perhaps in terms of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. A third way, as with me and Weil, is individual susceptibility to the infectious influence of another’s insights. Then there is a fourth way—perhaps the most interesting of all.

A footprint in the snow (philosophical quibbling aside) is proof of the existence of the foot that made it. It is a ‘negative’ proof of the foot—proof of its existence despite its absence. We all of us [there I go making representative claims again]—or at least most of us, I think, have something akin to the footprint in our deepest selves, an absence that cannot be assuaged by pleasure or material goods or fame or fellowship, no matter how frantically we might try to fill it. It is, I would suggest, the negative imprint of whatever it is we lack—the equivalent in each of us of his or her own individual Turin Shroud.

The shape of that absence—in the form of our own inextinguishable dissatisfactions and emptinesses—is the mould in which we can blindly trace the lineaments of whatever it is that might satisfy it. But it is beyond our power to force the issue. According to Weil, for example, all one can do is basic housekeeping, sweeping the spot and keeping it clean of all distractions and encumbrances—and then wait.

I write all this as an outsider, an observer. Not necessarily as a player.