This just poured out of me the other day after reading "Fifth Walk" from Rousseau's The Reveries of a Solitary Walker for my Humanities class, which I absolutely love. Comments appreciated...please forgive my lack of knowledge of Heschel...
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote about emotion over reason – or so says my Humanities teacher. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel also wrote about the power of emotion. They confront the same issue, perhaps, but in a slightly different context: Rousseau writes about happiness in “Fifth Walk” while Heschel writes about our search for and connection with God (and vice versa!). Heschel speaks of moments of radical amazement and how they reveal the presence of God to us. Rousseau speaks of moments of “happiness”, of “sweetest enjoyment”, “most intense pleasures”, “delirium” and “passion”. He has his own idea of radical amazement, moments “captivating my senses and chasing all other disturbance from my soul” that “often surprise…without…having noticed it.” What we see is more important than “internal movements”; we give ourselves up to wonder and living in the moment. (I understand that as part of Heschelian radical amazement as well.) Thinking is not as important as is being or existing. That is pleasurable in itself. Yet these moments are “scattered points along the path of life…too rare and too rapid to constitute a state of being.” Did Heschel intend these moments to “constitute a state of being”? Not having read Heschel yet, I cannot be sure. Yet I don’t believe he intended so. I believe he intended us to look at the world with special spectacles that help us to perceive God in the world, or at least to be open to those moments of radical amazement.
Rousseau excites me, yet brings me down. He confronts the entire idea of happiness: “And how can we call happiness a fleeting state which leaves our heart still worried and empty, which makes us long for something beforehand or desire something else afterward?” That doesn’t make much sense at all – score one for Monsieur Rousseau! He continues to talk about an existential being and happiness, about a soul content with living in the present, wholly confronting its existence, not caring about the worries brought on by the past or the future. Our pleasures come and go, and our happy feelings that result come and go. We can seldom taste true happiness with our passions; true happiness lasts. But we can be truly happy; we can find that “state of being” - the state of existing - if we enjoy “Nothing external to ourselves, nothing if not ourselves and our own existence.” This state makes us “sufficient unto ourselves, like God.”
Rousseau attributes this state mainly to the “unfortunate person who has been cut off”, as he willingly was, which may enable one to be favorable to this mindset and let one’s heart be at peace. He admits that this is more easily and “pleasurably” done on a solitary island. And when one is solitary, “Only enough ideas are needed to remember our own self while forgetting all our troubles.” Our brain’s wheels start to turn when we are alone and only have ourselves to confront, but “One rests less, it is true, but also more pleasurably, when light and sweet ideas only skim the surface of the soul, so to speak, without disturbing its depths.” What did he mean by “one rests less”? From what I understand, Rousseau says that it isn’t necessary to concern ourselves with greater issues, the issues that we might debate with others simply because we shouldn’t disturb the depths of the soul. So we should dumb ourselves down and ignore the most disturbing yet crucial questions just because they are disturbing? (And what exactly does disturbing the depths of the soul entail?) That’s not a confrontation of existence. Rousseau admits that “Everything is in continual flux on earth” because turmoil bothers him. He doesn’t want to have a happy moment and face the not-so-happy aftermath. But that is life, whether we like it or not. Singular, rare moments can be good, if Heschel has anything to say about it. Rousseau seemingly does not want to confront existence.
One of the most interesting statements in this entire work is “As long as this state lasts, we are sufficient unto ourselves, like God.” The philosophes of the Enlightenment believed in Deism, in that Great Watchmaker who fashions the watch, then winds it up, puts it down, walks away forever and lets the watch run itself and manage on its own. But the God that I believe in worries about God’s creation on Earth. God could not possibly let only “light and sweet ideas…skim the surface of the soul…without disturbing its depths.” Our aggadah, writings and liturgy speak of a God that hears our cries, if not always heeding them. God cannot only remember God’s own self - after all, God created a people that wrote an allegory that spoke of its relationship to God as an intimate love story - and God cannot forget God’s troubles; God is constantly frustrated with God’s failures. Heschel taught his students that God fails in Genesis multiple times. Adam and Eve? Failure. Cain and Abel? Failure. The generation of the Flood? Failure. Yet God says over and over, “Hit me again.”[i]
Both God and humans have the ability to be “sufficient unto ourselves”. God chose not to be. We can choose an existential happiness. A soul that confronts its existence is happy. But what does that mean? I think that when we confront our existence, it is almost inevitable that we concern ourselves with the world we live in. We may have to confront our past. Then, we have to ask the question, “What does this mean for me today, right now, right here?” This could lead into a discussion of the future, but that doesn’t seem as pertinent for an existentialist. The existentialist asks about today, about this moment. This is why we can ask ourselves about these special moments of “sweetest enjoyment.” Sure, they come and go, but we need to be able to take them for what they are worth and get use out of them. Unhappiness is natural. Not using our moments of radical amazement or passion is a mistake. If we can get out of the mundane or the depressing for just one moment, perhaps that can be enough. The happiness that we get out of those moments gives us the strength to keep going, to confront our existence every day, to look at our lives closely.
How do I know this? We all know this. We just have to recognize those special moments for what they are in order to realize this fact.
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[i] Gillman, Rabbi Neil. "Doing Jewish Theology Today: God, Torah and Israel in Modern Judaism." Lecture, The Henry N. Rapaport Memorial Lecture, The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York, January 26, 2010.
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The trouble with comparing Rousseau to Heschel is that for Rousseau, people less society are essentially animals, of necessity without Divine revelation, driven by the desires of the moment. This fundamentally contradicts Heschel, whose entire theology is founded upon the reality of Divine revelation. It is also very far from the Jewish conception of the human being, as steward of the earth. We as Jews are not supposed to act on our every whim, but rather have a system of commandments which serve as a "finger pointing at the moon," so to speak: they permit us to become aware of the ever-present Divine Presence.
ReplyDeleteThe desires of which Rousseau speaks are not inherently bad, since without them, we would be stuck in whatever our circumstances might be at present. No progress could ever come about. It also doesn't seem to be so much that man should not ask such existential questions, but rather that man cannot, either because man is an animal acting on fleeting passions, or because man's true self is covered by the facade of civilization.
I also would question your claim that "a soul that confronts its existence is happy." Are you saying that happiness is the ultimate end towards which one strives? A soul that confronts its existence may become whole by recognizing its simultaneous infinitude and incompleteness, but I would not say that it is happy. This could also be because the God of which I speak is not the same as the God that "chose not to be [self-sufficient]."
I appreciate your conclusion! However, I would even take it a step further. What comes to my mind derivative of your reference of the mundane is that there is no such thing. What is mundane? I would agree with the nineteenth-century zaddikim, that there is an essence of God to be found everywhere. Everything is a means to God, providing that we orient ourselves accordingly. The true test is to find that point of divinity. One can live one's life in a state of radical amazement. There are exalted moments, I agree, where this truth becomes evident. The true test, though, is to live a fully integrated life that recognizes the presence of God at all times.
Thank you for the philosophical update. I happen to not be well-versed in it yet. You raise some very important points which I appreciate.
ReplyDeletePerhaps "happy" was not the right word, though Rousseau's "Fifth Walk" is indeed about happiness. Wholeness is a better adjective to use. I find that my soul is happy when it confronts its existence; maybe that's because I love the empowerment of being a religious existentialist or because I love a great intellectual exercise. How one might see this may indeed depend on one's view of God - please elaborate on yours if you care to do so.
Nice point about the "mundane" and finding God in our lives. In my eyes, I'm still at the point where there seem to be those two sides of my life, sacred and mundane. I'm still on the journey to "recognize the presence of God at all times" and in all things...
Do you know French? I'd be curious to know what adjective Rousseau is using in the original French.
ReplyDeleteMy main issue with the use of the word "happy" is one you raise yourself: emotions fluctuate. Thus, engaging in the same action does not result in the same feeling state, as each time we engage in a given activity, it is different simply by virtue of being new.
In terms of your last point, perhaps it's easier not to view such a realization as the endpoint of a journey. The ability to recognize the pervasiveness of the Divine comes and goes, but one can garner strength by remembering this truth. In those moments that you term radical amazement, or that certain schools of Buddhism, notably Zen and Mahayana, term as suchness or thusness, when the filter of thoughts is seen as simply a filter and the mind directly meets the moment in all its beauty and vibrancy, God's eternal and infinite presence becomes palpable. It's learning through experience that there is a much deeper reality than appears on the surface, but one can only access it (in my opinion) by fully engaging, with all of the senses, with body, heart, mind, and soul, in the full experience of the present. It would be interesting to discuss...!
I found the text. He uses "heureux" for happy, "plaisir" for pleasure, and "agréablement" for pleasurably. This may be a good time to mention that I won the French Award.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to quote him here in both languages:
"Mais s'il est un état où l'âme trouve une assiette assez solide pour s'y reposer
tout entière et rassembler là tout son être, sans avoir besoin de rappeler le passé ni d'enjamber sur l'avenir ; où le temps ne soit rien pour elle, où le présent dure toujours sans néanmoins marquer sa durée et sans aucune trace de succession, sans aucun autre sentiment de privation ni de jouissance, de plaisir ni de peine, de désir ni de crainte que celui seul de notre existence, et que ce sentiment seul puisse la remplir tout entière ; tant que cet état dure celui qui s'y trouve peut s'appeler heureux, non d'un bonheur imparfait, pauvre et relatif tel que celui qu'on trouve dans les plaisirs de la vie, mais d'un bonheur suffisant, parfait et plein, qui ne laisse dans l'âme aucun vide qu'elle sente le besoin de remplir."
"But if there is a state in which the soul finds a solid enough base to rest itself on entirely and to gather its whole being into, without needing to recall the past or encroach upon the future; in which time is nothing for it; in which the present lasts forever without, however, making its duration noticed and without any trace of time's passage; without any other sentiment of deprivation or of enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear, except that alone of our existence, and having this sentiment alone fill it completely; as long as this state lasts, he who finds himself in it can call himself happy, not with an imperfect, poor, and relative happiness such as one finds in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, perfect, and full happiness which leaves in the soul no emptiness it might feel a need to fill."
That is the feeling that I think we can have when a soul contemplates its existence. Or so I think. I wonder if your argument can apply to Rousseau - hey dude, you said that everything is in continual flux yourself! I think you have an excellent point.
Another excellent point. We shall indeed discuss further.