Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Remembering Jonathan Lear

A vision of the future must never be only about the future. Otherwise we will commit the terrible mistake known as futurism, which is nothing more than an attempt to make a virtue out of velocity.

Whether in the form of impatience or dread, the future can deplete the life out of the present, and no less ravenously than the present can deplete the life out of the past.

It makes no sense to believe in a mode of time. To believe in the future is to believe in a cipher, or to perpetuate the illusion that the future will be one thing, this and not that, when in truth it will be everything, as all life is everything. And to believe in the past is also to believe in everything, because everything may be found in the past. The past does not all go together and neither will the future. (This is abundantly demonstrated by the historical origins of every innovation, by every “unprecedented” breakthrough. Chemists may look with contempt upon alchemists, but the science of chemistry was born in the superstition of alchemy, and for a while they coexisted in an incongruous explosion of the desire to know.) Until we make decisions about what we wish to retain and to cultivate from the past, until we make selections from among the survivals, until we impose some italics on the welter, the past is only a pile of events — an annals and not a history. It is only rich clay. But on what grounds can we make such selections? Only on ahistorical grounds, I would say; on philosophical grounds. And what certifies these philosophical grounds as criteria for our commitments is not that we find them in the past. The fact that certain values once existed and once animated a society does not establish their legitimacy. Their pastness teaches nothing about their correctness. Evil communities also had elders. Venerability verifies nothing, though their possible irrelevance to truth is no excuse for the wanton destruction of inherited beliefs. And contemporaneity, too, verifies nothing.

Conservatism — remember conservatism?— is no less selective about the past than progressivism, and no less committed to the future. The distinction between conservatism and progressivism lies in the philosophical criteria for choices among the many legacies. 

We have no right to erase something old merely because it displeases us; the erasure of disagreeable survivals of the past — statues, etc. — will establish not justice, but only a chimera of innocence. The grand telos of all the history that came before us was not to affirm us. We are the past’s stewards, not its tyrants; its stewards and its interpreters. There is no point in fighting its facticity, its finality.  And what we gain from our stewardship of the remains of evil is knowledge, which is one of the conditions of responsibly established belief.

Iconoclasm has a sterling reputation for its independence of mind, but it is also a variety of vandalism. Where were the independent of mind in the iconoclastic mobs? Consider, for example, the paintings of the sixteenth-century iconoclastic riots in the Low Countries, particularly in Antwerp. They give the lie to the categorical loftiness of iconoclasm. They depict only power and hatred.

Spit, abhor, but don’t demolish. 

A mile away, as I write this, the East Wing of the White House is being transformed into a heap of dust. Not a catastrophe by any means, and nothing like the rubble that one encounters in other locations in this roughed-up world. At least the local debris is not the work of war. But this demolition is certainly a perfect emblem of the Trump regime’s flippancy toward the past. Historical figures should be less casual about history, which normally should serve as a quarry for the inhibitions that are among their qualifications for office. An inhibition is often the expression of an appropriate reverence. An uninhibited man is an ahistorical man. There is something essentially disrespectful, essentially callous, about a rampaging backhoe, as there is about a rampaging president. 

Our power over the past is so immense that often we prefer not to know that the responsibility for what endures is ours. Secular and religious doctrines of inevitability relieve us of the anxiety of stewardship, not least by providing us with alibis for obsolescence, as if certain things are simply doomed to disappear, destined by time or by science or by providence. But nothing is obsolete until we agree that it is obsolete. We make it so.  We let it go.

The inheritance of the past and the reception of the past are two discrete moments. The former is passive, but the latter is, or must be, active. Without active reception, tradition expires. Culture advances when we revolt against the heir’s passivity, when we refuse to certify raw contingencies and we rise above our apathy about the flow of things. Allowing valuable pieces of the past to slip through your fingers is worse than melodramatically discarding them.  

Natural oblivion, the passing of memory with the passing of the years, is a permanent feature of human experience, and it may also be a blessing by leaving room for those who come after us, who would otherwise face an extremely discouraging sense of their own redundancy,  the asphyxiating feeling that there is nothing left for them to say or to do. Yet there is also unnatural oblivion, which is what we wreak upon the past with our laziness and our indifference. Unnatural oblivion can also be the consequence of persecution and oppression. We not only neglect and forget our own patrimonies, other people sometimes attempt to erase them, to coerce oblivion, so that the development of certain cultures, particularly the cultures of oppressed peoples, must proceed not least by means of salvage. And we sometimes attempt to coerce oblivion on others. 

Finding a responsible position among the generations is a matter of calibrating the feeling that we are not worthy of what we have been bequeathed with the feeling that what we have been bequeathed is not worthy of us. 

Futurism is a fantasy of a new beginning, a new birth — but really there is only a single beginning and only a single birth. We can travel far from our origins, but we cannot abolish them. Yehuda Amichai wrote: “I search for new beginnings / and find only changes.” 

It makes no sense to be born again. A transformation owes its resonance, its softly tragic consciousness of an earlier privation, to the lingering awareness of what preceded it. Otherwise a second birth is just an escape hatch, a “do-over” (what children want when they are too young to grasp the constraints of meaningful activity and seek to be held unaccountable for a mistake or a failure and want it not to “count”), like a third birth and a fourth birth. Moral and spiritual progress can be measured only against a continuous substrate.

Marx’s famous pronouncement that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” was a little cheap — another outlandish bid for newness. All the dead generations will never be overthrown, nor should they be. A war on origins is a waste of spirit, and misuses the energies that are required for constructing our own place in the epic chain, for creating the material with which to stimulate our descendants in their own nightmares of being trapped by the past, that is, by us.

What we call the past is only the remainder of the past. However overwhelming the past may feel, the truth is that we inherit only relics. By the time the past reaches us, oblivion has already done its work; so much has been forgotten or destroyed. “The past” is what’s left. 

There are always grounds, big ones and small ones, for the complaint about entrapment in the past. Until theories of necessity are cobbled together, the circumstances into which we have been tossed will seem capricious. Most people live their lives conquered by accident. The absence of restlessness, which can be mistaken for wisdom, can also denote a premature surrender to the given. But what home ever sufficed for a living soul? Restlessness is the attribute of a significant existence, or more accurately, of an existence laudably anxious about significance.  

My tradition teaches me that inherited customs are sacred, but all the customs that I inherited were invented. (They are sacred but they are not divine.) The problem with our derivativeness and our belatedness is not that we were robbed of the opportunity for self-creation, which is the adolescent Nietzschean-Rortyan objection. The problem is that we may not know what to do with what came before us, how to interpret it and to adapt it, how to hear it and how to see it. 

And what about the dead hand of the present that weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living? In the alienation sweepstakes, the past is a piker.

One of the sins of the traditionalists is to regard restlessness as a sin.

Whoever wishes to be born again really wishes to be blameless. And blamelessness is not in our cards.

Ex nihilo: that train left the station on the day you were born. “Self-fashioning” as it is propounded by the professors — who have the sabbaticals required for it — is a haughty doctrine; Emersonian arrogance without Emersonian humility. Who really wants to come from nowhere? And who is so vain to believe that he can suffice with his own resources for his identity and his improvement? A wish for a different beginning may be an expression of early pain — a wish, say, for different parents; a common wish, I suppose, since human beings are more biologically equipped to have children than they are psychologically equipped to raise them. But a wish for no parents? Self-fashioning is self-orphaning, and with the passage of one’s years it becomes more and more clear that orphanhood is overrated as an experience of emancipation. Nor is racination the threat that certain freethinkers have said it is, in the way that language is not such a threat. Obstacles can sometimes be overcome. Our specificity certainly condemns us to limits, but it is not obvious that we can flourish without limits. Whether or not we stand on the shoulders of giants, we stand on shoulders. 

In a tiny, low-ceilinged, plainly tiled room in a modest house in an obscure town in the countryside Spinoza conjured the entirety of the cosmos. On my first visit to Rijnsburg the disparity between the scale of his setting and the scale of his thinking made me spin. Limited or not?

Nothing is true because it is old, and much that is old is false. The history of science, for instance, is a history of mistakes, which is why contemporary scientists need not consult their ancient and medieval precursors. Old physics does not belong in the science of physics but in the history of physics. That is not so with old philosophy. We still study Aristotle, because the obscurity in which many questions of human meaning are shrouded, and the slim likelihood of arriving at perfect certainty about them, transforms ancient opinions about them into contemporary opinions. When we reject an Aristotelian theory of justice or truth, it is not in the way that we reject the Ptolemaic cosmos or the theory of phlogiston. Rational argument is transhistorical, which in our historicist culture, drunk as it is on developmental analysis, is an exhilerating respite.

The prestige of antiquity, of what came long ago, can be easily exaggerated, and culminate in a thoughtless piety — a counter-futurism, which longs for a cessation of movement, for stasis. For this reason, the querelle des anciens et des modernes of the seventeenth century seems beside the point. In its time, the exaltations of newness, the inebriating phenomenon called modernity, were becoming undeniable, provoking a panic about the tenacity of the past. The panic, and therefore quarrel, was unavoidable — but we have the privilege of considering it more calmly, because modernity, too, is now a piece of our past. Those modernes are our anciens! Time makes all precedence ironic. In that grand early modern disputation, both parties were right and both parties were wrong. 

There is a similar tension in the Talmudic tradition. One Talmudic opinion declares that certified instruction, or binding independent rulings, the ancient authority known as hora’ah, ended in the sixth century, which implies that the earlier a rabbinical decision was made, the more confident we may be in its correctness. Priority takes priority. But another Talmudic opinion states that the law is to be determined according to the “later ones,” the most recent experts, because the later you live the more you know. (Would that this were always so!) Belatedness, in this view, is an advantage. 

For the purpose of living meaningfully, one is always right on time. 

The recognition of one’s genealogy, of one’s place in the parade, should be a source of humility. But here is Nietzsche, moving steadily from brilliance to madness, denouncing humility and confusing it with timidity, and demagogically recommending self-origination, and bequeathing his culture not only the most challenging questions that have so far been asked about it but also a crass assertion of ontological arrogance. He once wondered how God can exist if he is not God. Nietzsche liked to call himself a psychologist, and sometimes he makes philosophical expressions seem like clinical expressions.

Heine once said of a French industrialist: “He is a self-made man, which relieves God of a terrible responsibility.” 

We have it backwards. The ancients are not old. They are young, because they came first. That is why we find their limitations not exasperating but enchanting, as with infants, and also why we marvel at the depths of their understandings when they are deep. But we are old. The later you come in the history of a culture, the older you are. And we will be judged by how much we have to show for it. 

The price we pay for our late appearance in history is that our avowals lack the patina of wisdom. This may not be altogether a bad thing, since the promotion of an idea into wisdom often insulates it from skepticism and removes it from the requirements of critical examination. Sanctification is an efficient way of ending a discussion. Whereas a laboring mind is too busy for wisdom. And wisdom is easily degraded: consider only the wisdom racket of our own era, in which there is a Stoic on every corner. Wisdom may be reduced to a style, to the style of wisdom. Maybe the difference between truth and wisdom is merely that wisdom is truth that has aged. Did the contemporaries of Anaximander and Empedocles regard their opinions as wisdom, or as physical and metaphysical propositions for their consideration? (I omit the adepts, which anybody can attract.) I do not recall that Descartes and Hume and Kant and Hegel were regarded as too immortal for their contemporaries to challenge. The thinkers of one’s own time must never be beatified as sages, since we are still in the midst of evaluating the merits of their ideas. Pedestals make people stupid. And wisdom, to count as wisdom, must manifest the additional quality of being true. 

The problem for the wisdom-lovers among us is that all the wisdoms do not agree with each other, and sanctimony alone will not resolve the contradiction. 

Conservatives often chastise us for having forgotten wisdom. If they mean that we are wasting ourselves with intellectual ephemera and simulacra, it is hard not to agree. But there is often a churchly sentimentality in their complaint. The important question is not, Do we have wisdom? The important question is, What do we believe, and why? 

A wise man knows also the limits of wisdom. The worship of wisdom does not make one wise. 

Unlike some wines and cheeses, truths do not get better with age. Unlike other wines and cheeses, truths do not get worse with age. 

In his ravishing writing about his old manse — have any more beautiful pages ever been written by an American? — Hawthorne declares that we should be grateful for our ancestors and grateful for our distance from them. Of course there are cases when gratitude for our ancestors is impossible, because they were evil or otherwise wrong, but generally Hawthorne’s prescription gets it right. There need be no ingratitude, no treason, in our distance from our ancestors. Indeed, one of the reasons that we admire them is for the distance that they put between themselves and their own ancestors, so that they could become themselves, the figures whom we admire. The distance between fathers and sons, however agonistically it is established, is a necessary test of the sons’ capacity for freedom. 

The perfect reproduction of oneself in one’s child is a narcissist’s fantasy.  All heirs are deviationists.

The pathos of the traditionalists lies in their futile belief that the forward movement that has characterized their traditions on their long journey to the present, to the traditionalists themselves, should stop with them. Yet even within orthodoxies there was always movement. The forms that the traditionalists wish to freeze were themselves the products of churnings and revisions. Unlike tradition, traditionalism is often a formula for unhappiness. The unhappiness is often weaponized.

In traditional Judaism, authors are known to posterity not by their own names but by the names of their important works. This pious habit can have a slightly comic effect. It would be like referring to Kant as The Critique and to Hegel as The Phenomenology. (As in: Did the Phenomenology ever meet the Critique? Or: I have a friend who studied with a direct descendant of the Critique.) This personification of books is an astonishingly effective device for making books live. The author’s name is scanted in favor of the author’s work. And this, ironically, makes you feel closer and more personal.

The nostalgist is an editor, and with no pretense to impartiality: he omits the disagreeable parts of the past, the episodes that are unedifying or useless to his intellectual framework, which is why every nostalgic picture of the past is axiomatically incomplete. In this way nostalgia takes the critical edge off the encounter with the past: it softens the life lived in time and is a kind of early stage of self-forgiveness. It is a cure for vertigo and a cure for loneliness, if ghosts can do the trick. But nostalgia is not quite happy. It is laced with melancholy, because it is born in the sense of loss, of disorientation in one’s own surroundings. Sadness always runs through its delight. Yet what delight! Surely the present in its various degrees of oppressiveness owes us such a passing recompense, a spate of rest. We can be hard-boiled and up-to-the-minute later. We must never become the sum of our carapaces. When Adam was discovering the first sweat on his brow and Eve was enduring her first labor pains, who could begrudge them a recollection of Eden? 

One afternoon, when my son was two years old, I asked him how his day was going, and he replied: “I don’t remember yet.” I have pondered that remark for decades. Too soon for a past! Experience without memory! I was jealous.

The police captain: “Those were the good old days!” Nick Charles, serving drinks: “Don’t kid yourself. These are the good old days!” In 1934.

Language confers upon us the illusion that the modes of time are distinct from one another, conceptually and even existentially separable phases, when in fact the past, the present, and the future are always spilling into each other like sauces on a plate. How porous can a border be and still be a border? Duration is, among other things, a condition of initial chaos. How we live, individually and collectively, depends on how we make order out of the ticking disorder. 

A vision of the future cannot be inspired by the future, because the future is still a nullity and without substance. Of course we never experience it as such: since it arrives as early as tomorrow, it will look a lot like today. But not always; and there will come days in which the differences will exceed the similarities — days of genuine departure, of the emergence of something new out of the old. Where else could it emerge from? We tiresomely refer to these hours of mutability as “inflection points.” Kinetically we adore them. Only inflect! But they are certainly not as common as we think, as we hectically inflect the recently inflected on our way to the next inflection; and sometimes we are forced, for stability’s sake, to devise mental techniques to retard the rapids and mitigate the shock of  the discontinuity, to preserve connections across the crucibles, to incorporate the breakthroughs into prior schemes and systems even when they will not fit. (Many years ago I had a Syrian Marxist friend who used to amuse me when we argued, because every time I presented him with a logical contradiction or an empirical refutation of his views he would blithely respond: “Well, I just have to work that into the analysis.”) But there are moments when we must concede, or lament, or rejoice, that things really are no longer what they were. The people who make these announcements regularly are called visionaries. The problem is that the visionary mode — like the prophetic mode — is notoriously facile. In contemporary America, who is not a visionary? Here all it takes to qualify as a visionary is a t-shirt and the latest iteration of a jargon. (Unless you are a visionary, you won’t get the financing.) We are drowning in the clichés of our dime-a-dozen visionaries. An entire population suffers from vision migraines.

Tocqueville’s most profound contribution to historical understanding may have been not his dazzling intuitions about America but his careful descriptions of how much of prerevolutionary France persisted into post-revolutionary France. In the age of revolution the incompleteness of revolution was a revolutionary idea. He wrote the greatest book ever written against the tabula rasa.

Our fashion in visionaries accounts also for the inundation of our culture by science fiction, which is the literary form that futurism takes. From Jules Verne on, radical depictions of the future have occasionally inspired a more helpful and sophisticated grasp of what may be possible: innovation is always the product of an expanded imagination. The problem with these prophecies is that too often they loosen not only the imagination but also the mind. The imagination involved in those visions is chiefly technological: the master plot of science fiction is the behavior of familiar human beings in unfamiliar technological circumstances. It is only lately that the imbecilic geniuses of Silicon Valley have had the effrontery to also promote the technologization of the human being – that “post-humanity” has become an ideal. Replicants are too human for these futurists. (Phillip K. Dick, the most accomplished futurist imagination of our time, never surrendered his humaneness and what he liked to call “the authentic human being.”) The insolence of the Kurzweils and the Andreesens and the rest of the Prometheans with offshore accounts knows no bounds. Billions and billions in the cause of de-humanization! I have been reading the unintentionally risible theological speculations of Peter Thiel — on the legend of “a zombie Nero resurrected in a parody of Christ,” for example, and its source in the Book of Revelations: “Saint John identified 666 as the number of the beast, and Nero’s Hebrew name, Neron Kaisar, has a gematric value of 666.” And so on, in this pseudo-esoteric vein. Thiel’s deep original thinking is a parody of hermetic tripe, a witless exchange of engineering arcana for chiliastic arcana, according to which what most direly imperils us now is the Antichrist. In this way thinking outside the box culminates in the least original and most poisonius thinking of all. “One question ripe for literary treatment,” Thiel reflects, “is how the Antichrist will take over the world.” His literary standard is low, since he treats comic books as metaphysical sources. (In one of these scriptures Christlike Luffy defeats Kaidou and Big Mom. Praise the Lord!) It will come as no surprise that the quasi figura Antichristi of our day is for Thiel the critic of artificial intelligence – or more generally, “in the twenty-first century the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science,” as if the technical (and economic) connivings of Thiel and Altman and the others are coterminous with science itself. (Needless to say, Carl Schmitt has a cameo.) We are paying heavily for one undergraduate’s infatuation with René Girard’s vaporizings about the redemptive power of violent unreason. 

It is no wonder, amid this outburst of science fiction and its antihumanist sensibility, that another genre of film and fiction is also thriving. The genry of the moment is horror. In our culture now it is everywhere. It responds to one variety of antihumanism with another variety of antihumanism, the genre of horror is consecrated to giving the darkness the last word. It, too, is visionary, except that its vision of the future is of a time in which uncontrollable sadistic forces have not been eradicated because they are ineradicable. What did the Saw and Hostel and Chainsaw franchises advertise if not the eternal recurrence of human depravity? Which, as a fact of history, is of course indubitable. But there is no courage in horror, no fearless confrontation with what must be faced, no high-minded reckoning with the worst that we need to know about ourselves. It is merely a commercial formula that exploits the fragility of our dignity, and the emotional infirmity of those who find pleasure in fear. Horror is to Thanatos what porn is to Eros. There is nothing especially tough-minded about the presentation of torture as entertainment. It is only a program for learning not to feel. Everybody was so frantically searching for the feminist lessons in that repulsive Demi Moore movie about a woman’s viscera that they neglected to note its virulent hatred of the human, its nihilism disguised as a bracing interpretation of body dysmorphia. (5,500 gallons of phony blood!) And the Gothic blockbusters of the nineteenth century — which like Dracula will never die, but continue to seduce filmmakers who prefer the demagoguery of special effects, Guillermo del Toro most recently — these allegedly transgressive classics teach the perdurability of the past at its most despairing: that there is nothing anachronistic about all those medieval castles and capes because the descent into the irrational and the insane is a perennial norm. Neither reason nor religion will keep the demons down. Transylvania forever! Pessimism with popcorn. We are at the same time so advanced and so atavistic. I guess atavism is the flip side of advancement. Or is it the other way around? For every gleaming gadget, a lopped-off limb. For every app, a fang. 

There was a time — all of human history until approximately now — when the existence of the future could be taken for granted, all the histrionics of apocalypse notwithstanding. But now we must pause over the houses slipping into the sea and the fires in the rain forests and the ice caps as they vanish to reflect that this platitude — this quotidian assurance about the lastingness of the world, upon which all human activity was premised  — may have been a momentous blunder. Futurity is no longer what it used to be. We must begin to picture what it will be like to live in the absence of any confidence about the year after this one and then the day after this one and then the moment after this one. What will it be like to carry on without the sense of an unbounded and unendangered future? Only the condemned have known that feeling. The sensation of ordinary mortality is certainly nothing like it. After all, the steadiness of the dying, or so I imagine, the equilibrium of the soul on the brink of the body’s extinction, is premised on the conviction that the world will not die with them. What will it be like to die without the certainty that the world will live on? What will it be like to be the last one to die? Bill Gates now declares that we need not worry about the end of the line “for the foreseeable future,” but what exactly is the foreseeable future? I am not yet prepared to exhale and open a bottle. Futurism (and its cult of the machine) may turn out to have been the indulgence of a shallow and greedy species that could not be bothered to look after the vast portion of nature that was not itself.

“The end of the line”: I suppose that the phrase comes from the railroads. Anybody who has ever been to the end of a line, to the final buffer where the tracks ignominiously stop, will agree that it is a peculiarly melancholy place. Whereas the sight of tracks running into infinity is peculiarly heartening. 

There is something funny about the fashion in infinity pools. Another game that the rich play with limits. 

Why should boundlessness be heartening? Why should we aspire to what we cannot be? (Americans evade the difficulty of such questions by hiding behind “the aspirational.”) To want to be what one can never be is damaging and dangerous, to oneself and to others. Surely it is the work of a lifetime to become no more than what one can be. In that enterprise we are in no danger of early or easy success. If you think hard about infinity, you will recognize that it is terrifying — but perhaps not for its silence, as Pascal remarked. The silence may be the best part of it.

The name that finite creatures have often given to what they are not is God. Some religious philosophers have been so militant about the conception of God as everything that we are not, as the strict and perfect antithesis of what we are, that they unwittingly lend support to the modern criticism that theology is no more than an exercise in human projection, except in the form of a negation. (This negation also explains how the idea of infinity can occur to a finite mind, which centuries ago was regarded as a miracle that proved the existence of the deity.) I do not see how a God worthy of the name, or the Name, can have anything in common with human attributes, or how infinity can also be finite, which is why the Christian idea of the Incarnation is philosophically offensive to me; but it is not hard to understand why finite creatures would need to find something of themselves in infinity – a link, a sign, a wink, a loophole — a back door to pagan satisfaction, the body of Christ. 

Unless you already believe that Jesus was the Son of God, the effect of a beautiful representation of Christ — say, Zurbaran’s huge corpus floating in a field of the purest black, in Chicago — is to encourage not heavenly religion but earthly desire. Listen to Buxtehude’s lachrymose seven-cantata cycle, Membra Jesu Nostri patientis sanctissima, or The Most Holy Limbs of Our Suffering Jesus, each cantata a penitential celebration of a different part of his body, and you will hear the sound of monotheism gently vanishing.

The most daunting challenge of all is to believe in a God who provides little or no satisfaction.

In the very few instances in my life when I seemed to have been lifted to some sort of brush with infinity — by the third movement of Beethoven’s fifteenth string quartet, for example, the “Lydian” movement, on a rainy night in a small room in an old stone manor at Oxford, a rickety gramophone on the trunk next to my monk’s bed — it was a relief to come away from the uncanniness without an obligation of worship. It was real, but it was only an experience. Is there a less reliable authority for cosmic conclusions? Epiphany, delirium, ecstasy, apotheosis: I wish I were visited by more of these heightened moments, but not because they are intellectually trustworthy. There are many reasons to want to vibrate, but a climactic illumination, the vouchsafing of an irreversible clarity, is not one of them. I am, alas, spiritually overprotective, with a phobic attitude toward illusion, which can interfere with pleasures of the imagination, and with experiences of abandon, and this almost neurotic skepticism has condemned me to a relatively unadventurous mundanity; but still I would rather be starved than swindled. 

A brush with the unlimited, maybe; but contact, never. Or not yet. No, never. 

The doors of perception? Don’t let them hit you on your way out. 

The plot thickens with the introduction of the infinitesimal — a thing not infinitely large but infinitely small. The origins of the concept are to be found in mathematics, where I am never to be found. My understanding is that it refers to a numerical value that is as close to zero as it can be without being zero. Or it could refer to a minute point somewhere far down an infinite line. Yet the dissociation of infinity from size permits a marvelous thought — that there is no end to littleness, or: the grandeur of humility. It is big to be small. (The self-abnegation of a point: an ethical allegory from poorly understood mathematics.) 

“There will be no other end of the world, / There will be no other end of the world.” Czeslaw Miłosz wrote those lines in one of his scorching poems about the Warsaw Ghetto, which he composed from the other side of the ghetto walls. Just think: a second end of the world! It sounds unbearable. But really it may be the most comforting thought of all. To live after the end — which, unless the entire planet burns up, somebody always will — is to benevolently recontextualize the idea of an ending, to fight back successfully against the most frightening aspect of extinction, which is its finality. Panic owes its power to its literalness, but a with panic disarms that literalness. The future may be good or bad, but so far it has never not arrived.

We go through our lives attempting to create permanent things — commitments and institutions — but the permanence to which we aspire for our creations is premised on the open-endedness of life, on the banality of time. What if time is no longer banal? My parents, and all the other survivors of the modern world’s protracted kingdoms of killing, lived for years without being able to rely on the open-endedness of life, while around them so much of the world stayed open-ended — which, for them, between 1939 and 1945, was one of its worst cruelties. 

The end of the world is more coherent than the end of a people. It is at least a shared human fate.

In 1948, a time when Jewish history was simultaneously flush with sorrow and joy in an impossible disequilibration of feeling, the Jewish thinker and scholar Simon Rawidowicz wrote a mordant and gentle essay called “Israel: The Ever-Dying People.” It was a critique of Jewish morbidity, in which he observed this about the chronic Jewish “fear of the end”: “A nation dying for thousands of years means a living nation. Our incessant dying means uninterrupted living, rising, standing up, beginning anew.” And also this great release from the prison of grief: “But if we are the last – let us be the last as our fathers and forefathers were the last, let us prepare the ground for the last Jews who will come after us, and for the last Jews who will rise after them.” That prayer belongs in the prayerbook. 

But what about calamities that are in some way without precedent, and cannot be tucked into prior patterns, into a salving familiarity which can lessen the temptation to hopelessness? I am thinking of the political nausea that occurs with the first appearance of post-liberalism in liberal societies. It is the sickening moment that we are living presently. The Trump era in America and the Netanyahu era in Israel are groundbreaking calamities in the histories of these countries, first iterations of national nightmares, and while they do not come out of nowhere they are an incontrovertibly new chapter, and so the customary consolation of historical irony will avail us nothing. About these developments there is as yet no way to knowing or weary. The first time is a heartbreak all its community.

Never, ever write the story of your own as a narrative of angels. Otherwise the discovery that you are not perfect strangers to evil will shipwreck you.

Is every heartbreak like the first one? 

We are mongrels of temporality: all the tenses exist in us at every moment, and our task is to attend to the proportions in the mix. Is the past colonizing the present? Is the future? Guard the frontiers! But we are never unmixed. 

This is the case also about previous epochs. In his defense of “the painting of modern life,” and more generally of the legitimacy of modernity, Baudelaire wrote that “by ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” — He was concerned that the speed of the new urban life, its pandemonium of people and incident, its noisy vulgarities, would disqualify it from the classical ambitions of art. And so he sagely pointed out that “every old master has had his own modernity,” because everybody has lived in their time, which was the latest time, and no time is incapable of transmutations into beauty. The poet – who was writing here as an art critic — was not privileging modernity; he was insisting that it be treated with the same philosophical and cultural privilege that other eras enjoyed — that the transience of a streetcar is no less real and interesting than the transience of a blossom, and no less inviting to art. Baudelaire’s whole sentence reads: “By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” Never unmixed.

So, the temporal and the eternal share in all things, or all things share in them – a partnership of opposites. But the alliance is not always legible. It is easier for me to find the eternal in Brueghel’s pictures of tiny people shitting on the ice than to find the temporal in Poussin’s ideality composed pastorals. (In his The Rape of the Sabines, a true masterpiece of pictorial design, the sub specie aeternitatis mood has, for me, always offended against the terror that is portrayed. What on earth is an orderly breakdown of order?)  

And for those who do not believe in the eternal or the absolute? Even for them, reality is not just a landfill of data. As long as there is form, we are not forever shut up inside our empirical preoccupations and conditions. Form has the power to alter our experience of a thing, of any thing, and to broach a beyond. How distant a beyond? Not necessarily as far as the heavens: no metaphysics are necessary for a faith in form, though a measure of abstraction is. The godless are not excluded from this realm of numinousness. And form is utterly neutral, devoid of prejudices or prerequisites: it will put up with, or shape, or disfigure, or transfigure, any material.

There is nothing more difficult than to live significantly in the present. Most people accomplish this by, well, cheating: they borrow from the past and from the future, from memory and from hope, until the present is overrun by the other modes and comes to consist chiefly in commemorations and in dreams, in hindsight and in anticipation. To be sure, the influences of the past and the future upon the present are impossible to annul; as I say, in the matter of temporality we are forever mixed. But can we control their intrusions? Can we calibrate our own temporality? This gave birth to the riveting notion of a pure present, an Eternal Present — to the view that the present is spiritually primary because it is the only mode of time in which we may experience the transcendence that we seek. In one sense, of course, this observation is trivial. When else is transcendence supposed to take place? In this sense, the ideal of living solely in the present, though it may be a fiction, is a magnificent attempt to protect transcendence from the relentless interferences of time — to insulate the soul’s shot at fulfillment from the distractions of memory and desire. One prooftext out of many: in the second part of Faust, Goethe has his hero declare that “the spirit looks neither ahead nor behind. Only the present is our happiness.”  

Whether or not it is easy to seize the day, it is not easy to seize the instant. Modern philosophers — Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Bergson, Bachelard, and others — have gone to pains to isolate the instant from the flux and attempt a characterization of it. The project proved to be rather Sisyphean. In 1932, Bachelard, inspired by an amateur play by a university colleague who was a historian and a winemaker, suggested that, as opposed to Bergson’s search for time itself, “the only way we ourselves can feel time is by multiplying conscious instants.” An instant is “the compressed center around which we would posit an evanescent duration.” But is evanescent duration the answer or the question? Four years earlier Heidegger edited and published the lectures that his teacher Husserl delivered in the 1910s on “the phenomenology of internal time-consciousness.” This may be the most impossible book I have ever read. A sentence randomly chosen from the discussion of “longitudinal intentionality”: “If we now let the flux flow away, we then have the flux-continuum as running-off, which allows the continuity to be retentionally modified, and thereby every new continuity of phases momentarily existing all at once is retention with reference to the total continuity of what is all-at-once in the preceding phase.” I do not adduce such a passage to make fun of it. In his admirable search for a close account of the lived experience of the fleeting moment, the philosopher was heroically undeterred by the difficulty of trying to capture in language what probably cannot be captured in language, even in the compound-coinages of a style of philosophy unfazed by turgidity. Husserl was braver than Heraclitus, who believed that he could make do with the metaphor of the river. Yet the more one considers these attempts to clarify the smallest and most immediate units of lived time, the more plausibly one may conclude that a life lived completely in the present would be incoherent without the shadows and the foreshadows of the past and the future. The coherence of a temporal life may require a mess of temporal intrusions. What, after all, can we do with an instant? 

There are perfunctory versions of the ideal of pure instantaneity. Animals live completely in the present. So do voluptuaries (Casanova’s memoirs are eight volumes of pure presents), and so do the beaded forever-young Baba Ram Dassians on the coasts and in the mountains. Yet they experience nothing like an eternal present: they live merely in a series, moment to moment, climax upon climax, high after high, sensation followed by sensation, over and over, robotically, by rote, in a frantic and unconnected collection of what Americans call “peak experiences.” But peaks are nothing without valleys. There are peak people and valley people. An existence of endless stimulation — the peak people — requires a deformation of time based on its complete atomization: be here now, and then now, and then now, and then now. Never mind that there may be more attractive than here. But the passage from here to there takes time — dumb extended duration of an unatomized and unmagical kind, provisional and continuous. Be there and then there and then there and then there, until the achievement of arrival will be yours. A series of theres is often deeper and more sustaining than a series of heres. The fantasy of a pure present expresses a kind of temporal provincialism; it is the connections between the instants out of which a life is made. (For the animals with whom I have gratefully lived, by contrast, I detected no distinction between ordinary experience and peak experience, except for sleep. Lucky pugs!) 

Another name for a pure present: immanent exile. What else could follow it?

Nothing valuable can be accomplished without repetition, but repetition deadens more than it quickens. The only solution I know for this problem is the musical form of theme and variations.
The colonization of the present by the past — there is so much past! — is a more common phenomenon than its colonization by the future, but there is an increasingly troublesome instance of the latter: messianism, or more precisely, political messianism. No matter how traditional they seem, messianists are people who derive the meaning of their lives not from the past but from the future — or rather from a particular construction of the future in which it will reproduce a particular construction of the past. Restorations are conspiracies between the future and the past. In their own minds the restorationists are already living in the future because they have already been living in the past, usually an ancient past that ended badly, and this hallucination of time travel accounts for their obnoxious tone of spiritual superiority. (All redeemers are obnoxious. They come with love but without respect.) They have come from their future to drag the rest of us into it. They are high on historical rupture. They mourn destruction and are ready to destroy. Guns sometimes follow. 

Another reason for preferring the present, a completely worldly reason, was given by Pierre Hadot. “Ordinarily our life is always incomplete, because we project all our hopes, all our aspirations, all our attention, into the future, telling ourselves that we will be happy when we have attained this or that goal. We are scared as long as the goal is not attained, but if we attain it, already it no longer interests us and we continue to run after something else. We do not live, we hope to live, we are waiting to live.” Hadot, as is well known, argued that the Stoics and the Epicureans had devised the solution to this conundrum: “to live not in the future but as though there were no future, as though we only had this day, only this moment, to live.” This is a little precious. We must add, compassionately, that hoping to live, and living in hope, is not the worst fate that can be imagined. Having lived but living no more, or having no grounds for hoping to live, is much worse. As for waiting, it is an art, a lost art; it is not a grudging way of meeting an inconvenient or frustrating delay, but a mature way of grappling with the stubbornness of time and the work requirements of truth and goodness and beauty.

To recommend impatience is to play with fire.

Hadot goes beyond his customary proselytization for Stoicism and its illusion of personal immunity. He suggests that an intensity of focus upon the present confers a different advantage. “To live in the present moment is to live as though one were seeing the world both for the last and for the first time. To work at seeing the world as though one were seeing it for the first time is to get rid of the conventional and routine vision we have of things, to discover a brute, naïve version of reality, to take note of the splendor of the world, which habitually escapes us.” How splendid this is. Since we are so accustomed to confusion in the present, it is encouraging to be reminded of its power to clarify. The purpose of Hadot’s putative ban on the past and the future is to prevent them from blurring a precise apprehension of what actually now exists. For lucidity’s sake they sometimes need to get out of the way. 

To see clearly: a stupendously immodest goal. It is the secular mysticism, the sharpening of perception as a spiritual elevation, that one finds in many modern poets and painters — the thrilling notion that seeing clearly is not only a practical matter but also, when the focus rises above our everyday eyes, and we succeed in a degree of detachment from our commonplace cognitive practices, an attainment of transcendence, even if it remains terrestrial. Seeing clearly is a life’s work. I am reminded of the passage in Rilke’s Ninth Elegy when he suspends his swooning and wonders whether the most that we can do in the way of an accurate grasp of reality is to delineate it properly, to say “house, bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window” — “such saying as the things themselves never hoped so intensely to be.” Nouns and nothing more, but each of them with the force of a revelation. Behind this dream of comprehensive clarity, of complete optical definition, was the poet’s revelatory encounter with Cezanne’s apples, which, like Zurbaran’s lemons and Chardin’s cherries and Morandi’s bottles, challenge ordinary perception with their distinctness and their vividness and their concreteness — with their overwhelming but immanent presence. 

Will someone who seeks a better view of heaven be satisfied with a better view of earth? Can apples do the work of angels?

The plot thickens. A jug figures prominently — two jugs, actually — in another twentieth-century attempt to seize the instant. This one occurred not in philosophy but in psychology, and this endeavor arrived at the opposite conclusion: that clarity about an object is to be found not in the delineation of its boundaries but in the blurring of its boundaries. Marion Milner was a British psychoanalyst and a strangely riveting writer about lived experience, born in 1897, a colleague of D. W. Winnicott and a friend of Adrian Stokes, who in 1950 published an exciting book called On Not Being Able to Paint. The story begins, as it often does for the analytical Milner, with a subtle observation of a small incident:

I woke one morning and saw two jugs on the table; without any mental struggle I saw the edges in relation to each other and how gaily they seemed almost to ripple now that they were freed from this grimly practical business of enclosing an object and keeping it in its place. This was surely what painters meant about the play of edges: certainly they did play, and I tried a five-minute sketch of the jugs.

Her sketch is reproduced in her book: two jugs overlapping, two solid objects with open borders. This imprecision gladdened Milner, and provoked her to a war against outline, against “the need to make objects keep themselves to themselves within a rigid boundary,” against “the fear of losing all sense of separating boundaries.” Her actual experience of the jugs was tentative and unclear and transitory, very much akin to the “transitional objects” that Winnicott interposed between the “inner reality” and the “outer reality” that the baby and then the child had to negotiate. Milner, in the realm of the visual arts, argued what Winnicott did in the realm of child psychology: against hypostatization, against too much fixity. When Rilke said jug, in other words, he had it backwards. He was distorting the object by means of excessive definition. In his search for a lasting crystalline reality, he made the object overly distinct. In this way he sought to idealize it, to make poetry out of it, but by idealizing it, by seeking to complete what revealed itself best in its incompleteness, he withdrew it from the world of natural perception. There is no instant, no present, in which you see the jug, unless you have the stamina for mysticism. Winnicott wrote wisely about “the strain inherent in objective perception,” which is to say that objectivity involves both a gain and a loss, because it represents an elaborate treatment of perceptual experience; it may grant truth but not immediacy. It might even be a stranger to experience.

I look again at Cezanne’s apples, first with Rilke’s eyes and then with Milner’s eyes. It’s a wash. Sometimes they have edges but not outlines, sometimes they have outlines in place of edges, and sometimes the shadows make the inquiry moot. How much of a shape must one see to know it? Not the entirety of it, to judge by the evidence of some of Cezanne’s incomplete still-lifes. Sometimes it is more powerful to suggest a shape than to document it. (One of the most precious aspects of Milner’s writing is her loss of interest in wholeness.)

Freedom may lie in the difference between an edge and a border, though both can be emboldening.

As they were together contemplating one of Cezanne’s depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Rilke remarked to Count Harry Kessler: “Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.” Was he thinking of Sinai or Nebo? Not every peak is the same. 

Presence occurs only in the present. This is not as pretentious as it sounds. A presence that has departed and a presence that has not arrived are poor nourishments, though we snack on them constantly.

Why would mortal creatures expend themselves with a longing for the end? It will come, it will come.

A short drive from Alamogordo, the cursed town in New Mexico where the first nuclear weapon was created, is one of the strangest and most spiritually addling places in the world. It is White Sands National Park, almost three hundred square miles of blindingly white gypsum sand. Truly one feels translated to another reality. With the rare exception of the skeleton of a dead tree — nothing can grow in that glistening ground — the white desert stretches featurelessly and without interruption in all directions as far as the eye can see. I never comprehended the obliterative power of white until I walked those dunes. The infinite was there, and so was the infinitesimal. I was surrounded by sublimity and I was lost.