“Purity of heart is to will one thing,” Kierkegaard famously proclaimed. He was right about purity but wrong to aspire to it. It is a common mistake, made all the more familiar to ordinary people because it is a quality that heroes and fanatics, the characters who spice religious liturgies, history books, novels, poetry, and Netflix often share. Even Dante, no stranger to the complications of life and character, endorses it: “One object, and one object only, is rightly to be loved ‘with all my mind, with all my soul, and with all my strength.’” Purity is simplifying, and it is romantic, and in an existence as relentlessly variegated as ours it promises a great relief. And so it is tempting to structure one’s life around a single, dominating idea or community, to be fanatically, singularly loyal. But like some of the most irresistible temptations, this one is false. Life will never be simple and people will never be pure. Perhaps it is our very impurity that engenders the myth that purity is a human achievement, medicine for the drabness that is a regular feature of living. But what if purity, were it even attainable, were instead a human failing? What if diversity, of kinds and of qualities, is an unalterable and enriching characteristic of individual and communal experience? It seems almost platitudinous to point out that the individual lives in many realms and has many loyalties. In a single day she may in one realm be a hero, in another a loser, and often just another body standing in line. Our various realms are the settings for the various roles we all play. An individual engages different parts of herself in a museum than in a place of worship, and with her friends than with her family, and with her mother than with her husband. Her priorities, the pattern of her attention, even her tone alters depending on which of her contexts she inhabits at a given moment. She is not faking it, she is still herself, but herself is many things. These shifts and developments are not deceitful; complexity is not synonymous with promiscuity. People cannot live fully in any other way, and we are right to seek fullness. It is in some ways much easier to adopt the Kierkegaardian ideal and devote oneself entirely to a single loyalty. It is easier, but it is not consistent with the mess of human life, which is why such an exclusive commitment breeds dissatisfaction with reality. In extreme cases, for those inclined towards melodrama, the undivided path can become a search for martyrdom. In such cases, the sort that Marianne naively romanticizes in Sense and Sensibility, one sacrifices oneself to a love that was never compatible with reality. These loves are not sublime, they are absurd. And while this sort of sacrifice certainly requires courage, so can folly. It is entirely distinct from the heroism of sacrificing one’s life for others, for the sake of life, which is the heroism that we rightly admire. Contrast that type of heroism with Antigone’s sacrifice. Against the order of the king and on penalty of death, Antigone buried her brother’s corpse so that it would not rot above ground. Upon a first reading of Sophocles’ play, she is strikingly noble. Ismene, her sister, acknowledges the integrity of Antigone’s devotion, even while Ismene accuses her of being “in love with impossibility” or, as we might say, out of touch with reality. Indeed, Antigone admits outright that she was able to face certain death in service to her brother’s memory only because she had no interest in staying alive. “For death is gain to him whose life, like mine, is full of misery.” If she had some reason to keep living, she would not have been able to die as she did. Suicide is not a sacrifice for someone who wants to die. Antigone’s single-mindedness proved fatal. To appropriate a contemporary platitude, she chose only one lane, and it led to her destruction. Madame de Stael’s intoxicating heroine Corinne suffered from a related contempt for real life. She whipped herself into a long and fatal frenzy in service to a love she knew could never be realized. A perpetual state of excitation was the only kind of loyalty of which she was capable; she could nurture only a single love, and so consumingly that it would kill her. Corinne’s intensity, not her love, demanded the highest sacrifice. It was a product of her temperament, and not based on the object of her love, on her lover’s qualities. The heat all came from her. Reality bored her. She wanted it to be more, or grander, than it was; she could not tolerate the inanities of ordinary existence. “I had learned about life by reading the poets.” she confesses. “It is not like that. There is something barren about reality that it is useless to try to change.” And so she chose to defy it. Both these women could not sustain a loyalty tested by commonplace experience. It was not that their hearts were too strong for the quotidian. They were, more accurately, too weak for it. A single, overwhelming love premised upon perpetual excitement is feeble, not powerful. Corrine and Antigone suffered from the same weakness, and it manifested for both in a similar monomania. For both of them, the simplification of self, its attempted transformation into a single thing, was poisonous. One-lane roads are the most dangerous ones. But it is also quite possible to love many loves poorly, and to dramatize all of them the same way that Corinne dramatized hers. Dissolve to Russia. Anna Karenina loved many people and idealized all of them. And despite nurturing multiple obsessions for different people, she was still dominated by a single loyalty: to her own feverish intensity. Actual human life was not enough, and it was too much, for her. Tolstoy’s omniscient narrator knows everything about Anna in each sentence describing her, but he knows
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence