Love in the Time of COVID
Socratic Spirit as the Imperative on Despair
Socrates, Socrates, Socrates! Yes, we may well call your name three times; it would not be too much to call it ten times, if it would be of any help. Popular opinion maintains that the world needs a republic, needs a new social order and a new religion — but no one considers that what the world, confused simply by too much knowledge, needs is a Socrates. Of course, if anyone thought of it, not to mention if many thought of it, he would be less needed. Invariably, what error needs most is always the last thing it thinks of — quite naturally, for otherwise it would not, after all, be error.
~ Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
Five years ago, I co-authored a monograph with John Vervaeke and Filip Miscevic called Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty First Century Crisis, an account of how stories about a risen corpse became paradigmatic myths for existential sickness. Astute observers will detect in these myths a perversion of the risen Christ, the West’s canonical symbol of the Self, wherein man’s abjections are redeemed by a capacity for self-transcendence that corresponds to a superlative criterion of truth and good. Becoming one’s Self under this symbol means conforming one’s attention to the pattern of this criterion, using it to order our relation to ourselves, and to all other goods. It animates that famous Robert Browning adage: that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”
In his lecture series, Awakening From The Meaning Crisis, Vervaeke provides a genealogy for the existential sickness. He outlines the various historical forces and conditions that brought us to this vertiginous precipice, a moment in time that appears endless, yet has not the slightest contact with the eternal. The zombie, for its part, embodies the nausea of this experience. It is a manifestation of our crisis of meaning, a kind of anti-symbol for spiritual decrepitude, for how mindlessness and misology degenerate human beings into a subcultural form of existence, characterized by spiritlessness, loss of narrative coherence, the dissolution of fellowship, and a fundamental revulsion toward the world and its occupants.
At the time of writing Zombies, it seemed as though the monster myth may have run its course. Yet the past two years have brought recurrence and amplification to the features depicted in that study. It has been a time of illness and contagion, but also of social enmity, economic decay, hysteria, neo-gnostic conspiracy, and the rapid rise of new orthodoxies and heresies. In other words, COVID has resurfaced ancient presentiments of fatalism and despair, and powerful ideologies have reared in response to the sudden loss of a determinate world. With this comes an unwelcome responsibility: the world can no longer be trusted to hold us in its favour, and we have defaulted once again to become custodians of our own souls.
We must be sure to understand the magnitude of these symptoms, and the attendant corrosions we are witnessing to civil discourse in Canada and around the world. We do not simply disagree on issues or facts — on what we know. Rather, these conditions have revealed a problem that Pierre Grimes calls the pathologos, a structural-functional disorder in how we know, and how knower and known are related.[1] We might conceptualize pathologos as the worldview we acquire unconsciously, almost incidentally. We catch it as one catches a cold, and much like a cold, it augments the mood and appearance of the world. It becomes easy therefore to mistake it for the world, to grow a body of beliefs from within this mood until the mood becomes an existential mooring. It becomes the way by which we know in general, that overscoring melody by which things are made real and meaningful.
Understood this way, a pathologos is perhaps not simply a “sick belief” as Grimes has described it, but a fundamental distortion in our relationship to reality, and therefore productive of many sick beliefs. It affects how we orient to the world, to one another, and to ourselves, and therefore how we assume our imperatives as minded moral agents. Our response to the COVID-19 virus has exemplified this kind of worldview mis-attunement; swollen passions compete in an arena of discourse that is uncomprehending as to the depth and scope of the problem they live out, wherein each side simply wants to triumph over the other by instituting its account of justice: of what the world is, and how we should act within it. A similar problem — by the name of Thrasymachus — appears in Book I of Plato’s Republic, and Socrates spends the rest of the work trying to resolve it. Alas, the rest of us seem not to have advanced this project. We are still firmly in the Cave.
The true volume of suffering incurred by COVID and its respondent measures is very difficult to scale by modern standards. Crucibles of the inner life are now grouped under “mental health,” as though our psychical constitution were an incidental feature of well being, rather than the enabling constraint that allows other virtues, including physical health, to be exercised in right proportion. This Greek tradition of contemplating the order and relation of different virtues might seem anachronistic at a time when the rightful order seems obvious. Unfortunately, obviousness can be a symptom of sick belief. Gone are those days when we turned to philosophers to be physicians for the soul, and sought their help to relieve us of confining perspectives. No one is surprised to find that politicians are unfit substitutes, but unfortunately this is perhaps the one thing we are able to agree on.
In search of new perspective, we must first understand the nature of despair, a condition that characterizes the inward disordering of human life and its endowments. This brings us to Søren Kierkegaard and The Sickness unto Death. For Kierkegaard, despair is a state peculiar to being an unconsummated self. The implied analogy to marriage may be helpful here. Despair is the condition of failing to turn and face oneself, to be oneself by becoming oneself, not as an incident of nature, but as a matter of existential decision — to be what thou art by art, as well as by nature. This God-given capacity, which he called “spirit,” is what distinguishes the person from the beast, recognizing that one’s being grounds out to a criterion of good that exceeds us, from which our spiritual vitality comes, of which we must become conscious. Irony in the Socratic and Kierkegaardian tradition is the awareness of living in a condition of contradictions: of being oneself, and not being oneself, at the same time. The contradiction turns to paradox the more conscious we become of living within it, the more ironic we become toward ourselves. This ironic consciousness opens a kind of acoustic space within us, amplifying the pains of our distention until we beg the paradox for resolution.
If we understand despair in this way, we may begin to understand its necessity as a condition for self-knowledge. In the grief of conscious despair, we are moved to seek oneness, to relate ourselves back together by relating our dichotomous parts and contradictions to some greater power, a supervening perspective that could fathom the absurdity, and reconcile the irreconcilable. For Kierkegaard, we cannot relate to ourselves until we relate to what exceeds us, to a higher order of perspective that could know us with absolute intimacy, could understand how everything belongs together, that could see us in toto as one would read a coherent sentence, thereby calling the self to order. Here we may begin to understand the affinity between faith and Socratic reason, an affinity that became embodied in Augustine’s Confessions, and all such projects that took self-knowledge as their ultimate concern. Being known, especially in relation to the transcendent, is what allows us to know ourselves, and therein we find an implicit identity between understanding and agapic love. Despair desensitizes us to such love. It keeps us riven. The unfulfilled need to become ourselves makes us feel as though we can no longer live with ourselves, and it intones our existence with a spiritual desperation that rivals the pain of any physical ailment. For good reason, “deaths of despair” has become a phrase to describe suicides that cannot be sourced to any obvious clinical condition.
We must understand this condition because it is central to framing the current state, these pathologic moorings, from which we see and speak to one another. Despair is living in a state of self-estrangement, of misrelation to oneself that amounts to a misrelation to others, and to all things. It is a failure to take full responsibility for one’s suffering and to follow its depths, to develop what Martin Buber called an “I-Thou” relationship to what is most real at the ground of us, and to reconcile ourselves with it. For Kierkegaard, the avoidance of this confrontation, and the pain of its initiation, has “much in common with the condition of the mortally ill person who is in the throes of death but cannot die,” a condition that grows more severe as its symptoms begin to metabolize. As we become more conscious in our despair, we remember that beneath worldly conventions and comforts, beneath any provisional consensus of culture, there is a fitful suffering born of inescapable dilemma: we are a faint spark of the eternal, suffocating in a container of time and frailty.
No one pays attention to their despair when the day is young, when we can discharge our angst with recreation and sybaritic pleasures. At such times, spirit is muted. But after a couple of years of forced claustration, keeping company with ourselves, with a clearer view to our faults and finitude, we have become fitful spirits indeed. This fitfulness brings to mind the following passage from Marilynne Robinson, who describes the self-confrontation rather beautifully as
that haunting I who wakes us in the night, wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer so diligently.[2]
As a spiritual domicide, we might think of despair as a loss of home from the inside out. Yet it is often provoked into awareness by external privations that place us vis-à-vis with our own decisions. Many of us have become aware that we can no longer look to the norms of “society” to constitute ourselves in good faith, and that being good or true, however we might define such things, relies on being intentional in ways that seem unnecessary when our environment is less obtrusive. It is little wonder that the Platonists, the Stoics and many other traditions were so suspicious of any grace conveyed by cultural ethos rather than by personal reckoning. Such things were not authentic because they could be easily stripped away when the winds changed direction, when the ethic of society was beset by unconscious impulses it could not fully account for. Jung and Nietzsche were among those who made this point most perspicuously: when society is overtaken by instincts that blur the lines between what is happening inside and outside of us, when it no longer has access to reflective symbols that allow it to know itself, when it is seized by forces it does not understand, those forces may in turn threaten to seize the world and engulf it. This gives rise to totalitarian impulses, the desire to use monologic declarations — like law — to close a fist around the world. When this happens, we lose the dialogic form of participation, the ability to reason which is so essential to spirit, the ability to bring consciousness, to know by being in the right kind of relation to what is known. This broader state of misrelation is Kierkegaard’s despair manifest on a different scale, the failure of reason that D.C. Schindler calls misology.[3] This fractal correspondence was uncovered in Plato’s Republic, which took the arrangement of state as an analogue for the individual soul. In a state of misology, one part of the state, or the self, mistakes itself for the whole. It begins to arbitrate our ontology, our idea of what is real and ultimate. When earthy virtues lose their common view to the transcendent, relative goods become absolute goods. Aspects of truth assert themselves as final and comprehensive, and attempt to totalize their influence over our normativity.
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche both regarded utopic political ideologies as modern examples of this idolatry. More recently, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has made a similar argument about health: that our algophobic avoidance of pain and risk has shuffled us off those sacred, superordinate values — such as a meaningful and contemplative life — for which we were once willing to risk our comfort and survival.[4] Here again we come upon the forgotten spirit of Socrates, whose famous Apology provided the prototype for such sapiential heroism. Even Nietzsche, whose relationship with Socrates was famously acrimonious, deplored this loss of the transcendent: “Man no longer derives man from spirit, from godhead,” he wrote. “We have put him back among the animals.” [5]
This state of misology becomes more intelligible when we understand it through the Jungian tradition, projected as a feature of unconscious religious instincts. “To the tutored eye, religion is often most influential where it is least obvious,” Mark Taylor observed.[6] When a part of our republic conceives itself as the whole, when it becomes monologic rather than dialogic, it creates a prison of perspective, a pathologic dream. As in the state, so with the self; that dream becomes a kind of false eternity, a place where we live in endless relativity, suspended, beholden to a single aspect of our experience like poor Thrasymachus and the souls of Plato’s Cave. When such ideologies arise, we face a Socratic predicament. We can no longer in good conscience move by the river of the flowing crowd, even if it means we are persecuted for it. To do so would be to sink further into despair, to do harm to our soul, to estrange our fundamental relationship with reality. When the Platonic/Augustinian synonymity between “knowing” and “loving” is brought forward, the moral implications of these stakes become clear and exigent.
Recognition of these stakes has provided the precondition for much of the conflict we are witnessing. Despair is not confined to the interior of psychic life. It becomes the mood of reality itself, and inflects everything with the grey life of its character. When it forces us into aporia, our despair demands that we pull our attention out of its moment in time and start wrestling with the eternal. This encounter with oneself is profoundly unsettling, and it is often thrust on us in situations of earthly fatality. Thus COVID became a reminder to many people that they must renew a conscious sense of decision in their lives; limits on lawful freedom awakened existential freedom. This change of spirit is associated with burgeoning religious conscience, and with it the realization that the lawful and the moral don’t always align, that reason and consensus are often at variance. How, then, are we to attain perspective? How are we to decide what we must do?
Contemporary Westerners have often avoided these Socratic dilemmas, if only by our ignorance. Yet it is upon such paradox that people are crucified and reborn. The debate about vaccination became aporetic, in part, because it was a symbolic fulcrum for this rupture, the non-identity between the ethos of society and the imperatives of existential decision, which — for Socrates and Kierkegaard — are religious in nature. We struggle to decide what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God because the categories have become confused in an epoch of spiritual dysphoria. The renegotiation is painful, and it has social consequences that add to our domicide, namely the loss of meaningful relationships, and the dissolution of identity created by those relationships. We are now finding out who our friends and family are, and we are paying a high premium for the knowledge.
For Socrates, fellowship does not simply coddle or console. It compels us to turn a scrutinous eye to those fundamental attitudes that cause us to react in ways that are visceral and instinctive, that project monsters upon the face of our experience. “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand,” W.H. Auden wrote. “They arrange our loves.” Human beings erupt with uncanny combinations of certitude and fervour when we are made to remember our dreadful freedom, and the veiled threat that all experiences carry. The fear of infection is as primordial as fear of the other, and it aggresses many of the restless monsters that have been raised to life by our two years of claustration. In the thrall of these powers, we fail to know one another, to be known by one another. We turn “is” into “ought” without due pause, and thus fail to produce that spirit of disclosure — the logos — that unfolds between two people who perceive their perspectives as incomplete, and inquire after a third. This is why we need Socrates and Kierkegaard, whose pseudonymous irony creates the space for this dawning consciousness to emerge, whose elusive spirit coaxes forth these unseen forces of belief and bids them to reveal themselves.
In this revelation, there remains a hopeful insight: that when despair and aporia are given to proper reflection, it becomes possible to wake up from a pathologic dream. It becomes possible for an involuted self to be touched, and then tutored, by a Socratic movement to the centre, a reawakened erotic drive for the authentic whole, even as it remains unattainable. In the hands of philia sophia, an unwelcome moment of anagnorisis can provoke a more disciplined attention to the truth, not set against the relative, but against the absolute, and therefore characterized by a learned form of ignorance. In order to undertake such a process, it becomes necessary to develop the required humility; we must first learn that nothing we believe is obvious, however much our convictions insist on it.
This humility is easier to come by when we begin to notice the many performative contradictions in our own behaviour. We profess one thing, and live out another. Kierkegaard is perhaps the greatest observer of such contradictions, and humour is often essential for bringing them into distinction. Limited as we are, we may come to see many things as true and yet not adequately true; real, yet not sufficiently real. This is the beginning of the Socratic turn. From this attention to paradox we can develop faithfulness in our relationship toward being. Faith is not a naïve credulity toward expressible beliefs, but a deepening, disclosing relationship with those inexpressible mysteries that precede us, exceed us, and ground our existence. This is most true of those mysteries that reside among the contours of our own reflections.
This dialogic way of being, as Jung once said of the religious, begins with a transformation in human relations. Philia is essential to philia sophia. To this end, Socrates offered himself as a mirror for his interlocutors to begin conversing with themselves. He is, after all, a midwife. He works to educe the Self from within the person, to deliver us unto ourselves, to bring us into consciousness… especially when we are unaware of being asleep.
May his spirit return to us. And for a final word, I return to Kierkegaard:
In the Socratic view each individual is his own center, and the entire world centers in him, because his self-knowledge is a knowledge of God. It was thus Socrates understood himself, and thus he thought that everyone must understand himself, in the light of this understanding interpreting his relationship to each individual, with equal humility and with equal pride. He had the courage and self possession to be sufficient unto himself, but also in his relations to his fellowmen to be merely an occasion, even when dealing with the meanest capacity. How rare is such magnanimity! How rare in a time like ours, when the parson is something more than the clerk, when almost every second person is an authority, while all these distinctions and all these many authorities are mediated in a common madness, a commune naufragium. For while no human being was ever truly an authority for another, or ever helped anyone by posing as such, or was ever able to take his client with him in truth, there is another sort of success that may by such methods be won; for it has never yet been known to fail that one fool, when he goes astray, take several others with him.
~ Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments
[1] See Grimes, “The Pathologos: The Unsuspected Underlying Belief” in Philosophical Counselling and the Unconscious (Raabe, Peter B., ed.)
[2] Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, 110.
[3] See Schindler, Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic.
[4] See Han, The Palliative Society: Pain Today.
[5] Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols.
[6] Taylor, After God, xi.
