Human life is impossible, but it is only a fliction that makes us feel this.
The good is impossible, found nowhere in this world.
Desire is impossible.
It destroys its object.
Lovers cannot be one, nor can narcissists be two, because to desire something is impossible,
we have to desire what is nothing.
Our life is impossibility, absurdity.
Everything we want contradicts the conditions or consequences attached to it.
Every affirmation we put forward involves a contradictory affirmation.
All our feelings are mixed with their opposites.
Contradiction alone is the proof that we are not everything.
Contradiction is our wretchedness, our sense of reality.
For we do not invent our wretchedness, it is true.
Impossibility is the door of the supernatural.
We cannot get it.
It is someone else who opens.
It is necessary to touch impossibility in order to come out of the dream world.
There is no impossibility in dreams, only impotence.
Our father, who art in heaven, there is a sort of humor in that.
He is your father, but just try to go and look for him up there.
We are quite as incapable of rising from the ground as an earthworm.
And how should he, for his part, come to us without descending?
There is no way of imagining a contact between God and man, which is not as unintelligible as the incarnation.
The incarnation explodes this unintelligibility.
It is the most concrete way of representing this impossible descent.
Hence, why should it not be the truth?
[Music]
This is KZSU, Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We are coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[Music]
We have heard her voice.
Actually it was my voice, phonetically speaking, but it was her spiritual voice that we heard in those words.
I just read in English translation.
And during the next hour on entitled opinions, we are going to turn our attention to the woman who wrote them.
Simone Vé, the most important name in modern mysticism and mystical philosophy.
In 1951, Alberca Mucald her, the only great spirit of our time.
T.S. Eliot wrote of her that, I quote, "She was more truly a lover of order and hierarchy than most of those who call themselves conservative."
And more truly a lover of the people than most of those who call themselves socialists.
Did you ever wonder what inspired Samuel Beckett to call his most famous play, "Waiting for Godot," which premiered in 1953?
Try Simone Vé's book published posthumously in 1950 called "A Taunt de Jure in English Waiting for God."
Simone Vé, a philosopher, a mystic, a social activist, and who knows?
Maybe even a cook, but the kind of cook who belongs on entitled opinions.
"Sin On Sonomati Non-Livoljado."
Stay tuned, we're turning our attention today to the woman who graduated first in her class at the Echolnaut Malin 1931, the same year that Simone de Beauvoir came in second.
[Music]
I have with me in the studio my colleague, Inga Pearson, who got her PhD in Italian studies at NYU a few years ago, and who currently teaches in Stanford's freshman program in the humanities that keeps changing its name over the decades.
It used to be called Western Civ, then it was called CIV for cultures, ideas, and values.
Then it was called IOM, or Introduction to the Humanities, and as of last year, it's been called Thinking Matters.
Eventually, they're going to call it "Neuro-Mancer" or something.
Some of the most dynamic and interesting younger scholars at Stanford teaching this program, Inga Pearson, is a case in point.
She is currently writing a book on tragedy and melodrama in mid-century French and Italian culture, and Simone de figures as one of her main authors.
It's a tall order she has today to introduce us to this very eccentric, original, and incomparable thinker, Simone de.
But if anyone is up to the task, it's the person who joins me today, Inga, welcome to the program.
Thank you for having me, Robert.
So I began by quoting a few passages there from Simone Vays book La Pizonta, Le Lagas, or Gravity and Grace, as it's known in English.
I mentioned a few things about her, but a lot of our listeners may know very little or even nothing about this person.
So could you tell us exactly who Simone Vays was and why she's a hugely important figure in 20th century intellectual history?
Well, I'm so glad you began with that passage because it provides a wonderful introduction to her thought, and hopefully we'll return to some of the themes that it evokes.
The difficulty in categorizing her as a thinker is a testament to the complexity of her reflections.
She was trained in philosophy, she received her eggre yesil in 1931 with a thesis on Descartes.
And she's been called one of the greatest French Hellenists of the 20th century, and there were quite a few great ones.
So that's an incredible compliment.
Her essay on the Iliad is often read in classics departments.
She's been championed by the Catholic Church as a mystic and martyr.
T.S. Eliot wrote that she had the genius of a saint.
She was a revolutionary in her youth, a social and political activist throughout her life, and a contributor to the French Resistance.
I think of her as a political theorist in the vein of Hanarent, and that's why I'm interested in her work.
Or she was also a teacher.
So, in summary, she was a radical non-conformist, and I think many later thinkers of the 20th century and philosophers are paying silent tribute to her thought.
Among them, for example, Jojo Agamben wrote his dissertation on her work.
Did he also, I think, was inspired by at least he wrote something on the whole notion of impossibility later in his career,
and it sounds to me very sympathetic, if not derivative of the passage I read at the beginning of our show,
which is from her chapter on the impossible in gravity and grace.
Jojo Batte, I think, is another one who was quite fascinated with her, along with many others.
Silently or not.
Well, that's why I'm really glad we're doing a show on her, because I think she's not as widely discussed or as well known today.
Much of her writing was published posthumously by friends with whom she'd corresponded.
So her most famous works, including gravity and grace and waiting for God, imitations of Christianity among the ancient Greeks,
and the need for roots, were all published after her death.
The essay on the Iliad, which I hope will discuss today, she actually published herself during her lifetime.
And her lifetime spans which years?
So she was born in Paris in 1909, and she died in 1943, so she was only 34 years old when she died.
She came from a well-to-do Jewish family, her father was a doctor.
They were not Orthodox or practicing Jews, the family was agnostic, and she was reared in that philosophy.
She has an older brother who's three years for seniors who's quite a famous mathematician, Auntie Vay.
And they were very close friends growing up.
I suspect there was also some tension between them, since he was recognized as a prodigy very early on.
And she really admired him and loved him, and I think wanted to emulate him as much as possible.
But both of them, I believe, went to the Echolno-Himad in Paris.
He went on to become a very famous mathematician, teaching at the Echolno-Himad as a professor, and founding a school of mathematics.
She, I think, was not one of the very first women to be admitted, but I think the Echolno-Himad started admitting women just a few years before she applied for entry.
That's true. And she was there between 1928 and 1931 when she graduated.
So that was around the same time that Sára and Simone de Beauvoir and Merlot Ponce, all these people were circulating.
And even at that time, I gather that she was extremely politically committed to social issues and was communistic in her sympathies,
unconditionally devoted to the cause of the workers. And was non-conformers, as you say, even among a group of eccentric students in Paris at the time.
She was very unlike any stereotype that belonged to that era.
That's true. I think three adjectives that would describe her even from a very young age, like five years old, are uncompromising, precocious, and eccentric.
So at that time, I think her friends at the Echolno-Himad referred to her as the Martian or the categorical imperative in a skirt.
And her thesis advisor called her the Red Virgin. And I don't think it was an infection, it named me.
I believe she had taken a vow of chastity early on in life, is that correct?
She did. At 16, she decided that that was how she was going to live her life.
It was a very private decision, so I mean, we know about it now, but I don't think she announced it at the time.
But presumably it had little to do with her subsequent conversion to Christianity and her kind of mystical experience.
It was motivated by different considerations than religious ones were.
At that point, I think she was dealing more with an ancient sense of purity.
So I don't even think she'd worked for a year at her first job when she quit, she came back to Paris, and she wanted to work in a metal factory.
She wanted to understand the workers experience, she had become involved with workers in the provinces while teaching.
And she really felt she needed this immersion. That was around 1934.
So this is, of course, a very tumultuous period in Europe, and she partook of all the changes and revolutions and ideas.
So from pacifism to embracing the war cause.
She finally, she went to join, she wanted to join the rebels in Spain.
It wasn't very successful. She burned her foot in the kitchen on some hot oil, and she had to come home.
Then she did participate in the resistance as a writer and a thinker.
She went to Marseille with her family in 1940 after the fall of Paris.
And there again, she had another immersion experience this time with peasants.
She wanted to work in the fields. And she lived in a shack just on the edge in a very acetic way.
And then she left with her family for the states. They fled in '42.
And the only reason she left Europe was because she wanted them to be safe.
So she only spent four months in New York, and then she was already back in London, and she was begging for them to give her some kind of dangerous mission into France.
But she was a frail and sickly woman, a bit clumsy, and also trained as a philosopher.
So they gave her some writing projects instead.
She would have, if she had her way, been on the front lines, she would have been sent on very dangerous missions, whether in Spain or later in France, after the war broke out.
It almost seems as if she would have loved to die a martyr on behalf of a cause, the cause of against fascism or on behalf of the workers.
But she was too frail, as you mentioned, for the organizers to send her into the dangerous situations.
Well, yeah, she wanted to participate shortly with her whole person.
And this is a feature of her thought. She wanted to live as she thought. She wanted her ideas to have consequences upon her actions.
But she was very skeptical of martyrdom. So I'm not sure if she would have wanted to be a martyr.
So, Inga, can we discuss a little bit what makes her such a unique and different, fascinating kind of thinker.
And so when you, when one looks at her biography, and though you're right that she had no intention deliberately to become a martyr, she does.
She seems to have sought out situations of extremity, of privation, in sympathy with the working class or the soldiers on the front.
Right.
And even went to great extremes to, as you say, experience with her whole person, what it meant to be part of the oppressed classes.
And her thinking takes up this ethic of her own personal commitment and behavior in so far as it has a lot to do with championing experiences like that of objection and affliction, and obviously suffering.
What can you say something about, for example, the concept of affliction in her work?
Sure. I think, first of all, I just want to mention that a lot of people say that she's not a systematic thinker that she's inconsistent.
And it's true that the style of her writing is often aphorisms, notes.
So it's very much on experiments in thought and reflection.
And it requires just as much thought experiment on the part of the reader to understand her ideas.
But I think there is something consistent about her work, and that she is interested above all in the intersection between the metaphysical, the self, and affliction, and others.
So, you know, something that might be most interested in the self or in the metaphysical, but she's really interested in how these three things come together, the self, the metaphysical, and the other.
And so one of the ways affliction is central to her understanding and her vision.
So that the fact that in darkness, in the complete, in suffering, in objection, is when we can fully, can know the divine.
So this is when you have lost absolutely everything. She admires Jesus. She admires Job.
These people who lived in very extreme situations or characters.
And the idea is to get to the bottom, to hit rock bottom, to lose everything.
And then to think even God has abandoned you. She loves to repeat that line from the synoptic from Matthew and Mark, which Jesus says, "The last words are, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
So you have to get to that moment and survive it, endure the void.
And that is when the divine will come and take possession of your soul.
So a lot of questions I have for you.
In that regard, you talked about the intersection between the metaphysics, the self, and affliction.
So, and then now you've introduced the notion of the divine.
Was C-1-vei religious? Did she believe in God her whole life long?
Or was God something that did she...
So she, as I mentioned, she grew up in an agnostic family and she had... She was not an atheist, but she had just kind of put the question of God aside as something
unresolvable.
Until 1937, when she visited Italy with her mother and she was in the cathedral in a C-Z, and she something compelled her to kneel, to fall to her knees.
So it was a completely foreign experience. And then about a year later, she was at a Benedictine monastery again with her mother in the
in the War Valley actually. And she experienced, that's when she felt that Christ came and came to her.
So, fundamental to the theory of affliction is the fact that it's not... That this is how we experience the divine.
It's one of two ways. There's affliction and there's beauty. There's affliction, there's beauty and there's compassion.
But that's the only way we can really know God.
And so it's very important. So suffering is central to her theory.
But also she suffered herself. She had terrible migraines. She had been ill her whole life, sickly as a child.
And so the story is that at this Benedictine monastery, she was repeating a poem by George Herbert.
And that's when she felt Christ came to her for the first time.
So you can't go to Christ. He has to come to you.
So is that what you meant by metaphysics? When you say that her metaphysics, self and affliction were all tied together is the metaphysics, a God-centered metaphysics?
Yes. But the supernatural insofar as God is nothing like we are.
So God is not a thing or an object or a person.
So the only way that we, the only experience we can have of God is that void or that nothingness.
So in order to be filled with love, you have to first be empty.
Well, this emptiness, let me, let's discuss a little bit the metaphysics so that we can understand the need to evacuate the self of its particular attachments.
Because I gather that she believed in a God who had to necessarily absent himself or itself from the created world in order to make room for the created world and that the A priori, the fact that the inhabitation of the created world means the inhabitation of a place from which God has withdrawn.
And that therefore, if God, as you say, is not a thing, is not a something, and if he is more on the side of the no thing, then self-effacement, as you were describing it, through suffering, affliction, objection, this, a complete dismantling of the self,
Am I getting it right that you're saying that it's necessary to undergo this dismantling of the self so that this God which is not a thing can be known in his or her weirdly primitive presence?
That's true, because remember, she's coming from not just Christianity, her religion or her metaphysics is eclectic.
So, it's kind of this mixture of the suffering Christ, the passion of Christ which to her was incredibly moving and incredibly central.
And then also a platonic notion of the universe which is divided into light, divine energy, form, and then evil darkness matter on the other.
And also some gnostic elements perhaps of the early Christianity, about the relation between the material world and the spiritual God. Can I read you a quote actually about from waiting for, I don't do, she says God has made it so that when his grace penetrates to the very center of a man and from there illuminates his entire being, this grace will enable him to walk on water without violating the laws of nature.
But when a man turns away from God, he gives himself over to mere gravity.
Afterwards he believes he is willing and choosing, but he is only a thing, a stone falling.
Actually, I think gravity and grace rather than I don't do sounds like you anyway, but I believe it's waiting for you.
So, what is this, I don't want to call it a dichotomy because that's not what it is, but this grace and gravity distinction where we, I take it that when grace penetrates to the very center of a person, then the laws of the physical world, which are also the laws of force by the way, are suspended.
They no longer are supreme and absolute or unconditional.
Well, again, in some ways, very simply, Neoplatonic, but in other ways, the complexity arrives with the Christ element.
So, in order to, our soul is made of some other matter, our soul belongs to the divine.
So, the soul gets trapped in matter, and we are weighed down by the universe.
She says, we need to feel the weight of the universe, and in order to feel the weight of the universe, to understand gravity and its force.
The force it exerts upon us, we have to empty ourselves out.
We have to acknowledge it.
So, we have to acknowledge our wretchedness.
So, not in order to escape from it, but in order to have a thorough experience of it.
Right, and also, but to acknowledge our distance from God.
We aren't going to know God until we can acknowledge the distance, the great distance between us and God.
And she says that this distance is so great so that the love which conquers it is even greater.
It's in a way of exalting the love of God that is capable of penetrating through the thickness of time and space to rescue the soul.
But in order for the soul to rise up, it has to be debased.
That's very Pauline Christian, the transvaluation of all values, that Nietzsche wanted to turn everything back up right side up after Christianity had turned everything upside down.
I like my God far, far away, distant God is a best God for me.
And I believe that one of the things about my version of Christianity is that it keeps God at a safe distance from us.
Because when that distance collapses, bad things tend to happen.
Well, I think of that as a feature of the Old Testament and the Hebrew God is that great distance.
But maybe that's because I was the generation I was re-ordered in.
Well, we've read Genesis in our philosophical reading group, I don't believe that you were part of it by then.
But it's quite astonishing when you read Genesis from start to finish, you find that God is very close, very near, very in the world talking to Adam, he's talking to Abraham, so forth.
And then all of a sudden after one screw up after another, he starts getting more and more remote because he's realizing that this is not going to work unless I just actually am so far away that people can't reach me anymore.
That's where he belongs in my book.
However.
Well, but that's the moment that you describe.
If it comes from Genesis, that's when he leaves creation, he withdraws from creation so that the world can exist.
Right.
That way we can system.
Maybe that freedom, human freedom is predicated on this abstention on his part.
But I'm not sure that Simon Vay was particularly committed the way the, for colleagues in the existentialist circles were committed to notions of human freedom, which would be flattering of human subjectivity and so forth.
Maybe not quite, but there is some existentialist, there is some existentialism in her, in her thought.
I want to just clarify something though because you mentioned Nietzsche and degradation and a lot of the criticisms of the Catholic Church from, from Marx on is this kind of to perpetuate degradation.
Whereas, she makes a very important distinction is that this kind of degradation or debasement, one, it's one's responsibility, it's our responsibility to do this to ourselves.
And that really means to, to acknowledge the existence of suffering and evil because simply because they do exist and to turn that into an experience, a useful experience, an experience of the divine.
If you impose degradation and debasement on others, if you debase others, that is merely transference for her of, of the responsibility of your metaphysical responsibility on to another.
And that's depriving, you know, of course that's not what you're supposed to do.
Would it be fair to say that she was insistent on, on saying that there is not just one law of the universe, namely the law of gravity or the law of force, and that the science of her of the modern time, understands only one law, which is out of force in general.
But that, if I can read a few quotes from her and have you respond to them that would be helpful.
So she writes, "For the past two or three centuries, there is a belief that force is the sole master of all natural phenomena and at the same time that men can and should establish their mutual relations on justice as determined by reason."
This is a patent absurdity, she says, because it is not conceivable that everything in the universe be absolutely subject to the empire of force, but that man can avoid it while he is made of flesh and blood and his thought drifts along with perceptual impressions.
There is only one choice to make, either one must perceive another principle besides force at work in the universe, or one must acknowledge that force is also the sole master of human relations.
So there she's saying that none of us is willing to accept that force is the sole master of human relations because all of us, empirically speaking we can show that most human beings have an innate sense of justice.
And that the human concept of justice does not obey the same laws as force does.
And so she goes on, and the quote here, "If force reigns absolutely justice is absolutely unreal, but it is not."
We know this by experience.
Justice is real at the bottom of men's hearts.
The structure of a human heart is a reality among realities of this universe as real as the trajectory of a planet.
So is her thinking an attempt to come to rally to the cause of this other law that exists inside the heart, that here takes a name of justice but can take other names and is part of this call to self-abassement and self-affacement, one of coming into intimate contact with that part of the self.
Which does not obey the law of force?
So I think if we want to talk about her metaphysics, then force and will are closely related.
And so far as they are energies that can move objects or can turn people into objects and we should have a more complete discussion of force when we talk about the essay on the
reality of the idea. But there are stronger energies or forces that are stronger than force and will.
And one of those is of course grace.
Now there is also a human counterpart to grace, which she sometimes calls attention, which has to do with rootedness and love and compassion.
But I think that the best way to describe it would be to call it faith.
So it is something that it is a kind of passion and I don't mean faith as in the profession of a particular creed because she really never embraced one particular creed.
It is important to say that. She never became a Christian, she was never baptized and she had problems with the Catholic Church as well as the providential design of the universe.
So is that how you understand attention as faith?
As a kind, yes, I think that is one way of the principle.
Yeah, the concept of attention is much more in her vocabulary from what I can tell than that of faith.
It is, but the reason I am using faith is because I think it helps to explain attention and it also helps to explain the relationship between this energy that comes from the human heart and that is the counterpart to grace.
Because by faith I mean something more like the passionate expectation of goodness and a kind of inner strength that has to be exercised, just like muscles are to the body so faith would be to the spirit.
So you have to exercise and train and that is the way she talks about attention.
Well, why do you have to use the word faith when she has a perfectly good word in the word attention?
I just think it helps to explain attention. It gives insight into attention.
I have made that clear that it is not the word she uses.
Well, I know that I am curious about your thinking on this because as...
Well, if you want to know the truth, the way I get faith from in this context is actually from Hannah Arendt.
In her essay, what is freedom?
She talks about maybe another basis for the political, another foundation for the political that would be in opposition to the will and the will to power.
And that would be faith.
So in her, the beginning of Simone's essay, that was Arendt in what is freedom.
And I will get back to it because following that passage where she talks about faith is where she talks about miracles.
And that we can't expect miracles in the political realm.
So if you go to Simone, vase essay on attention, which is in gravity and grace, one of the first things she does is talk about how what faith, what will can do is, you know, you can say she uses this very simple example.
I can will my hand to place my hand flat on the table.
Now, if God or the supernatural or the miraculous or something like my hand or an object that I could move, then I could talk about it in terms of the will.
But it's not. God is totally different.
And so...
Well, so in other words, the expression then going back to... I'm kind of going back and forth between the two texts.
And going back to Aaron's essay on what is freedom, she says that, you know, the will cannot move mountains. But faith can move mountains.
Right. The only...
I mean, in that sense it's something more powerful than the will.
But the issue I have is the relationship between faith and attention in this sense that faith is an attitude which is expected...
Christian tradition, faith is a precondition for knowing God or knowing access to revelation.
Whereas my understanding of attention in Simone Vays analysis is that attention is what can actually open up disclose,
or put you in relation with something that was not known before through faith.
And therefore it does not presuppose, whereas faith presupposes.
Faith presupposes what? The existence of God, the existence of grace, of Christ, or whatever.
I mean, I don't know what a certain point faith does, but I also think of faith as an exercise and as work.
So it's something that goes beyond the will, but it's not just...
Something that falls into your lap.
It has to be exercised, you're supposed to go to mass on Sunday, you're supposed to say prayers, you're supposed to meditate and contemplate.
And all of this is part of what Simone Vays calls attention, but which could also be considered the practice of faith.
Well, I'm asking questions here, in fact, you know that her corpus better than I do is attention...
Because she says the goal of attention when it reaches its apex is faith.
But she also says in certain passages that the goal of attention is this de-creation of the self, of this undoing of the self, and this reduction of the material entrapment under the law of force to the point where it's overcome,
and therefore it has something to do with this dismantling process.
Well, so that's the first... that's the conversion experience, right? That's where the seed is planted.
And on the question of force, since we're talking about force and grace, how does that relate to her famous essay on the Iliad?
Subtitled upon the force.
How does that...
So, this is where she gives us a definition. Force is properly speaking that which transforms anything subjected to it into a thing.
And so when it is... when force is applied in the extreme, it can turn a human being into a cadaver.
Force... she gives these wonderful examples of talking about Cassandra and Andramaka, taken a spoil at the end of the Trojan War and forced into concubine engine.
She imagines that the condition of being a thing with a soul led to heartbreak in a very literal way.
And I'm quoting from her to a death that extended through life, a life that was frozen long before it was suppressed.
And this is where she talks about to lose more than a slave is impossible for a slave loses his whole inner life.
The terrible thing about forces is that it can destroy your interiority.
And in the essay, she compares soldiers and slaves.
She's very impressed with Homer as being an exception among poets.
Even among not just ancient poets, but modern poets where she says that when you read the Iliad, you cannot tell what side the author of that poem is on.
Because the Trojans and the Iliad and the Iliad, it's not impartiality. It's this understanding of what you were talking about, that all who are subject to the law of force belong to the same condition of reification and petrification.
And whether you're a victor or a victor or the vanquished, we're all losers from Homer's point of view.
Am I over simplifying too much?
No, I think that there are two, let's say, two takeaways from this essay.
And one is the radical equality of human suffering.
And that is directly related to balance and equilibrium.
And the other is the miracle of compassion or the moment of grace.
So let's talk first about balance and equilibrium and this kind of radical equality, which is part of, as you suggest, what you're describing is a tragic vision of the world as opposed to a melodramatic vision.
Melodrama reinforces the status quo.
So you've got good guys and bad guys, a very clear black and white vision of the universe.
Any death or violence is justified generally, right out of revenge.
The bad guy gets killed.
In tragedy, the victim and the perpetrator are confused.
So the tragic hero is innocent and guilty at the same time.
So, and a tragic vision, content focuses on the problematic aspects, the most conflicted parts of reality.
It kind of blurs the line between agency and affect good and evil.
Everything's very confusing and ambiguous.
For her, Homer's Iliad is a paragon of the tragic, no?
She did not have much love or fondness for the Virgil's and Nia, because it's a different kind.
She read it as a triumphelistic epic.
Would you say that for Siobhan Vay, the Nia is more melodramatic in this genre?
Well, I think that that's why she considers it a poor imitation of the Iliad.
So the examples or what exemplary of this tragic vision that she admires,
are the Iliad.
There's really only the Iliad and the Gospels.
So, occasionally, throughout her work, she mentions tragedy.
So, Regine's fed resident, important one for her.
Much more, it's much far superior to Andromeda, to his play in Jamaica.
She also mentions King Lear as a poem or a tragedy about gravity.
So, in her, I mean, what she probably wouldn't agree with in the Iliad is the fact that Odysseus is vilified
and Anias is pious Anias.
He's presented as a better man, so to speak, whereas you don't have that distinction with Hector and Achilles.
And the other problem with the Iliad is Anias' mandate.
He is justified in his conquest of the Italian peninsula.
So, we're going to talk about the other moment, the grace moment in the Iliad poem.
But first, let's go back to what we were saying earlier in the show about intensity and intensification.
Is it the case that force intoxicates its own victims?
Right, so this is another feature of that question of radical equality and then equilibrium.
So, the force crushes the victim, but it intoxicates the one in possession of force.
And in thinking that he is invincible, he becomes a ferocious beast who is destined to destroy himself.
So, Hector dies first, but Achilles is going to die not too long after him.
But what she sees happening in this relationship is that war is a seesaw, this idea that once if you become too powerful,
you will eventually destroy yourself, you'll eventually self-destruct because no one can hold force completely.
Right, there's the wheel of fortune, you're not always going to be the strong one.
And you can't be forever strong in a finite body.
And she said that this notion of equilibrium has vanished from western thought.
So, one of the problems with force and why the battlefield is such a good example is that it destroys that moment of reflection.
That we would need in order to see the human substance before us.
So, the soldier wielding his sword is thinking only of necessity, right, of escaping violence and death.
And so he can't see the human substance that's the term she uses in front of him.
When Hector, I'm sorry, when Priyam and Achilles meet, remember Priyam is the king of Troy.
Achilles has killed Hector.
This is the last book of the Iliad.
And he is now dragging his body around.
So, this is an example, another feature of tragedy is what Aristotle would call shameful violence.
Desecrating a body, preventing burial is where the worst possible things that could happen in the ancient world.
And Priyam goes to the enemy camp to supplicate Achilles for his son's body back.
So, thinking of all the difficulties involved here, Priyam goes alone.
He ends up having a god help him because it's such a dangerous expedition for an old man who has now lost absolutely everything.
He's lost his kingdom, all his children are dead, or they will be soon, and he's lost his last hope, which was Hector.
And he kneels on the floor and he clasps Achilles' knees when he gets into the tent.
And Achilles, at first kicks him away.
So, he wants nothing to do with him.
You have to ruin my life.
I'm going to ruin yours.
And then there's this moment.
Priyam evokes his father, Achilles' father, and they both start mourning.
So there's this catharsis, and then all of a sudden they see one another for the first time.
So each recognizes the beauty and the other, and there's even some implication that they see God in each other.
Said Achilles looks like a god, and Priyam has the face of a god, something like that.
And so this is--and Achilles has compassion for Priyam, and he grants--he gives him the body.
So, the fact for a Simanbei, this would be just a moment of grace, because it's something, it's a flash.
It's a moment in time.
It cannot endure.
There's everything that's dangerous about this meeting.
Besides Priyam being in the enemy camp, if Agamemnon found out there's no way he'd let Priyam leave alive.
Achilles is afraid of his own wrath.
He takes several measures to protect himself and Priyam from his own wrath.
He doesn't let Priyam see him prepare the body.
He makes Priyam sleep in another room.
So that is what, first Simanbei, is miraculous about this encounter.
Compassion is as miraculous as walking on water, because compassion requires that the weak man,
not that the weak man, maintain his dignity and not become petrified or lose heart,
and it requires that this strong man acknowledge his weakness.
So, Achilles has to acknowledge his father, his father's mourning, his own imminent demise.
So, here we go back to what you were saying about the intersection between metaphysics, self, and affliction.
Does the realization on the metaphysical plane that force the law of force is a dehumanizing law,
or it's one that ratifies the human, and ultimately in its extreme form, petrifies and turns the person into a cadaver.
He turns his heart to stone, right?
He turns his heart to stone, petrification.
So, does this realization of the fundamental humanity of the other, even my enemy other,
cash out as an ethics of compassion in Simanbei's thinking, systematic, consistent thinking, as you mentioned earlier?
Can you repeat the fundamental?
So, is compassion the ethical consequence of a realization that
the law of force is one that dehumanizes the soul?
And to come to that realization, perhaps through the process that we've talked about of self-effacement and de-objection and so forth,
is, do we inevitably come to the obligation to have compassion?
Or what the Christian tradition would call neighborly love?
Well, compassion rehumanizes us, right?
But it's fairly difficult.
I mean, when you think about it, compassion is a rare phenomenon.
I mean, you have to be in the trenches with someone.
You have to love someone completely to experience compassion.
Is compassion a word that she uses for this?
Yes.
So, in compassion, she talks about pathos, so the idea of suffering or co-suffering, which is also the term that Aaron uses for compassion.
But it's also about modification.
So, empathy or compassion, let's just call them the same thing.
I don't think they're exactly the same.
I think you can have empathy for characters, whereas you would only have compassion for living beings.
But either way, it's to partake of the consciousness of another.
So, in the way, going back to her definition of the self, the self is nothing more than a point of view,
a perspective on the universe.
So, if I am, and this is where what she shares with maybe existentialism or maybe it'd be better to say phenomenology.
So, I have, I am one point of view.
I embody one point of view.
Whereas, ten paces away from me, there is another who embodies a point of view, which is equal to mine, which is different and separate, but equal.
And so, once I can acknowledge that the other is equal to me, right, in so far as that we are nothing more than a perspective in space and time, or a point in space and time.
I mean, that seems fundamental to a compared to the experience of compassion.
If you don't see the other as yourself, or as it's not seeing the other as yourself.
Okay, so it's not like suffering for a child or a twin.
It's suffering seeing someone who is not yourself and still partaking of their, and still accepting their existence.
Hannah Arat came, started from the same premise and came to a different conclusion.
Hannah Arat believed in plurality that our social world, our political world is constituted by a plurality, namely the plurality of citizens.
Each citizen has his own opinions entitled or not entitled.
They have their opinions, and that the whole role of the public sphere is to be a place where we mediate.
And exchange through conversation and deliberation and debate our opinions.
Hannah Arat, compassion or what you call pity, was something that she thought had no political significance whatsoever, because it is feckless in the political sphere.
Whereas the actual exchange of ideas or the ability to have a forum in which each citizen is free to state his or her own point of view is what constitutes the kind of generative, positive political plurality that makes for these provisional human happiness on earth.
Well, first of all, for Aaron, pity and compassion are not the same thing, and she says they may not even be related.
They may not be related to the truth.
So, it's a little to do with her political vision of what takes place in the public sphere, where you have a plurality of different perspectives that actually have to learn the language of mediation, which is in some sense of the language of reason, it's the logos.
As long as I'm continuing the conversation with my fellow man, fellow woman, then I am involved in the maintenance of a political sphere where at least my voice is heard.
Right, but I don't think that Aaron would be opposed, I think that Aaron might very well acknowledge the formative experience of compassion, something that you could bring into the public sphere.
This is a feature of interaction, well, I don't know if we could say it's not a feature of interaction in the public sphere, but partaking or having an alternate experience or partaking of the consciousness of another or acknowledging another's being in the world.
It seems to me fundamental to a sane or healthy discourse in the public sphere.
On the other hand, Simone Vay, I don't think that she would disagree with Aaron either. It's just that her interests are in the metaphysical.
So, she also talks about the collectivity and thought for her is also dynamic, can't become fixed in ideologies.
Aaron talks about the public sphere, it's a realm of negotiation and compromise where politics are dynamic, they're constantly changing.
They're both opposed to ideology and an ossification.
But Simone Vay is more interested in, I don't think Aaron is interested in the metaphysical at all.
Is Hannah Aaron more interested in remaining in this world, whereas Simone Vay is looking for an exit from it? Would that be overstating the case?
It's difficult, they're both departing from the same civilization. They both have a great fondness for ancient Greece.
And that's where, for Simone Vay, Greece is rooted in the supernatural. God is the, she quotes Plato's laws. God is the measure of all things.
And if we have this basic foundation, then we're more likely to have a successful exchange in the collective.
This brings us to the all-important book that Simone Vay wrote called The Need for Roots in English, Al-Hacimain French, where she addresses precisely this need to be rooted in the supernatural.
Since our show is drawing to an end, can you say something about this book of Simone Vay's called The Need for Roots?
Al-Hacimain is the solution she proposes to the problem of the social beast. And again, she's working from Plato. The social beast is public opinion. It's a system of values that is not necessarily that could be but is not necessarily rooted in the truth.
And her solution is to look for that root in the truth, in love, in God, in the supernatural. And she says that this may sound controversial for 21st century audience, but she says if we don't educate our children in God.
And by God, I think we should also remember her idea of God is not this Christian father sitting in heaven, but something akin to the truth or the supernatural, something transcendent, a system of values that transcends what we can come up with here in the world.
And if we don't educate our children in that search, or that search for truth, then they're going to embrace false gods. They're going to embrace ideologies, totalitarian ideologies, because they're going to look for that kind of total vision that God as the measure of all things quoting from Plato's laws, supplies.
Yes, but I understand her also to be advocating at the same time as rootedness in the supernatural or in some kind of transcendence and truth. The necessity to be rooted also in the past of a tradition of the culture and that she's recommending that there be special care taken to maintain continuity with certain elements of the secular cultural past.
So that the citizens of the nation would not be rootless in that respect because that kind of severing of bonds with the past, not only severing the bonds with the supernatural, can equally lead to the adoption of false gods.
Right, that's true. She's also a very practical thinker, so she does talk about the role of tradition, the role of culture, the role of the past of literature, because I think for her all these things are connected. It's through literature, it's through traditions and rituals that we learn about, we gain entrance to the supernatural, that we know how to describe it even or to talk about it.
And so for her it's all aspects not becoming alienated from one's work or the patch of earth on which one resides, right?
So she talks about the spirituality of work, there should be a relationship wherein we feel connected to what we're doing.
It's strange that there's a recommendation for this kind of connectedness when one of her motto is "Ditashi vu", no? To detach yourself.
So on the one hand she calls for detachment and on the other she's calling for re-attachment, something.
So just to conclude I'm going to give you the last word, but let me tell you where I don't think, how to write and see one way come together on this issue when it comes to truth, because how to write speaks about Plato as the exactly, he's the philosopher who was obsessed with truth, but he was no Socrates.
He was more committed to the realm of opinion. Opinion is a bad word for Plato, because opinion is what his fellow Athenians were trafficking in, and they led to the death and execution of his beloved master Socrates.
And Hannah Arendt's interpretation of what happens with Plato and the turn away from the police of the city, and establishing an academy on the margins outside of the walls of Athens is that philosophy now becomes detached in a bad way from the public sphere.
And with its obsession with truth and establishing absolute norms for ethical and political behavior, it actually militates against the plurality and diversity of opinions, and their negotiations within the political context, and she finds that that is where things take a bad turn rather than a good turn.
Well, right, I mean, that's why Arendt insists on being a political theorist and not a philosopher, she thinks that the philosopher is not detached, he's not engaging in the world. I mean, is that where your, that's the point where Socrates is engaged.
So, well, I mean, if you look at Simone Vays' life, she is much more of a Socrates than a Plato. But what she, so she engaged in the public life with strong platonic convictions of absolute truth and absolute norms.
But I don't think that she expected these things could be achieved in the world. I mean, she was also a very, like I said, a very practical thinker.
So, she believed in a plurality, but that plurality is not really where the truth resides, the truth resides somewhere outside of this world.
Well, it's true, but she thought that this world, you know, what we know in this world is suffering. That is our key to the truth.
So, she really wanted to experience that. She wanted to experience the world as completely and intensely as possible.
Well, maybe that's why T.S. Eliot said of her that she, she has the genius of the saint.
The genius of a saint.
The genius of a saint. Those are two categories. Genius and a saint that don't apply to everyone's soul.
But if you think about her, she's writing a report, remember on France, in the thick of, you know, at the height of the war.
She's talking about workers, she goes to work in a factory, the Renault factory, and then she writes about oppression. She goes to work in the fields, and then she writes this whole portion of on the peasant life.
But she knows from experience. So, I can't, I don't think we can say that she's divorced from the world. I think she's closer to a political theorist and a Socrates than the loss of her king.
Well said, we've been speaking with Inga Pearson, who teaches here at Stanford in the height.
Now known as Thinking Matters program. I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for listening, and thanks for coming on Inga.
Thank you for having me again.
[Music]
I got too much money. I ain't got too much sense. Long ago, I had a dream. But that's long when I go to pants.
My father was a blind man. My brother was a fool. My mother told me, God is love, but hatred makes lose.
Teach me to fly, so I shall drag my feet in the sun. Give me the sky. I won't take no world in my mind.
[Music]