On Moral Weight

an open letter

[Image: Orpheus, attributed to Hugues Jean François Paul Duqueylard, c. 1800, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.]

First: welcome, all new readers! What a joy that we keep meeting. Your time is precious to me, and I don’t take your attention for granted, so let’s pick up right where we left off.

Before New Year’s, I’d finally managed to respond to a longtime correspondent. A couple of days ago, he got back to me in a much more timely fashion. Here, I do my best to keep the thread going. Don’t worry if you don’t have time now to go all the way to the beginning of our exchange; you can pick up here and backfill later.

[Fair warning: what follows is a long read. Long long long. But let this reflect the joy of real dialogue! Clarifying and sharpening each other’s thoughts! I hope you experience this as it is meant: not as droning on and on, but as an expression of exuberant interest in a shared pursuit of truth.]

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Dear Mark,

Reality is funny, and synchronicity is still funnier. Precisely at the moment when I sat listening to rain on the skylights and typing away at a fuller response to your questions on seeing in literature (and in life), in came your latest. I am now surer of where you stand, which is all to the good. I am also well corrected by your clarification that you are not opposing contemplative realism so much as critiquing it, running your fingers over the fabric and calling attention to any spot where you feel loose threads.

Still, in the thread-by-thread approach I can’t help but continue to sense a bit of that flattening and unraveling tendency so characteristic of almost all online conversations, with no matter how much good will they are engaged. This flattening, which I’ve brought up before and which I see as an affliction we share in common, something being imposed on us, as much as we’re also participating in it, prevails in conversation anytime we’re seeking what we think of as “objective” knowledge.

“Objective” and “subjective,” terms I have been throwing around here pretty hard, seem to me now not to mean all that terribly much in point of fact. Just because folks like us have worked hard with language to try to invest meaning in a distinction, just because it has gained widespread acceptance, that does not mean that the distinction is a real one. Earlier times knew nothing of it. Knowledge was grasp of truth, and truth was the adequation of the mind to reality. And we can pick holes in every term in that line and still have to admit that we are doing the picking with what we must irreducibly call minds, that we are doing it in an effort to get closer to something that exists outside us and that we perceive as worth chasing after (reality), and that we hope all our effort will sooner or later land us closer to that thing (adequation).

Still, we will stubbornly cling to the idea that “knowledge” of a thing consists of dictionary definitions of that thing, repeatable formulae about the thing, concrete examples of the thing that even a seventh-grader can grasp. This is what I mean by a flattening. And I’m sure I’m contributing to the flattening myself, in trying to iron out precisely what’s meant by various phrases which seem nevertheless continually to provide us both with fresh cause for reflection and wonder. But more on this in a moment.  

First let me clarify that I too am finished with, as in completely over and ready to discard, the kind of declinist narrative about art which you say you see implicit in Pieper’s words about the loss of ability to see. On the contrary: that contemplative realism exists at all involves a statement that we are seeing, not aesthetic decline, but a flourishing and a flowering forth of creative and clarifying possibility.

True, we also live in dire times. I’ll accept your assessment that most of human history has consisted of dire times, though there’s room to debate about the proportion of gold to dross in each age. And in these dire times, we walk among no shortage of folks who want to make a hero’s journey of the claim that “beauty will save the world:” who might seem to say that the main and most relevant thing we are seeing in common life is a deeply desperate state of affairs, a yawning pit or gravity-well, into which a few select art-monsters must jump as rescuers, first tying ropes around themselves to ensure they (we) can still emerge carrying the wounded. This rescue scenario would seem to reflect more your own position, rather than mine or Pieper’s, when you state that cultural mores have been so skewed by popular narratives misplacing moral weight that therefore it is necessary to tell stories that recalibrate our ability to sense and to support that weight accurately—not by eye, but by feel.

But perhaps I have hold of the wrong part of the elephant, so to speak. If metaphors about vision appeal to my theological-aesthetical commitments more than other kinds of language, I will still recall that Orpheus can only ever rescue Eurydice from the underworld if he consents not to turn around to look whether she is following—and that he always, disastrously, turns around to look.

So to start where we often find ourselves together, in the question of genre: Quite a lot of the contemporary literature I read—and yes, if this is not obvious from context, I respect and appreciate and celebrate contemporary literature across a variety of genres, including various nonrealistic genres—is, whatever its surface motives, deeply driven by an effort to explore and navigate the nature of the real. To lift many objects, both fragile and solid, and test them for a sense of their value: What does this particular thing weigh in the scale of experience—this relationship, this discipline, this endeavor? How does it relate to things and people similar to it, in proximity to it, much farther away?

At the same time, quite a lot of this contemporary literature (not by any means all of it) is nevertheless also grounded in a position with which I find myself in disagreement, a kind of pure perspectivalism which might be voiced as follows—e.g.: How can anyone, ever, lay claim to the kind of wide-angle lens you seem to be looking for in life? All we can know about the human experience is what individuals report to us from within their own sense of “felt life.” Yet no sum total of effort in cobbling or quilting those various individualisms together can ever amount to anything like a universally valid report. We simply have to accept (runs this line of thought: remember, I am voicing a position I do not hold) that every human claim to knowledge is radically limited and bounded by the embodied reality of the knower. All claims to a commonality of spirit that transcends these bounds can only ever amount to an act of unwanted force, one that seeks to render likeness between persons who in truth are irreducibly unlike and incommensurable.

It's possible (I think) to arrive at an extreme edge of this perspectivalist view, where we could end up feeling that humans can never fully share any common understanding of experience, that what would seem to be a commonly held spiritual nature is not in fact so, and that anyone who claims to speak outside strict bounds of personal perception or, at most, bounds of category-belonging, commits an act of violent imposition. Speech, including written speech, of any kind whatever and from any source, can on this view only ever express two things: one, personal witness; the other, the will to power. The more actual power held by the speaker, the more suspect and compromised the nature of the speech act; if any widely valid truth exists at all, so runs the claim, then that truth’s accessibility is in inverse proportion to its speaker’s level of cultural enfranchisement. If this slough of permanent self-enclosure and irresolvable alienation seems as sad, airless, and shattered as the state of an astronaut stranded outside her ship with a cracked visor, as desperate as the case of a soul slipping back to the underworld because her husband lacked custody of the eyes: that is just too bad, on this view, because that is just the way things are.

Let’s term this first extreme, for ease of reference, the subjectivist position. The other end of the spectrum, wildly different in its perceptions and characteristics, but equally hegemonic in its certainty about the way things are. This objection, for the sake of parallelism, I’ll call objectivist. For the subjectivist, raw experience is truth; for the objectivist, experience is only the raw material of truth, which does not exist in itself until some consciousness constructs it. Objectivism, it seems to me, is neatly expressed—whether you meant it to be so or not—in your assertion that “meaning precedes vision.” That is as much as to say that we see exactly and only what our previous experience has prepared us to expect to see. Certain narratives within our heads preexist our intake of certain stimuli (never mind how the narratives themselves arrived there, or what role our earliest stimuli had in shaping and helping us to internalize them). These narratives in turn cause us to lend value to certain stimuli while we devalue, discount, or ignore others (never mind that our existing narratives might cause us to lend erroneous value to certain stimuli or blameworthily lead us to devalue, discount, or ignore others).

Once we are sure we have the correct narrative (and such certainty seems easy enough to attain, once we discount the multiplicity of conflicting and incommensurable perspectives, all of which may place at least some claim to consider themselves valid), to “correctly direct our attention” becomes a matter of great simplicity. (Are we laughing yet? Is it really so easy to “correctly direct our attention”—any easier than to “store up a fullness of perception”? Let’s acknowledge that these are desiderata, not claims to full achievement. They are aspirational, which is as much as to say, easy to mock. But let’s not laugh at the aspiring, unless and until we are thereby laughing at ourselves.)

But to return to our spectrum of positions on human ways of knowing: If the subjectivist says, “The pure singularity of my individual vision is the source of truth,” the objectivist says, “The narrative and/or conceptual construction I place upon the visible is the source of truth.” Perhaps you can see why, historically, objectivisms tend to devolve and collapse into subjectivisms. Both positions are essentially relativist. Both locate the source of truth within the perceiver rather than within that which is perceived. And if the source of truth is only to be found within our own perception, then it appears we are essentially as gods, justified in doing whatever we so choose.

Yet—and I expect you and I are on the same page about what follows here—when we set out to do whatever we so choose, experience teaches us that perception by itself is not enough. Things clap back at us. We find, too late, that we are not gods: not omnipotent, not omniscient, not justified in at least some of our choices and desires. Having set out to express and enforce what we supposed to be our own glorious and righteous justice, we have only rather clumsily exposed our tendency to infringe on others’ fair claims to our respect and patience. We have caused needless sorrow to those who freely offered us their love and might have been within their rights to expect better treatment. We have self-destructively obstructed our own progress toward maturity. Maybe we have done all of the above, all at once.

So pain—if we are lucky enough to be working from stable ground in the first place—teaches us our errors. We can then return to the workaday world sobered and chastened, ready to see and judge a bit differently than we did before. If we are lucky.

But sometimes we are unlucky. Sometimes pain does not teach any lessons at all. Sometimes pain is just pain. Sometimes it traps us within itself, in a place from which we can see no apparent exit. This is where rescue-metaphors about the saving potential of beauty have their best application. When people have fallen into this kind of misfortune, when they lie broken in the dark, it is of no use for those of us fortunate enough to remain relatively whole in mind and body, standing outside the prison in the sunlight, to tell those trapped inside to stand up and open their eyes. We need to take up lights, go inside, and lift them. We need to bear for them, with them, and perhaps for a time instead of them, the weights—moral and literal—that we cannot with any justice place upon them in their present state.

To do this with any sensitivity, we need aspire neither to subjectivism (the only possible truth for the prisoner is the darkness) nor to objectivism (the only possible truth is that which the bearer of light brings into the cave), but rather to a layered and complex intrinsicism, an acknowledgment of multiplicitous yet ultimately unified truth rooted in realities both within us and beyond us. Intrinsicism acknowledges the existence of value both in created things themselves and in our perceptions about these things. It is not incompatible with healthy doses of epistemic modesty: There are real things besides me in this cave, things of which I, though carrying my torch, still know little or nothing. I need to listen to those around me and to be careful where I step, lest I witlessly cause further pain without need. If I look too long or too directly into the flame I bear, I may only thereby blind myself, rendering me of no help in any situation where the subtlety of night-vision is required. What I do not know can hurt me. What I do not know can hurt innocent others, who deserve better treatment at my hands.

The reason for bringing up the epistemic question, with all its many-headed difficulties, is to complicate the idea that it’s somehow just a terribly simple thing to “lend moral weight” to matters in narrative, let alone to lend them the moral weight they have in and of themselves. The very idea that things have moral weight in and of themselves is either inherently true, or it is a culturally imposed narrative. Things can either be inherently true, or they can be purely culturally imposed narratives, but not both, not in the same sense at the same time. To many, the concept of moral weight itself may appear to be nothing more than the construction of a hegemonic will to power, as prone to be broken down as to be built up. If it’s truly “stories all the way down,” how can we prove that we haven’t simply made up all the stories to serve our own preferences and interests?

Still, when we bracket all that and enter into the state of keen attention that we also hope to induce in our readers, these questions do temporarily fall to one side. We become, as Caroline Gordon says, like “a three-years’ child”—or a thirteen-years’ one—having shed our habitual skepticism and prepared ourselves to enjoy what feels like, though it is not, a first-order experience.

But when we push harder on this phenomenon, when we begin to pull some of the threads of its fabric, we will notice how easily the whole artifice of fiction can come apart: how little change outside of itself, by itself, a single story is likely to effect. Yes, people may choose to let themselves fall temporarily under the sway of a story. As artists we hope to induce them to do so with delight—with Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” with immersion in our little tankful of subcreation, all just as you describe it. But in the end, people don’t have to do this, in the way that all healthy and mature people capable of the task ultimately do have to face the lived reality of every day. When it comes to story, they can opt out. They can shut their eyes and cover their ears. When it comes to taking up the thread of survival, they, we, do not have that luxury.

This is why, personally, I prefer to work in the realistic mode. It’s not because this mode is somehow better or more immersive or more transporting than any number of fantasies or surrealisms. Realism carries some aesthetic disadvantages in these regards, as you’ve clearly noticed. But realism, the mimesis of the fabric of experience, also more closely approximates how we relate to the real stories we live inside. And these real stories in turn always irreducibly affect the way we receive all fictional stories, realistic or not, which we choose to enter into. The real stories we live inside affect not only our ability to choose but even our understanding of whether or not we have choice.

An example: Increasingly, people—and especially younger people—have come these days to disbelieve in free will. The ascendant feeling in the air is determinist: that we’re all merely driven along by forces we didn’t choose and don’t control, whether we recognize it or not, and that if we believe otherwise we are the victims of “false consciousness.” This is to say that a phenomenon which you and I, Mark, experience as very close to and almost constitutive of the ground of our being is, to many others, not part of their perceptual framework at all. There are plenty of people ready to say that the only reason it is possible even to have this perception of possessing free will, a perception which they consider illusory, is because of late capitalism or cultural hegemony or—pick your flavor-of-the-week, all-explanatory concept. This too is a kind of story, a story that many find compelling because of pure experiential stimulus. Vision, here, has preceded meaning. A narrative has been adopted, not because it made for a full and robust accounting of the widest swath of lived experience that could be learned about, but because it seemed to fit exactly and only those facts which had first been judged “objective.” (Judged, I’ll grant you, on account of having first heard and accepted a certain story.)

Meanwhile the ability to tell a compelling story remains dependent, not on the strength with which an author holds conceptual judgments or other external frameworks, but on the believability with which the author can render a perceptual world present to the reader. And what constitutes the believability of a fictional rendering, in turn, is a function of loads of factors—not just factors within the writer, affecting what winds up on the page, but factors in his or her audience, which audience, these days, is likely to be a small subset indeed of his or her wider culture. We cannot even speak here of a single, monolithic “culture,” because everyone today inhabits not just one monoculture (increasingly, the Internet represents this monoculture) but an overlapping and coinhering set of cultural microclimates, which will positively influence both writer and audience in some ways and inspire their often-legitimate resistance in others.

In light of all this, it almost doesn’t matter how or whether we solve the chicken-and-egg problem of whether meaning precedes vision or vision precedes meaning. The problem is too complex to do justice in these tidy formulaic expressions. But if we can at minimum believe in free will, to say nothing of the other unseen spiritual entities in which it may seem from one point of view just as easy to disbelieve as to believe,¹ then it matters tremendously what we choose to continue to train our attention upon, and it matters how we choose to talk to ourselves about that choice. Most of all, it matters whether or not the spiritual things some of our stories might engage with are actually there to be chosen, focused on, and talked about. There seems little point in any of this if they are not.

You’re right to pick up on stories, narrative constructions, as key to how we attain understanding of ourselves and of our world. Yet how do we differentiate a story that constitutes mere entertainment, diversion, from a story whose truth and validity transcend the story’s own bounds, from a story that has some apparent explanatory power but that in reality is meretricious? How shall we speak with any reliability when it seems the value of speech itself is under question? How shall we avoid falling into the trap of indifferentism—the trap that says it does not matter what kind of story you tell yourself, all possible stories are equally valid and true, it simply matters that you tell some kind of story or other (that you hold some thing or other, n’importe quoi, to be of worth or value)?

If we accept the split between fact and value (objective and subjective) at all, we will find value itself dissolving in our hands. And soon enough, fact follows it. We can see this happening all around us. It can come to seem that if we hold things true only because we first received the means of thus holding them through culture, then any belief no matter how empirically verifiable can be with perfect ease invalidated, relativized, discounted by the claims of other cultures (sources of “alternative facts”) that believe, that “value,” in a contradictory manner. How shall we respond?

And if there is truly no reason why we should look to leave this unstable ground, no reason why we should even view it as holding traps for us rather than merely accept it as the human condition, then why do we still hold to a life-defining story that many consider to have been fully discredited and whose supposed adherents in the present day frequently reveal themselves to be all too discreditable? If the antidote to the wrong story is the right story, how will we know if and when we have the “right” story? Where will we find reliable witness? What sources, if any, can we trust?

I have my thoughts on these questions, but I am interested in yours. It seems to me that these are not matters where we can afford to rest disengaged. If we believe in the existence of truth, and if we are realists enough to understand that we have only so far caught so much as its faintest scent as we follow its trail, then we also need to be real about pursuing truth, not shrug our shoulders or play off our earnestness because it seems so uncool to care. In that light, to admit that a blindness commonly prevails among people today (we are people today!) is to say that people are deprived of something they, we, need and that ought to be theirs—ought to be ours. That is neither to be negatively pessimistic about, nor haughtily condescending toward, our shared plight. It is to say that we have all, all of us together, missed out to some extent on something it would better serve us to have.

We all need more truth than we have, no matter how much we have. I am not exempt from the implications of that statement just because I happen to have the good fortune to be able to make the statement. If we are both part of a group traveling toward the same destination in separate cars, and I happen to spot a landmark along the path to our shared destination first, is it condescending if I call you and sound excited to tell you that I caught a glimpse of a thing we were both looking for? Is it pessimistic?

Reality is irreducibly complex. In narrative accounts that acknowledge the existence of varying possible, believable perspectives—that is, in polyphonic stories—writers can honor that complexity without losing sight of the fact that, beyond all these seeming contradictions that experience brings, it is also reasonable for human beings to sense and perceive and accept a higher ground upon which at least some of these contradictions can be resolved. But this is the kind of problem that cannot be solved within the plane of its conception. We have to get under the skin of multiplicitous, constantly shifting story—yours, mine, and everyone’s—to see what else might be really present within and beyond it.

1. Your answer to the question how spiritual things get themselves depicted in an idiom that most readily deals with sensory surfaces is worth engaging but really requires its own whole separate essay. I hope to take that on one of these days.