Two weeks ago, another deadline passed, and nothing happened. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland remains a member of the European Union. For the third time this year my country failed in the task it has set itself. We will try again next January. In the meantime, we will have a general election. One of my American friends reminds me of some lines from a famous song from the late seventies: “You can check out any time you like/ But you can never leave.” Hotel Brussels doesn’t quite capture the glamour associated with the original lyrics, but the message of the song continues to resonate: wanting is not the same as getting.
I do not plan to write about the tedious English obsession with its relationship to the European Union, but rather about the conflict between wanting and getting, or more precisely about the conflict between wanting something – perhaps personal, perhaps political – to come to pass and the struggle involved in achieving it. When we stake our happiness on a future state of the world that is not fully within our power to bring to fruition, then we risk a permanent state of unhappiness. We can be both hopeful and doubtful about the future; we might look forward eagerly, but also with trepidation. This conflict between our desires and our expectations can lead us to experience pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.
I had been thinking about this theme, and how I might write about it, when I read Peter’s most recent post: The Missing Tapes. Like Peter, I had enjoyed the reviews in the NYRB of The Invention of Time and The Capital. And like Peter, I am a fan of Musil’s great novel, The Man Without Qualities. By coincidence I have just finished re-reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, another literary masterpiece that looks back with the benefit of hindsight at the delusions of European society in the years immediately preceding the Great War. One of Mann’s characters – Lodovico Settembrini – is a great optimist, a believer in progress, an active participant (albeit in slightly ludicrous ways) in the great quest to make society more rational and more humane. He is a paragon of the enlightened culture and society in which he believes. But, as Mann makes clear, in common with all the other residents of the mountain sanitorium where the novel is set, he is sick; he too will die – prematurely – of his infection. Settembrini is a man who believes in a better future but who also knows that he will not live to see it come to pass.
Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, five years after The Magic Mountain was published (although, bizarrely, his Nobel citation explained that the award was made principally for his earlier novel, Buddenbrooks, which is less overtly philosophical in character). Another recipient of the Prize – awarded in 1915, during the Great War – was the French author Romain Rolland, whose interests ranged widely from art history, Indian philosophy, socialist politics and pacifism. It was Rolland who coined the phrase I used earlier: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Although the saying has often been attributed to Gramsci, I suspect that he read it first in Rolland. Gandhi, who visited Rolland on one of his trips to Europe, also borrowed and made use of the saying.
It is easy to understand why the leaders of radical social movements would find solace in the idea that we can be – at the same time – sceptical about the likely immediate success of the cause to which we have devoted ourselves, while refusing to give up the belief that in the end our cause will triumph, relying upon the tenacity of our beliefs to maintain our motivation in the fight for what we believe. In the face of overwhelming evidence that we are not making progress, the stubborn hope for the ultimate success of our endeavours allows us to keep going, day after day, year after year, decade after decade.
Both Gramsci and Gandhi spent years in prison – courtesy of fascists in Italy and British imperialists in South Africa and India – but they kept faith in the eventual triumph of their ideas. Gramsci died disappointed that the communist revolution had not yet come to Western Europe. His ghost still waits patiently, and probably will do so for ever. Gandhi lived to see Indian independence, but not in the form he wanted; and he died a victim of the inter-faith violence that he had spent his life warning against. What his ghost would make of Narendra Modi is not hard to imagine. In both these cases, pessimism turned out to be amply justified.
The need to maintain patiently the sources of our motivation – to keep going, to stick to our values, beliefs, plans and dreams – when our current circumstances seem to have been designed to obstruct our progress, and when we see no immediate prospect of change that will allow us to achieve our goals, this need for consolation when our wanting appears to be wholly at odds with our getting, when our intelligence tells us that our wishes enjoy little or no prospect of success or satisfaction, this need is individual as well as social, is personal as well as political. For the making of a good life – a life that honours our best values and that we might one day look back on and be proud of – when confronted with challenges and obstacles that seem too hard to navigate, too difficult to overcome, can be just as real a struggle for each of us, as is the making of a good world.
(It is arguable – although not my main theme in this text – that the making of a better world can be best understood as the consequence of the making of many better lives; that lasting social change is in fact the aggregation of many personal changes, the result of numerous independent decisions by individuals to behave in a different way. These choices might be shaped and influenced by the example of others, through the transmission of cultural norms, rituals and motifs; but, in turn, the culture that is reproduced day by day, year by year, decade by decade is itself the product of many individual choices – some exercised with greater historical awareness and self-conscious deliberateness, for sure – as we re-enact the values and traditions handed down to us by our parents and their parents before them. We are all both shaped by and shapers of, made by and makers of, inheritors and legators of a culture which is everyday similar to but also subtly different from yesterday.)
Wanting what we cannot get is therefore a personal challenge as well as a political one. For Rolland, Gramsci and Gandhi it seemed necessary to focus on the will as a source of hope, to balance against the negative assessment of their judgments. It was as if, by their sheer determination, by the force of their beliefs, they trusted that they could change the odds; that a better world could be conjured out of their dreams, notwithstanding the adamantine resistance of the current facts of the matter. While I understand how this might work as a source of motivation, I am reluctant to abandon the best judgments that my critical faculties can supply me about what is likely, what is possible, how and when change might come. Whether I think about the political situation in my country, as the election campaign is launched – with a flood of unaffordable spending commitments and unachievable policy promises – or I think about more personal goals – a book I wish I could write, a job I would like to do better at, a skill that I am trying to cultivate, the ability to read, look and listen with greater sensitivity and engagement, some friendships that I need to invest with more time and care and, simply, my wish to become more kind – in all these cases I find myself unwilling to believe in a better outcome when my mind tells me that these changes are not easy to achieve. I do not want my will and my intellect to pull me in different directions.
For encouragement, I turn to philosophy and art, the bastions of my mental life.
Over the past few months, I have slowly been re-reading Spinoza’s Ethics, which I studied many years ago as an undergraduate. I have always found his enigmatic philosophy stimulating, appealing in many ways even if ultimately unsustainable as a system of ideas. Spinoza believed that all events were part of a predetermined unfolding causal chain, which we were able to understand, at least in part, by attuning our intelligence to the structure of the natural world. (For Spinoza the natural world is the whole world, all that is and that can be known). Reasons are, he says, always necessary; contingency, therefore is a product of our imagination. When we understand something, we do so under “a species of eternity”. That is, our knowing is set within the context of the whole causal sequence of the universe. In some ways this allows us to think calmly about the future: our efforts and energies, whatever they amount to and however they are employed, will achieve whatever they are capable of, given their place in the universal causal nexus. We do our best and wait for the results. On the other hand, we cannot enjoy any certainly about the outcome, only that the outcome has been caused in a certain way.
This leads Spinoza to make two very strong claims, at the end of Book II of The Ethics. First, that “in the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity” (Proposition XLVIII). In other words, what we want is itself caused, the product of past events stretching back in time beyond our ability to imagine. Thus, while we cannot be sure that we will get what we want, we can sure that what we want is the product of the unfolding of natural causation. Second, that “will and understanding are one and the same” (Corollary, XLIX). Spinoza suggests that since all volitions are particular and, therefore, involve the particular ideas of the objects of our wishes, then wanting something to be true, or wanting it come to pass, is the same as having the idea of something being true or coming to pass. And since our ideas are, as he has already explained, always part of the natural chain of causation, it follows that these wishes form part of our understanding. To use my language, rather than Spinoza’s: since the will and the intellect are not in competition but inseparable, we cannot truly want what we do not think possible.
Where does this leave the tension between wanting and getting? To be clear, I do not think that Spinoza would have denied that there are many times when we do not get what we want. Our desires can be frustrated, temporarily or permanently. What he suggests, which I find useful to reflect upon, is that they might also be mistaken, and that our understanding of the world should allow us to correct them. What we want should cohere with what we know. Therefore, rather than continue to believe that our dreams might come to fruition – whether they be personal or political – when all the evidence suggests otherwise, it would be better to adjust our dreams to reality. We cannot always get what we want but improving our understanding of the world should help us to adjust what it is that we want. Realism of the intellect will lead to realism of the will.
Further: my reading of history tells me that sometimes individuals and societies succeed in making significant changes, despite what appeared overwhelming odds. Gramsci might not have managed to lead a socialist revolution, but Gandhi did lead a successful independence movement. And, despite spending two years in hiding and then a year in a concentration camp where she died of typhus, a young Dutch girl who dreamed of becoming a writer managed to become one of the most read and admired authors of the twentieth century. Sometimes we do get what we want, although not necessarily in the way and at the time that we want.
The right course, then, is to remain cognizant of the challenges we face and the possibility of failure, but to keep struggling to achieve those goals that inspire us: neither to delude ourselves about our chances of success, nor to give up those desires and dreams that make us who we are.
The day after the United Kingdom failed for a third time to exit the European Union, I visited the exhibition of Paul Gauguin’s portraits, currently showing at the National Gallery in London. I was struck by a painting he made in 1889, called Christ in the Garden of Olives, which depicts Jesus on the night of his betrayal, spending time in solitude, struggling with his conscience, knowing that he must flee Jerusalem or face arrest and – likely – death. Gauguin paints Jesus using his own face, but with bright orange hair, most likely a reference to his friend, Vincent van Gogh, suggesting perhaps that both he and van Gogh were like Christ, struggling to fulfil their mission, betrayed by friends and rejected by the authorities.
It seems clear from this painting – and many others – that Gauguin was not short of self-belief and self-importance. I do not want to praise Gauguin’s ego or his life: they are not praiseworthy. But his art is. Much of it is very beautiful: rich in colour and symbolism; evocative, moving and elegiac. I liked the picture Christ in the Garden of Olives very much. In part because of the contrast in colour between the orange hair and the blues and greens of the olive grove and the night sky. The figure of Christ – the figure of Gauguin or van Gogh – leaps out of the picture, and into the viewer’s presence, leaving behind the disciples who remain trapped in the verdigris hues of the olive garden. This is an image not just about the loneliness but also the eminence of genius.
Paul Gauguin, Christ in the Garden of Olives (1889) (oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm) Norton Museum of Art, Florida, USA.
Better even than the colours are the symbolic structures: like the five olive trees in the background, the Christ figure is bent over, leaning to the left. The trees have adapted to the prevailing wind, distorted by the steady strength of the air that blows into them. Likewise, we too are sometimes diminished, distorted, or pushed out of kilter by the pressures of society around us. Like Gauguin’s Christ, we can become weighed down, tilted over, worn out by the difficulty of living in a way that is true to our beliefs. And yet, despite this struggle, just behind the Christ figure, Gauguin paints one upright tree – vertical and unbowed – a reminder that it is possible to resist the prevailing wind, to overcome the current climate; that it is possible to succeed despite the odds.
As I stood and admired the painting, I remembered that van Gogh and Gauguin both died before their artistic gifts were widely admired: during their lifetimes they did not achieve the recognition they craved, but they both stayed true to their artistic vision, and their work and beliefs are now better understood and appreciated. Sometimes life seems bleak, both personally and politically. We might be tempted to balance our cognitive pessimism with a willed optimism, and to live believing one thing and hoping for another. By contrast, we can try our best to connect what we want with what we know, to reconcile our wishes with our expectations; knowing that sometimes those who lean against the prevailing wind do achieve their goals eventually.