The Stretch of a Soul

The last thing we should want to do with accounts of mystical or transcendent or contemplative experiences is send them to the taxidermist and mount them for inspection. First we should watch them fly and roam, try to see what they see, and see what’s interesting about them. We may need different binoculars than we’re used to.

That’s what explorers of those perspectives tell us, anyway. Here is Simon Critchley in his recent study Mysticism: “Reading [Meister] Eckhart is a question of allowing the movement of his thinking to have an effect on you, an effect which is not reducible to an act of understanding.” Stanley Cavell struck a similar note in older reflections on Thoreau: “What is the sense that something escapes the conditions of knowledge? It is, I think, the sense, or fact, that our primary relation to the world is not one of knowing it.” In his recent book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing, James K.A. Smith quotes Teresa of Ávila: “These are the souls who apply the discursive mind to their meditations. This is all they have.”

It is table stakes for the religious believer or the artist (or the person in love) to agree that the discursive mind is not all we have and that our most important experiences are not reducible to understanding. But Critchley, Cavell and Smith are philosophers, and they join thinkers in other fields (Michael Pollan’s recent A World Appears comes to mind) who want to extend the range of our accounts of our relationship to the world. To do so as philosophers using the tools and language that have limited the account in the first place is a paradox worth naming. Christian mystics were forever saying what they didn’t mean by their reports. Those reports were provocations, not portraits, catalysts, not claims. Which is another way of saying that they wrote, as Critchley notes, to have an effect on their hearers, not to settle arguments.

Carlisle begins not by laying out an argument at all but by taking us on a journey to a cave. This launching journey sets the tone: in the six lecture-chapters of Transcendence for Beginners, we are in the company of a quiet seeker as well as a philosopher.

Carlisle’s opening chapter, “Halfway Up a Mountain,” tells two stories. One involves her youthful trip to the Himalayan region of India, where she encountered an ascetic from a nearby village. Dressed in Western clothes, he ran a snack stand for hikers. Carlisle only spent a handful of hours with the man, but the encounter was formative, and its significance returned years later as she considered her Gifford topic. It wasn’t really anything about the ascetic himself, she explains. She was at a turning point in her own life, and it was the man’s choice itself to go live in a cave that moved her:

I realized that those hours contained all the themes I would want to explore in a series of lectures on Natural Theology. Desire, devotion, courage: themes belonging to a philosophy of the heart. They posed questions about how to be in the world religiously or spiritually (neither word is right)—questions I’ve thought and written about for years. They evoked a yearning, perhaps a need, for solitude and companionship, disclosing the choices and sacrifices all that entails. And they made the shape of a story about the power of encountering another human life—how this can touch, move, teach, inspire and form us; draw us in a new direction, or just leave an imprint of longing.

At first she struggles to account for the ascetic’s impact on her: “When I tried to make sense of this life, the word ‘noble’ came to mind—without really knowing what this meant.” The man’s choice to leave his expected life behind seemed courageous to her; he was devoting himself to something. It felt like “uncompromising love—but for what?” Here, as throughout these lectures and this book, the biographer’s instinct leads; the philosopher’s sorting follows. She sees in the ascetic’s choice a path that she might also take, a life that she might follow. Long after the encounter, as she worked to identify its meaning, she discovered in the ancient Greek concept of the kalon the right term to capture her ascetic’s nobility: “For Plato this was a quality of phenomena, manifestations,” she writes; “it could be perceived either by our physical senses or with the eyes of the soul. The kalon is radiant, glowing, splendid,” and that “radiance arouses our desire, brings joy and elicits praise.” This feels like something less than the mystic’s visitation but something more than the poet’s inspiration. It also feels very much like Critchley’s effect not reducible to understanding.1Carlisle names Jonathan Lear as an influence. In his final book, Imagining the End, Lear also discusses the importance of kalon: “It is something that strikes us and fills us with admiration when we witness it, and it fills us with pride, a sense of accomplishment, and meaningfulness when we participate in it.” The key words in her description of the ascetic, however, involve personal impact, not just nobility, connection, not just clarity. This is an encounter. Something is evoked. Something—and someone—touches and moves and draws her. Her lectures will form a kind of pilgrimage, but it won’t be a solo journey.

The second story Carlisle tells describes her research into the life of Lord Adam Gifford, whose generous legacy endowed the lecture series that hosted, before her, William James, Henri Bergson, Hannah Arendt and many esteemed others. The endowment specifies lectures on “natural theology,” a term that, at first blush, seems like the very domestication of transcendence. But Carlisle discovered that Gifford meant something much broader than the contemporary associations of natural religion with William Paley’s watchmaker picture of the universe. Gifford, in fact, was a lifelong student of philosophy, and his favorite thinker was Spinoza—Carlisle’s favorite too.

Carlisle uses Gifford’s interest in Spinoza to introduce that philosopher to her project here and to let him help make an unexpected case for transcendence. “Spinoza has a reputation for denouncing transcendence,” she writes, citing Gilles Deleuze’s description of Spinoza’s “pure immanence.” Deleuze’s choice might seem the natural reading of Spinoza, who argued that we are all “modes” of a single substance, that substance being God, such that somehow we are, like everything, in God. But Carlisle argues otherwise:

Yet if the concept of transcendence posits some boundary, real or apparent, it affirms at the same time a movement that crosses or permeates or breaks this boundary. And if we are thinking of a movement beyond the smaller self—bounded by its own fears, attachments and defensive patterns of thinking, entrenched by the habit of saying “I”—then Spinozism, by illuminating and pursuing this movement, is a philosophy of transcendence.

The language here feels almost therapeutic: personal recognition elevated as transcendence. But Carlisle is trying to suggest more than just a kind of expanded selflessness or epiphany. This recognition isn’t a surrender to something larger than individual interests. The experience of the moral and imaginative movement she describes points to an actual connection to a larger reality, including to Spinoza’s God. It involves expanded awareness, yes, but that comes through human interactions, through encounters with other lives that expand our sense that our own life is part of an interdependent cosmos: “Spinoza’s metaphysics suggest that we transcend our habitually circumscribed selves through our interconnectedness with other beings, which can flow into us and change our nature, and also through our connection to God. These movements are a transcendence without dualism, without separation. They are possible precisely because we are all already in God.”

On its own, this Spinozist understanding of transcendence feels frankly like a leap that doesn’t acknowledge it’s a leap. But Carlisle’s project is more interesting and novel than just this reframing of Spinoza and this criticism of dualism. Philosophy is only half of her scope. She’s going to blend genres. This is surely why the lectures began with the story of a personal journey. Carlisle is looking for a way to “bring narrative and philosophy together,” which would allow philosophy to incorporate what Gifford called “felt knowledge.” Life writing illuminates and provokes our awareness that we are interconnected with other people, and all things:

What would it mean to do philosophy or theology in the open air, halfway up the mountain, somewhere in the middle of our lives? Not necessarily to demolish or abandon classrooms, universities, libraries, but to envision these structures with just three walls, and a roof for shelter from the storms. And maybe a couple of embroidered cushions—something that bespeaks care, art, beauty, intimacy, and renders our austere conceptual spaces more habitable. In my Gifford lectures, I decided, life stories would make a home for philosophy.

To establish that home, she borrows from what she has learned as a biographer.

What philosophers and biographers have in common, Carlisle decides, is that they are both in pursuit of a whole subject, or the “question of the being of a life.” The biographer’s quest is for the whole of one life; the philosopher’s, the whole of life itself. These quests quickly encounter well-known limits. But the idea of seeing the whole, the attempt at seeing, in Spinoza’s term, “under the aspect of eternity,” is, for Carlisle, the imaginative path to transcendence.

Her framing for this path is a discussion of the term “milieu.” To account for what a life reveals, we have to account for the life’s embeddedness in its entire milieu. “Its life,” she writes, “is inseparable from, and expressive of, its world.” The thickness of that world includes physical, cultural, historical and biographical contexts, but also a cosmic context. We are embedded in that cosmic context, “porous beings immersed in the world,” rather than Cartesian subjects holding shifting views of the object-world. In Carlisle’s telling, our embeddedness feels hopeful precisely because we are porous. Or maybe the right word, returning to the kalon, is that embeddedness ennobles us. Because of our cosmic connection, the question of who a person is becomes “theological as well as biographical.”

When Carlisle refers back in these lectures to her attempt to capture the whole of Kierkegaard in her first biography, she emphasizes what seemed to escape and exceed the normal details of biographical narrative: “Following Kierkegaard through his final months to his last days in Frederiks Hospital, I sensed the mysterious weight of a human life, glimpsed in its entirety. It is elusive and intimate, slight and immense, fragile and astonishing.” In these Gifford lectures, Carlisle imagines all of our lives the way Spinoza’s God might see them: “A whole life, moving through the world from its source to its end: unique, slender, searching. A God looking down on it may well be moved to love—and also, perhaps, to tears.”

In bridging life writing and philosophy here, George Eliot remains Carlisle’s exemplar. What Eliot is able to do in fiction is to reveal a life in full—or reveal the fullness of the context, the milieu in which her characters’ opacity is embedded. Writing about Daniel Deronda, Carlisle observes that the character of Gwendolen “contains a cosmos”:

If Gwendolen’s apparently insignificant life expresses not just a vast cultural and psychological world—an intensely rich human milieu—but also a deep, possibly divine or cosmic goodness that impels souls to search for it, then every life might be “read” in this way. … Even here, Eliot seems to be telling us, there is transcendence—a stretch of soul, a glimpse of something shining, perhaps not far away at all.

Eliot’s novels show us how cultural, historical, biographical and even cosmological layers are embedded in every life. We can see them in the novel in a way we don’t in our passing encounters with each other. But the novel’s portrayal teaches us that these dense layers are there all the same in everyone. My apprehension of that reality, which becomes part of who I am now, is the expanding light of transcendence. There’s a common trope about novels being vehicles of empathy, but this is something more. In the language of this book, it is kalon.

Carlisle’s first lecture took us to the Himalayas. Her fifth lecture travels to a mountain in south India, the sacred Arunachala that was home, from 1896-1950, to the spiritual teacher Ramana. She came to know of him in the first place because of a meditation group she attended in her thirties. The teacher of the group had had a vision in which he saw Ramana’s face before he’d ever heard of the guru. Years later, he recognized that this was who he had seen in the vision that calmed and transformed him. Carlisle herself was not transformed, secondhand, by this story, but neither was she skeptical. Her own “cosmological milieu” was in the process of expanding: “I found myself inhabiting a much wider agnostic sphere, stretched by new possibilities.”

Carlisle is autobiographical, even confessional in her discussion of Ramana. She is writing her own life now. Having done all the obligatory research into Ramana’s life and into his Hindu and colonial milieux, she realizes she is trying to connect her academic world to an encounter that is, for her, visceral and existential. The modes of philosophy and life writing have been in tension throughout the book, and now that tension provokes a new recognition: “At every turn, my fear of naivety, my dread of being a cliché, alerted me to a blind will to cleverness that runs through academic life, shaping our egos and forming our disciplines.” Ramana’s “own understanding of his life seemed incommensurable with the historical and critical narratives I’d accumulated. And what he taught—how he taught—was fundamentally different from everything I’d learned in the academy.” She refers back to Kierkegaard, who felt a similar contradiction, a similar rivalry: “Kierkegaard’s solution, if we can call it that, was literary, performative and indirect. Same here. The best I can do, if I write, is try to write truthfully.”

The end of the journey of these lectures on transcendence is not clarity or argument, or even a kind of mystical rapture, but devotion, or as she describes it in her final lecture: “the strength a vulnerable, fallible being has to muster day by day to express … love in the world.” Carlisle’s framing of this end—the answer she has as to what a life is for—is tender, personal and hard-won. Writing about a painter friend’s devotion to her mother and about her own mother’s death, the biographer closes with autobiography and love. Whatever transcendence might be, who can argue that love is not its best irrefutable witness? In the end, we are what we are devoted to.

In our technocratic times, any narrative or defense of the fullness of human life—the “stretch of the soul”—is cause for celebration. Carlisle, a gifted biographer, knows that every life is immeasurably complex and elusive, but she also asserts something more. The dignity of our complexity, the kalon of a human life, comes from its embeddedness in a cosmic reality that, with Spinoza, she is willing to call God. Understanding and experiencing this cosmic porousness is, for her, what ultimately marks and elevates us.

Yet still, the question for me throughout this book was whether transcendence was the right word for the encounters Carlisle describes. Her depiction of transcendence is continuous with ordinary knowing and feeling. Awareness, as she describes it, is expanded but not rearranged or disrupted—already porous, we don’t expect or experience rupture. In contrast, in their recent work on Christian mystics, Simon Critchley and James K.A. Smith focus on the discontinuity of transcendent experience. Smith especially grounds the meaning of transcendence in an interruption of ordinary perception: “One doesn’t reach such transcendence by building extension ladders from knowledge; rather, transcendence arrives as a flood that overwhelms and destroys our categories, assailing our confidence and certainty. This is not a mind on top of a ladder reaching for what’s next; this is a mind in the ruins of a hurricane’s deluge.” Critchley also defends “strange and novel forms of experience” and writes of “the feeling of sheer mad joy at the world.” Carlisle’s work swells with love and devotion, but it lacks this shudder of mystery and reverie.

Some of this difference might just be temperament. Not everyone is moved by the shared ecstasy of a rock concert or a religious rite. Sheer mad joy on its own is not superior to persistent love or quiet apprehension. And even in these different registers, Carlisle and Critchley and Smith share the belief that human fullness involves dependence on something outside the ego. Nuances involving the language of transcendence are less important than the common effort to direct our attention to, in Critchley’s words, “something more than human, something more than just our reflection looking back at us.” In ecstasy or calm, then, mad joy or habitual devotion, transcendence involves experience that makes human life seem not only expansive but also radiant, astonishing.

Photo credit: Šarūnas Burdulis, Himalayas (CC BY / Flickr)