Two Englishmen -- Robin Maugham and his friend -- visited me. I rather fear that they are proposing to write me up and present me in print and picture to the British Public -- let us hope not too grotesquely. I dislike this sort of thing; but also I dislike being disagreeable to people -- and, besides, I am fond of talking. The British Public wants romance -- and I am not a romantic figure, and have no desire to be portrayed as one. 'The World Well Lost for Love' is something the public can understand, and they can perhaps also understand 'The World Well Lost for Love of God'; but what they can not understand is 'The World Well Lost' tout court.[1]




[L. 139]   7 February 1965

How clever of you not to have come for me today! We have just had our heaviest rain for twelve months, an unexpected thunderstorm; and I have filled my cisterns and taken a much-needed bath. How irritating if I had left here a few hours before the rain, leaving the cisterns with an aching void in them! We needed this, even if only to save the cattle and the wild animals.

Thank you for the Hibbert Journals -- in general suffocatingly parochial, but one or two things of interest. I shall not attempt to reply in detail to your letter (it will be easier to discuss it when we meet), but it seems worthwhile sending you a passage from Jean Grenier (Absolu et Choix, pp. 69-71) on the very question that you raise about a personal God as against an impersonal (neuter) Brahman. Here is the passage:

Consider the metaphysicians of the Vedanta. The view that before the Absolute everything is indifferent has not prevented them from acting as if the Absolute were not indifferent before anything whatsoever. In the speculative sphere this is the transition from the apophantic theology [théologie apophantique] to the prophetic theology: and so Sankara, while avoiding any definition of the Absolute, designating it only by negations (neti, neti), yet admits that one can refer to it using 'indirect expressions' (laksana), which 'aim at making known those things of which our mind, being finite, has no direct measure, because they are, at least, in a certain respect, infinite, and as such escape all generic commonality.'[a] This indirect expression approximates analogy. Thus one can in some measure know the Absolute. And in his commentary on the 'No, no...' which defines this Absolute according to the Brhad-Áranyaka Upanisad, Rámánuja claims that this formula means 'Not thus, not thus', and that this 'No' does not deny that the Brahman is endowed with distinctive attributes, but only that it is not circumscribed by the attributes mentioned earlier.[b] For Rámánuja, who admits 'the natural variety of Being and beings', minds and bodies exist as modes of the absolute substance. His monism is thus quite attenuated compared to that of Sankara, since he allows both positive attributes and modes of the Absolute. Even Sankara distinguishes between the unconditioned Brahman and the conditioned Brahman, between the impersonal Absolute and the personal God. How is that possible? It is because Brahman is transpersonal rather than impersonal, and the atman that serves it as a means of access is rather a self than a non-I, as Lacomte perceptively notes.[c] We know how the cult of the personal God (Isvara) triumphed more and more in India thanks to this transition, and also the piety accompanying every cult devoted to a god, whereas the importance of knowledge concerning the divinity declined. More and more, the Absolute approaches the individual.
     The Absolute is named, it is God, it has negative and even positive attributes; finally it can even enter into relations with the world, whether it be the supreme goal towards which the latter tends, or its Providence, or its Creator. The last stage is attained when God takes on a human form: the Incarnation actualizes the fusion between what is essentially composite and what is essentially one.
     The philosophers have proceeded in the same way, and each time they wanted to take hold of the real, their most abstract metaphysics evolved into a specific ethics. The cosmic thesis is thus practically untenable. Once granted, this truth raises the question of the suitable point at which to stop in the slide from the Absolute to the individual. Now, everyone selects his own stopping-point, and that is the whole history of theologies and philosophies. For speculation, in its beginnings, almost everything is a matter of indifference; at the extreme limit of the practical almost nothing is. This transition is inevitable.

You say that personality is not (as it now seems to you) the highest value conceivable. I agree -- provided you will let me at once qualify this statement by saying that it is a grotesque understatement: personality is the lowest value conceivable, the root of all evil. Of all reprehensible things (says the Buddha) wrong view -- and sakkáyaditthi, 'personality-view', is the foundation of all other (ethically) wrong views -- is the most reprehensible. But I think I hear you muttering, 'That is not what I meant. That is not it at all.'




[L. 140]   2 April 1965

The Claudel[1] appears to be a masterpiece. It is very cleverly written, with an astonishing atmosphere; and I have had to read it rather warily -- it is full of emotional pitfalls and (as I told you) my visceral reaction is liable to be almost physically painful. But Claudel's presuppositions are wholly repugnant to me: I can by no means accept the view that a man's love for a woman (or hers for him) is of ethical value -- that is, that it can lead him to salvation, which, however we may look at it, must surely be defined as eternal peace of heart. And this is precisely what love is not -- and least of all when (as in Claudel) the woman insists upon keeping herself and the man on the rack. C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la paix.[2]

If you have the time you might find the Beauvoir worth reading. It is her autobiography, in considerable detail, up to the time she met Sartre (when they were both completing their degrees in philosophy). I was interested enough to read it straight through in a couple of days. How unfeminine (I do not say masculine) is she? I think she is a woman, but she is also a philosopher (but does she do much more than interpret Sartre?), and I do not manage to reconcile the two. But perhaps she is more successful than I am. Would one want (or have wanted -- she is fifty-seven, and must be something of a battle-axe) to sleep with her? And would she want it? She wants equal rights for men and women, but how does that work out in bed?

Any news of the Notes? If it seems unlikely that anyone is going to publish them, you can return the typescript to me when you have finished with it.




[L. 141]   8 May 1965

Deux êtres séparés [says Simone de Beauvoir] placés en des situations différentes, s'affrontant dans leur liberté et cherchant l'un à travers l'autre la justification de l'existence,[a] vivront toujours une aventure pleine de risques et de promesses.[1]

I have just been presented with the English translation of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). I have long had in mind, vaguely, a reading of Heidegger as 'one of the things I must do before I die'; but hitherto, not knowing German, it has been an unfulfilled ambition. Now, however, I have already made a start on it, but if my ambition is to be fulfilled I must read another three hundred fifty rather tough pages before I swallow the cyanide or reach for the razor.

Actually, it's extremely stimulating. Up to now my knowledge of Heidegger has been derived from short summaries and other writers' comments, and particularly through the refractive medium of Sartre's philosophy, and I am beginning to see that he (H) is a better thinker than I had been led to believe. I accepted Sartre's criticisms of him in good faith,[d] and in several places where I couldn't quite make out what Sartre was talking about I gave him (S) the benefit of the doubt -- if Sartre was obscure, that was because I had failed to understand, not because Sartre was mistaken. But now I find that Sartre's criticisms and obscurities arise from (in my view) seriously wrong ideas -- where Sartre differs from Heidegger, and it is where he differs from Heidegger that he is obscure, Heidegger is in the right. Anyway, apart from his formidable array of technical terms in 'the Awful German Language' -- and not improved by translation -- Heidegger is beautifully perspicuous -- hardly a philosophical opacity anywhere. But I think I should hardly have found this so had I not first sweated over Sartre. And Sartre still gives you a great deal that you don't get from Heidegger.

I am sending you a book with the snappy little title, A Study of the Psychological Aspects of Mrs Willett's Mediumship, and of the Statements of the Communicators concerning Process by Gerald William Earl of Balfour, P.C., LL.D. The book contains an account of some extremely high quality 'communications' purporting to come from the deceased members of the Society for Psychical Research (Henry Sidgwick, F. W. H. Myers, E. Gurney, S. H. Butcher, A. W. Verrall, William James) and addressed to Oliver Lodge and Gerald Balfour (the author). The book does not discuss the question of survival at all but accepts for the nonce the 'communications' at their face value -- i.e. as actually coming from the (late) individuals that they claim to come from -- and then, with this assumption, proceeds to discuss how the messages were transmitted and the actual contents of the messages -- but the contents of the messages are themselves actually a discussion of how they were transmitted.

Anyway, I found the book of remarkable interest from several points of view; and I thought that you might like to see it. I know that some people find such books (i.e. on mediumistic communications) extremely distasteful, and I shall not press it upon you. In any case it is not to be regarded as anattempt to 'prove re-birth' to you (re-birth, anyway, cannot be proved as one 'proves Pythagoras'; whether one accepts -- or rejects, as the case may be -- the account of some event as 'evidence' for re-birth depends upon one's temperament and one's presuppositions): I merely remark that since, as you know, I accept re-birth as a matter of course, I found no antecedent obstacle opposing my taking part (by way of marginal comments) in the Myers-Gurney-Balfour controversy about the divisibility of the self. But, whether you read the book or not, would it be too much if I were to ask you if you could possibly get the book bound for me? I think it is worth preserving, and it will not last long with only paper cover.

Here is Camus on Heidegger; perhaps it says more about Camus than Heidegger -- and also something about me, since I trouble to quote it.

Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and announces that existence is humiliated. The only reality is "anxiety" in the whole chain of being. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man "in whom existence is concentrated." This professor of philosophy writes without trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that "the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial than man himself." His interest in Kant extends only to recognizing the restricted character of his "pure Reason." This is to conclude at the end of his analyses that "the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with anguish." This anxiety seems to him so much more important than all the categories in the world that he thinks and talks only of it. He enumerates its aspects: boredom when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror when the mind contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of anxiety and "existence then delivers itself its own summons through the intermediary of consciousness." It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence "to return from its loss in the anonymous They." For him, too, one must not sleep, but must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this absurd world and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way amid these ruins. (Myth, p. 18)

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Footnotes:

[139.a] Lacomte, L'Absolu selon le Vedanta, p. 80. [Back to text]

[139.b] Ibid. p. 299 [Back to text]

[139.c] Ibid. p. 217 [Back to text]

[141.a] Cf. Sartre: Au lieu que, avant d'être aimés...[2] [Back to text]

[141.b] I have to admit, though, that under the pressure of unrelieved satyriasis I rather like the idea of having the girls tied up ready for me -- perhaps this will explain certain ambiguities in my attitude towards le deuxième sexe: a satyr is much too hard pressed to have time to be a feminist. [Back to text]

[141.c] Is not the Pill the eucharist of the New Morality? [Back to text]

[141.d] In one place (B&N, p. 249) Sartre refers to Heidegger's views as 'une sorte de psychologisme empiriocriticiste'. I don't quite know what this means, but it sounds to me like pretty severe philosophical abuse -- almost as bad, when applied to a philosopher, as insinuating that his parents weren't properly married. [Back to text]















Editorial notes:

[138.1] Robin Maugham: See L. 110. [Back to text]

[139.1] 'not what I meant': 'That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.' -- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Selected Poems, p. 12). This is not the Ven. Ñánavíra's only allusion to T. S. Eliot: in the first paragraph of the Preface to the Notes, the phrase 'Human kind cannot bear very much reality' is taken from a line of Thomas à Becket in Eliot's verse play, Murder in the Cathedral. [Back to text]

[140.1] Claudel: Le Soulier de Satin. [Back to text]

[140.2] C'est magnifique...: 'It's magnificent, but it's not peace': the allusion is to a French comment ('It's magnificent, but it's not war') on the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. [Back to text]

[141.1] de Beauvoir: 'Two separate beings, placed in different situations, facing each other in their freedom and seeking, one through the other, the justification of existence, will always live an adventure full of risks and promises.' The line has not been traced. [Back to text]

[141.2] Sartre: The Ven. Ñánavíra quoted the passage (in French) in full. For the English translation, see L. 69. [Back to text]