Lesson 6
On the Experience of Passion
The word
‘passion’ is exceptionally loaded emotionally. It is the first word that
springs to mind when we look for reasons to live: what we need is a passion for
something that motivates us, carries us forward and incites us to action.
Without passion we would be bored. One reason at least for passions to exist is
to occupy us. Hence we mix up “passion” with “distraction”: passion is going to
the movies, dancing, it is also falling in love, wanting adventures and so on.
Oddly,
this is not what the word ‘passion’ indicates. In passion there is passivity.
This would suggest that where there is action, there is also passion. But
passion for what? Why see a passivity in passion when it is the opposite of how
we think of it? For us post-modern people, passion is action, it is life. (See
all the advertising!) The passive element has found no place in ordinary
awareness. We see in passion something that “incites one to act”, that “gives
one reasons to act”. It does not occur to us that passion is also something one
has to undergo and to suffer.
Would this
mean that there are many kinds of passion? Or would it be the case that we do
not understand very well what passions represent? Perhaps we do not want to see
more that a limited aspect of the phenomenon of passion, the most attractive
one: the exaltation of love, sport, etc… Yet, putting aside all subterfuge,
what exactly is the passionate state?
* *
*
A.
Phenomenology of Passions
Let us
start with the intention characteristic of any passion. If all consciousness is
consciousness-of-something, passion, as something intentional,
must also be defined with respect to an object. We admit this when we
speak of the “passion for something”. Passion is passion for this or
that: video games, carnivorous plants, gardening, tennis and so on. This means
that our representation of passion is one which situates it within the
subject/object duality and that we think of passion as being situated above all
in the object. Passion’s thematic is the object that designates it:
swimming, golf, chess, programming etc… This too is the representation of
passion of he who looks upon it as a form of occupation or distraction. Passion
must have an object and it is this object. But this object must above all be a
desire. I have a desire for gambling and it becomes a passion for
gambling. I have a desire for money and it becomes the miser’s passion
for money, I desire this woman and she becomes amorous passion, I
desire to take risks and this desire becomes the adventurer’s passion for
risks, I desire power and this obsession becomes the politician’s passion
for power. Hence it would seem that one can admit of as many passions as
there are desires, since it is desire which gives passion its object as the goal
it is pursuing. One can effectively have desire without passion, but one could
not have passion without desire, since a passion for something is precisely this
languorous desire, long pursued and secretly sought for. It is the extreme
tension of desire, it is its exclusive character which makes it a passion.
Do take
note: passion is a demand that refuses all compromise. Such as we
understand it within the framework of intentionality, this demand has its given
form, its object usually limiting itself to the fulfilment of a
desire. Since desires are multiple we speak of “passions” in the plural.
We can
already draw one consequence: it is much reducing passion in the singular to
interpret it as synonymous with “amorous passion”. Our romantic sensitivity
certainly agrees with it, but we must admit that there are other passions as
strong, as bedazzling, as devastating as the passion of love. Also, we must
take care that the singular use of the word passion does not only mean this or
that passion. It is this experience of consciousness that we must take a closer
look at. What is actually happening during passion? I feel carried away in the
direction of my dearest desire.
1) Let us
take a look at gambling. The pleasure of gambling is after all a seemingly
natural inclination, a tendency that can remain as if outside me.
Gambling is a relation we have to life which is spontaneous insofar as it is
free. Things are totally different when this pleasure becomes the centre of my
life, when the desire for gambling is so violent that is annihilates all other
inclinations. There is this desire and it obsesses me, I think of it all the
time and cannot wait for the moment of exaltation when I shall at last be back
at the baccarat, the poker, the roulette. The passion for has here its
own thematic: gambling. This desire possesses me, I live for nothing else, I
dwell in the memory of my emotional experiences in the gambling room, I live for
the time when at last I shall once more savour this extreme enjoyment which has
become my absolute, my gambler’s divinity. It is not a pleasure; it is a kind of
trance. I am no longer any ordinary man who would enjoy the occasional game; I
have become a passionate gambler. I am in such a state that this desire
subjects me to abstinence, I experience genuine addiction. It is not for
nothing that there are detoxifying cures for gamblers. In passion I know what
desire’s wanting represents. What is worst is that, when I am in the throes of
passion, I cannot fight it; it is
myself, I have become this passion, it cannot
be separated from me. I identify with this passion. What I suffer from in
passion is myself, and nothing that would be “other”. As Alain says, passion is
me, and stronger than me. Mostly passion follows its own course; it gives me
its own direction, the fate of the gambler, the fate of a passionate man. There
is a sort of logic that carries away the passionate subject. Hence, in passion,
I tend to forget everything else. My universe is gradually depleted of
everything other than the object of my passion. When a gambler, I spend the
household money, reducing my children to misery and to daily humiliation; yet, I
do not see this, I only see this ek-stasis of strong emotions I get from
gambling.
I cannot
be lucid, I am blinded, fascinated, obsessed by the object of my passion,
gambling. It takes a situation in which an experience of real life hits me for
me to awaken from this fascination. Only then do I become aware of all the time
I have wasted, the life I have wasted, of this desert I have created around me,
of the pettiness of my existence. In passion I shut myself up in my little
world, I lived in a denial of reality, I tried to isolate myself from the world
for a solitary enjoyment in a rÊtreat of pleasure. My passion was just a means
of escaping reality by locking myself into a bubble of self-gratification.
2) Let us
consider another example, passionate love. The feeling of love is natural, it
is a surge of the heart which is there or which isn’t, without this in any way
being a problem. Love’s inclination remains outside me. But what happens in
passion? A face, the ensuing bedazzlement, the coup de foudre hitting
me, then confusion and with it a haunting desire to have this woman all for
myself, to possess her. The thought of this object gets hold of me and I cannot
chase it away. I have “fallen” in love, it is not a delicate inclination of the
heart, it is a passion. A beautiful page taken from Rousseau’s Confessions
gives a good description of the state of passionate love.
“And do not
imagine here that my senses left my any peace, as when I was with Thérèse or
maman. I have said it before, this time it was love, and love with all is
energy and all its fury. I shall describe neither the agitations, nor the
trembling, the palpitations or the movements of convulsion that I felt
continuously.”
Right
from the beginning of the text, passion is presented in its proper thematic as
passion-of, here love. But it is not only love as a feeling, it is love with
energy and fury. This means a certain force, but in a particular
light, since there is ambivalence; to a positive aspect capable of creation,
energy, corresponds a negative aspect capable of destruction, fury. There is
passion-of and not just feeling because this duality is there and one easily
goes from one aspect to its opposite: love/hatred. He or she one once loved
passionately, one can hate him just as passionately. Passion is then described
as a sort of catalyst of emotions, in such a way that the passionate subject not
only feels everything touching his passion in more intense a manner, but he
instantly loses control of himself. Passion burns us alive, it makes us
emotional beyond measure. It exacerbates our reactions. This is all the
stranger as the cause is not real, it is mostly a fantasy, it is imaged:
“one can
judge of this by the sole effect that her sole picture had on me…While walking I
dreamt of she whom I was to visit, of the tender welcome she would give me”.
Passionate
love feeds on images, it fantasizes on its object, with the result that it must
often fight reality in order not to lose it. Not only does it provoke
vivid emotions that sometimes have it lose control, but it tends to make the
emotional mirage last longer, give it duration. In this respect, it is
quite a way from emotion to passion. An emotion passes, as Kant says, it is
like water breaking a seawall. One takes control soon after, when one
“recovers one’s senses”. But in passion things are different; passion is
engraved in time, it has a project, which is the fulfilment of a desire and will
only die with this desire. The passionate person may have moments of semi-
lucidity,
he can for a brief instant see in what state passion has thrown him, yet the
force of his desire is so great in passion, that the mind need only follow the
furrow it has drawn.
“Instructed
of the danger, I tried upon leaving to distract myself and think of something
else. I had not walked twenty steps when the same memories and all the events
that had followed, returned to assail me without my being able to free myself.”
There is
no point in adding up examples. Passionate states have some common
characteristics, even though the object varies. However strange it may seem,
the zeal of the fanatic, the flame of the adventurer, share some with the
burning passion of the gambler, or with the fever of the passionate lover.
There a state of tension of the soul in desire, which is the mind’s total
investment in the realisation of its desire. Some passions can barely conceal
this tension beneath an appearance hiding their true feelings. This is
characteristic of revenge. Hence some authors have wanted to distinguish
between “cold” passions and “hot” passions. But we see that this is not what is
essential about passion. What is essential in passion is that it imposes a
suffering-of-the-self, a tension, a requirement of the soul and above all, that
it implies the expenditure of an immense amount of energy.
B. The
Logic of Passion
What
place does passion leave to thinking? Does thinking preserve some independence
or is it totally carried away by passion? Does it merely assist desire? Can it
be a guide to passion?
On basis
of ordinary behaviour, it is perfectly possible to distinguish on the one hand
passionate behaviour and on the other hand rational behaviour.
When we are be it just a little rational in making our decisions, we weigh for
and against, we deliberate and chose carefully, we consider the consequences of
our acts. Reasonable behaviour is behaviour nurtured by reason, a sensible and
measured behaviour, and not one resulting from a blind impulse carried to
extremes. A free life is lead by correct thinking, by a man who remains the
master of his thoughts. But what takes place in passion? Can there be such
control? Is it not precisely this control which is swept away by the storm of
passion? Instead of allowing Thinking to guide him, the passionate man is in
some way fascinated, manipulated by a single thought, at the expense of
all others. There is no passion-for-something without an obsession, without the
repetition of a single theme. Far from reasoning in any way, the passionate man
confines himself to self-justification. The argument from passion always
conceals its true motivations. Already we are rather irrational in our
emotional reactions; yet in passion we take a step further in the direction of
lunacy, by putting reason at the service of our fantasies. Effectively there is
an element of deliberation in passion, not because reason presides but because
an implacable logic is a work, the logic of passion. To follow
passion is to follow one’s destiny as the logic of passion prescribes it; it is
obviously not to follow the logic of reason. Hence there is the fate of the
gambler, the fate of passionate love, the fate of the passion for power.
Passion seems to follow its course in an implacable way and carry us away in its
flow. We like to give ourselves to passion, to lose our head, even if it then
requires a moment or two to come back to earth and once more face reality. This
can be summed up in a table:
|
Reasonable behaviour |
Passionate behaviour |
|
That
is, sensible |
Mostly irrational |
|
In which we weigh for and against |
In which one seeks to justify oneself |
|
Founded on thinking and deliberation |
Founded on impulse, thoughtless |
|
Measured conduct |
Excessive behaviour, exaggerated, inclined to extremes |
|
In which we take the consequences of our actions into
account |
One in which we don’t really care about the
consequences of our action |
|
Conducted by reason |
Inspired by an ever-growing influence of desires |
|
The logic of reason |
The
logic of passion : |
|
The order laid out by correct reasoning |
The fate of the man in love, the gambler, ambition etc… |
|
It is our own thought |
One thought has us on a leash |
|
Freedom of judgement is preserved |
We lose our freedom to judge |
Strangest of
all, however many times we have been fooled by passions’ tricks, we continue to
believe that we are rational in its grip, that it expresses our truest self and
that it could never run out of hands! In fact is the passionate man not always
a believer? Yet how could thinking not undergo the influence of passion?
Indeed it follows the course of passion. Where then is this inner core that we
fancy to be beyond the grasp of passion? Could passion possibly grow without
the aid of the mind and its representations? No. Passion is not void of
thinking; in passion the mind is even unusually loquacious. In passion we are
ready to discourse, to endlessly argue in order to persuade ourselves and others
as much as we deem necessary that our conduct is valid. We need to convince
ourselves that our decisions are rational, yet the case is decided in advance;
all our thoughts stem from desire and work at its justification. We do
anything in our power to weave a pleasant illusion and remain in the exalted
vision of passion. The passionate man is very articulate, he appears to reason,
yet in reality he does not reason, he does not examine anything, his verdict has
been rendered in advance in favour of desire.
What can
then be said about how the passionate man pictures the world? The obvious
result is that the world of passion is very narrow. It is even confined to a
single object, that of passion. There is nothing other than gambling, love,
only money matters, only the object, reality has been hidden from
view. What in fact does the gambler think that he does not dare to say? “What
does the world and other people matter to me, as long as I find satisfaction in
my passion? Leave me alone! Rather sacrifice the whole world than be denied
this gratification!” What is then remarkable is passion’s tendency to alter
values to the point of reversing them altogether. The distinction between good
and evil is normally derived from the dignity and preservation of the person.
Good supports life and proceeds in the direction of greater happiness, evil
denies life and breed suffering. But the passionate man interprets the duality
of good and evil in a completely different manner. For him “good” is what gives
me pleasure, “evil” what displeases me, what comes between me and my
desire. Then a total reversal takes place. In fanaticism for instance, what
for a lucid mind would be looked upon as murder is looked upon in this
hyped up representation of things as a sacrifice. For the passionate
gambler, what would normally be understood as indifference to others and
withdrawal into oneself, is simply felt as a manner to rÊtreat from a noisy
world in order to savour his passion. What a lucid man would regard as cruel
and insensitive
behaviour, passion interprets as a just reaction etc… The
passionate man lives in a world of his own, he does not dwell in the World; he
does not see himself, he does not see his true motivations, he only sees his
passion. In passion’s logic there is an irrepressible tendency of the self to
close on itself. And the worse is that restricting one’s interest in life to
focus on a single object is looked upon as an ever-renewed interest in life! The
passionate man cannot see things as they are, he sees them as he would want them
to be, as they are in his dreams. He lives in his passionate world, the
one of his passion and rarely encounters the World. Or he
encounters it in moments of semi-lucidity, in brief moments when life’s
knocks hit him. This semi-lucidity is for the man in love to realise that deep
down it is not she he loves, but being in love. The passionate man mostly
perceives things and events in the light of his passion. We say that the man in
love lives in a rose garden. Things, events, people have a greater or lesser
importance according to whether they oppose or assist his desire.
This is
illusion. How does the mechanism of illusion emerge from the passion for
something? With Spinoza we have seen that desire can create the value of its
object. The mechanism with which passion intoxicates itself with the value of
its object through producing it is called crystallisation. In On Love
Stendhal uses the metaphor of a twig thrown in a salt mine in Salzburg. Before,
the twig was ordinary. It was a mere branch. Under the influence of
crystallisation it gets covered with thousands of scintillating crystals.
Crystallisation implies that a value is projected, superimposed upon the
object, which at first it did not have. It is desire, inasmuch that is carries
within itself the soul’s secret aspirations, which produces a myriad of frenzied
expectations and which generates an ideal capable of fulfilling it. Thus
Descartes confides: “when I was a child, I was in love with a girl my age who
squinted slightly; this way, the impression my eyes made upon the brain when I
saw her erring eyes so connected with the one created therein to stir the
movement of love’s passion, that for a long time afterwards, when seeing
squinting people, I felt more inclined to love them than to love other people”…
Once upon a time there had been this endearment and thought produced desire;
desire once there, a tendency to crystallise on a similar object the same
expectations immediately followed. It is as if the past was just waiting for an
opportunity to once more project itself, seeking something like a clothes-peg on
which to hang. It requires all the enchantment of imagination for an object to
be covered with perfections, when its true role is simply to support desire.
Passionate love is of this sort. I begin to love young girls who squint
because I seek to recover the love I once felt. Passionate love, through
seeking to repeat the past, is in fact loving itself, it expresses a need to
take in the other in order to make it mine. The ritual of flirtation is its
means to weave an adoration through fantasising its object. Hence, even if we
are easily trapped by the desire to be passionately loved, “it is still the case
that the person who is loved knows dimly that he is not the true object of the
love he is given; he guesses that he is only an opportunity for the lover to
evoke some souvenir, and thus to love himself.” Hence no wonder passionate love
is fragile. It can always start its crystallising work all over again on
another similar object (another clothes-peg). It is therefore also that
passionate love is so possessive and cruel, because it does not really give; it
wants to take the other person’s affection because it implicitly demands
of him to embody its idealized expectations. Crystallisation breeds a mirage
and the passionate man indulges in this mirage, in his own luxurious fantasies
until the moment when he has to face up to reality; then disappointment comes
and with it the passage from love to hatred.
This is
the mechanism of the illusion of passion, one of the most powerful
illusions that can seize hold of the human mind. What the passionate man wants
in the end is for the voluptuousness of his own passion to inebriate him, and he
cannot get this intoxication unless he shuns reality. Let’s be honest: it is
impossible to disconnect the passion for something with the generation of
illusions. What is also clear is that passions feed the ego and flatter
egocentricity. Passions whirl around me. They are by nature egocentric. They
are as many ways for the self to adore itself, to give itself gratification, as
well as to assert itself to others, which is much the same thing. Hence the
pursuit of passions take place within the enclosure of the self’s mental realm.
It never really gets in touch with the World, other people or even Reality.
Passionate behaviour is blind because the passionate man is locked up within
himself and does not know generosity. He only knows how to take or consume;
mostly he does not know how to give.
C.
Passion at the heart of Life
Must we
remain within this opposition? The duality we mentioned above, is it real? Is
it the case that a reasonable conduct, free of all illusions, must not be
passionate in any way? Is it necessary to be cold and intellectual in order to
behave rationally? Does not reason after all have its own pathos, albeit a more
peaceful one, yet which still can be thought of as feeling?
Simone
Weil observes that all state of passion contains in itself an exceptional
ascetic force. The gambler can refrain from eating, deny his needs like a
ascetic who, in the shade of his cave, would have made up his mind to bruise his
own body in order to experience God. There is prodigy in passion. In one
case there is vice, in the other virtue, but however strange it may seem, the
gambler and the saint are much alike, being both carried by the same underlying
state of Passion. Yet the rational man is often represented as free of all
passion, as if one had agreed that the rule of the intellect in advance excludes
all passion. But is this really true? Is it at all meaningful to say
that intelligence is “passionless”? Can one really consider passion as one
of the mind’s secondary elements? Could one not equally say that Passion
is necessarily at the heart of consciousness, even in its most intimate Life?
In
passion, there is passivity; yet this does not necessarily mean immobility,
nor insensitivity. The passivity of passion is not that of “perception”. There
are several forms of receptivity, the one of perception and sensation on the one
hand, and of feeling and sentiment on the other. Fundamentally, in what way am
I passive in passion? I am passive because I am on my own at the heart of
feeling. It is in a way as if the self did not get out of itself, knocked
itself against itself, the I-subject totally trapped in itself. In reality, and
contrarily to what common sense tells us, Passion is not fundamentally passion
for a thing. In Passion it is not with respect to an external object, an
experience structured in the duality subject/object that I am passive; on the
contrary Passion is the very state in which the subject is grappling with
himself and both knows and experiences that he cannot get away from himself.
Passion is experiencing oneself, the suffering of oneself which is inherent to
life and which makes of Life a Self gathered in its indivisible unity. This is
the thesis of Michel Henry.
How come
we place reason to one side and passion to the other? Passion is not a thing
which I may or may not possess, an object I could position outside
myself. Passion is not inside the object; it is the subject grappling with
himself. There could not be a subject who would be an “intellectual self” in
conflict with another subject, the “passionate self”. The subject is a subject
only because it is the Self, because it experiences itself with passion.
The true distinction between reason (rational behaviour) and passion (emotional
behaviour) is the one you find between a peaceful and serene pathos ,
which is the manner of looking at things of the intelligence, and a more violent
pathos, one allied with desire, that one sometimes would want to place
outside oneself, among “passions in general”. Passion grows in a radical
inwardness which knows nothing of objects and nothing of any division between
self and self. It is not something caused externally by “the body” as if
proceeding from it, nor is it caused by the object of desire. Passion is a
Passion of the soul and it contains a corporeal aspect. This sphere of
radical immanence to which Passion takes us is what Michel Henry calls
affectivity. Affectivity does not just pertain to certain emotional states
or “passions”. Life does not cease for a single moment to be subject to
affections and this precisely because it is Life. Life is by essence
affectivity.
Hence
representation itself, as vision (videre), is sustained by a
self-affection in which it has the experience of what it is (videor).
This self-affection in which all passion takes place is the “original feeling,
the feeling of feeling, the videor in which the videre experiences itself”.
Intellect’s vision is not only determined by its object, as intentionality
teaches us and as we experience it in daily wakefulness, but seeing is also in
its Foundation feeling oneself.
But does
not passion require something to bring it about? Without an object, there would
be no passion. In addition, does it not happen that passion walks out on Life?
Is this not in fact very often the case in our dull and passionless lives? How
does it come that, if Life is by essence Passion, it can still be lived in
boredom, repetition and mediocrity? The answer Michel Henry gives is very
important. The Self cannot cease to be itself, and yet the ego may not
coincide with itself. Life cannot lose its essential nature, but it can be
split to an extent such that it gets out of touch with what makes it
Life. It is when coinciding with itself that life is experienced for what it
is: a secret passion, a pure Passion. Yet the struggle to split up with itself
introduces this flaw such that Life ceases to experience itself as it is. For
example, this could be to view myself with suspicion, the division of guilt into
me-the-judge and me-the-defendant, the introverted attention of the man who
feels under constant observation, one’s own condemning judgement; there are many
ways in which consciousness can operate a scission within itself. However, if
being one with oneself gives Life its passionate strength, division
yields the weakness which empties it of all passion. This does not mean
that the most intimate Self would have been altered. What has changed is the
relation to oneself, the contact with the Self, it is that the coincidence with
Oneself has been disrupted. Life remains what it is, a pure Passion which never
ceases to give itself to itself and to reach itself; yet, when seeking to
introduce a division the intellect has succeeded with one thing: to break this
bond. I begin to hate myself, I become divided against myself, and immediately
I generate what is called weakness. True Force always resides in the
coincidence with oneself, in the original union with Oneself. Even in weakness
life is still passionate, but it is no longer anything more than the passion of
its powerlessness; it is a life that has become ill from emptying itself of its
own passion. Hence life’s illness, in the words of Michel Henry, is
expressed through in all the ways in which life attempts to escape from itself,
to get dazed, to forget itself, in one word to deny itself within itself. This
state of uneasiness that we have all felt is it not deep down the feeling that
there is no passion in us?
We now
better understand the reason behind Nietzsche’s criticism of asceticism.
If the ascetic morality of religion attacked passion, this is because it
believed that wisdom knows no passion. It viewed the wise man as a sort of
übermensch of the intellect, austere, cold and rigorous. It is true that
passions are always narrow and umbilical in the beginning. Passions need to
expand and be sublimated. Yet, to criticise passions because of their limited,
fanatical and egocentric side, is this the same as fighting Passion itself? To
deny Passion, Nietzsche explains, is this not attacking Life at its very core?
To “eliminate will, remove all feelings without exception, were this possible:
what next? Would this not amount to castrating the intellect?” And by the way,
how would we understand that Christianity, although so severe in its
condemnation of passions, could at the same time refer to the love of Christ by
this very word, passion?
2) We must
reconsider the problem of passion independently of all interprÉtation ruled by
intentionality. A fire hatches under the embers of intelligence. Lucidity also
includes Passion. Would it not be possible for the fire of lucidity to burn in
the midst of passion? Let’s try this. Let’s suppose that we stop judging
ourselves and dividing, that we could then remain in the state of lived
experience, without cleaving subject and object, at the heart of living
alertness, what then would we find? The fire of Passion. Life affecting itself
is there within us. Lucidity is a flame of attention. Exiting the intellect,
we can follow the original flow of consciousness as it discovers itself as pure
experience of itself. It is precisely this donation of self to self which is too
the flame of lucidity.
But what
is Passion? The experience of oneself, the experience taking place in Life’s
innermost flow, in a region beyond duality, beyond concepts, an inner region
where life gives itself to itself without intentionality ever taking place.
What is given before all conscious duality is Presence, the presence in
which the experience of living is immediate. If I don’t introduce any division
in the flow of living, there will neither be any distinction between
me-the-judge and me-the-defendant; there will only be a sensitive blossoming of
consciousness as it experiences the pathos of its own unfolding. This
consciousness is vulnerable, it is a pure feeling of its own undivided self, it
is a fire that nurtures no object. The flame of attention burning here and now
is the objectless passion, or the passion without a motive: it is this exactly
which we ought to call Passion.
Let’s
suppose for instance that I am consumed with discontent. I cannot help
projecting this discontent on an object, on other people, on the state of
the world. I am dissatisfied and give others the blame. In fact, I am similar
to the man passionately in love who burn with the fire of passion by relating it
to its object. I fight other people, I accuse, I loathe, without being able to
appease the fire that is burning me. Discontent thus externalized makes me
cynical, aggressive to others, negative and cruel to myself. Could I only
put an end to division, stop seeing in others, in some object or
other (myself included) the cause of my discontent, what would happen then?
What would become of this fire of discontent, were I to stop discharging it on
others? When viewed in an in-depth vision, the fire of discontent
becomes the fire of Passion. This fire in which I consciously enter
without reserve, without identification, can then sublimate, turn into an
uncompromising insistence; it becomes the incandescent Flame of a desire for
excellence that does not go outside itself. What then happens at the heart
of discontent is that:
“one has one
passion, the passion for excellence.
I. Would
this imply that this passion has no object?
The result
is a ‘burning passion’ – not a passion for something.”
In any
passion-for-something, there is Passion. As long as passion is just
passion-for, passion directed towards the object, then it remains restricted by
desire and confined to the ego’s expectations. It is a fire which gives itself
an outlet, one of frightening violence and blindness. When, in the course of
its endless fights, through the effect of setbacks and disappointments, it gets
out of breath, it does not for all that put out its fire. This fire becomes the
fire of discontent and of dissatisfaction, the fire of bitterness. Passion that
gives up on itself and turns against itself becomes self-loathing and
mediocrity. To clarify: what in fact is mediocrity? Ah, strange! Nothing
other than the absence of passion. Mediocrity is a life that passion has
abandoned, a life that has abdicated and is content with vegÉtating: a life
which is not truly lived. Conversely, what happens with a Passion that
asserts itself, grows, creates? It becomes enthusiasm and excellence. The
struggle for excellence is the fire of burning Passion to which one gives no
outlet. But this passion burning with such intensity, is it not Life itself?
It is in this flame that Life is at once lived and uncompromisingly asserted.
What shall
we do with passion? We cannot neither deny it, nor condemn it or judge it.
Therefore there is no use to demand of ourselves, as we sometimes hear people
say, that we find “a passion in life”. “Go off to the sports centre and find
yourself a passion!”. Are we in need of something that gives us meaning or a
distraction to help make us feel alive? This will not do. Nor is there any
point in moralising, asking people to turn life into a passion, something that
would sound very artificial. Would life by nature be so empty and dull that one
would be forced to dope it with some passion or other? What life demands is to
be lived and the very intensity with which it is lived is
Passion. It is not a mystery; what becomes obvious here is that Life must be
fully lived for what it is. This is the point made by Michel Henry’s
analysis: Life is suffering, Life is Passion, because it its essential
nature is to affect itself, and hence it experiences itself passionately as
Life. This self-affection turns the world into its playground and a land to
conquer.
There is
in all passion, because of the fire running across it, a degree of openness.
What the passion-for is lacking is not Life, but fullness of consciousness,
clarity and generosity. Passion carried to its utmost degree of intensity is
light of the intelligence, receptive, it gives of itself. Pure passion is not
restricted to the limitations of a desire, these are the boundaries of the
self. We can no longer mix up Passion and passions. The plural is egocentric.
As long as passion is my passion, it depends on the object, it only
reinforces the ego and obfuscates my vision; it is fanatical. Mostly it does
not know how to give, it only takes. The lucidity which burns at the heart of
Passion does not suffer from these limitations, because it is not the work of
desire. Hence Passion can also be compassion. Compassion signifies the
passion which shares, the loving passion which embraces anything sensitive and
vulnerable, the generosity of a heart which could not turn away from anything
that suffers. Thus one can explain that in so ascetic a religion as
Christianity, which condemns passion, at the same time vindicates Passion when
speaking of the Passion of Christ. The Passion of passions for the religious
man is the love of God.
This
enables us to understand that the too human self of the passion-for can never
feel compassion. It can at the very most measure its own pity, while still
caring for its own desires, and draw condescending arguments from there for this
“other” who suffers. It does not know this undivided unity that Passion
delivers, that a loving heart discovers when loving. When we love truly we do
not divide. The heart that gives itself is an indivisible wave of feeling, a
generosity that does not bill. In fact, were we to grow a single passion it
ought to be that one, because the passion of generosity is a self-expansion and
does not lock itself into desire.
Thus,
there is necessarily Passion in compassion, in the same way that in lucidity
dwells a fire that is passion, but it is the Passion without an object and not
the passion for something. Therefore we should not be astonished that the
gambler and the saint sometimes behave in identical ways. There can be as many
passions as there are objects of passion, but there is only one passionate state
which does not exhaust itself in intentionality. Understanding Passion opens
the gate to self-knowledge, but in a dimension other than the purely
“psychological”, a metaphysical and phenomenological one. Passion takes us back
to the very Manifestation of Life. This means that it is superficial to view
passion from the point of view of some prior “cause” that would stir it. It is
possible to detect in the past a motive the repetition of which would generate
passion. But this explanation does not tell us what it is, it does not help us
to understand the experience of passion, to understand this grappling
with oneself that passion implies, the experiencing of oneself that actually
constitutes passion in the consciousness which is having this experience.
* *
*
Passion is
not a mere psychological mode among others, a state one could do without,
without for this reason altering life in any way. When we say that a life
without passion would not be worth living, we are speaking the truth. Yet
unfortunately this is just half the story. We imagine that “passions” are
necessary to give meaning and we fancy that a few small distractions will fill
this void and make us feel we exist. What we lack is Life itself because we
only live it in a very superficial manner. We have not encountered life’s
inherent Passion, the Passion that constitutes it through and through. Compared
with motiveless Passion, all these tiny passions are just fleeting sparkles and
not the great fire, the inner Fire of the soul that Passion is.
Yet the
inner Fire of the soul is also its brightness. Intelligence’s seeing is itself
passion. Lucidity is itself Passion. It is therefore pointless to want to
oppose a passionate life to one that allegedly would be free from Passion. It
is just that there is a difference between desire’s fiery and furious pathos,
and the more serene and collected pathos of lucidity.
Home © Philosophy and
spirituality, 2003, Serge Carfantan. Translated by
Catarina Lamm
