The Human Condition

René Magritte's paintings raise philosophical questions about the nature of representation and reality. Of course all art inherently concerns such questions, but few artists have been as overt in addressing them. A case in point is Magritte's La condition humaine (1933), a painting I have long found fascinating. What is the human condition that it purports to reveal?

René Magritte, La condition humaine, 1933

At first glance it is a reassuringly straightforward example of a familiar genre, the landscape, albeit a rather dull landscape. But the more we look, the more unsettling the painting becomes. The scene is enlivened its being viewed through a window, and further by what appears to be a 'joke': part of the landscape is obscured by a canvas on which is painted in meticulous and realistic detail that portion of the landscape it hides from direct view. Or does it? There is no way of telling what is really behind the canvas: there may be a cottage, or a family enjoying a picnic, or a flock of sheep.

Even supposing the canvas accurately represents what it obscures, it soon becomes clear that the whole is an impossibility. The canvas is an absurdity. It only works from one precise angle: imagine being able to shift our perspective slightly, and what this would do to the alignment of canvas and landscape. Furthermore, it only works at one precise moment in time—the exact second that the clouds form the arrangement we see. The absurdity, of course, is the idea that a painter could depict the clouds exactly as they would be arranged at some point in the future.

By teasing us with a realism that under closer examination becomes transparently artificial and impossible, Magritte explodes the whole notion of realism in art. There is always a gap between reality and representation, and no matter how hard we try we can never close that gap. The world as it is and the world as we see it are two different things; the human condition, Magritte's painting tells us, is that we are forever denied grasping the former.

There is a further way in which La condition humaine plays with the problem of reality and representation. When we look out onto the countryside we describe what we see as a landscape, and may also consider it beautiful; an artist may even want to paint this landscape. It becomes ordered in our minds, and possibly on a canvas too, as a landscape and possibly as something of beauty. But as Simon Schama, with reference to La condition humaine, argues in Landscape and Memory (1995): 'What lies beyond the windowpane of our apprehension... needs a design before we can properly discern its form.' (p. 12) Landscape and beauty are simply our projections of order and ideas, our way of making sense of what we see. Magritte's painting comments on the way we look at the world: we see it not as it is but artificially as if on a canvas. Landscapes and beauty exist in the mind, not in nature. 

The Fool and the Angel, part 1: On folly

In the late summer of 2007 I committed my greatest act of folly. Aware of what I was doing, I texted the Artist with my doubts. 'Folly is the way to go', he replied. Of course, I thought, for I was never likely to go any other way. This was a journey I had to make, with all my heart, even though I sensed disaster. I inserted myself once again in the flow that was taking me—and had been taking me for several months—to the airport, to the plane, to New York, to Brooklyn, and finally to the Angel. The Angel—an angel out of Rilke, but I had not then read the warnings from the Duino Elegies:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the ranks / of the angels? Even if one of them clasped me / suddenly to his heart, I'd wither in the face / of his more fierce existence. For their beauty / is really nothing but the first stirrings of a terror / we are just able to endure and are astonished / at the way it elects, with such careless disdain, / to let us go on living. Every angel is terrifying. (Duino Elegies, 'The First Elegy', lines 1-7, trans. by Martyn Crucefix)

'Jeder Engel ist schrecklich'—would it have mattered had I known, before boarding the plane, that angels are terrifying? Or, as Rilke describes them in 'The Second Elegy', that they are 'deadly birds of the soul' who will destroy us should they take one step towards us? No, for folly is vital and important, and I had determined, for once in my life, to adopt the role of the Fool. And so the Fool was on his way to encounter the Angel. Of the Angel, who was eventually to acquire notoriety, we shall learn in due course. But the starting point of the journey is folly.

Folly ascends the pulpit; marginal
drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger
to Desiderius Erasmus,
 Praise of Folly (1511)

Fools, it is often supposed, are deserving of contempt. We are told that they are not to be suffered gladly. Yet in the old courts of kings and queens and in the guise of comedians and clowns and jokers they have long been sought out, valued and esteemed. It takes a certain kind of grim, humourless, intolerant character not to suffer fools gladly—and, ironically, a lack of wisdom. The Renaissance humanist Erasmus (c.1466-1536) knew this. In his Praise of Folly (1511) the essential role of folly in the world is extolled. Personified as an old woman, Folly tells us that without her divine gifts there would be no love, no joy, no friendships. Who would marry, who would have children, who would devote time to drinking with friends, to playing games, to hobbies and interests, indeed to most of the things that make life worthwhile, if it were not for folly? How dull life would be, Folly insists, if we only ever followed the sensible and rational course!

Much of Praise of Folly is a light-hearted rhetorical exercise; Erasmus is having fun, particularly at the expense of self-important bores who would caution against any leavening of life with a dash of folly. But the tone of the treatise progresses to a satirical and often scathing critique of his contemporary society, particularly its superstitions, scandals and corruptions, and finally to a serious philosophical point: the simplicity of faith, the acceptance of ignorance and the poverty of the spiritual life are greater rewards than the supposed worldly wisdom of dogma, superficial certainty and material wealth. It is not necessary to be a Christian (I am not) to get Erasmus' point: once we look deeply it turns out that the fools are really the wise and the wise are really fools.

This idea that the fool is actually wise, and has the function of exposing the true folly of others, is a commonplace. In Shakespeare the comic characters, disguised by wit and folly, frequently serve to highlight the shortcomings of their social superiors. As Isaac Asimov observed in his Guide to Shakespeare, 'the great secret of the successful fool [is] that he is no fool at all'. The Fool in King Lear is wiser than the king he serves, understanding the truth where his master does not. The shifting, hazy boundaries between folly and wisdom are captured in Touchstone the clown's comment in As You Like It (V.1) that 'The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.' At widely different times, and in different cultures, similar ideas have been voiced. The 4th-century BCE Taoist philosopher, Chuang Tzu, wrote that those 'who realize their folly are not true fools'. Francis Bacon considered that he 'who thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool'. And perhaps more than ever we still laugh at the absurdities of satire while grasping its serious point: however absurd the satire is, it is not more absurd than the target at which it is taking aim.

To be a fool, as I increasingly thought I was during the summer of 2007, may paradoxically therefore to be in possession of a deeper wisdom—or at least to be open to the possibility of wisdom, just as the philosopher is not the wise man but the desiring seeker after wisdom. I reassured myself with this idea, and with its rendering as the figure of the Fool in the Tarot deck.

The Fool, from the
Rider-Waite Tarot
deck

The divinatory aspects of the Tarot can safely be set aside as nonsense; but (a possibility that also occurred to Jung) there remains, nevertheless, an interesting iconography and symbolism to the Major Arcana, the set of twenty-two cards preceding the four standard suits of wands, cups, swords and pentacles. Some commentators have seen the Major Arcana as charting an allegorical path to wisdom, a journey that takes in such familiar symbols as The Lovers, The Hermit, The Wheel of Fortune, The Hanged Man, Death, The Devil and the Sun, and ends with The World. The journey is being made by the one numberless card (in some decks it is designated as zero), The Fool, the Joker in the traditional deck of cards, the wild card. In the classic Rider-Waite Tarot deck the Fool is depicted as a seemingly wistful young man, evidently embarking on a journey—one that will begin by stepping off a cliff. It is the classic leap of faith which only a fool would make. Ignorant but seeking something more than the world he is leaving behind, it is the fool who sets out on the path where the outcome is uncertain and unknown.

Ray Bradbury once said: 

If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or, "She's going to hurt me." Or, "I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore..." Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.

Of course, it is also possible that you plummet and crash at the foot of the cliff. Or maybe something else happens—maybe an angel catches you on the way down.

As I sat on the plane waiting for it to take off I mused on all these possibilities, and on wisdom and folly, on life, on love, on the leap that I was about to make. The leap was likely to end horribly, so my reasoning told me. I was putting my trust in faith and love, and my hope in the Angel—even though the Angel and I had never spoken to one another and I wasn't sure she even existed...

Rilkean beginnings, or, loving the questions

I should begin with Rilke. As well as his poetry, his Letters to a Young Poet are well worth reading. The 'young poet' was Franz Xaver Kappus, a military cadet with poetic leanings. Kappus sought advice from Rilke, about poetry, about the choice of poet as a career—and about love. The turbulent nature of Rilke's own relationships might suggest that he was not the ideal advisor on the subject of love; reading his poems and letters soon dispels such suspicions.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Love, according to Rilke, is 'hard':

The fondness of one person for another—it may be that this is the most difficult task that we are set, the most extreme, the ultimate trial and proof, and the task for which all other tasks were no more than a preparation. (Letter VII)

For this reason, he writes, the young are not 'capable' of love; they are still, like apprentices, to learn how to love. The characteristic of young lovers—their most grievous mistake—is to 'hurl themselves at each other when love overcomes them and scatter themselves abroad in whatever state they may be—in all their prodigality, confusion, madness'. In doing so, 'each is lost for the other's sake, and loses the other'; what will come of it is ultimately 'aversion, disappointment and deprivation'.

Far from seeing the essence of love as the union of two people, Rilke emphasizes the importance of retaining the individual self in love. There is a logic to this that escapes some of the most common presentations of love. To fall in love is to fall in love with the other person—ideally we love that person for who they are, just as they love us for who we are. To become a union with that person is to change and to lose two selves, precisely the two selves who loved each other in the first place. Love, in Rilke's view,

is a high occasion for the individual spirit to ripen and to develop into something in itself, to become a world, to become a world in one's own self for someone else's sake: it is a great, immoderate demand upon the self, choosing and summoning it to far-distant places. (Letter VII)

Perhaps that (youthful) quest after union is really a search for answers to the troubling questions that love inevitably arouses. For Rilke, the young should abandon this pursuit of answers, as he urges Kappus:

You are still so young, so uncommitted, and I do entreat you as strongly as I can, my dear Sir, to stay patient with all that is still unresolved in your own heart, to try to love the very questions, just as if they were locked-up rooms or as if they were books in an utterly unknown language. You ought not yet to be searching for answers, for you could not yet live them. What matters is to live everything. For just now, live the questions. Maybe you will little by little, almost without noticing, one distant day live your way into the answers. (Letter IV)

To love and live the questions, and by doing so, to live one's way to the answers: this could be the basis for a philosophy of life. It resembles the idea of mindfulness—to live attentively in the present. It resembles too the philosophy of Socrates and its seemingly interminable questioning without ever fixing on an answer.

I have taught many students over the years and most of them are eager to rush towards answers, in life as well as their studies. They regard this time in their lives as the acquisition of answers. Rilke reminds us that first it is necessary to live and explore the questions—and that this is a long and difficult, but ultimately rewarding, process.