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Peter Critchley

A Few of us have Many Eyes

Updated: Dec 31, 2020


Painting by Christian Verpoorten


“This life's dim windows of the soul

Distorts the heavens from pole to pole

And leads you to believe a lie

When you see with, not through, the eye.”

  • William Blake


What are all these eyes about? I see in many ways. I’m seeing very clearly today. And I’m feeling coolly apocalyptic. Apocalypse as the beginning of times as much as the end, the revelation of a deeper, hidden truth. As anyone familiar with the Bible knows, ‘Apocalypse’ is an uncovering, a Revelation. Count how many times the words ‘I saw’ are used in the book of Revelations. ‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away… I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem’. (Rev 21: 1-2). The old reality passes away when we come to see the true reality for the first time. We’d better start seeing this reality, and quickly.


Seeing through the mind's eye. Here and there, every so often, I come across sneers against ‘ivory tower intellectuals’ and anti-intellectual drivel of similar stripe. It takes the sting out of awkward ideas and questions, I suppose. Reassures the discomforted. Enough! Thinking is indeed an activity. We map the world with ideas, live by them and, get them wrong, die by them. As for those who think we don’t know anything, contemplate deeply these lines from Marx on Gustav Hugo: 'He is a sceptic as regards the necessary essence of things, so as to be a courtier as regards their accidental appearance.’ (Marx MECW I 1975 204). Those who are sceptical of any and all meaning in history will soon find themselves lost in the thickets of accident. And that won’t end well, given the scale of the problems we face on this planet.


‘We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think – in fact they do so.’

Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity (1925), p. 166


‘Death is a consequence of not thinking. That could be physical death, of course, but it also applies to a spiritual death, existing in some dumb, passive state which falls far short of human potentiality. Ideas matter, ignorance is not bliss, and there is a high price to be paid for stupidity. The extent to which we think determines the extent to which our behaviour is guided by ideals, which values we pursue and which we push into the background, which opportunities we see and realise, which we miss. We manage our fears and govern our hopes by ideas, so the quality of these ideas matter. We think, therefore we are. How and what we think determines who we are and how we live. This, ultimately, is the reply to the ‘ordinary man of common sense’ who urges philosophers to live in ‘the real world’. Philosophers show us what this ‘real world’ really is behind and beyond the world of sense experience and its manifold illusions. And they show us what the real world could be. This is why philosophy is more than an academic exercise but is a way of life. Ideas are not ‘up in the clouds’ but shape our reality. Whether this is for better or for worse is down to us and our ability to think, our preparedness to think, our courage to think. Philosophy is an integral part of civilization. For Aristotle, the purpose of life is not just to live but to live well, to flourish. Since this is so, it makes sense to think well. To live well, it is necessary to think well. As we think, so shall we live. That, in the end, is both the premise and the promise of philosophy.’

My good self, from Philosophizing Through the Eye of the Mind. The title came from a bit of Blake and a bit of Plato.


How else does one actually see the real world?


‘But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty—the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colors and vanities of human life—thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.’ (Plato, Symposium).


'Set your mind behind your eyes

so that they may become the mirrors for the shape

that in this heaven's mirror will appear to you.'

[Dante, The Comedy, Paradiso XXI 1-24]


Maybe Heidegger was right:

‘Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.’ (Martin Heidegger, in an interview with Spiegel near the end of his life, in 1966.)


I’m seriously tempted by the idea of abandoning the field of practical reason and going back into pure philosophy, getting stuck into some serious philosophy. I spent a decade or more talking philosophy to just a handful of people. It was another world. A profoundly satisfying world. It took me six months of reading Kant, the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason, to really start to understand what he was talking about. But when the breakthrough came and it all started to click, other worlds opened in front of my eyes. I saw with new eyes. I saw 'the real world'. I can remember the real ecstasy that came when I resolved some obscure Kantian problem up in my ivory towers. Who did it impress? My DOS and a couple of other philosophers. I was impressed too. Or, more accurately, profoundly satisfied. There is nothing less impressive than the need to impress. I felt full, elevated, whole.


I’m pretty tired of endlessly correcting lies, half-truths, wishful thinking, the fanciful, the prejudiced, and the half-baked in the world of politics, a world of murk and bias. As Freud lamented, all the science in the world can’t alter the fact that, ultimately, people will believe what they want to believe. If Freud is right, and "our unconscious will murder even for trifles,” then imagine what the rich and powerful would do to hold on to their wealth and power, and imagine what the cowardly, dependent and servile would do to serve that wealth and power. (P. Roazen Freud Political and Social Thought 1969 ch 4). We'll abuse thinkers, stop thinking, celebrate ignorance, reinforce prejudice and call it 'common sense'. I call it plain head-in-the-ground stupidity and it will doom the human race.


I like the way that Karl Marx paraphrased Dante (Purgatory V, 13) to conclude the preface to the first edition of Das Kapital (1867): "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti" ("follow your own road, and let the people talk"). And talk they do. I never had much time for the democracy of opinion. ‘Live in the real world’, people shout at philosophers. ‘Live in the real world’, philosophers shout back. There is indeed a real world. People should start living in it. But do they know where it is? Anyone listening? Pythagoras, are you out there?


Nietzsche did warn us, didn't he?


In The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote:


"'Where has God gone?' he cried. 'I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is more and more night not coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? - gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives - who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed - and whoever shall be born after us, for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.' Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground and it broke and went out. 'I come too early', he said then; 'my time has not yet come. This tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time after they have been done before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves.' - It has been related further that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang a requiem aeternam deo. Let out and quietened, he is said to have retorted each time: 'What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchres of God?'" (GS, 125)


'Ultimate scepticism What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? - They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.' (GS, 265)


Welcome to the post-truth, post-moral society. If you think this 'death of God' is liberating, then think long and hard about the chilling words that Nietzsche penned in The Will to Power.


"The biblical prohibition 'thou shalt not kill' is a piece of naivete compared with the seriousness of the prohibition of life to decadents: 'thou shalt not procreate'. Life itself recognizes no solidarity, no 'equal rights', between the healthy and the degenerate parts of an organism: one must excise the latter - or the whole will perish. - Sympathy for decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted - that would be the profoundest immorality, that would be antinature itself as morality!"


And think long and hard about Nietzsche's contemptuous dismissal of humanity in The Antichrist:

"What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.

What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness.

What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtù, virtue free of moral acid).

The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.

What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak— Christianity…"

Are you a superman? I'm not. You can count me amongst the walking wounded. As one of 'the weak and the botched', I expect no sympathy in the Nietzschean world of power quanta. Here's to health and to flourishing, to a world in which we have the power to be, a power shared with others! In the meantime, I am glad of practical sympathy.

There's a lot of wild words to be getting on with there, anyhow. The biggest problem we face in 'the real world' is global warming. It's an existential crisis as well as an ecological crisis. How do we want to live our lives? Any notion of human flourishing has to address the conditions of planetary health. You can kid yourselves with political fantasies and indulge you pet prejudices, but there is no post-ecology society. The quality of our thinking should be judged by the extent to which it sheds light on the conditions for human and planetary flourishing or, in today's straitened circumstances, by the extent to which it enhances or inhibits our efforts to address global warming, mitigate its effects and adapt to its consequences. There's a lot of wild words here. I don't care. "Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking." (J. M. Keynes). Just don't call me an ivory tower intellectual, or I'll come round and set you to work. There's plenty of work to do on the planet, and there's a job for all of you. Apparently 2015 set the record for environmental activist murders. Wild words, wild facts.


We live in Godless times. For the life of me, I see no joyful Nietzschean science before me.

Here is a pertinent quote now from from Georges Bernanos' Les grands cimetieres sous la lune, where he speaks of Hitler and Stalin:


"The one exploits the mystique of race, the other the mystique of class, for the same purpose: the rational ex­ploitation of human labour and human genius in the service of purely human values. An immense reform, with incalculable implications, when one reflects that up to now the better part of human endeavour has been devoted to the discovery, defence and celebration, not of human but of spiritual values. Millions of men have killed one another on account of metaphysical ideas to which the minds and hearts of millions have been dedicated. A fraction of the heroism expended for the conquest of eternal life would have been sufficient to found a hundred empires. Admittedly, there are many who are not yet familiar with the new point of view. But once it begins to establish itself it will spread like wildfire. One has only to remember how enormously the religious instinct has been weakened by the successes, modest and, above all, incomplete though they have been, of experimental science. And yet there was something about the purely utilitarian materialism of the 19th century which was repulsive to any noble soul. But our reformers have linked it with the ideas of sacrifice, grandeur and heroism, so that the peoples are now able to turn away from God without anguish and almost without knowing it, in a state of exaltation like that of the saints and martyrs. There is nothing to warn them that this experiment ends in a condition of universal hatred."


And now a quote from Middleton Murry's The Price of Leadership:

"It can be no cause for astonishment to the Christian mind that, in an economic order of which the characteristic is that the physical energy at the disposal of society has been multiplied a thousandfold in the last hundred and fifty years, the natural man by his natural actions should be preparing to bring moral degradation and universal catastrophe upon himself. ... It is not enough to admit that the history of post­war Europe has plainly shown that the working-class has no intention and no power to dictate, and that what happens when it is foolish enough to say that it intends to do so is that it is dictated to by a satanic nationalism. It is imperative to realise why this happens and why it must happen. It happens and must happen because, by no conceivable operation of the ordinary self of mankind, or any class of mankind, can the 'classless society' imagined by Marxist Socialism be brought into being. Such a society will be brought into being by Christian love - 'that seeketh not its own' - or not at all."


A love that seeketh its own will be concerned only about its own personality. The ego as a prison. Society as myriad egos locked in a mutual self-cancellation as a universal antagonism and nullity. Bernanos expresses a belief in the reality of something greater than 'purely human values' whilst Murry denies the adequacy of humankind's ordinary self. Enlightenment rationalism bequeathed to civilisation a self-satisfied, self-serving, self-justifying humanism or anthropocentrism, which came to be buttressed by the advances of natural science, to the point where, as Max Weber noted, every increase in scientific knowledge came to disenchant the world, rob it of objective value. The more we come to know the world, the less meaning it has. The paradoxical effect of this has been to boost the ego whilst increasing anthropocentric discomfort.


To do better, we need to see the world as objectively valuable, a 'real world'. A world we hold in common. Such a world will be brought into being by a greater love 'that seeketh not its own' - or not at all.


The deeper Dante enters into the light that is Truth, the more his sight and understanding expand (XXX 52-54).


The eyes, that heav'n with love and awe regards,

Fix'd on the suitor, witness'd, how benign

She looks on pious pray'rs: then fasten'd they

On th' everlasting light, wherein no eye


Of creature, as may well be thought, so far

Can travel inward. I, meanwhile, who drew

Near to the limit, where all wishes end,


The ardour of my wish (for so behooved),

Ended within me. Beck'ning smil'd the sage,

That I should look aloft: but, ere he bade,


Already of myself aloft I look'd;

For visual strength, refining more and more,

Bare me into the ray authentical


Of sovran light. Thenceforward, what I saw,

Was not for words to speak, nor memory's self

To stand against such outrage on her skill.


As one, who from a dream awaken'd, straight,

All he hath seen forgets; yet still retains

Impression of the feeling in his dream;


E'en such am I: for all the vision dies,

As 't were, away; and yet the sense of sweet,

That sprang from it, still trickles in my heart.




I had not yet quite finished with my words

when the light began to spin around its core,

whirling like a quickly turning millstone.

Then the love that was within it spoke:

'Divine light focuses on me, piercing

the radiance that holds me in its womb.

'Its power, conjoined with my own sight,

raises me so far above myself that I can see

the Highest Essence, the source from which it flows.

[Paradiso XXI 79-87]

In the conclusion to The Acquisitive Society, R.H. Tawney quotes from Dante’s Commedia on the power of love, respect for boundaries, ‘through which our wills become a single will’, the peace of the blessed life.

“Brother, the power of love appeases our

will so—we only long for what we have;

we do not thirst for greater blessedness.

Should we desire a higher sphere than ours,

then our desires would be discordant with

the will of Him who has assigned us here,

but you’ll see no such discord in these spheres;

to live in love is—here—necessity,

if you think on love’s nature carefully.

The essence of this blessed life consists

in keeping to the boundaries of God’s will,

through which our wills become one single will;

so that, as we are ranged from step to step

throughout this kingdom, all this kingdom wills

that which will please the King whose will is rule.

And in His will there is our peace: that sea

to which all beings move—the beings He

creates or nature makes—such as His will.”

Then it was clear to me how every place

in Heaven is in Paradise, though grace

does not rain equally from the High Good.

[Paradiso Canto 3: 76-90]


Tawney comments:

"The famous lines in which Piccarda explains to Dante the order of Paradise are a description of a complex and multiform society which is united by overmastering devotion to a common end. By that end all stations are assigned and all activities are valued. The parts derive their quality from their place in the system, and are so permeated by the unity which they express that they themselves are glad to be forgotten, as the ribs of an arch carry the eye from the floor from which they spring to the vault in which they meet and interlace."


This the democracy of place, person and purpose/function that I argue for as against the democracy of subjective opinion, preference, ego and will. This points to the attainment of Being through the realisation of purpose.


"Such a combination of unity and diversity is possible only to a society which subordinates its activities to the principle of purpose. For what that principle offers is not merely a standard for determining the relations of different classes and groups of producers, but a scale of moral values. Above all, it assigns to economic activity itself its proper place as the servant, not the master, of society. The burden of our civilization is not merely, as many suppose, that the product of industry is ill-distributed, or its conduct tyrannical, or its operation interrupted by embittered disagreements. It is that industry itself has come to hold a position of exclusive predominance among human interests, which no single interest, and least of all the provision of the material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Like a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the processes of his own digestion that he goes to his grave before he has begun to live, industrialized communities neglect the very objects for which it is worth while to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation with the means by which riches can be acquired.

That obsession by economic issues is as local and transitory as it is repulsive and disturbing. To future generations it will appear as pitiable as the obsession of the seventeenth century by religious quarrels appears today; indeed, it is less rational, since the object with which it is concerned is less important. And it is a poison which inflames every wound and turns every trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer. Society will not solve the particular problems of industry which afflict it until that poison is expelled, and it has learned to see industry itself in the right perspective. If it is to do that, it must rearrange its scale of values. It must regard economic interests as one element in life, not as the whole of life. It must persuade its members to renounce the opportunity of gains which accrue without any corresponding service, because the struggle for them keeps the whole community in a fever. It must so organize its industry that the instrumental character of economic activity is emphasized by its subordination to the social purpose for which it is carried on." (Tawney 1982 ch 11).



The politics of hope, the politics of unity, the true basis of the classless society as a society of friends. Truth counts for nothing unless we create a habitus in which the motives, the springs to action, emerge and solidify. Then we can have emotions as expressions of values rather than as the manipulation of facts. Reason educates desire from within. Nature via nurture. Nature seen through the eyes of reason.


"There is ..no alternative but to hold in one's mind's eye some pattern, or range of patterns, of human character, conduct and interaction in the community, and then to choose such specification of rights as tends to favour that pattern or range of patterns. In other words, one needs some conception of human good, of human flourishing in a form (or range of forms) of communal life that fosters rather than hinders such flourishing."


J.M. Finnis Natural Law and Natural Rights 1980:219/20



Dante concludes the Commedia with these words:


At this point power failed high fantasy

but, like a wheel in perfect balance turning, I felt my will and my desire turned

by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.

[Paradiso XXXIII 142-146]

That's the greater Love that enfolds, nourishes and sustains us all, the practical sympathy that is the true basis of the classless society, the truly human society as grounded in something greater than the individual personality or self.

"Human stupidity is only exceeded by God's mercy, which is infinite."

- Pope Benedict XVI

All the books I've read and words I've written are a mere footnote to that truth. It's the ground of all hope. What Dante calls the 'Highest Essence'.


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