This is a 13,000-word essay that I submitted for my M.A. Dissertation in EFL University, Hyderabad. It's about amending T.S. Eliot's problematic, yet prophetic vision of the world. This chapter is massive - I wouldn't recommend reading it in one sitting.
Read Chapter I and Chapter III here.
Critique of T.S. Eliot’s Absolute, Modernity and the Rabbit Hole of Rationality
CHAPTER 2
CRITIQUE OF T.S. ELIOT’S ‘THE ABSOLUTE’
Unlike doctoral theses or philosophical treatises, with T.S. Eliot it is more profitable to unpick the poetry. Eliot saw inseparable links between his poetic vision and the Absolute. A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present notes how Eliot saw his literature forming, among other things, an ‘ideal order’, mirroring the idea of the ‘whole’, a recurrent theme in The Sacred Wood (Habib 607). Eliot himself notes that he wanted his poetry to terminate in a formulated philosophy, and extend into a way of life (Gordon 63). He also admitted that his celebrated theory of poetic impersonality in Tradition and the Individual Talent was a bluff.
There is an early Absolute and a late Absolute. The early signs of the Absolute stem from Eliot’s isolation and reclusiveness that, until the final decade of his life, maintained this theme. Eliot was born to a Boston elite family and he had a Unitarian upbringing in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A. He eventually rejected the Unitarian value-system and culture, which was largely set by his grandfather, Reverend Greenleaf. The rejection of a Puritan offshoot in twentieth-century urban modernity is understandable, yet Eliot’s rejection was not because he found Unitarianism too orthodox for a modern world. Indeed, when Greenleaf’s morality was being eroded, he was deeply distrusting of the resulting Jacksonian individualism. Eliot’s gripe, in essence, was that he did not think Unitarianism was orthodox enough.
This rejection of value-systems on grounds of principle is a recurring theme. When he was at St. Louis, Eliot was disillusioned by his privileged upbringing, “the inertia of his class”, and prowled the slums instead (Gordon 25). When he was at Harvard, he was disillusioned by the influence of Hegel on its philosophy department. Over time, when the culture changed to new realism, he did not find satisfaction there either. He disagreed with Santayana and Bergson, and took to Eastern philosophy and the lives of saints for answers. The British idealist F.H. Bradley interested him, and it was on him that Eliot’s doctoral thesis was eventually written, but Eliot also found problems with Bradley. His thesis ended up being a series of eloquent disagreements with him, and a vague, unconvincing retort on the actual nature of truth. George Whiteside, in his analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Dissertation, summarizes this:
…Eliot hungered for but lacked the sense that all things form a whole. The hunger made him embrace Bradliean monism, but the lack kept him unconvinced of it. This absence of conviction can explain why Eliot eventually gave up Bradleian monism (Whiteside 424).
To understand Eliot’s train of thought one must stand in his shoes. Eliot prioritized his own sensory inputs over facts handed down by books, thinkers or other sources. His reasoning could be that they were subjective, as all second-hand information inevitably is. Eliot therefore preferred his own eyes and ears, always being aware of the Cartesian Malicious Demon. This was why Eliot’s first conception of the Absolute arose from a vision.
Eliot, at the age of twenty-one, wrote an unpublished poem called Silence. The poem was the result of a ‘vision’—an incredibly brief, transient moment when he saw something that made his velleities over the world disappeared. Eliot calls this moment his “communion with the Divine”, and it is safe to suggest that this is his first encounter with the Absolute (Gordon 23). Whatever Eliot saw made him feel a certain way, and that feeling enabled him to write Silence and commence his lifelong quest. Here was a man who finally had his fleeting glimpse of the general truth… yet this was simply a feeling, a state of mind. How could this be formulated through logical argument? How could this information be explained to everyone?
Eliot faced the same problem as all the mystics. As Abraham Maslow would put it, it was similar to the problem of the ‘peaker’ to relay their message to ‘non-peakers’. Therefore, from an early age, Eliot began to read and write voraciously with the intent of reaching an irrefutable conclusion of the Absolute through logical, philosophical and somewhat objective argument. His entire search was premised on the notion that behind the tapestries of rhetoric, fake-news, propaganda or malleable truths there existed the nugget of indubitable, unquestionable reality.
Questions: Do I Dare to Eat a Peach?
Eliot was far from a Hegelian disciple, yet Hegelian dialectics offer a useful tool to understand the Absolute. Dialectics is a method of understanding history, political struggles or even worldly phenomena through the origins and tensions of two extremes, two oppositional forces. If one views all the languages of the world (linguistic, scientific, mathematical, cryptic, etc.) as human constructs of signs, symbols, patterns, etc. to explain universal phenomena, then dialectics help realize that language itself is constructed to prioritize and explain the most opposing concepts. There are several examples of a dialectical struggle, most of which are political (Democrats and Republicans, seculars and fascists, etc.) but dialectics expand to all dimensions, including the master and the slave, the self and the other, speech and writing, art and science, protons and electrons, etc.
According to Hegel, in any dialectical struggle both points of view are, to their human participants, justified. Therefore, after the creation of an oppositional ideology to a dominant ideology, most humans either support or reject a particular idea. To argue whether the information that has led to their belief is selective, exaggerated, propagandist or not as rational as the other may hinder the recognition that there can be no objective measure on what is ‘more’ or ‘less’ rational. Any ideology, concept, phenomenon, etc. tends to inevitably develop its thesis and antithesis.
Karin de Boer, in Hegel’s “Antigone” and the Tragedy of Cultural Difference, elaborates on this point. She not only agrees with Hegel that both dialectical forces believe their own points of view to be morally righteous, but also suggests that each side has their own internal contradictions and lapses in logic. Therefore, neither side is completely immune from scrutiny.
The tragic nature of such conflicts [between Creon and Antigone] can only be accounted for, I think, by assuming, first, that each moment contains its contrary within itself and, second, that neither moment has, once and for all, acquired an “absolute right” over the other (de Boer 42).
While it is difficult to label Eliot’s Absolute with rigid adjectives, one notable feature is that it tries to escape dialectics. Eliot’s quandary with the world is more understandable in this context. Eliot was on the lookout for a ‘general truth’, but instead he was estranged between oppositional truths i.e. for every ontologist there was an epistemologist, for every rationalist there was an idealist, and for every theist there was a materialist. As an aspiring academician, he was forced to consider the two, three or infinite sides to every story, and soon found himself among several arguments, all of which touted themselves true, and implied others to be false. Eliot had to patiently acknowledge that each perspective of each concept (be it dominant or subjugated discourse) was valid while having its own internal contradictions, its unspoken premises. Therefore, the world neither has complete meaning, complete unmeaning or part meaning.
Eliot’s thought process moved naturally from dialectics to skepticism, another philosophical school that emerged from ancient Hellenistic cultures and survived across the ages. Socrates is an ideal skeptic, even though he died before the school of thought was born. The Socratic method of interrogation is precisely to interrogate the list of baseless assumptions that follow each and every sentence considered ‘true’. Despite taking on the form of various subdivisions and schools of thought, skepticism’s essential paradox of unanswerable truths has remained.
When Earth is identified as a land where not a single belief, nor its dialectical opposition, can rest their ideologies on fundamental, unbreakable truths, then Earth runs the risk of becoming wholly empty of meaning. Eliot’s hunt for the Absolute had reached this impasse.
The first criticism of Eliot’s Absolute emerges from the moment he, in his search, made arduous and authentic attempts to read the opinions of the greatest thinkers of politics, phenomenology, existence, appearance, reality and related domains. The more Eliot read, the more ammunition he found to criticize whatever he had read. Under the ironic truths of skepticism, no philosopher, scientist or artist’s word may be considered an absolute authority. However, Eliot used this as license to abandon or reject every philosophy the moment he found it fallible, rather than realize that due to his expectations, each and every philosophy would be liable to a rejection.
If skepticism concludes that no human being really knows anything—that the word of no theist, atheist, Marxist or neo-capitalist may be taken at face value—then Eliot is well within his philosophical rights to reject whoever he wishes. However, the end result is disturbing. Hegel, Bergson, Santayana, Bradley, Russell… one must make note of the list of thinkers who had noted their perspectives with mountains of evidence, in excruciating detail, only to be wholly abandoned by Eliot, who preferred only to formulate his own version of the Absolute. Eliot is an individual at the tail-end of a tradition of an endless splitting of hairs, an endless churning of Absolutes that divides human beings on basis of thought, philosophy, ideology; whatever one may call it. And if one thinks that such a process of endless fission has been healthy to humanity, then consider the trail of corpses in Eurocentric history alone; the bloody split of Judaism into Christianity, the anointed priests denouncing the rest as pagans, the Protestant and Puritan divides, the Royalist at the throats of the Republicans, the dialectics of the Cold War. Even consider, today, the politically polarized nations of Brazil, Colombia, India, Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S.A., the bitter Twitter spites between ‘libtards’ and ‘MAGAites’, ‘Sanghis’ and ‘Mallu commies’, between PlayStation stans and Xbox stans—patterns that have seeped past politics and into pop culture, that have far-crossed the murky realms of banter and witty repartee, have resorted to rants and personal affronts, and created dialectical monsters armed with their own paradigms of rationality.
Being a brainchild of philosophy, Mr. Eliot was doubtless aware of this conundrum. There are several poems and quotes that hint toward Eliot’s exasperation with dialectic struggles. An extract from Silence would be the most illuminating, since in its last line, there is also an espoused solution that pertains to his aforementioned ‘vision’:
Yet the garrulous waves of life Shrink and divide With a thousand incidents Vexed and debated: – This is the hour for which we waited – (Gordon 23)
Eliot attempted transcendence was from this dialectical malaise, this perpetual antagonism of force against force. He wanted to reclaim the ‘hour’ that he was once privy to. However, he did not, in his commendable efforts, realize that his very approach to understanding the Absolute was flawed. He may have had solid or arbitrary reasons for rejecting the systems of thought that he did, but the end-result was that he consistently chose the philosophical path of isolation. He became uncertain of most established thinkers, most established schools of thought and most cultures. Consequently, he could not formulate his own way of life to offer himself certainty, since he could not trust the authenticity of his own rationality. Here is Eliot in Prufrock…
And indeed there will be time To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’ […] Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. […] So how should I presume? (Eliot 14)
…and Eliot at the end of Portrait of a Lady:
Doubtful, for a while Not knowing what to feel or if I understand Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon… […] And should I have the right to smile? (Eliot 21)
The end to Portrait of a Lady is particularly malicious. Eliot is, of course, chronicling the general angst of the modern age, part of which is that humans feel detached from their emotions, making them prone to inhumane emotions. However, Gordon and Jain suggest that this particular sentiment strongly existed in Eliot himself. Eliot made it a point to take actual scenes, symbols and images from his life (hyacinths, the Burnt Norton garden, etc.) because he felt that substituting it with generic, constructed allegories or metaphors may corrode the authenticity of the sentiment. Portrait of a Lady, for instance, was directly inspired from his episodes with a Boston society hostess, according to Eliot’s Harvard colleague Conrad Aiken.
Eliot’s uncertainty, inertia, passivity and confusion in knowing which emotions he must feel, are symptoms of a larger cancer. It hindered his lifelong ambition and ability in finding the Absolute, partly contributed to his personal issues, and led to his poetry becoming subjective and somewhat indulgent. The extent of these issues may be better explained by two neologisms, which will also be instrumental in amending Eliot’s Absolute.
Rationality, enlightenment thought, cognitive thinking, scientific attitude, etc. are all terms with different shades of meaning—depending on which person, school of thought or dictionary one refers to. Through regulative analysis of these terms, let’s categorize all of them into a singular, much simpler term: the thinking side. This umbrella term is, of course, prone to collapsing upon itself at the first appearance of poststructuralist deconstruction, yet it should be viewed as a fluid placeholder rather than a fixed, rigid word. The thinking side, here, encourages a critical attitude, a mistrust toward authority and self-proclaimed credibility, a use of mental, logical, mathematical faculties, an inclination toward facts, evidences, statistical analysis, etc. The thinking side presupposes that a person must be calm, composed, objective and rational. Consequently, the thinking side discourages base emotions and all that emerges from it, such as subjectivity, polemic speech, passion, irrationality, etc.
Now, when Eliot attempted to out-think his way of religions, philosophies, cultural norms or systems of thought that he found fallible, he essentially tried to maximize the capacities of his thinking side. In other words, he believed that if he read enough, thought hard enough, or wrote long enough, then he would eventually construct a wholly unique philosophy, a singular answer, one that would close all the loopholes of philosophy and present awaited, irrefutable truths i.e. the Absolute. Eliot, however, assumed that the thinking side would lead to a singular, objective outcome.
The Rabbit Hole of Rationality
In all probability, each and every individual has, at one point or another, considered one postulation or the other as irrefutable or unquestionable, under notions of principle, common sense, law, morality, science, etc. Despite being aware of the infinite regress inherent to the thinking side (as informed by skepticism), one cannot but help assert certain things to be true, while implying other things to be false. The motivations to engage in the dialectics of politics, economics, psychology, culture, pop culture, etc. perhaps emerge from the sense of defining what is right and what is wrong.
However, even a brief examination at the history of ideas suggest that the thinking side does not guarantee a singular answer. It guarantees multiple answers. There are infinite schools of thought that have used the so-called objective tools of science and math to arrive at entirely different conclusions. A flat-earther touts the importance of empiricism (‘I can see and feel the surface is flat’) just as much as the farmer examining his field. Biologists used the theory of evolution to disprove theology, just as much as Nazis used Darwinist logic to conclude that the Aryans were the most superior race. The thinking side tends to service the whims of individual people or groups, and does not tend toward objective answers. It is people who consciously or unconsciously curate the facts they would like to believe. Syed A. Sayeed in Cross-Cultural Rationality expands on this notion:
When we talk about contexts what we mean is not that total context but the relevant context. But relevance is a matter of selectivity, of decision. However, that decision is in turn, as any decision must, guided by our reasons. So, persons decide whether or not a belief is acceptable on the basis of what they regard as pertinent reasons. In other words, it is persons who have reasons for holding beliefs […] Beliefs themselves do not have reasons, and are not therefore, rational or irrational. It is persons who are rational or irrational depending on whether they hold whatever beliefs they hold for good reasons or in the absence of good reasons (Sayeed 19).
Eliot’s pursuit to identify, characterize and assimilate the Absolute led him to investigate the authenticity of multiple answers from multiple rational minds. It also partially led to his reclusive nature, his erosion of any firm standing in reality, and an inability to shrug aside past prejudices. Some of these prejudices include an affinity for orthodox Christianity, a dislike for Jews and a mistrust toward women.
There are possible reasons that explain, if not justify, Eliot’s misogyny and anti-Semitism. Eliot was brought up in a patriarchal household. His father associated sex with nastiness. Eliot’s dislike for the secular interpretation of Christianity (which prioritized generosity, mercy, love forgiveness, etc.) and his subsequent prioritization of asceticism, penitence, rigorous devotion and sacrifice meant that he had embraced the more orthodox, patriarchal tendencies of Christianity. His upbringing also partly led to his anti-Semitism; an ideology latent in Inventions of the March Hare, or in the omitted portrayal of Bleistein in an unpublished draft of The Waste Land, or in his open intolerance toward freethinking Jews in his 1930s lectures at Virginia.
Of course, each human being is, in their nascent years, influenced by a few people among parents, friends, teachers, mentor-figures, cultures, etc. who ingrain undesirable morals that will, in the future, at least be interrogated by the individual. Perhaps part of the challenges of existence is to identify which morals ought to be reinforced, and which dispensed. However, this is where Mr. Eliot fails, and this is paradoxically due to his staggering scope of reading. For Eliot’s eventual conception of the Absolute is so obviously inconsistent with his fundamental, ingrained intolerance toward women and Jews, so far removed from the feminist, secular principles that were chronicled during his period, that it can only result from his inability to properly overcome his childhood prejudices. If Eliot’s maximization of his thinking side, of reading classical feminist thinkers, moral philosophy, and his lengthy friendship with feminist icons like Virginia Woolf would not work wonders in changing his ingrained prejudices with respect to women, it is safe to suggest that the solution is not simply education.
This paper’s second criticism of Eliot’s pursuit of the Absolute, is that entering the rabbit hole of rationality not only rendered Eliot unable to cope with his personal problems, but aggravated some of them till the point of no-return. Take, for instance, his marriage with Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Eliot, caught in skeptic inertia, and residing in a foreign, warring metropolitan, yearned more than ever to submit to the Absolute. While he believed that philosophy and the lives of saints held the answers he was looking for, Ezra Pound and Vivienne were driving forces in ensuring he instead followed the path of poetry and marriage. For all of Eliot’s indecisiveness and perpetual agony over the infinite possibilities of the world, Eliot married Vivienne within three months of their first acquaintance. Vivienne energized him, brought life to his sullen agony. Gordon suggests that one of Eliot’s reasons for swift marriage was because he thought he would find the Absolute via this route.
Eliot and Vivienne’s marriage quickly unraveled. Many of the reasons are irrelevant, but there are a couple of reasons that are crucial to note. Firstly, Eliot and Vivienne were two complementary personalities: while Tom tended to be cold, impersonal and almost sullen, Vivienne would be lavish, dramatic and original. Vivienne abhorred cultural snobbery where Eliot espoused the necessity of tradition. Yet, instead of thriving off each other from a point of mutual tolerance, upon time they often brought out the worst in each other. Several anecdotes attest to how Vivienne’s heightened sense of drama and self-pity was met by Eliot’s purgatorial manifestation of duty, thus encouraging a relationship where one party would throw innovative tantrums and the other would act the loyal, sullen soldier.
Secondly, and more crucially, after Eliot realized that, for well-documented reasons, Vivienne was no path to the Absolute, he promptly chose the religious life, converting to Anglicanism and celibacy, sacrificing pleasures of sex and human love in search for a divine love. Here is Gordon:
…the thought of the intelligent believer ‘proceeds by rejection and elimination’ until he finds a satisfactory explanation both for the disordered world without and the moral world within. Eliot stressed rational progress rather than emotional states. He accepted the morality of damnation, and could not save himself without help. It seems that at this time he felt no fervour, and was driven to the Church almost as a last resort. (Gordon 211)
From then on, Eliot entirely isolated himself from Vivienne. He removed her name from his original dedication to Ash Wednesday. He did not see her since she found him in an event in 1935. He chose not to interfere with her admission into an asylum, he did not meet her until her death in 1947, and all the while he did not file for divorce.
Eliot follows a similar pattern, to a lesser extent, with Emily Hale. By reliable accounts, Eliot was in love with Emily, and Emily was in love with Eliot. If Eliot was Dante, Hale was Beatrice, which is to say that Eliot also saw Hale as a potential route to the Absolute. Indeed, Hale was a huge motivator to Four Quartets—a set of four poems that describe Eliot’s Absolute, and is largely perceived to be the end of Eliot’s poetic stream of thought. With Hale, once Eliot identified what he wanted, he immediately isolated himself from the person. Gordon notes:
There is a startling ruthlessness about this reach for ultra-human bliss, reminiscent of St Augustine or Abelard, men who were capable of passionate devotion yet were avid for purity. For such men, purity was counter to human fidelity, which they came to perceive as temptation. (Gordon 403)
Another person once in love with him, Mary Trevelyan, was a close companion to Eliot in the 40s and 50s. She was similar to Vivienne in the sense of her frankness, uprightness and general complementarity to Eliot’s traits, although did not look at her love with rose-tinted glasses. For a poet reputed for his impersonality, Mary knew Eliot at his moodiest, his most unpredictable and at his most extreme. Mary was not taken by Eliot’s international fame, and did not fear to speak her mind to him. In fact, Gordon notes her criticism of an Eliot play:
‘Your people are mere puppets, speaking what you want them to speak,’ she said in February 1950. They don't really come alive at all - and what often puzzles me is that although, in some ways, you seem to know so much about people, in other ways you seem quite blind - perhaps because you don't like them.’ (Gordon 472)
Mr. Eliot has a unique, prophetic strain on the general direction of humanity as a culture, race, and species, yet amid multiple allusions to high cultural pianists, poets, painters, etc., it is reasonable to suggest that the art is often lost to the ordinary theatre-goer, the casual poetry reader or the working-class autodidact. Eliot’s art was much like Eliot himself—utterly rewarding upon comprehension, but from the outset extremely complicated and exclusive.
Eliot’s path to seclusion and self-insulation was both an intellectual and practical instinct. As with Vivienne, he removed John Hayward from his acknowledgment to Four Quartets and ceased contact with him after marrying Valerie Esme-Fletcher. He would, after his marriage with Valerie, break both politeness and contact with Mary Trevelyan as well. In these major episodes of his life, one sees the actions and destructive effects of the supreme intellectual’s overly rational, dangerously abstract, chillingly objective and rather indulgent pursuits toward a perfectly logical conception of the Absolute.
The third criticism of Eliot’s Absolute is that not only did the thinking side hamper his ability to think rationally, it also impacted his capacity to trust his own instinctive, base emotions. The beginning of Eliot’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech is illuminating in this particular context, since Eliot openly wonders over what he must think, what he must feel, after receiving such an accolade:
Merely to indicate that I was aware of having received the highest international honour that can be bestowed upon a man of letters, would be only to say what everyone knows already. To profess my own unworthiness would be to cast doubt upon the wisdom of the Academy; to praise the Academy might suggest that I, as a literary critic, approved the recognition given to myself as a poet. May I therefore ask that it be taken for granted, that I experienced, on learning of this award to myself, all the normal emotions of exaltation and vanity that any human being might be expected to feel at such a moment, with enjoyment of the flattery, and exasperation at the inconvenience, of being turned overnight into a public figure? (Eliot)
Answers: Shantih, Shantih, Shantih
The conception of Absolute changed over time. In Eliot’s younger days, any possibility of conversing or finding some closure through a transcendental ‘thing’ needed, for him, to surpass the cyclical, oppositional nature of dialectics. Eliot also believed that this transcendental thing was related to Christianity, for he was a believer in God, heaven and hell. Eliot was consistently against humanist, pluralist notions espoused by people like William James—that truth was subjective, multiple, that it would be found in a human’s free will, innate goodness, etc. For Eliot, there still existed a general truth, a singular, absolute truth beyond all constructed truths. To focus on subjectivity, to make “man the measure of all things” would be to ignore the Divine, the Absolute (Gordon 31).
Eliot conceived the Absolute as the greatest intellectual activity coupled with the greatest receptivity to the Divine. This appears as a philosophical paradox at first. The greatest ‘intellectual activity’ is a good indicator that this entails using the faculties of the thinking side. However, the thinking side is replete with critical approaches, an interrogation of previously assumed truths, etc., the result of which is losing oneself in skepticism, ultimately unable to discern any general truths. In contrast, the greatest receptivity to the Divine requires the ability to accept, on the basis of faith, the general truths offered by this Divine thing. On the one hand, Eliot’s goal is to be as receptive, accepting and devoted to the Divine as possible; on the other, it is to develop a skeptic attitude toward anything and everything.
Eliot’s most rudimentary conception of the Pure Idea, the Pure Soul, made body and soul enemies. This, almost metaphorically, represents a dialectical relationship between (a) the material, pleasure seeking, libido-like ‘body’ and (b) the transcendental, salvation seeking, pure, objective, saint-like ‘soul’. Eliot himself did not view them as oppositions or dialectics, since he thought that the intellectual process was a path to eventually culminate in faith. In essence, Eliot thought that if he would optimize his thinking side, then sooner or later he would find an objective path to faith, to the general truth, to Absolute.
The aforementioned metaphorical ‘body’ was the first obstacle to the Absolute. The second was time. Eliot believed the temporal world (bringing with it the chilling realization of mortality, the impersonality of existence, etc.) must be in some way transcended—not materially through creating nectars or time machines, but spiritually. The third obstacle to the Absolute was women. Eliot believed them to exude manipulative energy, or a kind of sickly pallor that thwarted the arduous journey of men. Many of the women Eliot portrayed in his literary works were either fossilized into divinity, submission or into distracting, manipulating, ‘femme-fatale’ beings. One may argue that Eliot does this for men as well, that his characters are caricaturist by design. Yet this cannot explain the latent misogyny in the unpublished Bolo poems, his open disdain for Katherine Mansfield that culminated in Eeldrop and Appleplex, his confession to Trevelyan over his fright for women, or his treatment of three women who loved him.
Eliot was also taken by Dante’s notion of paradise and purgatory. He believed that one must undertake a sizeable amount of penitence, punishment or self-control before one could be a contender for the Absolute. It is almost to say that there could be no pleasure before pain, as if pleasure needs to be earned for it to be appreciated. The Waste Land seems to espouse part of this solution through Damyata. The tendency toward submission and ‘obedience’ is interesting. It is definitely anti-modern to sentiments of independence, free will and individualism.
Damyata: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your hand would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands (Eliot 74)
The two other solutions mentioned at the end of The Waste Land i.e. Datta and Dayadhvam (Sanskrit for ‘giving’ and ‘being compassionate’) are interesting in a different sense. While Damyata was a self-imposition, the other two relate to the community. It is necessary to note is that these solutions stem from feelings, not thoughts. Take Datta, for instance. Eliot is telling his readers to ‘give’ out of the feeling of generosity. This is not a Machiavellian notion of ‘give for they will owe you a favour’, nor is it some stage of economic demographic transition where a family ‘gives’ birth to several children to secure retirement assets for the future. There is no calculus, no selfish schemes at play here. One gives out of generosity. One gives to give. Eliot further writes: “The awful daring of a moment’s surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract” (Eliot 74).
Why does Eliot think prudence is no match for this? Possibly because prudence entails cautiousness, discipline, preparation and reason. It is in nature methodical, cold, calculated, utilitarian and meant for the greatest benefit for oneself. It is very much part of the thinking side, which means it comes with stressful skeptic follow-up questions, all of which are necessarily unanswerable. Datta and Dayadhvam contradict the thinking side in this regard. They do not stem from scientific reasoning but from instinctive feelings of generosity, faith, love; whatever one may call it.
Emotions, passions, instincts, primal sentiments, etc. are a set of related terms with their own etymological histories. For the aid of analysis, let’s group them into another umbrella term: the feeling side. Like the thinking side, the feeling side shall be explored in greater detail, but it is important to note that the feeling side tends to transcend constructed truths i.e. rational thought, probabilities, calculations, cold logic, etc. A person may analyze the various metrics of speed, velocity, density, time, frequency, etc. and calculate, say, a 0.6% probability of thunder and lightning charring their home to crumbs. But if this same person had a phobia of thunder, then that feeling of fear would supersede all rational discourse, all postulations and probabilities offered by the thinking side. They would probably panic and think their house was on the verge of burning down.
The feeling side is crucial to the Absolute. When Eliot tells his readers to ‘give’, or to be ‘compassionate’, he is trying to increase empathy and tolerance toward others despite the self-criticism, intelligence, cynicism, distrust, etc. that exists in the modern human. He is telling his readers to develop their feeling sides, and quit optimizing the infinite regresses of our thinking sides, since he has personally witnessed its disastrous effects.
This is also supported by his notion of how an ideal society should look like. It is not a place with educated citizens and healthy dialectical argument, as one may have expected a scholar like Eliot to suggest. Eliot was not at all convinced by liberal, secular and extremist politics, nor by capitalism as an instrument of progress. He instead posited lots of little communities knit with religious discipline. This focus on religion—where the feeling of faith, not critical thinking pervades—and the notion of discipline, which correlates to the self-imposition of purgatory before paradise, are important angles. Of course, Eliot was more focused on the personal Absolute, and was apolitical in such matters whenever possible, but this brief aside shows how he thought amplifying Christian humanism was key to his ‘modest ideal’.
His modest ideal was men's virtue and wellbeing in community for all, and, for a few, the divine beatitude. He wanted a community that would grant the individual a sense of dignity, and he was indifferent to twentieth-century political schemes in which the individual was of small worth (Gordon 229).
Arguably, Damyata took preference to Datta and Dayadhvam in Eliot’s own life. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday is an important poem in this regard, for it chronicles the arduous journey of conversion. Here is an important excerpt:
I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed face And renounce the voice Because I cannot hope to turn again Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something Upon which to rejoice (Eliot 89)
Eliot presents a tongue-in-cheek notion of rejoicing in something that is fundamentally constructed, fundamentally absurd. It is an example of a larger strain of thought in Ash Wednesday, where the speaker accepts the fundamental uncertainties of the world and does not aim to understand or out-think it. Note how the simple act of faith is characterized with such hesitancy that Eliot writes a poem over it. The difference is that, while the speaker is still caught in his Prufrockian cycle of a hundred indecisions, they are longer passive, as one would expect from a skeptic. They have moved from passivity to humility, and from humility to submission toward a greater thing.
Self-control and discipline are the motive forces of Ash Wednesday. Eliot knows that he cannot hope to turn again; that there is no going back to normality after he has converted. The entire poem thus becomes a preparation and contemplation for the arduous, disciplined, devotional, submissive and purgatorial life that awaits conversion to Anglicanism and celibacy. Gordon writes:
[Eliot] criticised the anthropologists - Frazer, Jane Harrison, Durkheim, and Levy-Bruhl - for giving no explanation of religious rituals ‘in terms of need’. He criticised their ‘wanton interpretation’ based on uninvestigated assumptions, and suggested there was no adequate truth in the study of religion short of an absolute truth. And that would be found, not through methodological enquiry, only through intuitive sympathy. (Gordon 86)
This is a change in thought from Eliot who, as stated in a previous quote, stressed rational progress over emotional states.
The fourth criticism is that, from the outset, when Eliot took his vows, it seems as if his renunciation of the thinking side was total. Yet the notion of self-imposed, self-torturous duty to sustain his faith does not appear to be the natural expression of this feeling. If Eliot wished to invest in his faith by conversion, this ought not to come from a place of heightened, unnatural discipline. Eliot’s rigorous duty and devotion, as Gordon’s biography constantly validates, is very much practiced as a self-imposition. It was methodical and prudent in nature, and did not initiate from a genuine sense of love and faith.
Four Quartets is the culmination of Eliot’s conflict between duty and pure emotion. It is telling that Eliot took eighteen drafts for Little Gidding, the last of the quartets, since that poem was meant to provide answers to all his doubts. When Eliot completed the Quartets, he thought his work was done, that his poetry had finally touched on that elusive ‘formulated philosophy’. While this was not entirely the case, there are several salient features in Four Quartets that mark a paradigm shift from his early skeptic angst. Most of these describe his eventual Absolute.
Firstly; ‘the still point of the turning world’, ‘neither flesh nor fleshless’, ‘neither arrest nor movement’… these words describe the Absolute. This description is crystal clear after following his stream of thought. By suggesting what the Absolute is not, Eliot is precisely suggesting what it is. The Absolute transcends the Hegelian dialectics of oppositions that are constructed by the thinking side and language. It is therefore neither ‘movement from’ nor ‘towards’, a place where both past and future gather, what we cannot ‘call … fixity’, and so on. The Absolute is not fixed “knowledge [that] imposes a pattern, and falsifies”, as most concepts generated by the thinking side tend to be (Eliot 179). The Absolute cannot be expressed by language, since language is by nature dialectical. When it comes to language, “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still”, Eliot notes (Eliot 175). The transcendental nature of the Absolute is also shown in the very last line, where two elements that evoke two very different sensory reactions (the fire and the rose) are unified.
Secondly; to identify this general truth beyond dialectical truths came at a cost. Four Quartets is credited for being an authentic search for a glimpse at the Absolute, but it also concludes with the tone that Eliot was not a candidate for Divine. Neither are all humans. While the Absolute exists as a force transcending dialectical oppositions, the Absolute shall remain elusive to humankind on Earth. Eliot once thought his penitence, sacrifice and rigid adherence to duty were the correct paths toward a fleeting glimpse at the Absolute (even Burnt Norton was the result of one of two visions in his life), but he was disappointed.
Thirdly; the realization of not being able to communicate with the Absolute leads to a change of focus toward more human, worldly, material activities. Eliot moves his line of reasoning toward what humans can do in a world where the Absolute may never appear. The suggestions he offers mostly pertain to the feeling side. One is humility, while another is the oft-repeated notion of purgatory-before-paradise—that one can only be healthy by being diseased. It is a suggestion to descend to ‘perpetual solitude’ before one can hope to rise. However, the third is the most important, backed from the Bhagavad-Gita, and relates to the dutiful adherence to one’s present task. The reader is basically told to keep faith in what they must do in the present, rather than wondering over perpetual possibilities that are the hallmark of the thinking side. “What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation,” he notes (Eliot 171). Duty affords the person an escape from continuous thinking, which can lead to continuous melancholia.
Fourthly; Eliot has somewhat moved on from his self-imposed conception of duty (in poetry, if not in practice). He uses the metaphor of the ‘dance’, something that is performed in the moment, in flow, without passive wonderings over the ripple-effects of any action. Eliot uses the symbols of excited, laughing children to illustrate this point—children who, in most cases, are not in overthinking existential angsts over the origin and purpose of life. This is also how Eliot believes time can be defeated. To transcend time, one must be lost inside the dance, in the moment, and not ponder over “Time past and time future / [which] Allow but a little consciousness” (Eliot 173).
Lastly; world history, according to Eliot, shall of course remain cyclical and dialectical. History has shown that all political and economic idealisms have inevitably succumbed to the human lust for power. Eliot uses the symbol of “the boarhound and the boar / [that] Pursue their pattern as before” to express this point, yet he concludes with a curious line: “But reconciled among the stars” (Eliot 172). The stars represent the afterlife, the divine, the beyond. Eliot is propagating a kind-of transcendent unity and equality among all human beings beyond life. This does not come from Christianity, but the Hindu belief of moksha as transcendence from the life/death cycles of samsara. This belief maintains that life on Earth is not the final destination of our souls, and suggests that the essential ‘equality’ in all humans comes from the Supersoul, or Lord Krishna, residing in each human. In Hinduism, Krishna is the Absolute. “There is not truth superior to Me,” says he in the Gita (Prabhupada 374).
In many ways, to debate about the Absolute, and how it relates to transcendence, to existence beyond planet Earth, is a moot point. To speculate on matters with which one is unlikely to have communication (forget communion) to even confirm their existence, appears to be one of the very perils of the thinking side that Eliot himself warned against.
The amended Absolute shall therefore ignore notions of heaven or afterlife, and it shall also focus on a more public utopia on planet Earth. The irreverence toward religion is not because this paper wishes to cater to atheists, but because such queries must be reserved for the mystics, the monks, the hermeneutists… infinitely more patient persons than myself.
Originally written: May 2021
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