Love and Emptiness

In my recent meditations on ressentiment, I’ve had to come to terms with my own ressentiment as my motivation for finding it throughout American culture, particularly the dominant form of politicized Christianity, epitomized by the mega churches. The realization that I’ve come to is this: I should start looking for alternative models of spiritual practice that provide a way to overcome ressentiment.

I think that Simone Weil may offer an alternative. In this meditation, I want to start to understand for myself how this alternative might work. I’ll spend most of my time here on “The Love of God and Affliction,” but I want to begin with the first passage that deeply struck me once I began reading Waiting for God. It is from “School Studies and the Love of God”:

The fullness of love for neighbor is simply the capacity to ask the question, ‘What is your agony?’ It is to know (recognize) that the afflicted exist, not as a unit in a collection, nor as an example of a social category labeled ‘the afflicted,’ but in all their humanity, exactly like us, who have been stamped and marked by an inimitable mark, by their affliction. For this reason, it is sufficient but also indispensable to know how to look on them in a certain way.

This look is first of all an attentive look, when the soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being that it is looking at, just as it is, in all its truth. It is only capable of this if it is capable of attention. (Awaiting God, 28)

If we simply paused after reading the first paragraph, we would end up, quite possibly, reading the words “humanity, exactly like us” in a conservative fashion. We would think that her admonition to see through categories and collections is a way to look through socially imposed identities to find something truly and essentially human that we can save. We would be tempted to find, in Nietzsche’s terms, “the subject” hidden behind the scenes waiting for a hero to liberate it from its socially imposed affliction. In the end, we would find just another set of normative categories for what we think humanity actually is.

If “humanity, exactly like us” has a definable essence, then we’d get a Platonic answer in the next paragraph, but we don’t. The second paragraph turns away from propositional truths about humanity and forces us (if we are attentive readers) to double back on the first paragraph and read it differently. The emphasis must be placed on what she means by “an attentive look.” This attention is the emptying out of the soul so that the truth of the other’s agony and affliction can be registered with me on its own terms “just as it is, in all its truth.” What does it mean to truly empty one’s soul so that the other can speak and be heard by me? When we ask the question, “What is your agony?”, we must not greet it with attempts to categorize the other — she’s just hysterical or this is a clear case of Oedipal neurosis or he’s just expressing bourgeois guilt. This is not the question of a psychoanalyst seeking the answers in the in DSM or in a cocktail of prescription drugs. This is not attention for Weil. This is the imposing of pre-defined categories onto the situation we face — including a pre-defined category of what “humanity, exactly like us” is. When we try to interpret the experience of others through these kinds of categories, we are not attentively asking the question, “What is your agony?”

The attentive listener empties her soul to “receive into itself the being it is looking at.” This emptiness is crucial for Weil as a spiritual practice. We must strip our preconceptions that would allow us to pre-understand the answer — to go looking for what we already think we know — and to just listen. This is “the fullness of love of neighbor.” This love is a spiritual practice that must see the other as “humanity, exactly like us,” but this humanity must be emptied from having any pre-defined essence. Our experiences are, to use a term from Lyotard, utterly incommensurable: “humanity” does not provide a measurement that would make my agony and that of the other directly comparable. Yet, incommensurability is not pure difference either. She is advocating a spiritual practice that combines an “emptying out” with a common “humanity, just like us” that allows the connection between us to occur but not because the connection is pre-defined, lying in wait to show up.

These terms — humanity, affliction, love, and attention — must be understood as working together as spiritual practices. But we should not try to put them together as if they are founded on stable essences that hold them in place as a systematic interpretive apparatus. She is not articulating a philosophical system founded on a metaphysics or an ontology. Rather, these terms are held together by the practice of emptying our souls of their contents as we listen. In the process, we must empty out our conditioned understanding of these terms. We must grant the other the status of humanity without knowing what the content of that humanity is when we ask, “What is your agony?”

This is, I think, a profound undoing of so much of what I have come to see as Christianity where our souls are primarily vertically oriented as we seek individual salvation. The vertical soul gazing upwards at its source of salvation tends to atomize itself in its quest for God. Its relationship with others is defined by this vertical orientation — either you help me or you hinder me or you are neutral in my personal quest. To operate at scale, Christianity needed to define itself through doctrines and creeds that penitents can say “Yes” to definitively and univocally. This is the heart of the Catholic Christianity that I grew up with. Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the only Son of the Father? Do you believe that God is the benevolent Creator of all that is seen and unseen? Do you believe that confession will absolve you of your sins? Catholic Christianity, as I grew up with it, is contained in these propositional statements. Salvation is about professing these beliefs — not about spiritual practice.

This is not the Christianity that Weil presents. She often frames the problem of the twentieth-century Christian soul as a problem of finding one’s orientation amid the experience of emptiness. Nihilism lurks at the heart of this experience of emptiness, and it is the turning away from nihilism that she finds so profoundly Christian. Her Christianity has nothing to do with the will to truth and institutional doctrines. She is not trying to replace the Death of God with a new God. Rather, she is taking emptiness seriously as a spiritual matter and seeking spiritual practices that confront nihilism positively, honestly and with “attention.” In doing so, she does not resort to an Existentialist’s “nothingness” that turns “emptiness” into a new foundation for a heroic and affirmative self. In this way, she is honestly taking up Nietzsche’s fearful challenge of the Death of God: Where will our revaluation of values come from? If we no longer can “will truth” will we necessarily “will nothingness”? Her answer, paradoxically, is to double down on nothingness as the way to overcome nihilism. In the rest of this meditation, I want to dwell on this doubling down because I think that it is crucial to understanding her spiritual practices as a rescuing of Christianity from its fundamental formulation as a set of propositional Truths about God, Jesus and our salvation.

In previous meditations, I’ve used concepts of vertical and horizontal orientations of the soul to get at some of the problems I’ve encountered in thinking seriously about Christianity. I’ve struggled with how the vertical orientation — especially in ascetic practices — stultifies our ability to imagine our souls as stretching out into the world and connecting with it in meaningful ways. Our salvation is upward, personal, and atomizing in the traditional Catholic Christianity that I grew up with. Such an orientation makes it difficult to see the challenges that we face as necessary responsibilities — a heating planet, global inequalities of wealth, failing education systems, global pandemics, distrust in national governments to collaboratively deal with these challenges, et cetera. Confronting these massive problems requires, at minimum, ethical transformation of ourselves. If we think that our reward is in heaven as compensation for having to live in a fallen world, then Christianity is of little to no value in orienting our souls to these problems.

Weil presents a far more complex and powerful understanding of the Christian soul that I want to unpack here. “Love of God and Affliction” can be read as a re-orientation of the Christian soul from a primarily vertical to a paradoxically and simultaneously vertical-and-horizontal orientation. The hint of the answer is actually contained in the paragraphs I cited. To ask the question, “What is your agony?” is to emphasize the horizontal orientation of myself to others. Asking this question and emptying one’s soul in order to receive the answer is her definition of “the fullness of the love of neighbor.” This love is equivalent to the act of emptying oneself of one’s predilections for clear answers at the moment the question is asked. To receive the answer fully in all its truth and honesty is to adopt an orientation to the other that is a disorientation of oneself. It is Socratic ignorance that does not assume the shape of the answer to come. The Socratic aporia doubles back to become the aporia of the questioner as a true and deep ignorance of what will be received.

As such, love must be a reaching out with one’s soul that is simultaneously giving it up to the other so that what the other has to reveal about her agony can be received. This is “attention”: “And above all our thought must be empty, expectant, without searching, but ready to receive the object meant to penetrate it in its naked truth” (Awaiting God, 26). This is definitely effort, “perhaps the greatest of all efforts, but it is a negative effort” (25). The effort to empty one’s soul at the time of listening is the hardest of efforts. It goes beyond our knee-jerk concepts of “active listening” and “mindfulness” and “vulnerability.” These concepts always rebound as self-affirmations that we are (or will be) better than the others we hear. They are always deliberately momentary states of mind that we enter into — always with an instrumental or strategic end (to borrow some terms from Habermas). How will this moment of vulnerability make me a better manager or leader or salesperson? How will active listening help me to get others on my side so that I can close the deal? It is all so much Dale Carnegie — “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (which was a key presence in my youth as my father taught these courses in the 1970’s).

Vulnerability and active listening are condescending to the other as they become platforms on which we re-affirm our own atomized strength of effort. They are the concepts of an Existentialist who refuses to take “nothingness” any further than being a springboard for a renewed sense of self, as Keiji Nishitani told us. Thus on the other side of these instrumental and strategic techniques is a superior self that wins friends if only to influence them. Arrogance is not far off: if only you could be like me, you’d be cured of your affliction or be a better salesperson. I can only hear you because you are a version of myself that has not yet attained what I have. When I speak to the other, I will provide “advice” and “instruction” as my primary response. I have carried this burden throughout my life.

Weil doubles down on nothingness by making it into a spiritual practice and not just an Existentialist’s concept. Weil’s challenge is how I can truly empty my soul so I can really pay attention to what is expressed — verbally and bodily and with the other’s soul. This requires love as an orientation to the other that is radically open to what one will receive. Again, this can’t be stressed enough, this love does not have a formal definition — we are not on a Platonic quest for a definitive answer. The best we can say is that it is an orientation:

One only needs to know that love is an orientation and not a state of the soul. If we ignore this, we fall into despair at the first onslaught of affliction. (44, emphasis added)

So much of what Weil has to tell me is contained in these two sentences. Love is an orientation — a disposition — to affliction that commits to holding onto that disposition, even if it cannot be defined. This lack of definition means that it cannot be understood as a state of soul. A state of soul is something we seek, and to seek it is to define it as a finality, as a telos. Abandoning this disposition leads to a nihilistic despair when affliction arrives. The key point here is that “despair” is not the absence of values but is itself a value that emerges from within the experience of affliction. Nihilistic despair is thus an active choice one makes and is not the absence of values. Despair places a value on giving up in the face of affliction — one’s own affliction or that of others. As such, nihilistic despair is not the conjoined twin of of affliction. We must overcome the temptation to choose despair as a way of life in the midst of affliction. This overcoming is a spiritual practice that channels love as an emptying out of one’s prejudices and pre-dispositions to create a connection with the other — a connection that is not reducible to pure sameness or pure difference.

Weil describes this turning back of affliction in substantially the same terms that Nietzsche described how ressentiment works. Weil writes:

The contempt, the repulsion, the hatred in the afflicted is turned against themselves, penetrating to the center of the soul and from there, their poisoned color poisons the whole entire universe. Supernatural love, if it survives, can prevent the second effect produced by it, but not the first. The first is the very essence of affliction; there is no affliction where it does not occur. (35)

The echos of Nietzche’s polemic against ressentiment in the Genealogy are clear. This self-poisoning backward turn is the Christian form of ressentiment as it becomes “bad conscience” and the permanent installation of “guilt.” Here Weil presents the same double move that Nietzsche presents: ressentiment starts as hatred and contempt directed outward toward the other: “our sensibilities (senses) attach all the contempt, all the repulsion, all the hatred to affliction that our reason attaches to crime” (34). Affliction’s second move is to turn this outward contempt inward on the self such that it “imprints the depths of the soul — like a branding iron — with contempt, disgust, and even the repulsion of oneself…” (34).

So much Nietzsche here, but with a more sophisticated answer than reducing Christianity to the inescapable internalization of ressentiment. Weil’s answer to ressentiment is not to oppose it with love as its binary opposite. Nietzsche already reminded us that Christian love emerges from ressentiment. Weil’s love arises from affliction, but it is not bound to it because it is an emptying out, not a filling up. It is not a positive foundation from which one can mount a defense, a correction, or an accusation — this would be to reinvigorate ressentiment. In other words, love is an emptying out of our souls at the moment we are presented with another’s afflictions and therefore presented with our own necessity to hold the other in a knee-jerk contempt. At that moment, we must turn back our necessity to judge by asking the question, “What is your agony?” This question is a signal to ourselves to become attentive — to empty ourselves of prejudices so that the answer can be received.

Thusly she deals with ressentiment in its first movement, when the afflicted other is presented to us. As the citation above makes clear, the presence of another’s affliction automatically creates condescension and contempt on the part of the non-afflicted: “Humanity has the same carnal nature as animals. Chickens rush to peck an injured chicken” (34). We are no better when presented with another’s affliction. This is our first reaction that must be greeted with the question “What is your agony?” and the emptying out of the soul so that the response can be truly understood.

Attention is an orientation to “love in the void” (33-34). This is faith for Weil. Not faith in a doctrine — for that is not possible from this reading. It is faith that love as an emptying orientation to the other can work to help, if not heal. It is a faith that love can be held onto in a universe designed to afflict the innocent. It is a faith that defuses ressentiment at its moment of inception. It is, in Nietzsche’s terms, the revaluation of all values at the moment we ask the question, “What is your agony?”

October 19, 2022 Postscript: To be sure, not all forms of ressentiment are bad. There is no need to totalize. Sometimes ressentiment is necessary, especially outward facing ressentiment from the truly powerless toward the powerful. For example, Greta Thunberg’s ressentiment is productive and properly aimed. She plays Nietzsche’s lamb to the eagle of conscience-less industrialized forces heating up the planet. As a young teenager, her power is to embrace her powerlessness to directly affect these forces. She insists that these forces gain a “bad conscience” to understand what they are doing: they must see themselves as doers of their deeds and to make amends. I can only imagine that, at least in the US, most of the polluters she targets would identify as vertically oriented Christians — thus having no conscience that is oriented horizontally.