THE INNER LIFE AND HUMAN FALLIBILITY
Appreciation for the complexity and vulnerability of others needs to lead us to greater empathy, compassion, and kindness.
In Vergil's Aeneid, there is a well-known line that has stumped students of Latin, as well as literary connoisseurs, through the ages. Having escaped the defeated Troy, and embarking on the long voyage to found Rome, Aeneas makes a stop in Carthage. There he visits a temple dedicated to Juno. On the temple's wall is a large mural depicting the Trojan War and his fallen comrades. He even recognizes himself in the portrait and begins to weep. He then utters the moving but ambiguous phrase, “Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.” Moving, implicitly profound, perhaps insightfully mystical, but unclear. Literally, it can be translated as “There are tears of things, and mortal matters touch the mind.”
A problem is that the word “rerum” - literally of things is in the Latin possessive case, whereas something like there are tears in things, would make more sense in English. Some translators have employed this usage and allow themselves requisite flourish. One could translate the line as signifying merely that there is sadness in human experience which is amplified by our mortality. Or, one could see the poet making a more sublime statement of enduring pathos to the effect that the sadness we feel permeates through nature; when we are sad, nature shares our sorrow with us, hence there are tears in things.
In another classical reference, the word “person” is derived from the Latin persona, which means mask. Roman actors wore masks on the stage. The etymology is telling. Socially we all don masks. We seek to present our best selves to the outer world and to others. But the inner life remains mostly undisclosed and hidden. We experience our inner self and engage it masked from the outside world. There is the subjective inner life, experienced from the inside out. And there is the objective self as others perceive us, i.e, from the outside in.
I want to conjoin these two observations from my study of ancient languages to provide a way into a reality I think about often. My life-long work as a clergyman has given me privileged access to the inner and private lives of others. What I have learned is that there is scarcely a family that is not touched by great tragedy. Perhaps they have a child with disabilities that ensures he or she will require life-long custodial responsibility. Maybe a loved one suffers from chronic pain or illness that also undermines financial security. Or, a couple is locked in discord that immiserates them both, and divorce isn't a viable option.
Henry David Thoreau remarked that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and he may have been right. We all confront problems and anxieties, and many, perhaps most people- out of pride or shame, or simply lacking in the ability to share difficult matters- suffer in silence.
The ubiquity of suffering and sorrow has brought me to the brink of adopting the tragic view of life. We tend to want to focus on life's joys and triumphs. We strive to present ourselves as joyful to others. This prevailing reality of life's challenges often devours, or at a minimum, compromises our capacity for happiness. Despite moments of joy and periods of fulfillment, life is primarily spent coping.
We relate to the outside world. We manage our problems as best we can. But then there is the second, silent realm of conversation we have only within ourselves. The mind is a matrix of wild emanations that often come unbidden, and many are unsettling. We experience this most directly in sleep when dreams, unorganized by the ego, manifest the mind's disorder. In wakefulness, we often experience our thoughts welling up from within, often with disturbing effect. Anyone who has practiced meditation knows how difficult it is to clear the mind of intruding thoughts. Sometimes happy reflections emerge, often in the form of pleasant memories. There are pleasant imaginings of plans for future activities that we desire. But there are also thoughts of insecurity and pangs of guilt. We may shudder in shame at a hurtful statement rendered or an infraction committed in the long past. The mind also works by association and we may often associate to negative things. Perhaps there are parts of ourselves we privately do not like, and we strive to push them aside or rid ourselves of them, often finding that they relentlessly cling to us. Our inner life is a messy affair and our relation to it requires a lot of management.
It was Sigmund Freud who famously attempted, with great specificity, to map the contours of the mind. In the broadest outline, he saw our rational egos caught in an ineluctable condition. On one side, there is the id, the repository of our primitive instincts tied to our biological natures. Its will to power is expressed in our yen for aggression and fulfillment of our sexual drives. On the other, is our superego, the repository of conscience, which displays its punishing influence through the employment of guilty feelings. And here is the poor ego caught in the middle, confronting these forces on both sides and compelled to manage them as best it can. Its fate is an unhappy one and gives rise to Freud's well-known pessimism about the human condition. For him, the tragic view is embedded in the deepest recesses of our inherent natures. However we may reform or improve the external conditions in which we live (and he believed that such striving was worth the effort) man is fated to never do himself out of his basic nature.
While much of Freud has fallen into disfavor, my personal experience does not allow me to dispel altogether his overall assessment of our inner lives. I never have been a Pollyanna, and have long tempered my struggle for justice and optimism with a sober sense of realism as to the possible.
Such observations of the dynamics of the inner life have led me to certain conclusions, and I have attempted to meld them into my humanism, and my relation to others.
In the first instance, I cling to an idea I cannot prove, namely that the value of an entity, most especially human beings, is tagged to its, our, complexity. We are, indeed, wondrously complex. When it comes to our fellow persons, it is necessary, reverential, I believe, to appreciate that behind the surface there is a subjective, highly complex self. People are always much more than they appear. Behind the manifest person, there is a self that struggles with a multitude of feelings and issues, as I so struggle. All people yearn to be recognized, to be loved. All people yearn for a place in the sun. And all people, to varying degrees, succeed and they fail. The complexity of each life ensures her or his uniqueness, and one's uniqueness is commensurate with one's worthiness.
The struggles that people confront, most unknown and waged in silence, inspire a sense of compassion. If I can be sensitive to the feelings and thoughts that suffuse my own inner life, so I can be sensitive to this reality in others.
I believe that we strive for inner wholeness, but this state of being eludes us. Such integrality, the congruence of our inner dynamics, is a state of perfection that cannot be ours. It is the human condition that we are all fallible; we all have our vulnerabilities. Some remain within, others are expressed socially as we stumble and fall, and at times do harm to others, often unintended. While the Vergilian presumption that the sadness we endure is felt in nature at large may be an overreach, an expression of the naturalistic fallacy, it may nevertheless be true for that part of nature as far as humanity extends, informed by our fallibility, our finitude, in a word, our mortality.
It is this reality that, again, emanates from the farthest reaches of our human natures. It is this universal and existential fact that makes not only compassion but forgiveness necessary.
As I peruse the social landscape, I conclude that we live in unusually harsh and unforgiving times. Judgment comes too easily, absent a wider patience for facts, details, and context. Complex conditions are reduced to ideologies and categorical thinking. There is often a preoccupation with legalistic norms that obviates a humanistic sensitivity. We are in an era that spurns nuance. Moralism abounds. Whether because of fear, insecurity, or resentment, there is a diminished appreciation for the humanity of others in their complexity, in a feeling for the inner struggles others endure to make their way through life. Though everyone's story is unique, in this wider sense there is little difference between ourselves and others.
If we are to make a better world, we need to change the economic, political, and institutional structures in which we live out our lives. But this is only half of what is required. We need also a change in the human heart. What is required is an openness and renewed sensitivity to the humanity of others, to those known to us, and to the vast numbers who remain unknown. We need to value others in their unseen complexity, in an appreciation for their inner struggles, and in their pains and sorrows.
If we can cultivate this sensitivity, we will not only be richer for it, but we will widen a necessary pathway to social peace.
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Joe
Thoughtful and profound article.
Joe, your appeal to Virgil and Aeneas' lament is not overreach. Nature is sentient, even though intellectual fashion has been to deny that. When we open our hearts mindfully, we can sense the tears of the earth's suffering at the hands of human industry. Even when we resist acknowledging nature's capacity to hear, sense, and relate to us, we can embrace the poietic reach of this reading.
For me, the tripartite division of the charioteer and the good and evil horses of Plato's Phaedrus come to mind. With all our might, we all wrestle with deep forces within us, as Plato's Charioteer wrestles with his hard-driving horses to go in opposite directions. As charioteers, we struggle to move forward with a semblance of balance and harmony among the bellicose forces within. It is better to be mindful of our divided selves and the cacophonous complexities within when we fail or succeed at reaching and sustaining semblances of balance and harmony. The will to mask, cover up, and oversimplify does more harm than good.
You write, "It is this universal and existential fact that makes not only compassion but forgiveness necessary." This, for me, is a great moral truth. We don't know; we may have no idea what others are going through to make their lives work for themselves, family, loved ones, friends, workmates, and more. We don't know how they came up short today and try again tomorrow. The harsh condemnations and othering that crowds our social media today oversimplify irreducible complexities of life and divide us into warring camps raging at the gods, each other, and ourselves. The harmful pleasure of rage drives harm and violence in our society. It's easy enough to see.
Compassion and forgiveness are a salve for wounds we all suffer in the human condition. Not one of us is an exception. Paying more attention to our inner complexities and shortcomings offers us the space and opportunity to be kinder and more understanding of those with whom we disagree or have yet to find commonality.
Thanks for opening my heart to the sounds of nature laminating our human condition. At your prompting, I will open my heart further to the laminations of fellow human beings and nature herself. Healing connections may blossom unexpectedly.