Sila and Soul (Part 8)

So we've been saying that inevitably in our lives, we're going to find ourselves in situations where the structure of the situation demands a choice, a moral choice on our part between two values, or of one value out of maybe more than two -- or other times, or just directions in life, not so much a specific situation, where, in a way, we need to choose, preferentially, one value that's in perhaps an antinomical and oppositional relationship with another value. It's not even just from the structure of the situation. It arises from the complexity of individual values and virtues, implicating and involving others, needing counter-weights, etc., and values themselves being in antinomical relationship.

And so we're asked to do this. Life asks us. It presents us with these situations. Sometimes the choices are relatively simple, but when there's this antinomical relationship, etc., between values, it's not always so simple. And we can try to avoid this, but that's hardly a solution -- not very ennobling, not very helpful for our soul or the growth of our moral being. And so we incur a certain guilt with the responsibility that comes as we make those choices in life, as we navigate our path through life, the situations, and in the general directions of our life.

Now, one factor to consider here is why, given a choice between, let's say, two values, one person chooses to prioritize and invest in and care for and express and manifest one value, and another person chooses a different value. There's a consideration of personal differences here that I think is really crucial: a difference in souls, in soul-styles, in soul-callings. So this must come into kind of a mature consideration of ethics.

We touched on very briefly earlier -- there are, we could say, moral duties that we have to the collective. We have a moral duty to the groups around me, the communities, the larger society, etc. And I have, you have, each person has, likewise, a moral duty to one's own individual soul. And there can be a tension here between them, of course. And it's not always easy. In a way, you know, no one can flower fully as an individual, no one's soul can flower fully without drawing sustenance and all kinds of support, in fact, from the basis of, and a basis from the collective, from what's around them. The individual rises up out of that, to whatever extent they, so to speak, rise up.

But likewise, the collective, the community, the society is dependent on the individuals. And actually, a really healthy community has individuated individuals. It's not a collection of replicas, of unindividuated individuals. To the extent that the individuals that make up a community or society are true to themselves -- listening to their callings, their souls' promptings and callings, caring for their duty to themselves, and allowing that to shape the flourishing of their being, the full flowering of their being -- to that extent, a community is strong, is robust. So there's a kind of reciprocal dependency and reciprocal need between the collective and the individual. And in terms of the moral duties, there's a kind of tension there. So we already said that.

But what can we say about how the personal, what Hartmann would call the 'personality,' or soul-style, the individual duties of a soul, soul-duties that are individual, how does that come in, flow in, and influence, and affect this whole discussion of ethics, especially where there are choices to be made between values (as there always will be, as we said)? So some of what I want to explore a little bit here or open out a little bit may be -- or may sound, to some people -- may be considered a little bit provocative, maybe controversial, maybe contentious. I'm not sure. Maybe not at all to some people; maybe so to others. I'm certainly not seeking to provoke or to be controversial for the sake of it. I get absolutely no kick out of that kind of thing.

But I do think it's important to try to open up this area, which is tricky, delicate, needs careful consideration. Can we begin, just begin right now, to open this up, open up the whole field for kind of wider, deeper, more careful considerations regarding ethics and soul, especially as some of the things I want to go into now are kind of areas that are not usually considered when we consider ethics? But they are pertinent, and particularly they're pertinent if we're interested in soulmaking. And axiomatic to soulmaking is the principle of the necessity of my uniqueness and my particularities and my individual soul. Yeah? It's not at the exclusion of everything else, but that's a part of it.

So these areas that I want to talk about are pertinent when we talk about sīla and soul, ethics and soul. I'll do my best not to be clumsy. I'm sure inevitably I'll be a little clumsy in how I phrase things, treading in this delicate territory, but I'll do my best. So there's this whole range of values, whole range of possible choices that we have, as I said, either in terms of the larger currents of our life, or in specific situations. And we need to make choices. To not make a choice is also a choice, but as I said, not ennobling, not soulmaking. So we need to make choices. And part of what comes into making our choices, part of what comes in or what forms and shapes and directs and inspires different choices by different individuals, is those personal soul-styles -- personal, if you like, inclinations or callings or duties of the soul.

Now, Hartmann points out (and I can't remember if I've said this, but it really, really is important to say) that the universal values -- so for example, those basic precepts we get in Buddhadharma, or the basic sort of the last five of the Ten Commandments, and that kind of thing, the universal values, such as justice, etc. -- they need to form the basis. And in a way, they have what he calls 'unconditional precedence.' So they are kind of set in stone. Like the Ten Commandments, they're chiselled in stone. They form a platform, a foundation on which, on top of which, on the basis of which the more differentiated personal values can be built and raised. So everyone needs to, everyone has an obligation to these basic, universal values and to the precepts organized around that.

But on top of that basis, all kinds of choices present themselves in terms of the variegated emphases on different values that one can have, that there can be between human beings. But that's the foundation. So we need to bear that in mind. In a way, you know, that sounds like, at least in abstracto like that, it sounds like a relatively simple formula -- maybe. And sometimes it is very simple, so: "Okay, you choose this. I choose that. You prefer this. I prefer that. I prefer developing this. I prefer investing in that." As long as we're both keeping those universal values, keeping a care for them, then all's well and good.

And so sometimes it's that simple. But sometimes it's not. It's a little more tricky. It's a little more nebulous and ambiguous, and we draw in, of course, to our evaluation of others and self, sometimes, what's just a kind of indoctrination, or a fashion, or the dominant view of the culture, etc. And it's not necessarily such an open-eyed, unblinkered view of the moral landscape. Because you know, as I sort of just see different people, read about different people, know different people, some souls, for example, may have a soul-calling to express or manifest what might be quite extraordinary virtues, not so commonly found virtues, a kind of boldness that's out of the ordinary, a moral courage that's out of the ordinary -- for instance, to speak the truth, to stand up in the truth despite threats and possible dangers, etc. They might, in their soul-style, express and manifest what Hartmann called this 'radiant virtue.' The German's schenkende Tugend. I asked Kirsten, and she said that's not a good translation, but I didn't ask her what a better one would be. [laughs] She said it would be difficult to find words. But anyway, this radiant virtue -- there's something in the being. It's like sunshine, spiritual sunshine just pours out of them. And it radiates to those nearby -- sometimes just communicates non-verbally and indirectly, and sometimes through the direct interactions. That's not a common virtue. It's an uncommon virtue.

Or a person may have a propensity for a kind of radical generosity -- how they are with money, how they are with their possessions -- a kind of magnanimity, a largeness of soul, a big spirit, a big heart, an adventurousness of spirit that's quite rare. So some people may have those kind of more extraordinary virtues. And that's their soul-style. That's their soul-shape. That's what they're called to manifest in this life. It's part of their ethos, their soul, their personality.

And sometimes, what I notice is that that manifestation, that soul-style may kind of come in a package, if you like, where, for example, other virtues are relatively neglected -- we've touched on this a little bit before -- or even contravened, or at least not developed so much. So for example, they may not be gentle in speech. They may be at times quite harsh, even insensitive, judgmental. Or they just seem to live in a way that keeps quite different sexual mores, for example. They may be quite promiscuous, and other people might be looking and judging, for instance, that promiscuity. Maybe that goes with the kind of liberality and freedom of a soul.

So oftentimes, those particular neglects of whichever virtues are, relatively speaking, neglected, are maybe judged by others in the society, in the wider society. But those others may be relatively or even completely insensitive or blind to the particular set of virtues that this person is expressing. They're kind of blind to the radiant virtue. They're blind to the radical generosity. They're blind to the moral courage, or they don't value it so much. They evaluate it differently. [15:25] And the others who are judging this person -- I'm thinking of several people now, but I'll say something in a minute. The others who are judging might also be blind or insensitive to the very idea of duty to one's soul, to one's daimon, daimons, angels, to what Hartmann calls the 'ideal personality.'

So this is tricky. The universal values must be a foundation, must be a common, universal foundation. But on top of this, there's this space, amplitude for personal variation and disposition and inclination and the callings of the soul. Sounds simple, but it can be very tricky here, because what exactly are those universal foundations? Where are the boundaries?

So one of the people I'm thinking about is Bob Marley. I'm thinking of some others, but let's just focus on him right now, just very briefly. And to me, he had a lot of those qualities that I just rattled off: something exuding from his being, a magnanimity, a largeness of spirit, a radical generosity, a sort of openness of being, a radiant virtue. He just shines that kind of spiritual sunshine and beneficence, boldness, adventurousness, courage -- not to mention, of course, his creativity, his bestowing of his gifts artistically to humanity.

And at the same time, for instance, some people would criticize him as being, "Well, he was extremely promiscuous sexually." And he wasn't faithful to his various women. I think he slept with people who -- you know, slept with others while he was married, and things like that. I don't know the exact details. So to some people, "Well, he contravened basic, universal values" -- say, in his sexual promiscuity. But I just have a question. In that particular personal, relational, marital, community and wider social context in which he lived at the time -- Jamaica, and that community, and that larger community -- where in that context, in that complex of contexts, the personal, relational, marital, community context and wider social context -- where exactly was the boundary of universal values, say, vis-à-vis sexual behaviour, or even fidelity to one partner, monogamy, etc.?

So as I said, this is tricky. This is really tricky. I guess there are several points here. Partly it's the need for this faithfulness to the individual soul and the individual soul's callings, and the virtues that have a claim, that grasp the individual soul -- and at the same time, the tension with the duties to both the collective and also the faithfulness to the universal values. But sometimes these universal values are not exactly clearly, their edges are not clearly demarcated. And on top of all this, very often, people who have that kind or certain kinds of spirit often get judged by people who are blind to certain virtues, or as I said, blind to the duty souls have, the duty each soul has to the particularities and particular callings of one's own soul.

So I don't know if that made sense. And as I said, I'm trying to tread very carefully here. Perhaps it's best if we, again, view this as something for us to consider, something for you to consider carefully, to open up certain areas which don't usually get opened up, rather than me provide an answer which I don't actually have. Somehow in these tensions, there's a tension created by these pulls, these demands, these duties that pull in different directions. But the development of what Hartmann calls the 'personality' towards what he calls the 'ideal' of the personality -- so for him (I think I touched on this in another series of talks, and I can't remember where, just very briefly), each person has an ideal personality, the ideal that, if you like, exists in the realm of ideal. Again, we don't completely ever manifest, we don't completely ever express it fully, precisely, totally, faithfully. But in a way, that constitutes, in some ways, our more real essence, in some ways, than what we actually do manifest, in some ways.

So there's that kind of view, and it's akin to when we talk about the angel out ahead or the daimon, the daimon refracted, etc. In his language, the development of our personality towards the ideal, or in faithfulness to the ideal, in the harkening, in listening, in duty to the callings and the shapings and the promptings of the push and the pull of the ideal of our personality, that is a virtue. And so, can we include that in our sense of values, the value of our individual personality, the value of our listening and caring for those individual soul-callings, and the shapings and the growth of our soul? And included in that process, in the development of that virtue and the care for that virtue, is our, each of us as individuals, our unique weighing and differential emphasis between different values, our unique weighing up of different values. So how I weigh up and make a choice between different competing oppositional values in a situation or in my life is different than you, and different than a third person. And that's part of shaping my being.

At the same time, with this principle of goodness being 'choosing the higher value' -- but just to say, goodness as 'choosing the higher value' doesn't give enough clarity always about what to do, and doesn't give a full enough picture of what's involved in the choices that are presented to us as souls in life. So yes, choosing higher, but combined with that, we have this possibility to choose in different ways. It's part of developing our souls, part of our soulmaking. And this faithfulness to our own soul's calling and our particularities, the individualities, or what Hartmann calls our 'ideal personality,' that's a virtue. So there's what he called an 'ought' and a duty to this unique, irreplaceable, once-in-a-cosmos soul -- this unique, irreplaceable personality, in Hartmann's terms. And that's also a moral demand. That itself is a moral value. It's a high moral value, perhaps a very high one. But it plummets in height, it loses its status as a value if we contravene universal values in our development of that.

So this 'ought,' this duty to this, as I said, unique and irreplaceable, once-in-a-cosmos soul that you are -- it's hard to find teachings like that, certainly in Buddhadharma, certainly in the kind of emptiness teachings, or teachings of oneness, of which there are many different kinds. In general, they lack that. And it's actually quite unusual in moral philosophy to recognize that duty to what Hartmann calls ideal personality, to our personality, our duty to our individual soul. I'm not at all an expert on the sort of range of moral philosophy, but I'm not sure where else -- maybe Max Scheler -- I'm not sure where else you find such a thing in the considerations of moral philosophy, which tend to try and compact things to a single rational sort of rule of thumb, as Kant did, for example.

So within the realm of this consideration of what's an individual calling and our duty to that, I want to consider three particular, kind of unusual manifestations within that, again, for the sake of opening out what's less commonly opened out, and for the sake of our exploring of the relationship of soul and sīla, because these ones in particular may have quite a lot to do with soul, too, in particular ways.

(1) So one is the virtue of 'nobility,' as Hartmann uses that word. So I tend to use it in a slightly different way, but it's not important. I want to talk about what he calls 'the noble' as one possible kind of virtue or value, or orientation to that. As I explain, you'll see what I mean. That, as I said, is rarer, but may have its place when we consider the callings of individual souls. So for him, the noble is the opposite of the common. Okay, so it's nothing to do with social class and money, and nothing to do with aristocracy in the usual sense of the word, nothing to do with ethnic or racial divisions -- nothing like that. It's just the opposite of the common, this, what he calls 'noble,' because in a way, he writes:

Goodness can [sometimes] be commonplace. There is such a thing [he writes] as hackneyed virtue, ignoble contentment, narrow-minded virtue and righteousness.^[1]

Now, he's not saying that all goodness is like that. That would be not accurate or kind to say that at all. And even when there's a hackneyed virtue, it doesn't make it bad. It's just something common. It's just what everyone does or most people do. So this nobility that he's talking about is actually not everyone's concern. Goodness -- what it is to be good, and to practise goodness, to invest in goodness, to care for goodness -- that's everyone's concern. Nobility is something that's not everyone's concern. It's particular to some souls, if you like.

It is "uncommon"; it is always and necessarily common to few [he says].... [So] its opposite is the common, the usual ... ordinary, the well-worn track [he writes], in so far as upon it goodness as well as badness can be found. [So, and then] by its very nature the noble is not everybody's concern.

So even among 'the good,' if you like, if there are such, we can say, people who are good, or who care for goodness, there are the noble and there are the not-so-noble. He says:

It consists in nothing but an aristocracy of disposition.

So what's he talking about? He's talking about something very particular here, and in a way, it only partially overlaps with the way I might use the word usually, or most people might use the word usually. In any culture, there's a kind of generally accepted morality -- in most cultures, at least, certainly throughout history, maybe less so nowadays. But there's a generally accepted morality. And we talked about this historical fact of the shifting of moralities between cultures, different times and places in history, and different communities, etc. But this kind of search for what is not yet in the range of the accepted morality -- he said this is a noble search. Some people, sensitive to, groping for, intuiting, at the edge of grasping and being grasped by a value or a set of values that are out of the ordinary for that context that they're in, for that social context that they're in, and the accepted morality that has.

So there's the kind of prevailing view, and whatever that morality is now can be extended upwards into sort of higher reaches of the development of certain values. That would be one way for grasping what's out of the common range. But it can also kind of move laterally, if you like -- not so much just upwards in terms of higher values or more extreme kind of reaches of a certain value, but also into different values that are not even on the radar of an accepted morality of a society, etc. And he says, as well as the height of moral values, and extending the heights, it's "to this also," this wider range, this moving into new territory, this sensing or this opening up of a novel ethical sensibility, ethical sensibilities -- it is

to this also [that] the searching glance of nobility is directed. Progress, therefore, in selecting values, even within the range of goodness, is itself a function of the noble. For nobility of character is the pursuit of the uncommon.

Now, what he's saying is that, in a way, there are kind of pioneers in any society or time and place whose antennae, whose soul-receptors are sensitive to what is uncommon, what is beyond the scope of the usual sensibility. And in kind of opening up to that sensibility, they break new ground. But in time, that new ground comes to be shared with -- those perspectives, those sensibilities, those priorities come to be shared with the larger part of society. And so, what was sort of cutting-edge new territory becomes, actually, relatively common. And then the process has to start again, historically. Now this range is common, and now some people will be sensitive to newer values, to the uncommon.

[So] the content of nobility changes, although its direction towards the uncommon remains the same [he writes. And he continues:] In the historic process of the displacement of values [so this shifting of the torchlight from area to area within the whole range or the scope of the firmament of values], the essence of nobility is the perpetual anticipation, the searching and testing, the moving forward which transforms the ethos of an epoch. Its content at any given moment must therefore be the moral claim of the uncommon. Without the noble the process must needs stagnate -- [and] since to stand still is an impossibility -- become retrogressive.

On the grand scale, nobility is the onward-striving life of the historical ethos; in the individual it is the spirit of the pioneer.

So this whole way, you know -- again, I don't know where this lands in you. Some will say, "Oh, this sounds so elitist, and it's a certain view of history," and all that. But to me, there's something worth considering here. Again, I just want to open out some territory for our consideration. Doesn't mean we have to buy these ideas wholesale, but there's something, again, rarely considered in moral philosophy, perhaps, here, that again, as I said, has an importance for our considerations of soulmaking. So he says:

As regards its content, the higher development of the human type always depends on the actual tendency (not perhaps the conscious aims) of the noble. It necessarily clashes with the interest of those who are accounted "good" [in inverted commas], and is always to some extent aloof from the community at large, and stands in open opposition to the universality of their standards.

So again, we get this -- some people would judge this prioritizing of virtues to which they are blind. And there's a kind of, as he says, a clash between normally respected members of society -- the normally sort of, you know, good member of society, deemed good member of society -- there's a kind of clash of interests and moral values and vision and sensibilities. And so there's a kind of separation there.

An improvement in the standard is made possible by concentration of energy upon a narrower sphere.

So again, there's this, which we've touched on before: how is it that progress is often made, new territory is stretched into? It's by focusing on and getting interested in something in particular, and really heightening our focus, our work in that direction, often.

Hence the necessary remoteness of the selecting group from the general public.

So he also writes -- it's quite strong. He writes, "The noble man" -- again, excuse the gender-biased language. It's hard to read. It's quite dense, so it's hard to convert it as I'm reading:

The noble man hates all compromise as to values, even those that are wise and beneficent.

So can you get the sense of the kind of soul-character of what he's talking about? A pioneer who is at odds with the sort of entrenched, ordinary, common, respectable way of being. He's reaching out. He/she/they are reaching out, listening to some kind of sense of something else that is possible, some extension that's possible. And there is, in that character, a kind of dislike of compromise. They tend to be very uncompromising.

The noble man hates all compromise as to values, even those that are wise and beneficent. His salvation lies in another direction, in the exclusive fostering of the value which he thinks should be preferred -- even at the expense of all others.

So this kind of character can often be, can often seem to others a bit out of balance. They're sort of pressing on into the future, in a way, into unexplored territory. And as such, they can be leaning forward into that, in a way that others would regard as being out of balance. Maybe it's part of the soul-style. Is it always a demand for the soul to be balanced? So you get a lot of that in some interpretations of Jungian psychology. It's all about wholeness and balance. And yet there's a place for a lack of balance. Or perhaps there's a place for a lack of balance. Perhaps there's a soul-style that goes with that. And yes, it comes with costs.

So again, this is an unusual consideration. It's an unusual way of thinking. It's perhaps controversial. But it might be relevant to certain souls, and it might be relevant to the duty that certain souls have, the particular duties that certain souls have, and the particular duties in the realm of values. And they always go together: duty and value. So the new, the expanding into new territory of the valuational sensibility and the ethical sight.

I'm not sure if some people -- you know, we've talked about values being a part, an intrinsic part of soulmaking, as one of the elements of the imaginal, and now, everything we're talking about with ethics, and how they can relate to values, and how our relationship with values and virtues can be made soulmaking in that way. One might -- some people have sort of said something like this to me -- consider that soulmaking itself is a kind of value. So we're valuing, we value soulmaking. And as such, that might be, some of these people are saying, a kind of what Hartmann would call a 'noble virtue,' or one of the new -- for our time, a relatively new value. We value something because it's soulful. We value soulmaking. We value that whole ethos and that whole sensibility and sensitivity to existence, to self/other/world, to the elements of our psychology, to the cosmos. And in our time, that might be an expansion into newer territory in terms of a new virtue and new value: soulmaking itself. Perhaps -- I don't know.

(2) The second thing, the second area that I'd like to consider -- again, it's quite tricky territory; let's see how we do -- is hatred. I want to see if it's possible to shine a little light, again, from the point of view of soul, and what it might have to do with soul -- hatred and soul. So what do we mean by 'hatred'? Actually, if you look it up in the dictionary, it just says something like 'intense dislike,' which is good enough for our purposes right now. There are different schools that kind of go into the psychology of hatred in different ways, and in so doing they kind of define it in much more specific ways. But let's just say this 'intense dislike' and, so to speak, to make almost like an enemy out of something. So it could manifest in a kind of cold way. Some people put that in their definition of 'hatred,' that it has a kind of coldness that's different than anger, which is hot. But I just include both. So it can be cold, it can be kind of withdrawn and out of relationship, or it can be hot and kind of ranting, whatever.

Okay, so also, with the definition, we should say, hatred does not necessarily include ill-will. Ill-will means to wish harm on someone, okay? So you can intensely dislike something. You can hate something without wishing a person or persons harm. It's not the same, either, as cruelty, which is kind of either inflicting harm or enjoying the harm that someone else is suffering. Those are, if you like, a whole step further from what I'm talking about here by hatred. Okay, so intense dislike that, let's say, just doesn't include ill-will or cruelty (that's something else).

But let's see, if we put this in a soulmaking context or bring together, shine a light from the perspective of soulmaking teachings, if there's something worthwhile to consider here, and it's helpful to open out. So I've said several times, that kind of, if you like, maybe a really fundamental axiom of Soulmaking Dharma is "Soul loves soulmaking. Soul wants soulmaking." It can sound so simple: "Soul wants soulmaking." And in a way, it might be possible to use that axiom in a very basic way, in the sense of: take it as a first principle, and see what follows from that principle. So rather than saying, taking, you know, that "human beings want attachment," or "human beings want pleasure," or "human beings want even biological survival," or whatever it is, you know -- "Those are the primary drives" -- what if we say, "Actually, soul wants soulmaking," and just entertain the idea that that's the primary drive? Our primary drive as human beings is to soulmaking, and that gets diverted, subverted, etc., in different ways. What might ensue, what might that imply when we consider our psychology and our needs as human beings and how we consider all kinds of things -- for instance, developmental psychology, etc.?

So the soul wants soulmaking, which implies eros, because eros is an element of soulmaking, an indispensable element of soulmaking. And soulmaking also involves, with the eros, that the self, other, the world, and even our eros itself become imaginal. Yeah? So we've talked about all this. Self, other, world, and eros become imaginal. It's part of soulmaking. Soulmaking also asks or involves that the sense of self/other/world in our life -- the senses of self/other/world in our life -- mirror those imaginal self/other/worlds, etc. So in some way, there has to be some refracting, some mirroring, some reflecting. And we also said that with the eros, there's always got to be this -- there's always some beyond. There's always something to reach into, to grope into, to feel into, to sense into, to create/discover into. There's always the angel out ahead.

So if we just pause there: soul wants soulmaking, but because of avijjā, because of the basic delusional reification of self/other/world and elements of our psyche and psychology and being -- for instance, eros -- because of delusional reification, avijjā, because of cultural indoctrination, because of limited patterns or limitations on the movement and the growth, the expansion of eros, of psyche, of logos, and also of emotional/heart-life and energy in general -- the soul often moves in a direction that is not soulmaking. So we've been through all this on other retreats and talks. The soul wants soulmaking, but because of all these other conditions -- avijjā, indoctrination from culture, limited patterns of eros, psyche, logos, and emotion -- it often moves in a direction that's not soulmaking.

So of course, many people would contest that idea that the basic sort of drive is to soulmaking, and say something like, "You know, before all this soulmaking stuff, and eros for soulmaking -- which is kind of like an icing on the cake -- souls, beings, egos want to live. They want to have biological survival. They want to feel well. They want pleasurable sensations, you know -- Freud's pleasure principle and all that." But you know, (A) we're not clinging to this as a sort of dogmatic ultimate truth, this idea that what souls want most fundamentally is soulmaking. We're just entertaining it as a certain idea that can be very illuminating, I think, and open up different perspectives and avenues in our life. But (B), it's like, you can just look throughout history, and even today, in the West, countless numbers of human beings choose soulmaking over and before pleasure, over and before even health, and sometimes even physical survival. So with regards to dying or living, sometimes making choices in the service of something that's soulmaking, despite the material, hedonic (meaning the pleasure), the material cost, the hedonic cost in terms of "It's painful, it's unpleasant," and despite physical cost. So there are countless examples that bear witness to that prioritizing of soulmaking over any of these other drives, if you like, that are usually considered more primary. Something can trump all those. A person can say, "Doesn't matter if I die. I'll sacrifice my health. I'll sacrifice my material well-being, my pleasure, etc."

Let's play with this principle, "Soul wants soulmaking," as a fundamental drive, perhaps the fundamental drive, with everything that's involved in soulmaking. Now, sometimes what happens, of course, is the soulmaking is blocked. It's not possible. Or in some ways it's blocked. With some inner or outer blocks, it's not possible for the sense of self, other, world, and eros to become imaginal. Either one has only literalized the desire -- so there's desire there; it's craving rather than eros, and nothing is imaginal, for whatever reason -- or in the blocking, one literalizes desire. That can go both ways, so that only literalized desire blocks the soulmaking, or when soulmaking is blocked in some other way, then the desire is still there sometimes, and it can only get literalized because it can't get transformed and dimensionalized by the soulmaking process. And then a few different things can happen:

(i) One is, we can try and have whatever it is, the object that we want. So hatred often arises when there's something we want, and when I can't have it. So we can try and have that, and as we've talked about before, without the eros being allowed to instigate the soulmaking dynamic and things to become imaginal, have dimensions and have depths, etc., then this desire is just craving and not eros, and it has to move, so to speak, on a one-dimensional plane. It has to move flatly, in the flat world, into a kind of greed for more and more things, or into a kind of consumerism. That's one option.

(ii) Another option, when the soulmaking is blocked and there's still this desire, is that there's a kind of collapse, a despair. And the being collapses. And you can sometimes see it in a person's body language and demeanour at a certain time, or as a more general trend in their whole life, because there's been a kind of more habitual collapse of the whole soul, in a way, or a large portion of the soul, because the libido and the eros are not allowed to grow and to extend things. And sometimes with that despair and collapse, there's a kind of withdrawal, what some psychologists call a kind of schizoid withdrawal. One sort of retreats back out of relationship with the other or another or others. What happens, then, to the eros or the desire?

(iii) And a third possibility is, hatred ensues. Okay, so when we're frustrated in our desires, in the desires of our soul, we either (i) reify something and go to a kind of greed or craving on a flat level, (ii) collapse in despair inwardly, in this kind of withdrawal out of relationship, or (iii) something gets transformed into a kind of hatred. Or some combination of those three.

Now, hatred is interesting, as well, because it often comes out of a feeling or a perception of powerlessness, of my powerlessness. The powerlessness of self in its desire with regard to something for the self, or desire for something with regard to an other, or desire in the world, and not being able to have that. And sometimes, when that's intense, there's a feeling of powerlessness.

I really want to focus on certain kinds of hatred. So it's very particular, certain manifestations of hatred that I want to talk about. But you can see this link with powerlessness, if you weren't already aware of it: powerlessness and hatred often go together. If you find yourself in a really difficult contraction of hatred, one of the first things to do, when you're working with it, is to look for, ask, "In what ways do I feel powerlessness? So what is the particular kind of powerlessness I feel?" So you can see, for example, sometimes someone who's, let's say, a kind of secularist in some ways -- I'll just use that word in the sense of an opposition to a kind of religious fundamentalist, so I use the word 'secularist' in a particular way -- they may hate religious fundamentalists when they feel powerless in relation to them, either because they feel powerless in relation to a sort of group of terrorists, let's say, or they're living in a community or a country or a regime that has an oppressive religious law, and they might hate that, because there's a powerlessness in that.

Conversely, I think, probably a lot of religious fundamentalists hate secularists sometimes, when they feel powerless in relationship to them. For example, they may feel, I think a lot of religious fundamentalists in the world probably do feel powerless with respect to the sweeping power, if you like, of capitalist and modernist views, and kind of modernist -- what they would regard as immorality and amorality. So hatred and powerlessness go together, usually. The hatred often comes out of or from a feeling of powerlessness. That's quite an important thing to be aware of and to explore, as I said.

But I really want to talk about quite specific kinds of hatred, a bit more narrow, ones that don't just involve powerlessness, but powerlessness in relation to what may be soulmaking -- so where the soul wants soulmaking, and somehow it's blocked. And maybe it doesn't even realize that what it wants is soulmaking. So that's partly why I'm saying all this.

Let's see. Actually, on the theme of power, before we move on, you know, there's actually a lot of energy, a lot of libido, a lot of life force tied up in hatred. It can feel completely frozen, and completely contracted and imprisoned, and not very powerful. But actually, tied up in it, because there's so much energy tied up in it, there's potentially a lot of power in it. So there's a possibility of liberating that power and energy. And again, it depends what we do with that power. So it comes from a feeling of powerlessness, but it actually has in it the potential of a lot of power. And that power can go in the soulmaking direction, can kick-start, galvanize, instigate, open up, and give energy to the direction of soulmaking, to things becoming images, to the imaginal sense of self, other, world, and eros.

Or it can get stuck in that withdrawal and despair. And actually, that tightness there, that contraction actually has a lot of power. It takes quite a lot to keep the soul bound up like that, to keep the being contracted like that and withdrawn like that. Or this potential power can move in the direction of literalized action -- maybe action to destroy the object of hatred, or to work towards what is actually desired. There's potentially a lot of power in hatred. It feels, once we get under the sort of obvious feelings of hatred, then there's a sense of powerlessness. And underneath that is the potential of liberating power. The question is, and what will we do with that power? Where will it go?

So anyway, hatred comes out of, usually, a feeling or a perception of powerlessness of the self in relation to its desire for something in regard to self/other/world. Now, an interesting thing about hatred (and this is the particular kind of hatred I want to talk about) is that -- I don't know if you've noticed -- oftentimes, certain kinds of hatred arise for what is quite close or similar. So it's very common, for example, [for] people within a certain religious tradition to end up hating, intensely disliking, or opposing and making a kind of enemy or polemic out of someone in the same tradition, whose teachings are in some ways very similar. Or in the realm of philosophy, or in the realm of psychological -- schools of psychology, or whatever. So that's also quite interesting. Why is it that certain kinds of hatred arise much more for or towards something, some expression or manifestation that's not too far from one's own position?

So if we think, for example, it's unlikely that someone in the Insight Meditation tradition -- and that has a range to it -- would start hating, I don't know, the proponents of indigenous belief from Papua New Guinea or something like that. It's too dissimilar. But within that range of what is quite similar -- let's say, Insight Meditation tradition, or we could say Tibetan Buddhadharma, or whatever -- there can be intense polemic. Insight Meditation tradition tends not to speak these things, but they simmer along there in the background, and you can hear them come out, and you've probably heard it seep out of this voice at times. And certainly the Tibetans are much more open about it, and engage in, I think, probably a much healthier, open polemic that's quite cutting and intense at times. So why the similarity? Is it something to do with the relationship between eros and hatred? And are there certain souls who might have, if you like, a lot of soulfulness, a lot of disposition towards soulfulness, towards soulmaking, towards image, towards eros, that may be in some ways liable to or prone to this kind of hatred for something that's actually quite similar?

So what's the connection here, possibly? Eros delineates, right? We talked about this when we went into a lot of detail in previous retreats. So what does eros do? It complexifies, it creates distinctions, it creates and discovers more and more faces in what it loves, and carves its kind of relationship with those particulars, of which making those distinctions, discovering/creating those distinctions, those different faces, and those delineations is part of the whole process. And certainly one can get attached to those. But something probably more primary even than the attachment is the fear of the dissolving of the objects of eros that have been created/discovered through this process of fine delineation, of subtle discernment, discrimination, subtle kind of differentiation into different aspects.

So when another, let's say, teaching, or tradition, or school of thought, or whatever it is, is quite close, maybe it presents more of a danger to one's own objects of eros, what one has delineated, and what one loves in terms of what's opening up for oneself. So where there's less similarity, where the difference is huge, it's strangely less likely that hatred arises. Somehow the object of my eros -- that which I love, that which I'm discovering and creating here in terms of thought and the direction of my eros, and the whole sense of soul there, carving that out in terms of self/other/world -- if that's blocked somewhere or crowded out by something that's similar, but in the similarity tends to be heard or seen in a way that kind of washes over all differences, then the hatred might arise. It's more likely to arise.

It's interesting. So is there a relationship between eros and hatred? You know, 'hatred' in Pali, in Sanskrit, the word is dveṣa, and the root there is from dva, which means 'two,' 'to make two.' And of course, with the twoness, it's part of the eros as well. So that's why this sort of eros can be dangerous -- a double-edged sword, if you like. Is there some connection here, in the need to differentiate and the actual differentiation that comes with eros, and the tendency or the danger of hatred there? [1:07:35]

So, I'm thinking also of James Hillman at this point, who said, somewhere or other, you have to hate something. And he, if you read some of his -- more in interviews and things, but it comes across in writings as well -- it's quite polemic, and I think what he would have openly called a hatred of different schools of psychology. Now, notice that his hatred was for psychology. He was a psychologist hating different or varying schools of psychology. So for instance, there was a teacher of his at the Jung Institute called Marie-Louise von Franz, and she presented a certain picture of psychology -- and particularly of puer psychology and other things -- which affronted Hillman's own soul-sensibility and the kind of careful differentiations that his soulmaking process made, that his eros and the eros of his intellect and sensibility made. And so he kind of, in a way, hated her teachings. And he also hated what he regarded as the dominant sort of psychology at the time where he was beginning to write -- the dominant sort of ego psychology or behavioural psychology.

So in a way, the preponderance of those, and the power of Marie-Louise von Franz being an authority in the Jungian school, and the power wielded by the dominant psychological paradigms, perhaps, made him feel a relative lack of power, and the danger, as I said, of what he wanted to find out for himself, discover, create space for, present -- both to his soul and to the soul of the world and to others -- those faces were in danger of getting covered over. And in that, there was a feeling of a relative lack of power, perhaps.

But what was interesting, in that case, and it's part of what I want to say, is he was able to kind of mobilize a power for himself in actuality by writing, and speaking, and also by working with and supporting others whose work he sympathized with. And in doing all that, in beginning to write and speak and carve out this vision, this soul-vision and soul-sensibility, and present it as something different, and differentiable, and present it to the world -- in a way, he became also image for himself. And his eros -- all of it was allowed to come into the soulmaking process. And even the other, then, can be a kind of imaginal other, in terms of the other as the object of hatred, whether it's a school or a person kind of embodying the school, whatever. It's not actually, as I said, it's not ill-will. It's not harm. But it can become imaginal and not reified.

So with that potential sort of obliteration and covering-over and loss of what his soulmaking process -- the differentiations, the aspects of divinity, the aspects of soul that his soulmaking process was revealing, and creating and revealing to himself -- faced with the danger of that, faced with a kind of relative powerlessness or perception of relative powerlessness in that wider situation, yet he was able to act and move in a way that the whole landscape of that whole environment, and the whole constituents of that landscape in the world of psychology became actually imaginal for him, and he himself, an imaginal character in that landscape, an imaginal warrior. [1:12:19]

And remember, the erotic-imaginal always has these 'beyonds' to it. So you get the similar thing with "the warrior always fighting" as an image. There's not an end to this. There's not necessarily an end to some of these battles. Some revolutionaries, so to speak, actually need a constant revolution. Actually, the soul would not be satisfied with arriving at some kind of, you know, finished utopia. There's this beyond there.

So faced with this kind of thing, and there's the desire, there's the frustrated desire, there's the movement, incipient movement of the eros, and the sensed powerlessness and danger with respect to what it wants -- it could be anything that the soul wants. But getting what one wants, or what one thinks one wants, in some of those situations may not actually be soulmaking. That's a point to bear in mind. So one way out of all this, one way out to dissolve the hatred is to really let go, to really let go in terms of what's going on, in sort of the classical teachings of Buddhadharma. Another is when the self actually does manage to get some power and no longer feels so powerless. So to some degree, there's a decrease of the sense of powerlessness, and to some degree, the sense of the self that's desired, the sense of whatever the other is that's desired, and the sense of the world that one's in that's desired -- those are achieved kind of materially or literally. And that would be a way, also, out of that hatred.

But another is for something to become image -- the self, other, world, eros to become image, or some combination of all these avenues out of it. But it's worth bearing in mind that sometimes, as I said, getting what one wants -- in other words, the literal achievement of what one desires -- may or may not be soulmaking. If the self, other, world, and eros don't open up to the imaginal with this open-endedness there, and the beyondness, the forever-beyondness there, then that process may not be soulmaking.

We've talked about that connection. We've talked about before on previous retreats, you know, the need for boundaries, because boundaries make two. There's a boundary between this and that, between number one and number two. So boundaries, limits actually form part of the crucible of soulmaking. So sometimes, as I said, getting what one wants, if one's not careful, that's not actually soulmaking. If I get what I want, there has to be something more that I haven't got, that I want. There's the extension into the beyonds of the eros, the angel out ahead, always moving ahead, the infinite growth of those beyonds, so there's still a boundary between what I have and what I don't have that can potentially allow more, allow a soulmaking process. I can end the hatred by getting what I want, but it might not be soulmaking. What's the fundamental desire there? Is it to get what I want, or is it actually the soulmaking? And I've sold it short by just getting what I want. But I've flattened it.

So hatred will stay as kind of poisonous hatred, and it really, really can be very poisonous and very imprisoning, and toxic in a way that seeps out to other people, as well, when self, other, world, and eros cannot become image. It can be transformed, it can dissolve when we let go, when we really, fully let go in the usual Dharmic sense; or when we get some power, in terms of what we want; or when things become image, and they really are allowed to become imaginal.

I was struck -- I don't know if you saw it. There was a video someone sent me -- I don't know when it was, sometime in the last three years -- and I think that someone had posted on Facebook or something. It was a kind of selfie video that this young woman had taken. I think she was Swedish, but I can't remember. And she had boarded a plane which was deporting -- like a regular airline flight to Afghanistan or somewhere, and it contained an Afghani man that was being deported, probably facing great threat to his life back in Afghanistan. And she boarded this plane, and took a selfie of herself standing up and refusing to sit down when they asked everyone to sit down so they could take off. And she filmed it on her camera, she disrupted the flight, and she and the Afghani man were removed. But I was so touched by seeing this video. I don't know if you saw it. I think it was quite popular. She was then in a situation where there was potentially a great deal of powerlessness, a sense of powerlessness. She actually did something quite brave and extraordinary and, I thought, very beautiful in the kind of grace with which she did it, and the largeness of soul with which she did it.

But it was self-empowering in the sense that, instead of just feeling powerless in terms of that terrible situation, she did something which was self-empowering. So by empowering herself that way, there was -- I don't know if she would have gotten contracted into hate, but there was certainly, like, much less chance. There was the dissolving of any chance of hatred through the self-empowering. And hatred often goes with this kind of hardness of heart. There's something really brittle and contracted there. And part of what was really touching to me, seeing this, was just how vulnerable she could be at the same time. She was very strong, standing up, being very firm with those who were shouting at her, and criticizing her, and calling her names. She was very strong, very upright, very bold, very courageous, very clear. And at the same time, very vulnerable. So she was crying, and there was a richness of soul there, a breadth of soul. There wasn't any hardness there at all.

And it was interesting too -- again, we're talking about ethics -- in terms of some of what people who didn't like what she was doing, some of the other passengers on the flight complained about the inconvenience, and said, "What about, you know, there are children on the plane, etc. You're upsetting the children." And again, you can hear there the sort of opposition of different value systems -- I would say, actually, the values of different heights in this hierarchy of values. You know, inconvenience -- how high a value, how important a value is convenience? And there's so often this trope of "upsetting the children," as if that's kind of become something almost sacred in some people's outlook in our culture, so that those values, like that, become somehow more important, or eclipse the value of care, of kindness, of compassion, of saving someone's life, of standing up to injustice.

And again, so we have to be very careful with hatred. I'm just talking there about certain manifestations of hatred that come out of, actually, at their root, there's a blocked soulmaking, some soulmaking and some direction of eros and image and soulfulness that wants to be allowed to flourish, wants to be given space to carve out a pathway for soul, and it's blocked. And hatred can come out of that. And sometimes we're just so in the hatred, we don't actually quite realize the different levels of what's going on -- even the level of the powerlessness, etc. And in some of those instances, it's not easy, but it's worth, perhaps, approaching it with this lens, to do with power and powerlessness, and soulmaking, and what the soul might want there that's getting blocked. And are there ways for it to open up the situation imaginally, etc.? So again, tricky territory, difficult, potentially contentious, but really important to consider when we want to -- if we want to -- bring in the reflections about soul, and considerations of soul, into our considerations and reflections on ethics and morality, and also psychology more generally.

(3) Okay. A third, again, example of a kind of area that's unusual, an area of virtue or values that's unusual to consider, but that also might have something to do with what's a personal calling for some souls, is one I've mentioned before in one of the earlier talks, in the talks on ethics. It's this 'love of the remote.' So I want to say something about that. I think it was coined by Nietzsche as an idea, but I'm not entirely sure. So what is this 'love of the remote'? Well, I've actually mentioned it earlier, but I want to go into it again in a little more detail. [1:24:29]

So there is, for us, a kind of bond with those that are nearest to us in the community. We have an obligation to them, etc. We feel that bond. We rub shoulders with them. We feel moral duty and concern in relation to them. Love of the remote, one of its aspects is it's a love for and an obligation for, a moral duty, or it's a sense of love, a sense of obligation, a sense of moral duty to the future, if you like, to the following generation or following generations. That's one aspect of it. I'll qualify it a bit more in a second, in a minute. So Hartmann writes about this, and he says:

The responsibility which arises therefrom [the responsibility which arises from this, the responsibility of this, responsibility for the future; it's a particular kind of responsibility to the future] signifies a solidarity of a newer and greater kind than that of justice, brotherly love and faith. Like these it is a bond, a fellowship, a pledge, a joint responsibility of person for person.... [But it's] different [he says]. In it the man of to-day [again, pardon the gender-biased language] feels himself one with the man of the far-away future, though the latter [the man of the far-away future] will have forgotten him and cannot be of help to him. The temporal direction of cause and effect is not reversible. The influence of man on man, solidarity itself, is only one-sided. Only he who lived previously can be of service to him who lives afterwards. The successor bears no retrospective obligation. Instead, there falls to him a new obligation towards the generations coming after him. Solidarity is directed forward only; its form is progress, not co-existence. Still it is a bond which is great not only in extent but great in the quality of its task.

So there's perhaps some overlap here with what he calls 'nobility.' And again, we're talking about something that not everyone will resonate with, not everyone will feel. Not everyone will feel a soul-calling and a duty in this direction. He continues:

That it is a bond of a more fragile kind, that it is taken so much less earnestly by the living than is the solidarity of justice or love, this is not due to its own nature. It is due to the moral immaturity of the living, to their not having wakened to their greatest task. It is their lack of thorough self-conquest, which transcends the sphere of the Now and the Near.

So again, it's quite strong language. But he's saying, sometimes we get so preoccupied, or so limited in our sense of the scope of our obligations, that we forget that we might have a greater obligation to the sort of progress of humanity, if you like. Yes, in German it's called Fernstenliebe, and it was in fact Nietzsche who coined the term. It's very characteristic of Nietzsche, and sort of something that he was perhaps the first person to promote, I think, the first person to sort of cotton on to and sense really keenly. And he had an imbalanced relationship with it because he neglected its antinomy, antinomical value in the love of the nearest. So Hartmann criticizes him for that, which I think is a good point. Then, I'm going to read another passage. It says:

Love of the remotest, at first, really requires an overcoming of one's commitment to the nearest.

So this is interesting. Here we're talking about values that have antinomical relationships.

It is the same overcoming which generally inheres in the nature of a future intention. Everything which is dear and entrusted to man attaches to the immediate environment [usually]. Here an attachment of love to the remote is demanded.

Somehow I have to feel this attachment, this moral obligation to the remote, the far future.

Hence not only natural inclination, but also genuine moral habit, must be overcome [he says]. A valuable commitment, not acquired without moral struggle, is to retire into the background and give way to another ethos.

So we've maybe worked hard to practise love of the nearest, to practise altruism, and in a way, at a certain stage, maybe something else has to come in, and that love of the nearest has to kind of, relatively speaking, diminish in our hierarchy of priorities -- for some.

[So it's] the conquering of a product of previous self-conquest. Love of the nearest ([or] altruism) went counter to self-love ([to] egoism); it was a tremendous extension of the sphere of life, efficiency, evaluation, participation. Now even this widened sphere is seen to be too narrow, to be a drag on the intention of love. Love of the nearest does not go beyond one's contemporary. Its effect does not endure, it dies with its object; it is not adapted to the continuation of its object, but to his present existence. Love of the remotest seeks a different measure of efficiency, an efficacy which will last.

So I said I'd qualify what he means here. Some of you will have heard, "Oh, we need to consider the next seven generations in our choices now." So that, to me, is absolutely critical when we're talking about things like species loss and climate change. And we really need to bring that kind of thinking. this care for the future, this care for the next seven generations, seventy generations, in terms of the totality. Everyone in those generations, we need to care for. That's, to me, a given, just common ethic -- well, it should be common ethical sense. But he's actually talking about something different here. It's not obvious from the language, 'love of the remote.' But he writes:

In love of the nearest the energy of striving, as it has no choice, reconciles itself with whoever is accidentally at hand.

It's just the practising of kindness and concern and empathy and support to whoever's around one. It has nothing to do with whether that person is worthy or not, just as when we teach mettā: it's unconditional in that. So it's not interested in assessing whether someone is worthy or unworthy of that kindness, that love of the nearest. With love of the remotest, though, it's different. Okay, and this is, again, where it might be somewhat contentious to some people, to hear. It might sound somewhat contentious:

With love of the remotest the opposite is true. The energy of striving [he writes] shall serve not the nearest but the best, whom it will bring to further fruition. Herein, a selection of persons from the point of view of values is introduced, a selection which on its side does not refer to the given person at all, but to the type of man.

[1:32:42] So in this kind of love that Nietzsche was sort of promulgating, and that Hartmann's picking up on, and I think Max Scheler, as well, there's this interest in those in the far future -- but those, if you like, the most morally ready, the most morally capable, what he calls "the best" in the future. So it's really quite elitist and quite selective. And it does consider worth, and it does consider along lines, evaluate in terms of values and virtues, and moral capacity and sensibility. So again, this is probably not at all fashionable in a lot of circles nowadays, and a lot of our current way of thinking in our society. It's worth noting there are, in the Pali Canon, several times where it mentions that the Buddha, when he was going to give a Dharma talk, would, with his psychic powers, with his siddhis, survey the audience and find who was nearest to awakening -- not those who were already arahants, neither those who were nearer the beginning. He would sort of get a sense of where everyone was at with his psychic powers, and he would aim his talk, he would pitch his talk at those who were nearest to awakening -- not at the beginners, not at those far away, but those who were nearest to awakening.

So again, he's aiming at "the best." He's aiming at a certain capacity. And how rare that is for us to think that way these days! For many of us, it contravenes another kind of law, ethical law, which is this love of the nearest, which often goes with a concern for who's weakest, who's more the beginner, who's more in need, etc. So there is this antinomy between these two valuational pulls and duties. And Hartmann criticized Nietzsche for being too one-sided and neglecting the love of the nearest, but there's this antinomy, there's this tension there.

Let's see. So because it puts one out of relationship a little bit, or less in relationship with those that are around one -- and the demands, and the sort of more immediate and obvious contacts that we have with those around one -- this is a hard value. It's a hard virtue. And Hartmann writes:

The way of the creative spirit is hard.

So there's something in this of the creative, because, again, we're forging into new territory, giving a gift to those in the remote future who may be able to understand something that's not necessarily easily understandable now, who may be able to sense, and who may have a capacity that's not readily available now, for the sake of some larger process of humanity, perhaps -- and also for the sake, because some people's souls are called to do that. But this "way of the creative spirit is hard"; there's a creative spirit in this. And he says:

It is as hard towards oneself as towards another. [So it's tough.] It doesn't set much store by either, both are means.

Either oneself or another -- so regarding oneself as a means. In this kind of hard work there, there is a kind of -- it's a tough love. One's hard on oneself. One's not soft and mollycoddling, giving in to what one needs, even though one might be, if you like, isolated in that venture, in that endeavour, in that work.

To be a means [he writes] is what is hard for any man; all that is sensitive in him protests. Here the apriorism of sympathy must be silenced [so even sympathy for oneself]. Another apriorism, which is also fraught with value, rises up against it, a prophetic sense of the ethical potentiality in man, his latent capacity, the future value which transcends his own person and his own environment.

So I don't know if you can get a sense of the kind of loneliness of that, isolation, struggle, potential to be misunderstood, etc. There's maybe an overlap here in the realm of aesthetics. And like I said, for me, sometimes I'm not even sure I make a distinction between aesthetic sensibility and moral sensibility. I class them all together sometimes. If it's a similarity or overlap, I don't know. But I'm reminded of Beethoven in his late period, in his last years. He'd gone deaf quite a bit before that, but he was able to write quite brilliant music with no real loss to the quality, extraordinary quality of his music, even though he was deaf. But in his late period, he sort of opened out a whole new way of composing, a whole new way of thinking about music. And his contemporaries thought he had gone mad, actually. They couldn't make head or tail of this new music, the late string quartets or some of the late piano pieces. And it wasn't that they thought, "Oh, he's gone deaf," because they knew he could write when he was deaf. They thought he had gone mad. They thought he'd just lost it.

But he knew what he was doing, and he said (something I think Mahler said as well) of his symphonies, when people were saying, "No one really listens to your music," both Beethoven and Mahler said, "These are for other generations. They're for future generations." So there's a solitude in that. There's a hard task in that, a hard duty, when your attachment, when your love, when your care is for those in the future, and those fruits of which, the thanks for which you will never know. You won't even know if it will land. You won't know if it will be received. And in the isolation of that, there can be difficulty.

So as I said, actually, and this is something also Hartmann picks up on, it's a strange venture, this one, because we really don't know the future. When there's the love of the nearest, I'm dealing with these people around me. I can see what they need. I can feel it. I know I'm addressing something real. It's obvious to me that we're talking about real needs, and they're reasonable. It's a reasonable outpouring of my love and my care and my concern. But when there's love of the remotest, I don't know. I don't know what its actual effect will be. Maybe there won't be anything, and all this sacrifice is in vain. And not only is it in vain, but in so doing, in sacrificing, I'm actually sinning, to use Hartmann's word, against my contemporaries and those around me.

[So] in this respect [he says] love of the remotest is worse than any other virtue, but especially so in its damage to brotherly love, which is always sure of its immediate objects and which, even when it does not achieve them, is sure that they are reasonable.

We've just said that. There's something about this, and I'll just read, again, another paragraph from Hartmann. Again, this really may not resonate with some of you. I'm sure it won't. But some of you will hear the kind of soulfulness in this, and the kind of beauty of this. And it may be, for some of you, that this kind of love is part, again, of your personal soul-calling, the way your personality, your ideal personality, your soul, weighs up preferentially between different values. So he says:

Love of the remotest ... excels brotherly love and every other virtue [on certain accounts]: greatness of moral spirit, intensity of spiritual energy, which is required in the taking upon oneself of what is inherently uncertain. The venture is great. Only a deep and mighty faith, permeating a person's whole being, is equal to it. It is a faith of a unique kind, different from trust between man and man; a faith which reaches out to the whole of things and can do no other than stake all it has. It is faith on the grand scale, faith in a higher order, which determines the cosmic meaning of man. When it becomes active and carries out its schemes, its work is of historic import.... And [he says] this energy is harmonious with a similar feeling -- [what he calls] hope, when it is raised to its highest power, the basic feeling of ethical idealism, which bears all things and gladly suffers for an Idea [with a capital 'I' -- so that transcendent moral value bears all things and gladly suffers for that soul-sense of the values, in their transcendent dimensionality, divinity, beyondness, its love for that], never despairing: hope, the peculiar assurance which takes hold [of] one who risks all on a single issue.

So again, sometimes we might find ourselves engaged in something. We talk about our duty, our moral duty to our fellow human beings. Sometimes we're limited in our sense of scope, of who our moral duty is [to]. It's interesting, reading moral philosophers, how often they neglect the natural world and our moral duty to the natural world, moral duty to animals -- it's all very anthropocentric. And then there's also the limit, potential limiting, just in the love of the nearest, just those who are around me now, and not so much the vision opening to this love of the remotest.

In a way, we could also add -- and maybe it's actually akin to, maybe it's a different name for the same thing -- our duty to the angels. Sometimes angels want something. They always want something from us. And sometimes what they want is quite hard. It's a big ask. And sometimes we're engaged in a work that, it may seem it doesn't have any bearing on or effect on our contemporaries, on those around us. No one else seems to value it. It seems like it won't have any impact. But there may be a duty to the angels. And maybe the angels are the face of the remote, the face of those souls in the far future who will have a capacity.

So as I said, three or four kind of potentially controversial ideas there, but also potentially very relevant to our considerations of both soulmaking and ethics, and certainly of the way in which the needs of individual souls within the realm of ethics, and the needs of individual souls to find their particular callings, particular duties, to manifest and realize their ideal personality, in Hartmann's words -- how all that mixes with and is part of a bigger vision of ethics.

So in regard to personhood, personality, soul, etc., Alasdair MacIntyre -- again, I think it's in his book After Virtue, yes -- also talks a little bit about this, not so much, but from quite a different perspective, not using our language or Hartmann's language, really. He talks about the potential for a kind of narrative unity for a life, for a human life, that there's some sense of weaving together, creating/discovering -- these are my words now -- a kind of soul-story, narrative unity, in which our identity, our particular soul, the face of our soul is bound. So that has something to do with what Hartmann would call his 'personality,' etc., but he uses different language. And he writes:

In what does the unity of an individual life consist?^[2]

Before I go on, one of the reasons he's asking this is because one of his sort of tentative conclusions in his book was that it's only when there's a kind of unity of a life that all the virtues kind of make sense, and they find their place within that unity. So I don't know whether we need to necessarily believe that, or whether we can also have this kind of view of, as Hillman says, a polytheistic psyche. But even a polytheistic psyche can have a certain unity, another level to it. But for Alasdair MacIntyre, this idea of a unity is something which makes sense of virtues. Without a sense of a unity to the movement of one's life and the direction of one's life, all these potentially competing values can't be assessed, judged, placed in relative order of duty and importance, etc., for the individual. Anyway:

In what does the unity of an individual life consist? The answer is that its unity is the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life. To ask "What is the good for me?" [in other words, "What is the morally good for me?"] is to ask how best I might live out that unity and bring it to completion.... The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest.... [And then he says:] A quest for what?

And then he says a couple things which I think are very interesting before coming to his tentative conclusion. He says:

Two key features of the medieval conception of a quest need to be recalled. The first is that without some at least partly determinate conception of the final telos [the final goal] there could not be any beginning to a quest. Some conception of the good of man is required.

So some conception of what is good is required to start the quest for what is good.

Secondly it is clear the medieval conception of a quest is not at all that of a search for something already adequately characterized, as miners search for gold or geologists for oil. It is in the course of the quest and only through encountering and coping with the various particular harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which provide any quest with its episodes and incidents that the goal of the quest is finally to be understood. A quest is always an education both as to the character of that which is sought and in self-knowledge.

So he writes:

A provisional conclusion about the good life for man [is that it] is the life spent in seeking for the good life [of] man.

It's the life on this quest, this quest which intuits, partially, what it's looking for -- so it has some sense of what's good and valuable, some sense of its final telos, and is also in its process an education, both as regards to the goal, but also as regards to the self.

The good life for man [his tentative conclusion, provisional conclusion, he says] is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which ... enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.

So that's, again, with regard to the place of personality, personhood, self, uniqueness in our moral explorations, in our explorations of morality. This is another way of thinking about it. So this quest involves search, involves eros regarding values, involves stretch, involves questioning, and is potentially -- and what I've just read of what he's written, I read that as -- potentially open-ended, as the whole soulmaking process is. I started the whole series saying, perhaps our exploration of morality is inevitably, or it should be inevitably, inherently open-ended. And we'll never finish with this area.

So one idea of what unifies a human life and gives it that stamp, mark, face of our unique soul, is our unique quest for goodness, for moral goodness, for understanding values, towards those values -- moral, I'd include aesthetic and all that -- which speak to us, which touch us, which are necessary. And as I said, maybe that will vary from person to person to a certain extent, as we've touched on, and it might be open-ended, and I think it should be open-ended.

Okay, so these are some, as I said, perspectives and ideas to ponder, to think about, to reflect on. Some of them, as I said, not easy, not simple, and some of them relatively rare in what usually gets considered. Let's stop there for today.

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1. For Hartmann quotes in this talk, see Nicolai Hartmann, Ethics, ii: Moral Values (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 192--3, 196, 198, 201, 317--9, 321, 330--1. ↩︎

2. For MacIntyre quotes in this talk, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 253--4. ↩︎