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Friday, May 05, 2006
REVEL In 1997, the French social philosopher Jean-Francois Revel, who died a few days ago, had a long conversation with his son, a convert to Buddhism who lives in Nepal. They sat in an inn near Kathmandu and went back and forth on the secular Western tradition of Revel and the spiritual Eastern approach of his son, Matthieu Ricard ("Revel" was a pen name). The book, a best-seller in France, was issued in the United States as The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life, and I've always liked it for the emotionally and intellectually intense atmosphere the two of them generate. One comment of Revel's seemed to me worth quoting in his memory. His son has been lamenting what he calls "the failure of philosophy," which he finds of little use ...to those looking for reference points or principles that could give meaning to their life. Those philosophies, cut off from the practical application that any spiritual path requires if its goal is to bring about a veritable inner transformation, were able to indulge themselves in an unimpeded proliferation of ideas, intellectual games of extreme complexity and minimum usefulness. The gap between the world of ideas and that of the individual's life has become such that those who promulgate these philosophical systems no longer themselves need to be the living illustration of them. It's completely accepted nowadays that you can be a great philosopher at the same time as living in a way that no one would even think of taking as an example. We've already emphasized that the principal quality of a true teacher is that he's a living illustration of the perfection he teaches. That perfection can't just be the coherence of a system of ideas; it should be transparently manifested in all the person's different sides. A philosopher can completely lose his way in his personal problems, or a scientist in his emotions, but a disciple committed to the spiritual path knows at once that he's on the wrong track if he notices that over the months and years his human qualities - goodness, tolerance, being at peace with himself and others - have been declining instead of growing. To this, Revel responds: The picture you've just sketched sums up what could be called the essential wound of Western civilization, which is basically the contrast and contradiction between the intellectual and the artistic prowess that individuals can attain on the one hand, and the frequent poverty of their moral life, or of their ethics, on the other. And it's true that it's the result of the gap left when philosophy abandoned the individual quest for wisdom. [Our philosophers] don't indicate much of a path for us in terms of how we should behave. Their ethics are based on retreat from the world. They see how mad everyone is - there are only people blinded by ambition, politicians demented by their lust for power... [S]o the best one can do is refuse to mix with any of them and just sneer at the spectacle... |