It’s a shame that the world lost such a great singer so early. And yet, the same louche excess that killed Winehouse was part of the appeal of her songs. Nobody wants to hear a soulful voice sing “I ate all my vegetables and flossed daily,” even if this idea is put in more poetic cadences.

Since her death I’ve been thinking about the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil – who was not much older than Winehouse when she died herself. Weil’s most famous work Gravity and Grace is regularly quoted for this line: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.” Winehouse’s self-destruction was an evil in the wider sense of that word; one suspects it may have been gloomy and monotonous for her, as romantic and varied as it was for us. Though the evils she faced were real enough for her and those close to her, this nonfiction story may as well have been imaginary for most of us, the ones who knew her only as a voice and a moving image.

Weil’s quote offers an implicit criticism of Martha Nussbaum’s thesis, in “Transcending humanity,” which attacks the attempt to transcend everyday human life in part on the grounds that the transcendent life is less interesting. In Homer’s Odyssey, we readers want Odysseus to refuse the nymph Calypso’s offer of permanent bliss with her outside the human world, because the story wouldn’t be interesting if he took it:

What story would be left, if he made the other choice? Plato saw the answer clearly: no story at all, but only praises of the goodness of good gods and heroes. Unfortunately for Plato, readers brought up on Homer would be likely to find that prospect about as appealing as twenty-four books of description of Calypso’s unchanging island. Readers, too, want to be where the action is. (Love’s Knowledge 367)

What Nussbaum skirts around, though, is the distinction between the Odyssey’s story and those we might make for ourselves – between the lives we wish to hear about and the ones we wish to live. I think the Mahābhārata may be the greatest story ever told; but I would never wish the tragic fates of its heroes on myself or any of my loved ones. Those lives are filled with romantic and varied imaginary evils. To trudge through those evils every day would indeed be gloomy and barren.

The point in turn casts some doubt on the actively engaged human ideal that Nussbaum endorses – an ideal standing in contrast to the peaceful monastic life sought by Platonists like Augustine (as well as the immortality sought by so many Daoists). Nobody writes stories about a monk immersed in contemplative retreat. Unless that monk’s meditative journey is interrupted, he has to leave that retreat for a pilgrimage (the Journey to the West) or face inner demons (the Buddha under the bo tree) – that is, unless the monk faces imaginary evils. (Ironically enough, Simone Weil’s own life turned out to be fascinating, in part because she pushed the monastic ideal too far – seeking self-denial, she died young of a disease caused in part by starvation.) But this lack of interest does nothing to invalidate the monastic life. It doesn’t make for a good story, but maybe that’s a good thing.

By saying all this I’m expressing the counterpoint to the things I said earlier this year in commenting on Penelope Trunk: while there is something to be said for a life that’s interesting and not merely happy, there’s something else to be said for happiness too. For fictional characters, interest is much more important than happiness; for real people, that’s not so clear. Looking back recently at my own reasons for rejecting monasticism, I notice that it’s not about choosing interest over happiness, so much as choosing a different kind of happiness: active joy versus blissful contentment.

Amy Winehouse’s life was not long, and it does not sound to me like it was happy. But it was definitely interesting. The world is richer for its having taken place. I hope that’s what she wanted.

But if one takes up the resulting position – neither supernatural nor political – then one has relatively little company in the history of philosophy. From Yavanayāna Buddhists to Unitarian Universalists, those who have sought to move beyond the supernatural have typically also believed in political engagement. The vast majority of political quietists like Śāntideva believed in a vast panoply of unseen worlds far beyond those supported by empirically tested evidence.

I continue to wonder: is there something I’m missing? Is there some reason why so many in the end tend to supernaturalism, politics, or both? (Epicurus is perhaps the clearest example of a figure who avoided both supernaturalism and politics – but Epicureanism as a system did not last, and even those who sought to resurrect Epicurus’s philosophy have sometimes ditched his anti-politics.)

Last time I mused on the subject, I turned to an explanation from Simone Weil: “Atheist materialism is necessarily revolutionary, because to orient oneself toward an absolute good down here, one must place it in the future.” Humans, Weil seems to imply, will always seek some sort of absolute perfection: the choice is to seek it in an otherworldly realm, or in the future of this one. Eric Voegelin appeared to see the same choice as Weil, and view the latter choice as disastrous: there will always be an “eschaton,” a Final End that human life aspires to, and if we immanentize it – that is, set it in this world instead of a transcendent world beyond – then we will end up with totalitarian states that goosestep over the messy imperfections inevitable in human life. Whether or not there were any other world in which to transcend, according to Voegelin, the absence of belief in such an other world leads us to terror in this one.

But I asked before: do we really have to seek an absolute good? What about just seeking modest improvements, trying to minimize suffering without eliminating it? As non-supernaturalists, shouldn’t we just try and make sure that people set their eyes lower than Weil and Voegelin do?

Well, one answer that comes to mind for that question is: death. The existence of a final death seems to pose a major problem for any sort of egoistic consequentialism, any idea that one should seek out the best consequences for oneself – including the virtue and tranquility that Epicurus himself seeks. For eventually, there will be no further consequences no matter what one does. At the last moment of one’s life, there is no future, nothing to maximize and no reason to do anything. And at the previous moment, all the egoist can act for is something better in that last moment. In the earlier moments of life, the moments that one can improve will run out before one knows it. As important as this one life looks while we’re in it, it begins to look pretty small when one faces impending death, whether it is impending in seconds or in decades.

By contrast, an absolute good – an “eschaton” – outlasts the individual self, it is something bigger to strive for. Even striving for the good of one’s immediate circle of friends and relatives seems hollow when their death will follow in a few decades as well. But the state – that offers the promise of something more lasting. The Jacobins are long dead, but the capitalist world unleashed by the French Revolution is still with us. The possibility of a classless communist society offers the same intoxicating thought of a world in which one’s contributions live on long after death, a world where one’s life is more important than its mere length.

Politics, then, offers a way to transcend death through what Freud called cathexis – as might one’s children and one’s work. We break down the boundaries of our selves and identify them with something that outlasts ourselves, such as a state or new classless society.

But there remains a basic problem with transcending death through cathexis in this way: the object of cathexis has no guarantee of immortality either. Lenin’s classless society lies in ruins today. What guarantee have we that the perfect society we think we’re building will not do the same? Let alone the more minor improvements we might make to politics as it is. This seems to me the greatest problem with descent philosophies of whatever variety: however much one might accomplish, in the end it comes to naught. Lucretius is right that when we die we won’t care about that nothingness. But that doesn’t stop it from casting a shadow over all we do in life, raising questions about the point of it all, whether it’s really worth bothering or we’re just fooling ourselves.

And so I start to turn to ascent philosophies, views that turn us in some respect away from the world we see. But then we are back to the original problem: most ascent philosophies, especially the ascending intimacy philosophies, are supernaturalist. They depend on an afterlife, turn us away from this world toward the one that is supposed to come after death – but to one who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, it would seem like there is no such thing.

However, those philosophies of the afterlife have one thing in common with the descent philosophies. They both put the absolute good, the eschaton, in the future, whether a transcendent or immanent future. A great appeal to me of Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta philosophy is that it gives us an eschaton which is beyond time itself, and therefore essentially not in the future. We have an absolute good that is already there at all times; it’s just a matter of realizing it. Does Śaṅkara get us entirely beyond the supernaturalism-or-politics quandary? Probably not – he believed in rebirth himself, after all, and the main point of bothering to realize the absolute good would be that one would do so in the future and avoid the suffering attached to future ignorant births. It makes for an interesting alternative way of viewing the problem, but not necessarily a solution to it.

This sort of pattern provides great fodder for the social constructionists in the Western humanities. When one is immersed in the humanities today it’s easy to assume that the default position is a cultural relativism that assumes the absence of cultural universals. But cross the quad to the psychology building, and one can discover a startlingly naïve cultural universalism that confines everything outside Western white experience to a brief appendix.

There are many lessons to be taken from Watters’s article, and I can’t begin to address them all here. The one that stands out for me is Robin Horton’s point that non-Western cultures have a great deal to teach us about psychology and sociology, and not only in the long-literate “great traditions” of South and East Asia. Especially, their supernatural explanations of (what we usually call) mental illness can be far more humane than our medical models. Anthropologist Juli McGruder noted in her studies of Zanzibar: behaviours that the DSM would easily classify as schizophrenia, are classified in Zanzibar as examples of spirit possession, and treated accordingly; and while Zanzibari rituals don’t return the individual to a “normal” state, they nevertheless allow the individual to remain within a caring social environment, and allow a kind of “calmness and acquiescence” (patient endurance, I might call it) in the face of the unusual behaviour.

It’s not hard, then, to see that there’s something very wrong with psychological diagnosis in the West – which becomes psychological diagnosis everywhere, as it gets exported. On the other hand, it’s also worth asking what’s right with it. While the Zanzibaris might have a more effective way of dealing with the behaviours in question, those behaviours do still seem to have something in common with schizophrenia. The case of anorexia is still more intriguing. The behaviour of starving oneself to death is common to thin-obsessed Manhattanites, Hong Kongers complaining of stomach bloat, and the philosopher Simone Weil, who starved herself as an ascetic attempt to transcend the world. Could there not be something these differently interpreted behaviours have in common? If Manhattanites have something to learn from Zanzibaris, surely the reverse can be true as well.

The same is true at most Unitarian Universalist churches. I attended a UU church for two years, but this is among the major reasons I stopped going. The UU church appealed to me because it seemed open to seekers with a wide range of values; nevertheless, there are some values that typical UUs do share, among them a commitment to political activism for social justice as a central part of a good life. That’s something I’m skeptical of, at the least. And so while I found a great community there and made some lasting friendships, I ultimately found myself far out of sync spiritually with the church’s ethos.

To me, perhaps the most curious example of the close connection between politics and non-supernaturalism is Robert Hanrott‘s now-defunct Epicurus Blog. Hanrott claimed to devote the blog to the Epicurean philosophy of “moderation, enjoyment of life, tranquillity, friendship, lack of fear,” along with Epicurus’s rejection of gods and other supernatural forms of causation. Hanrott explicitly acknowledged that “those who try to follow Epicurus and his teachings are not supposed to involve themselves in politics.” And yet the majority of the posts on his Epicurus Blog wound up being about… politics. Often he talked about how “Epicurus would approve” (or disapprove) of current political claims or programs, even though he knows Epicurus disclaimed any involvement in politics. He defended the blog’s political orientation by saying “But if the greatest objective in life is happiness, peace of mind, tranquility and freedom from fear and anxiety, then one would prefer a government that offered policies that helped it all along.” While that may technically be true, it doesn’t imply that one should care a great deal about that government and its workings. Hanrott, it seems to me, went directly against his philosophical mentor’s teachings by being concerned so heavily with politics – rather than on, say, exercises to make oneself happier, of the sort found at Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project. But it’s not such a great surprise that Hanrott did this; his ethos is entirely of a piece with humanists, UUs and Engaged Buddhists.

The question I ponder is: why does this happen? I lean myself toward a strong supernatural skepticism but against strong political engagement. The philosophers who are most notable for such an orientation are the classical Epicureans, which is why it startles me that the most explicitly Epicurean blog went in such a different direction. But then classical Epicureanism never got a great foothold in the first place; I don’t know of any really enduring traditions that have been neither supernatural nor political in their orientation.

Simone Weil’s La pésanteur et la grace (Gravity and Grace) offers a potential explanation, one that takes us back to the last two posts. Weil says (my translation): “Atheist materialism is necessarily revolutionary, because to orient oneself toward an absolute good down here, one must place it in the future.” As I understand it, Weil means that human beings necessarily seek some sort of perfection, some “absolute good.” If our spiritual aim is merely for the better and not the best, it is dour, washed out, unmotivating. If we no longer have a heaven, an other-worldly nirvana, or a future rebirth into perfect buddhahood to aim for, then the only absolute good available to us is a future worldly utopia, a political realm that will transcends the manifest imperfection of the political world as it is now.

Is Weil right? I don’t think I feel the kind of imperative that Weil seems to identify – I think we’re better off accepting the world’s imperfection, just trying to minimize suffering without eliminating it. But am I deluding myself? Am I going to always wind up craving some sort of unfulfilled perfection, in this world or in a world beyond?