by Katalin Balog
It was the first day of a Tibetan Buddhist retreat in 2016. We were about to participate in a ritual of chants and burning sage. Before we proceeded outside, the head teacher asked all of us to invite someone we would like to share this moment with. Instantly and vividly, my grandfather appeared in my mind. I found the defiance embodied in this choice shocking. My grandfather was the rock of my childhood. Kind, optimistic, a fountain of knowledge about the world, a lover of poetry and music, he was the undisputed authority in the family. He was a heir of the Enlightenment, and he would have been horrified by my association with religion, even the nontheistic Buddhist variety. At that moment, I realized that when the chips were down, I would choose my Enlightenment heritage over the enlightenment Buddhism promised. I was at this retreat (and later joining a synagogue) in an effort to recover parts of my soul that my secular rationalist upbringing made me feel I was missing. My being here was my rebellion against this very Enlightenment heritage.
But once here, feelings of unease increased with every chant about the “basic goodness” of humans, with every question waved away with impatience, with every forced debate on topics the leader of the organization set for his ostensibly grown-up disciples, with the disapproving jibes about “too much thinking”. The dissonance became too much, and by the end of the retreat – six long weeks later – I was out, no longer a disciple.
The tension I was experiencing was a small manifestation of the central problem of modernity. Can the common-sense, first-person, subjective view of ourselves as souls or subjects be reconciled with a scientifically informed, objective perspective? Can reason be overridden in the name of mindfulness, of systematic attention to subjective experience? This question preoccupied two very different thinkers of the 19th century, Auguste Comte and Søren Kierkegaard, who, though they seem to have been unaware of each other, lived at the same time and have come to very different conclusions.
Comte was a hero of my grandfather. As a young medical student in Budapest, in the early years of the 20th century, he was one of the founders of a progressive youth organization, the Galileo Circle, that was at the avant-garde of politics, science, art, and literature. He and his comrades were kindling hopes of a liberal democratic future for Hungary built on an enlightened and educated citizenry, lifted out of poverty and ignorance by the glorious advances of the scientific and industrial revolutions.
Those hopes came dashing down after World War I and the failed revolutions of 1918 and 1919. Politics, which was his passion, went in decisively opposite directions from his ideals for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, even the Holocaust, which he survived by hiding in Budapest with my mother and uncle, didn’t extinguish his hope in an ultimate future that will be wiser, kinder, more enlightened, and more just. I don’t think it was simply naiveté that kept his spirit intact to the end. He was heir to a world-view, scarcely comprehensible now, which saw science and education as keys to human flourishing and a more humane society.
Comte’s ‘positive philosophy’ taught that science is the only reliable form of knowledge, based on observation, measurement, and the discovery of laws of nature. The spectacular success of science in the past 300 years has raised hopes that it also holds the key to guiding human beings towards a good life. Comte thought that the ‘positive’ method, which replaced the fantasy-driven doctrines of religion and the speculative theories of the metaphysicians, was the very best way to reconcile the intellect and the heart. He thought that scientific thinking liberates the heart and leads not only to more clarity in moral thought but to actual moral improvement in people, and the discovery of the best ways society should be organized for the flourishing of its members. He warned that the intellect should be restricted to realizing the desires of the heart: “the intellect is intended for service, not for empire; when it imagines itself supreme, it is really only obeying the personal instead of the social instincts”. Human flourishing is guaranteed once ‘positive philosophy’ is allowed free rein, since the social instincts that are the main source of desire are, by nature, good. In his telling, there is no tension between intellect and the heart, science and the subjective view of life; to the contrary, our subjective, moral, and aesthetic selves will be immensely helped along by the scientific method.
Kierkegaard, a deeply religious thinker, of course, realized the incompatibility between the ‘positive method’ and religion. But he saw a wider opposition that existed not merely between the scientifically informed world view and the world view of Christianity, but between what he called ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’. His mission was to make religion and subjectivity safe from science. Much of his philosophy is a warning against the tendency – already in evidence in his age – to take an increasingly objective, abstract perspective on the world. Objectivity abstracts away, as much as possible, from the subjective, experiential concepts that usually furnish everyday thinking. A subjective orientation, on the other hand, is based on an attunement to the inner experience of feeling, sensing, thinking, and valuing that unfolds in our day-to-day living.
Contrary to Comte, Kierkegaard held that objective thought, a paradigm example of which is science, is most problematic when applied to one’s own life and existence. As he put it, “Science and scholarship want to teach that becoming objective is the way. Christianity teaches that the way is to become subjective, to become a subject.” He thought that the modern age is characterized by less immersion in life through experience, and constant distraction by its abstractions. To identify life with its abstractions is, in Kierkegaard’s view, a dangerous but all too common error. And it is a problem: by becoming less subjective, one cuts oneself off from sources of meaning and value.
It is a mistake because our experience of life matters in ineffable ways that no purely objective understanding of the world can capture. Wittgenstein, in a well-known letter to Ludwig von Ficker, the publisher of the Tractatus, claimed that “the whole point of the book is to show that what is important lies in what cannot be expressed” in a scientific language. A super-intelligent organism that lacked any feeling or experience and so lacked a subjective, experiential understanding of the world could know many things about the world, about humans as well, but it would know nothing of human significance.
Comte didn’t share the early Enlightenment’s suspicion of the heart and glorification of the intellect. He didn’t think there was any incompatibility between heart and intellect, that is, in Kierkegaardian terms, subjectivity and objectivity. People like my grandfather and his comrades could in all good conscience, revel in poetry, art, music, believe in the innate benevolence of the heart, and at the same time champion science and reject all systems of thought incompatible with it, most especially religion. In their minds, only error and ignorance kept humanity from reaching its potential. In the 19th century, scientific and literary culture could still more or less happily coexist. Freud, for example, was both scientist and belletrist, nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature.
By the 20th century, the two cultures had separated. But the optimism about scientific thought Comte and his followers shared was echoed by C. P. Snow in his famous essay, The Two Cultures. Snow believed that what keeps humanity back is not scientists’ – admittedly grievous – ignorance of the humanities, but it is rather the scientific illiteracy of literary types. He thought that swelling the ranks of the professional-technocratic elite is the surest way to eradicate poverty and inequality.
Things turned out to be different. The elites proved themselves to be often mistaken and quite indifferent to the plight of the uneducated. Quasi-mandatory higher education has bred cynicism instead of prosperity. And the two cultures not only separated, but the humanists are increasingly losing, with lamentable results. Subjectivity is in decline, and a general soullessness is spreading. One does not have to share Kierkegaard’s hostility to science and scholarship, one can agree with positivism that one’s beliefs about the world should be reconciled with what science has to say about it, and still see his point about the cultivation of subjectivity, because that is where his major insights lie.
So what about his exhortation to become subjective? At first sight, the idea that we can become more or less subjective might seem problematic; it seems that just by virtue of having experiences, one is subjective already. But contemplation is more than simply having experience. In contemplation, experience is “held” in attention and explored without a particular goal in mind. Contemplation happens in small ways every time we stop to appreciate the world as we experience it, every time we are present for what is happening deliberately, rather than breezing through in automatic pilot (or being absorbed in thought to the exclusion of experience). This could be a momentary lingering on someone’s body language or the way they express themselves. It could be an experience of merging with the natural environment. It could be a state of reflection, reading a novel or poem. It could be just sitting and mulling over some experience of the day. Kierkegaard’s exhortation to become subjective can be read as a call to contemplation.
Our age seems particularly ill-suited to contemplation. We are getting lost in that hopeless little screen, as Leonard Cohen said. It is getting more and more difficult to find the silence, empty places, and the experience of being off the grid that we need to renew our connection to the world. The four horsemen of technology, the internet, social media, AI, and virtual reality, push us away from ourselves and away from the world. Kierkegaard’s warnings are more apposite now than in his time. But while we might be forgetting how to contemplate and how to read, we are still the same humans. The degradation of attention, the ubiquity of internet slop, might become intolerable for a future generation that will perhaps insist on rediscovering what we are now losing.
As for myself, I will still invite my grandfather wherever I go, but will tell him that he was wrong about one thing. When he taught me to appreciate the beauty of the world around me, he was not channeling “positive philosophy” – he awakened my soul.