March 21, 2025

Normally, when a love affair ends, you pick yourself up, shrug off the sadness, and plunge back into the fray again. But once in a while there is not an end but a calamity, perhaps one that you didn’t even see coming, one not foreseen by your horoscope. Yet suddenly the moon turns blood red and the stars plunge from the sky. Afterward, crawling out of the wreckage, you may find that you have changed, that you have come to doubt yourself. In “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” Yeats facing his enemies, thinks,

How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?

How much more so if that shape is cast by one you loved, as it was for Yeats in another poem, “The Cold Heaven”:

And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light.

In the face of the awful accusations, coming from someone whose judgment you trusted, you may feel that somehow they must be true. And, if so, that means you are not the person you thought you were. And if you have been wrong about your own identity, maybe you have been wrong about everything. Maybe you have understood nothing about self, world, and life, but lived in a delusional fantasy.

You can say that such a crisis of confidence is an irrational overreaction, but it is in fact the rousing of a dormant feeling of uncertainty that may be the defining element of human nature. In The Denial of Death (1975), Ernest Becker said that what we most strongly repress is the certainty of death. But in fact the nature of death is not certain at all, and we feel that anyone who says that it is is protesting too much. Hamlet is deeply attracted to death, but what keeps him from suicide is his uncertainty about it: “For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?” The blustering defensiveness with which some people dismiss the possibility that death is anything but oblivion betrays the fact that, in one part of their mind, they are not quite sure. Hamlet is arguably the most famous character in literature, and what is fascinating about him is his uncertainty. He doubts everything, even sometimes his own doubts. He cannot act because he is consumed by doubt.

The catastrophic destruction of a society may have the same result, as I think we are going to find out. The United States has disintegrated in a matter of weeks, in a fashion that no one predicted. The historian Heather Cox Richardson, both in her book America Awakening and her Substack newsletter Letters from an American, has been teaching us that the anti-democratic authoritarian elitism that is now in control of the country has been an element in American society since its founding. Nevertheless, I don’t think anyone realized how pervasive the anti-democratic sentiment was, how many people, from virulent MAGAheads to nice grandmas and grandpas, longed for someone “strong” to get into power in order to smash it all, in order to take out their fear and hatred on somebody—immigrants, trans people, federal employees, whatever. We thought that we were a country basically full of good people, with an antisocial minority too small to seize control. We may yet find out that we are the minority, that those who have been whipped into a lynch-mob frenzy are what Americans really are—perhaps what human beings really are. Even if the Trump administration immolates itself on the pyre of its own excesses it may be that we will find ourselves unable to believe again in the dream of a country founded upon democratic principles of liberty, equality, and the guaranteed satisfaction of basic needs, which is what the Declaration of Independence means by “life.” The ancients thought democracy the worst form of government, because based on an illusion that people are, or could be, better than they are. Whereas what they are is a selfish rabble ruled by herd instinct and invariably manipulated by demagogues. We thought we had proved them wrong.

Right now, to quote Yeats yet again, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Nothing has changed since Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919. The right is full of passionate intensity, a euphemism for fanaticism, both religious and political. The liberal center tries to keep its grip on a kind of relativistic tolerance that goes along to get along, a stance useful for the purposes of its neoliberal economics but lacking all conviction. The left is, on the surface, tied up in identity politics, but those politics are underpinned by a radical skepticism that became visible in the “theory wars” that dominated the humanities several decades ago. The Democratic Party tries to contain the center and the left, but has lost touch with the one element that would actually give it a chance to win elections—the kind of genuine populism represented by people like Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown. Meanwhile, Trump’s erratic behavior is cunningly designed to amplify the mood of anxious uncertainty as much as possible, because it throws everyone off balance and paralyzes action. No one knows where the next attack will come from, or even whether there is an attack or not. Have tariffs been imposed, or paused, or imposed again at an even higher rate? He has totally bewildered not only Americans but the markets, our former allies, the whole world. This is not senility. He is being deliberately unpredictable because the mood of uncertainty devastates morale and scatters any attempt to focus a counter-attack. Uncertainty is Trump’s greatest weapon, and the blitz of wildly destructive edicts and firings is designed to overwhelm his opponents.

When I was an undergraduate majoring in English, some of the more intellectual students regarded philosophy as the superior discipline because it was more “rigorous.” I was genuinely puzzled. If you read a history of philosophy, you will find that there is no single theory or philosophical system that has not been refuted. I thought that, in the course of history, all that logical rigor ought to close in on at least some modest certainties, if only by a progresssive identification of errors. But in fact all the analysis and debating never produces any consensus. Philosophy remains in the position of Socrates, who said that he knew nothing. He tried to show his students that they too knew nothing, even though they thought they did, and that his only superiority to them was that he was aware that he knew nothing. But Athens put Socrates to death rather than be reminded constantly of the uncertainty of all knowledge. In the 17^th century, Descartes decided he would doubt everything until he finally reached some foundational reality that could not be doubted. He thought he had found that in the form of his own subjective consciousness: “I think, therefore I am.” But even the seeming certainty of our own self-awareness has been denied. The philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that consciousness can logically be only an appearance generated by the brain’s programming. In this we are no different than Siri, who is intelligent but not aware. The 60’s comedy troupe Firesign Theatre put it correctly: “I think Therefore I think I am.” That is why Elon Musk does not care how many people’s lives he destroys. He refers to them as the “non-player characters” of video games. To think of them as real because they make convincing-sounding noises is the naïve mistake he calls “empathy.”

In fact, philosophy has given up on the possibility of any kind of definitive knowledge, on what German philosophy in the 19^th century called the Absolute. The case of Hegel seems to have been decisive. Hegel produced a vastly ambitious philosophical system that claimed to answer every question, to be what the theoretical physicists call a Theory of Everything. He felt that his system was the end of philosophy, in more than one sense. It was the end or goal that philosophy had always been seeking, which meant that it was the end of philosophical inquiry, since all questions had now been answered. It was a brilliant system, but Hegel’s belief that the Absolute had awakened to know itself in his work was a symptom of what Jung would call inflation, a megalomania produced when reason is supercharged by energy from the unconscious so that if feels godlike and all-knowing. The deflation of the Hegelian balloon led to the abandonment of attempts at a grand synthesis of knowledge. One of the people who stuck pins in the balloon was Nietzsche, who hated Socrates and yet helped return philosophy to Socrates’ iconoclasm. One of his books was in fact called The Twilight of the Idols. Philosophy of the last half century has been dominated by a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a radical skepticism that is sometimes called “antifoundationalism.” There is no solid foundation on which to build any structure of truth. The proper task of philosophy is not to build grand structures of knowledge but rather to cultivate a mental discipline that critiques all intellectual structures, exposing their limitations, and thereby exposing the limitations of reason itself. In other words, philosophy has come full circle to wisdom of uncertainty espoused by Socrates.

The idea that uncertainty is a form of wisdom has dominated not just philosophy but all the humanities disciplines for the better part of a century. If you don’t change your major to philosophy but rather stick with English, you will still be confronted with uncertainty in the form of “literary theory.” Theory teaches that there is no definitive answer to the question that begins “What is the meaning of” in relation to any text whatsoever. There is no final meaning: there are instead many interpretations. This is not relativism: an interpretation can be critiqued, its failures of logic, its biases and blind spots identified. But there is no final interpretation. Literary critical knowledge is perspectival: a text looks different according to what theoretical lens you are viewing it through. A series of books designed to prepare English majors for graduate school, back when we sent students to graduate school, bundled a literary text such as Heart of Darkness together with essays interpreting the work from the perspective of various theoretical schools—deconstructive, psychoanalytic, feminist, political, and so on. Heart of darkness indeed, some students no doubt thought: two interpretations could be so different that they could seem to be about different works. And you can’t abandon theory: every interpretation has to be based on certain principles assumed to be true, and those assumptions are theory in a broad sense. Even the assumption that a text is coherent and not nonsense is a theoretical assumption. This is why a lot of students, especially male students, say they do not like English classes. Everybody just expresses their opinion, and there is no “right answer,” they complain. They are wrong if they think that means anything goes, but correct that there is no “right answer.”

Humanity has traditionally turned to religion for a certainty that reason cannot offer. Indeed, religions claim to possess truths that reason cannot discover or even understand. We could reason for a thousand years without arriving at the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and transubstantiation. Such truths derive not from reason but from revelation, nor can reason understand them even when they are revealed. How God can be three persons and yet one, how Christ can be fully God and yet fully human, how bread and wine can also be the body and blood of Christ: these truths are paradoxical, and must therefore be accepted upon faith. Revelation from a transcendent source, when accepted by faith, promises certainty. Faith is defined in Hebrews 11:1 as what the King James translation calls “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” Modernizing translations assume that “substance” and “evidence” must refer to a feeling of certainty. For example, the New International Version reads, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” But, as Northrop Frye points out in Words with Power, such a translation reduces faith to positive vibes and evades the question of what kind of substance or evidence backs up those claims.

Well, what does? There have been two answers to that question: Scripture and the teachings of a supposedly infallible Church. Protestantism rejects the latter and bases its assurance on “Scripture alone.” Although papal infallibility was not proclaimed doctrine until 1870, the teachings of the Church were always accepted as a form of revelation complementary and equal to Scripture. The pronouncements of Popes and Church councils were assumed to be inspired by God’s grace, so that a doctrine like that of purgatory could be accepted even though it is not in the Bible. Protestantism rejects this as institutional overreach, but is still left with the problem that our only proof that Scripture is true lies in the fact that it proclaims that it is. Neither the Old nor the New Testament provides evidence of a sort that historians would accept—which is exactly why fundamentalism insists so vehemently that they do. But fundamentalism protests too much. However, if all or part of the Bible is not “literally” true, we are faced with the question, “What is a non-literal truth—other than a euphemism for a fiction?” Moreover, the Bible is a text, and, like all texts, has to be interpreted, and there is no end to the process of interpretation, especially since the Bible, unlike most literary texts, is often obscure and contradictory. The fundamentalist insistence that it has one clear, simple meaning that is clear without “interpretation” is, like the insistence on its factuality, a product of desperation.

Since the 17^th century, science has disproved the Bible’s cosmological and natural claims, historians have rendered questionable its factual claims, and the appalling record of violence and abuse of power on the part of all the Biblical religions has subverted the credibility of its moral claims. All of this has led to a dramatic secularization of most Western societies. The attempt on the part of Christian nationalism and Project 2025 to forcibly impose a theocracy is a backlash against the steadily increasing percentage of people who are without religion. As with all authoritarianism, the coerciveness is evidence not of certainty but of hidden doubt. Authoritarian types are black-and-white thinkers who find any kind of uncertainty threatening, and their fear of falling into an abyss of anarchy and ambiguity easily turns into hatred.

Science is not the same as a curiosity about the natural world. The ancient Greeks had plenty of curiosity about nature—the title of one of Aristotle’s works is Parts of Animals—but, as historians remark with some puzzlement, they never developed science. Perhaps the necessary catalyst was the need to replace the arbitrary pronouncements of a corrupt Church with a method of acquiring knowledge that could provide real certainty because it was based not just on logic, like philosophy, but on empirical evidence confirmed by repeatable experiment. As usual, coercive tactics betray a hidden insecurity. What really frightened the Church about Galileo was not his challenge to the old geocentric cosmos, which after all was not in Scripture and could very well have been regarded as one of what were called “things indifferent,” things which were open to opinion because the Bible did not speak of them or spoke of them ambiguously. What was threatening was not this or that arguable fact but a method, a mode of inquiry that did not depend on blind faith but could point to demonstrable proof. Scientific method was not merely a challenge to certain previously-believed notions but a whole new source of authority. It was thus potentially revolutionary, a threat to the Church’s very existence.

From the beginning, the dream that science might replace religion in redeeming the world had two aspects. One was technological. Science could transform the world by means of inventions that would improve the quality of human life. But the greater dream was not that someday we would be living in the world of The Jetsons but that society might be redesigned according to a set of moral values based on scientific proof rather than mere ideology and the will to power. Abraham Maslow never lost that hope, and I still subscribe to his view that values can and should be based on a hierarchy of universal basic needs, or what Northrop Frye called primary concerns. I think that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is another way of articulating the vision of a society based on rationally-discovered universals, even though, yes, the great problem is who gets to decide how this new moral knowledge is applied. On that level, of course, we will never be done with politics and conflicts of interest. But Maslow was a social scientist, and a humanistic one at that, which means that according to the materialistic view, often called “positivism,” that predominates in the hard sciences he was not a scientist at all. Science cannot provide certainty in the human realm because it can only be concerned with facts, not values. It has subverted the traditional source of moral certainty without providing an alternative.

Moreover, even in the material realm, science undermines people’s sense of certainty. It has replaced the old, stable worldview with a new one that is constantly shifting and being revised. When I was young, it was believed that Mars had air enough to breathe, that Venus might hide oceans beneath its clouds. Poor Pluto enjoyed its status as a planet for a mere 76 years before being demoted in 2006. We thought that the expansion of the universe from the Big Bang would slow—and instead find that it is bizarrely speeding up. Most of the universe is dark matter and dark energy, which nevertheless we haven’t discovered yet. We not only do not have a Theory of Everything but worry that our picture of the cosmos is somehow fundamentally flawed, that there is something that eludes us. In short, I do not think it is an overstatement to say that science understands reality less now than it did when I was born. If we widen the historical framework to the lifetime of my parents, we include the three great theories that essentially explain to us what we cannot know. Relativity tells us that locations in space and time can never be absolute, only relative. Quantum mechanics tells us that physical conditions are altered by the observer, and that our knowledge of the subatomic realm is limited by an Uncertainty Principle. And Kurt Gödel showed that we can never know whether mathematics is an internally coherent system, because any method of proof would rely upon assumptions that lie outside the system. The general public may not care about abstract theories, but the CDC’s repeated retraction of its previous conclusions about Covid led to the paranoid distrust of the anti-vax movement.

Thus, religion increasingly fails to provide certainty, science is no substitute, and the humanities are dominated by a culture-wars skepticism. Are we forced then to give up and learn to live in a world without certainty? Has the human race reached maturity, and does maturity mean abandoning the comforting illusions that made us feel secure as children? We learned to get over our disillusionment about Santa Claus: can we learn to get over our disillusionment about God? In a famous passage of one of his letters, Keats made a virtue of what he called Negative Capability, “that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It is certainly possible to get impatient with the need for certainty, usually when we are being hounded by the glassy-eyed pronouncements of some True Believer. Alan Watts wrote a book called The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (1951) whose premise is that, since life is irredeemably insecure, most insecurity comes, ironically, from obsessively seeking security. Maslow repeatedly stressed about self-actualized people that “They tend to be attracted by mystery, unsolved problems, by the unknown and challenging, rather than to be frightened by them” (299).

Nonetheless, the psyche does not seem capable of living with radical uncertainty. Instead, it goes mad, collapsing into neurosis or, in worse cases, into psychosis. The neurosis takes the form of a numb despair—of depression. It is the voice of the person in Eliot’s The Waste Land that says, “On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” Pushed to extremity, the depression may turn to the nihilistic anger of a Macbeth saying that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But in those more troubled souls who stare into uncertainty as into a bottomless abyss, the psyche instinctively responds with psychosis, which is a defense mechanism to prevent a complete collapse. Thomas Pynchon put his finger on it when he made “paranoia” one of the thematic key words in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). The mind of the paranoid constructs a belief system to allay panic and provide certainty. The paranoid belief system may take the form of a pseudo-religion, in which case we speak of cultism. Or it may take the more secular form of a conspiracy theory or fanatical ideology, what Jung called one of the “isms.” But the one thing a paranoid system needs is an Enemy, something or someone to hate, something that symbolizes an imagined threat. The threat may be physical: the danger of immigrants said to be criminals, rapists, and drug dealers; of Black males in urban ghettoes; of Democrats, seen by QAnon as Satan-worshipping pedophiles; of Jews, perceived as rich and traitorous conspirators; of workers, seen by rich capitalists like Elon Musk as parasites who will work as little and take as much as they can, who fasten like barnacles on the sides of the capitalist enterprise and may sink it by their sheer numbers. In every case, the feeling of threat is delusional.

Why the need to fabricate an Enemy? Because the Enemy gives a shape to what would otherwise be a pervasive dread. The Enemy gives certainty and a sense of meaning. Now I know the reason for my feeling of threat, and an identifiable Enemy can be attacked, maybe destroyed. But if the Enemy is only a projection, what is the real threat? The sense of meaninglessness, of existential absurdity.

The dread is of feeling one’s universe collapse into emptiness, into the chaos before the Creation. This is a terror arguably deeper than the terror of death. Fighting it is like trying to fight the sea, as the Irish hero Cuchulain strove to do in his madness, the “deep” that is the Bible’s image of chaos. But actually it is worse than that, for the sea is at least something, matter without form. Beneath chaos is the formless void out of which even chaos emerged, ex nihilo, as the medieval theologians said. The real enemy is the word echoed by Macbeth and the voice on Margate Sands, the word that blows through the text of King Lear like the voice of the storm itself: Nothing.

There are also scapegoats whose threat is intellectual rather than physical. The Middle Ages found its external scapegoats in the Saracens and the Jews, but reserved the sadism of the Inquisition for the heretics. Thus, the secure Age of Faith about which some moderns are nostalgic turns out to have been gnawed from within by its own uncertainties. The persecuting fury directed against wrong-thinkers is understandable. They represent doubt, which means they represent the dissenting voice within the persecutors, the one who disturbs the serene assurance of the possessor of Absolute Truth. The need to silence that doubting voice afflicts fanatical ideologues as much as it does religious authorities.

An unforgettable example is the opening chapter of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem (2014), the first volume of the trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past that was made into the TV series titled after the first volume. (At any rate, it is the first chapter in the English translation, which represents the author’s original ordering. In the Chinese edition, the chapter was moved to the middle of the book to avoid attracting the attention of the censors). That chapter dramatizes a “struggle session” in 1967 during the Chinese Maoist Cultural Revolution. In such sessions, friends and family publically accused the victim of being a traitor by harboring reactionary ideas. The first accuser of the physicist is his own wife, also a physicist, who says, “we must clearly understand the reactionary naure of Einstein’s theory of relativity. This is most apparent in general relativity: Its static model of the universe negates the dynamic nature of matter. It is anti-dialectical! It treats the universe as limited, which is absolutely a form of reactionary idealism….”. Then one of his former students blames him for teaching “the reactionary Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics….This explanation posits that external observation leads to the collapse of the quantum wave function. This is another expression of reactionary idealism, and it’s indeed the most brazen expression.” Finally, he is blamed for teaching the Big Bang theory, because, as he concedes, before the Big Bang there was nothing—which means the theory leaves a place to be filled by God.

These fools would be laughable if they weren’t so horrifying: they are screaming these hysterical denials of the laws of physics while they are torturing the physicist to death for his heresy. Why are Maoist materialists hostile to relativity and quantum mechanics? Because, as we saw earlier, those theories draw limits to our knowledge about the behavior of matter, and thus enforce a kind of uncertainty. True knowledge in physics must instead follow Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism, about which there cam be no doubt. The irony is that Marx’s theory is another 19^th-century Theory of Everything, like Hegel’s Idealism. It is, in fact, “Hegel turned on his head,” as Marx himself famously remarked. But in practice Marxism mutated from theory into a quasi-religion of which Maoism was one variety, which meant it had to attack all rival authorities. Nevertheless, we have to grant that science itself is a belief system that provides a sense of certainty through a belief in physical laws and an order of nature. After its opening chaper, Liu’s book jumps 40 years to a time in which disturbing anomalies suggest that the laws of physics have ceased to work, and have perhaps never been more than an illusion. The evidence turns out to be false, but not before a number of prominent physicists have committed suicide. Ideologues are not the only ones who cling to their belief systems.

In 1969, a Canadian Maoist group published a pamphlet called Northrop Frye: The High Priest of Clerical Obscurantism. I am one of the few people who now own a copy, and no doubt one of the even fewer who have actually read it. It is usually dismissed contemptuously, but in fact it deserves a bit more than that. The author’s name, Pauline Kogan, may be a pseudonym, but she is clearly a real person and not a committee, one who is academically trained and has read extensively in Frye’s work, which she cites repeatedly and knowledgeably. Her attack on Frye parallels the novel’s attack on the physicist: Frye is an “idealist” whose work therefore apologizes for and helps further the cause of evil:

Northrop Frye’s ideology is most decadent, reactionary, outdated, racist, fascist, anti-scientific, and medieval. It represents the interests of that clerical and petty bourgeois segment of society which has rejected everything modern and twentieth-century as “alienation of progress” and which is so afraid of change that it is seeking shelter in the metaphysical backwaters of the Middle Ages. That this retreat to obcurantism appeals to petty-bourgeois intellectuals displays their dread of change, their detachment from the real world, and their eagerness to stand in the path of progress in social, political, and intellectual matters. (92)

The passage sounds sillier than it is because it is detached from the textual analysis of Frye’s work by which Kogan attempts to prove her case. This is not the mindless foaming at the mouth of Liu’s Red Guard Maoists. Her attack is on two fronts. On the one hand, she tries to associate Frye’s archetypes with those of what she calls the “’Aryan’ psychoanalysis of Jung” (66), which is simply wrong about both Frye and Jung. But her other attack resembles what was said of Frye by later Marxist critics in a toned-down form. Frye’s supposed idealism, with its “clerical” trappings, provides an ivory-tower retreat from the struggles to make a better world, and in fact helps keep structures of oppression in place by opposing any truly revolutionary activism. Those structures of oppression are identified as “late stage monopoly capitalism,” and she remarks that fascism is the final, revealed form of monopoly capitalism. I think that remark should be taken seriously in 2025, as the richest monopoly capitalist in the world has seized control of the U.S. government and is remaking it according to a fascist model.

I do not agree that Frye is a bourgeois idealist, and I think Kogan is blind to the fact that it was Maoism that resembled Nazism: Mao was just another Führer attempting to create another Reich by destroying everything and rebuilding it. But I have a qualified respect for Kogan’s desire to join in what Blake called “the day of intellectual battle.” If she had been my student—I think she was probably a grad student, possibly even a gifted undergrad—I would have invited her to do an independent study with me in which we debated each other’s premises, both in person and on paper, and she wrote a final paper articulating her final position which would get a good grade if it argued impressively, whether I agreed with it or not. She was passionate and intelligent and did her homework, and you don’t get many students like that. She was probably also abrasive and obnoxious, but then so am I. So was Blake, Frye’s mentor. So was Frye in his youthful writings. My invitation represents liberal education as I understand it. At the heart of it is intellectual inquiry, not a “right answer” that provides certainty. I am not digressing: the right wing in the United States has already been attacking education for not teaching the ideological certainties it should teach, and such attacks are about to enter a dangerous new phase.

I understand the need for certainty in a very personal way. I was not, as they say, like the other children. At the age of 18, I went through a psychological crisis that no one ever knew about but me. I read a well-known science fiction story by Robert Heinlein called “They.” This story predates The Matrix and the novels of Philip K. Dick, all of which are about paranoia and epistemological uncertainty. It is a simple story, really. Descartes began his program of systematic doubt because, he said, a demon could be deceiving him, creating a false reality by supplying wrong information to his senses. In “They,” through the simple act of walking suddenly and unexpectedly from the front to the back of his house, the man discovers that Descartes’ paranoia is justified. It is raining in front of the house, but not raining behind. “They” is not a very sophisticated story, but it had a powerful effect on me, producing a state of mind in which everything around me seemed unreal. I suppose it could easily have become the prelude to a psychotic episode, but middle class people did not have therapists in those days, so I was on my own.

What “cured” me was another story, “To Here and the Easel” by Theodore Sturgeon, another writer of Heinlein’s generation, about a painter who is blocked and can’t paint. His crisis, which can be read literally or psychologically, takes the form of being transported into the world of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Briefly, he escapes and simultaneously cures his painter’s block by changing his attitude towards the world. Previously, he could not paint the world because he did not love it, and he could not love the woman who loved him because, like the world, she did not come up to his narcissistic standards. What he learns is the identification with the world and with others that we call love. Love is not just a feeling but a mode of perception. Paranoia is essentially a failure to love. It is indeed the opposite of love, a pulling-away-from rather than an identification with the Other. I do not claim that this was a very impressive crisis, merely that it is exemplary.

Within a year I would be in college reading Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye’s book on Blake, which began to give me the vocabulary with which to understand what I had experienced. I had to wrestle with Blake, and to some extent I was wary of him precisely because I did not trust his confident certainty. He was always saying things that seemed excessive, such as “If the Sun & Moon should doubt / They’d immediately go out,” and (in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) when asked if a “firm persuasion” of something makes it true, he replied that the wise ancients always thought so. On that basis, how could one distinguish between the visionary and the delusional, between the imaginative and the imaginary? Gradually, I developed my version of an answer, based on Blake, and it became the foundational premise of The Productions of Time. Descartes had defined the main problem of modern philosophy as the subject-object split, the split between the I and the Other. The subject is an alienated ego consciousness “in here,” detached and alienated from a world of objects, including other people, “out there.” That is the psychological origin of uncertainty, which is in turn the origin of paranoia. Kant complicated the issue by saying that the mind constructs reality out of the data of the senses according to its own categories of time, space, causality, and the like. We only know reality through these mental constructs. The “thing-in-itself,” or the noumenal, is inaccessible. Kant thought that anything totally unknowable could be dismissed, but instead he redoubled the paranoia about what could be beyond the mind’s constructions.

The only way out of the Kantian dilemma is to recognize a mental power that leaps the gap between subject and object, self and Other, leading to their mutual participation, what Frye called their “interpenetration.” However, the identity-in-difference of subject and object is not theoretical, despite the philosophical terms used to describe it. It is an experience, not just of exceptional people but potentially of everyone. It breaks through in what Maslow called peak experiences, in the religious epiphanies that Mircea Eliade called hierophanies, in what Blake and the other Romantics simply called vision, and, yes, in the consummating union of romantic love. Faith then becomes, not the blind faith of believing in something without evidence—the peak experience or the vision is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen—but rather the act of committing to what we have seen, and felt, in a moment in which the doors of perception were cleansed.

But while believing in a greater reality because we have actually experienced it is better than trying to believe in it as an abstract idea, revelatory experience does not eliminate the possibility of doubt. The devil’s advocate says, “Experience is even less reliable than reason. ‘Enthusiasm,’ as it used to be called, sweeps us up in irrational wish-fulfilment feeling. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are no more reliable than the drunk. The imagination is indeed the great intoxicant, and its irrationality is dangerous.” Anti-Romantics from Samuel Johnson to the deconstructionist Paul de Man agree that the task of critical reason is to “demystify” the false claims of the imagination. Blake notwithstanding, they are right up to a point. There is no way to eliminate uncertainty, and that is good. There is such a thing as a saving doubt. And that, I have come to think, is why I have had two mentors, Frye and Jung.

Medieval theology spoke of two modes of knowledge, the Way of Affirmation and the Way of Negation. My faith in the imagination’s power to remake the world by expanding its vision until we can see that humanity, nature, and God are united in one greater identity is the Way of Affirmation I got from Blake and Frye and a few other writers such as Abraham Maslow, Joseph Campbell, the Romantic critic M.H. Abrams, and Mircea Eliade. It is a hopeful vision, expressed in literature through the wish-fulfilment genres of comedy and romance as well as through the ebullient energies of satire. Most of all, perhaps, it gives me laughter, the imagination’s most powerful weapon.

But I have always felt the need for a counterbalancing Way of Negation, a via negativa, and I found that in the depth psychology of Jung and in a few other writers such as Loren Eiseley and certain dark fantasists. The Way of Affirmation is an ascent towards the light and the source of light. But the Way of Negation is a descent quest into darkness—into uncertainty. I am not really a thinker. What passes for thinking in me is a form of reverie in which the ego relaxes enough to become aware of some mystery in the depths of myself and the world. From that mysterious otherness emerge intuitions, associations, unexpected feelings, long-lost memories, words and rhythms and images that I try to capture in writing. To call the unknown Other the unconscious is misleading. My unconscious is part of or one aspect of that Mystery, but its deeper levels are beyond anything I could call “my.” This mysterious otherness is what I know of God, and what I know is not much. Conventional Christians speak movingly of feeling suffused with God’s presence and God’s love in every moment, but I am not trying to be shocking when I say that I know nothing of God’s love. This may well be because I am angry at him for permitting all the innocent suffering of the world, but it is what it is. What lies below is a creative power, so I call it the imagination to keep all the talk about otherness and mystery from sounding pretentious. I believe it is potentially transformative, but it will awaken and arise only in response to a descent into the darkness of uncertainty. An anonymous mystic in the tradition of the via negativa titled his work The Cloud of Unknowing. The descent is a “dark night of the soul” whose suffering is not the same as the non-creative suffering that can and should be alleviated by therapy, perhaps medication. Telling the two kinds of melancholia apart has always been a difficulty, especially since people may suffer from both at once. We end where we begin, in the loss of confidence after a rejection that leaves us doubting everything, especially ourselves. The moment I feel closest to Jesus was when he cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” He is quoting Psalm 22, which begins in an anguish of rejection by both God and other people:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

O my God, I cry in the day time, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.

But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.

Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.

They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.

But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.

The Psalmist cheers himself up by the end, but it is good to remember, in this time when people are suffering far more than I ever have, that the central symbol of Christianity is not the Resurrection, which the Gospels never show, but the Crucifixion. Suffering, loss, and grief are an ineradicable part of experience, and the greatest uncertainty of all is that we will never understand why.

References

Kogan, Pauline. Northrop Frye: The High Priest of Clerical Obscurantism Progressive Books and Periodicals, Montreal, 1969.

Liu Cixin. The Three-Body Problem. Translated by Ken Liu. Tor Books, 2014.

Maslow, Abraham. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Penguin Books, 1976. Originally published in 1972.