The preceding “Pascalian” Chronicles (840, 841 and 842) exemplify paradoxical analogies of the sacred in the real world, something that Pascal himself did not state explicitly, yet illustrated by implication, as in the pari (bet) or in his separation of the esprit de finesse from the esprit de géométrie.
It is a fundamental human intuition that a moral distance is incommensurable with a physical distance; if an object is sacred and cannot be touched, it is effectively at an infinite distance from us even if it is standing right in this room.
And beginning with the originary event, human events of significance have in principle had as their goal a similar passage from the original state of blocked individual desire to that of communal sharing, whether in a truly collective activity such as a communal feast, or in an individual event that can be understood as a harmonious element in the construction of the human community, such as a wedding—where the groom and the bride form a single couple but one that sets an example for others and that is in principle expected to help produce the next generation of this community.
In principle, individual desire should only seek fulfillment in such terms. Most of our daily acts do not oblige us to choose between our own satisfaction and that of our community, but a sufficient number do that we are constantly aware of the dictates of our conscience, as well as of the communal laws that spell out our duties and the society’s means of enforcing them.
Culture and the sacred
The cultural sphere is only understandable in terms of the sacred. The miraculous disappearance of an infinite distance is impossible in the real world, but in the world of culture, it is constantly replayed on the scenes of art, whether as an image to contemplate or as a story to follow to the end.
Every work of art, even the most vulgar, celebrates a (sometimes perverse) version of the same closure that we experience at the end of a religious ritual, and that repeats the closure of the originary event, with the abolition of conflict in communal celebration. We take all this for granted to the point where we no longer bother to distinguish in kind between human culture and the learned behavior of animals: speaking, for example of animal “languages” rather than signal systems. Animals can learn to perform worldly tasks; all life consists in the performance of tasks, whatever the level of consciousness of the performer. But animals cannot follow, let alone tell, stories because they have no conception of the sacred, of the closure of the sacred drama that began with the gesture of appropriation that could not be completed without being deferred through the signs of language, of representation.
That we spend a good portion of our lives following (and telling) stories that reach conclusions, not to speak of listening to (and performing) music that ends with resolution, or looking at (and drawing/painting) images whose closure, however imperfect, makes them momentarily for the spectator sacred objects, is an exclusive sign of our humanity, however much the physiological qualities of these acts have analogies in the animal world. Our trendily victimary mentality has made it difficult for us not merely to judge some civilizations as more advanced than others, but even to so judge our own species—to speak of human language as qualitatively different from animal communication systems seems to many to smack of a speciesism not far from racism.
If generative anthropology can accomplish one thing, it is to oblige humanity to accept its différance—both for good and ill, for human crimes are desecrations, evil as no animal act can be.
Culture and Paradox
In my early essays on literary esthetics I sought to define the esthetic as paradoxical, and in 1977 published a volume of essays in French entitled Essais d’esthétique paradoxale. But on returning to these reflections many years later, I realized that the paradoxes I was seeking were analogous to those of Pascal, those that separate géométrie from finesse, and above all, the sacred from the profane.
What is, after all, esthetic judgment? Beauty, like significance, is in the first place a quasi-synonym of sacredness, a category embodying a value judgment analogous to “the good,” which expresses the valuation of one’s conscience. The same can be said of the “true” when placed in parallel with “the good and the beautiful.”
But truth has a (more common) logical sense; a “true” theorem is not sacred, it merely follows from the premises that define the field in which it operates. To put truth in parallel with the others is to refer to a value judgment rather than a logical category, as in the phrase “to thine own self be true.” The bottom line of all these qualities is that they are worthy of affirmation, of “worship” if one likes. Once this is recognized, there can be no possible controversy; but in our post-religious world, it has become difficult to assert these parallels, as if they were specifically dependent on religious belief.
What makes the realm of the esthetic paradoxical is what makes paradoxical the contrast between the physical distance and the moral distance of a sacred object: the contrast between a measurable finite quantity and one wholly qualitative—a contrast which, as I have become aware in recent years, is more easily assimilated by Eastern than Western religions and cultures.
No doubt human beauty has its physiological indices, according to which a beautiful human being can be considered objectively more “harmonious” than an average one. But these categories measure the mode of spectators’ reactions to this beauty, something very different from measuring someone’s height and weight. The workings of human desire are certainly worldly realities, but they cannot be understood independently of what we can, and perhaps should, call the soul of the humans who experience these desires.
For even if a computer program were written to test our judgments of beauty whose results corresponded every time with what we consider the best human judgment, the two sides of the equation would have nothing in common; to say that some combination of the ratios of the length of a woman’s nose to the thickness of her lips and that between the distance between her eyes and the height of her cheekbones corresponds 100% of the time to expert judgments of her beauty would not permit us to define beauty any more precisely than it is today. Nor is it even appropriate to define it by the satisfaction it gives the spectator, not even if this satisfaction were inevitably accompanied by, e.g., the secretion of a certain hormone. Esthetic “pleasure” is a cultural phenomenon that cannot be separated entirely from its sacred source; at root, it is a moral pleasure, a sense that the harmony between the human world and that of the order of the universe has been satisfied. And “the true, the good, and the beautiful” are linked by the connection between all three and our vision of the human community’s survival and perpetuation—best summed up by the word sacred.
None of this is new or mysterious, but it needs to be repeated in today’s intellectual environment in which quality is constantly reduced to quantity. The physical parameters of a phenomenon cannot be made to express its meaning, its significance—in a word, its sacrality, which exists only in the context of human culture.
In consequence of what I now conceive as the necessary foregrounding of the category of the sacred, what I had earlier called “esthetic paradox” should really be seen as an effect of the tension between physical and moral distance, between objective worldly measures and those mediated by the sacred—ultimately, by moral value, value with respect to the survival of the human species and its transcendental world, in contrast to the wholly worldly nature of life before the coming of humanity.
Let me illustrate this point by an analysis of a key passage in Phèdre, Jean Racine’s most famous play, the high point of 17th-century French classical theater. Phèdre is an adaptation of Euripides’ Phaedra, a play that the Roman Seneca had previously adapted in Latin.
What I had called in my essay on Le Paradoxe de Phèdre (Nizet, 1975) to “differ differently,” différer différamment, referring to Phèdre’s culpable love for her stepson Hyppolite (which leads to the deaths of both) referred to Racine’s attempt to show, going beyond Euripides’ Phaedra and even Seneca’s, that Phèdre’s love for her stepson led her to transfigure in her mind the status of the Labyrinth as a prison for the Minotaur into an inverted paradise in which alone this forbidden love could be realized.
Whence these verses in which Phèdre expresses the ultimate consequence of her love:
Et Phèdre au Labyrinthe avec vous descendue
Se serait avec vous retrouvée, ou perdue.
And Phèdre having descended with you into the Labyrinth
Would with you have found—or lost—herself.
This are lines that Euripides could never have written, that reflect a Christian understanding of the human soul, where instead of an impersonal curse, Phèdre’s forbidden love for her stepson is both a sin and at the same time, a transgressive expression of erotic love as, in Nietzsche’s terms, Jenseits von Gut und Böse—beyond good and evil.
Thus Theseus’s quest to eliminate the monstrous Minotaur as a threat to human civilization is transformed into its opposite. Phèdre’s speech does this line by line, first replacing Theseus by Hippolyte, then her sister Ariadne (who gave Theseus the thread that would allow him to enter and leave the Labyrinth) by herself, and finally herself taking the place of the hero, but not to kill the monster, but so to speak to become it, realizing in Phèdre’s imagination her quest to lose herself in what becomes for her a sacred space where her adulterous love for her stepson can be reconceived as innocent.
Speaking in my professional capacity as a professor of French, I can only say that nothing in Western literature, not even in Shakespeare, expresses so sharply the paradoxicality of the sacred as the ultimate moral value that corresponds to the preservation of the human community, yet at the same time embodies the tragic aspiration of the individual human soul to transcend the limits of the community as it exists toward an ideal community that could accommodate even this desire—even the desire to commit adultery with her stepson, as pushing back yet farther the limits of the human.
Which is, after all, what tragedy has always been about. The tragic hero/heroine’s “fatal flaw”-hamartia is that he or she is led by desire to seek to transcend the limits of human reality by defining this desire as sacred precisely because it is experienced as an—effectively diabolical—imperative. To my knowledge, Phèdre’s speech, which culminates in the passage I have described, is literature’s sharpest example of the moral inversion that results: the conversion of the labyrinth that shelters the diabolical Minotaur into a trysting place. What I had previously described as paradoxical is the result of the necessarily judgmental nature, not of the sacred itself, but of our individual access to it—there is nothing in the sacred as the expression of the good of the human species that can persuade one thus dominated by his or her sinful desire.
And witnessing this makes us both recognize Phèdre’s sinfulness and at the same time pity her, the explicit and shocking contrast between her desire and the purpose of Theseus’ quest lending her a pathos beyond that of her Greek model that only the Christianization of Renaissance tragedy could realize. To call this “paradox” was not an error, but to abstract it from its sacred/moral context risked assimilating this tragedy of human desire into a mathematical exercise.
Afterword: Readers interested in delving into the “Jansenist” background of both Pascal and Racine should read Lucien Goldmann’s The Hidden God: a study of tragic vision in the Pensees of Pascal and the tragedies of Racine. Trans. Philip Thody. London: Routledge, 1964; also available in paperback, Verso, 2016.