All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
Ecclesiastes 1:7-8
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia was written by the great Dr Johnson in the mid-18th century. It was the only novel he ever wrote, written to the sole end of paying for his mother's funeral; he wrote the novella in a week. Yet in spite of the haste with which it was written, there are moments of great wit, and moments of sharp philosophical inquiry.
As Voltaire is to the French, and Goethe is to the Germans, certainly Johnson is to the English: he is the great essayist who both epitomises Englishness and inspires many a later English author. A favourite anecdote of mine is his conversation with the Bishop Berekley. Berekley propounded the theory of 'subjective idealism', and believed that all matter was but the fiction of the mind. Dr Johnson, when confronted with this solipsistic worldview, kicked a nearby rock in the church and exclaimed, "I refute it thus." His sobriety of thought when confronted with the fancy of continental thought is Dr Johnson's great tonic to philosophical discourse. Many philosophers wish to weld wings to you, and let you fly away to faerieland; Johnson, however, will pull you back to hard ground with an iron chain. For instance, in
Rasselas, Imlac the poet proceeds on a long panegyric on the height and grandeur of the role of the poet, to which Rasselas replies, "Enough! thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be a poet."
It would be worth me giving an overview of the plot to
Rasselas. The eponymous Abyssinian prince lives in 'the Happy Valley', where all possible pleasures are sated; but the prince is not sated by these pleasures of the flesh, and wants something more from his life. He meets the poet Imlac, who has travelled the world, studying and acquiring wisdom as he went. Together they plot an escape from the Happy Valley to go on a journey to see the world beyond in its suffering and its meaning. On their journey, they meet many men of great learning in an attempt to find Happiness, but each has their own flaws in thinking. They meet the a very wealthy man who seemingly has everything, but due to his past acts lives in fear of the Sultan's reprisal. They meet a hermit who whilst at first enjoyed his solitude, has grown bored once the novelty wore thin, yet doesn't have the stomach to stop. They meet a great orator speaking on morality and how to live well. The prince was enamoured with this man's wisdom and wished to follow him as a student of his teaching; but when he goes to pay for tuition, discovers the orator in fits of grief following the death of his daughter. The teacher in his sorrow says all his teachings are for nought in the face of this grief. And Imlac spoke, "Be not too hasty to trust or to admire teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men": a sentiment easily forgotten, particularly in the present day. They meet also an astronomer, the greatest scientist of the age, who in his solitude of learning has begun to think he was the one to move the stars and change the seasons. Through his new-found friendship with the prince's sister, who tagged along on their escape, the astronomer begun to be dragged back down to earth from his fancy.
The conclusion to the narrative is rushed and unsatisfying; Dr Johnson's mother's funeral was approaching, undoubtedly. But what kind of conclusion can their be to the question of Happiness? Our protagonists by the finale had found vocations, but they had not found that elixir for everlasting contentment that is so easy to want to seek.
Akira is a favourite film of mine, which I have written about here
several times before. I'll assume most readers are familiar with the plot, so I will gloss through, accentuating the poignant details for our inquiry. Tetsuo and Kaneda are childhood friends, who grew up together in an orphanage, and later formed a biker gang, Kaneda being the gang's leader, in a decadent decaying neo-Tokyo. Tetsuo our protagonist was spirited away by the military, and an advanced medical procedure was performed upon him to give him ESP powers. Tetsuo's inferiority complex for his adept older brother figure Kaneda begins as a bud at the start of the film; but as Tetsuo's ESP powers grow, his envy for Kaneda begins to flower and fruit as rage and destruction. A thread throughout, however, is the search for Akira, the first child the experiment was performed upon. Whilst Tetsuo's anger is directed at Kaneda, Tetsuo has a compulsion to find Akira, who holds a religious significance to his attenuated mind. Tetsuo destroys the Tokyo Olympic stadium (predicting the Tokyo 2020 games, would you believe) under which the remains of Akira are stored. Slices of his brain in formaldehyde, kept at very cold temperatures, are all he finds. At this realisation, Tetsuo begins to 'blob', as the very structure of his body can no longer be maintained. Akira is in a sense an idol: a fake Messiah who will set him free from his rotted bond with Kaneda. Tetsuo digs to the very depths of the earth, to the very depths of the Jungian psyche, only to find bits of brain stem in jars.
How will I wed these two seemingly separate works together? They shall be wed by the idea of an onion. Some time ago, I used to listen to many of Alan Watts' lectures on YouTube. Watts was one of the first Westerners to become self-styled Eastern mystics being ahead of the curve of the interest following the LSD and hippies of the sixties. He was an interesting man to listen to, and managed to think in a truly Eastern way, reforming his mental cosmology. But as Jung wrote, sharp shifts in mental cosmology typically result in neurotic ailments; and for Watts, this was alcoholism. When he was sober, however, he had many thought provoking views on the world; and since these views came from such an alien web of thinking, they are novel and challenging. One such view was his comparison of the fruit and the onion. With many of the big questions, such as how to find Happiness, we expect it to be like a mango, say, where we may shave layers and finally, at long last, find something hard and solid in the middle. Whereas, in reality, Watts argues that answering the question of happiness is much more like an onion: you can continue to take off layer after layer, only to find no pip. The onion has no core: there are only more layers of onion.
What Rasselas' journey shows is that the great wise men of the world are like onions: the deeper you look, their wisdom has no pip, no silver bullet, no Platonic form of pure wisdom beneath the clothing. In chapter 22 of the novella, Rasselas speaks with a philosopher who passionately argues that all man must do is live in accordance with nature; to which Rasselas asks, 'Let me only know what it is to live according to Nature'. To this, the philosopher rambles on senselessly, and Rasselas acquits himself. The layer of onion was pealed off the word Nature, but nothing was beneath. But it isn't merely the wise men, but the ideas also. The perfect idea we imagine can never be made material; for man cannot make perfection into reality. When, therefore, we attempt to find ever-lasting Happiness, or contentment, or peace, the only solutions we can conjure are but onions; and as we peal off the layers, the phantom of Happiness floats away giggling. Tetsuo also peels the layers of onion to find nothing. In his search to find the root of his burning wrath he peels away the Olympic stadium, and every layer of insulation between him and Akira's remains. But the burning phantom of Akira - that vision of salvation - is in its extension but sliced brains frozen in formaldehyde. Beneath the layers of onion is no hard pip in its core.
How are we then to interact with these phantom? Must they jeer at us? Here we must use a somewhat cruder analogy: the lingerie shot is sexier than the nude. What I mean by this, is that the potential is preferable to the actual, or that the imaginal is preferable to the reality. Onto the lingerie shot all kinds of imagination can be projected onto what's beneath; in a sense, we project the unachievable from our own mind's eye. Whereas, once 'nothing is left to the imagination', the 'magic' of what might be, is lost. In chess, there's the concept of 'maintaining tension in the position'; this is when you refuse to exchange pieces, and instead pile up more threats, to increase the positions complexity and opportunity. It's difficult to maintain this tension when you're beginning to learn, because your first instinct is to resolve the tension and attack. But much like with all the passions, sometimes the very experience of that passion is preferable to it's resolution. The quest for Happiness will be a circling and fruitless journey, for where can true Happiness, the Platonic form of Happiness, be found? When we begin to peel the onion, we shouldn't be surprised when there's nothing within, but instead appreciate what is there: we should appreciate the onion. As cliche as it may sound, it is about the journey and not the destination, for if you treat the journey as a means to an end, the destination will often disappoint. Can you say you've found Happiness if the journey to find it was nothing but misery? If you've only ever felt misery, you'll have hardly experienced Happiness! However much we may want Happiness, as Rasselas did, or acknowledgement, as Tetsuo did, we cannot blindly charge forth in search of a core which isn't there; but we ought instead allow that mechanism of projection to occur, and become cognisant of it. When we see pure wisdom in a man, it is a kind of projection, not a reality; and in that moment, and that moment only, are we able to see something pure and ideal. It exists in that tension like a rainbow, or like a mirage on the horizon, delicate and dependent on the conditions of the environment. In short, then, Plato is wrong. Study upon study, and investigation upon investigation, won't bring us ultimately close to these absolutes. The answers we search for are aetherial, and blow in the wind; and these truths are so often unutterable.