Thinking is one of the great pleasures of my life. I fully subscribe to the idea of the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) according to which “it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”. The question never even really came up for me. As soon as I started to think a little seriously, I felt such a need to continue on this path that I never stopped doing it.
The exercise, of course, is not without frustration. We would like, especially with regard to the great questions such as those concerning the meaning of life, the foundations of morality, the existence of God or the beginning of the world, to arrive at clear and definitive thoughts, but we do not ever really succeeds. The enterprise, however, does not stop, since, once triggered, the sex drive is irrepressible.
The German philosopher Schelling (1775-1854), noting the dissatisfaction inherent in the act of thinking, concluded on the “unalterable and profound melancholy” which resulted from it. It is this troubling observation that the Franco-American literary critic George Steiner (1929-2020) attacks in Ten (possible) reasons for the sadness of thought (Albin Michel, 2023, 160 pages), a brilliant booklet that Georges Leroux, in THE Dutycalled it a “little masterpiece” when it was originally released in 2005.
Human thought, Steiner first notes, is infinite, can explore all that exists and even that which does not exist, but it nevertheless remains uncertain as to the reality of the territory it covers. “Never, writes the critic, will we know how far thought goes with regard to the sum of reality. On the ultimate questions, in other words, “we arrive at no satisfactory answer.”
This “first motive of affliction” joins the tenth and last, in which Steiner returns to the question of God. Efforts to think about God or his absence, because to deny it is still to think about him, just like “the enigma of nature”, are at the origin of “our religious, philosophical, literary, artistic history and, in to a large extent, scientific”, but they also cause, in the final analysis, sadness since they are not accompanied by any assurance as to their truth.
Science, in its field, obtains more reliable results, but, like other methods, it fails at the ultimate moment, since it “could not provide the slightest answer to the quintessential questions which possess or should possess the human mind”, writes Steiner. Science may well tell us that it is absurd to ask about the moment before the Big Bang, but, the critic counters, “we are so created that we ask”, with the inevitable dissatisfaction that follows.
Should we then forget God and stick to more down-to-earth questions in order to live happily? “To abstain from this questioning, to censor it,” writes Steiner, “would be to nullify the pulse and the dignitas that make up our humanity. »
Among the other reasons for sadness linked to reflection, Steiner retains the fact that thought, that of every human being, because we are all, whether we like it or not, thinkers, is an incessant flow that is extremely difficult to master and that true concentration is the lot of only rare minds. In general, our thought, therefore, remains “an amateur affair”.
It is what “makes us present to ourselves”, what makes us unique, but it remains, at the same time, almost always banal in that it remains determined by a “human universal”. True originality of thought, Steiner insists, is “exceedingly rare.”
Incessant, but muddled, our thought spends itself, but almost always fades immediately to sink into oblivion. We would like, sometimes, that it carries consequences, that it translates into reality, but its passage through language creates a disappointing gap between the inner vision and its realization.
The thought of others, for its part, escapes us almost absolutely. “No familiarity, no analytical finesse can ensure or verify that we read the minds of others,” notes Steiner. Hence, he adds, the difficulty of relations between the thinking beings that we are, strangers to each other and often to themselves.
We are all thinkers, it’s true, but original and essential thought is rare, while boring banality is common. It is between the two, suggests Steiner, that the value of a culture lies, in the openness and welcome it reserves for “authentic thought” when it is expressed. A culture that despises intellectuals, in the name of a doctrinaire egalitarianism, for example, condemns itself to mediocrity.
To think is an existential test, of course, but to refuse it would be detrimental to our humanity.