11

Acting without Desire

——

The Causal Law

I now address a particular aspect of the attitude in question, applicable to a wider and less exclusive field: that of life seen as the field of works, activities, and achievements in which the individual deliberately takes the initiative. We are not dealing now with simple, lived experiences, but with procedures aimed at a goal. The character of the human type I have been describing must result in a certain orientation whose essence was defined in the traditional world by two basic maxims.

The first of these is to act without regard to the fruits, without being affected by the chances of success or failure, victory or defeat, winning or losing, any more than by pleasure or pain, or by the approval or disapproval of others. This form of action has also been called “action without desire.” The higher dimension, which is presumed to be present in oneself, manifests through the capacity to act not with less, but with more application than a normal type of man could bring to the ordinary forms of conditioned action. One can also speak here of “doing what needs to be done,” impersonally.

The necessary coexistence of the two principles is even more distinct in the second traditional maxim, which is that of “action without acting.” It is a paradoxical, Far Eastern way of describing a form of action that does not involve or stir the higher principle of “being” in itself. Yet the latter remains the true subject of the action, giving it its primary motive force and sustaining and guiding it from beginning to end.¹

Such a line of conduct obviously refers to the domain in which one’s own nature is allowed to function, and to that which derives from the particular situation that one has actively assumed as an individual. This is the very context in which the maxims of “acting without regard to the fruits” and of “doing what needs to be done” apply. The content of such action is not what is given by initiatives that arise from the void of pure freedom; it is what is defined by one’s own natural inner law.

Whereas the Dionysian attitude mainly concerns the receptive side of the testing and confirmation of oneself while in the midst of becoming, and perhaps when facing the unexpected, the irrational, and the problematic, the orientation of which I have been speaking concerns the active side, in the specific and, in a way, external sense of personal behavior and expression. Another saying from the world of Tradition may apply here: “Be whole in the broken, straight in the bent.”² I have already alluded to it when evoking a whole category of actions that are really peripheral and “passive,” which do not engage the essence but are automatic reflexes, unreflecting reactions of the sensibility. Even the supposed plenitude of pure “living,” which is largely biologically conditioned, does not belong to a much higher plane. Very different is the action that arises from the deep and in a way supra-individual core of being, in the form of “being inasmuch as one acts.” Whatever their object, one is involved in these actions. Their quality never varies, divides, or multiplies: they are a pure expression of the self, whether in the humblest work of an artisan or in precise mechanical work, in action taken in situations of danger, of command, or of controlling powerful material or social forces. Charles Péguy was only stating a principle of broad application in the world of Tradition when he said that a work well done is a reward in itself, and that the true artisan puts the same care into a work to be seen, and into one that remains unseen. I will return to this theme in a later chapter.

A particular point that deserves to be highlighted concerns the real significance of the idea that neither pleasure nor pain should enter as motives when one must do what must be done. It might easily make one think along the lines of a “moral stoicism,” with all the aridity and soullessness inherent in that concept. In fact, it will be difficult for someone who is acting from a basis in “life” and not from “being” to imagine the possibility of this kind of orientation, in which one obeys no abstract rule, no “duty” superimposed on the natural impulse of the individual, because his impulse would instead be to seek pleasure and avoid pain. This, however, is a commonplace derived from the false generalization of what only applies to certain situations, where pleasure and pain are rightly viewed as detached ideas, which a preliminary rational consideration transforms into goals and motives of action. Situations of this kind are rarer than one might think in any “sane” nature (and the expression rightly applies here); there are many cases in which the starting point is not a reflection, but a vital motion that resonates as pleasure or pain as it develops. One can in fact speak of a vital “decadence” when values of hedonism and comfort take first place in one’s conduct of life. It implies a splitting and a loss of soul that are analogous to the form sexual pleasure takes for depraved and vicious types. In them, what otherwise arises naturally from the motion of eros and concludes with the possession and embrace of the woman becomes a separate end, to which the rest serves as a means.

In any case, the important thing is to make the distinction, well known to traditional teachings, between the happiness or pleasure that is ardent, and that which is heroic—using the latter term with due reservation. The distinction corresponds to that between two opposite attitudes and two opposite human types. The first type of happiness or pleasure belongs to the naturalistic plane and is marked by passivity toward the world of impulses, instincts, passions, and inclinations. Tradition defines the basis of naturalistic existence as desire and thirst, and ardent pleasure is that which is tied to the satisfaction of desire in terms of a momentary dampening of the fire that drives life onward. Heroic pleasure, on the other hand, is that which accompanies a decisive action that comes from “being,” from the plane superior to that of life, and in a way it blends with the special inebriation that was mentioned earlier.

The pleasure and pain that are not to be taken account of, according to the rules of pure action, are those of the first type, the naturalistic. Pure action involves the other kind of pleasure or happiness, which it would be wrong to imagine as inhabiting an arid, abstracted, and soulless climate. There, too, there can be fire and vigor, but of a very special kind, with the constant presence and transparency of the higher, calm, and detached principle—which, as I have said, is the true acting principle here. It is also important in this context not to confuse the form of action (that is, its inner significance, the mode of its validity for the I) with its content. There is no object of ardent or passive pleasure that cannot in principle be also the object of heroic or positive pleasure, and vice versa. It is a matter of a different dimension, which includes everything but which also includes possibilities that fall outside the realm of natural, conditioned existence. In practice, there are many cases in which this is true and possible on the sole condition of this qualitative change, this transmutation of the sensible into the hypersensible, in which we have just seen one of the principal aspects of the orientation of an integrated and rectified Dionysism.

Finally there is an analogy between positive or heroic pleasure and that which, even on the empirical plane, accompanies any action in its perfection, when its style shows a greater or lesser degree of diligence and integrity. Everyone has experienced the particular pleasure obtained from the exercise of an acquired skill, when after the necessary efforts to develop it (without being driven by the idea of “ardent pleasure”) it becomes an ability, a spontaneity of a higher order, a mastery, a sort of game. Thus all the elements considered in this paragraph complement each other.

There are some further observations to be made in a more external field: that of the interactions to which the individual is exposed, even if he is integrated in our sense, by virtue of being placed in a specific society, a civilization, and a cosmic environment.

Pure action does not mean blind action. The rule is to care nothing for the consequences to the shifting, individualistic feelings, but not in ignorance of the objective conditions that action must take into account in order to be as perfect as possible, and so as not to be doomed to failure from the start. One may not succeed: that is secondary, but it should not be owing to defective knowledge of everything concerning the conditions of efficacy, which generally comprise causality, the relations of cause to effect, and the law of concordant actions and reactions.

One can extend these ideas to help define the attitude that the integrated man should adopt on every plane, once he has done away with the current notions of good and evil. He sets himself above the moral plane not with pathos and polemics but with objectivity, hence through knowledge—the knowledge of causes and effects—and through conduct that has this knowledge as its only basis. Thus for the moral concept of “sin” he substitutes the objective one of “fault,” or more precisely “error.”³ For him who has centered himself in transcendence, the idea of “sin” has no more sense than the current and vacillating notions of good and evil, licit and illicit. All these notions are burnt out of him and cannot spiritually germinate again. One might say that they have been divested of their absolute value, and are tested objectively on the basis of the consequences that in fact follow from an action inwardly free from them.

There is an exact correspondence with traditional teachings here, just as there was in the other behavioral elements suggested for an epoch of dissolution. To name a well-known formula that is nearly always misunderstood, thanks to overblown moralizing, there is the so-called law of karma.⁴ It concerns the effects that happen on all planes as the result of given actions, because these actions already contain their causes in potentiality: effects that are natural and neutral, devoid of moral sanction either positive or negative. It is an extension of the laws that are nowadays considered appropriate for physical phenomena, laws that contain no innate obligation concerning the conduct that should follow once one knows about them. As far as “evil” is concerned, there is an old Spanish proverb that expresses this idea: “God said: take what you want and pay the price”; also the Koranic saying: “He who does evil, does it only to himself.” It is a matter of keeping in mind the possibility of certain objective reactions, and so long as one accepts them even when they are negative, one’s action remains free. The determinism of what the traditional world called “fate,” and made the basis of various forms of divination and oracles, was conceived in the same way: it was a matter of certain objective directions of events, which one might or might not take into account in view of the advantage or risk inherent in choosing a certain course. By analogy, if someone is intending to make a risky alpine climb or a flight, once he has heard a forecast of bad weather he may either abandon or pursue it. In the latter case, he accepts the risk from the start. But the freedom remains; no “moral” factor comes into play. In some cases the “natural sanction,” the karma, can be partially neutralized. Again by analogy: one may know in advance that a certain conduct of life will probably cause harm to the organism. But one may give it no thought and eventually resort to medicine to neutralize its effects. Then everything is reduced to an interplay of various reactions, and the ultimate effect will depend on the strongest one. The same perspective and behavior are also valid on the nonmaterial plane.

If we assume that the being has reached a high grade of unification, everything resembling an “inner sanction” can be interpreted in the same terms—positive feelings will arise in the case of one line of action, negative in the case of an opposite line, thus conforming to “good” or “evil” according to their meanings in a certain society, a certain social stratum, a certain civilization, and a certain epoch. Apart from purely external and social reactions, a man may suffer, feel remorse, guilt, or shame when he acts contrary to the tendency that still prevails in his depths (for the ordinary man, nearly always through hereditary and social conditioning active in his subconscious), and which has only apparently been silenced by other tendencies and by the dictate of the “physical I.” On the other hand, he feels a sense of satisfaction and comfort when he obeys that tendency. In the end, the negative “inner sanction” may intervene to cause a breakdown in the case mentioned, where he starts from what he knows to be his deepest and most authentic vocation and chooses a given ideal and line of conduct, but then gives way to other pressures and passively recognizes his own weakness and failure, suffering the internal dissociation due to the uncoordinated plurality of tendencies.

These emotional reactions are purely psychological in character and origin. They may be indifferent to the intrinsic quality of the actions, and they have no transcendent significance, no character of “moral sanctions.” They are facts that are “natural” in their own way, on which one should not superimpose a mythology of moral interpretations if one has arrived at true inner freedom. These are the objective terms in which Guyau, Nietzsche, and others have treated in realistic terms such phenomena of the “moral conscience,” on which various authors have tried to build a kind of experimental basis—moving illegitimately from the plane of psychological facts to that of pure values—for an ethics that is not overtly founded on religious commandments. This aspect disappears automatically when the being has become one and his actions spring from that unity. In order to eliminate anything implying limitation or support I would rephrase that: when the being has become one through willing it, having chosen unity; because a choice is implied even here, whose direction is not obligatory. One might even accept and will nonunity, and in the same class of superior types that we are concerned with here, there may be those who permit themselves to do so. In such a case their basal unity does not cease to exist, but rather dematerializes and remains invisibly on a deeper plane.

Incidentally, in the same tradition to which the doctrine of karma belongs there is the possibility not only of eliminating the emotive reactions mentioned above (through “impeccability,” inner neutrality toward good and evil), but also of the “magical” neutralization of karmic reactions in the case of a being who has really burnt out his naturalistic part, and thereby become actively de-individualized.

This partial digression may serve to clarify how the “moral” plane can be eliminated impersonally, without any pathos, through considering the law of cause and effect in its fullest extension. Earlier on, I examined the field of external actions in which this law must be taken into account. In the inner realm it is a question of knowing what “blows to one’s own self” may result from certain behaviors, and of acting accordingly, with the same objectivity. The “sin” complex is a pathological formation born under the sign of the personal God, the “God of morality.” The more metaphysical traditions, on the other hand, are characterized by consciousness of an error committed, rather than by the sense of sin; and this is a theme that the superior man of our own time should make his own, beyond the dissolution of religious residues, by following the course I have described. An additional clarification comes from these observations of Frithjof Schuon: “The Hindus and Far Easterners do not have the notion of ‘sin’ in the Semitic sense; they distinguish actions not according to their intrinsic value but according to their opportuneness in view of cosmic or spiritual reactions, and also of social utility; they do not distinguish between ‘moral’ and ‘immoral,’ but between advantageous and harmful, pleasant and unpleasant, normal and abnormal, to the point of sacrificing the former—but apart from any ethical classification—to spiritual interests. They may push renunciation, abnegation, and mortification to the limits of what is humanly possible, but without being ‘moralists’ for all that.”⁵

With that we can conclude the principal part of our investigation. To sum up, the man for whom the new freedom does not spell ruin, whether because, given his special structure, he already has a firm base in himself, or because he is in the process of conquering it through an existential rupture of levels that reestablishes contact with the higher dimension of “being”—this man will possess a vision of reality stripped of the human and moral element, free from the projections of subjectivity and from conceptual, finalistic, and theistic superstructures. This reduction to pure reality of the general view of the world and of existence will be described in what follows. Its counterpart is the return of the person himself to pure being: the freedom of pure existence in the outside world is confirmed in the naked assumption of his own nature, from which he draws his own rule. This rule is a law to him to the degree that he does not start from a state of unity, and to the degree that secondary, divergent tendencies coexist and external factors try to influence him.

In the practical field of action, we have considered a regime of experiments with two degrees and two ends. First there is the proving knowledge of himself as a determined being, then of himself as a being in whom the transcendent dimension is positively present. The latter is the ultimate basis of his own law, and its supreme justification. After everything has collapsed and in a climate of dissolution, there is only one solution to the problem of an unconditioned and intangible meaning to life: the direct assumption of one’s own naked being as a function of transcendence.

As for the modes of behavior toward the world, once a clarification and confirmation of oneself has been achieved as described, the general formula is indicated by an intrepid openness, devoid of ties but united in detachment, in the face of any possible experience. Where this involves a high intensity of life and a regime of achievement that enliven and nourish the calm principle of transcendence within, the orientation has some features in common with Nietzsche’s “Dionysian state”; but the way in which this state should be integrated suggests that a better term would be “Dionysian Apollonism.” When one’s relations with the world are not those of lived experience in general, but of the manifestation of oneself through works and active initiatives, the style suggested is that of involvement in every act, of pure and impersonal action, “without desire,” without attachment.

Attention was also drawn to a special state of lucid inebriation that is connected with this entire orientation and is absolutely essential for the type of man under consideration, because it takes the place of that animation that, given a different world, he would receive from an environment formed by Tradition, thus filled with meaning; or else from the subintellectual adhesion to emotion and impulses at the vital base of existence, in pure bios. Finally, I devoted some attention to the reality of actions and the regime of knowledge that should take the place of the mythology of inner moral sanctions and of “sin.”

Those who know my other works will be aware of the correspondence between these views and certain instructions of schools and movements in the world of Tradition, which almost always concerned only the esoteric doctrine. I repeat here what I have said already: that it is only for incidental and opportune reasons that I have taken into consideration themes from modern thinkers, especially Nietzsche. They serve to create a link with the problems that preoccupy Europeans who have already witnessed the arrival of nihilism and of the world without God, and have sought to go beyond these in a positive way. It must be emphasized that such references could have been dispensed with altogether. With the intention of creating a similar link to what some contemporary thinkers have presented in a more or less muddled way, it seems useful to treat briefly that contemporary current known as existentialism, before proceeding to some particular sectors of today’s culture and lifestyles, and to the proper attitude to take toward them.