The Violence of Life
To speak of just or unjust in itself is quite senseless; in itself, of course, no injury, assault, exploitation, destruction can be “unjust,” since life operates essentially, that is in its basic functions, through injury, assault, exploitation, destruction and simply cannot be thought of at all without this character. One must indeed grant something even more unpalatable: that, from the highest biological standpoint, legal conditions can never be other than exceptional conditions, since they constitute a partial restriction of the will of life, which is bent upon power, and are subordinate to its total goal as a single means: namely, as a means of creating greater units of power. A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power-complexes but as a means of preventing all struggle in general […] would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.—
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 2nd Essay, Section 11
Introduction
I was recently struck by this passage in Nietzsche, which briefly and powerfully states a position at once glaringly obvious and deeply uncomfortable. The violence of life is something that most modern people, it seems, have a very confused relationship to. On the one hand, we have jettisoned the Christian conception of God and the supernatural—all that suggests a different, deeper reality not ruled by the principle of violence; on the other hand, we have intensified the Christian concern for justice and equality into an unprecedented societal obsession. We know the natural world is all there is, and that nature is red in tooth and claw; yet won’t rest until violence and oppression are done away with. Assuming life is good, this presents a troubling contradiction. (Suspending this assumption, as Nietzsche’s concludes, this call for absolute justice is simply a call for life’s elimination.)
We might reframe this more generally as the tension between our ideals and what we are. By the latter phrase, of course, I don’t mean what we happen to be because we have not yet attained our ideals—but what we essentially and ineluctably are. We are, of course (whatever else we might be), living beings, a manifestation of life. Life predates upon other life—depends upon its injury and destruction. Of course, life also depends upon cooperation. Aside from examples of mutually beneficial symbiosis, we can see this within an individual organism itself: if a body was ruled by competition, it could not cohere (this is Nietzsche’s point about justice being needed within units of power). Yet even within a body, cells are constantly dying and being replaced—and often actively killed, if they present a threat to the body as a whole.
If violence is constitutive of our being, it’s schizophrenic to be universally opposed to it (that is, when it’s not simply suicidal). Such an endeavor is likely to drain away our vital strength and rejoicing rejoicing and cast a deep gloom over our existence, dooming us to forever despise ourselves. Nietzsche’s affirmation of power and violence as basic conditions of life is one way out of this. Another way is religious: the natural world is violent, but is not the fundamental reality. This is the Christian notion of nature as fallen, and the Christian promise of a perfected world to come. This makes the tension a war between worlds rather than between human thoughts and the biological brains that generate them. If our ideals are rooted in a transcendent realm that is more real and potent than the immanent world we live in, then fully pursuing our ideals need not undermine the conditions of our very existence.
There are, of course, problems with this position. What exactly is this other world we are positing, and how exactly could it be? While faith in it might relieve us of the sense that fighting ourselves is futile, it just creates a deeper level of self-conflict if it cannot convince our intellect. I’ll therefore explore a couple of other approaches to the problem—approaches that are at once religious and (so to speak) reconciled to the world as it is. In these, the transcendent and immanent are both real, but separate. Finally, I’ll offer a couple of suggestions as to how we might move past this present confusion.
Christianity
The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. [...] They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
Isaiah 11:6–9
There is something beautiful in this image of final peace and harmony. The Christian story goes like this: the world was made perfect, out of absolute love; but due to the willful disobedience of its most significant creature, it fell from this original perfection; God in his love will one day restore it, and it will have no more evil or suffering. Therefore, the world of violence we now behold is a temporary perversion of its true nature. Renunciation of violence may lead to our demise in the world as it is—but this is no matter, for the true life and the true world is to come. The story of Jesus encapsulates this: renouncing violence, he was crucified—but then gloriously rose in a perfected body, the very substance of the world to come.
In Doors of the Sea, David Bentley Hart writes powerfully about these two worlds (or two modes of the one world):
The Christian should see two realities at once, one world (as it were) within another: one the world as we all know it, in all its beauty and terror, grandeur and dreariness, delight and anguish; and the other the world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply “nature” but “creation”; an endless sea of glory, radiant with the beauty of God in every part, innocent of all violence. To see in this way is to rejoice and mourn at once, to regard the world as a mirror of infinite beauty, but as glimpsed through the veil of death; it is to see creation in chains, but beautiful as in the beginning of days. (p. 61)
He supports his account with the insight of Dostoyevsky (whose Zosima the Elder sees this divinized world) and the testimony of real saints and mystics. Personally, I am willing to credit these experiences. I don’t just assume they are delusions; they may be revealing some real aspect of being. And yet, not having had these same experiences, I am at a loss as to how this deeper and more glorious world relates to the world that we know. In the world that we know, the lion predates—is almost defined by its predation (not only in popular imagination, but by the evolutionary necessity for his particular shape, speed, sharpness of teeth, etc.). It seems that for the lion to lie down with the lamb (or the calf), it would not be a lion at all! Likewise, the human being truly free of violence—may not be a human being.
The problem of how God’s glorious creation relates to fallen nature is magnified by the myth of the fall itself: at one point, creation was perfect, and then it was corrupted. But we don’t have any knowledge of this prior world—not in the earliest days of humanity, of our earth, or of the universe itself (the very laws of physics guarantee destruction and decay). There is no continuity with the unfallen world in time as we know it. This gives rise to ideas about a different kind of relationship—between time and eternity, or fallen and divine time—but what does any of this mean, exactly? (The ‘time’ of our ordinary experience is ontologically baffling enough.) Actually, time is a good thing to focus on, as time (as we know it) and death are intertwined, just as we are shaped and defined by time.
The mystic insight opened up by burning love and asceticism may reveal an aspect of reality the rest of us, blinded by our fallen natures, cannot comprehend: the glorious, eclipsed essence of our presently violent world. This conception ennobles the natural world, without affirming her violence (a theme I explored more fully in my post on Christ and Kali). But there are, at the very least, rational difficulties with this approach.
Modernity
In any case, rightly or wrongly, we in the modern West have cast aside this whole notion as fantastical. We hold that the only world is this world that we can all experience and measure. And yet no civilization has been more obsessed with ideas like equality, love and justice. According to the dominant worldview, all violence and oppression must be done away with—at least among human beings, though increasingly also in our relation to the natural world. Ironically, this very sentimentalism is a luxury afforded by our incredibly effective domination of the natural world. (On a related note: the state that would eliminate violence could only do so due to a monopoly on violence.) We can afford to be soft—yet to what end? The Christian (who may at the same time be rather ascetically hard on himself) can say: for the sake of the world to come. We cannot.
Let’s say, charitably, that the aim is to establish ‘justice’ as far as it can be established, without undermining life itself. We will have a world where ‘justice’ flourishes, relatively speaking, while accepting that injustice must tragically continue to rage in the animal kingdom, in the fact of human mortality, in all the ineradicable inequalities between people, and in all our embarrassing, archaic urges to domination (which we will appropriately channel, where we cannot remove). Still—the question must be asked: where does this passion for justice come from, where this deep discomfort with violence? Ontologically, are we more than mere life or mere matter, after all? If not, why not just dismiss this obsession as a curious self-delusion? The status quo worldview about this is incoherent, and so it seems it must lurch into either Nietzschean life-affirmation (with all its violence) or life-denial. As it hovers between these, it is too often nothing but ressentiment: the resentful protest of weakness against strength, the progressive undermining of the conditions of flourishing life by those too cowardly, even, to end it at once.
There is a strand of the modern worldview that seems to escape this dilemma, however. One way to articulate this would be: there is only this world, yet we (and our ideals) are the unfolding or fulfillment of this world. Before humanity, nature needed to subsist by violence—but now that we have arisen, the intelligence that lay latent in nature is coming to conscious fruition. With this intelligence—using its tools, and in its image—we can remake ourselves and the world. For example, using technology we can extend our lifespan—perhaps indefinitely. We can enhance ourselves, cyborgize our brains and our bodies. We can hack our DNA, and that of other creatures—perhaps to finally excise our lingering aggression, perhaps to remove predation from the natural world. We can live in virtual worlds that are far more interesting and do far less harm. At the extreme end of this aspiration, perhaps our minds can merge, the destructive ego gone forever, finally harmoniously One.
I will call this strand of the modern worldview transhumanism. I say it is just a strand because it still makes most people uncomfortable, and I feel like most wouldn’t consciously go along with it, though history is tending in its direction. Obviously, enhancement by technology needn’t be wedded to an attempt to constrain or eliminate violence. (If we consider the technologies of war, the effect has generally been the opposite.) But this tends to be the case, because this strand of the modern worldview is quasi-religious: it strives to have transcendence within immanence. It suggests we can regain the religious hope for salvation without buying into fables of the supernatural. But the price we pay is twofold: first, the technological transformation of everything; and second, following from this, the loss of ourselves. For better or worse, transhumans will cease to be human.
And finally, after all this effort, the project will necessarily fail. We cannot rewrite the laws of physics. We will be left with a compromise, like the more tepid status quo referred to before. Perhaps, at best, one vast hivemind will subsist, lost in its own virtual world, sustained by some solar-powered sprawl of servers entwined with residual human brain tissue. Still violence will be constitutive of existence—an existence now extremely distant for this mind.
Nietzsche
Nietzsche would despise all this. Neither the Christian, modern–confused, or transhumanist approaches affirm and rejoice in life as it is. Though the transhumanist may seem an example of humanity’s triumphant will to power, I suspect Nietzsche would reject this. Is what triumphs here life, or intellect (and a certain kind of intellect, at that)?
Nietzsche loves life. And by directing our attention to what life is and does—namely, violence, the destruction of other life—he offers us an opportunity to embrace our own life forthrightly, without self-denial. This is not passive resignation—the sad awareness that I must harm and destroy, and be harmed and destroyed in turn. The life that I am is dynamic: it asserts itself, grows, reaches forth, conquers and rules. It is ever moving and striving, and there is joy in all this essential activity of life. Nietzsche’s vision is of life lived fully, and therefore joyfully, while fully recognizing the tragic (in the rich aesthetic sense of that word) reality that we must eventually be defeated and destroyed. This is the Dionysian vision—hot, ecstatic physicality rather than cool Apollonian ideals.
Yet this does not mean mere savagery. Culture and intellect are an integral part of who we are, and it would be ridiculous to try and abandon them—as it would generally be absurd to regress to crude physical violence to get whatever we want. Yet Nietzsche is clear about the hierarchy: culture and intellect are to serve life, to enhance the feeling and expression of it. They are not (flowing as they do, for Nietzsche, out of it) independent standards by which to judge it. Nietzsche is a vitalist.
(This, by the way, shines some further light on the difference between the Nietzschean and transhumanist—the transhumanist is a mechanist. ‘Life,’ like everything, is just a mechanism that can be taken apart and reassembled. For Nietzsche, life is fundamental, a self-organizing force.)
But would Dionysian existence really be a life fully lived? Is there not, after all, more to life than the lifeforce? Is there not something else that life itself is for? There is a sense in which the intellect, for example, flows out of life; but there is also a sense in which it is independent. It has its own standards, values, and aspirations. Its objects have their own reality (mathematics being the clearest example of this). And there are different kinds of intellect—from the contemplation of God or absolute being, down to the technical intellect that would take apart and reassemble the world. There are also moral values, the pursuit and realization of which make life worth living—justice being but one of these. In his Non-Formal Ethics of Values, Max Scheler argued persuasively for the reality of values and their arrangement in a hierarchy (we will return to this). The spiritual/intellectual values are intrinsically higher than the vital values that Nietzsche invokes. Yet that does not mean the latter should be neglected, or even impatiently borne with. They should be appropriately fulfilled and affirmed.
Hinduism
If Christianity holds that imminent nature will be transformed or restored to its transcendent origin, Nietzsche would have us wash our hands of transcendence completely. And yet this doesn’t seem possible—or if possible, it would be an impoverishment of the human experience. Is there a way to affirm a transcendent reality and the imminent natural world just as it is?
Some of the greatest examples of this can be found in Hinduism, a religion renowned for the most austere asceticism and uncompromising monism on the one hand, and the most scintillatingly vital panoply of deities and myths on the other. Even in the most monistic streams of Hinduism there exists a bold affirmation of the world as it is.
He who is attributeless also has attributes. He who is Brahman is also Shakti. When thought of as inactive, He is called Brahman, and when thought of as the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer, He is called the Primordial Energy, Kali. Brahman and Shakti are identical, like fire and its power to burn…
Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, vol. I, ch. 3
So said Sri Ramakrishna, the great 19th Century mystic and all-but-illiterate synthesizer of different Hindu traditions—who might therefore be taken as an authentic summation of that vast and varied religion. His goal was clear: liberation from the relative world, realization of God, moksha. He pursued this with singleminded intensity and never ceased spurring his disciples to do the same. “Renounce everything and seek God alone,” he taught was the one all-essential message of the Bhagavad Gita. And yet he uttered the quote above, and taught that when you have renounced all and realized God you will see that God is also everything you left behind.
The Hindu cosmos is vast in time, and endlessly cyclical. After the universe is destroyed, it arises again. There is no final salvation in time—no abrupt fall and no definitive restoration. To attain moksha is, in a sense, to step completely out of time. The universe exists in time; Brahman does not. There is no sense in the material world being redeemed from violence and suffering—these realities are constitutive of it. And yet it is not all there is: there is also, at the heart of this world, the transcendent being that ceaselessly gives rise to it, to whom it is possible to relate and, ultimately, to realize your identity with.
The Divine Mother is full of bliss. Creation, preservation, and destruction are the waves of Her sportive pleasure.
Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, vol. II, ch. 16
Why does Brahman, the supreme and only being, ceaselessly give rise (as Shakti) to this relative universe? The Hindu answer is lila, God’s divine play. This world with all its beauty and tragedy is God’s self-enjoyment, Shakti realizing all her myriad possibilities, the bliss of her creative self-expression. “But is that fair?” we might ask. “It is we who have to suffer for her enjoyment!” Yet the Hindu reply is perfectly self-consistent: “You are her! Who you think you are is only her playful self-delusion.” The basis of reality is bliss (God is conceived as Sat-Chit-Ananda: limitless being, consciousness, and bliss)—and as far as the the relative world is involved in this, the violence of life is essential.
Simone Weil
Necessity is the screen set between God and us so that we can be.
Limitation is the evidence that God loves us.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
This Hindu vision of the cosmos is sublime: it is, in all its beauty and terror, God’s blissful self-expression. Yet there is something lacking in this vision: something of the dignity of human being, something of love. The 20th Century French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil had a view that is quite similar, yet different. In accord with the Hindu position, she held that the universe is exactly as it should be. But as the quotes above suggest, God’s motive for creating it is somewhat different.
God, who is infinite and all, lovingly sacrifices himself: limits and reduces himself to create a space for us to be. (There is a similar idea, I believe, in mystical Judaism.) As Weil explains, “God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself.” For “if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, of time and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun.” As limited beings, we must be embedded in limitation in order to exist. As other than God, he must remain (in a certain sense) distant and hidden from us, for us not to be consumed by him. This limitation and absence of God is simply necessity, the very stuff of the universe: time and space, the laws of physics, change, suffering, death—and violence.
For this reason, for Weil, our very wretchedness becomes a way to experience God’s love for us and so to love him in turn. Although she was never baptized, Weil was powerfully influenced by Christianity, and reported having mystical encounters with Christ. This is perhaps why love, suffering, and self-sacrifice feature so strongly in her thought. As God sacrificed himself in creating the universe in which we could be, we must imitate his action and ‘decreate’ ourselves out of love for him. Briefly, this means allowing our ego to die completely. The universe, with all its violence and suffering, therefore becomes the indispensable scene for an exchange of love.
Weil did not believe in God until she experienced him, unexpectedly and directly. What God is is a question best left aside for now; but for Weil, at least, what she experienced was a reality far more real than the everyday physical world. If we accept with Nietzsche that God is dead in the popular imagination, we must nevertheless acknowledge that the phenomenon called ‘God’ remains extraordinarily powerful and transformative to those who do encounter it. It is not good enough to simply exclude it from our worldview.
Weil integrates God and the world exactly as it is. Her approach is perhaps compromised by a too intense asceticism: “But God can only love himself. His love for us is love for himself through us. Thus, he who gives us our being loves in us the acceptance of not being.” (Is this really an adequate description of love?). But the central claim that God’s universe is constituted by limitation (and thus violence and suffering) in order to be at all, is a compelling one. It has no need for a mysterious ‘Fall’ somewhere in the primordial mists of time. If we can speak about a ‘Fall’ at all, it is simply an ontological distinction: the sheer fact of not being God.
Reflections
The question of the relation between the violence of life and justice ‘in itself’ is a question about the imminent and transcendent. We can discern at least five clear positions on this.
First, the extremes:
The Nietzschean affirmation of life, including all its violence. (All imminence, no transcendence.)
The moralistic denial of life, due to its violence. (Imminence nullified by transcendence.)
And then the more nuanced positions:
The Christian belief that life is only violent in the fallen creation (i.e. violence is not essential to life), and that creation will be restored to just perfection. (Imminence infused with and transformed by transcendence.)
The Hindu (and Weilian) belief in both a transcendent God and the essential violence of life. (Imminence and transcendence, related yet eternally ‘separate.’)
The transhumanist endeavor to transform life using imminent means. (Transcendence projected into imminence; this may ultimately be more a confused than a clear position.)
The status quo in the modern West is unclear and confused regarding this question. We deny the existence of any transcendent realm and claim to celebrate imminence. This is largely true as far as, say, sexuality goes. But we condemn violence maybe more than ever before. In general, we tend sometimes to Nietzschean affirmation, sometimes to moralistic denial, sometimes to transhumanist transformation—yet we are uncomfortable with each of these. This situation is dangerous: it saps our sense of meaning, saps our strength, and fuels our tendency to ressentiment.
It seems to me that reintegrating the Nietzschean affirmation of life (including its violence) is indispensable to the health of our civilization. This is the most immediate remedy for the consuming sense of guilt about our—individual and collective—existence, excellence, and dominance. This is not to justify anything (declare it ‘just’), but to acknowledge necessity, and have gratitude for the necessity by which we benefit. Attempts to ‘justify’ invasions, colonizations, etc., in the sense of pretending they were inspired by impartial moral principles, are just as repugnant as a consuming guilt about one’s own existence. Yet the honest will to expand and rule, the honest joy in conquest—these are not, in themselves, repugnant. These are as natural as the desire for food and the pleasure of eating.
Note that I’m not saying there is nothing higher than these vital pleasures and desires; just that they must be affirmed on their own level, as the indispensable precondition for existing and thriving in the world we find ourselves in. They may perhaps be limited and channeled by a higher realm of values; but I’m suspicious of anyone who preaches these higher values without having passed through the lower—such a one is either simply preaching ressentiment, or too unintegrated to be a reliable model or teacher.
For my part, I do think there are higher levels. Scheler’s hierarchy of values is a good way of picturing this:
(Note: the above diagram is from Iain McGilchrist’s Master and His Emissary, so he gives it a brain hemisphere spin; use values are distinguished from pleasure values in Scheler, although not as definitely as the other levels.)
The lower levels are best pursued for the sake of the higher, though that doesn’t mean they are simply reducible to the higher. Utility is for the sake of pleasure; but it may be uncoupled from it, and be pursued for its own sake—generally a bad situation. Likewise, pleasure is ideally for the sake of vital values: the pleasure of eating good food conduces to (and is best enjoyed in the overall context of) health; but it may be pursued for its own sake, and thus ruin health. Likewise, the vital should be oriented to the spiritual (‘intellectual’): For what is all this strength and health and power to be used? In what way is it to be exercised? Power pursued solely for its own sake is as toxic as pleasure pursued solely for its own sake—and here I part ways with Nietzsche.
Note that pursuit of higher levels of value doesn’t abolish the lower levels. The question is not if we kill and dominate, but how and to what ends. Vital power is also, generally, the fuel by which we approach the higher level; and is in turn stimulated by the higher level. The pursuit of beauty, truth, and justice can give us amazing vital strength. In is book on Ressentiment, Scheler objects to Nietzsche’s characterization of Christianity as a religion of ressentiment. Yes, he says, it can be—but it isn’t essentially. Moving above the vital level can look very much like attacking it from below. The early Christians, he says, gave their lives away in agapic love out of an abundance of vitality, inspired by unlimited hope and the experience of God’s love. They were stronger than the merely strong—the ones who, though powerful, must always defend themselves. This is a very different phenomenon than that of resentfully railing against a power and strength one is not capable of.
To me, at least, this is all very instructive. We can affirm each level, while striving higher. The highest—the Holy—returns us to our basic problem of how the transcendent and immanent relate. If we posit an absolute God, what becomes of this relative world? Is it a mistake to be abolished or a fallen reality to be restored? Does it serve some greater purpose, or is it valuable in itself?
The Christian story of fall and restoration is the most beautiful and compelling to me—to a point. Even if we strip off the ‘fall’ aspect (let us say that is a metaphor for God’s intention for creation), we still have the apparently insuperable difficulty of imagining a world that is ours without obeying the most basic laws of ours. (And, on a higher level, there is the difficulty of imagining any physical world of which destructive change is not constitutive.) Everything appears interwoven—life and death, joy and suffering, identity and change.
In this respect, the Hindu approach resonates more with me. The universe must be exactly as it is, and is valuable as such (as an expression of God’s innate creativity—lower values gaining their full meaning in light of higher). Weil supplements this approach by bringing it more in line with the Western emphasis on agapic (self-giving) love. More than merely God’s creative self-expression, this world is his sacrificial self-limiting so that beings other than him may be. The blind and unchangeable necessity of the universe then becomes a sign of God’s love for us, and our amor fati becomes love of him.
The problem with this view, I think, is that the universe that we know through science isn’t utterly ruled by blind necessity. There is a basic, irreducible randomness in the quantum realm—and a curious enmeshment of it with observers. This, in itself, doesn’t prove much. But if we credit the consensus of human experience to date, that magic and miracles are real, then the picture changes dramatically. Then it seems that the physical world, on the human level, can be directly altered by the spiritual. (Obviously, this is the central claim of Christianity—a body devoid of life came alive again.) The work of Rupert Sheldrake suggests that nature operates by habits rather than ‘laws,’ and thus the ‘laws of nature’ can change. The Christian hermeticist Valentin Tomberg claimed:
Thus the ‘law’ of the struggle for existence that Darwin observed in the domain of biology will one day cede its place to the law of cooperation for existence which exists already in the cooperation of flowering plants and bees, in the cooperation of different cells in an organism, and in cooperation in the human social organism. […] This will be, because the new ‘law’—i.e. a profound change in the psychic and physical structure of beings—will replace the old ‘law,’ firstly in consciousness, then in desires and affections, then lastly in the organic structure of beings.
Meditations on the Tarot, Letter IX: The Hermit
For Tomberg, this is achieved spiritually, through the power of self-sacrificial love. And again, there is an abundance (a superadundance) of at least anecdotal evidence of this in the stories of saints and holy men. However, it is not achieved by the clever technological manipulation of the existing world which is the modus operandi of transhumanism. I believe this approach is a temptation we must reject. Perhaps the natural world can be fundamentally redeemed and transformed by the transcendent, working via the sacred magic of agape; this can never be accomplished by willful human engineering. In striving to have transcendence totally within the bounds of imminence, transhumanism may just be an intensification of the basic confusion that underlies our modern worldview. It would do boldly what we now do falteringly.
Where does this leave me? Without total clarity, perhaps; yet with more than before. In the only world we know, life and violence are inseparably intertwined. Unqualified justice ‘in itself’ is indeed hostile to life. And yet, at the same time, justice is one of those values that human life is valuable for. While Nietzsche notes that justice can help to make overall units of power more powerful, it is also true that justice is intrinsically valuable, and more deeply so than mere power. Individually and collectively, we ‘unjustly’ subjugate the world around us—in order to practice it! (Much could be said regarding precisely what justice is; I have ignored this question in order to pursue the larger one about the relation between spiritual and vital values in general.) We must look at this truth squarely, and embrace it. To neglect this easily becomes neurotic self-denial and ressentiment.
Nietzsche provides an antidote for this (just reading him can help us feel the power and exultation of the life we are). But we mustn’t go too far. Scheler reminds us of the whole hierarchy of values, and how they relate to each other. As far as a worldview around this goes, I am most aligned with Ramakrishna and Weil: we can affirm transcendent reality and the imperfect world we live in. Crucially, in both these cases, the world is affirmed in the light of the utmost value of the transcendent.
And yet, there are hints, here and there, that matter itself can be transformed by spirit—in isolated cases, if not unto universal paradise. If this world really can be, somehow, perfected by the divine, then our affirmation of the violence of life—while vitally necessary now—must remain ultimately provisional. Regardless, we must live fully human lives: without undermining life or attempting to impose paradise, we must remain open to what is above us.