Is It Possible To Justify The Quotidian?

I recently read the Washington Post critic Michael Dirda’s fine review of Ellmann’s Joyce, a book written by Zachary Leader about Richard Ellmann’s biographical work on the novelist James Joyce. Key to this review is, of course, Joyce’s novel Ulysses. Dirda summarizes:

“Ulysses” takes place during one day in Dublin — June 16, 1904, now known as Bloomsday — and exemplifies what [Richard] Ellmann called “the justification of the commonplace,” that is the faithful depiction of ordinary people leading ordinary lives. 

These words should give us pause. If memory serves, Erich Auerbach, in his classic Mimesis, argued that the novel, as a genre, inaugurated the close examination–psychological as well as sociological–of the lives of ordinary people, an examination that put “the minutiae of life” increasingly under the microscope.

Joyce is following in this train. What strikes me as his noble–yet failed–experiment is his attempt to justify the lives of ordinary people without appealing to (in his case) the Catholic religion that was, perhaps starting in the latter half of the nineteenth century and no doubt by the end of WWII, losing its cultural and religious legitimacy. Of course, Joyce is not alone in this project. Many high modernists sought, through aesthetic form, to fashion an alternative to Christianity, but none (save for the early Eliot of The Waste Land?) were so ambitious as Joyce.

Yet, I wonder, is it possible to provide a robust, deeply satisfactory “immanent ontology” without any direct appeal to transcendence? Can the quotidian existence of ordinary people, just as it is, be ennobled? I suggest that the question, however beautiful it is, is moving in the wrong direction: worldliness cannot be redeemed since a keen inspection of the lives of anyone seeking to live in this way will disclose a “quiet desperation” (to cite Thoreau). The Buddha termed this desparation dukkha, suggesting, in his First Noble Truth, that it was nearly ubiquitous.

If, in brief, modernity’s project can be said to be the justification of the ordinary lives of ordinary people (or the “affirmation of everyday life,” as Charles Taylor put it), then, so far as I can see, that project has resoundingly failed.

Heroism And The Radical Right

One of the basic themes of Matthew Rose’s careful treatment of the radical right in his book A World after Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right is that of heroism–or heroism and transcendence.

The quotidian, for these thinkers, is seen as decadence, and any justifications of human life in terms of safety, security, and longevity (one thinks of Patrick Deneen’s trenchant critiques of liberal political philosophy in Why Liberalism Failed as well as in Regime Change) are, in essence, missing something very deep in the human spirit. You might say that the quotidian simply asks too little of us. The question I’d pose in this connection is: “Is it enough? Is this enough? Can it be?”

In this sense, then, these thinkers are inviting, soliciting “moreness.” And yet, I don’t think that a valorization of the heroic ethos or of the heroic will bent on transcending limitation gets one beyond the bounds of the mind, for the mind is simply projection or conceptualization. The result of any such efforts to break free from the shackles of modernity via the mind or via the human will shall prove ineffectual. To transcend one limit is not to transcend limitation as such; it keeps finding more. Thus, one can’t, by this means, come to rest in the Whole, which is what all of us ultimately seek.

The Nondual Teaching: Absolute Contentment

It’s here that the nondual teaching comes in. Unlike the quotidian view espoused by secular modernity, this teaching does suggest that one’s potential is far greater than Bloom’s perambulations and Stephen’s perorations. And unlike the heroism endorsed by certain political thinkers on the radical right, this teaching is about emptying out a sense of self and thereby coming–through Love or Knowledge–to the very Heart of Being.

The spiritual quest is unapologetically inward-facing, and this is the very path that opens up for us at this moment in modernity. When all other paths have come to nought, what is revealed is the question concerning the one who is seeking, the question concerning what the nature of “all this” is, the question concerning the Truth beyond all prisms and refractions. In the Heart of Being is silence: the silence of absolute contentment.