ON UNFETTERED FREEDOM WITH JAMES JOYCE, SARTRE, HAMLET AND SEVEN-TIME OSCAR WINNING 'EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE..'
BY PUSHKAR SANYAL
“To discover the mode of life and of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom” stated the young Dedalus, our protagonist from James Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. He asserts that this will be the central construct of his life. He is 20, or there around.
Unfettered freedom. A bewitching phrase that can turn into an obsessive goal. It needs foregrounding in the same way that most phenomenological things do.
My body and mind are plagued. It constrains me that I know. My physical environment – the weather, the sounds, the choking air, the calls, and the messages, the unfiltered waft of hustle culture and productive work for mass or niche consumption – constrain me. The transcending of my beliefs and conditions with knowledge or art confronts the fallibility of my essential nature, and it constrains me. The sheer seclusion amongst the herd impinges on the power I have to reflect. It constrains me.
But Dedalus just like his creator recognizes that artists are born. Not manufactured or talented but their mind is born in a way that only they can grasp themselves. Such is the big joke on them. Within the confines of their minds, there rages violence of objects. For it to bear the brunt of concealment remains a herculean task, and the sparks emerge in moments. At first, the intensity has nothing to say requiring stimuli to cultivate the language and content, and then if honed with time and discipline, there is a direct accession to existence.
In ‘Being and Nothingness’ Sartre’s noted work, the self-conscious individual confronts nothingness from an ontological lens meaning what it is not what is deduced or understood. Nothingness thus just like perhaps in meditative practices supersedes being. Sartre continues to remark that nothingness is not a void but an active force that creates the possibility for new beginnings and possibilities. And from it emerges radical freedom and space to create.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet suffers existentially but his suffering emerges from the knowledge of the despicable world he is a part of. His inner sanctum is as Jung may have put it centuries later gone through individuation because through it reflects a self-conscious individual who recognizes the dynamism and activity he is graced with. He takes it upon himself to act and speak only with the abandoned wheel of a ship that knows that the ocean is boundless. And thus, we have the unhinged madness that is Hamlet, and that is Shakespeare.
Sartre also views the human subject as purposive without actually having any purpose. A baffling view with various implications, one of them being the importance of subjectivity. For Sartre, subjectivity can have no function. Cut to figures of repute in society, amongst your friends, and your family, it seems that their grasp of the subjectivity of their human experience tilts the scale in their favor. It is sophisticated uniqueness that while Sartre describes for a metaphysical examination, I apply to this framework of being.
Subjectivity or a uniquely human experience has no function, it is the function. It is the point.
In living, there are various points of departure of thinking. Your gaze is refreshed. It is a renewal of your spirit, a frothy mess of your abilities. And at those times, you apprehend your subjectivity. For a moment it is rewarding, and only for that moment do you believe that the society we inhabit is right.
For the river after the turn, I will refer to ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’, a film that seemed to transcend the above and punch in the final piece. Its literal rendition of infinite possibilities is grounded in the human subjective experience. It is a theory that can be explained but must be experienced to be believed. While technology is the obvious candidate in the movie to explain what cannot be explained in a movie, the ability of the mind to fully grasp itself in all its infinitude possibilities renders a possibility where the bridge may exist to all of these possibilities. After all evolution itself is a statistical probability. The quantum leap made by the film is only a leap for pop culture not for 21st-century philosophy whose obsession has been teleology and yes ‘unfettered freedom’.
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV: DOSTOYEVSKY'S SEMINAL WORK THAT TEACHES YOU HOW TO LIVE
BY PUSHKAR SANYAL
Six hundred pages in and the Brothers Karamazov ceases to be a book you are reading. Instead, it turns into your daily aide. The premise has been set. You are drunk on the characters. The characters themselves have undergone a personal revolution each, their inner worlds fraught with the complexity Dostoyevsky is famous for weaving. It stops being a novel and becomes a manual on life and the various ways it can be lived. Correction, the various ways it should and should not be lived. But we will suspend that moral judgment for later in this essay when there again is a need to re-evaluate your ideas on people and what has driven them to their actions.
It is a book that confronts you. Dostoyevsky invents the Karamazov spirit, a spirit that beckons one to live and confront the human condition head-on, the sons of Karamazov representing three divergent paths of living.
One, a man of passion, nobility, and love. The second, a man of piety, compassion, intellect, and good. And the third, a man of rationality and reason. In the worlds of Dmitry, Alyosha, and Ivan, the reader discovers a fragmented yet shared morality. Their eclectic dispositions radiate a unique conscience yet through the plot and its various strands, the objectivity of the human spirit dawns on you. Each of the brothers represents an ideal that you could have lived by and yet haven’t. They represent the totality of human nature if it were uncurbed.
The principles that drive us to behave in 2023 are a combination of Dmitry, Alyosha, and Ivan because society detests extreme proclivities, instead incentivizing people to adopt traits that go about solving one personal problem to the other. The approach serves the need to propel ourselves, sometimes in order to solve problems created in the last decade itself.
The spiritual evolution of the brothers’ is a story of grasping yourself in your eternal contradiction – a tension of opposites. What we think, and what we do. What we see, and what we perceive. Whom we think we are, and what runs through our minds. Development typically aims to reconcile these contradictions over time but Dostoyevsky depicts a journey of thinking minds, of minds whose inward worlds are a repository of ideas and reflections. Within this spectrum of reconciliation, there lies the suite of characters:
Alyosha is the reconciled man. Positioning the youngest brother as a monk who leaves monkhood to become a man of the world, Dostoyevsky expounds upon one of his famous principles – of man’s discovery of God and the spirit of Christ setting him off on a personal journey instead of settling into a faction of contemplative monkhood. It is an exploration of the redeemed man who is seen as such by those around him and who takes upon the responsibility of wisdom and virtue in an ever-suffering world.
Dmitry is the protagonist and the heartbeat of inquiry in the novel. Epitomizing the Russian ideal, he resounds with a love for passion and expression yet is driven by the urge to be loved. A depraved childhood notwithstanding, this man suffers from his own self with his traits of nobility, honor, and love superseding any inkling of self-preservation. His love for a woman trumps all his urges, and his heroic journey leading to a tragedy enables Dostoyevsky to put forth one of his lifelong principles –
‘Conscience without God is horror; it can deviate to the most immoral things’
The fact that Dmitry knows this yet prefers to chase other delights can be read between the lines. Dmitry is a walking-talking contradiction borne out of his needs and whose naturalism embodies the recognition of man’s own spirit.
Ivan, the oldest brother is the persona of modern reason. Here Dostoyevsky paints the picture of the modern intellectual, one founded on the ideals of subjective personal freedom. Without recourse to a God or religion, Ivan’s love for mankind is juxtaposed against Weltschmerz, that regardless of personal freedom, the acute awareness of the crippling nature of reality and the self-induced sufferings of people and consequent inability to ascend the ladder of freedom, creates a terrible sadness. Via Ivan, Dostoyevsky posits some ideas –
One – the idea of self-suffering as The Devil incarnate. It is the belief that the Devil is everything that is wrong and distasteful about man. Ivan contracts a hallucinatory fever through which he speaks to an inward Devil. The conversations are replete with the contradictions that arise out of his suffering, his conscience, and a mind unable to come to terms with reality.
An Ivan lives among us all. He is a part of us that lives in the crevices fed occasionally by the news, the people around us, and a fantastical grandeur lurking amidst the smidgen of personal freedom.
Second – everything is lawful, everything is permitted.
Everything is lawful, says Smerdyakov, a minor yet crucial character who stands as the nihilistic pillar in the novel. A phrase interesting enough to write a few academic papers on, Dostoyevsky refers to a psychological state that arrives, and if nourished stays. Combine a slavish upbringing and a lack of a belief system towards anything except one’s wit, and you get Smerdyakov. While Smerdyakov operates at an opposing spectrum of morality to an Alyosha, he has reconciled his contradictions unlike a Dmitry or an Ivan. He is nihilistic and has expounded upon the subjective personal freedom enjoyed by Ivan but without the love for mankind, instead harboring hatred for all, chiefly brought about through his rotten fortune and a supreme belief that unbelief alone can alleviate self-suffering of the mind.
The Karamazov spirit runs in all of us. Suppressed by conditions, economic or social, it is only when let amok do we get to see ourselves in our original design. The novel discourses on the moral and social degeneration of 19th-century Russia but there is a hint of a shining light in the epilogue. Through remembrance, gratefulness, and a collective conscience can we defeat the ill effects of time and the condition that governs us all – a sponge-like self-consciousness that has the ability to forget.
Postulations: Alastor or, The Spirit of solitude by Shelley
BY PUSHKAR SANYAL
Photo by Inés Álvarez Fdez on Unsplash
“A neo-romantic era might yet emerge out of the fringes of a tech-industrial age primarily because the dreamy individual soul continues to re-emerge. For this notion of relevance, Alastor is important”
The bowels of nature, the unending visions of the adventurer, and the inherent mythological and metaphysical foundations of Alastor endow it with timelessness.
In countenance to peers such as Wordsworth, the glorification of nature dazzles at the behest of Shelley’s astounding imagination. Verses drip of rhythm and metaphors are lapped up like the nectar of Gods. Some lines require lingering, others a passing eye as tensions engorge this illusory world.
At the heart of this heartbreaking piece, is a conflict. The poet’s need to love and lead a poetic life. The more he tries, the more alienated he gets, the more the flowers in his heart wilt. Amidst the grandeur of love, truth, and beauty, it is this dichotomy that is idiosyncratic in Shelley’s writing.
In one sense, the spirit of solitude and what makes it grand is juxtaposed against its temporality. The poet is a breathing essence of seeking unto death because even death is part of the impulse, a reverie induced by the flow of it all.
The abyss of death and the de-romanticization of it. No elegies. “Art and eloquence, And all the shows o’ the world are frail and vain, To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade.” The recontextualization of the fall of the poet is assertive and even in its ornate language attempts to show the starkness of death.
Nature as the epitome of beauty vs nature as brutal and dominating, the contrast brings about the sublime aesthetic, evident as one reads through the poem. The fluidity of the language captures the distinct allure of the objects of nature that plow along with the wider narrative of the story. Among the vivid imagery however, there are shards of horrid aloneness and barren lifelessness, symbolizing the poet’s impending fate.
Intersecting with spiritual connotations, at the heart of Alastor, is a recurring spirit – a spirit of eternity. An often-discussed subject from the echelons of Plato, one desires eternity or immortality to escape evanescent states. It is this search that seems paramount to the romantic sages and is central to the dreams in Alastor.
At the cost of materiality, Shelley ironically does craft an eternal piece of art in Alastor.