A few weeks ago, reposted his essay, “Toward a Shallower Future.” I read it then for the first time; below is my attempt at a response.
After his friend Albert Camus died in a car crash, aged 46, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “Every life that is cut off — even the life of so young a man — is at one and the same time a phonograph record that is shattered and a complete life.” Three years earlier, Camus had won the Nobel Prize. As an author and philosopher, he was at the height of his powers, and on the cusp of writing a trilogy about love — the culmination of his earlier trilogies about “the absurd” and “revolt.” It might have been a lasting work of philosophy. But it was not to be. “For all those who loved him,” Sartre continued, “there is an unbearable absurdity in that death. But we shall have to learn to see that mutilated work as a total work.”
We shall have to learn to see that mutilated work as a total work. Sartre isn’t referring only to Camus’ writings — his incomplete philosophical and literary works. He means Camus’ complete work as a man of action, as a political figure, as a husband and a father. Camus was a human being who still had a lot to do. But this isn’t only true about a brilliant philosopher. Anyone who dies young is a mutilated work.
Noah Smith begins his essay, “Toward a Shallower Future,” reflecting on another unfinished work: the artist Keith Haring. A year before he died from AIDS at age 31, Haring completed Unfinished Painting: a quarter of the canvas is decorated with Haring’s typical mosaic-like composition of dancing figures; most of the canvas is empty, plain white and streaked with dripped paint. It is a statement about his own interrupted work, his life that, Haring knew, would be cut short by illness. “Amazing how many things one can produce if you live long enough,” he said. “I mean, I’ve barely created ten years of serious work. Imagine 50 years.”
Noah reflects on this work: “… without AIDS, Haring very well might never produced anything as haunting or evocative as Unfinished Painting. … without the pressure of a life cut short, Haring’s art might never have been as deep as it was.” Instead, Haring’s work, especially what he completed when he knew he was dying, has a certain pathos and depth to it. We are forced to see Haring’s mutilated work as the total work. It’s moving, and lasting.
But imagine a world where we discovered a cure before Haring died. Haring survived to ripe old age and developed, over the long arc of his career, a merely mediocre body of work. His style never matured or evolved. “That would have been a good trade,” Noah says. It is better to live a long happy life than a brief one that is full of suffering, even if the latter yields great works of art. “Without AIDS, the world might have been a bit shallower, with less tragedy for humans to struggle against. But no one in their right mind wishes for tragedies to continue just so that human life can continue to be filled with pathos.”
In general, Noah says, we should strive to eliminate suffering, rather than treat it like an end in itself. “The nobility of suffering has always been a coping mechanism,” argues Noah. “Happiness isn’t truly shallow — it just has a different kind of depth.”
The problem with Noah’s view is this: there is no such thing as a happy life that is free of suffering. Happiness when it comes is always bound up with suffering. Even a long lived life with a happy ending has some suffering in it. Even a complete life is a shattered record. A full life is a mutilated life. An old man can look back at his life and examine all the ways in which he failed himself and others — all the paths he didn’t take, the mistakes he made, the limits of his love. Most of us hope to reach old age in good moral and spiritual shape. Even if we manage to do so, there will still be forms of incompleteness all around us: projects that we’ll have to abandon; relatives we will not see grow up; wayward friends whose moment of redemption we will miss; historical events we won’t get to see; hopes that will emerge only after we’re gone. There is no way around it: even a complete life is in many ways incomplete.
Think about the artists who, unlike Haring and Camus, enjoyed a long and fruitful life, and worked to the very end. Stanley Kubrick, Pablo Picasso, Saul Bellow — they never saw completion in their work. There was always more to say and to explore. They continued to work because they continued to have questions, to feel the incompleteness of life — in short, they continued to suffer. The deep wisdom that they acquired in their creative engagement with their own suffering didn’t merely make them interesting. It helped them survive. It didn’t always ennoble them — Picasso, in particular, was a real jerk. But it permitted them to dwell successfully in a world rife with darkness and fear.
We will always need the wisdom that comes from suffering because we will always be incomplete. In fact, the more the world approaches the frictionless utopia that many people are hoping for, the more a strange void will emerge inside ourselves: a question of why this utopia is not enough. It’s then that we will go back to the work of poets and artists whose suffering was crucial to their creativity. A soul that feeds only on slop and reels won’t be able to cope even in utopia; it will flee from itself, and as it grows older it will long for the type of relief that comes only from gazing at something like Haring’s Unfinished Painting.
Consider the daily life of an upper middle class American professional, living in a comfortable suburb, in the shallow future that Noah foresees, which I believe is already here. This American professional is relatively happy, with a few challenges here and there. But every day there is news of horrors — in Gaza and in Utah. His only way of coping is to escape into entertainment, or reposting videos of the horrors as an act of moral protest against them. Distraction or outrage, but not real spiritual processing. For that, you need an education in tragedy and philosophy; you need to read the works of someone like Camus.
Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!
I'll add to your list of complete, yet-truncated, artistic trajectories. 'The Brothers Karamazov' -- one of the great apexes of the nineteenth century novel -- was to be a two-volume work, in whose second volume the "failed" monk Alyosha was to find his vocation as a revolutionary. It's a metamorphosis that would have struck Dostoevsky's Russian readers as completely logical, but might in retrospect have come to seem utterly banal. Lenin put paid, surely, to the world's guileless Alyoshas as agents of change.
There are some who will conclude that you are arguing that all suffering has meaning and purpose. I am not among them. But the transformation of suffering into purpose and meaning is a spiritual alchemy of which homo sapiens is uniquely capable. And in these dark days, we must reaffirm that human capability, through compassionate witness and action.
With gratefulness for your own witness.