I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
In his book Mysticism, philosopher Simon Critchley writes of 14th century German mystic and theologian Meister Eckhart’s ideal of releasement:
What is being described in the “Poverty Sermon” is what Reiner Schürmann sees as the central theme in Eckhart’s teaching: releasement, gelâzenheít, which is picked up by Heidegger in the 1950s with his talk of Gelassenheit, letting be. Entering into internal poverty—wanting nothing, knowing nothing, and having nothing—is about learning how to give up the will. Of course, the riddle here is that one cannot want to give up the will, for that is an act of volition. So how is one to think without the will? How is one to be without wanting, having, and knowing?
Eckhart thought this was necessary to feel oneness with God, to reduce the self to nothing. Critchely writes further:
The point is not in asking why a thing is the thing that it is, but rather letting the thing be and letting ourselves be with that thing, and all things. What is released in releasement, what is lâzen, in gelâzenheit, is a relaxation of the will, where the soul is open and God is open. Both soul and God let go and meet in a kind of softening or unwinding of the tightly knit core of the will and its attachment to things, even its attachment to God….
We see here how the logic of negation—neither this nor that— can induce in the soul that is open to such things what we can call a spirit of freedom. Such freedom is not freedom of the will, but freedom from the will.
Martin Heidegger, a twentieth century German philosopher, critiqued modern willfulness, a technological mindset that seeks to control and master everything in the world, even human beings. He believed this led to servitude rather than freedom (see Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society for a related argument).
As Critchley notes, Heidegger proposed Gelassenheit (releasement or “letting be”) derived from Eckhart’s work as a new kind of freedom: free for death and free for understanding one’s finite existence, allowing for a more authentic way of being in the world.
Two days ago I wrote about love as negation, that real love requires annihilation of the ego and the very self (which is more than the ego I think). And now I am writing about putting down the will, similar to setting down ambition. In achieving freedom from the will you can potentially stop being the achivement subject of Han’s burnout society. That is perhaps what I’m seeking even as I drive my inner creative to make quicker progress on the book manuscript.
There is a thread in my philosophy of recklessness of dropping egoic concerns, effacing the self, dropping the societally-imposed drive for productivity, stuff, ambition, and achievement. How is this reckless? Because trying to control your life through controlling your inner self, Han’s inner slave driven by the inner master, is fundamentally reckful: seeking optimization, making outward displays of achievement and affluence, attempting to control your life through prudent action and decision-making.
The alternative is releasement: a reckless opening up to whatever happens.
I drew the Five of Pentacles card recently in a Tarot reading. It is the “poverty card,” showing two figures, one on crutches and the other looking very cold wrapped in her shawl, walking in the snow past a lit stained glass church window. In the reading, it represented for me my medium-term experiences in my life.
I didn’t read it as the poverty card in that position though. To me it showed instead a sloughing off of ego concerns, an acknowledgment that our bodies will fail us, and the possibility of connecting with what is divine.
Shortly after I drew this card, I suffered a ski accident and while I’m not on crutches, I am hobbling a bit like the left figure, and when Ray comes to my house, he wraps up in blankets (I keep it cold to save money and because I overheat easily). One part of me is very upset that I skied too fast yesterday afternoon as the snow was getting icier and icier throughout the day, injuring myself badly. Another part of me recalls what I wrote very recently about what living recklessly looks like:
It would look like feeling trust in the unfolding and trust in myself to deal with that unfolding no matter what happens. I can handle anything even if I were taken prisoner and tortured, or faced a painful terminal illness, or lost a child, or any other possibility. There is nothing that can happen that I cannot endure.
I can endure the fact of my ski accident, very similar to one I had maybe eight years ago. I have to endure it and the fact of the earlier one too, treat them as events in the box universe, or Nietzschean eternal recurrence. And I do welcome those crashes, because they have offered up a really beautiful topic for a Things Men Gave Me essay, showing as they do two ways a man might or might not support his partner when she’s hurt herself.
At any rate, I read the Five of Pentacles I drew as a card of opportunity rather than poverty. It makes me think of mystic experience, of living more simply and with fewer creature comforts, of exploring the possibility of connecting to what is meaningful and transcendent rather than what is consumerist and commodified. And I think of walking this path with a partner, who, like me, may hobble at times as we are aging humans with (fortunately only slowly) deteriorating bodies.
This, to me, feels like something akin to the releasement that Eckhart and Heidegger recommend. And I welcome it.