On Intimate Knowledge

Gabriel Marcel, St. John Henry Newman and Iris Murdoch

Sep 15, 2024

In Terry Gilliam's Brazil there is a scene where the hero of the film, a bureaucrat by the name of Sam Lowry, visits a woman to deliver to her a "receipt" for her husband, who has been erroneously killed by the state, on behalf of the "Ministry Of Information." The scene might help us imagine the kinds of situations encountered by Gabriel Marcel during his time as the head of the Information Service organized by the Red Cross to inform relatives of the fates of soldiers during the First World War.

Like Lowry, Marcel had to visit families to tell them of the death of a son, a husband or a brother. Unlike Lowry however, Marcel was highly sensitive to the unsuitability of his bureaucratic approach to the situation. For Lowry, the man's death is a problem to be solved by having his "receipt" delivered and signed by the wife. Marcel realized that the death of a loved one is actually not a problem and that it has no solution. While the bureaucrat can forget the event after having done his job, the family will have to live with it. There is no solution to the death of a son or a husband. What he could do, was to be present to the suffering of the family. To be with them. Their suffering is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

This is the difference between being and having. The problem is something one either controls or seeks to control. The mystery is a darkness into which one can only leap, in the faith that someone or something will catch them there. Or that they will grow wings. The attitude of having is the attitude of one observing a spectacle. It is, in the words of Owen Barfield, an onlooker attitude. The gaze subjects the world under itself, foreclosing any communion with it.

Marcel read Barfield and was deeply inspired by his idea of an ancient poetic participation in the world, a different mode of consciousness which we have lost. For Barfield, it is impossible for us to return to this ancient mode of consciousness where, as Hölderlin says, gods walked among humans, but there is a possibility of another final participation, through which we may transcend the onlooker attitude.

The difference between being and having is the difference between participation and detatchment, life and death. The more the world appears as a spectacle, the more alien and meaningless it becomes.

The more we treat the world as a spectacle, the more unintelligible must it necessarily seem from a metaphysical point of view, because the relation then established between us and the world is an intrinsically absurd one.¹

This is the soil from which French existentialism grows. With this detatched attitude, nature, animals and other human beings become instrumentalized objects in relation to a subject who determines their meaning.

When two detatched human beings meet, we shall then have a kind of Hegelian master-slave battle of gazes where each tries to objectify the other. In so far as each succeeds (or fails), every subject is (having been objectified by the other and hence relating to itself as object) alien to itself, and thereby capable of being ashamed of itself. And of course it is also alien to the other it objectifies. Such is the world painted by Jean-Paul Sartre, who Marcel and his friend Rachel Bespaloff critiqued, while also acknowledging his philosophy’s value as a reflection of the mode of being characteristic of its time.

For Marcel, there is beneath Sartre's world, a deeper reality of participation. Due to the totalizing , and hence conflictual nature of the subject, or “for-itself”, and its “fundamental project”, there is no room for communion. To Sartre's line, from the play No Exit, "hell is other people”, Georges Bernanos could reply with the line, from his novel The Diary of a Country Priest, "Hell, madam, is to love no longer."

For both Marcel and Sartre, the egoic self is a disembodied nothingness. Here, René Girard agrees, at least in his first book. In Deceit, Desire And The Novel, Girard (who was significantly influenced by Sartre, “the first philosopher [he] understood”² and later remarked on the "Sartrean tone”³ (tonalité sartrienne) of his early writing) lays out a similarily Sartrean ontology, but in an inverted form. The subject is no longer the ruler but the ruled.

The Sartrean subject subjugates the world under its project. But whence does this project originate? For Sartre it originates in the subject itself. The subject is a nothingness and hence absolutely free to evaluate the world as it wills. For Girard however, it is not the subject that is the origin of its evaluations (and thereby absolutely free), but an Other, a mediator of its desire.

Girard speaks of desire. But for the purposes of this essay, it will help to think of desire as value. Everything we desire that is irreducible to innate biological appetite, has its roots in value, and hence in the mediator. Value is the being of things. It is what makes a Lamborghini a Lamborghini, rather than a piece of metal. Desire that is not innate is learned. And what is learned is imitated. Everything we see and everything we do receives its meaning from what we value and hence, from the mediator. He is the sun, by the light of which we see things.

The subject desires the being of the mediator precisely due to the lack of being within themselves. Being means here an existential completeness. The ground of meaning and value. What is perhaps sometimes meant by the word “God.” Cut off from being, we are lost at sea, looking anxiously (or with fierce and volatile false certitude overcompensating for the anxiety) where the other ships are sailing and following them. The problem is that all the ships are lost and none of them dare to say it. The sun is actually a fire burning inside a cave, casting shadows on the wall, to which our gaze is fixed.

Whereas for Sartre, the uprooted nothingness of the self leads it to itself create value, to bestow meaning upon the world, to take God's place, for Girard it leads the subject to project being onto an Other, the mediator. The perceived being of the mediator is itself an illusion. The mediator is just as lost and lacking as everyone else. However due to the shame of one’s lack of being, everyone keeps it as a secret to themselves and hence everyone believes in the fullness of being of the Other, and desires this being of the Other.

For Girard, this lack of being and the shame that accompanies it, is the result of an "apotheosis of the self", which is itself a result of the death of God, humanity’s divorce from the "external mediation" of religion and religiously ordained social hierarchies. The human tries to make a God of himself but fails. For the desire of the human being, a nothingness by himself, is mediated desire. And a mediator is, for the subject, God.

For Girard, then, a human being can not not have a God. The God of the kingdom, who grounds the values and class structures of society, has died. Since he still needs a God, the human will make a God of his friend. He believes himself to be the only one cursed with this lack of being, this existential need. Everyone believes this because no one dares to admit their emptiness. Hence, everyone believes in the divine fullness of the Other. Not consciously of course. Consciously they hate this Other who has, as it were, stolen their being. The subject inhabits the fantasy of its image of the Other. The cave, with its fire, shadows and chains.

Everyone thinks that he alone is condemned to hell, and that is what makes it hell. The more general the illusion the more glaring it becomes. The farcical side of under ground life is revealed in this exclamation of Dostoyevsky's "anti-hero": "I am alone, and they are together." So grotesque is the illusion that a crack appears in nearly every existence created by Dostoyevsky. In a brief moment of insight the subject perceives the universal deception and can no longer believe in its continuance; it seems to him that men will throw their arms around each other in sorrow. But this is an empty hope, and even the man whom it arouses soon becomes afraid that he has given away his horrible secret to the Others. He is even more afraid of having betrayed it to himself. The humility of a Myshkin at first seems able to penetrate the armor of pride; the interlocutor opens his heart but is soon overcome with shame. He loudly proclaims that he does not wish to change his being and that he is self-sufficient; thus the victims of the modern gospel become its best allies. The more one becomes a slave the more ardently one defends slavery. Pride can survive only with the help of the lie, and the lie is sustained by triangulated desire. The hero turns passionately toward the Other, who seems to enjoy the divine inheritance. So great is the disciple's faith that he perpetually thinks he is about to steal the marvelous secret from the mediator. He begins to enjoy his inheritance in advance. He shuns the present and lives in the brilliant future. Nothing separates him from divinity, nothing but the mediator himself, whose rival desire is the obstacle to his own desire.⁴

This "internally mediated" desire becomes the rivalrous and, as it were, cannibalistic desire to become the friend and take his place. As Kierkegaard already noted in The Present Age, we have shifted from aspiring towards greatness, to envying it, due to our being uprooted from a sense of transcendent value, and the coincident unfettered flight of our disembodied speculative ego consciousness. It is not surprising then that for Girard, the answer to existential anguish is imitatio Christi, to imitate Christ. He does not yearn for the reinstitution of an ancien régime of hierarchical social differentiation, but as he explains in Battling To The End, the dissolution of such societal differentiation and of the chivalric codes of war which they also entail, does in his view, point towards an apocalypse.

In Deceit, Girard's advice is not however, merely imitatio Christi but also imitatio Prousti. For Girard, Remembrance Of Time Past, along with every other truly great novel depicts a "conversion" to "novelistic truth”. The hero sees, as in a mirror, the vanity and groundlessness of his existance as an imitator. He is, so to say, born again or resurrected. The internal mediator is always a figure of rivalrous obsession. Hence, novelistic conversion means the transcendance of this obsession. This victory is as painful as it is transformative.

Great novels always spring from an obsession that has been transcended. The hero sees himself in the rival he loathes; he renounces the "differences" suggested by hatred. He learns, at the expense of his pride, the existence of the psychological circle. The novelist's self-examination merges with the morbid attention he pays to his mediator. All the powers of a mind freed of its contradictions unite in one creative impulse. Don Quixote and Emma Bovary and Charlus would not be so great were they not the result of a synthesis of the two halves of existence which pride usually succeeds in keeping separate. This victory over desire is extremely painful. Proust tells us that we must forego the fervent dialogue endlessly carried on by each one of us at the superficial levels of our being. One must "give up one's dearest illusions." The novelist's art is a phenomenological epoché. But the only authentic epoché is never mentioned by modern philosophers; it is always victory over desire, victory over Promethean pride.

In 1949, twelve years before Girard's book, Marcel articulated his own, remarkably similar, idea of novelistic conversion. Marcel's account compliments Girard's by emphasizing how this conversion relates to lived time. In the lecture, Marcel brings up Corneille's Cinna, a play about the Emperor Augustus. Augustus is betrayed by his closest friends, people who owe him everything they have. These latter say they are merely saving the people from the hands of tyranny. Augustus is first overcome by righteus anger. However, he realizes that in these people he sees an image of himself. All his life he has acted in precisely the same traitorous manner. This creates in him an ethical revelation, a conversion.

Marcel comments

It is obvious that Augustus cannot ignore this situation; on the contrary he must as it were revolve it in his mind, so that he can see it from every side; and the surprising thing is that we here once more come up against what I said earlier about contemplation as a turning inwards of one's awareness of the outer world. It is not a matter merely of turning inwards, of introversion; the word that naturally occurs to us is conversion, though not in any strictly religious sense. The Emperor appears to himself not as the mere victim of human ingratitude, but as responsible, in the last analysis, for the situation in which he finds himself caught up.

For in the past has he himself not acted just in the same manner as those who have now decided on his death? So that for Augustus, entering into his own deeper self essentially means, in this case, seeing his situation from the other man's point of view and thus making it impossible for himself simply to condemn the conspirators in the straightforward fashion which at first seemed his only course. The man who returns to his own depths is forced to ask himself the gravest question that can be put to any man's conscience: Who am I to condemn others? Do I really possess the inner qualification that would make such a condemnation legitimate? The kind of internal contradiction which we have so often come up against here displays itself in a very striking fashion: to enter into the depths of one's self means here fundamentally to get out of oneself, and since there can be, as I have already several times emphasized, no question of our having two objectively separable selves, a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde, as in Stevenson's story we must suppose that we are here in the presence of an act of inner creativity or transmutation, but also that this creative or transmuting act, through a paradox which will by and by become less obscure, also has the character of being a return only a return in which what is given after the return is not identical with what was given before: for such an identity let us suppose, for instance, that Augustus emerges from his painful self-examination just the same man, in every respect, that he was before it took place would rob the ordeal of all significance and would in fact imply that it had never really taken place. The best analogy for this process of self-discovery which, though it is genuinely discovery, does also genuinely create something new, is the development of a musical composition; even if such a composition apparently ends with the very same phrases that it started with, they are no longer felt as being the same, they are, as it were, coloured by all the vicissitudes they have gone through and by which their final recapture, in their first form, has been accompanied.⁵

This “recapture” of one's past is precisely what we see in Remembrance of Times Past. Proust's narrator does not simply return to being the child of Combray or fantasize about such a return. To use Marcel's analogy, he is a musical being. Like a fugue, he returns to himself through transmutation, folding time upon itself and creating himself anew. It is the lived transcendance of time that saves him from vanity, the fantasy of the transcendent Other. Having eaten the madeleine which he last ate only as a child, he tells us that he was filled by a "precious essence" which "was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal."⁶ Marcel elaborates on time in his diary.

To transcend time is not to raise ourselves, as we can do at any moment, to the actually empty idea of a totum simul, empty because it remains outside us and thereby becomes in some way devitalised. By no means. It is rather to participate more and more actively in the creative intention that quickens the whole: in other words, to raise ourselves to levels from which the succession seems less and less given, levels from which a 'cinematographic' representation of events looks more and more inadequate, and ceases in the long run to be even possible.⁷

Proust's narrator already anticipates this lived participation, the coming-to-life of the world, a few passages before the appearance of the madeleine, in a kind of folk mystical contemplation.

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.⁸

The novel is about the regaining of time, which means also the regaining of being, of participation and enchantment. Girard discusses novelistic conversion in Deceit, through the example of Proust's narrator. However, in addition to the narrator, Monsieur Swann experiences also a conversion of his own. To the "invisible reality” of music. Through a "little phrase" of the fictitious composer Vinteuil.

... like a confirmed invalid whom, all of a sudden, a change of air and surroundings, or a new course of treatment, or, as sometimes happens, an organic change in himself, spontaneous and unaccountable, seems to have so far recovered from his malady that he begins to envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond all hope, of starting to lead—and better late than never—a wholly different life, Swann found in himself, in the memory of the phrase that he had heard, in certain other sonatas which he had made people play over to him, to see whether he might not, perhaps, discover his phrase among them, the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe, but to which, as though the music had had upon the moral barrenness from which he was suffering a sort of recreative influence, he was conscious once again of a desire, almost, indeed, of the power to consecrate his life.

Hearing the little phrase again in another context, Swann characterizes the melody as a "protective goddess"

As though the musicians were not nearly so much playing the little phrase as performing the rites on which it insisted before it would consent to appear, as proceeding to utter the incantations necessary to procure, and to prolong for a few moments, the miracle of its apparition, Swann, who was no more able now to see it than if it had belonged to a world of ultra-violet light, who experienced something like the refreshing sense of a metamorphosis in the momentary blindness with which he had been struck as he approached it, Swann felt that it was present, like a protective goddess, a confidant of his love, who, so as to be able to come to him through the crowd, and to draw him aside to speak to him, had disguised herself in this sweeping cloak of sound.

The goddes does not lull Swann into some comforting phantasmagorical reverie. On the contrary, she confronts him with reality. Like the painful victory of Girard's novelistic conversion, Proust's musical "metamorphosis" reveals to Swann the "vanity of his sufferings"

When it was the little phrase that spoke to him of the vanity of his sufferings, Swann found a sweetness in that very wisdom which, but a little while back, had seemed to him intolerable when he thought that he could read it on the faces of indifferent strangers, who would regard his love as a digression that was without importance. 'Twas because the little phrase, unlike them, whatever opinion it might hold on the short duration of these states of the soul, saw in them something not, as everyone else saw, less serious than the events of everyday life, but, on the contrary, so far superior to everyday life as to be alone worthy of the trouble of expressing it. Those graces of an intimate sorrow, 'twas them that the phrase endeavoured to imitate, to create anew; and even their essence, for all that it consists in being incommunicable and in appearing trivial to everyone save him who has experience of them, the little phrase had captured, had rendered visible.

The phrase endeavours to imitate the graces of an intimate sorrow. In Battling To The End, Girard and his interlocutor Benoît Chantre develop the idea of an intimate mediation (mediation intime) in addition to external and internal mediation. In intimate mediation the mediator does not impose itself as a model upon us since it is itself our innermost being. They develop this idea from Augustine's notion of God being nearer to one than oneself, Deus interior intimo meo.

Girard: Given the extent of its growing control, escaping from mimetism is something only geniuses and saints can do. Thus we would place in the order of charity a person who went from heroic temptation to sainthood, from the risk of regression that is inherent to internal mediation to the discovery of a form of mediation that we have to call…
Chantre: Innermost?
Girard: Why not. “Innermost mediation” (in the sense of Saint Augustine’s Deos interior intimo meo), in so far as it supposes an inflection of internal mediation, which can always degenerate into bad reciprocity. “Innermost mediation” would be nothing but the imitation of Christ, which is an essential anthropological discovery. Saint Paul says, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”⁹ This is the chain of positive undifferentiation, the chain of identity. Discerning the right model then becomes the crucial factor. It is not so much that we imitate Christ as that we identify with the one who, in the apocalyptic texts, will have been Christ. To imitate Christ is to identify with the other, to efface oneself before him: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”¹⁰ Identification supposes a special aptitude for empathy. This explains the constant reminder in these texts of the danger of Antichrists, the danger that they will increasingly present, for Christ alone enables us to escape from human imitation.¹¹

Here intime is translated as innermost, perhaps to emphasize this Augustinian idea of depth, but I will translate it here as intimate, to evoke the lived experience of a deeply meaningful communion or “identification” as Girard says. The last statement seems to imply that only “Christ” or a kind of mimetic descendant of his can provide the model for such transcendent communion. This might be contested.

In any case, we will, in the present essay, consern ourselves solely with this idea of transcendence through identification, and Augustine's expression. The intimate mediator is a model closer to ourselves than ourselves. This is, of course, not a definition, but a poetic image. A definition is something had, grasped. And, as we saw with Marcel, what is had is of the Self.

As we have implied, introducing this idea following Proust's evocations of the little phrase, does not Augustine's expression apply also to a transcendent aesthetic experience? Marcel remarked that it was Bach rather than Pascal who brought him to Christianity. And he was infact himself a composer. The intimacy of music was very familiar to him. In an essay on Cesar Franck he asks us,

just what is this purity that is the complete contrary of having everything stripped away? And how is it that it never makes us sad or never disappoints us as does something that is lacking? This is because Franck’s melodies seem most often to conceal an intimate and painful secret; only, is this secret really its own? Is it not rather ours?¹²

Like the Girardian mediator, music exists, for Marcel, in a hierarchical relation to us.

The beautiful is what, in a certain way, has authority over us. Authority is the distinguishing mark of a work of art, whether it is exercised immediately or not, whether it must struggle or not with a rebellious sensibility.

Yet, the legitimacy of this authority is bestowed to it only by its resonance with our innermost selves. The secret is ours. Marcel speaks of Franck's music as a mediator with whom "our soul concludes an alliance, an original and carefully nuanced pact." Not however, merely a mediator who mediates my desire towards an object, but a mediator between different orders of being.

To be sure, Beethoven’s typical idea is always the answer of man to man, an expression, sublime to be sure, of resolution and resignation; but not the fervent Annunciation of another order. With Franck it is really as though the idea always has a mediating function. It is sometimes a grace; it can also be an intercession. But always it seems poised between two worlds, the fundamental duality which Beethoven was not able to recognize.

Before developing further this idea of intimate mediation with Marcel's help, we must note that we have already carried it some distance from Girard's hands. I believe that it is sometimes more faithful of the student to let an idea be transformed in his hands rather than pass it on mechanically. Derrida's idea that neither an author nor anyone else possesses a monopoly on the interpretation of a text, is sometimes popularized as a kind of abolition of Truth as such. It shows, on the contrary, how Truth escapes all attempts at human capture and weaponization, into the play of différance.

A captured “Truth” is a tyrannical homogenizing force. A hammer that smashes everything into identical images of itself. It effaces all difference and depth. Its discourse is tautological because it has no life, no creative force. It is violent because, having no reality, it must force itself onto the world. It must murder that which lives. But like the wind, Truth blows ever beyond its grasp. Ever resurrecting from its grave. Derrida's idea might then also be interpreted to mean that to a given work, there is a reality which exceeds all human capture, even that of its author. Of course, we must be careful here with the word “is.”

For Derrida, as for Irigaray, Plato was concerned with Ideas that can be captured and presented to the human mind. Tyrannical Ideas. But the Platonic Idea could also be interpreted as precisely that which is uncapturable and unpresentable. As the form of a cube, that is to say, a cube seen from all sides, can not be made present. It is deferred. Is not this seeing-from-all-sides-at-once, the essence of dialogue? Of Justice? The troubles begin when someone or something lays claim to it and inscribes it in stone. Dialogue becomes monologue. Community becomes the State. Value becomes capital. The Saying becomes the Said. Justice becomes Power.

The words of a written text are more easily manipulated and captured, made present, by my Self than the words spoken by a living Other before me. It is the written that is present and the spoken that is absent. It is in this Platonic light that I approach Girard's Ideas. Of course we must make clear that we are not representing here Girard's ideas in their original form but something they have inspired. The interpretation of intimate mediation in the present essay is also deeply inspired by and indebted to Wolfgang Palaver's book on the subject, Transforming the Sacred Into Saintliness, as well as Rebecca Adams’ and Robin Collins’ ideas of loving and non-conflictual mimesis respectively, though it does not represent any of these either.¹³

Intimate mediation is an intimate transcendence. Transcendence is not here anything hinterworldly. It is that which interrupts, breaks and transforms our world. Not a phantasm hovering over it. It is the immanence of a lived beyond. It is only transcendent with respect to the Self. It is the Self and its “real world” that is, in truth, hinterwordly.

As something truer to ourselves than ourselves, the model exerts a hierarchical power over us. It commands. It shows us the way. Yet, in following this way, we feel that we are only following our own innermost being, our purest freedom. In place of anxiety, there is now an authentic certitude. A resonance. Again, have we not here described the transcendent aesthetic experience as such? Is not the depth of a work of art, its depth as an intimate model? Proust's novel, like Franck's music, is an intimate mediator. Intimate mediation may be imitatio Christi. But it may also be imitatio Prousti or imitatio Francki.

Philosophy can also be an intimate mediator. I would say that the greatest example of this is the philosophy of Simone Weil. I will even say: the essence of philosophy is intimate mediation. Of course this is also a matter of definition. What I mean is that perhaps there should be two different words for what Weil is doing and what Descartes is doing. My suggestion for these words is philosophy and speculation.

Continental philosophy, starting with Kant, is mostly an immune response to speculation. I would say that even Hegel combats speculation, in our sense of the word. Analytic philosophy is the effort to quarantine Continental philosophy, which it deems incurable, so that it does not spread speculation. And of course, a philosophy can always be reduced to speculation. Is this perhaps what has occured in Derrida's and Irigaray's readings of Plato? If so, this nevertheless in no way undermines the incomparable value of these readings as a studies of the essence of speculation.

What Girard speaks of as a conversion to “novelistic truth” is then a particular instantiation of intimate mediation. When a person reads the New Testament, and is thereby “born again”, when Rilke hears the archaic torso of Apollo command him to change his life, when Weil recites the poem Love (III) by George Herbert and Christ comes down “to take possession of [her]”¹⁴ these are all instantiations of intimate mediation.

But consider also what happens when you witness a friend commit a heroic deed, or a stranger some small act of kindness, and this moves something deep within you, calls you towards something. This is also intimate mediation. In the act of the other we hear the call to our own being. The act is closer to us than ourselves. Intimate mediation exceeds the aesthetic into the ethical. The aesthetic and ethical dimensions of transcendent art stem from its mimetic nature. It is its humanity that moves us, its imitation of the graces of our intimate sorrows and joys.

In the beginning of this essay we distanced ourselves from the solitary, cold and meaningless world of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. However, perhaps Sartre himself also had some intimations of transcendence. Of the warmth of the sun. Towards the end of his novel Nausea, the protagonist Roquentin, who has spent the novel contemplating the horrific and nauseating groundlessness of (his) existance, hears the jazz song Some of These Days playing on the gramophone.

I feel something brush against me lightly and I dare not move because I am afraid it will go away. Something I didn't know any more: a sort of joy.
The negress sings. Can you justify your existence then? Just a little? I feel extraordinarily intimidated. It isn't because I have much hope. But I am like a man completely frozen after a trek through the snow and who suddenly comes into a warm room. I think he would stay motionless near the door, still cold, and that slow shudders would go right through him.¹⁵

As we noted, in internal mediation, the being of the model, no longer a being of a different order, becomes attainable. The object of desire and model converge in the figure of the rival. There is neither heaven nor God. These have descended to earth in the godlike mediator and the imagined heavenly bliss of his being. Modernity is made of envy. Its subject desires, not the satisfaction of his desire but precisely its masochistic impossibility. For, at the moment he attains what he desires, he also confronts the emptiness of his achievement in his resultant unsatisfaction. Hence he sets his gaze higher. A higher dose. Ever higher. Ever lower. His life is a Fall. Girard gives the following metaphor for this "obstacle addiction."

A man sets out to discover a treasure he believes is hidden under a stone; he turns over stone after stone but finds nothing. He grows tired of such a futile undertaking but the treasure is too precious for him to give up. So he begins to look for a stone which is too heavy to lift– he places all his hopes in that stone and will waste all his remaining strength on it.¹⁶

If external mediation is the perpetual somnambulism of Don Quixote, internal mediation is the perpetual insomnia of Dostoyevsky's underground man. Desire does not give him rest, for every satisfaction is a disillusionment. The man of external mediation may also experience disillusionment with his object. But he can change the object while the model remains constant. Hence, his world remains intact. There is no Fall since he always has ground, the desire of the mediator which organizes phenomena and courses of action in a hierarchical order by evaluating them, beneath his feet.

For the man of internal mediation, the object and the model converge. Hence, disillusionment with the object becomes disillusionment with the model. And since it is the model who grounds his desire, who gives the world its intelligibility through the hierarchical evaluation of its contents, the world collapses. As Girard observes, Proust depicts this slow crumbling of the world masterfully, as his narrator begins to realize that the people of the salon are not necessarily the deities he had made of them, causing him to question his own judgement.

When the narrator is finally invited by the Guermantes, after longing in vain for the invitation for several years, he experiences the inevitable disappointment. He finds the same mediocrity, the same cliches as in other salons. Can it be that the Guermantes and their guests, these super human beings, get together to talk about the Dreyfus affair or the latest novel, and moreover to talk of them in the same terms and the same tone as other people? Marcel searches for an answer which would reconcile the sacred prestige of the mediator and the negative experience of possession. He almost manages to convince himself, that first evening, that it is his presence which has profaned and interrupted the aristocratic mysteries whose celebration cannot be resumed until he leaves. The will to believe is so strong in this upside-down St. Thomas that it even survives a while after the concrete proof of the idol's emptiness.

This ephemeral nature of the internal mediator has an important consequence. It means that the man of internal mediation lives in splintered time. As his mediator changes, so does his self.

Every mediation projects its mirage; the mirages follow one another like so many "truths" which take the place of former truths by a veritable murdering of the living memory and which protect themselves from future truths by an implacable censure of daily experience. Proust calls "Selves" the "worlds" projected by successive mediations. The Selves are completely isolated from each other and are incapable of recalling the former Selves or anticipating future Selves.

We will call the temporality resulting from this "veritable murdering of living memory", dead time. The subject of dead time is Legion, the legion of Selves. Girard traces the intesification of this fragmentation from Stendhal to Proust to Dostoyevsky. Time for Stendhal's Julien Sorel remains an unbroken unity until it’s threatened by his love for Mathilde. Proust's narrator is not merely threatened by the splintering of time but lives nearly his entire life in this state. Dostoyevsky's characters not only change mediators with even more rapid speed, they are also torn between multiple mediators at any given time. This is the "polyphony" of Dostoyevsky identified by Bakhtin. However, it is, for Girard, not an ahistorical revelation about human existence. Rather, it reflects the state of human existance at the time of it's writing.

Girard speaks of desire as an object falling in space, transforming as its velocity increases. Each novelist takes a photograph of the object as it appears during his time. The task of a “phenomenology of the novelistic work” is to investigate the invariants of the movement itself, thereby creating a “topology” of mimetic desire.

The various Selves are incapable of recalling past Selves or anticipating future ones. This follows from the premise that their present mediator is their ground of intelligibility as he who bestows value. I can perhaps remember eating a madeleine. But I can not remember who I was, what I valued while eating it. Hence my memory is a kind of retrograde fabrication. The Self then, could be thought of as something loosely analogous to the Kantian transcendental conditions of experience. The past is not merely lost. It can not have been. To truly recall my eating the madeleine, to truly regain my past, would be a miracle, a revelation.

Girard's close friend and interlocutor in the book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, has studied this phenomenon of temporal fragmentation in great depth. For Oughourlian, we see time in reverse. We imitate a desire, claim it as our own, and project it into our past. It is only due to this reversing of time that our life appears to us as the continuous narrative of a self-same ego. “Physical time” can never appear to us as time since it lacks narrative structure. Hence "physical time has no reality." He illustrates this idea with the help of Proust.

... the reason I say that physical time has no reality is that during a psychotherapy, when one revisits an event in memory, this event becomes present; psychological time can be made present but it is never correlated to physical time. For instance, I know that I have been in a certain city before, and I have vivid memories of some of the things I did or some of the people I saw in that city, and I can make those moments present to my mind now—but I am totally unable to tell you whether they occurred ten or twenty years ago. In other words, I am totally unable to evaluate the physical time between today and the time that my memory presents to me. “Time regained” in the Proustian sense is not physical time, because what Proust “regains” are not “durations” but sensations, emotions, and images.¹⁷

The time regained is not time as such. Thus we could say that Remembrance is not actually a novel about time or even memory, but rather about these "images" or Signs into which the false unity of the Self is now dispersed. Furthermore, it is a novel of becoming acquinted with the Sign, to the extent of the narrator becoming an artesan of Signs, an author. This is the argument of Gilles Deleuze in his book Proust and Signs. For Deleuze then, time can be regained only through the work of art, the work of Signs.

In dead time, the model is ever changing. This means that one forgets his past desires and hence, his past being, as Proust's narrator forgets his madeleine eating self of Combray. These events are not necessarily literally absent from memory, it is their lived experience which is forgotten, as this is no longer intelligible through the new orientation of desire. As we noted, the amnesia is categorical in a kind of Kantian sense: the past is impossible. The mimed desire is the ground of all possibility, the condition of all experience. The Other as such, is also, for us, an impossibility. Both, our past self, and the present Other, become means to the end of our desire. Legion, trapped inside the mirror, can see nothing other than it's own image.

In intimate mediation, the fantasy is renounced. The past is remembered as it was. The Other is seen as she is. This is where the madeleine and the little phrase intersect. I see myself in my past. I hear my self in the melody. The self closer to me than myself. Intimate mediation is, in this sense, a miracle. It is the impossible. It is something analogous to the Lacanian Real, the Badiousian Event and Levinasian Infinity. However, the dichotomy of absolute otherness and innermost communion disintegrates. It is only in the deepest communion beneath the Self, that the Other may be seen and heard as Other.

This is why Proust can say on the one hand that,

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”,

and on the other that,

“Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon.”¹⁸

Reality does not exist under the microscope. The scientist sees there things that will bring him glory. The capitalist sees in his research the possibility of profit. The general sees in it the means to win the war. Hence, the capitalist and the general become for the scientist, means for glory. And the scientist and the general for the capitalist. And so on. Science is abstracted from these silent fantasies which drive it, whence its objectivity. But it is the objectivity of a skeleton or, at best, of a corpse on a dissecting table. Reality lives and breathes. It is visible not to the eye but to the heart. To the innermost heart of the heart. Rather than to look under the microscope, it is more helpful, in this regard, to look at a rose, a painting, a Cathedral, a good film or into the eyes of an Other.

But are we not here in danger of falling into a kind of aesthetization of the religious, where the transcendent is limited to the intermittent revelations of art and involuntary memories without any connection to how one actually lives? How are we to distinguish sainthood from good taste? St. Francis from a conoisseur of cinema? Are we becoming those people who St. John Henry Newman speaks of, who have substituted taste for conscience and have

made their own minds their sanctuary, their own ideas their oracle, and conscience in morals was but parallel to genius in art, and wisdom in philosophy[?]¹⁹

Just a year after the publication of Deceit, Girard edited a collection of essays on Proust. In his introduction to the book, he asserts that, unlike Dostoyevsky, "Proust does not perceive the metaphysical or even certain of the ethical implications of his vision, because he never abandons the level of "psychological" analysis."²⁰ He then refers to Ramon Fernandez' essay for further explication. In the essay, In Search of the Self, Fernandez reads Remembrance through the lens of an idea of "spiritual progress" elaborated by Newman.

For Newman "conscience" is an authority higher than any on earth, including the pope. Conscience was for him however not any faculty of the self but “the aboriginal vicar of Christ”²¹ and in strict contradistinction to "self-will", its rival and doppelgänger. Conscience is not my doing what I personally feel to be right, but my obedience to a truth which transcends me. It is, as Hermann Geissler says, “the advocate of truth in the innermost part of the person.”²² From our perspective of intimate mediation, the dichotomy of self-assertion and obedience, breaks down here, as does the dichotomy between authoritarian dogmatism and liberal individualism or rebelliousness.

A person might ask Newman, "How can you know that what you call conscience is not the voice of the your own selfish desires? How can you know its not the voice of the Devil?" But the question is itself false. It reveals that the inquirer wishes someone or something, a pope or a doctrine, to tell him what to do. Which is to say, he does not know what to do. Which is to say, he can not hear his conscience. And then the task is to awaken it.

For Newman, conscience has “His representatives.”²³ We might say, intimate models. Newman, however, could be interpreted to mean the Catholic Church and its doctrines, thereby giving it a monopoly on the representation of conscience. Thus one would be able to say that to follow a well developed conscience, means to follow the dogma of the Catholic Church. And indeed, Newman does say, stretching the doctrine of Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus (no salvation outside the Church) to its limits, that a person who is capable of considering the validity of the Catholic faith, can not be saved from eternal damnation without thereby adopting it.²⁴

However, he also says that this capability is hindered by “predjudice.” The Catechism says likewise that a human being “must always obey the certain judgement of his conscience”, though this may sometimes be “ignorant” or “erroneous.”²⁵ It would seem to me that in theory, anyone who rejects Catholicism could be said to be predjudiced or ignorant. The doctrine becomes rather malleable. And perhaps it must be malleable for conscience to preside over it.

Newman also warns about the mistaking of self-will for conscience causing one to “ignore a Lawgiver and Judge”.²⁶ Jesus however, like Antigone and St. Joan, was quite familiar with ignoring Lawgiver and Judge. That is why he was, like them, murdered. Law-as-Truth must annihilate what it can not contain. Truth sets itself free. It can not be held within walls or words. It is all there is. The sea. One need only open his eyes.

For Marcel Catholicism means Bach. For others it might mean St. Francis, Michelangelo, the Chartres cathedral, singing hymns together, their virtuous grandmother, a community of virtue that grows in resonance. For St. Francis himself it means the all engulfing love that exudes from the life of Jesus. This is all intimate mediation. There is Catholicism in theory and Catholicism in practice. Pascal and Bach. Institutional religion and intimate religion. Catholicism is Janus faced. These faces blend together in confusing ways. I am not in this essay arguing for or against the Catholic Church. As Newman's notion of the development of doctrine illustrates, she is in a continuous process of becoming. As is a human being. And just as a person cannot therefore be judged on the grounds of their past misdeeds, neither can a Church. Furthermore, she repents.²⁷

The most beautiful account of conscience is perhaps given in one of the constitutions of the Second Vatican Counsel, Gaudium et Spes.

Conscience is man's most secret core, and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.²⁸

This is deep poetic and intimate language. To institutionalize religion however, means to translate it to the public discourse of the anyone. This means to reduce language to the lowest common denominator of depth: carrying out orders and accepting propositions. Institutional religion is democratic, in that it requires no depth of vision. Intimate religion is aristocratic, in that it is the aspiring towards Truth as it manifests in the Other. It recognizes degrees of depth in language as well as persons. But it is not the person, as such, who is superior, rather the degree to which Truth permeates her actions. This Truth is my innermost self. And the innermost core of every human being.

Hence, virtue is not the private possession of individuals but that which unites them in their depth. It is Love. The superior does not command the inferior but calls that which is superior in this inferior, and awakens him to his innermost nobility, his innermost equality with her, through resonance, planting the seed of virtue. I do not aspire to be the Other, as in rivalrous internal mediation. I aspire towards that which the Other aspires towards, which is our innermost intimate unity in Love. The Fullness at the origin of time, from which we have diverged into incarnate individuals. Only from there can an Other be seen as she is. Remembrance is anamnesis.

The aristocracy of intimate religion is, in a sense, radically egalitarian. It is the experience of the peasant gazing at the icon in the corner of his room, or the slave singing spirituals while working at a plantation. The aristocracy is not one of class or biology. And conversely, institutional religion is strictly hierarchical. There are those who can read and those who don't. The learned and the laity. While virtue can not be confined to a class, learnedness can by itself constitute a class division.

The anyone speaks at the surface of language. On this surface there are commands and propositions. But there are also creatures that swim in the depths. In the unfathomable. There is explicit or exoteric surface meaning, and there is implicit or esoteric deep meaning. In deep discourse, the commands or propositions at the surface can contradict each other, canceling out all surface meaning. The Thunder Perfect Mind²⁸ can not be institutionalized. It is for those who have the ears to hear. For those who know. It is precisely the self-negation of its surface meaning, that calls forth the depths of the reader, his intimate knowledge. This is the essence of poetic language.

For Newman, the individual needs an external authority because he can not by himself know that he is interpreting the scriptures correctly. And the “gift of inspiration has as its complement the gift of infallibility.”²⁹ But just as a poem or a novel is not something to be interpreted correctly and then expounded into universal laws of conduct and belief, neither are the scriptures. They are a mystery to be lived. They are parables. Consciousness has, not one, but two enemies, two doppelgängers. There is the Scylla of self-will, the Self doing whatever it feels like, unbeholden to anything Other. But there is also the Charybdis of other-will, its submission to an external authority or law. Both presuppose a not knowing what to do. A broken compass.

Following Newman's logic of conscience to its conclusion, I would say that the duty of the Church, in so far as there is such a thing, is to appeal to this innermost conscience of the believer, to awaken and strengthen it. Like a lighthouse shining on the dark and perilous seas. If the Church strays from its mission, the believer must stray from the Church, keeping hold of the intimate model of The New Testament.

Keeping -hold-of is the essence of Newman's view of spiritual progress and Fernandez' reading of Proust. Fernandez quotes Newman's remark regarding the character Wilfred Poole in George Meredith's novel Sandra Belloni. Wilfred may be

a gallant fellow, and harsh, exacting, trouble-dealing, and I know not what besides, in youth. The question asked by nature is, Has he the heart to take and keep an impression? For, if he has, circumstances will force him on and carve the figure of a brave man out of that mass of contradictions.

This is the heart of the matter. Passive experiences of transcendence do not necessarily create virtuous people. Aesthetic taste, or even artistic genious, and ethical integrity do not go hand in hand. And conversely, someone with absolutely no knowledge of or interest in art, novels or philosophy may witness their friend or some Hollywood film character commit a noble deed, or hear about such a deed in a sunday sermon, keep hold of this transcendent impression, and live virtuously, allowing it to mediate his actions, and thereby radiate outwards to the other souls navigating these dark waters. It is this keeping of the impression and living it into practice, which is, for Fernandez, absent in Proust and which Girard referred to with his "ethical implications."

This is why the gaze of Proust's narrator is fixed backwards towards his past. He is unable to gaze towards the future, towards what is to be done. All that is to be done is to record these impressions into the novel. This suits Deleuze's interpretation perfectly. The impressions become a kind of gallery or repository of Signs for future use as a man of letters. The transcendent unity of time is now dispersed into these revelatory memories rather than integrated to ones acting and enduring person. They become something to write about rather than something to live.

The word Newman uses for the lived taking-root of transcendence, is "sentiment." It is not merely a feeling, nor some dogmatic code. It is a visceral certitude of action, grounded in the transcendent impression which Newman calls "real assent." It happens when the affective transcendent impression penetrates the mind, whereupon it gains permanence and generalizability into action in varying circumstances.

Thus, Fernandez writes

Take and to keep: Proust takes but does not keep, or rather in a very peculiar fashion, and it would be perhaps more correct to say that he is kept by the object of impression. For this impression, in being filtered through his consciousness, is not purified, nor is it schematized so as to form both a kernel of sentimental resistance and a sheaf of tendencies oriented at a particular direction: instead of representing his experience by simplifying it, it projects his ego out of himself and fixes it into that experience. The process described by Newman and Meredith is accomplished in Proust in reverse order: to take and keep an impression is for them to transpose a particular into the key of the mind a particular concrete experience, to cast off the spatial and temporal moorings of that experience, and to confer upon it the infinite plasticity of a living personality in perpetual growth; for Proust it is to fuse one's ego directly into the experience, to deposit this ego at the points in time and space where this experience has taken place, and thereby to cut it up into pieces each of which is identified with a particular experience lodged in a corner of time which thus acquires the fixity and exteriority characteristic of space.

In other words, Fernandez agrees with Deleuze and Oughourlian. Proust does not write about time, but only of the regaining of time as Signs. As I understand, Fernandez is by no means seeking to undermine the value of Remembrance as a masterpiece with this assesment. On the contrary, he asserts that through it we may "understand far better [Proust's] true beauty." The protagonist of, say, Notes from the Underground is not very virtuous either, but this in no way diminishes the value of the work or the depth of its insight.

The present essay has been concerned primarily with a kind of mysticism. But as Fernandez observes, mysticism is nothing by itself. It is only a seed. And sometimes it is not needed at all. As we noted, sentiment may grow in "ordinary people" through "ordinary impressions", so long as they inspire virtue. I use quotes for, is not all truly mystical in the end? Is not every creature, every event truly a miracle? Is not reality the miraculous as such, as we have been saying all along? That said, we may concur with Fernandez that

Mystical reactions mean no more in my eyes than sensible reactions, so long as I am not convinced of a man's power of creating sentiments with his impressions. For the whole problem is in that. One may form sentiments for oneself without mystical help - so long as one does not call mystical everything that is sentimental - and mysticism can be applied on to incurable sensuality.

By an "incurable sensuality", I take him to mean something like a ship sailing wherever the wind and the waves command. For affects are the wind and the waves. There are north winds. South winds. Smaller and greater waves. Breezes. Storms. Doldrums. Fog. One must learn to navigate. As if he were planting the seed of intimate mediation, to be articulated 45 years later by Girard and Chantre, Fernandez states that

A man who has deep sentiment knows how he will act in such and such a circumstance because he has intimate knowledge of the immutable principle of his future actions. Sentiment therefore is much rather a response by all our being which cannot be translated indifferently either into the language of the intelligence or into that of sensibility, but of which our acts are the veritable signs, the only ones which make possible the exact measurement of its value.

Obviously there is no ruler, scale or other instrument with which a human being may objectively measure sentiment. And the depth is in a process of continuous change. And it is no one's private property as we noted. But there are differences of intensity. Perhaps this relates to what Luke Burgis calls the thickness of desire. The movement from ephemeral and shallow thin desire to deeply meaningful lifelong thick desire, is in our language the movement from internal to intimate mediation.

(Movement from external mediation to intimate mediation is not possible, precisely because external mediation is such a secure and rooted structure. It is in its anarchic rupture, in the void between Athens and Jerusalem that intimate mediation manifests. That we begin to see it sprouting already within the Greeks and Hebrews, in Antigone and Job, is no accident. These are uprooted and colonized peoples. It is only in such a situation that a person can become alien to their own community. And it is only then that they are forced to listen to their inmost voice in its stead. Historically, external mediation bifurcates into internal and intimate mediation. As Hölderlin says, where the danger is, also grows the saving power. )

I would say that a person whose sentiment is so deep, that her entire life, after having attained that depth, appears as a complete work of art, a transcendent image saturated with beauty, may be called a saint. A peasant can become a saint just as well as a prince. They are, in this respect, equals. But the saint is unequal to the peasant and the prince. Humanity is equal in its innermost possibility, but unequal in the actuality of the innermost. An artist can, inspired by a transcendent impression, produce a work that acts as an intimate mediator. In the case of the saint, it is her life, and therefore also her hagiography, which is the intimate mediator, the work.

Art is not parallel to virtue, but orthagonal to it. It is the horizontal plane from which virtue can grow. In this sense, Jesus is also a saint, and the New Testament is a also hagiography. To imitate Christ is to take and to keep this impression. Here we have Sartrean authenticity returned to its original Kierkegaardian form as not merely a commitment made by selfhood in its freedom, but also as a submission made in faith in an otherness transcendent to selfhood, this otherness being the innermost self beneath selfhood.

To be clear, these statements on saintliness, do not express Fernandez’ views, but mine only. He then argues that someone who has no sentiment, no certainty, may seek to compensate for this through loud exaggerated theatrical displays of a mimicked sentiment, perhaps even killing themselves in demonstration. Perhaps also killing an other.

On the contrary, the immediate expression of the true sentiment is silence, the religious silence of certitude, and it does not occur without a certain immobility, although it may produce violent movements.

Affects are the wind and the waves. The man without sentiment acts out the storm. The man of sentiment attends to the storm. And the calm. The waves must be felt deeply. But one must not drown in them. Nor get carried away. The depth and the gravity of sentiment is the depth and the gravity of the anchor. Proust's narrator appears to observe something similar.

Later on, when, in the course of my life, I have had occasion to meet with, in convents for instance, literally saintly examples of practical charity, they have generally had the brisk, decided, undisturbed, and slightly brutal air of a busy surgeon, the face in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, and no fear of hurting it, the face devoid of gentleness or sympathy, the sublime face of true goodness.³⁰

I would like to ask Girard and Fernandez, does not this passage imply that Proust did indeed have intimations of the kind of ethical seriousness which they accuse him of being oblivious to? And what about Swann’s desire of consecrating his life after hearing the little phrase?

Like Fernandez, Marcel also critiqued Remembrance as non-temporal. In his diary he remarks that Proust's "great mistake" was to write as if there is a priviliged state where one transcends time. The transcendance of time must itself be temporal "fidelity", a continuous creative effort of participation. The idea of participation however outweighs here that of effort, since it is, generally speaking, the self that exerts effort. Self-transcendence can not happen through will power, but only through participation in something greater, through Grace. The revelatory vision described by Proust is, for Marcel, only a "foretaste" of being.³¹

We shall conclude our study with the perspective of yet another reader of Proust. For Iris Murdoch, as for Weil, virtue means the apprehension of reality.

Virtue is not essentially or immediately concerned with choosing between actions or rules or reasons, nor with stripping the personality for a leap. It is concerned with really apprehending that other people exist. This too is what freedom really is; and it is impossible not to feel the creation of a work of art as a struggle for freedom. Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves. Virtue is in this sense to be construed as knowledge, and connects us so with reality.³²

Murdoch weaves together the two musical lines we have been hearing into intricate counterpoint. The lifting of one’s gaze from the dark lair of the Self onto transcendent reality on the one hand, and the temporal keeping-hold-of, the disciplined fidelity to this transcendence on the other. To see and to act. Lookout and navigation. Even the most skilled and experienced navigator will run aground if the lookout falls asleep.

Proust’s examples concern and illustrate a particular way in which reality is suddenly apprehended in the midst of illusion, an experienced contrast of dead impure time with live pure time, serial time with lived time, which may lead toward a recovery or ‘redemption’ of life through art. His state, or moment, of perception-memory may be seen as like Sekida’s pure consciousness, or Simone Weil’s perception without reverie, but it is also unlike. Proust’s essential illuminations are involuntary, gifts from the gods, not experiences or states which could be attained or prolonged by a (morally, spiritually) disciplined way of living. Proust is here celebrating, as capable of a truthful ‘recovery’ or vision of his own life, the artist in the ordinary sense (an exceptional person), not in the ‘we are all artists’ sense. ‘In the end’, in Proust’s story, the narrator discovers pure time and pure experience, he feels joy and certainty because he has learnt about, indeed experienced, truthfulness, and can now set about recovering his life in the light of truth. But of course, in an important sense, the narrator’s life cannot be recovered, and those, including himself, whom he harmed by an imperfect way of living, remain irrevocably harmed; how much harmed the story ruthlessly reveals, the story which also exhibits true goodness and true love, as well as the mensonges [delusions] for which the narrator was ready to destroy himself. In writing the book Proust has of course revealed himself (as the narrator will reveal himself), as every great novelist does, as a great moralist as well as a great artist. But the narrator’s final revelation is not, as presented, a general guide or pointer to a good or spiritual way of life, it is about the artist, not about the saint. Nor, of course, is this (artist’s) recovery of time the same as that of a penitent who feels ‘at the end’ that God has forgiven him. We have here to be our own moralists if we want to use Proust’s states of pure consciousness as part of a moral, or moral philosophical, argument. Put it this way, why do we have to wait for accidental inspirational experiences which may, if we are lucky, make us artists? Should we not attempt to turn most of our time from dead (inattentive, obsessed, etc.) time into live time? This is an attempt which can be made, in various manners, as a disciplined way of living. ‘Inspiration’ is always available, truthful experience is a touchstone, something, in Proust’s words, pareil à une certitude [like a certainty]. Such states are of course not guaranteed just by their own intensity or feeling of insight, their status as truth-bearing can also be tested by longer-term examinations and considerations. But we can in general see and appreciate the difference between anxious calculating distracted passing of time when the present is never really inhabited or filled, and present moments which are lived attentively as truth and reality. In selfish obsessional calculation or resentment we are ‘always elsewhere’; and the anxiety and fear and grief which come to us all may be lived, from moment to moment, in a variety of ways as illusion or as reality.³³

For Murdoch, this is the meaning of Plato's cave. The allegory is not theoretical but practical. Not speculative but moral. It is a mystery and a parable for us to live into being.

Plato’s moral education is to be seen in terms of a change of self-being, of mental and spiritual activity and ‘stuff’, and the modern moral philosopher in search of a concept might profitably reflect upon the myth of the Cave as implying a progressively changing quality of consciousness. Subjects begin to see different objects; they have a deeper and wider and wiser understanding of the world. The pilgrim will not only produce a better series of acts, he will have (down to last details) a better series of mental states. He can literally see better, see people’s faces and leaves on trees, he will more rapidly and easily expel an unworthy thought or improper image. Herein the concepts of knowledge, truth, justice and moral passion are internally bound together. Knowledge informs the moral quality of the world, the selfish self-interestedly casual or callous man sees a different world from that which the careful scrupulous benevolent just man sees; and the largely explicable ambiguity of the word ‘see’ here conveys the essence of the concept of the moral. The connection between ethics and epistemology is something which we are intuitively grasping all the time in our non-philosophical lives.

The Good is the sun. The innermost sun. Conscience is the light by which we see things as they are.

1. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, 2007

2. Vol. 25, No. 2, Violence, Difference, Sacrifice: Conversations on Myth and Culture in Theology and Literature (Summer, 1993)

3. René Girard, La conversion de l'art, 2023

4. René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 1965, as the following

5. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Volume I, 2001

6. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume I, Swann's Way, 2003

7. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, 2007

8. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume I, Swann's Way, 2003, as the following

9. 1 Corinthians 1:1

10. Matthew 25:40

11. René Girard, Battling to the End, 2010

12. Gabriel Marcel, Music and Philosophy, 2005, as the following

13. Simone Pétrement, La Vie de Simone Weil, 1973

14. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, 1949

15. René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 1965, as the following

16. Rebecca Adams, “Loving Mimesis and Girard's 'Scapegoat of the Text': A Creative Assessment of Mimetic Desire." In Violence Renounced: Rene Girard, 2000

Robin Collins, “Nature as a Source of Non-Conflictual Desire: René Girard and Traditions in World Harmony” in René Girard and Creative Mimesis, 2014

17. Jean-Michel Oughourlian, The Mimetic Brain, 2016

18. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol 6: Time Regained and A Guide to Proust, 2010

19. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University

20. René Girard, Proust: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1962

21. John Henry Newman, Letter to the Duke of Norfolk

22. Hermann Geissler, Conscience and Truth in the Writings of Blessed John Henry Newman, 2012

23. John Henry Newman, Letter to the Duke of Norfolk

24. John Henry Newman, On the Inspiration of Scripture

25. Catechism, IV. Erroneous Judgement

26. John Henry Newman, Letter to the Duke of Norfolk

27. List of apologies made by Pope John Paul II

28. Gaudium et Spes