Very few of us will be sad to say goodbye to 2021. No one has escaped the pandemic without being diminished, even those of us who have been fortunate not to have been directly impacted. Without question, the greatest empathy must be reserved for those who have died from the virus (along with those who loved them) as well as those who have suffered with the virus I experienced two major loses this past year, my father and my father-in-law, both of whom were lovely human beings— intelligent, accomplished and devoted to their families. Neither died of the virus, but I believe that both of their lives were adversely affected by enduring the pandemic, which restricted their social lives and regular contact with family. They will never be included in the gruesome statistics. Their deaths are more difficult to accept, though, because they died as the pandemic waned hot and cold.
My thoughts have turned to consolation—what is it, and how can it sought out and welcomed? Of course, I have been striving dutifully to be pro-active. Cooking more, check. Stepping up the exercise regime, check. My wife and I find ourselves relying upon the profound wisdom and limitless generosity that we have come to attribute to our aged dachshund. We have designated him with (and he does not refuse) the identity of being a life coach. Nevertheless, I have encountered some significant health problems that might well have been spurred by the pandemic. I have been writing this newsletter for about a year, and it has served well as a vehicle of self-expression and relative stability. I have also found consolation in reading and have tried to make more time to read things that are unrelated to my work. I wonder what has brought consolation to others.
Recently, I came across a wonderful new book, On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times, by Michael Ignatieff, a series of short essays that cover Job, Paul, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Boethius and Dante, El Greco, Montaigne, Hume, Condorcet, Marx, Lincoln, Mahler, Weber, Akhmatova, Levy and Radnóti, Camus, Havel and Saunders.[i] All of these writers/thinkers/activists provide creative ways to grapple with consolation, which Ignatieff presents in a lively succinct form. He recognizes (briefly) that he is elaborating ideas that belong to Western culture, without naming it as such, and with no attention to contributions from other cultures and traditions (or how they have intersected with Western culture). The book works best as a series of individual portraits, although there is an implied trajectory that is worth pausing to try to articulate. The arc swings from theocentrism to anthropocentrism: from regarding consolation as contingent upon a divine order, where either by our good deeds or more arbitrarily, we humans must depend on God to provide what we lack, to consolation as subject to our self-pursuit, either as a radically individual search or one that entails recognition (and affirmation) of others. Ignatieff is not terribly self-revealing, but he begins the book with a moving example of experiencing consolation at a festival of music based on the Psalms, despite being non- religious himself. Toward the end of the book, he reflects a bit upon his parents’ death. In the background, inevitably, is the pandemic, and also the threat to democracy (Until this year, Ignatieff was the President of the Central European University, the Soros- funded university in Budapest that has become non-grata in illiberal Hungary, currently in the process of relocating to Vienna).
Two experiences repeatedly serve as the impetus for consolation: the death of a child and various epidemics. The stoic philosopher Cicero struggled to sustain meaning after the death of his daughter; in particular, struggling to be able to reconcile his belief in the republic of Rome with his overwhelming distress. So did Gustav Mahler whose music was transformed by his grief for his daughter: what emerged was “sorrowful awareness that joy was fleeting and brutally revocable” (And so did Freud with whom Mahler had a consultation, whose daughter Sophie died in the flu epidemic in 1920). Akhmatova’s poetry was inspired by her son’s imprisonment. Epidemics as the impetus for consolation necessarily elicits all of our attention. Marcus Aurelius died of the plague, and his meditations, which were composed in isolation, are symbolic in Ignatieff’s reading that consolation is threatened by feeling alone, which must haunt everyone if it affects an emperor. Montaigne had to leave home in order to avoid the plague; his reflection on how it changed life hits home, as he notes that even small symptoms were automatically construed as the plague. Max Weber died in the flu epidemic in 1922 after bouts of depression and raising the fear that consolation is impossible. The plague is taken up as a central theme in Camus, who recalled a typhus epidemic in Algeria, but also used it as a metaphor for the German occupation of France as well for life itself. Ignatieff credits Camus for challenging us to realize and accept that we need each other, and notes that Camus would have understood the spontaneous cheering in different cities around the globe for the first responders during the current pandemic.
Both the death of a child or pandemics entail loss. Ignatieff does not dwell on loss per se, but that theme is prominent in his reflection on El Greco’s painting, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, not long after the capital moved from Toledo to Madrid, and the Spanish armada was defeated by the English. Ignatieff is more captivated by the specific accounts of how we find consolation and sustain hope. While he appreciates the struggle for faith to prevail, he is especially drawn to humanistic views, beginning with Montaigne in the 16th century, who is skeptical about consolation, and relishes nature and the body, and the love of life itself. Ignatieff also admires Hume, the 18th century Scottish philosopher, also a skeptic about causation, identity and the soul, who affirming Socrates’ exhortation that the point of philosophy is to learn how to die, apparently, died with equanimity. For Hume, consolation can only be found in forging a path for oneself, and he embraced the project of autobiography as the vehicle of self-realization. Ignatieff celebrates the life of the French Count, Condorcet, also in the 18th century, who was threatened by the extremism of the Jacobins after the French revolution, but never wavered from his belief that science and technology would liberate humanity from tyranny and superstition. As an advocate of the Enlightenment, Condorcet believed that new sciences like calculus, probability, and political economy would redefine how consolation might be realized.
Ignatieff offers an ambivalent, but somewhat positive discussion of Marx in the 19th century. On the one hand, he values that Marx contributes a social element to our understanding of consolation. Especially in his early writings, Marx was concerned with promoting the development of human potential. Ignatieff appreciates that Marx welcomed science and technology and the ideal of a democratic state (Ignatieff supports this by pointing out that Marx wrote a letter congratulating Lincoln after he was elected president). On the other hand, Ignatieff does not distort Marx’s lack of influence on politics in his own time or the disastrous efforts of communism in the 20th century. Ultimately, Ignatieff recognizes that Marx’s utopianism is unique in its endurance, but he does seem tempted to reconsider its contemporary relevance. Closer to Ignatieff’s heart are the figures who have endured great suffering in the 20th century, while retaining their hopes for humanity through politics --- like the writers Camus, Akhmatova, Levi and Radnóti, and the playwright/politican Havel. Ignatieff puts great weight on Havel’s humility (as he did in discussing the figures of Montaigne, Hume and Lincoln) and his recognition (through his reading of the French philosopher Levinas) of our responsibility to each other. The book concludes with a chapter on Cicely Saunders, the British social worker who invented hospice care, based on her interactions with people who came to experience a genuine kind of consolation through facing death that, too often, hospitals preclude. She is, sadly, the only woman discussed in the book. In the Epilogue, Ignatieff tells us about a moving visit to the 87-year-old Polish poet Milosz, who had endured being in Warsaw while the ghetto was exterminated, lost his wife and had a son who struggled with mental illness. Ignatieff and his wife asked Milosz to read his poem that celebrates consolation in the intensity of a beautiful moment, working in the garden and looking out at the sea. This is lovely, but the theme of political hope has receded to the background.
I experienced consolation in reading Ignatieff’s book and in writing about it as well. Nevertheless, I have some differences with his take on consolation. I would begin with his underestimation of the underbelly of the Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and Adorno explore in their examination of the dialectical process in which the affirmation of some values occurs as the exclusion of others.[ii] Their account focuses on anti-Semitism, but a larger way to make this point would be in terms of the systemic racism that is a part of the legacy of Western culture. Here I would like to clarify that I am not “cancelling” Western culture, just stressing that it is no longer justified to endorse its merits without grappling with the violence and harm it has perpetrated on people who happen not to be white men.
There is a psychological aspect to incorporate, too, which Ignatieff does not emphasize, even though in the Epilogue, he invokes the idea of unconscious forces that affect the experience of consolation. Horkheimer and Adorno base their thinking on the impossibility of eradicating human irrationality, an idea that can be traced back to Nietzsche and Freud. Ignatieff mentions Nietzsche in the chapter on Weber: quoting him that the only consolation is that no consolation exists. In other words, it is only from looking into the abyss of meaningless that we can avoid being satisfied by phony kinds of consolation and derive some affirmation. Freud builds on this in imagining that psychoanalysis can help us to be more truthful, and not to retreat from the challenge of looking at ourselves and our place in the universe without blinders. Ignatieff is not a fan of psychoanalysis (which he refers to as a no longer a therapy of choice) or of psychotherapy in general (diminishing it as treating suffering as illness). These judgments are overgeneralizing. As a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, I try to help patients to face the circumstances of their lives, entangling both as a product of living in an environment that might not be conducive to their well-being and a product of their own making and responsibility. Ideally, therapy helps people to become less self-absorbed and less isolated, and more aware of the value of connection to others. A Marxist-Freudian perspective that holds onto the fantasy of transformation differs from the assumptions of Ignatieff’s humanistic perspective.
Ignatieff refers to Freud more positively in the context of recalling his consultation with Mahler, referring to them as “two masters of the language of emotion,” one of whom uses language and the other music. The tension between consolation as verbal and non-verbal is a rich subject to explore. Ignatieff shows himself to be open to the non-verbal realm through El Greco’s painting, Mahler’s music, and writing (especially poetry) that can be verbal and non-verbal at the same time. There is more to say, I believe, about emotions as the site where the mind and the body are linked, where we discover the uniqueness of having an inner life and the gratification of sharing something with other humans and other living things. Consolation is an emotional experience that is not just momentary; as I see it, it possesses the gravity of recognizing that we find ourselves in a vast, unknown universe, but is willing to entertain radical experimentation, as long as we are honest enough to recognize when and if that goes awry.
[i][i] M. Ignatieff (2021). On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times. New York: Metropolitan Books.
[ii] M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno (1947/2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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