14 Nov 2024

Weil wrote that "It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy, in order to find reality through suffering." This is somewhat at odds with the view that I subscribe to, which is that we can find reality through joy, despite the presence of suffering. But it's interesting to consider Weil's view. There some force to it. To really comprehend loss, we must have known what it is to have. Also, I find it curious that Weil uses the term "revelation", instead of something like "experience." She appears to suggest that joy and suffering are weaved into the fabric of reality, out there, in the nature of things, waiting to reveal themselves to us. Or perhaps Weil is just projecting her own subjective attitudes onto the world. I'm not sure.

Maybe it's just different ways of approaching life. The joy-despite-suffering view does seem to be a bit more resilient. It sheds slightly more light on the tension between joy and suffering, the ongoing dialectic between the two, whereas Weil's view seems to suggest a linear progression from joy to suffering. Plus, the joy-despite-suffering approach is more general, in the sense that we can apply it even without having had major experiences of joy to begin with. It's harder, definitely, to find joy in the midst of suffering, especially if you don't know what joy looks like, but the rewards are greater. That's what I think.

There's something strange about depression. But there's something even stranger about breaking out of depression. You'd have to be in two state of minds at once: to be inside of the depression, while at the same time being outside of it. Only by conceiving of ourselves as standing outside can we have any hope of actually breaking out. It would be impossible to break out if we could only conceive of ourselves as being inside, or if we couldn't conceive at all. Actually, it would be possible. I think. If we had some kind of mirror. Maybe that's what other people—friends, family, psychoanalysts—are for. Symbolic mirrors by which we see ourselves as we are, that is, of being inside, from some "outside".

Also, once you're outside, there's the danger of losing touch with the inside. When you spend enough time outside, you might forget what it was like to be inside. And when that happens, there's really no difference between being inside and being outside, which isn't that much different from being inside again. I think this second case is more problematic than the first, because a person who thinks they're outside when they're really inside is in a worse position than a person who knows they're inside. The latter sees reality as it is, while the former sees reality as a distortion of what it is.

Maybe the goal is not to break out, but to stay as near as possible to that thin line between inside and outside.