The Meaning of Life 3: Passion Enacted

 

I have linked the "meaning of life" to instinct, my little terrier's life exploding with meaning as he chases the yellow cat from his backyard. Meaning is his moment of doing what he is instinctively called to do. Instinct derives from the Latin instinctus 'impulse,' a compound of the prefix in- 'toward' and a verb meaning 'to goad.' It is the image of a herdsman prodding on a beast along with a sharp stick, a cowboy's spurs. Instinct hurts us into action. 

Etymologies don't dictate current meanings, but there is insight here. Instinct, however pleasurable it may be to fulfill, springs from a goading of dis-ease. Buddhists call this dukkha, loosely translated 'suffering.' My dog hates the yellow cat. It hurts him to see it in his yard as intensely as it gratifies him to chase it away. If he could rid the universe of yellow cats, he would. Instinctual meaning is inseparable from pain and evil, the goads of instinct. If everything were perfect, all our instincts would sleep. We would lose purpose. This suggests another Latin-derivative balanced on the cusp of joy and pain.

Like many English words, passion has narrowed and shifted from its Latin meaning, and, again, the older denotation isn't to be confused with its "real" meaning. Still, insight is gained by infusing the Latin back into the English. Passion so infused may be a better term to describe what gives meaning to life in all of its ambiguity. 

Passion almost literally implies sexual desire, one of the master instincts. There is no doubt of life's meaning, no impulse to skeptical philosophy in the doorstep of orgasm. A broader usage of the word, perhaps felt today to be metaphorical, is a sense of enthusiasm about a cause or hobby, having a passion for something. Again, in the moment there is little question of value, purpose, or meaning in pursuits that we are passionate about. Passion is autotelic but varies from person to person. I avoid sweets and consider encouraging people to eat food with a high glycemic index to be tantamount to drug pushing, but I once watched a documentary about a woman who was ecstatic when she achieved her life-long dream, opening a bakery. I saw her layering saturated fat and refined flour, dusting it with refined sugar, pandering to the human confectionary instinct, but there was no doubt that her life had meaning when she did, at least to her. She was following her passion. The woman was passionately in love with baking.

The Latin verb passus means 'allow,' 'suffer,' or 'endure,' and, as such, is almost exactly synonymous with the archaic sense of the English word suffer. Today, of course, suffer denotes enduring unpleasantness, but earlier it had the neutral sense of allowing, as in the 1611 King James translation, "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me" (Matthew 19:14), or it meant tolerate as in "suffer fools gladly" ( 2 Corinthians 11:19). The single occurrence of the word passion in the 1611 translation refers to the crucifixion, the suffering of Christ (Acts 1:3). When we use passion to mean suffering today, it is exclusively in that context, referring to a "passion play" or the name of an oratorio. In all other uses, over the last 400 years, passion has narrowed toward pleasure, suffering toward pain, so much so that some moralists define all human "suffering" as evil. Behind the broad sense of passion is a trait they have in common.

            The English word derives from the Late Latin passionem, a Christian term, and current usage said to have evolved from the sense that the passions are temptations to sin, and thus suffering (https://www.etymonline.com). Behind the Christian usage is a Latin root found in the common verb (patior, pati, passus) meaning 'allow', permit', 'suffer', and 'endure.' The same root gives rise to an adjective meaning 'patient', 'submissive', 'tolerant', 'enduring,' and 'hardy,' including specific reference to the submission of a prostitute, and part of the term for a yoke (https://latin-dictionary.net). 

         Common to all of these is the sense of another English cognate, passive. It may seem odd to think of passion as passive, but the here sense is that a person is acted on by passion rather than initiating it. We are moved by passion rather than moving it. We find our passion rather than creating it. Passion is something experienced as coming from outside. Experienced, not chosen. Passion, even when pleasant, shares with suffering that it is not willed. To intend passion is to fake it, to be a hypocrite.

Back to the meaning of life. Unless you're looking for some absolute, universal meaning of  "life, the universe, and everything" (which, if you find it, may be no more personally useful than Douglas Adams' 42), then a search for the meaning of life may be a search for passions to enact. Maybe this is a more exact way of saying what young people mean when they say they are trying to "find themselves." Work at your passion and never work a day in your life. There's a curious variety here. What kind of fool writes an essay every week for amusement? Most folks, I'm sure, would prefer baking. 

The meaning of life as passion, as an energy imposed from the outside, contradicts or at least qualifies Existentialism as I understand it. A passion is an impulse that may be resisted, but it can't be willed. It acts on passivity. But existentialism stipulates that life becomes meaningful through personal commitment--nihilistically perhaps because it doesn't stipulate what to commit to. It is a sect of faith without a gospel. But passionate commitment presumes an autonomous passion that overwhelms us, not anything we willfully commit to. This may be nihilistic from the perspective of a specific orthodoxy, but it is grounded on an external state of being. Even to the degree that we can choose to do anything we want, we don't choose to want anything we want. Want is another word for a passion, for what may be affirmed or denied but not initiated.

If passion confers meaning, the meaningless life would be one of dispassionate commitment. A father is passionate about his son's taking over the family business, while the heir who isn't may be trapped in meaninglessness. People who major in safe fields in college can be trapped in "meaningless" work. This recalls Max Scheler's tripartite analysis of personhood, a division at least three thousand years old.* The phenomenological person has three parts: body, soul, and spirit. The body generates impersonal needs that aren't directed toward any particular action, the sensation of hunger, for instance. The soul, in its ancient sense, is the animating principle of animals and people (the anima in Greek), which initiates action toward or away from objects or images on a more-or-less instinctive basis. A dog sniffing at food, finding it good or bad, is soulful. The uniquely human part (though that could be debated) is spirit, which is rational but potentially deceptive, sterile, and false unless sensitive to soul and body. Plato described spirit as a charioteer driving these two horses.

          Passion is the motive force of soul, in this sense a virtual synonym of heart. "Heart and soul," like "fitting and proper," are redundant. The medieval concept of passion as temptation has merit. If we did everything our heart tells us to do, led by the leash of impulse, our lives would be dangerous and chaotic. Spirit organizes, channels, and inhibits impulsivity, but it cannot operate without the dark energies that rise from the heart or belly. Rising autonomously out of darkness, the passions of the soul/heart/belly may be wellsprings of meaning.

*For more on Scheler's tripartite system, see the following:

https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/04/body-soul-spirit-recovering-tripartite.html 

https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/04/sensuous-spirituality-body-soul-and.html 

https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/04/body-mind-spirit-new-age-tripartite.html 

https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/05/the-ecstatic-self-fourth-tier-of.html