Giving up

Eastern philosophy, particularly the Baghavad Gita, often emphasizes the principle of renunciation - renunciation of desires and material attachments. Hermann Hesse, in his Siddharta, is inspired by this idea of renunciation, but adapts it to our Western, Judeo-Christian perspective: the novel's conclusion, through the image of the river, lets us glimpse the course of life as being truly the meaning of the Whole and the One. Gone, then, is the idea of a half-naked hermit in a Himalayan cave. I find this interpretation attractive, as it moves away from material and emotional desiccation, while emphasizing the acceptance of one's own sense of life, independent yet intrinsically linked to the lives of others.

Maya« is the illusion of the world, the illusion of the reality of things. Without getting into a Platonic debate on ideas, the cave and the like, let's keep it concrete and simply say that Maya, at our everyday level, can be the illusion of the importance we give to certain things, ourselves, but above all to others. All groups, whether age, social or cultural, define certain elements as having more or less value. Without going so far as to speak of a collective unconscious for facts that remain, all in all, quite trivial, it would be quite justified to describe these elements as the »collective unconscious’.’habitus, following in the footsteps of Bourdieu, whom I don't like very much. One belongs in such and such a group, because one possesses this, because one does that; paradoxically, those who make the greatest claim to independence, even to irreverence in the face of social demands, can perhaps afford to do so, because they are the ones who best meet these same criteria, fish in the water we might say, who have nothing of the guerrilla about them, even if they give themselves the appearance of it...

That a certain number of values are necessary for the cohesion of a group (if that group happens to deserve legitimacy) is quite normal; what is not normal, on the other hand, and which it's up to us to ignore, is the importance given to them - relative importance, and above all a means of pressure, used by some either to exclude, or to make people feel uncomfortable, in short to cover their own mediocrity with the veil of whether or not they conform to these same criteria. And since every man belongs to a multitude of different groups, there's bound to be one who will question you. I once heard it said that «human beings only create groups to hate those who don't belong to them». And rightly so.

That's where this idea of Maya comes in: all we have to do is take a step outside the narrow circle of our «selves», our friends, our work, our love relationships, to abstract ourselves from certain criteria, certain ready-made ways of thinking, and to realize that these may only be the fruit of little tensions, little internal rivalries, little overused reasonings, and in the end, much less important than we might be led to believe, or even want to believe, given our personal experiences and suffering. In the end, while it's important to live with others, you must not live for If we don't, we'll end up in sterile, even poisonous, relationships, where it becomes impossible to love others and help others. Medice, cura te ipsum, we might add. So much for the positive note.

I'll end on a more pessimistic note. Marcel Proust, speaking of «man's solitude and the need to accept it», considered that «everyone is alone, that we have passions and feelings but these are independent of their supposed object, and that no one communicates with anyone». In view of what we've just said, in view of the rivalries that gnaw at human beings, and perhaps the only peace to be found in distancing ourselves from the normative power of society and its opinions, couldn't we say, in the final analysis, that «we are so many islands»?