Thoughts On The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

I read Carson McCullers’s The Heart is A Lonely Hunter last month, but it’s taken me some time to sit on it and stew over it. It’s not an obvious book. I’m not going to summarize it here.

The imbalanced relationships between the main characters (Singer and Antonapoulos and each of Mick, Jake Blount, Biff Brannon and Doctor Copeland and Singer) are the heart of the narrative. The close friendship between Singer and Antonapoulos is demonstrated from page one, but are they really close friends? Is Antonapoulos even capable of the kind of relationship that Singer projects onto them (with an actual projector even!), or is Singer really just doing to Antonapoulos what the others do to Singer? Singer imagines a deep and fulfilling relationship with Antonapoulos that is in fact not really mutual at all: the handicapped Antonapoulos is as incapable of understanding what Singer says to him as the deaf Singer is incapable of truly understanding what any of the others say in turn to Singer. Nevertheless, just as all four fiercely believe and cling to the notion that they have a unique and powerful connection with Singer, Singer believes his only real friend is Antonapoulos.

Thus we are faced with the terrifying true nature of relationship and mutuality, the extent to which we are inevitably and fully alienated by our inability to really know what the Other is thinking, and we are shown the resulting despair. Nobody’s ending is happy. Everyone dies alone.

There are a lot of other things going on in the novel–definitely a lot sexuality and innocence and hate and race and class and Marxism, but all of it is primarily explored through this fundamental lens of alienation, the loneliness that results from our fundamental inability to know or be known by other human beings.

Hand in hand with this theme of loneliness and alienation is a related theme, and the two are tied together in the novel’s title. Each of McCullers’s main characters is yearning for something, and although they try to express this yearning (futilely!) through connection and relationship, relationship is the impossible means to the impossible end, not the end itself.

Mick’s quest for music, to really get music, to capture whatever-it-is that music makes her feel when she hears it, is the prime example. It’s an obsession, really: Mick hears a symphony and she is certain that somewhere in Music is that Thing that will fill the hole in herself. Blount and Doctor Copeland are both looking for it in the Marxist dialectic (although race creates an inseparable gulf between the two characters that should be able to connect), and Biff, though he doesn’t consciously know it, is looking for it in gender and sexuality, but for each of them is is an aesthetic hunger. A notion that the truly beautiful thing will fulfill them. And with each of them, what they are looking for is elusive–it’s not clear if they could theoretically find what they are looking for, but they certainly are not able to find it through their (non-)relationships with Singer. And, unable to find it, each of them flails around their respecitve existences, trying to find substitutes in sex, alcohol, hate and even death.

In the end, it’s a sad book, but it’s a beautifully sad book.

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Absolute Morality Versus The Gaping Abyss

I’m taking a class on Jurisprudence this semester in law school, and it is unquestionably the most interesting class I have.  Jurisprudence is the philosophy of law, and the class is taught by a professor from the philosophy department at the main campus, as opposed to a law professor.  All things considered, this is a good thing.  I have generally found the academic study of law to be tedious, although I am interested in actually practicing law.  But this is really a philosophy class, so it’s fun.

An issue that keeps coming up–a core issue in jurisprudence, really, almost a given–is the existence of morality.  This isn’t an ethics class, so we don;t really spend a lot of time talking about what morality is, where it comes from, etcetera, but whenever we talk about morality, those kinds of questions become preeminent in my mind.

Actually, this isn’t just about my Jurisprudence class.  I think about the existence of morality all the time, and for me, it has become my core theological problem.  I spend a lot of time grappling with what I think is the very real possibility that nothing means anything, that morality is a purely human invention, that there’s nothing behind it but arbitrary preference.  That morality does not exist as anything other than a social construct, and thus has no implications for anything other than society (and, well, psychology to the extent that psychology is informed by sociology).  Simply put, if values and morals are culturally relative, then they do not really exist at all.  Thus, the gaping abyss.  I do not buy Utilitarianism.  I do not buy Kant’s categorical imperative (because why should I act only on that maxim which I can at the same time will to be a universal law? ).  They are toothless.  They are inventions.  They have no real weight.  We have to assume them in argument, because they don’t hold in virtue of themselves.

What I am getting at is this: if there is not actually a universal ultimate morality that exists outside of human beings and the human mind, then there is no real morality at all.  If morality or values are not absolute, then morality and values cannot exist.  Any argument to the contrary is, in my frank opinion, complete bullshit.  Morals and values invented by human beings are utterly arbitrary.  Even if they are practical, there is still no pressing reason for any individual to follow them.

So there I am, staring into the gaping abyss, wondering what is going to save me from complete nihilism.  And I’ve got nothing.

C. S. Lewis’s inference of ultimate morality from general human consensus and a universal existence of “ought” is not unreasonable, but it does not convince me.  I think you can rationally infer that since most people think that, say, torture is wrong, then it’s likely that there may actually be an absolute moral principle behind it.  But it’s not a slam-dunk.  Consensus may be compelling, but the consensus can still be wrong.

So there are either absolute values, or there is nothing but the abyss.  I would prefer absolute values, but where are they?  Where do they come from?  And if they aren’t really there… then it’s the abyss, and the abyss is terrifying.  It is total nihilism.  It is nothing at all, but it swallows up everything else.  There is no meaning, there is no truth, there is nothing.  There is nothing, and it is absolutely terrifying.

The easy answer would be “God,” and if I had an easier time believing in God, I would just say that.  but I don’t; I have a hard time believing in God.  My confidence that God exists is actually less than my confidence that Lewis’s argument from consensus is correct.  If I was sure of God, then I could easily see God as the creator of the universe and thus the source of everything–including truth, value, and morality.

Maybe this is really why I can’t leave religion alone, why I can’t just not worry about it.  I have to worry about it, because this abyss is looming open in front of me.

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