Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Conduct Towards Others, by Louis Lavelle

Conduct Towards Others, by Louis Lavelle, is a collection of texts that explore various aspects of human interaction and relationships. The book is divided into twelve chapters, each delving into different dimensions of how individuals relate to others and the world around them. Lavelle’s writings touch on topics such as the place of humanity in the world, the significance of presence and intimacy, the interconnectedness of all individuals, the dynamics of society and appearances, the virtues of discretion and consideration, the complexities of love and friendship, the role of justice and reciprocity, and the spiritualization of nature.

The chapters cover a wide range of themes, including the exploration of personal identity, the importance of genuine connections with others, the impact of our actions on the world, and the pursuit of spiritual growth. Lavelle examines concepts such as empathy, forgiveness, indifference, hatred, love, and the pursuit of virtue. Through his thought-provoking insights and reflections, Lavelle offers guidance on how individuals can navigate their relationships with others and cultivate a more meaningful and compassionate approach to life. “Conduct towards others” serves as a valuable resource for those seeking to deepen their understanding of human interactions and foster harmonious relationships in their personal and social lives.

Warning

The pages that we are about to read, which were brought together by Louis Lavelle under the title “Conduite à l’égard d’autrui” (Behavior towards others), seem to be the complement to that part of his work which begins with “Conscience de soi” (Self-Consciousness) and continues with “l’Erreur de Narcisse” (The Error of Narcissus). They will be its culmination. They were perhaps intended to be so in his thought, which had never ceased to progress and expand. Undoubtedly, the entirety of being is already present in “Conscience de soi” where, in discovering oneself, one discovers the Whole; undoubtedly, in “l’Erreur de Narcisse,” with the condemnation of a thought entirely turned in on itself, there is an indication of everything that should guide our behavior towards others. However, here the perspective is different; the gaze is no longer turned solely towards oneself, but simultaneously towards oneself and towards others. We have moved from self-consciousness, which is the first step of our intelligence in the world, to this universe of consciousnesses of which we are a part, without which our self cannot know itself or realize itself, and from which none of us can be completely separated. There is no solitude that erases the presence of others within us.

This book, like the two that preceded it and like the entire work of Louis Lavelle, is based on the inner experience that we have of life by becoming aware of what we are; but it is accompanied by the ordeal of society, where beings confront each other, judge each other, and make war on each other. Therefore, as the author points out in his preface, we find here a bitterness that was absent from the previous books: the bitterness that is inseparable from the spectacle that human beings present. Louis Lavelle’s optimism has often been discussed as if it came from a thought that separates itself from the real world in order to create an ideal world unrelated to it, where people would find happiness without obstacles or effort. When reading these pages, one will undoubtedly see that this philosopher was neither ignorant of evil nor willfully blind. His gaze turned to all the anxieties of today, to all the hatreds, to that instinct of destruction that has its roots within us and by which we turn creation into hell, as if to give ourselves reason to curse it. He teaches us that the world is given to us so that each of us contributes to its creation by making himself, and that everything good and everything evil depends on the use we make of our freedom. The person who constantly oscillates between hell and paradise carries within them the power to free themselves from hell: the path of hope is always open to those who live with courage. Such optimism is neither weakness nor surrender. It is effort and will.

All those who knew Louis Lavelle will find in this posthumous book the vivid evocation of what his behavior towards other human beings was like: his discretion and his demands, the quality of his reception, a trust that precluded confession and the anxious expectation of an encounter where each person would find themselves enriched, understood, and confirmed in the highest parts of themselves. For he did not separate his philosophy from his life. With the philosopher, it is the man that we find here, very close to us, which makes the reading of these pages all the more endearing due to his presence.

M. L.

Note

All the texts we present here are part of those that Louis Lavelle grouped under the title: “Conduct towards others.” Some chapters were already organized, and all had received their titles, but neither the final choice of these texts nor the order of their succession were definitively established everywhere. We have done our best to supplement them, following the model left by “Self-Consciousness and the Error of Narcissus.” Thus, wherever necessary, we have provided titles for the paragraphs that make up the chapters. Louis Lavelle had the habit of meticulously reviewing all his writings before sending them for printing. Unfortunately, he could not do so for this book, to which he would have given completion, unity, and definitive organization. It is beyond anyone’s power to replace him. Here are these pages as he left them, along with an unfinished preface.

M.L.

Preface

The entire problem of relationships between human beings consists in knowing how to transition from a state of natural sympathy or antipathy that exists between characters to a state of mutual mediation that allows each of them to fulfill their own spiritual vocation through the intermediary of another person, a stranger, a friend, or an enemy.

The real universe is reduced for us to ourselves and to the beings with whom we are closely connected. All around us, there is a large circle of darkness populated only by appearances or things.

There is not a multiplicity of isolated consciousnesses that strive in vain to bridge the gap between them. There is only one consciousness of which we are the dispersed members. Each one needs all the others for support, and what it encounters in others is also within itself, which it discovers thanks to their mediation.

We would like to describe the true face of humanity, not only what it is in contrast to what it should be, but what it believes itself to be, which is only an opinion, with what it truly is deep within itself and in its essence. It is precisely this essence that it is up to each individual to find. However, the unhappy states we describe are the ones in which all people today take pleasure and consider them to constitute the entirety of human existence.

It is possible that one may find more bitterness in this book than in our previous works. This is because there are two truths: a spiritual truth, made of joy and light, but one that we do not always live in; this is the truth that we have endeavored to describe until now, and it brings great satisfaction to all those whose gaze is turned inward and who are often accused of dreaming life instead of living it. And there is an external truth that manifests itself and continually contradicts the other, the only truth that exists for those whose gaze is turned outward, and which justifies all their complaints and sarcasms: because they compare it with the other truth, which stirs a nostalgic longing within them. One could say that this is the conflict between truth and reality. Each side tries to make them coincide. But for some, reality must be abolished and transformed one day into truth, while for others, truth means nothing if it does not conform to the reality in which it must be embodied.

However, two observations can be made: the first is that spiritual truth is only revealed to humans in solitude, where the self is immediately in connection with God, whereas there is a human truth that constantly contradicts it, and where the individual always encounters other individuals like himself, with whom he engages in a kind of ongoing conflict. They are like rival gods fighting for preeminence, but if they manage to reconcile, it is God Himself who becomes present among them. The second observation is that our relationships with other human beings form the very substance of our own lives. And within each relationship, they reveal both what limits, stops, and opposes them, and what allows them to transcend and unite.

There is no other evil than that which humans inflict upon one another. It is the relationships we have with other people that make us happy or unhappy. But if we knew that the possessions we have necessarily generate jealousy and hatred, we would accept this jealousy and hatred without them tarnishing our happiness…

CHAPTER I. The Place of Man in the World.

I. The Royalty of Man.

“If I look at the stars,” says the psalm, “what is man? Yet, O Lord, you have made him a little lower than God,” that is, infinitely superior to the stars, which Pascal expresses admirably by saying that the universe comprehends and engulfs him like a point, but the universe is unaware of this advantage it has over him. Therefore, his dignity consists entirely in the thought by which he, in turn, comprehends the universe, making him a spirit like God.

But that is not enough: God has made man the only being in the world who is free like Him, who can always become the first beginning of himself, who is not entirely captured by the impulse of nature or the demands of events, the only being in the world who is both in the world and above the world.

Man is the god of this spiritual world in which he lives, a world that exists only in him and in relation to him. It is not enough to say that the power he possesses is comparable to that of a king in his kingdom, for a king only exercises his power over things, whereas the royalty of man is an internal sovereignty that makes him master of himself and all his thoughts. The king, as a king, only has control over what he can see, that is, the appearance, but as a man, he has control over what he is, which no one sees, and that is the only kingdom where everyone is called to live, even the king. Finally, while the king seeks to conform the order of things to his own will, which is always miserable and enslaves him, man, when he is wise, conforms his will to an order of which he is a part and which, by surpassing him, frees him from his limitations.

II. Man, the Pendulum of Creation.

Man is the mediator between flesh and spirit. It is not that flesh and spirit exist separately before man begins to act or that his nature is an effect of their mixture. On the contrary, man becomes flesh or spirit by an option of his freedom. As soon as freedom is abandoned or renounced, the self falls under the law of inertia: it becomes nothing more than matter. And this matter makes him a being of flesh that knows no other state than sensation and passion. But as soon as freedom comes into play again, the self is completely united with it; it rejects everything that limits and constrains it; it discovers its participation in the absolute: infinity is open before it. This is where the value of man lies and the reason he has to have confidence and always hope. The self-awareness he possesses becomes both the vehicle and the witness of creative power.

Man is a middle ground between the animal and God; he is incapable of ever becoming completely one or the other. But he oscillates between these two extremes. He is the balancer of creation. The animal undergoes evolution, but man leads it. He is an evolving animal moving towards God.

Man has a history that accumulates within him, like a spiritual capital, all the events he has experienced and all the actions he has taken. But the animal has only a nature that enslaves it to its species, that is, to instinct and flesh. The distinctive feature of human activity, therefore, is that it ceases to be subject to the law of the species like animal activity. As long as it is, it is the animal speaking in man, not man himself. Within man, there are as many species as there are individuals. And it is futile to dwell on race, which belongs to nature, when man begins only with freedom.

Animals have divided among themselves all the modes of activity; man gathers them within himself and, by choosing among them, frees himself from all the bondage of nature. He prefers to use the organ given to him rather than the instrument he has invented. It is true that he can become a slave to it in turn: and when he seems to guide the instrument, it is often the instrument that guides him. But he is also capable of detaching himself from it. He is always above: for he does not accept being just a cog in this grand universe. He wants to assume it entirely, that is, not only to take possession of it through thought, but to constantly recreate it, like God Himself, who is never imprisoned by His creation.

Therefore, it is the nature of the animal to remain faithful to its nature, whether it be a lion or a lamb, a vulture or a dove. But the nature of man is always to surpass it. And if he finds within himself all possibilities at once, it is to enable him at times to embellish them and at other times to corrupt them. Depending on the use he makes of them, he becomes, as Aristotle says, the best or the worst of animals.

Sometimes it is believed that the only originality of man is to put his intelligence or his will at the service of need and instinct; this is an ideal that suffices for almost everyone. But then man is merely a more knowledgeable and skillful animal, capable of perverting in himself all the ends of animality. It would be better to say that his vocation is to put all the powers of need and instinct in the service of intellect and will. Instead of annihilating them, he gives them a meaning that transfigures them.

III. Play and Freedom of the Mind.

Leisure in animals gives rise to play, which is, so to speak, the testing of all the possibilities of their bodies: all the movements in play are performed with a kind of disinterestedness and solely for pleasure; they find in space a kind of pure exercise. This is also the form of the life of the spirit: it is a kind of superior play, of which consciousness is the field. There, all the possibilities present in the world undergo, in turn, a kind of test: but this is so that each of us can choose from among them the possibility that will become the being that is uniquely ours.

Because if man contains within himself all the powers of nature, it is because he has the power to affirm or deny them, to suppress or exercise them through a free act. Thus, it is rightly said, as it was done in the past, that nature was created for man, but it is because nature provides him with all the materials and resources whose disposal belongs to him alone.

And if there is no limit to the progress of humanity, it is not primarily because it has infinity of time before it, but because from the moment when the will frees itself from instinct, all the boundaries within which its nature pretended to confine it suddenly break.

However, man, in a kind of intoxication of freedom, must guard against another servitude that is worse than that of instinct, and this time impose it on himself. For the need to always produce some new work, to exercise an ever greater dominion over matter, are constraints worse than those of instinct. The chains forged by our freedom are heavier to bear than those to which nature subjects us. A being who reduces himself entirely to his own nature does not feel divided within himself, but one who carries within himself the whole of nature wants to constantly prove to himself that he is free. And the necessity for him to always exercise his freedom becomes so burdensome that he experiences a kind of nostalgia for the natural spontaneity he has lost, which also becomes for him a kind of model of true freedom. But the ideal of freedom is to make the movements of the spirit resemble those of nature, to extend them instead of abolishing them, and to be their flower.

IV. Time and the Life of the Spirit.

It is sometimes said that man lives in time, while animals only live in the present moment. This is not entirely true. The animal is also grounded in what has just occurred and inclined towards what is to come. But it is subject to the law of time, whereas man produces it. Man, too, is incapable of ever breaking away from the moment that pins him down to becoming: but within the moment, he constantly oscillates between the idea of his potential being and the idea of his accomplished being. And the transition from one to the other is the very life of his spirit.

This is because man is, first and foremost, a being who has control over his attention. He is not necessarily drawn to the present thing. He can withdraw his gaze from it and apply it elsewhere. The animal, on the other hand, is constantly fascinated by it. It can just as well be said that the animal lives in a state of perpetual distraction, for only man is attentive or at least capable of being attentive, if to be attentive means to be master of one’s attention, to always choose its object and use.

The animal has no inner core: when it turns inward, it falls asleep or enters a dream that perpetuates its sensory existence and never detaches it from it. It moves within a world where it merely suffers. And so does man, insofar as he is an animal. But insofar as he is a man, he moves within a world that he seeks to understand and to which he seeks to give meaning. The former is the world of bodies and the latter the world of the spirit. Contrary to popular belief, the latter is unique to each individual, while the former is common to all. The former only exists through sensation, and the latter only exists through thought.

V. Transfigured Animal Life.

However, animality always acts within man, who continually strives to overcome its eternal existence. Therefore, it is important not to belittle the animal within us too much. There is even a wildness of life that it is sometimes not bad to surrender to. It is this wildness that gives power to the soul. It is not a matter of stifling it—where would another force be found to struggle against it?—but of transfiguring it to change it into a spiritual impulse.

Undoubtedly, the man of action, driven by the instinct to dominate and attracted by the possession of the world, is often nothing more than a predator that can be placed, if one wishes, at the summit of the animal ladder, but which is always a means and not yet an end for the spirit. In another man, he finds only prey to hunt. It is true that there may be more union between prey and hunter than between prey and its protector, who are like strangers to each other and only meet to despise each other.

But the truth is that within the human species, one can observe all the relationships that different animal species have with each other; beings that repel each other and others that attract each other from the first contact, without reason or choice playing a role. These are relationships that can be softened, strengthened, governed, and sometimes converted, but never abolished. Among them, there are dogs and cats, birds and snakes. They can be brought to live and even play together in a kind of domestic society. But their most immediate reactions, though masked and restrained, burst forth at the first crisis. And the difficulty lies not in abolishing them, but in converting them. It is the characteristic of the spirit to change their meaning, not to dwell on natural differences, but to penetrate to the truth and error, to good and evil, to beauty and ugliness, of which they are instruments rather than marks. For each of them, undoubtedly, can be put to good or bad use. And in every man, it is this good or bad use of what he is by nature that must be loved or rejected.

VI. The Upright Station, an Image of Our Spiritual Being.

The upright position, it is said, is characteristic of man. But it is the image of his spiritual being. It is only possible through a constantly renewed act of will that prevents him from succumbing to gravity and living under the law of instinct. In the same sense, it was said of man in the past, using the etymology of the Greek word that names him, that he is the one who looks up and far, the one who embraces not only the earth he desires but also the heavens he contemplates and the horizon that joins them.

The upright position still persists even in the Cross, which is also the image of man, but reduced to his most perfect deprivation: it is man himself when he is immobilized, when his feet are brought together, and when he is unable to defend himself, forced to have his arms outstretched. It is on the Cross that he is truly exposed and ready only to suffer.

For if the greatness of man lies in the power given to him to commit a free act, independent of the order willed by God, that is, in the power to sin, he can only establish a mysterious connection between sin and suffering. But we always wish for suffering to be not so much the punishment as the redemption of sin. We feel that if suffering is existence itself insofar as it has naturally imposed limits, sin is also existence, but insofar as it imposes limits on itself; and our reason would be almost satisfied if one were always the effect of the other.

However, it goes beyond the mark to make suffering a merit; it is enough to say that it is inseparable from the condition of man, which resides in the encounter of nature and freedom. In suffering, it is freedom that is defeated, while in joy, the condition of man seems forgotten and transcended; nature and freedom are so well aligned that they are no longer distinguishable; nature blossoms freedom and ceases to violate it.

VII. The Inner Significance of the World.

The world that surrounds us is a mirror in which our nature is reflected. It outlines on its surface the very interest we take in things. It shows us reliefs and hollows that depict the image of our desires, the greatness and limits of our various powers. In this world, the existence of bodies is the effect and measure of our imperfection, rather than imperfection being an effect of the existence of bodies. It is upon this world that the gazes of all men are directed and intersect. But at the same time, it is the site of a test that is common to all.

There is nothing more extraordinary than this apparent discovery of the moderns, which is so paradoxical and yet so commonplace, that the self must first reposition itself in the world. For there has never been anyone who denied it. There has never been an idealist blind or fanatical enough to want to be placed beyond the world or to confine the world within his mind. But what is now overlooked is the greatest achievement of human reflection, that the world has an inner significance and that no one can discover this significance except within their own mind and through an act of their mind.

There are indeed individuals who seem barely to belong to humanity and leave it to others to live on the earth, merely carrying within themselves the consciousness of humanity, of the earth, and of life. All the actions that others accomplish remain in them as ideas, that is, as pure powers: all they need to do is take possession of them and experience their play. Will it be said that they have withdrawn from existence? But they give it meaning and value; they have succeeded in capturing its essence, and it can be said that other human beings borrow from them this spiritual light without which existence would be only that of the body, bringing them closer and closer to both themselves and to God.

CHAPTER II. Presence of Someone.

I. Initial Approaches.

Similar to the animal that, observing an unknown presence in front of it and sensing a life beating within it that is not its own, reduces itself entirely to the anxious alternative of making it prey or becoming its prey, so when one person encounters another person, it is a stranger to them, but with a human face like their own, and they wonder in a kind of trembling, today as on the first day, whether this person comes forward to share their life or to destroy it.

Indeed, what is another person, if not an initiative, a will that are not mine, over which I have no control, and which [32] compel me to always be on guard? Within me, there is only a silent questioning about what they will be to me. What does their gaze promise me? What does their hand bring? Will they support and enlarge the being that I am? Or will they oppress and hurt it with their mere presence before even acting?

Therefore, the initial contact between two human beings is always filled with hesitation, timidity, fear, and hope. Each person experiences a kind of shudder before this living mystery that suddenly presents itself to them. Will it be just a passerby? Will I discover in them a tormentor or a brother? In these initial approaches, one delays the encounter by wasting both time and words, desiring and fearing at the same time that it will happen.

“He is another,” they say. It seems that for me, he is first and foremost an enemy who contradicts everything I am. His mere presence offends and denies me. Because the essence of self is to aspire to rule over the world. Therefore, it must drive away any other self or fear being driven away itself. The entire earth was promised to me, and now it begins to slip away. This existence that suddenly confronts me is so different from that of an [33] object that in the face of this gaze, I, as it has been said, feel myself becoming an object and perhaps prey.

However, this being who is not only different from me but truly the self of another person gives me the consciousness of the self that I am. Until then, I was lost in a world that offered no existence comparable to mine anywhere. Now, I discover a power that is no longer mine alone, which balances its effects, which sometimes precedes it and sometimes responds to it. It is the miracle of a consciousness that is not my consciousness but reflects it, extends the being that I am, uncovers unsuspected powers within it, and unleashes that eternal dialogue with oneself that can only be consummated through a dialogue with the entire universe.

For as soon as I find myself face to face with another person, my whole being is shaken and, so to speak, mobilized. All my states become more acute; I no longer simply endure them. They are already acts. My psychic being ceases to consider itself as a given being that accepts being what it is; it already transforms into a potential being that takes responsibility for what it will become. The self no longer remains on the surface of [34] existence and life: in itself, beyond itself, it seeks their deepest meaning and undertakes to give them that meaning. The greatest test that can be given to a person is the encounter with another person. Because it reveals them to themselves. And sometimes it fulfills them, and sometimes it torments them.

II. A Nascent Society.

We always believe that we inhabit the world of things or the world of ideas. But, as Vauvenargues profoundly says, “we only enjoy men; the rest is nothing.” Likewise, a person easily endures all the hardships that come from things or from ferocious beasts. But they cannot endure those that come from a human will. A person can only have another person as their executioner.

And it is also evident that others are always the occasion of sin for me, the sin of jealousy, the sin of hatred, which is perhaps the only sin. It happens that others are for me only the object of desire, which is sometimes confused with love, or what amounts to the same, [35] a means intended to serve me. But this occasion changes its meaning as soon as self-love is forgotten: in charity, it is I who think only of serving.

A spiritual world then opens up before us, at once familiar and unknown, a society begins to form, and anxiety constantly transforms into security and lack into possession. This is what can be seen in love, in friendship, and in the mutual relationships between master and disciple, which do not differ as much as one might think from friendship and love. And in the presence of another person, each one of us, whether great or humble, is alternately a disciple and a master.

How extraordinary it is that there can exist beings outside of myself whom I cannot do without and cannot bear. It is the relationships with them that fill our entire life, and that is why we hardly notice them. For matter stands between them and us and alone arrests our gaze. It is what constitutes the object of our knowledge. However, our greatest misfortunes, our greatest joys come from others. There are few people who can remain alone with themselves for a long time: they long for a friend who [36] can deliver them; they often settle for an indifferent person. The presence of an enemy is even a kind of relief to them.

And yet, they also long for solitude, they lament its interruption: one must have the courage to say that there is probably no one in the world who, in the presence of the most reliable friend, has not felt at times the faint ripple of annoyance form and dissipate within them. Humans aspire to be alone in the world as if they wanted to occupy the entire expanse of reality themselves. Another person is always an obstacle that prevents them from doing so. Therefore, they try to make the other person an instrument of their own dominion or, failing that, annihilate them. But they always end up realizing that possessing all the objects in the world is worth less than a straw compared to the mere gaze of a stranger. The contact with another being is always a trial that one must have the courage to endure: it must humble me and exalt me at the same time. It seems that in both them and me, a god is ready to emerge who, at the slightest sign, opens their arms to the other and carries them to the seventh heaven.

III. Universal Interdependence.

Even of God, one can know nothing if they consider their own self as an absolute beyond which there is nothing but a world of indifferent things and refuse to penetrate that world of spirit that they share with another self and that continually forms and expands through their mutual contribution. What would be my misery if I were alone in the presence of things! How arrogant it is to think that I am a unique and privileged being capable of sufficing myself independently of all the beings who are with me in the world to express the infinity of creative power, that I must separate myself from them to be entirely myself! I then want God to be mine alone. But God did not allow it. He wanted human beings to be able to communicate with Him only by communicating with each other, as if He were nothing more than that living communication. He wanted each one of them, even the humblest, even the most foolish, even the wickedest, to bring to me some revelation about the world that I would not have received if I had remained alone.

And God also wants us to imitate Him. Just as He realizes His essence by giving Himself to other spirits whom He calls to enjoy the life and light that are eternally in Him, He also asks us to create our own essence by involving all the beings we encounter on our path in the gifts we have received.

Conversely, my existence always needs to be confirmed by others. Otherwise, it seems to me that I remain myself separated from the world and from existence itself; I become nothing more than pure possibility; I can no longer distinguish between dreams and reality. Because what distinguishes them is that dreams interrupt my relationships with others: it is a monologue that I pursue without them. They can be present in my dream, but it is an illusory presence that is contradicted if I encounter them.

IV. Existing for Others.

It is admirable that there is nothing more within us than pure potentiality before we embody it in the visible world, and this embodiment is at the same time the testimony by which we break our solitude [39] and enter into contact with all humans. Thus, it seems that one must exist for others in order to exist for oneself.

Certainly, everyone protests against such a thought because no one doubts that their being is an inner and hidden being. But no one doubts either that they are nothing but a test that they must be capable of facing and enduring at every moment. And this test is our action in the world, as it occurs not only in front of all humans but also toward them, allowing us to form an invisible society with them, witnessed by the world. It is a paradox that the visible world is also a world of separation until the moment it reveals the secret of the spirit that abolishes all separations.

Furthermore, I doubt the value of all my ideas, even the most beautiful ones, if I cannot awaken them in another person. I need them to be understood and shared. And the greatest emotion I experience is to discover one day that the deepest secret within myself, which I hardly dared to admit to myself, is also the secret of another person and perhaps the secret of everyone.

V. The Miracle of Presence.

The contact with another person is always a rupture of self-love, of that shell that envelops and protects our secret being before it can blossom in the light of day and discover the wonder that is the world. But this rupture always recurs because self-love is always reborn: it separates us from the world, and yet without it, the world would never become [41] “sensible” to us. It is self-love that preserves our independence and that pathetic kind of knowledge of the separate self, which must be traversed and transcended so that the world itself becomes present to us. For it is the same bond that attaches us to ourselves and to everything that exists. By first closing in on our own self, it forms a knot that must be unraveled so that we can then tighten it around every being and every thing.

However, things alone are not enough to tear us away from ourselves, and the taste for solitude always accommodates itself to the spectacle of nature: from it, the horizon always recedes, but it is still the horizon of our solitude. The same cannot be said of the encounter [41] with another being who is too similar to us for their activity not to seem to limit ours in that very infinity where we thought we were moving and wound it in that free disposition of itself that belonged to us until then. But this wound, by revealing to me an existence that is not my own, brings me more than I could give myself; it then becomes a “wound of love,” which is enough to make nature itself no longer a refuge against the society of humans but its instrument and vehicle. And from then on, as the poets have well seen, nature itself seems to participate in all the feelings they can experience, in their joy, in their sadness, and in all their passions, of which it becomes, in a way, the mirror.

But we need the presence of other humans even more than their words or their gestures. It is true that we do not always discern where presence begins and where it ends. It can be reduced to the presence of the body, which is only an image of the other person and often stands in its place, for the body can be like an opaque mass that obstructs the inner presence instead of producing it: by claiming to be self-sufficient, this bodily presence [42] accompanies a spiritual absence that no longer concerns us. It must only be a sign or a means in the service of the other, who does not need it but can, with or without it, be an illusory presence, an imaginary presence. True presence depends only on an act of the spirit: it always needs to be regenerated; if this act is not performed, nothing remains. But this act is more difficult to accomplish than one might think; no encounter, no assiduity can bring it about. Because presence carries within it an effectiveness, a fullness that exceeds all the endeavors of the will: it always goes beyond our expectations. It is like a grace that brings beings closer to each other in their very essence and not just in their modalities. It is always a consented and mutual presence that reveals us both to others and to ourselves. It has more power the less it seeks to impose itself. It fears all manifestations that would disrupt, so to speak, its totality. It abolishes all shades of pride or contempt. It frees us from desire, regret, and boredom. It even excludes any intention that always interposes an ulterior motive between two beings [43] and withdraws them from bare existence. It exercises its virtue in a pure manner without us seeking to gain any advantage from it. It restores our balance when we have lost it. It is a source of ardor and light. Any other presence is merely apparent: it is a screen that blocks our vision and paralyzes our movements. Only true presence remains always easy and natural, approachable and familiar, solemn and silent, yet ready for speech and laughter; it alone envelops within the same horizon of sweetness and clarity those humble communications of daily life in which humans experience the same joys and sorrows.

VI. Perfect Presence.

In my conduct towards others, it should never be about a result that I seek to obtain - that would be to enslave their will - nor about a momentary satisfaction they can give me - that would make them a sort of accomplice - nor about a constant practice I seek to establish between them and myself - that would involve us in a too well-regulated mechanism. Moreover, it is always much less about recognizing a particular situation in which we find ourselves together, to which I must respond, than about surpassing all situations, reaching through them to their eternal essence, that is, accomplishing towards them that act of pure and ever-identical and ever-new presence, the miraculous discovery of our common existence in the world being only the occasion that arouses it.

But this real presence, which is the presence of their essence alone, immediately transforms them into a sort of angel or genius, that is, already a pure spirit. They are not truly so as long as I see their body, which is only an appearance in which their will becomes entangled like mine and which continually betrays them. Perhaps it is even necessary to recognize that they will truly become so only when they are dead. Now, I can forget the dead; I can still regard them as living, their mere image continuing to haunt me. But there are also times when they have for me a presence so disinterested and yet so present that I believe I am part of the same spiritual universe with them. Such is the impression one always has in the presence of someone one has loved, with whom death seems to give us a more perfect and purer communication. It is true that earthly preoccupations quickly reclaim us. At least this experience teaches us that the deepest relationships I can have with another person are not only, as is believed, temporal relationships that I would wish to eternalize, they are relationships that I already have in time with their eternal being, but which their bodily appearance often prevents me from grasping. Is this not saying that I imagine them as if they were already dead, or rather that death will have no power over them and that it is only, as one wishes, a transparency or a purification, a fulfillment or a culmination of their life.

VII. Faith, Immediate Relation between Spirits.

However, this experience, the most moving of all, which reveals to me the existence of a self that is not my own self but the self of another, is a scandal for reason. Despite the most repeated testimonies of common consciousness, despite certain privileged moments when the presence of another imposes itself on me with even more evidence than my own existence, reason always contests such an experience and declares it impossible: for how could I have an experience other than that of a thing? I only observe around me examples of an incomprehension that is impossible to overcome, an isolation that is impossible to break. I see well that there are other bodies in the world that resemble mine, and I conjecture that behind them there is a secret being capable of saying “I” like me. But this being who is capable of saying “I” is not a new body more subtle than the other, which could reveal itself to me if my gaze were more penetrating. It is a soul and not a body, a seer and not a seen thing, an awakened and active consciousness and not an object that another consciousness could find before it.

How, then, could there be a power to say “I” in that whole region of the world where I am not and which I precisely define as being external to me, or, according to the word of philosophers, as a non-self? Or perhaps it is still myself who says “I” in others; I can barely imagine that it might be the same for their own self in relation to mine when they think that in turn I can say “I.” Therefore, it must be that all beings borrow from a common source the same power they have to say “I.” For the more one thinks about it, the more one sees that otherwise this power would only separate them instead of uniting them, that it would invite each of them to be self-sufficient, that it would dig between them a gap that no artifice could overcome. They would only have contact with themselves, and yet if they communicate, it must be in a purer intimacy, interrupted and as if obscured by the shadow of their bodies.

But this is properly an act of faith, for the essence of faith is to go beyond everything that appears, which is what knowledge itself ultimately comes down to. It is not to say, as is often done, that faith is inferior to knowledge, or that it is resorted to when knowledge eludes us; for it is of a different nature: it is an immediate relationship between spirits, just as knowledge is an immediate relationship between the mind and things. This means that just as there is in us a power by which we enter into communication with things, there is also a power by which we enter into communication with beings, that is, by which we await and demand from them that inner existence and reciprocity of intention that things cannot give us. But then the knowledge of things themselves is nothing more than a mediation between spirits.

VIII. The World of Consciousness.

It is true to say of the world of consciences, and not of the world of things, that it forms a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. And the world of things in this respect is only an image of the other. Yet each consciousness is capable of saying “I” only for itself, and the circumference it traces around itself always has a very small radius. Thus, this power it has to say “I” seems to confirm it in solitude and separate it from all the beings in the world who nevertheless have the same power. But as soon as it renounces itself, this “I” expands the circle in which it begins by enclosing itself to infinity, and it encounters everywhere around it other beings who say “I” like it.

Therefore, in order to encounter each other, two beings must flee from and move away from their own center; but if they do not surpass their own boundaries, they can only collide. Must it be then that in surpassing mine, I cease to be what I am, or that in penetrating yours, I become what you are? And must it be the same for you, so that a kind of spiritual metempsychosis takes place between us? This seems true, no doubt, if the soul does indeed dwell only where it acts. But how could two beings contemplate exchanging their separate existences? In reality, the movement that carries them towards each other also carries both of them towards the common source of their own existence; they only encounter each other beyond themselves: only at the moment when each of them thinks they are losing themselves do they find the other and find themselves.

CHAPTER III. Intimacy.

I. The Third.

There is real communication only between two beings: the third party is always a third wheel and, as they say, always unnecessary; they distract us, preventing communication from happening. When there are three people, it seems that each one could be the third wheel. It can be said that they could be the mediator between the other two. But as long as their presence is noticeable, they become a barrier: they never quite manage to fade away completely. Because the only true mediator is God, who is communication itself, the absolute presence from which both self-presence and mutual presence originate.

One should even avoid talking to another person about certain contacts with third parties from which they themselves are excluded and which they would always perceive as a sign of separation.

For true intimacy exists only between two beings, but it must culminate in perfect reciprocity, in a give and take. This is the metaphysical meaning of the dyad, which begins with dialogue with oneself and ends with dialogue with others. And the third party always disrupts it: they become nothing more than a witness turning the union between two consciousnesses into a spectacle, a kind of sacrilege. For true intimacy belongs to God alone and not to creatures, except in their intimacy with God. But the dyad arises from this intimacy and fulfills it. Therefore, even when speaking to a thousand people, one must be content with being understood by just one.

II. The Lightning that Illuminates.

Our relationship with God is similar to our relationship with other human beings. Although God is always present, the communication we have with Him cannot be solicited or forced, at least not in our conscious awareness. And when it presents itself, it should not be rejected or postponed, regardless of the specific concerns that may distract us from it. We do not always feel the impact of grace, and in the ordinary course of life, we can only guess or sense it. Its irruption always surprises us without warning, and the connection it has with events, situations, and moments is so delicate that we can barely grasp it. It is a rupture with the earthly realm, but a flash that illuminates the entire world. None of our thoughts or resolutions has enough power to bring it forth; not that grace abolishes them, but it absorbs and engulfs them in its strength and light.

III. Intimacy with Self and with Others, or the Secret.

It is remarkable that the same word “intimacy” is used to refer to the most inaccessible recesses of solitary consciousness and the closest communication between two consciousnesses, confirming once again that the relationships one has with others are the same as the relationships one has with oneself: they are an extension and a test, multiplying rather than abolishing the secret. Thus, it is only with my most intimate friend that I become truly intimate with myself.

Where there is no obvious and mysterious subjective communication between two beings, such that each is present in the other’s consciousness as a part of oneself, it is as if there is nothing at all.

One must sever ties with anyone with whom it would be impossible to share the purest intimacy at any given moment. However, can one ever be certain, and is it more the fault of the other person or our own? Most people often settle for superficial relationships that only interest their self-esteem, appearances that should be abolished or transfigured. Genuine relationships are only those that make beings, in a certain sense, consubstantial with each other, creating between them the same dialogue that each of them constantly maintains with oneself. Thus, one can think alternately that true intimacy exists when one turns inward and when one reaches out beyond oneself. This is remarkably instructive because there is a point where these two moments coincide.

In the charm of initial contact, it seems as though two beings surrender to each other; for a moment, they only exist for each other, having learned through each other about their own secrets. The sign of true communication between two beings is not that each one’s secret is revealed to the other, but that each one discovers, thanks to the other, that they indeed possess a secret. However, the secret means nothing if it is not renewed with each encounter, if it does not prove to be inexhaustible. This is evident in love as soon as it begins to emerge; it is its surest criterion.

IV. Intimacy and Freedom.

Most people have only anonymous relationships with each other. This creates the apparent society that would be better described as a herd. But when I perform that free act in which I claim responsibility for who I am, I immediately encounter other beings who are free like me. Regardless of how differently they use their freedom, we inhabit a world together, a spiritual world or a world of intimacy.

To establish a connection with another being is to recognize in them the presence of freedom, not necessarily the power of choice often mistaken for it, which leads to pure arbitrariness, but rather the perfect spontaneity that allows each individual, free from external constraints, to find the inner root of their own being. What I discover in you should be that unique initiative which makes everything start anew for us at every moment, that I am for you and you are for me a completely new being, facing whom an unknown future opens up, dependent solely on us.

Being capable of placing oneself in this native position before every being one encounters in the world, regardless of the state of degradation they may have fallen into, is to learn to love them. For what can we love in another being other than the journey we will undertake together? What could we hate in them apart from the nature that confines or restrains them, or the will that takes pleasure in it and further perverts it? However, once intimacy begins, this nature is forgotten, and even the will no longer looks upon it. It goes beyond. We are both transplanted to the initial moment of creation, our ears attuned to our most secret desire, which is the very desire that God has for us.

I have no communication with another being, and I cannot respect and love them spiritually unless I discover their freedom rather than their nature. If I only see their nature, my contact with them is limited to the extent that I reduce myself to my own nature. The bonds that unite us then become nothing more than those of temperament and flesh. Hostility is always ready to arise.

In our deepest relationships with other human beings, with that hidden essence of themselves that their outward appearance never ceases to betray, we are undoubtedly less concerned with what they are—because what they are, they are no longer—than with what they should be, what constantly prompts and compels them to act.

V. Spiritual Accord.

The most important point is for each individual to discover within themselves that supreme interest to which they are willing to subordinate everything and, if necessary, sacrifice everything. That is where their true essence lies, that is, their relationship with the absolute. Skepticism and diversion prevent us from seeking it and merely thinking or believing in it. For us, they are means of escaping it, that is, of evading the life we fear to assume. Yet, that is the only bond that unites humans with God, but this bond always needs to be renewed. It is always in danger of being broken.

We establish a connection with another being only when we discover in them that shared interest, that spiritual harmony in which each person engages their deepest and best self. Only then does true communication begin, without which every word is nothing more than a breath that stirs the air. Only then does intimacy commence, which the body separates us from and yet must simultaneously become its sign and participant.

VI. Intimacy and Dissent.

In the most intimate relationships we can have with another being, there always remains an imperceptible element of compromise. Otherwise, we would no longer be two distinct beings. However, there exists between them and me a kind of silent commitment that neither of us wants to betray. Can I ever involve another person in that cynical sincerity with which I live with myself when I am alone? I do not always succeed in achieving it when they are absent. Much less is it exactly the same when they are present. But there are moments when it becomes more transparent or penetrative, even in the happiest times.

No matter how perfect our friendship may be, there are times when I must learn to tolerate the presence of a friend. After all, I must often learn to tolerate myself. It is already significant that sometimes I am surprised by the feelings they suddenly display without becoming irritated. However, even between the most trusting and loving individuals, intimacy is never without shadows. It is in these shadows that they discover the common source of their existence and the identical origin of their separate beings, so to speak. It is there that they learn to know, to desire, and to love each other as individuals. And this separation should not be criticized, for it allows them to overcome it and, consequently, to know, desire, and love each other. Thus, it is both justified and overcome. Hatred only retains the separation without reaching its principle, but death abolishes separation. It establishes a kind of spiritual intimacy among all beings, as the dead no longer struggle for existence like the living and only know their pure essence.

Friendship should not blind me to the point of refusing to change anything in the person I love, but it should be similar to my desire to change myself, with all my goodwill, gentleness, and zeal.

Intimacy abolishes the spirit of dissension. I no longer seek to prevail. I only call upon you so that we may together penetrate an inner world that is common to us. Each of us, unknowingly, should be a light that illuminates the other. However, those who harbor the spirit of dissension bring only their own darkness with them.

VII. Intimacy and Depth.

It is rightly thought that a person is contemptible when they consider only matters of self-esteem or opinion. But as they delve deeper within themselves, they discover a spiritual and divine being, even though there may also exist a certain depth of the flesh that is properly demonic, which self-esteem and opinion often manage to conceal, just like the other. However, the spirit has greater depth than the flesh; it envelops it in light, reveals its limits, and sets us free from them.

Depth and intimacy are one and the same. It is true that the essence of reality must be sought within and not outside. Depth and intimacy are signs of the infinity that each being carries within themselves and can never exhaust. But where does this infinity of reality reside if not at the point where two beings discover, not strictly speaking that they are one or that they are two and similar to each other, but rather that they are different from each other, despite existing only for and through each other, constantly giving mutual existence to each other.

As intimacy becomes more perfect and pure, what it reveals is not, as one might think, the irreducible differences between beings, but rather the common source from which each one continually draws and the possible human that each individual carries within themselves and that is their responsibility to realize, not discover. All individuals draw closer to each other as they approach their origin. It is with a certain trembling that they manage to surpass within themselves the pre-established being that they show to all, in order to penetrate into the being that is in the process of becoming and bears the responsibility for itself, always ready to return to that moving and mysterious point where, with their own consent, the virtual within them becomes real. It is necessary to go that far in order to penetrate the intimacy of another being. Any friendship that stops short of reaching that point does not deserve the name of friendship. And there is no person in whom friendship is impossible and does not manifest itself, at least fleetingly.

CHAPTER IV. All Men within Me.

I. Similar and Different.

“It is in our own minds,” said Vauvenargues, “and not in external minds, that we perceive most things. The greatest souls need neither reading nor travel to discover the highest truths.” And how could it be otherwise? No matter how much effort we make to distract ourselves, we always remain closer to ourselves than to the objects that entertain us. Each of us carries all our baggage within ourselves. And what I believe I see outside of myself is nothing more than a reflection of what I find within me.

The greatest philosophers, like Plato and Leibniz, are the ones who have shown us that each person carries the universe within their own consciousness. It is as if all the knowledge in the world exists to teach me about myself. It is as if all the actions that take place in the world exist to enable me to become myself.

Even more so, each person carries within themselves the entire humanity, of which they are the culmination and origin at every moment. This is keenly felt during periods of crisis and moments of lucidity. It is evident that it takes all of humanity to make one person, and that each person is responsible for all of humanity. There is nothing that demonstrates the solidarity of all people and the impossibility of solitude more strongly.

However, it happens that a person who withdraws into solitude feels more closely connected to other people than someone who lives among them. The person in solitude encounters only a few individuals who separate them from the rest of humanity, and the presence of their body and the movements of self-love constantly force them to collide.

But each person carries within themselves the entirety of time. Not only do they go through childhood, adulthood, and old age, but at every moment, they experience the three moments of time in which everything is born, grows, and perishes—a direct experience of creation itself. The elderly person already exists within the child who still persists within the elderly person, and the adult who does not want to be either one is both of them at the same time: they are the balance between the two. And in relation to everything that passes, I am both a child and an elderly person at the same time.

There is more. All the people who lived before me are present within me and constantly make their voices heard. All those who will come after me lean over me, whispering in my ear and pulling me along with them. All those who live with me today, even those who are farthest from me, are present beside me and never cease to speak to me when I think I am only listening to myself. The entire humanity acts and speaks within me. In the smallest of my gestures, in the smallest of my thoughts, there is an invisible crowd mixed with me, constantly encouraging or restraining me.

II. Each One Bears the Burden of All.

There is agreement among people only in a positive act where each person takes responsibility for what they are and seeks other beings around them who share the same responsibility, but in the fulfillment of a common work in which the destiny of the world is at stake.

Another person is always myself for whom I am responsible. I cannot completely reject that responsibility onto them. Because in them, it is still a matter of myself. Therefore, I must take my share of everything they do and everything that happens to them, which I cannot sever from what I do and what happens to me. And it is not just from them, but from the entire universe that I must bear the weight.

Thus, there is a responsibility of all people towards the weaknesses of each individual. Those weaknesses are also mine, and they would still be mine even if I believed myself to be above them. It is enough for them to be present in a world that I cannot deny is the one in which I live, meaning it is my own. How could I reject it? How could I escape from it? It is sad to think that one could criticize others in order to elevate oneself at their expense. The slightest criticism you make of someone calls into question humanity itself, which exists within you and within me. Contrary to popular belief, we are not guaranteed to advance when we see others lagging behind because we are also with them, and we see ourselves both ahead and behind ourselves.

We can only act on others by acting on ourselves. And if we were to apply this rule, we would not doubt education, but radically change its principles. It is surprising that education often produces effects opposite to what it aims for. That’s because, although it denies it, education always seeks to act on another being as one would act on an object. But to educate a child is to educate oneself. To reform humanity is to reform oneself first. Other people resist when they see that we seek to advise or impose a good on them to which we ourselves remain strangers. On the other hand, producing that good within ourselves without thinking of others is to grant its benefits to others without intending to, and it generates in them the desire for it and already its possession. This invisible and involuntary effect cannot be reduced to the influence of imitation and example; it is deeper than that—it involves the common essence of humanity down to its roots.

If there is not a single person in the world who is not present in us in some way, we have no right to belittle or condemn anyone without belittling and condemning ourselves.

The life that all the sufferers, all the wretched, all the depressed, and all the degenerates carry within them is also a sacred life that should not be seen merely as connected to ours but whose meaning is given by the care we take for it, which already gives meaning to our own life. Even a simple glance we cast upon it is enough to ennoble it, as if the light in which it is enveloped begins to beautify and free it from its stains. But our own life is also transfigured by it.

Furthermore, it is their misery that unites all people. In happiness, no one needs another. Each person is capable of self-sufficiency. “Bear one another’s burdens,” says the Gospel. Perhaps it is because that burden of another is not imposed on me but it is I alone who choose to take it upon myself that I am the only one who can free them from it.

But what brings us closest to other people, and what prevents us from separating from them, is any fault we have committed toward them or any reproach we have for ourselves regarding them. All beings are tightly linked to one another by the very evil they inflict upon each other, which reveals their unity at the moment they tear it apart.

Finally, the wretched and the sinner have rights over all other people, especially the best and the happiest. They ask them to teach them virtue and happiness.

III. The Same Water for All.

We all draw from the same source of life that makes us who we are. What you are, I could also be through imperceptible changes in circumstances or a subtle shift in my will. Otherwise, I cannot understand you, love you, blame you, or help you.

However, I cannot ignore what separates me from you—the circumstances in which I am not precisely present or the acts of will that I do not precisely carry out. There is an impermeable barrier between you and me, one that I can always push back but never abolish. It protects the secret within each of us that makes us an individual, the initial beginning of ourselves, a being that is constantly generating itself anew, a self as mysterious to me in the past as it is to itself in the future that lies ahead. This interval that separates me from you establishes your independence and, consequently, your very existence. And sometimes, I suffer from being unable to cross it.

But to love another person means to love them in this very independence that separates them from me. Some may say this is a sign of our dual limitation. And without it, love would have nothing to do—it would die before being born, and it could not be consummated without dying. To love is to recognize the presence of two infinities that always limit each other and never cease to interpenetrate.

All people drink the same water, but they do not drink it equally close to the source. All people read from the same book, but it teaches them what they should be rather than what they are. And it is only through contrast that they discover what they lack and, consequently, what they possess.

It is often said that people do not understand each other, that there can be no communion between them. But do they truly understand themselves? Can they truly commune with themselves? One can think, as has often been observed, that the two problems do not differ. Solving one solves the other. There is little difference between people, except in the proportion of the common elements of their nature or in the choices they make, which determine whether they emphasize one aspect or neglect the other.

IV. Others Reveal Us to Ourselves.

I receive nothing from another mind except the power to make discoveries within myself that I would not have made without them. These discoveries may be very different from what they themselves have discovered about me or what I would have discovered in myself if I were alone. A whole new world emerges from this encounter alone, where I shape both my own being and the beings around me. By learning to observe what they are, I learn to recognize what I am, that is, to distinguish between what I could be and what I have managed to become.

Because even though people experience the most diverse states, they recognize in themselves the same faculties of understanding, willing, hating, and loving. They communicate with each other through what they could be, which is even deeper than what they are. And each person still learns from other people, not merely out of curiosity to know them, but to test their own thoughts and embrace within themselves that portion of truth held by others—a truth that expresses the original perspective they have on the world, one that we would not participate in without their mediation.

People constantly look at each other, but they find outside themselves only mirrors in which each person sees only themselves. However, there is nothing that I can think, feel, or do that does not receive a different light when it is reflected in another consciousness. I can only judge myself when I consider myself not as I am or even as another person sees me, but as I would judge myself if I were in the place of someone else who saw me as I am.

Sometimes, in the gaze of another or in their expression and attitude toward us, we perceive the shadow of our actions with even greater clarity than in our own consciousness. Sometimes, in their conduct, we discover aspects of our behavior that we were incapable of perceiving when we acted. Perhaps we should say that we do not bear ourselves, that we only decide to act when we do not see ourselves. We only have the courage to look upon ourselves through the image that another person gives us.

It is not enough to say that others are witnesses for us, showing us who we are. Not only do they provide the distance we lacked to know ourselves, but when we are in their presence, the sense of our own existence shatters into a plurality of different images, each of which reveals a part of our real being, our potential being, who we have been, or who we will be someday, who we could have been and toward whom we have strived while despairing of ever reaching it. Each of us is composed of all these varying relationships between different beings that we carry within ourselves, and the beings surrounding us show us the separate existence of these relationships. Yet, they are like us, and what they show us is never more than one aspect of what they are.

V. It is in Ourselves that We Know All Beings.

It is a very common mistake to think that to know other people it is enough to observe them. But it is within oneself, which is the only being in the world that is always present to us, that each of us knows all beings. It is an object of infinite meditation, this opposition between those who think that there is only knowledge of what is foreign to us and who ask us to study ourselves as a stranger, and those who think that there is only knowledge of oneself [75], where they discover the essence and meaning of everything that initially seemed foreign to them.

However, no one will deny that this activity within us, which is us, requires an encounter to shake it and allow it to be exercised. It is only then that it tears us away from separate existence. Far from exempting us from all contact with other people, it teaches us how to obtain it. We recognize them; what they are, we already summon it; what we do, we can only do it with them. All the ideas that others can think, all the feelings they can experience, we already find them within us in a nascent state. To say that each consciousness contains everything is to say that it is a power to communicate with all things and all beings.

Thus, there is nothing that does not emerge from within ourselves, but it is always in contact with another: which undoubtedly explains that peculiar phrase of Malebranche, that we all need one another although we receive nothing from anyone.

What one could not read in one’s own mind, one reads in another’s. The difficulty lies in applying it to oneself [76]. For we live what we are, and we know what we are not. Only the greatest minds know how to reconcile the two opposites: but such is the ambition of every consciousness, however humble it may be.

One must then approach another consciousness closely enough to be able to hear it, as if we were listening to our own. In the deepest relationships that people can have with one another, there always comes a moment when each considers the other as himself and himself as the other.

We never speak to other people except to ask of them the very thing we perpetually ask of ourselves. And it is the same to convert others and to be converted oneself.

The doubling is the condition and means of this inner dialogue that is constitutive of consciousness. But this doubling is full of instruction. For the self does not become an object to itself, as the proponents of introspection believe. It is another being that emerges within it, a possible being, a being that it may become one day and that is already present within it in some way. But this other being, [77] the other, is there before me, realizing it, embodying it, modifying it or contradicting it through a presence that imposes itself on me and that I cannot reject. Thus, internal doubling is the apprenticeship of my communication with others. It teaches me to go out of myself and to allow another being besides myself to enter. The doubling prepares this kind of self-creation by myself, which is only realized through my relationships with another being.

VI. Beyond Achieved Being.

People agree much less with each other based on what they possess and what they are than based on what they are not yet, that is, based on the possible being that they carry within them and which they think can only be realized through their mutual endeavor.

In myself, in others, I am never in the presence of a complete being that I merely perceive and describe. Men are not made to be known by me any more than I am made to know myself. We are made, each and every one of us, to help one another live, that is, to infinitely broaden, refine, and deepen [78] our own participation in existence. There must be an identity between making ourselves what we are and discovering ourselves. We seek to know ourselves and others only to penetrate, like them, with them, and through them, into a potential world where each of us never ceases to nourish and grow.

The encounter between two men is reduced to a double and silent interrogation. It is so moving precisely because instead of focusing on what they are, it focuses on what they can be, not separately, but together and through each other. The fragility, the mobility of all relationships between people stem from the fact that they are a work that is always being undertaken and that engages the very destiny of the two beings who face each other. And this work depends on us at every moment to interrupt or continue.

We can see this even in blame, which is always ambiguous and can either be directed at what I am, condemning me forever, or at what I do, which is always in question. In the first case, it sanctions a state and creates a rupture; in [78]

the second case, it becomes an opportunity for inner reform and ever deeper communication.

There are infinite possibilities in every person that explain both what separates and opposes them, but also what allows them to understand and harmonize with each other. Each of us only discovers and exercises them through the medium of others. Thus, each person reveals the other to himself: sympathy is born between two beings who may be completely different but who realize at every moment that they could also be similar; from that moment on, communication between them becomes inexhaustible and always new.

VII. Primacy of Relations with Self.

It is therefore understandable that every person always wants to equal the whole. That is what gives him dignity, what makes his relationships with other people so difficult and what should make them so easy. On the surface, the relationships we have with ourselves and with other people are both similar and contradictory. But even this contradiction often hides a [80] similarity. Because there is nothing in others that does not represent something that we also find within ourselves. The hostility we show towards them is often a repulsion towards what we are. What we cannot tolerate in them is a certain image they reflect back to us. The body may take pleasure in the reflection the mirror gives it. It is not the same with the soul: in every portrait shown to it, it recognizes and becomes irritated.

Not only can we say that our relationships with other people are nothing more than an enlarged and visible image of our relationships with ourselves, but also that whoever communicates with oneself communicates with everyone. Whoever is closed off from oneself is closed off from everyone. Not daring to penetrate oneself is refusing to allow anyone to penetrate. The two actions are reciprocal. Each of them is both a cause and an effect in relation to the other.

But there is nothing more beautiful than the identity of the feelings we have towards ourselves and towards others. We know very well that we are always with others as we are with ourselves. It is the same thing: the person who is annoyed with everyone is annoyed with [81] himself first and foremost. It is the same people who persecute others and persecute themselves. It is false to think that one can be content with oneself and not tolerate others, or be troublesome towards oneself and full of consideration for others. How can someone who makes their own unhappiness make others happy? The essential thing is to fulfill our obligations to ourselves. Everything else follows.

The criticisms, the reproaches, the indignation that I direct towards others often hide a protest directed at something I also find in myself, and by exploding, it affects everyone around us, sometimes unjustly and always unintentionally.

Speaking about others, even in the reproaches we make to them, is merely a device for speaking about ourselves. But the faults we accuse them of are our own. By suggesting that we are devoid of them, we sometimes defend ourselves against their attacks. I cannot ascribe the lowest motives to others without already finding their seeds within myself; and depending on the circumstances, I think of exculpating myself or condemning the whole of humanity within me.

Conversely, if we find around us beings who sometimes avoid us, sometimes [82] tolerate us, and sometimes seek us out, it is because they first experience all these movements towards what is similar within them. Sometimes they turn away from it, sometimes they tolerate it, and sometimes they take pleasure in it. Indeed, the way we behave towards others reveals nothing more than the way we behave towards ourselves.

All the relationships I can have with another person must occur on a terrain where there is a real separation observed between us, but which must become the instrument of a possible agreement or identity. What he is is also what I could be, what I already am to some extent. One could say: what I am is precisely what he is not, and what I reject in him is what I do not want to be at any cost. But in doing so, we forget that I reject it in him only because I also find it within myself, where it risks invading everything that I am. Thus, the debate I can have with others only prolongs the debate I always have with myself.

For what we love and what we hate in other people is no different from what we love and hate in ourselves. And there is no being in [83] the world whose encounter does not shed light on me, not so much on what I am but on what I aspire to be. Every relationship I have with another being is an opportunity for me to discover and bring to life the best part of myself. And the more demanding ones are the most loving, for through the lofty idea they have of me, they unintentionally compel me to prove myself worthy.

VIII. Reciprocity.

It is only with other people that I can maintain that reciprocal relationship that does not occur with the things I rely on and modify at will, nor with God who supports and enlightens me, from whom I can receive everything, but to whom I can give nothing.

It seems to be a general law governing relationships between people that the treatment each person receives is what they have desired. Because other people always give us exactly what we give them. And it is always our fault where we are ready to reproach them for theirs.

Anyone who complains of being misunderstood would be surprised [84] if they were told that it is because they refuse to understand others. But it is always the case. And the same can be said of someone who complains of not being esteemed, admired, or loved; love begets love, hate begets hate, and indifference begets indifference.

Thus, all the interactions we have with other people are, for the most sensitive souls, like wounds. But they are primarily wounds to our self-esteem. We always find that others show some indifference towards us; they never show us the absolute interest that we feel for ourselves; we soon realize that they pursue a separate existence to which we remain strangers, and they seem to disregard and despise all those intimate and secret things that are the invisible substance of ourselves.

However, this is the same attitude we have towards them. Are we certain that we take an interest in who they are when we reproach them for not taking an interest in who we are? There are also intimate and secret things within them that we had previously ignored and despised, and they are the same things we find within ourselves and in which [85] they participate with us. If we can perceive them, they will reveal a mysterious kinship between them and us, which we had never suspected, and they will create a mysterious communication between them and us, which we had never sought.

IX. Everything in Everyone.

What complicates judgment of other people is that we can say the most different things about them. Because it has been seen that each person carries within them the totality of human nature. And of which person could it be said that they have accomplished everything they are capable of?

Each of us is made up of good and evil. This should lead us to be tolerant towards others and severe towards ourselves. Because our task is to make ourselves and to accommodate ourselves only to others. In the same vein, we should never be offended by the truth told to us and never offend others with the truth we tell them.

There is a true communion between people only when each person is attentive to the qualities [86] of others and their own faults. But we almost always adopt the opposite attitude. It is this attitude that breeds hatred. It is not our place to condemn others: those we are ready to condemn carry within them some infirmity, and they need our assistance above all. Wisdom commands us to avoid all relationships that embitter and do not help. Regardless of the state of mind in which others find themselves and the state of mind in which we find ourselves, we must always be ready to understand and accept them. The important thing is to do nothing that discourages or diminishes them.

Furthermore, we always forget that the person standing before us is indivisible. We accept and esteem certain parts of themselves. We reject others, despise them, and wish to abolish them. But that is not possible.

X. Identity of Relations with Self and Relations with Others.

Within each being, there is an infinite multiplicity of powers that correspond to the very multiplicity of consciousnesses that find their place in the world. And by pushing things further [87], it can be said that there is an identity between the society of different powers within each consciousness and the society formed by the most diverse consciousnesses among themselves.

Thus, the secret of the universe lies in the indivisible communication of each consciousness with itself and of all consciousnesses with each other. It can be readily agreed that our relationships with other human beings are quite similar to the relationships we have with our own thoughts, and that we must turn away from certain individuals just as we turn away from certain thoughts. Within us and outside of us, there are encounters that inspire a sort of horror: they embody our guilty conscience. And one must behave with evildoers as one does with one’s own evil thoughts: either tame them or flee from them. But just as there are thoughts that debase us, there are others that exalt us, which is why ideas have been compared to good and bad angels that inhabit the souls of men, lifting them up or dragging them down, uniting them or separating them.

Even our sympathy and hostility towards others are an image of the battles fought within us between opposing powers. [88] For these powers themselves, we show ourselves sometimes complacent and sometimes anxious. They inspire both trust and fear in us. And we take sides among them just as we take sides around us in choosing our friends. Thus, when people fight against each other, we seem to recognize in an externalized form the battles waged between the different parts of our nature.

CHAPTER V. Being and Seeming: Society.

I. Two Societies, Visible and Invisible.

When we consider social life, it sometimes seems to impose constraints on individuals, restricting their movements, and at other times it appears to provide them with expansion, liberating them from their limits. In reality, it subjects bodies to a common restrictive law that forbids encroachment, but it opens up a broader domain for minds, where they continually enrich themselves. In this sense, it must be said that it is always simultaneously a discipline and an inspiration.

There are two kinds of society: a visible society and an invisible society; the former provides a kind of inverted image of the latter. There is nothing in the visible society that can satisfy us and that is not both a path and an obstacle with regard to the invisible society, which it claims to replace and fulfill.

In the visible society, all relationships are external and superficial; they only concern what is shown. They only reach within the individual what makes them an individual and not a specific individual. And within man, it only concerns the function to be exercised, the duty to be fulfilled. But there is only a real society where one individual begins to encounter another individual, unique like them in the world, where, by mutually penetrating their secret, they discover with wonder that it is common to them. Then, it is true, it seems that all the relationships that are properly called social are interrupted as if they become useless. They become nothing more than a derisory shadow of the others. Individuals forget that they are part of a material society, while for so many men there is no other society. They can be called asocial. But they constitute the essence of any real society. Because there are only real relationships between men that are based either on the spontaneity of natural instinct or on the simplicity of spiritual grace. The former engender war if they do not subject themselves to the artifice of opinion, custom, and law, whereas the latter engender a communion that liberates them from their limits.

Therefore, there are also only two ways to establish unity among men: from the outside, through discipline, or from within, through love. In the first case, the will is subjected, and in the second case, it is conquered. In the first case, it is always ready to separate, submitted but rebellious, and in the second case, it is always ready to consent, conquered but wanting to be.

II. Sociability, Superficial and Deep Connection.

Sociability is a form of entertainment that, according to Pascal, remedies the boredom that seizes all men when they are alone. But it also happens that the society of other men becomes a source of boredom for me: and it is always when they are together that they are most bored. It seems that the advantages of sociability can be explained differently. It gives men a kind of security; it diverts them from the solitude they fear because it exposes them to the unknown of the outside and the inside, against which they always seek support. This support is almost physical, and it is enough that it brings them the forgetfulness of their worries. In reality, the solitary person assumes their entire life, while the social person always entrusts part of it to others.

There is much vanity in the impulse that drives us towards others due to our inability to remain with ourselves. And that is why we often only have superficial relationships with others; entertainment does not go beyond that. Sometimes, this mental activity provoked by the presence of others resembles a fire that flares up with the wind and almost immediately falls, leaving only ashes behind.

We must avoid all superficial communications that only concern appearances. They deceive us about the true ones, prevent them, and often satisfy us and take their place. This is a fall that even the best can succumb to. But this is the true surrender in life. And if the word “bourgeoisie” has a negative meaning, it is that one. But the mark of true aristocracy is not being satisfied with the surface or appearance; it is knowing that the depth of our relationships with others faithfully reflects the depth of our relationship with ourselves.

III. Apparent Life and Deep Life.

There are almost only two categories of men: those in whom being surpasses appearing and those in whom appearing surpasses being. There are very few, and perhaps none, in whom the balance is achieved. Thus, the man who appears great when he is facing other men becomes very small when facing himself.

Some seek to appear, being concerned only with visible effects and others' opinions. Others are only concerned with the inner self, disregarding anything that exists outside. It can be thought that they prefer being to appearing. However, being and appearing must also be reconciled, and in appearing, there should be an opening to a being that it conceals and reveals.

Some believe that in order to enrich our inner life, we must restrict our outer life. Others, on the contrary, believe that it is our life among men that nourishes our secret life. But the mark of wisdom is to reach the point where our two lives permeate each other so closely and act upon each other so continuously and subtly that they cannot be distinguished.

The opposition lies between those who think that there is nothing within man that is worthwhile unless expressed and manifested, and those who think that there is nothing outside of him that is worthwhile unless internalized and spiritualized.

A person’s value always lies in the difference they know how to make between being and appearing, between the authentic life they live and the opinion that shows them. The famous maxims, “Caute, Bene vivere, bene latere,” are not inspired by cowardly prudence, but by a proper appreciation of the difference between being and appearing, which obliges us to preserve our secret being and prevent appearances from betraying it.

IV. Elegance.

One should not despise elegance, as everyone can sense that it is both internal and external. One seeks only to express the other, but it also imitates and betrays it. Undoubtedly, it can be said that it is only an appearance, and in its most perfect form, it shows no effort. But this effort itself depends on us; there is no need to exclude it. It can indeed be an effect of self-love and the desire to present a pleasing facade. But even that should not be despised. There is no person who does not have to defend themselves against nature and laissez-faire. Others have a relationship with me only through the appearance I show them. It attests to both respect for others and oneself. And in the desire to please, there is love for others as well as for ourselves. It should not be said that faithfully reproducing the image of what I am is sufficient. What I am is also what I want to be. And by acting on the outside, I also act on the inside. There is a cycle that always repeats itself. And our appearance, like our conduct, testifies to the dialogue between nature and the will that reflects our inner life and compels it to be realized, that is, to be. We spend our lives repairing the misery of our condition. It happens that people know nothing more about us than appearances, but in those appearances, they seek not only evidence of what we are but also of our disposition towards them. Thus, elegance, like politeness, can indicate excessive artifice, a desire to please that goes beyond the reasons for pleasing, and self-interest that surpasses our concern for others. But it also happens the opposite, that in certain individuals, there is such natural and profound distinction and delicacy that they exceed all efforts of will, making them appear simultaneously powerless and useless.

V. Modesty.

Modesty is the virtue that demands that being always surpasses appearing in each of us.

Vanity is a compensation for weakness. It demands in the realm of appearing what is lacking in the realm of being. Thus, it gives everything to appearance and opinion, skillfully combining these two characteristics so that it places the opinion others have of us far above the opinion we have of ourselves.

We clearly see the opposition between being and appearing and the imitation of being through appearing when we reflect on the two senses of the word sufficiency. For sufficiency, when well-founded, is the supreme virtue, and when it is not, it is the most wretched and ridiculous vice.

Men know well that their being is a hidden being and not a being that is shown, and their self-love is so subtle that they often succeed in making us admire them for what they hide from us even more than for what they show us, and perhaps for what they hide from us behind what they show us. If what they hide from us were shown to us, we would cease to admire it. For we know well that all greatness is secret, and so it is by what they show us that we always belittle them. But to make us admire what is hidden from us, it must be shown to us, and in showing it, it simultaneously fails to achieve its purpose twice.

We must always interrupt the immediate impulse that leads us to want to appear greater than we are. This is a sign of vulgarity. True distinction lies in appearing just as we are or not wanting to appear at all, as if appearing were a given and not our concern.

One who is concerned with appearance is always unhappy and powerless because it is incapable of satisfying them. The reality beneath it overwhelms them through neglect. One who is only concerned with reality and disregards appearance does not leave the ground, which constantly supports them, while the other pursues clouds.

There are very few people who, in what they do, are interested in anything more than the appearance of what they do. How could they not be inclined to do so for two reasons: the real is what is seen and touched, and nothing in the world matters except what others approve or applaud. But the meaning and value of things, which is their very being, lie elsewhere, namely in an invisible and secret essence that only the mind, through appearance, is capable of reaching and producing.

VI. Power of Conversation.

We never fully measure the power of conversation. It is through conversation that beings reveal and conceal themselves, where their nature and will associate and oppose each other, where they inadvertently testify to their indifference, timidity, the hope of an always-disappointed reciprocity, a desire to give or receive that always fears expressing itself, an envy or hatred that wraps its blows to ensure impunity. Conversation, the communion that seeks itself or the war that masks itself.

Sometimes, it is thought that there is only real conversation between men that possesses an intimate character and resembles a confession. However, if I only talk about myself, about what is uniquely individual in me, the feelings I experience, the circumstances I find myself in, and the events that happen to me, I separate myself from you instead of uniting with you. I invite you to enter a part of myself that should remain separate, strictly unique, and incommunicable. There is a kind of indecency and baseness in doing so. I can only speak to you about what is common between you and me or what is even superior to the human and appears as a divine source of possibilities from which both you and I draw everything that constitutes our being, everything that drives us to act. Then you recognize yourself in what I say to you. You recognize your own feelings, your situation, and the very conditions of your own life. We are united to each other above ourselves in the utmost discretion. For the one who listens to us, we say nothing but what is general, abstract, and far removed from application. But let us not be mistaken. Each person feels that it concerns themselves.

Even love cannot escape this supreme law, even sensual love. Only extreme modesty can reach the extreme intimacy. The essence of immodesty lies in only concerning the body, that is, the appearance that is merely the appearance of nothing, for I cannot breach the interior through the exterior. The clothing that covers me only hides my body so that you can speak to my soul. But in the soul itself, I can only have communication with you if I surpass in you that finished and already individualized being, which is a kind of isolated and impermeable block with which you refuse, despite me, to merge. And if I awaken within myself and within you the being that is always being made or remade, that is always in question, that lies on the border between the virtual and the real, and that always discovers in itself that infinite possibility in which all free beings are rooted, constantly revealing themselves to each other, and where each of them continuously chooses the very being they will become.

VII. Sincerity and Sociability.

It is often thought that when two consciences are both sincere, they penetrate so deeply into their mutual intimacy that there is nothing they hide from each other.

Is sincerity then to show myself to everyone as I see myself when I am alone? Is it to bring forth all the movements that arise within my consciousness and often surprise and disturb me? Perhaps this is what is called cynicism. However, it cannot be denied that all these inner impulses are precisely subjected to a double control within me before I accept and make them my own, and outside of me before I agree to give them a place in the world and assume their effects. Thus, it is also a violation of sincerity, sometimes by deficiency and sometimes by excess, to let them act in the shadow by refusing to admit them to oneself and show them to all eyes before they have become completely ours.

There is a measure to be held between what we keep and what we show, which varies according to circumstances and individuals. It traces a winding line between being and appearing, which serves to define the differences between characters and the degree of possibility in communication between two beings, in such a way that one cannot remain below without accusing a separation, nor go beyond without causing a wound.

Naturally, in another person, we see what they show us, that is, what has taken shape in them and presents an individual and complete character. But what we see of ourselves is a secret being, without form, still a pure possibility, and what we show expresses it, but always betrays it. Hence the reproach that we are always entitled to make to others and the tribute that we are always tempted to pay to ourselves.

The relationships we have with other people necessarily dissociate being from appearing. For being is in us as it is in them, but appearing is in what we show them and in what they show us. It is beautiful to want being and appearing to be one. But it is not possible. It does not take into account the metaphysical difference in the relationships that each one may have with oneself or with others. For it is equally mistaken to want to appear to oneself or to ask others to show their being. Hence comes the complexity and infinite subtlety of the relations that unite people, the impossibility of confusing sincerity with oneself and sincerity with others, the difficulty of practicing these delicate virtues called discretion and politeness. Rousseau was a nature both too sensitive and too crude to succeed in this. He thought that one had to be unsociable to be sincere.

We desire to be loved, esteemed, admired, and we suffer from not being so. That is perhaps the origin of all our evils. These are therefore evils of opinion. But the essence of wisdom is to want to be nothing more than what we are, which is more difficult than one might think. For it is a question of discovering all the possibilities within us and putting them into action. As for the opinion that others have of us, we must have enough strength to traverse the world without needing to worry about it and even accept being misunderstood, hated, or despised, if that is the result of our sincerity and the natural consequence of what we are.

Social life leads to the paradox against which our conscience constantly protests: that what we appear to be truly constitutes what we are. Everything else is only virtuality, that is, illusion.

VIII. Playing a Role.

Playing the comedy is transforming oneself into pure appearance. It is repudiating the idea of a serious and authentic life in which our eternal destiny is engaged. The 18th century delighted in it. Everything was for them banter, a banter that did not exclude sentimentality, a sort of search and almost always a comedy of sentiment, quite distinct from humor, which is instead a kind of modesty of sentiment that does not dare to admit it.

The society that men form with each other is based on appearance, not on being. How could it be otherwise since it is appearance that reveals them to each other?

And this should allow us to understand what is called the world, which is also social life. It is only there that one can shine, which is the ultimate object of desire for many people. And one only shines through the play of appearances precisely where one knows how to detach them from the reality they convey. Hence the role of anecdote or witticism, which only have piquancy by opposing to what is shown the small amount that corresponds to it. Alas, this is not always done to ridicule what is shown, but to testify that there is nothing more to it. Thus, man experiences a bitter and liberating pleasure in laughing at his own misery. Such is the essence of the world and social life, which collapse when it is otherwise, it is only a dissipating foam. But in solitude, if we know how to carry it amidst men, being is found behind appearance, and with it, silence, simplicity, nature, and friendship.

There are two forms of irony: one is a kind of victory of truth over appearance. It resides in the mere gaze, which, without any words or smiles accompanying it, measures the distance between what is shown and what one is, between what one pretends and what one feels. It is the cruelty of pure light and always exercises itself with greater penetration against oneself than against anyone else. But there is another form of irony that is, so to speak, the opposite of that one. It is the one that disqualifies appearance because of the impossibility of recognizing the inner greatness that manifests itself and of rising to it.

IX. The Role of the Body.

There is no shame other than having a body that exposes us to the gaze of others and exposes us to their grasp. But that is also the source of our vanity. But what is more shameful than what one is ashamed of is the shame one feels about it.

It is through the mere appearance of their bodies that men, as soon as they meet, immediately feel separated or united, enemies or friends, inhabitants of the same world or of two distant worlds. These are very great signs that should not be belittled. The body is the visible spirit that reveals its presence to me and, by incarnating itself, shows and acts.

Sight does not reveal to us the reality of the body. It is said that it only reveals its appearance because it assumes distance instead of abolishing it. But it thus preserves us from the coarseness of material contact. It transfigures matter in such a way as to make it a pure, already spiritual image, almost an idea. What is an idea, etymologically speaking, if not the visible, a visible to which the gaze of the spirit and not the eye applies? But the transition from one to the other is almost imperceptible, not only metaphorically: it is enough that the object moves a little further away, and already the light that reveals matter dissolves it. But the light of the spirit converts the image of the object into pure idea.

And of all reality, one can say what Bergson says with great delicacy, albeit in a somewhat romantic language, of a physiognomy, that it can only be seen in all its perfection as a beautiful alabaster vase when it is illuminated from within.

X. Transcending Appearance.

One must break off all relations with another person when they bring us neither pleasure nor profit, which may be the same thing for someone who gives these two words a strong enough meaning. This means that there, like everywhere else, appearance must be dissolved and all chains imposed by the situation or the event must be broken. Alternatively, one must be capable not only of enduring them without irritation and boredom but also of transfiguring them and turning this material presence that constrains us into a secret spiritual complicity, so that the passerby we encounter becomes a companion who consents to walk the path with us.

The drama of relationships between men is that they oblige me to adjust to the appearance they give me and to offer them only my own appearance. In both cases, this appearance must be traversed. Without it, we would always be ignorant of ourselves; with it, we always deceive ourselves. But sometimes it appears so transparent that we cease to perceive it: we see only what it concealed from us and what it now reveals to us. Only then does intimacy begin. We must act toward other men as if we only had spiritual relationships with them, which are the only true ones, while all others are relationships of appearance that conceal and falsify them instead of discovering and showing them. But what do we gain from it, since no one is deceived?

Our real relationships with other men are relationships between what they are and what we are, between our essence and theirs. They remain the same when we are far from them and even when we do not know them. The events in which we are involved, the mutual actions we can perform, change nothing. But sometimes we fail to recognize it. We then live in the world of appearance or manifestation, with which the true world never coincides. But sometimes we make every effort to produce such a coincidence, without succeeding; we force appearance, we multiply manifestations, we do what Pascal recommends, “take holy water,” but being resists and cannot be seduced. We obtain nothing of value if we are not the same person when we are alone as when we are with others. For we know well enough that we can have no other communication with them than the ones we have with ourselves, that is, with those powers of ourselves whose seed and blossoming we see within us at different times.

CHAPTER VI. Discretion.

The greatest art is to create real communication among people. It is the result of a gift or grace. And the essence of art is to awaken this gift or grace that always awaits deep within our consciousness, not to try to surprise, force, or imitate them because that reveals their absence. There is always a point where communication refuses to occur, either due to our fault or the fault of others. To preserve and not corrupt or transform it into its opposite, one must know how to abstain and withdraw. It is both a mark of discretion and charity.

Discretion is a delicate art that must be carried to the point of indifference, yet it is its opposite. It is an attentive indifference always ready to be broken. The interest we have in someone who intends to keep their secret and only reveal it to the one they have chosen is more oppressive than hatred, and indifference appears as true charity.

There is an inviolability of intimacy and freedom within ourselves and in others that must be respected, without causing indifference, harshness, or coldness in us. But the boundary is subtle and easily crossed in both directions.

Even the wisest among us find it difficult not to abuse their strength or virtue towards others. It requires great fervor and charity.

One must not solicit or provoke intimacy when it refuses or delays to manifest. Friendship, love, and that spiritual understanding so perfect and silent that it deserves neither of those names cannot be the result of willpower. In the purest action, it seems to happen without our doing: we simply have to welcome or receive it.

There is no true connection between people except through a mutual consent that cannot be forced. But the miracle is when, without being forced, it cannot be refused. This means that people give too much importance to willpower. Even when they speak of good will, they show more modesty because they limit this will to a consent they choose to grant. For us, everything should be reduced to an effort of attention seeking to recognize in the world a profound order, a mysterious agreement between essences.

Relations with others are often corrupted when we demand from them what they cannot bear. It is an act of charity not to compel them to exceed their own limits. The problem is to determine the extent to which my communication can go with another being and never exceed it: if I surpass it, I break it. One must not ask too soon for signs of sympathy from others that we do not yet feel for them, or that seem only possible or desired. It often prevents such sympathy from arising.

II. Knowing How to Abstain.

In our interactions with others, we do not always perceive the great charity that lies in abstaining. It is a charity that appears as indifference but is precisely its opposite, which suffers from being mistaken for it yet consents to it. It can be the culmination of respect and delicacy, the result of the most immediate and effective interest that renounces all apparent effects, the testimony of the most vigilant love that dispenses with all testimonies. This becomes evident when compared to false eagerness and even sometimes with sincere eagerness, whose insistence is sometimes unbearable. But to abstain, in many cases, is the most perfect assistance I can give you—an all-encompassing presence that does not distinguish itself from absence, a true attention to yourself, supremely respectful of your freedom, integrity, the play of all your powers, and that perfect disposition and enjoyment of yourself where no shadow projected upon you by the mere thought of my existence can tarnish or divide it.

There is a perfection of charity that consists of allowing others to grow according to their own genius. Before considering helping them, acting upon them, even imperceptibly, we owe them nothing more than attentive respect. It happens that they are grateful to us even for our indifference. But the discretion of a sympathetic gaze is to them like the gaze of God—it is already a grace that enriches them. If everyone looked toward God and not always toward others, far from disregarding others, they would also become like a god to them.

III. Silent Understanding.

We are never quite cautious or moderate enough in our interactions with other people. It is when we love the most that we fear the most—fear of asking for too much or offering too much. It is as if every being around us is enclosed in a fragile and almost sacred solitude that we always fear tearing or desecrating. This solitude itself is circumscribed by a barrier more sensitive than the most delicate epidermis. Our task is always to respect it rather than penetrate it. Relations between people are what they should be only when each of them discovers in the other a solitude that resembles their own and, knowing it is there, affirms it instead of breaking it.

Perhaps this is the highest and most perfect form of communication that can occur between two separate beings. They only begin to understand each other when there is nothing public between them, when everything between them remains secret, and each one becomes aware, thanks to the other, of their own secret.

Solitude contains within it all possible relationships with all people. Even within society itself, it is this solitude that we must rediscover. Intimacy between beings only begins when each of them, for all the others, is not a means to escape solitude but, on the contrary, a means to enter it. Most people have never experienced this. We seek to multiply our relationships with others, thinking that to exist means to show ourselves and even express ourselves. Hence, the prestige of speech, causing all the silent ones to be misunderstood or distrusted. But most often, we only have a connection with bodies, which separates us from God and consequently from other people. Likewise, speech alters that pure intimacy with ourselves that writing preserves when it does not try to imitate speech. In its true purpose, writing is silent—it is a sealed secret, more than it is uttered.

IV. Perfect Confidence.

The belief that people are separate and forever incapable of understanding each other leads some to keep silent about everything they think, while others speak freely as if they were alone. Yet, even in our reserve, there is often a strong presence of self-importance. Thus, we hide certain things as if they were ridiculous because we hide them, and they only become ridiculous once revealed.

Even the man of the world, whom Balthasar Gracian calls the “discreet,” is included. Our relationships with other people require delicacy in the dual approach and safeguarding of our intimacy and theirs.

There is a certain taste for confidences that repels us because it seems to violate the law of secrecy, which is the supreme law of conscience. And indeed, when intimacy becomes real and communion begins to establish itself, one can no longer speak of confidences. Discretion itself is a withheld confidence, and in confidence, there is sometimes a premature and awkward appeal to a communion that is prevented by assuming it when it should be created.

There are things within us that are so secret they must remain a secret to us, things we dare not even confess to ourselves. There is an extreme point of modesty where it disappears. It is then that our communication with others is most perfect. Nothing remains of the shame we have in showing what we are, the risk of distorting by a movement of self-love our most natural state. It is our solitude that expands and deepens. It is our inner silence that becomes audible.

V. Virtue of Timidity.

There is an extreme point of reserve or modesty that makes us hesitate to project our actions into the world, as if they suddenly became impure, as if they revealed, exposed, or altered our most secret being, as if, by making it public, we tore it away from itself, as if, through our fault, it suddenly disturbed the order of things that we did not author and fear perverting. And this is nothing when it comes to acting upon the material world; we only change the spectacle. But when it comes to acting upon other beings, it seems that we enter into rivalry with God, who created them and gave them their freedom.

Yet, the secret of the world is only revealed to the timid, those who are always at the source, at the point where the self is born to itself, oscillates between being and nothingness, enters the world, and ceases to be solely an individual to become a manifested being, a being for others. Virtue itself dies when it shows too much confidence, whether in action or words.

But it is natural that the most delicate beings are always wounded by the most vulgar ones. In their presence, they experience an ambiguous suffering—finding them as they are and feeling themselves so insecure in comparison.

How much reticence, refusal, and modesty, how much movement of self-importance, pretense, and apparent insincerity among those who fear showing what they are, to the extent of making others believe they are not what they are. Yet, we suspect in their countenance, which is revealed to all, the faceless intimacy they carry deep within themselves and that every face continually betrays.

It is the most beautiful ideas one has had that also cause the most timidity. We blush to express them, both out of fear that other people may not be able to rise to their level and a suspicion that they themselves have had some familiarity with them and despised them, and because of the overly personal touch they make us feel, which, when revealed, becomes an open wound.

VI. Burning Gaze.

We only truly know someone’s face when we observe them while they sleep. They are present then in all their possibilities, none of which, being realized, hides all the others. They no longer watch themselves. It is as if they were naked. And there is a certain immodesty in catching them in their sleep, for we see them as they are—divinely liberated from all the concerns of wakefulness or hideously enslaved to them in an immobile grimace that betrays them. It is no longer the person we have known; it is the person as they are, with a transparent face that alternately fills us with delight and horror.

Modesty and sympathy must prevent us from looking too intently and too penetratingly at spirits and bodies. Insistence creates discomfort, penetration causes injury.

It happens that someone else’s gaze or words suddenly reveals us to ourselves without them having the slightest suspicion, in such a bright and harsh light that we feel a prudish alarm as if our secret life, without any external appearance, suddenly feels violated.

Someone who dares not look another person in the eye is not always lacking in frankness; often, it is an excess of modesty, either because they fear being penetrated and, so to speak, exposed or because they feel their own gaze is too intrusive or burning.

There is a modesty of knowledge, as if we know that being carries its own secret within it and that knowledge suddenly exposes it, meaning it becomes public. But there is an attentive and constant presence that abolishes boundaries instead of violating them, dissolving all reactions of self-importance and rendering two beings transparent to each other in a gentle light that allows nothing to escape.

VII. Resorting to Silence.

The relationships we have with others are of the most delicate nature because they involve not only words and actions but also different types of silence and the mutual exercise of our most mysterious powers.

Resorting to silence is a sign of the futility of words and the measure of their impotence, either because communion has become perfect and no longer requires them (in fact, they sometimes disturb rather than serve it) or because they reveal and exacerbate a separation that is irreparable from the start. Silence then becomes a kind of remedy. Therefore, conversation must cease as soon as one feels even the slightest sense of love. If it continues, it is only a facade that conceals it instead of expressing it.

True conversation only exists when one can understand each other with half-words—it must always remain on the threshold of intimacy and silence. When I speak with irony, you must be very attentive, for it undoubtedly concerns very intimate matters that I cannot speak of otherwise.

Even the most intimate relationships themselves are difficult to endure without a touch of humor, where the individual, detaching themselves from what they feel, refuses to be deceived and constantly recognizes the imperfection of their state.

VIII. The Boundaries of Intimacy.

No one can speak about what moves them or simply about what happens to them as if it were about someone else and not themselves. Therefore, it is better not to question another person about what affects them too deeply. The most intimate parts of one’s own being or another’s can only be delicately addressed by always speaking of a universal and abstract object where each person recognizes, judges, and engages themselves as if it were solely about them. Whether one speaks or listens, it is necessary to avoid venturing into a territory where each person seems too obviously designated to the attention of the other in their separate existence; here, one must fear always imposing or enduring some humiliation. The only ground where individuals can understand each other is the one where each person seeks to attain their own individual essence in that which is common to all. I can only reach the most secret point of intimacy, both in what is mine and what is yours, where my secret is also yours.

One should never share what [126] belongs solely to oneself. Even love does not exempt itself from this rule. It perishes when that which cannot be protected is revealed. Modesty is its safeguard, not as one might say, because of the mystery that surrounds it, but because of the protection it provides to my individual being, which ceases to be mine as soon as it is uncovered. It then becomes a pure spectacle, a thing that, like all things, is external, anonymous, and public. It is the end of love, whose life is all about intimacy and which, in the body itself, abolishes the spectacle and seeks the echo of an invisible intimacy.

IX. What Should Be Reserved.

It is a mistake to think that everything should be shown. It is blindness not to be able to distinguish between the public and the private, and to believe that by triumphing over the separation of individuals, love itself has nothing to keep silent or hide. There are, so to speak, secrets of the body that cannot become a spectacle without offending delicacy. In our own soul, there are things that we do not even confess to ourselves, not so much because of the shame we would feel if we saw them, but because by naming them, they would take on a form, a prominence that would distort them, make them different than they are. There are possibilities that arise within us and that we will never fully realize, even in thought; intentions that intersect within us almost unconsciously, fleeting dreams that dissipate immediately. I do not possess words light enough to evoke them without giving them a body that distorts their weight. I have no other recourse than to suggest them through almost silent and practically useless words, but ones I cannot defend myself from, and they create a kind of common atmosphere between others and myself, without ever risking revealing what I have deemed unworthy of being assumed within me. A desire for communication that is too narrow, pursued beyond the limits of the legitimate independence of individuals, both concerning the body and the freedom that has not yet chosen among the possibilities I carry within me, always threatens to separate beings rather than unite them.

The nature of consciousness is to be made of emerging states. It is very difficult to always treat them [128] as if they have already reached maturity because it requires a lot of time and many events that are sufficient to disappoint even the most perceptive eye. Conversely, suppressing an emerging feeling and yet keeping it under the gaze of attention instead of expressing it sometimes aggravates it and sometimes abolishes it.

Each of us is like a child who should be judged as a child and not as the adult they will one day become.

CHAPTER VII. Considering Others.

I. Never Inflicting Harm.

One should not be too rigid in the presence of others, lest one becomes closed off to them as well. Recognizing in others a separate existence from mine, showing genuine courtesy towards them or lending myself to them, which are very similar attitudes, means ceasing to collide with them as an already realized being, accomplished before and without them, over whom they would have no influence. It means returning to a state of pure potentiality in front of them, so that I can fully realize myself only through them and in my relationship with them. Thus, one should never oppose the opinion of others, but rather embrace it in order to influence it. And sometimes, it is our own opinion that is influenced.

Our wisdom is best tested in how we treat others. It involves restraining all negative reactions, such as anger or contempt, by considering the irreducible diversity of individuals, the irresistible movements of character, the infinite distance that separates the finite from the infinite and equalizes all finite beings. We must avoid creating a rift between them and us, which would forever render them strangers to our own life. Closing off the future before us and prematurely withering away possibilities that have not yet awakened in them and in us, possibilities for which we could have been intermediaries.

We must abide by the rule of yielding to others when our self-esteem is at stake because by triumphing over their self-esteem, we also triumph over the self-esteem of others, which dissipates into emptiness through an all too easy victory. However, this rule does not apply when justice is at stake because if we can do nothing about the injustice of intent, we strengthen and confirm it, becoming accomplices when we refuse to fight against it.

Sensitivity is the result of the clash of two self-esteems. We must strive to overcome it within ourselves and handle it delicately in others.

There is a golden rule that is always forgotten: we should strive to never hurt anyone. It is the mark of utmost delicacy. It is sufficient to create an invisible and spiritual communion among people. But it does not serve the interests of self-esteem, which needs to prove its existence and power through the wounds it feels or inflicts. In itself and in others, it always seeks to inflame and intensify them, as if life had an acuteness then that far surpasses happiness. Perhaps there is a certain inner state in which it could establish itself, preventing us from experiencing or causing such wounds.

However, it is believed that being considerate of others is a sign of weakness when the opposite is true. Weakness lies in feeling hindered by others and wanting to diminish or destroy them. But to be considerate, one needs a great deal of tact, intelligence, finesse, strength of character, and a power of sympathy that surpasses even the most cunning calculations.

II. Grievances and Contradiction.

People are never considerate enough of the sensibilities of others. In contrast to indifference, which pushes another being out of the world we inhabit and annihilates them in our eyes, there are two extremes: the negative interest we show towards others to make them feel our difference, constantly inflicting wounds on them, and the exquisite delicacy that makes us always put ourselves in their place, even fearing to touch them, as if any external contact would tear them apart and violate their secrets.

We should never complain about others or reproach them. It would preclude any future communication with them. There is no person in the world who is not, to me, an opportunity for trial and improvement, just as I am to them. We must accept, endure, and, if possible, rejoice in their existence and their unique qualities. No words spoken in the presence of others should sound to their ears like a grievance we hold against them, but rather like a truth that brings them unexpected enlightenment and solace.

Contradiction arises from self-esteem. Contradicting almost always shows that we do not accept others, that we reject their existence, that we do not want them to be an “I” like us, although different from us. We refuse the perspective from which they contemplate reality: we do not consent to place ourselves there. We remain convinced that we are the only ones who see things as they are. However, truth belongs to everyone and no one; no consciousness is wide enough to contain it. The vision I have of the world is always fragmented. I need all other human beings to enrich it. And this divergence between the representations that people have of things, which only sets them apart, should serve to unite them.

To truly understand other people, we must always take their side, strive to see things from their perspective, enter into complicity with them for a moment, and feel ourselves becoming them.

III. Politeness.

It is often believed that kindness and courtesy are virtues of society that diminish individuality and, ultimately, tend to abolish it. As if individuality can only be preserved through separation and conflict. However, these outward and social virtues have more intimacy and personal significance than one might think: they express in each of us our most delicate essence, which is experienced and constituted not in solitude but in the infinitely sensitive contact between our own self and the selves of others.

The very act of self-effacement is sometimes the result of a proud and disdainful solitude and a jealous self-esteem that refuses to acknowledge itself. But sometimes, it is the result of extreme discretion in encountering an intimacy that we know is unique to each one of us and yet is shared among us.

It is said that I cannot have a real relationship with another person unless I am facing them as I face myself. But that is not enough to say. Because sometimes, when I am alone, I observe myself, watch over myself, and restrain myself. And it is sometimes easier to be simple and natural with someone else than with oneself. How can one be otherwise unless one abandons oneself? However, there is a kind of contradiction in abandoning oneself when alone. One can only abandon oneself in front of or to another person because in doing so, one gives oneself.

Politeness, often seen as a constraint we impose upon ourselves, is nothing if it is not a relaxation of the separated self that begins to abandon itself. Even the most artificial politeness still attempts to be an image of abandonment. But it is a false image that clearly reveals the impotence of the will to produce it. And that is why politeness can be used to highlight separation rather than abolish it.

Perhaps it should be said that there is something cruel about truth, either because of the spectacle it reveals to us or because of the demands it places on us. All the artifices of civilization aim to hide it.

Politeness, which should bring gentleness to human interactions, is also a terrible constraint, always harder for the one who endures it than for the one who practices it. Thus, it is always less awkward to offer than to accept and to invite than to respond.

Communication with other human beings is so difficult, it can be so moving, and it deeply involves us that we desire it and fear it at the same time. We try to avoid it or refuse to put it to the test by resorting to politeness or falsehood. But even this is a testimony we pay to it, a starting point for freeing ourselves from the errors of self-esteem that are inseparable from solitude. And we know very well that humans remain crude beings, minerals enclosed within themselves, resistant to all contact until they are shaped and polished by others.

Misunderstandings between human beings, and what is even more serious, the falseness of their relationships, stem from the fact that they only touch the outermost and most superficial parts of their nature. Common politeness does not need to go beyond that. True politeness is the encounter of intimacy where we are truly touched, but in a different sense.

IV. Kindness.

In every person, there is a mixture of selfishness and kindness. The one called wise is the one who knows how to maintain a balance between these two conflicting tendencies. One who does not sense any selfishness within themselves cannot possess kindness because, by ignoring their own self, they also ignore the selves of others. And one who is not afraid to be constantly surprised by kindness does not need selfishness to ever hold within them an existence that would endanger it. Each of these two movements is a defense against the other.

But it is a great prejudice to believe that we cannot enjoy anything without depriving another of the same enjoyment. Kindness, on the contrary, means involving others in the goods we enjoy. However, selfishness, properly understood, should lead us there. It reaches its full potential only by surpassing itself, by self-transcendence. This is evident in the pleasures of love, both sensual and spiritual.

Furthermore, the services we render to others and the gifts we give them do not always originate from our kindness. Sometimes it is self-esteem that inspires us, along with the satisfaction we derive from demonstrating what we can do or what they owe us. However, it is different when, instead of always seeking to give them more, we strive to enhance their own being, that is, the power they have to give themselves everything. Then our actions are truly selfless. They do not call for recognition, that recognition whose testimony is equally difficult to give or receive.

V. Benevolence.

The primary virtue towards others is goodwill, which resides in a gaze turned towards what they could be and is already present in what they are. It is accompanied by a gaze turned towards ourselves, acknowledging how different we are from what we could be. Without goodwill, any contact between two individuals is shattered, and all communication is interrupted.

Thus, we must always interpret the actions of others in a favorable light. Not only does it preserve the possibility of future understanding, which may happen even if we are mistaken in that particular instance, but it can also influence the behavior of the other person and incline their soul towards what we believe we see in them. Yet, people act differently. They joyfully observe the flaws of others, what they lack rather than what they possess, what diminishes and humiliates them, and the movements of their nature rather than those of their spirit. It is a kind of consolation or revenge against ourselves, as we see in ourselves the same or other miseries.

However, love acts differently from self-esteem. When we love someone, that person always surpasses us both in what they possess and in what we believe they can acquire. And when we love someone, we are inattentive to all the weaknesses of their body and soul that remind each of us, so painfully, that we are not purely a spirit or even a pure will.

VI. Mutual Trust.

Two individuals cannot communicate until there is mutual trust between them. But what does this trust consist of? It is like a possibility for each person to be more truly themselves than when they are alone, to see all the barriers that solitude raised around them fall away, to find a welcoming power in which they expand and are received.

However, within this trust, each person ceases to think about themselves or the other. Both only have eyes for spiritual truth. They stop monitoring their own actions or, which is the same, they are fully attentive to them, but only because they seek to discern in them as many traits that target that truth alone.

Some individuals who lock themselves in jealous and resentful solitude simply lack someone who can give them the confidence and openness they need to appear as they are: brimming with life and joy, enthusiasm and charity.

Our only support is the trust of others, and therefore we must always strive to be worthy of it. When we place our trust in someone else, we always fear being deceived, but that is rare. Trusting someone who deceives us makes them hesitate and often changes them.

However, there is a kind of trust that is like a form of knowledge: it arises when we are in the presence of someone whom we know to be reasonable, loyal, or always acting out of duty. But this trust, like respect, never produces an act of love. It reassures us, but it does not engage us. It separates us even more than it unites us; it impedes communication and renders it useless. It entails no risk; it is simply trust in the laws of nature.

VII. The Wounds of Grief.

There is no problem more difficult than knowing how we should behave towards those who bring us sorrow. For they are the cause of a kind of rumination that constantly prevents and darkens our spirit. Thus, it seems that there would be no greater advantage for us than not to be troubled by them, or even to convert this kind of obscure presence that suddenly invades us into strength and light.

We find in a spiritual author who was widely read and practiced in the past the following advice: first, not to complain and not to talk about it to anyone, as if by doing so we risked giving them a kind of material weight they lacked, and at the same time depriving them of the inner secret that allows them to be transfigured—secondly, not to deliberately and complacently think about them, and even to chase away any thoughts that might come to us, which is not easy and is only possible by attaching ourselves to some greater object that makes us forget these wounds, whereas leisure constantly revives them—finally, to cast a look loaded, so to speak, with a favorable prejudice toward those who caused them, instead of turning away from them, which leads us to seek in their behavior a value to which they were attached and to which they sometimes believed they remained faithful even in the very evil they did to us.

We should only take the positive aspects of this advice and not the negative. The important thing is never to accept being transported to the realm of opinion, where things lose their substance and are reduced to their appearance. And this already begins to heal us from all the stings that reach that vanity within us, where everything we are is reduced to the image we project.

This should not be merely a policy of lulling to sleep, as happens in all pain without remedy, from which we try to withdraw our thoughts. Because then we remain sore, and just when we thought we were free, we suddenly feel new pangs that become increasingly acute every day.

But in the case of deep sorrow, we should never think of diverting ourselves. It is a matter of digging it even deeper rather than abolishing it in order to bring to light its true meaning, which illuminates our destiny like a stormy light. As for the person who produces it in us, instead of rejecting them into external darkness, we must seek in them that essence of themselves which is also the best part of themselves, and of which the sorrow we attribute to them is both the expression and the betrayal.

VIII. Virtue of Time.

The difference between people arises from the way they behave towards time and perhaps only from the meaning they give to the word “present.” For some, it is the present that never ceases to elude them and makes their entire life a continuous flight. Whereas for others, it is a present that always subsists and that the variable content of existence diversifies but does not shake or alter. For some, it is the presence of things, and for others, it is my presence to myself.

There is much to be said about the role of fidelity that has been so praised. It is the virtue of time and in a certain sense dominates its scattering; it makes all the moments of our life interconnected, which Descartes taught us to render independent. He refused, through promises, to compromise his freedom in advance, knowing well that it is a present act that always recommences. In reality, it should be a virtue of the heart rather than the will. But the heart does not follow the efforts of the will. And the sincerity of the heart is worth more than a fidelity achieved by the will. It happens that one has once committed oneself to a certain course and wants to remain currently faithful to it, while the heart has detached itself from it, and all the forces of our spirit are constantly directed elsewhere.

Fidelity and oath are only precautions by which those who currently hold us want to chain us forever.

The role of the moment is not to keep the memory of the past but to immerse us in eternity. It is to eternity that we must be faithful, not to time, and often it requires, in order to be faithful to it, infidelity to time.

I can perceive the beauty of the world in its entirety only if my life begins anew every morning, if it is a perpetual birth. And then the entire past is as if it were nothing to me. It should not be said that I forget it, but rather that I annihilate it.

And even in the relationships I have with others, as can be seen quite clearly in love, what I have known about the person who is standing before me is like nothing compared to what their mere presence brings me today. Love, they say, is nourished by memories; but it is when the presence is absent, where all the memories vanish at once, or perhaps condense.

But the fact that I can resurrect this past, which is nothing, through thought is precisely what is a new miracle, a miracle of every moment.

And there are two very different uses that can be made of it. For sometimes the past comes to disturb the presence and almost prevents it from occurring. It only awakens precautions, grievances, or promises in me that form a kind of screen between the present and me. But the past has another value. As soon as I stop comparing it to the present, it becomes a spiritual present itself. It detaches itself from the event; it ceases to represent it and retains only its pure significance. And there is not the slightest fragment of this past that does not receive an inner light that transfigures it.

IX. Forgiveness.

Forgiveness involves the relationship between the present and the past and the miraculous power of memory, not to erase the past but to transfigure it and even change its meaning.

However, true forgiveness can only be achieved when one also feels the need to be forgiven. It is very delicate to make someone feel that we have wronged them and that we acknowledge it. By humbling oneself, one also humiliates the other person. Discretion is never exercised enough. Almost always, by an excess of zeal, we aggravate the fault we wanted to repair. One must always spare the forgiveness one asks for in order to spare the person to whom it is asked, and the forgiveness one grants in order to spare the person to whom it is granted.

That is the true forgiveness that brings about a genuine transmutation of the very evil done to us. It purifies and eternalizes it instead of burying it in oblivion.

The fault that others may have committed against us creates between us and them a closer bond of flesh, which forgiveness spiritualizes.

It is not surprising that everyone thinks first of punishing the guilty rather than converting them. Because in punishing them, one elevates oneself above them, one exerts a moral ascendancy over them, which is further confirmed by the physical ascendancy in the pain one inflicts upon them. Self-esteem speaks as much as justice. But if one converts them, one equals them, loses any advantage, and may feel surpassed by that inner transmutation that one may not always be capable of.

There is no fault that naturally does not engender pain: no one has the power to forgive unless they are willing to take upon themselves both the pain and the fault.

There is everywhere around us an evil that reigns in the world, which we only think of cursing and punishing but which we should know how to accept, alleviate, and repair. That is what is expressed by the beautiful word “mercy.” As soon as the misery of others, suffering, misfortune, or vice touches our hearts, how could it not engender mercy? But every finite being is full of self-love and resentment. Mercy is the most difficult virtue for them. Only God can be perfectly merciful, and we do not cease to invoke His mercy upon us and to trust in it.

CHAPTER VIII. Indifference.

I. Welcoming Everyone Alike.

It is more difficult than one might think to tolerate the presence of other people. We are always hurt by them to the extent that we are more sensitive. From there, it is only a step to despising or hating them. But God welcomes them all in His vast universe. We must imitate Him.

To endure others means also to desire that they endure us. This implies recognizing that we are in the world with them. It is accepting the initial condition of existence, namely that there are other beings besides us who differ from us, whose mere presence restricts and negates us. It is accepting life itself, which we lament, [150] against which we revolt, but we must accept it in order to lament and revolt against it. From the world itself, we must make a certain use, and it is ourselves that this use either condemns or justifies.

It is already a great virtue for all people to tolerate one another. They share the infinite richness of being; and each one should equally rejoice in finding within themselves what they possess and in others what they lack. Thus, in a certain way, they participate in what they do not have. On the contrary, they almost always forget what they have and suffer precisely because of what they lack. Therefore, they would like to possess everything, whereas the wise person rejects from within themselves what they have, happier that there are so many things in the world than to know that they belong to them.

It is not well understood how one can feel irritated towards others either due to the differences one finds between them and oneself or due to the evil one reproaches them for, which often is nothing more than those very differences. If it is only a matter of difference, it only instructs and enlarges us, and if it is bad, it corrupts an existence that is common to us, and that corruption is, in a certain way, ours. Instead of justifying [151] our complaints, it commands us to heal it.

No one is ever offended except by themselves, say the Stoics. Those who would consent to recognize this maxim as true would have more patience towards others because they are never more than the occasion or pretext that allows us to experience what we are.

II. Balancing between Hatred and Love.

One should not speak ill of indifference, which is often the difficult work of the will, the remedy for so many evils, dissensions, and sufferings. It brings peace among people, just as peace reigns in the world of things. It abolishes all obstacles and memories and allows purer feelings to arise and grow as if nothing had happened. And it happens that the most intense sensitivity hides behind the appearance of indifference. That is its only means of preserving its delicacy and secrecy. However, it does not always succeed, and then it exposes itself to wounds that can be even more treacherous because they may seem more innocent. To learn to endure evil, one must [152] give it its due and know in advance that it is inseparable from our condition, that it is present in all our endeavors and always threatens our happiness.

It is a great achievement for people to learn to endure one another, that is, to overcome the hostility that each being naturally feels towards any other being whose mere presence seems to deprive them of air, sky, and light. But to be able to endure them is to discover that they are inseparable from our life and that they are connected with it: it is to begin to love them.

For indifference is itself a balance between hate and love: it holds them in reserve as a double possibility that emerges depending on the encounter and the choice of freedom.

It is a great accomplishment to have acquired this indifference towards others, not a negative indifference but a positive one, where a seed of love, if it happens to fall, can grow.

III. The Indifference of the Wise.

One must be imperturbable, not only to know things as they are but to love people as they deserve. [153] This implies that love, in its most perfect form, is nothing more than knowledge of beings, their worth, and what we owe to them.

Nothing can give us as much strength towards ourselves and others as the composure that is the power to silence our passions and to elicit shame and self-control in others.

The sage is not the one who is the most insensitive and who experiences the fewest inner oscillations; it is the one who knows how to quickly regain that attentive indifference where all our emotions arise and die simultaneously. And when everything is restored, the sage forgets all those disturbances to the point of no longer understanding how they could have troubled them for a moment.

It seems that the broadest and deepest minds do not sympathize with any particular passion. Thus, they are perceived as cold. It is not that they ignore them, but rather that no passion satisfies them; on the contrary, there is within them a fire that fuels all passions at once but consumes them all.

IV. Indifference and Hostility.

It is not the feelings I have towards others that constitute chains for me, but rather the feelings they have towards me, sometimes because I feel incapable of responding to them, sometimes because I cannot do without them. As soon as these feelings undergo the slightest apparent alteration, they throw me into anxiety due to the effect of vanity, the disruption of a habit, the loss of a security or support whose presence had become almost invisible. The thought that they are missing suffices to pierce me with a thousand small cruel arrows.

The indifference of others is always a test for us, demanding that we seek self-sufficiency in solitude. Yet it happens that God’s goodness goes so far as to remove the friendships we have sought most when they can no longer produce anything in us but wounds.

Hostility, it is said, is preferable to indifference. In indifference, another person is nothing to us; it is indifference that annihilates them. Whereas hostility raises them [155] before me as another self with whom I engage and measure myself. But this is a fallacy. Indifference does not contend with another’s existence; it ignores it and leaves it to its own care and to the care of God. On the other hand, the interest that hostility bears for them thinks only of preventing them from being and rejecting them into nothingness.

Those whom we call our enemies are often just different from us. They do not think about us; it is enough for them to live separate from us in another world where they do not encounter us. This is what we forgive them the least. Because we do not matter to them. We mean nothing to them. Hence arises within us a sort of hostility that is only the reverse side of self-love, which is all the more perfect as it bears no grievances. Indifference itself is the first remedy before that very difference that opposes us unites us and transforms our hatred into love. Thus, when one feels hatred about to arise, indifference helps us endure the one we hate; but it is only the effect of holiness to convert hatred into love.

V. Dissent.

The disagreement between two beings becomes irreparable when, at the moment when one almost unwittingly confesses their most secret interest, the other feels an incomparable coldness towards them.

Indifference can be seen as a remedy for jealousy. But one must be wary of this false indifference, which is an effect of self-love and consists of nullifying the goods one does not possess, as one considers all the goods one possesses as superior to them.

It is better to have someone by our side who thinks of nothing or something entirely different than someone who thinks the same things but from a completely different perspective. For our thoughts quickly intersect and hinder each other in the latter case. They readily give way to all movements of opinion and self-love. On the contrary, the presence of someone who thinks of nothing and simply lives, or someone whose thoughts are very different from ours and seems to belong to another world, often lends us a silent support like nature, on which our inner gaze itself sometimes likes to rest.

VI. Remedy for Indiscretion.

Indifference is the remedy for indiscretion. And the boundary that separates them is the measure of our delicacy. Nothing can remain indifferent or foreign to us because there is nothing from which we are separated and for which we do not have responsibility. There is no endeavor in the world that we would not want to be well conducted and to which we are not inclined to lend assistance if God gives us the opportunity and means, which is His way of asking us to do so. The supreme rule concerning other human beings should be this: Always act in such a way that you make them love the life within them and the world they inhabit.

The wise person anticipates all demands and responds to none. Not because they are like the sun and rain to those around them, who only have the use of them. They imitate God, who does not want to acknowledge [158] any demands except for those deep and unspoken demands that would be ashamed to confess themselves, and who remains deaf to the cries and supplications through which souls full of baseness and anger always seem to try to elicit pity and force His hand. He does not want those prayers laden with reproach that seek to submit His will to ours, instead of the opposite.

VII. Responding to Injustice and Hatred.

Perfect indifference has no degrees. But it is only a difficult limit to reach; opinion always holds us back by some thread. And it is even more meritorious towards the esteem we receive than towards the contempt with which we are burdened.

The true worth of a person is expressed in the way they react to hatred. The greatness of Socrates or Jesus is recognized especially in the way they endure the injustice of their enemies.

Those who fear confronting the hatred of others are helpless.

The harm of slander, Saint Francis de Sales said, is never better healed than by disregarding contempt and by showing through our firmness that we are beyond reach.

There is a certain purity, a certain intransigence, a certain spiritual inaccessibility that provokes outrage and contempt instead of repelling them. They should not be feared, which is an effect of cowardice, nor should one rejoice in them, which is an effect of self-love. One must remain unaffected by them. Hence Isaiah’s words, ch. L. 7: “Therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed.”

VIII. Bearing the Presence of Others.

There can be between people a purely negative and apparent agreement that is based even less on the separation where each tolerates the other because they are unaware of them, but rather on the shame and lack of courage that leads each of them to efface themselves, to abolish themselves, to return to that indifference which is the state of pure existence before individuals have begun to assume it.

Nevertheless, one must learn to endure the presence of other human beings before learning to love them. And it is not always easy. But it is the first step that must be taken. Only then can we aim higher.

The difficult part is to first accept that they differ from us. For to desire them to be different from us is asking too much since that itself is called loving them. And if we cannot love them, or in the absence of hatred, that is, desiring to annihilate them, we must leave them a place in the world where we live. Therefore, it is always a good sign to see the weaknesses of others without holding any grudges against them. Otherwise, it is night or war.

One must even expect that other people will push us away, especially from the best parts of ourselves. Without this precaution, we find ourselves defenseless, ready for all doubts and discouragements. Even their calumnies instruct us, for they reveal to us as close to us and already present within us, in the state of a germ or a mere possibility, a harm or danger that we would not have suspected without them.

CHAPTER IX. Hatred.

I. The Legacy of Cain.

The characteristic of Iron Age men is to hate one another, according to Hesiod. But this age begins with the birth of man and only ends with his death. Perhaps it should be said that men are enemies to each other in the animal parts of their nature, which are inseparable from instinct and the body. These are the aspects through which our life manifests itself and to which it must be reduced if it is considered as identifying with nature. Adam carried within his seed all the posterity of Cain. But if Abel is the figure of the spirit, he, on the other hand, lacked posterity. For the spiritual part of man is invisible and secret, fragile and always threatened. [162] It must always be regenerated and resurrected; and if it is considered as the most exquisite flower of nature, it still lives at its expense and must constantly consume it.

The origin of hatred is much deeper and more metaphysical than one might think. There is a profound and irreducible hatred that arises in a being at the sight of another being whose mere presence in the world seems to condemn its own existence. Thus, it seeks to destroy it. It is an effect of the instinct of self-preservation. Hatred is the result of this separation that would erect the self as absolute and, unable to achieve it, converts its impotence into rage and seeks to annihilate any existence that limits or obstructs it. That is why there are men who hate not only all men but the entire universe and everything that fills it.

There is, therefore, a destructive will that is inseparable from human action. It applies to all objects it encounters in front of it that limit its free play. A child is eager to destroy his toy, and the conqueror works of the centuries, the jaded disqualifies all feelings, and the skeptic all ideas. Thus, many men, when faced with everything that [163] is presented or everything that asserts itself, do not think of understanding or admiring it, but of diminishing or annihilating it. This becomes even more apparent in the frenzy with which one seeks to extinguish life wherever it emerges, as if life everywhere claimed its independence against the will of man and constantly disputed a part of its domain.

Isn’t it often the nature of strength to go so far as to create the very enemies it then seeks to destroy? But there is another force that is spiritual and can also destroy the enemy, but because it transforms them into a friend.

We are familiar with the terrible Arabic proverb: “The forest precedes man, the desert follows him,” the forest where all the life of nature multiplies, the desert where man is always alone. But the Arabic proverb can be transfigured: to apply it to spiritual life is to transform, at every moment of existence, our individual society with others into a solitude of all with God.

II. Hatred is Inseparable from Existence.

There are such differences in nature and level among men, and even such mutual contradictions, that each one must accept not being understood and even being hated. No one can avoid it. As seen in the animal kingdom, each type of existence generates its own enemies. Therefore, every effort we make to reconcile our enemies and soften them, the esteem or admiration we may show them, only sharpens their hatred and worsens our fate. It must come from them and not from us. And one must never forget Rousseau’s terrible words that the world is full of people who hate me for all the harm they have done to me.

Shall we say that we do not choose our enemies, that we only endure them? But that is only an appearance. We choose them unknowingly. Their attacks aim at the being that you are, and going deeper, the being that you take pleasure in being, that is, that at every moment you choose to be.

Therefore, we must have enemies. Otherwise, we are nothing. We lack that relief that they seek to flatten. But our true enemies, the ones we must measure ourselves against, are those who are on our level. And everyone knows that it is not true that we must always despise our enemies, but it is difficult to always find enemies worthy of us.

It is cowardly not to fight our enemies. For they are not only enemies of ourselves, but within ourselves, enemies of what we have and what we aspire to be better. Otherwise, if they sought to destroy the worst in us, they would be our friends and not our enemies. It is noble to recognize the fateful nature of the struggle, to accept it as a duty we must fulfill, but without employing any hatred. That is why Lagneau says that one must “be united with God and fight one’s enemies for God and never for oneself.”

Therefore, we must not think that hatred can ever be abolished. It is inseparable from existence. For every being, to the extent that it does not remain in the silence of its own possibility, as it manifests what it is or what it [166] wants to be, begins to occupy a place in the world that another being seeks to dislodge. There is no existence that, as soon as it asserts itself, does not seek to invade the world: it is a participation in the whole, which seeks to equal the whole and cannot assign itself any measure. It encounters only other forms of existence that deny it and that it denies. It cannot take a single step without enemies springing up all around it.

III. Hatred, like Love, Aims at Essence.

There is only true hatred that, like love, does not need reasons but transforms all circumstances and events, virtues as well as vices, benefits or prejudices, sympathy as well as hostility, and the happiness or misery of others. Everything here becomes a pretext for them. And, like love, there is nothing that does not contribute to increasing it and that cannot be transformed into its own substance. Love and hatred always seek to [167] find justifications, but they do not need them because they aim at essence and not at appearances. We reproach men for what they do only to attain what they are.

And what proves it is that hatred, like love, survives death itself. It alone provides, like love, a kind of proof of immortality. In death, love measures everything it has lost. But hatred also reveals its full measure in the judgment it passes on its enemy once they are dead. It sometimes happens that at that moment, like the king before the corpse of Guise, it finds them too great.

But if it is true that love and hatred conceal a mysterious relationship between particular essences, it happens only to the greatest to rise above them, abolishing at once this hatred that opposes individuals as enemies and this love that unites them as accomplices, in order to envelop all beings in a love of charity that recognizes in them only their common origin and their common destiny.

IV. Veritas Odium Parit (Truth begets hatred).

However, the individual, insofar as they distinguish themselves and assert themselves as such, is always an object of hatred, not so much from another individual who claims the same advantages as them, often against them, but from the “common” which rejects separation and would like to abolish in the world everything that bears the mark of originality and independence. But things here are so closely linked that one can equally say that it is individuality, that is, separation, that engenders hatred, and that it is hatred that engenders both separation and individuality.

The most hated people are those who stand out, not so much from ourselves, but from the crowd with which we would like to merge them. They are the most pronounced individualities, and we know that in no case will they yield an inch to us. For we neither succeed in making them fit into our game, nor in entering ourselves into that superior game in which they move and which requires neither a partner nor a witness.

We hate all forms of superiority [169] because they humiliate us. We refuse to acknowledge them. We always seek to deny or destroy them. Because they always demand an admission of how little we are and that we never want to make, an act of admiration or love that always costs us to accomplish.

But we dislike other men even more for the talents they possess than for the virtues they may have acquired. For the latter, we can hope that our will is capable of attaining them, but not the former. Look at the example of poor Mozart, so hated because he was charming, because he was happy. That is what men forgive the least.

Those who find themselves devoid of everything must attack others in an attempt to make them unhappy and to show them their own weakness, especially those who have received all the favors of nature or fortune, for otherwise, they would be too happy; the gifts they have received would always put them in a sort of ecstasy that needs to be disturbed. And those who take on this task obtain a kind of compensation in the bitter joy they experience in disturbing a happiness that seemed until then so assured and tranquil.

The characteristic of a great mind is the power with which it participates in the infinity of Being, in such a way that it is not only imitated and envied in everything it possesses but, by highlighting everything it lacks, it also suggests it to others, who use it to combat and hate it.

But it can no longer be hurt because it has not enough self-love to feel the sting.

Malebranche quotes this terrible proverb: Veritas odium parit (Truth begets hatred). Every man who testifies in favor of truth must be persecuted because it is opinion, that is, error, that dominates the world. But he must accept persecution as a testimony rendered to him by the world. Applause, on the contrary, should unsettle him and make him think not that he has imposed or communicated the truth, but that the truth, as he understands it, does not differ from the falsest and most common opinion.

However, every value recognizes itself as truth through the very power of the hatred that continues to pursue it. There is always a hatred ready to erupt against light, happiness, strength, all forms of success or greatness. For they are [171] the sources or effects of love. And the deepest and most persistent hatred is hatred of love; if it could love, it would only love hatred, or at least it is always ready to ally itself with hatred against love.

And the poet of the psalm thinks only of this hatred directed towards him when he asks God to deliver him. The apostles themselves were the most hated men. And in the Eternal Consolation (I, i) it is written: “Jesus Christ had adversaries, and contradicting, and you want all people to have your friends and benefactors. With what will your patience be crowned if no adversity comes against you?”

A god among men is always destined to be crucified. And it seems that he has given himself a body to be capable of it. For his sensitivity is constantly torn apart; it suffers to exhaustion. He ignores all the rules that men have established; he transgresses them and always goes beyond. He is for each of them a living reproach that must be banished from the earth and compelled to return to heaven.

V. Hating Evil, not Beings.

Our enemies easily justify their hatred because they seem to be attacking the worst part of our nature, our errors and faults. But that is only a pretext under which their hatred hides. It is the better part of myself that is the true object of their hatred, and even less the good that is in me than the fact that it is in me. Thus, it can be said that every hatred takes the form of jealousy.

How could we hate the faults of others: we can only pity them, and sometimes they serve our vanity. The vices we see in them find great complacency within us, either because we lack them and therefore feel a kind of gratitude towards those who possess them, giving us a sense of being superior to them—at least in this regard—or because they serve, through their example, to excuse our own vices and thus create a kind of brotherhood between them and us. We only hate their virtues: we feel incapable of acquiring them, they are a constant reproach to us.

But when we hate another being for their virtues, we use their faults as arguments against them, so that hatred, which is always wrong, appears always legitimate, even to the one who is its object. When another person hates me, I can never be sure that it is not for some good reason. Thus, hatred always pleads for God, whom it always seeks to avenge. It is in His name that it condemns others or condemns us when, as happens, it turns against ourselves. Duty, worth, and even God Himself are called into question to justify the strongest hatreds. But it is when it invokes the most just motives that it has the most venom: through me, it aims at God Himself.

To hate another being is not to hate the evil one sees in them, which one can only hate out of love for the being itself. To hate them, one must rejoice in the evil that afflicts them, love the evil they suffer or that degrades them. First, one must hate the good that is in them and that one wants to destroy because it sharpens hatred by making it without excuse. Thus, the coward does not admire the hero, except to the extent that it is admiration for the hero that strengthens [174] their hatred and nourishes it. Conversely, to love another being is to love in them both the good they possess and the good one wishes to give them, which, by incorporating into them, would make them increasingly worthy of love. Thus, hatred and love equally seek, in good and evil, but in opposite directions, the means to justify and perpetuate themselves indefinitely.

But to love another being in their evil and to detest them in their good are merely two different forms of hatred: the apparent love of evil is only a means of defending oneself against it or becoming complicit in it, but not genuine love.

Lucifer does not love the wicked; he enjoys in them his own hatred and precipitates into them all those he has managed to seduce. Thus, the community of hatred does not create love. Only through a kind of contradiction can one imagine that there is love among demons, for each of them can only love in another the evil they see in them, which is the essence of hatred.

VI. Hostility towards Oneself.

The one who is closest to them is often the one whom men hate the most. For they recognize in him their humbling image. And they always fear that his gaze will penetrate them or that their sympathy will diminish them. How can one not feel hatred towards the one who knows what you are because you are what he is, and who sees you as you are and not as you want to appear?

But the examination of hatred confirms this identity of relationships with oneself and relationships with others, upon which our entire understanding of man is based. For if the one in front of whom you are ashamed of being what you are is almost always an object of hatred, there is also a witness within me who is ashamed of himself and sees that he is nothing more than what he is; but in me too, this other self is secretly hated.

Hostility is not always an effect of jealousy. For there are times when I have as much hostility towards myself as towards others. I suffer then from my misery and from being unable to alleviate it at the expense of yours, which, instead of excusing it, confirms it. But this misery [176] itself must be loved in order to alleviate it, and not to hold it against the one who is afflicted by it, whether it be myself or another, and to transform it into a victim. Is it enough to say that legitimate hatred is that which hates in you what I also hate in myself? But the person should only be an object of love, and the powers of evil within them should be converted rather than hated. When one reproaches others for lacking certain qualities that one does not possess but would like to have, it is often hostility against oneself, but it conceals a great deal of tenderness towards others as well as towards oneself; it is a kind of ideal demand that is an effect of love rather than hatred.

VII. Hatred, the Source of All Misfortunes.

The source of all our miseries lies in hatred, not only insofar as we are its object, but also insofar as we ourselves feel it towards others. The one who could abolish its roots would be perfectly happy. But they will probably never succeed, and in the meantime wisdom [177] lies in knowing and accepting its presence from the depths of others and oneself.

It is true that evil is often an effect of self-love or selfishness rather than hatred. But then it generates hatred itself, both to justify itself and to seek revenge.

Hatred begets hatred and apparently justifies it, in the name of the principle that like always produces like. And the saddest paradox is that the one who does not hate is always the most hated.

But the worst thing about the hatred I may be the object of is that it produces in me that very thing which it often unjustly reproaches me with. How could it be otherwise? Every reproach that can be made to me gives me a kind of insecurity and awakens in me a thought, an intention that perhaps I had never had. All of human nature is within me, and the slightest suggestion is enough for me to discover in myself and begin to make real this very evil of which I am suspected.

There are different possible attitudes towards the hatred directed at oneself. Sadness or anger, which are effects of self-love, but then the hatred we receive [178] awakens another hatred in response to it, it is always nature speaking - indifference, which is more meritorious because it already masters self-love, then hatred seems to be subdued, but it is only an illusion; it ceases to harm but its venom is not removed, and sometimes it flares up even more - benevolence or kindness that converts it, and is based on the feeling that we deserve it and on the service it renders us by preventing us from becoming proud.

It is difficult not to hate one’s enemies, even more difficult not to be irritated by the hatred they bear towards us, incomparably more difficult to think that what they hate in us is some evil that indeed exists and that we have great difficulty in recognizing. But the most difficult of all is to love them.

Some acknowledge that men are wicked: but they despair that it could be otherwise: they resign themselves to imitating them by finding in themselves the same instincts; they end up yielding to them out of cowardice or for fear of being deceived. Some are not shaken by the wicked: they know how to oppose them with a perfectly smooth surface, but perfectly [179] hard, on which blows have no effect but slide off or bounce back. The rarest ones make an effort to overcome hatred within themselves and in others, and to convert it. But that is the hardest task and one that is not always attempted.

How could one still hate the wicked when one has realized that the wicked are also unhappy? Thus, one should have compassion for those who hate us without letting them feel it and without mixing a trace of contempt with it: and perhaps one would succeed in appeasing them if one felt a little love for them.

VIII. The Shadow of Love.

Although love always begets love and hatred begets hatred, sometimes one is tempted to wonder if in the perfect balance of the world, where all things are equalized, and in order not to be broken, there can exist a single movement of love that does not provoke somewhere a hatred that seeks to abolish it, if there exists a single movement of hatred that does not provoke somewhere a love that seeks to repair it.

Hatred and love are two opposites. And that is why one often transitions from one to the other. Thus, it happens that the “yes” that feels its weakness turns into a “no”: but it is an admission of defeat, while the greatest victory and the rarest is when the “no” turns into a “yes”. But there is a love that is beyond love and hatred, transcending these two opposites, and in the love that has hatred as its opposite, it reveals an insufficient and imperfect love that encounters its limits in it and makes hatred itself a will for love that is always powerless and always disappointed.

It is therefore in the destiny of love to absorb hatred within itself. And it is still the need and the inability to love that leaves nothing in the soul but hatred as the immense shadow of love.

In seeking to destroy each other, beings seek to destroy their separate existence. It is easy to say that each one aspires to remain alone amidst the ruins of the world. But this may be an illusion. For in this struggle, each one is always ready to perish. This could testify in both of them to a secret will to abolish their limits, that is, to unite.

CHAPTER X. Love and Friendship.

I. Knowledge is Directed towards Things.

The essence of knowledge is to apply only to things as they are present before me, already done, already accomplished. And one could say that to know is to transform all reality into a thing. Therefore, there is no true knowledge of persons, neither of oneself nor of others. For a person is an unstable being who constantly creates himself, whose reality is always in suspense, and who, through the freedom at his disposal, always surpasses what he was and constantly disappoints all our predictions. A person is merely a play of powers, whose exercise depends on an act that is nothing before being accomplished. At most, one can say that these powers need things in order to [182] exercise themselves, so that knowledge of things is like a vast mirror in which we learn to know all the powers that are within us.

Knowledge of others sometimes seems easier than self-knowledge. For self-knowledge cannot immobilize the freedom through which I change myself at every moment. I succeed more easily when it concerns others, who are outside of me, whose movements I do not control, and whom I can more easily transform into things. But if I do so, it is a bad sign. And those who deliberately seek to know others always do so for their own ends. They aim for a satisfaction that never comes without a touch of malice. But others, no more than myself, are determined and circumscribed beings. Like me, they are pure possibilities, the centers of an ever-new activity, and not mere mechanisms that always repeat themselves. There are undoubtedly petrified and dead parts within them, but they barely belong to them. We must have enough charity not to want to reduce them to those parts. And we can clearly see the difference between beings whose existence is always alive [183] and participating, and objects of knowledge to which our gaze is directed and which can grasp what they are because they know nothing of the act by which they are made.

The danger lies in always considering other human beings as things and in seeing ourselves as nothing more than a thing in relation to other things. But the essence of love is to restore, at every moment, to both you and me, and through the very relationship it establishes between you and me, a spiritual existence and personal dignity.

II. Love is Directed towards Beings.

Thus, a sort of comparison can be established between the relationship of knowledge to things and love for persons. Love is directed towards another being that is not ourselves, just as knowledge is directed towards a body that is not our own. Therefore, self-love, which is sometimes called egoism, is parallel to self-knowledge. And since the latter is not true knowledge, self-love is not true love. And just as it is said that self-knowledge draws all other knowledge towards its own center, the same applies to self-love: and just as self-knowledge can only be attained through knowledge of the world, self-love can only be achieved through love of others. Only knowledge of the world is capable of enriching the idea we have of ourselves; only love for others can make us happy and achieve the goal pursued by self-love. And just as we must cease to think of ourselves in order to know the world, it is almost the same thing to forget ourselves and to love others. The same selflessness is required for knowing and loving. And just as knowledge of the world is distorted as soon as the slightest opinion arising from oneself mingles with it, so does the love of others falter as soon as the slightest ulterior motive towards oneself enters into it. The most perfect knowledge eludes method and rules: it is an illumination, a self-evident truth brought to me. But love also eludes willpower and calculation; I receive it as a gift that surprises and fulfills me.

I do not truly know other people, nor do I truly believe in their existence, except in proportion to the love I have for them. The same holds true for the [185] limits of the knowledge I have of God and even the belief I may have in His existence. God, who is love, disappears from the world where love is lacking. On the contrary, love always finds Him before it, always carries Him within. We only love in God and through God. Thus, it can be said that love truly creates its object: it is the very substance of the beloved. Its role is to bring souls and bodies into being. Thus, spiritual life is a unique secret that is indivisibly both God’s secret and the common secret of each and every one.

III. Love is the Discovery of Infinity.

It is often said that men draw closer to each other through the community of knowledge. But that is not true; knowledge only brings us closer to the object. And it can alienate me from myself as well as from others. It is not enough to create that real communication that compels each of them to discover the innermost part of themselves and opens access to another being; love is needed for that.

No one can know another person as well as they can know themselves when they consider them with a spirit of charity and think only of serving them.

Respecting you is not enough; I must both respect and love you. And for that, I must not only accept you for who you are but also rejoice in it. I am truly united with you only if I discover you as you are, and if I want you to be a being in the world, not like me but different from me. And the one who always seeks new things on the surface of the earth only needs to open their eyes to the beings around them, who seem to be the most familiar. They quickly realize that they only know their bodies, their outward behavior, which resembles their own or at least corresponds to it. If they were capable of penetrating these screens, they would discover beyond them a secret being that would continually astonish and admire them. I cannot feel that I am united with them and love them before that. What makes me love them is that they always reveal new reasons to love them: love is the discovery of [187] another being, that is to say, an infinite being that is never exhausted.

It does not always happen that we love the one we seek and admire. It is enough to feel alive and growing near them. But love requires something else: it requires mutual intimacy, a broken solitude, and the elevation of the other’s being above our own, within us.

IV. Beyond Bodies.

The nature of physical love is to show that our bodies are unable to be self-sufficient and seek in another body the very unity that it lacks. But it cannot achieve this without giving birth to a new body that will soon reveal the same ambition and the same impotence. Thus, an unending chain is born, one that never closes. Spiritual love, on the other hand, gives birth to the very souls of those who love each other in that admirable reciprocity where each of them is both loving and loved, and where physical love is only a feeble imitation. Here, union resembles a battle that leaves [188] only two defeated beings facing each other. But spiritual love must be described not only as something received and given, but also as something received in the very act of giving. The union of two beings no longer takes place in the child that comes after them and separates from them; it takes place within them and above them, namely in God, who can be said to be the very unity of their union. The lives of beings whose bodies I can only see are always a peculiar secret to me. And the society they form with us is made up of almost fortuitous incidents, but they leave behind an immense shadowy zone. Love is the abolition of that zone.

V. Love Escapes Will.

The entire problem of love lies in its relationship with the will. We suffer because we cannot have it at our disposal. And if we could, it would not be love. But if it eludes our will, it is because it is related to a deeper and more secret activity that cannot be said to produce it, but that is identical to it. It is born from within ourselves; it is a gift we receive from ourselves before it becomes a gift we give of ourselves. We become incapable of it if we content ourselves with ourselves alone. It is always a reproach to say that someone is incapable of love. And if we were capable of loving everything, we would continually produce happiness in ourselves and around us.

It can be thought that it is the law of love to always engender love and that true love can only be reciprocal love. But when we are commanded to love other men, it is not for the sake of being loved in return. That is merely a sign that love is fulfilled. We should still love them even if hatred were our reward.

In the love you have for another being or for humanity in general, you can truly know the love they have for you. The same cannot be said for desire as for love.

Any love that questions itself, its sincerity, its depth, the worth of its object, is a love that we destroy with our own hands. And yet, it is precisely the life of love that is nothing if it is not [190] always restless and threatened: it must feed on its own substance while continually consuming it.

Love is the cause of all our sufferings, but it heals them all.

VI. Mars and Venus.

There is an inseparable ambiguity in our lives, without which our freedom would not come into play. This ambiguity always implies a choice between spirit and body. It can be found even in the love of bodies, and in two bodies that unite, there is always a desire for annihilation, either each thinking to annihilate the other in their own complete and separate pleasure, or they have the illusion of annihilating each other in a kind of excess where their very souls come into contact.

Thus, love is not only the opposite of hatred; it is not only that it can be transformed into hatred, but it is a battle in which hatred itself enters as an element.

Men have always associated Mars and Venus, war and love. But the association is much more intimate than one might think because [191] it is Venus whom Mars wars against, and his love is a war that never ceases to ignite and extinguish.

VII. Love and Modesty.

The essence of love is to abolish, one by one, all the barriers of modesty. But each time, it gives rise to a more delicate modesty that blushes on its own and trembles at once at being respected and not being respected.

This is because love is a purely spiritual relationship between two beings. We always fear that it will stop at the body, that is, at appearances. But then it is the being itself that refuses, not the body. And when it is said that the body gives itself, it is only a witness; it is also the being that gives itself.

Modesty, however, brings to light the secret virtue of inhibition. And it is almost inevitable that the person who refrains from acting will eventually discover all the powers of the spiritual world. This is confirmed by the example of modesty. If we do not confuse it with a more subtle means of seduction or with an inner struggle that is a more serious defeat than [192] defeat itself, it imposes a barrier on the body only to abolish the very barrier that is the body; it multiplies and affirms my spiritual connections with all beings; it is already a conquest of pure spirit.

In the love of God as in the love of other beings, the one who loves always seems to address the other with this silent prayer: “Do not reject me on the pretext that I am not yet close enough to you and that, in believing to attach myself to you, I am still attaching myself to what separates me from you. But it is you that I want to reach; give me the slightest sign of your love so that it is finally you whom I find and love.”

VIII. The Alter Ego.

In the expression “another self,” and as Latin seems to say with more force, an alter ego, there is a sort of contradiction. Logic alone is not enough to overcome it. Love is needed. For only love can recognize in another the same existence as in myself, an existence independent of mine and yet on which mine depends, and that, without merging with it, is such that I live only through it, from what it gives me and what I receive from it.

Where there is no love, there is no neighbor for me; there are only strangers, that is, things.

It is enough for there to be a single person whom I love in the world (or for whom I have a single friend) to be reconciled with all of humanity in them.

The difficulty lies in first learning to tolerate people in order to then learn to love them. And whoever loves wants others to truly be what they are without having to tolerate them. The essence of love is to have eyes only for the best part of yourself. It knows how to discover it in you, even if you do not show it, even if you are unaware of it. Within me, there is a constant attentive presence, an ever-present demand; but this attention, this demand that turns me away from myself and towards what is best in you, is also everything that is best in me.

IX. Abolition of Duality.

The love bestowed upon a person weaves around each individual a shell of impermeable sweetness that protects them against all attacks, against all wounds. Without it, they find themselves defenseless in a hostile or indifferent universe.

The one who is loved becomes a god to the one who loves and adores them, and they only love if they adore. This is sufficient evidence that love is God Himself present among us. But it requires the reciprocal relationship between the one who loves and the one who is loved. For if it is the one who is loved who is adored like a god, it is the one who loves who gives to the other what a god could give, and that is why in true love, the lover and the beloved are not two distinct beings but each of them is both at once. Can one conceive of a more active and living unity, where duality continues to be reborn only to be abolished, a form of perfect union that never ceases to be fulfilled and surpassed?

X. Election.

The beings we find around us and with whom we are destined to live are not always those whom our preference or friendship would have chosen. But we must always prefer what we have to what we lack, the body that is ours and the condition that is ours over a more powerful or more beautiful body, a nobler or more brilliant condition. It is with this body, with this condition, that we shape our destiny. And likewise, we must learn friendship not with exceptional beings whom we will never encounter, but with our neighbor who is right there before us and whom we cannot escape. Duty teaches us to behave toward all beings as God demands and according to what He expects of us. Otherwise, will would be useless, feeling would suffice for everything.

Is it the chance of destiny that reveals to us the encounter with another being whose presence, becoming constant for us, sometimes limits our life from all sides and hinders all our [196] impulses, and sometimes expands each of our states to the limits of our consciousness and brings to perfection every act begun, an act that we would not have known how to complete without their intervention? Or is it freedom, on the contrary, that unknowingly calls and elects another being as an instrument and a witness, who discovers and puts into action all the possibilities that we carry deep within ourselves?

XI. Every Man is a Potential Friend.

No matter who the person is before us, no matter the distance that separates us and even the wounds they may inflict upon us, we must silence all resentments and all criticisms. We must evoke within ourselves an absent friendship, a possible friendship, and ask ourselves what we would do for them if they were our friend. For every person can be a friend. And what do we not endure from a friend? What is a wound when it comes from others is loyalty when it comes from them.

There is only one rule in relation to all other people, and that is to consider each [197] of them as a potential friend. There is no doubt that they can become one, provided that both of us delve deep enough into an intimacy that is shared between us. But only in God, that is to say in Paradise, is this intimacy unveiled. As I approach it more closely, even in this given existence, there is no being that ceases to be

a stranger to me and that I do not feel is, in the same source from which they draw, one with what I am.

There is no man in the world who cannot become a friend with whom I can enter into a shared intimacy. For in every person, there is the entirety of humanity, where each person shapes the friend they wish to have, who exists only for the one who knows how to bring them forth. Thus, in friendship, the individual and the universal are so closely united that we can give proper place to separation and choice without undermining the human brotherhood that makes every person a potential friend.

It would be futile to expect every person to become a real friend to us, but we treat them as we should if we discover in them a possible friend.

Let every person be towards every other [198] person a witness or a mediator, that is sufficient to rescue both from the anonymity of daily relationships, to awaken them to the thought of a possible friendship, and already to a friendship that begins.

We must govern our relations with other people according to this double principle of conduct: to act towards our best friend according to principles that we would like to practice towards all people, even though they may not always respond, and to act towards each person, towards the neighbor, that is to say, the passerby, as we would act towards our best and only friend.

XII. Meeting the Friend.

There is no one who does not hope to find in another person someone with whom they can unite. In each person, there exist secret aspirations that only rise to the surface of consciousness when they begin to express and feel them shared. But disappointment occurs quickly, either because they only consider what is unique to them and separates them from all others, or because their gaze lacks sufficient penetration to reach that deep center of existence where they sense their common origin. Thus, it is natural that we always seek a privileged being to whom we feel drawn by some exceptional calling. However, this being is not present in the world before us, waiting for us to meet through fortuitous and miraculous happiness. There are several beings placed on our path who could become the ones we seek, provided that we ourselves employ enough faith, gentleness, and perseverance. Friendship, like the beings themselves, is something to be made rather than given. Like them, it is primarily a possibility that depends on us to realize, a timid proposition that depends on us to accept, a humble beginning that depends on us to lead to its end.

Should we say that we have chosen our friends from among the best people? But do we have the power to choose them? It is the encounter that gives them to us. Some never make encounters. And not everyone desires a friend either. “I have no friends,” said [200] Michelangelo, “and I do not desire to have any.” He had a taste for solitude with himself and with God. Undoubtedly, there is no person who does not show us some trust and intimacy and who is not capable of becoming a friend to us. But the friendship that brings us so much joy is not as easy as one might think. It creates duties not only toward the other but toward ourselves as well. Many fear or reject it in favor of a more familiar cordiality. However, as it deepens further, it abolishes duty in favor of a natural freedom and grace, so that in the presence of a friend, we are more ourselves than when we are alone.

XIII. A Friend is a Mediator.

There can be no true friendship except between those who have faith in the same values. However, there remains a great difference among them, for not all recognize the presence of those values with the same subtlety or in the same things. They all seek with them an ideal encounter that they almost never achieve. But it is by pursuing it that their friendship endures and strengthens.

When the good that I seek for myself takes away the good that you seek for yourself, it is a very bad sign. We are then enemies. And what you and I were seeking does not deserve to be called good. But when the good that I pursue always coincides with the good that you pursue or, more precisely, is in harmony with it and seems to serve it, then we are friends, even without knowing that we are. For friendship is above you and me. It creates between us a common life that fortifies and fulfills our individual lives.

To know in each case what we should think and what we should do, it is not useless to sometimes step out of ourselves and ask how that friend of ours, who, in the most lucid moments of our life, seemed most like what we aspire to be, would act.

It seems that the essence of friendship is to form from two separate beings a new being in which this separation seems abolished, although it still exists, but only as the instrument of an invisible and secret union [202] that is the effect of their very differences. Thus, we see two things of complex and seemingly distant form come together in such a way that their bumps and hollows fit and respond to each other. However, there is still something too static in such an image. Two beings who love each other are far from having a pre-existing and completed form; they do not have to adapt to each other as they are. Each of them, in fact, contributes to the creation of the other. You see in the world what I do not see and can only see through your intervention. You set in motion certain hidden powers that I discover within myself when you exercise them. What is there in you and in me other than these mysterious possibilities that I must bring to light in order to know that I possess them and become capable of employing them? Each of the two is a mediator between oneself and oneself for the other. As long as they are alone, they use the powers they have learned to wield, but a friend is like God Himself, who reveals Himself to them in order to continually give them some new power, that is, some new grace.

XIV. Perfection of Solitude.

We must distinguish between the person who effortlessly welcomes all encounters and has countless friends, the one who knows only a unique friendship in which their inner dialogue prolongs, the one who is all love and flourishes in the gift they receive, and finally the one who remains confined in their own secret, sometimes with their misery (that is, with themselves), sometimes with their greatness (that is, with God).

It is sometimes said that friendship should be placed above love because it no longer requires the servitude of the body. But it is also what it lacks, for where the body is not present, the being is not fully present; it seems to have left the earth; it keeps, retains for itself alone what limits and enslaves it. From two weaknesses that confess to each other, a strength is born that intoxicates us. But perhaps there is a point where friendship and love merge, and that is when the beauty of the body speaks a language so pure that only the spirit is capable of understanding it.

The malady of life is not so much, as it is often said, the impossibility of breaking our solitude, but rather realizing its perfection, that is, being completely ourselves in [204] our pure relationship with God. As soon as we are with others, we only know compromises and wounds. The one we call a friend is the one who miraculously restores us to our solitude. They always compel us to rediscover it, to re-enter it. They protect it. They are there as if they were not there. And they must be there for us to feel that we are alone. We speak of the bond that friendship creates between people. It would be more accurate to say that it unravels all the ties that bind us to other people, to the one who is there and whom we call our friend, and ultimately to ourselves. Our freedom is now unshackled. It is only liberated in its miraculous relationship with another freedom. Neither thinks of acting upon the other or sacrificing anything for their agreement. And without the other, neither of them would be entirely themselves. Each of these two beings expands their own inner life without concern for the other: the marvel is that a meeting occurs between them that surpasses all the aspirations of desire or the efforts of the will. Nothing matters to one or the other except the truth of themselves, which is their own individual essence that they seem to discover in the other through their mere presence, without intending to do so.

CHAPTER XI. On the Maxim: Do unto Others as You Would Have Them Do unto You.

I. Beware of Universal Rules.

Almost all men think that there is a general rule of conduct valid for all circumstances and for all beings. That is what we learn in schools, in catechism, and what society proclaims. But in life things happen very differently. For I know and there are in the world only individuals or cases. It is to them that my action must always exactly correspond; it is for them that it is done. Far from saying that I possess in advance a rule that would come between a man and me and prevent me from having any immediate and living contact with him, it must be said, not only that [206] the characteristic of judgment as well as of love is to discern in each case the particular differences that compel me to modify its application, but also that every action is unique and privileged, that it only makes sense with regard to a particular being at a particular moment and in particular circumstances, and that it is only there that it penetrates the heart of reality, that it creates a real encounter between him and me, that it involves both of us and enters into our destiny.

Will it be said that it is after the fact that I generalize? But I never think of doing so. And what purpose would it serve? Will it be said that I discover the general in the particular? Yes, undoubtedly. But what do we mean by the general? Not the abstract, then, but that eternal presence of God of which every particle of the world is for me a revelation.

The danger of applying a universal rule to all men is to dissociate them from their own individual nature and from the situation in which they find themselves involved, either to transport them into an abstract and unreal world where all beings repeat themselves, that is to say, cease to exist, - or, more often still, to demand that they resemble me and judge them only on this resemblance they have with [207] me. But there is only one universal rule, and that is for all beings to discover and implement what is unique and incomparable in each of them, so that it agrees with what is unique and incomparable in all other beings, instead of denying and fighting it.

We must be wary not only of universal rules but also of the need for universality that so many consciences testify to. It is the surest means of radically separating all beings from each other and above all each of them from himself.

We legislate only for others and not for oneself or for oneself when one considers oneself as another. But perhaps we should go further and say that every law is a law of bodies and that if we speak of the laws of volition, it is also to subject the body by means of the will to a universal order comparable to the order of nature and extending it.

II. Justice and Reciprocity.

It is clear when one considers the duty of justice. It seems that everything has been said when one has established the principle that [208] men must be just towards one another and defined justice as perfect reciprocity. But things are more subtle than one might think. For we never deal with equal and interchangeable beings, but with a play of differences, with an architecture of inequalities that means that in relation to the other, each one has a unique duty to fulfill and which varies according to the circumstances, according to the call that is made to him and the power he has, according to what he is capable of receiving or giving. Every real relationship between two living individuals defeats abstract justice instead of discovering it. I know very well that my action is only pure if I expect nothing in return and that yours is also only pure if it never aspires to reciprocate. But perfect reciprocity gives the mind a sort of theoretical satisfaction that abolishes the unique character of the individual in favor of the truth of the rule. It has a character of apparent clarity and imperious rigor that comes from its apparent resemblance to certain laws of the material world, particularly to the law of equality between action and reaction. But that itself should make us wary. For matter is not the model of the mind; it is up to a certain point its image, but an [209] imperfect and even reversed image. The principle of equality between action and reaction is the very opposite of the relationship between minds; it expresses the limit of their communication and so to speak their point of repulsion, where they are subject to matter according to certain laws that are the same for all.

God, it is said, always acts according to general laws. He bestows His grace, which is His very essence, without distinction of persons. And it is compared to the rain from heaven. But nevertheless, everything happens as if He addressed each man nominatively, as if He made to each one that gift that is appropriate to him alone. That is how we must behave towards other men. And like God Himself, we must and it is sufficient that we are always fully present to each of them without subtracting anything from what we are, so that each one receives from us without us having intended it just what he needs, that is to say the best thing we can give him.

Each person must proportion their behavior towards others to the difference that separates them, just as each person must proportion their action towards objects to the distance at which they are placed. It is true that no one is sufficiently aware or skilled to recognize in all cases the best course of action. But there is a certain simplicity that dispenses with all calculations and goes much further.

To always be with everyone is the means of never being with anyone; but to always be with each one is the only way to be with everyone. I do not want everyone to treat me as they treat all other beings: I then feel that I am nothing to him, but if it is me that he encounters, I am sure that he cannot be with any other as he is with me.

III. Understanding the Selfishness of Others.

The problem becomes acute when we meditate on this classical maxim that our conduct towards other men must be identical to our conduct towards ourselves. It is sufficient, therefore, that we serve the interest of others as we serve our own interest. The universal laws of conduct would find there, not only a particular application, but their absolute foundation. But things quickly appear in a different [211] light: if we consider each being as naturally selfish, we can easily imagine a law by virtue of which all these selfishnesses limit and compensate each other. But it is always selfishness that speaks. I do nothing for others, and in these restrictions that I impose on myself, it is still for myself that I think, I conclude a sort of pact with the selfishness of others so that my own selfishness does not have to suffer from it.

That is not the meaning of the command that obliges me to do unto others as I would have them do unto myself, to serve their selfishness as I serve my own. If selfishness is evil, would it then be a cure or would it not be adding to it even more to cultivate and satisfy it both in oneself and in others? The only thing that matters, in fact, is that my own selfishness be transformed into its opposite, that it itself be changed into selflessness. However, we are here faced with a transmutation of values that undoubtedly reveals to us the mystery of our conduct towards others. First of all, I can only discover the presence of another, take an interest in him, enter into communication with him, from the moment I stop thinking about myself, [212] that is, when I forget myself. Thus, it is first the attachment I have for my own selfishness, by discovering in the selfishness of others that I represent to myself in the image of my own, that liberates me by a sort of contradiction from the selfishness that is my own. By transferring from myself to another the satisfaction of selfishness, it must not be said that I still serve my own selfishness: I deny it and transcend it. We are dealing here with an admirable mental chemistry that does not deceive our sensibility, but which our intelligence does not always manage to discern the elements of: for it always looks towards their origin, it does not understand how they can become at a certain moment other than it found them. Yet here we are at the very heart of existence, where nature merges into spirit, where each self finds in its connection with another self a liberation from itself, where, by applying to others the rule I followed for myself, I give it a new meaning that reverses and transfigures it.

It is not because it is good for me to pursue my own interest that it is also good for me to pursue the interest of others. What is [213] bad in me when I seek it for myself becomes good in me (and not for you) when I seek it for you. The good that I do to you is mine more than yours. For you can accept it as a purely selfish satisfaction that you are not capable of surpassing. It is good insofar as it comes from me who gives it to you and not from you who sought it to enjoy it.

But can we admit that I am the sole beneficiary of this inner transformation and that it is realized only at the expense of others whose selfishness I still flatter and nourish? The situation is even more beautiful. For this selflessness towards myself that I learn when I serve the interest of others, I also teach it to others, as soon as they no longer need to defend their own interest and another has taken it upon themselves: thus one should not think that the application of such a rule obliging me to serve the interest of others ennobles me by debasing it. For it brings about the same transmutation of values in others as in myself. The selflessness inseparable from the act of giving, it also introduces it into the act of receiving.

IV. Transcending Selfishness.

Let us look at things from within. This good that I formerly pursued out of selfishness, behold, I now receive it from you. But how could I enjoy it in the same way as if I had given it to myself? I can no longer lock myself in to possess it. It is impossible for me not to trace it back to the hand that has just provided it. And the author of this good suddenly becomes present to me, I have no eyes but for him through the very thing I hold. Therefore, he ceased to think of himself in order to think of me, and I no longer think of anything but him in this object that I have just received and that is nothing to me by its substance itself, but only by the testimony it brings me and that comes from him. And perhaps it must be said that in this alone lies the difference in nobility between men: that some never look in the things they receive but at the advantages they can derive from them, and others only at the intention that gave them. Only then do visible things return to their true meaning, which is to establish a connection between invisible minds. This very material connection [215] is lost, it merges into the thought of the one from whom it comes. Its enjoyment itself becomes purer; I no longer rush upon it greedily. This unexpected, unforeseen presence, seemingly contrary to the laws of nature, which would not be sufficient to produce it, creates between you and me a spiritual communication that makes me equal to you, as disinterested towards this good that comes from you to me as you are towards this good from which you have separated yourself for me; it transports both of us into a spiritual world whose material world opens the access to us, if we know how to understand it and use it as we should, that is to say, change the meaning of all the movements that take place within it.

V. Justice and Charity Apply Only to Others.

The opposition that popular conscience establishes between selfishness and altruism overturns the foundations of universal morality: it infinitely surpasses in metaphysical value the idea of a justice or a charity that I would claim for myself on the same grounds as for all others and that would hypocritically be sought to be justified by the abominable idea of a well-understood selfishness.

If the two fundamental virtues are justice and charity, how could I practice them towards myself without becoming odious? They only make sense from me to others or from others to me. And it is this perfect reciprocity that establishes the union between others and myself. Justice is the relationship I try to maintain between all other beings so that each one can safeguard their own existence and develop all their powers, without being oppressed or annihilated by reducing them to being a slave, or a thing, or nothing. Charity is the living relationship of one being to another being to whom I must give all my love, like God Himself, in order to support him in existence. And the cement of the world is that all men learn to apply justice and charity towards others, without ever claiming them for themselves.

Moreover, being the origin of the act, I cannot be its object. And when I ask myself how I should act towards myself, I distort all relationships, I become another to myself. I turn against myself a power that was not meant for that purpose and I lose myself by believing that I am serving myself. For I am nothing but that very power to give to others, which means that I always increase by what I give to them and diminish myself by everything I take from them to give to myself. The idea itself of equal justice between him and me abolishes this fundamental distinction between me and the other, on which all real relationship between persons is based. It assumes that I could not properly make the selves of others another self of my own, but that of myself I could make another than myself.

And the purest virtue that I can practice towards another, which is charity, would be a mockery if it were claimed that it must also be practiced towards myself. A sort of odious caricature of it is found in the maxim that embodies the selfishness that one is best served by oneself. It is the opposite of the law of love, and in the very expression of self-love, the word love is dishonored.

VI. Leaving Oneself.

It is a remarkable thing that objects are always the subjects of knowledge and not ourselves, that all beings [218] must love one another and not themselves. The source of all our errors, disagreements, and miseries is that we seek to know ourselves rather than things, and we think of loving ourselves rather than other beings. Those who isolate themselves know only powerlessness and despair. Those who abandon themselves begin the apprenticeship of joy: and the entire universe will gradually fill the void that they have left behind.

However, one must always avoid basing my actions towards others on what I could expect or demand for myself. For the mere thought of expecting or demanding something suffices to introduce a selfish ulterior motive that disqualifies the criterion of action, either at its source or in the model I give it, or at its end and in the effect I anticipate from it.

The ideal would be for me to strip myself of everything I have for you. Only then would I possess a good that I could not acquire otherwise. The relationships between people only make sense in order to realize this marvelous solidarity where beings perpetually create themselves through constant [219] mediation. It is what they do for others that makes them who they are. This is the secret of moral life and the foundation of all society among minds.

VII. Self-Love, Is It Truly Love?

Thus, there is undoubtedly a hidden irony in the Gospel precept that one must love their neighbor as themselves. For no one would dare to think that these duties can be placed on the same level. It is well known that self-love does not need to be taught, but restrained. And it would be sufficient to apply as much love to others to be as virtuous as one could ever be.

But it is not a matter here of moving from the easier to the more difficult. It is a question of conversion and a change of direction. Therefore, these two loves always compete. The one who loves themselves expends all their energy on self-love: they have no strength left to love others. But to love oneself, is it truly to love? To love is always to love another and not oneself; thus, the love I had for myself recedes and [220] gradually disappears. All love emerges from oneself, a call toward another being. Love discovers it, love brings it into being; it always finds the act of love that created it. But selfishness is the negation of love; it precedes it, but it is not its most primitive form; instead, it would prevent it from being born. Love needs to overcome selfishness in order to exist. When selfishness is not a simple explosion of nature, but something that does not deserve, to any degree, the name of love, it is a late and perverse product of reflection, the death of love. We only know, we only love what is not ourselves, although Narcissus is interested only in that self-knowledge nourished by self-love and claims to nourish it in return, but only with illusions and illusions.

Who can think that the love I give to others, if it is genuine love, is the same love that I give to myself, an expanded selfishness rather than renounced selfishness? It is the love that I withdraw from myself. The world no longer has the same center for me. The self, far from thinking about itself, is always ready for sacrifice. There lies the true measure of love, which exists in no other way. And Christianity, from which the maxim is borrowed, always contradicts it. [221] Who would dare to apply it to the human life of Christ, which the Christian must constantly imitate? He loves people not as he loves himself, but as he loves his Father, and his body eternally dies for them on the cross.

VIII. Sacrifice.

Every creation is a perfect gift of oneself, and sacrifice is the very law of creation. We already observe this in the relationship between the artist and their work: the artist suffers from never being able to fully express themselves in it, in everything they are, in everything they could and would like to be. But that is also why when we encounter the human being, they often disappoint us and seem inferior to what they have done. They themselves do not always recognize it. It happens that they have not remained at their level. But it is in their work that they request to be judged: it is in it that they exist, no longer in their body, which is already in ruins. The Creator of the world, in turn, infuses into his creation the infinity of his power; it is in his creation that he asks to be known. Only the spiritual ones succeed in doing so. All others are [222] blinded by the malice of creation. They see only the gift: they do not see in it the giver. And God has taught us that it is a universal law, of which he himself gives the example consummated in Christ, that creation can never be separated from sacrifice.

CHAPTER XII. Spiritualization of Nature.

I. Let Our Actions Imitate God’s.

One can doubt whether God created the material world because it is uncertain if this world is worthy of Him. Plato assigned such a task to the demiurge. But one cannot doubt that He created the world of spirits, and that it is He who continually awakens and revives our spiritual life within each of us. This is the unique action of God, His essence upon which all men, atheists and believers, should easily agree. In this, we ourselves are made in the image of God. Our material action is uncertain and ineffective. It is the result of an order in which we are caught, but of which we are not the authors. And we truly act only when we awaken ourselves, when we awaken other beings to the life of the spirit. It is by creating other souls that we create our own soul. In this, we are imitators and co-operators of that supreme act of creation by which God calls all beings into existence, allowing them to participate in the operation by which He eternally creates Himself.

It is of no use to assist others materially; we must assist them spiritually. However, the former is easier than the latter, although one can jest about it. All material aid must be a means in the service of spiritual aid and must not be dissociated from it. Conversely, regarding spiritual aid itself, matter must always be the expression. It is because man is indivisible. He must always be considered as a whole. But within him, there is a hierarchy of functions, and the tasks appear unequally distributed: however, in no case can they be separated.

We can have no other attitude towards others than to help them realize themselves, that is, to help them realize in themselves that life of the spirit which we also realize in ourselves through this intermediary. The peculiar thing about spiritual goods is not only that they must always be ready to be received or given, but that they reside in the very act that receives or gives them. They do not allow us to keep them or enjoy them in solitude.

II. Spiritual Environment.

We should only have purely spiritual relationships with other men. And material relationships should always follow and express them. Most people believe that spiritual relationships only make sense in order to prepare for the material relationships that fulfill them. But it is undoubtedly the opposite that is true. It is the material and sensory relationships that only become real when they are spiritualized.

When Mark says, “Man is defiled by what comes out of him, not by what goes into him,” it must be understood that there is a spiritual environment within him that transfigures everything he welcomes, and that nothing goes out except to return to the earth that degrades and corrupts him.

It is remarkable that absence does not break the communication between two beings, but rather favors it. It could not exist when they were still close to each other. Even in the closest presence, it was still entirely internal and independent of signs: it rendered them unnecessary. It is then understood that neither space nor time has power against it.

Because proximity and distance between two beings should not be measured by distance. Perhaps it must be said that they are already marked in God before we become aware of it. It is like a revelation that is made to us, but what we discover then, it seems that we already knew it.

Men only have temporal relationships with each other, determined by events or fluctuations of desire. However, we know well that the only real relationships are those that concern their essence. These are the ones we will have with them in eternity. But they begin here on earth, and sometimes we perceive in a kind of flash this relative situation in absolute being that our particular actions depict but do not modify. It is only at that moment that men truly understand each other, that is, they discover themselves as different or inseparable.

III. The Sensible and the Spiritual.

I always deal with sensitive beings whom I always risk hurting and whom I have a duty to spare. Because in sensitive relationships, there is a kind of image and effect of the spiritual relationships in which the body itself participates. But wills always collide: they always seek to constrain each other or to seduce each other. They put sensitivity at their service instead of letting it retain its disinterested nature and its free play. But the spiritual and the sensitive must support each other instead of excluding each other.

We only begin to have real relationships with other men, relationships that acquire a true intimacy when we feel that it is the same God whom we inwardly worship. All other relationships occur only between bodies. Thus, in ancient society, strangers were allowed into material and venal commerce before they were allowed into religious and spiritual communion. And perhaps it must be said that it is still the case among us.

It is not necessary to pursue human communion as a goal. For that assumes that men are separate and seek to overcome their separation. But then it happens that they underline it. It is enough for them to discover themselves as spiritual beings. Then human communion is realized without them seeking it, without them desiring it, and as if each one had never thought of anything but himself.

When we have given another man access to the spiritual world, we have given him everything. We can no longer do anything for him.

IV. Opening up to the Life of the Spirit.

There is an instinct in beings that drives them to enslave and devour one another. And perhaps it must be said that for us, it is less a matter of abolishing it than of converting it. So true it is that we must borrow all the forces from nature, which we are precisely responsible for using in a way that is often antagonistic. Thus, the idea of voluntary sacrifice arises. But the extremes are more connected than one might think. Generalize the instinct to prey, and the world becomes a charnel house. Generalize voluntary sacrifice: there are only victims to be sacrificed.

It can be said of almost all men that when they are left to themselves, they are at once limited, brutal, cruel, and sad. This also happens to us as soon as we are reduced to nature. It is unclear whether compliance or revolt shows most clearly the chains in which nature holds us. But opening up to the life of the spirit means allowing light, gentleness, goodness, and joy to enter into oneself.

It is because natural sensitivity divides the world into objects of pleasure or pain, aversion or desire, while there is a spiritual sensitivity that causes each thing and each being to become a source of love and joy.

Finally, many people believe that the environment is only important for fools who only endure it or for those foolish parts of my nature that naturally submit to it. But it is the environment in which our roots plunge and which nourishes our independence.

There is a spiritual environment in which all our feelings and thoughts develop, just as there is a material environment in which all our actions develop. It obeys subtle laws, but it would be as perilous to despise them as it is to despise the laws of physics.

The spiritual seeks pure beings with whom one is always like an initiate. And by initiates, we mean men who possess a secret. But this secret is the forgetting of everything one knew, a perfect openness to the present as it is given to us, perfect docility toward all inner voices as soon as they begin to speak to us, and a clear view of reality without any shadow or stain coming between it and us.

It is the calm who live in the midst of calmness, and the tormented who live in the midst of turmoil, without anyone knowing if it is an effect of nature or of election.

V. God Alone.

Eckhardt says, “Whoever would take God and the world at the same time would have no more than if he had God alone.” But that is difficult to understand. For if one has God alone, one has more than the world, which is only the path that leads to God. If one still keeps an eye on the world, the world holds him back and prevents him from finding God. One must not let him believe that if he has God, he also has the world, because the possession of the world might attract him, and then God would withdraw from him. It must be said that if one has God, the world becomes unnecessary, and even through the world, one enjoys only God alone.

The beginning of wisdom is to show that there is nothing in the world that can find its true end in the world. It has been said enough that everything changes, that time carries everything away, and that there is no port anywhere where we can find rest and shelter at the end of our tribulations. Moreover, it must not be that by saying that we will find it one day in heaven, faith makes heaven itself another earth where we would enjoy certain goods given to us as things. Because heaven is the spirit that each one carries within oneself and where at every moment, every event comes to completion and, so to speak, unravels, revealing its value and fruit to us, delivering its eternal essence to us as we have managed to disentangle it and make it our own.

VI. The Center of the Soul.

The study of man, self-examination, aim to retain in existence the most beautiful moments, that state of pure simplicity in which all his powers seem available without any of them needing a separate exercise. In this perfect balance where the soul is reduced to its essence alone, that is, its unique relationship with God, one must not say that the being seems stripped of everything and turned, so to speak, towards an inner contemplation without an object. Instead, it is the required condition for everything to show itself to it in its fullness, every idea in its transparency, every being in its effectiveness.

And wisdom is to know how to make this exceptional disposition constant, which suddenly appears in us without us seeking it, like a gift, like grace. It would be vain to think that the will is capable of maintaining it because it seems to drive it away. But it precisely has the power, by fading away, to allow us to bring it back again: for it is always present within us if we do not obstruct it. Let our self-love fade away, and it is it that reveals itself.

We must always remain as close as possible to the most secret center of the soul, from which joy is always ready to spring forth. And it is undoubtedly the only means we have of arousing an ever-renewing communion between other men and ourselves, of tearing them away from the prison of subjective solitude, of not being irritated by what they do, of not reproaching them, of welcoming them into a world from which they themselves believed to be banished and where, without knowing how, it seems to them that they flourish.

VII. Selflessness.

For men desire only what they lack. Self-love alone leads them to think that they need nothing and to despise what they do not have. Perhaps it must be said that all true enjoyment is disinterested and exclusive of any desire for possession. It consists in the contemplation of the universe and all the differences that fill it, rejoicing that it is what it is, always new, unpredictable, and inexhaustible. What folly it is to want to always keep for oneself the use and disposal of these goods whose essence is that they are offered to all: nothing belongs to anyone except the very act by which one makes them one’s own. What folly it is to want to enclose everything within oneself and retain everything. This desire is applicable only to earthly goods, but their essence is to always elude us, and all our sufferings arise from the desire to possess them. Unless these goods are formed only as the image and effect of a certain baseness of our desires, and when our desires rise higher, they deliver us from it.

There are mercenary souls whose only aim is profit, and with whom all communication is impossible. For all communication presupposes perfect disinterestedness, which is to look towards God and not towards men.

Disinterestedness is indifference, it is disdain towards everything that is only ours and that limits us. It is to throw oneself into the infinite or to trust in it without any ulterior motive, without wanting to retain anything. And according to a very ancient remark, it is to renounce everything in order to possess everything.

One is tempted to say that the tasks one can accomplish are of little importance, as long as all the powers of the soul find their employment in them. Many expend all the subtlety of their mind on sterile tasks they have chosen themselves, tasks from which it seems that neither they nor anyone else will ever benefit. Should we admire their disinterestedness? But there is no doubt that they pursue some solitary satisfaction. Should we say that they sacrifice themselves? But to whom or to what? On the contrary, it seems that they give themselves a privileged end that is only valid for them, which never allows them to sacrifice themselves. There is always a danger in choosing for oneself a form of occupation that separates us from other men and is not imposed on us by their presence and by the very situation in which life has placed us. For it is said, “Thy will be done,” but it can only be done within us and by us. It is up to us to do what God wants.

In relationships between men, one would also like to choose. One can suffer from being rejected and do nothing to be accepted. It is sufficient to act in a disinterested manner, without any concern for the reception that will be given, and it will then be all that it should be.

VIII. The Faces of the Spiritual.

It is a sign that one has not yet been elevated high enough in spiritual life to say or listen to so many mediocre things that most people settle for every day. Those who are more advanced do not change that. But they chase away boredom; behind the empty shell that is sufficient for others, they always know how to find the missing almond, which is nourishment for them and for others.

Sometimes, if one considers only the features of their faces, the face of those who live by the spirit does not differ from the face of those who live by the body. Just as during winter, one cannot distinguish the living trees from the dead trees. But with the first ray of light, everything changes, and just as we see the living trees turn green and blossom, so the face of the spiritual acquires, as soon as grace touches them, a secret sweetness and a supernatural radiance.

All men occasionally have good thoughts. But there are few who acquire the habit of having good thoughts. This conversion of an act into a habit is the effect of the sacrament according to Malebranche, and there is an entirely internal sacrament that is the very presence of God, to which we must not cease to be attentive.

We must not despise relationships that are apparently completely external and superficial and that only concern the physical being or the social being, the body and the situation. They can obstruct deeper and more intimate relationships, but they often serve to symbolize them, and it often happens that they lead to them.

Refinement of manners not only transfigures human relationships but also the very idea we must have of man. It attests to the presence of a spiritual life that permeates action, softens it, and makes it its expression and vehicle. The military seeks a similar effect through constraint; it appears in that uniformity and rigidity that offend the honest man and in which he precisely takes pleasure. Here, will is everything, to the extent that one feels it is bent from within to without; sensitivity is nothing, although it can produce a deeper and more subtle understanding: it would rather be an impediment, a weakness, an indecency.

IX. Perfection and the Different Ages.

The fact that there is a perfection specific to different stages of life should lead us to think that the best of all ages is the one in which we are, and where, at every moment, we fulfill our destiny.

Should we mourn the dying youth, thinking of all the possibilities that death has destroyed within it? But it perished in its flowering, which passes, and that death eternalizes. The sublimity of Raphael, Mozart, Keats, and Pushkin is inseparable from the youth in which their destiny was consummated. None of them lived beyond thirty-seven. To regret that their lives were not longer is also to regret that quality of their genius that death reveals to us, which also has its age in eternity. It was not the age of Homer, Milton, or Victor Hugo.

Should we complain about old age? And say that it needs consolation? But everything depends on the use one is capable of making of it. Among the elderly, some become cheerful and indulgent, who are the wisest, and others become sad and acrimonious, who do not accept it and hold it against those who have remained young.

Old age is the age of contemplation where one no longer aspires to anything. It must spiritualize the entire past instead of making us regret it. In this sense, there is an increase in it and not just a decrease in the person who is approaching death. Although their future narrows, it is at the expense of their past, which expands and which they had never had the leisure to know. As their strength declines, their vision broadens. They no longer need to act because their only concern is to see. Thus, their spiritual life gradually replaces their material life until the moment when the latter will be engulfed, and the former will be liberated.

X. Holiness.

There is only one trait that can define the saint, the rarest, the only necessary one, which suffices for everything, which gathers all the others, and without which all the others are as nothing. The saint is the person completely stripped of all self-love.

The difference between the person who has engaged in the world and the person who has detached themselves from it is that the person in the world often considers self-love as a virtue in many cases. The saint never does.

The saint is also the one who supports and loves the sinner instead of pushing them away and hating them.

The saint is not the one who saves themselves, but the one who saves others. And it is by saving others that they save themselves. This word “salvation” sufficiently indicates that our existence is always threatened. And if it is true that time continues to annihilate it, it can only be saved by this entry into eternity, which is the privilege of the saint.

End

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