Columbia University Press
It could save potential readers of Christopher Hamilton's book. ecstasy (Columbia University Press) There is some confusion in the subject headings in the Library of Congress catalog. The first, “Rapture (Christian Eschatology),” refers to one of the more well-known apocalyptic scenarios in which believers are suddenly transported to heaven before the world is thrown into chaos on a much larger scale than usual.
The author (a professor of philosophy at King’s College London) mentions the “rapture” belief only once in the book, to make it clear that it is not something he has in mind and that he will not discuss the issue at all. Another subject title given to Hamilton’s book is “Religious Awakening – Christianity”. This may seem broader, but it is not entirely relevant.
Sometimes you have to read beyond the title of a book to understand what it's about, and this is one of those times.
Hamilton is honest enough. On the nature of his subject matter. He wrote early on: “To be enchanted is to be taken out of oneself, absorbed in an experience or a spectacle, and then to return to oneself, free and unburdened.” No theology is implied. Those who have experienced ecstasy may find mystical or pious language appropriate when talking about it. But most of Hamilton’s characters—Friedrich Nietzsche, Werner Herzog, Virginia Woolf, Philippe Petit, who walked the tightrope between the World Trade Center towers in 1974—do without such language.
The author himself supports the 'broadly humanistic' position expressed by George Orwell in his essays on Tolstoy and Shakespeare.
Orwell said, “Life is miserable. Only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. [religious] The goal is always to escape the painful struggles of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of heaven or nirvana. The humanistic attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.”
But ecstasy is not ruled out. We may be made to be in ecstasy. Hamilton notes that sexual embrace is not a prerequisite for ecstasy, but it is the most fully absorbing ecstasy. The experience of recovering from an illness—finding yourself able and eager to do familiar things again—can also be ecstatic. “I suddenly find myself paying attention to the little things in life,” he wrote. “About their irreplaceable value. And then I realize that these are the sources of value in life in general.”
This can feel like a revelation, but it is never enough as long as it lasts. (The miracle of everyday existence tends to fade when the regular pace resumes.) Ecstasy is exciting, but it reaches deeper into a person’s experience of the world than a feeling. It is a lightning flash in the darkness of everyday life, revealing what has become too familiar and lost.
An artist of great talent (and with a terribly high degree of acrobatic qualifications) Hamilton seems, in his estimation, better equipped to grasp and communicate the experience of the rapture than most of us, including philosophers. His entire essay is filled with his disappointment and anger at the discipline.
He wrote, “Philosophy is in many ways very bad at cultivating the imagination and embracing flights of fancy and fantasy.” This, he complains, debilitates the profession by making it impossible for philosophers or laymen to think of themselves as “full human beings, with all that entails through hopes, fears, longings, fantasies, blood, sweat, tears, etc.” A vague and confused inner life, resistant to improvement, stubborn in obsessions and desires.”
The obvious exceptions to Hamilton are Nietzsche and Simone Bayou. Their openness to ecstasy (both as a personal experience and as a challenge in understanding the world) makes them artists as much as philosophers. Bayou, in particular, is a challenging figure for Hamilton's project, given the secular and humanistic sensibilities highlighted above. Bayou's curved spiritual path (from a Jewish socialist to a non-convert to Catholicism, displaying extreme self-denial in solidarity with the oppressed) was marked by mystical experiences of compassion, suffering, and love of beauty. . (I wrote more about her here.)
Weil understands his rapture in theological terms, which Hamilton takes seriously without taking it for his own. (He also avoids psychologically analyzing her beliefs and actions, a temptation that non-believers find difficult to resist.) The author models his approach on the founder of the essay, Michel de Montaigne, who criticizes human life with skeptical irony about our ability to rationalize our assumptions.
It makes sense, then, that Hamilton would challenge his own primarily secular view with the example of someone who understood the world in a fundamentally opposite way. He wrote that ecstasy, whatever its metaphysical source, “can be a destructive force.” “Because it expresses a certain energy about life. The experience of ecstasy is a thirst for experience, a thirst that can be authoritative and demanding, although it does not always have to be so.”
The author's stated purpose is not to provide readers with an escape from the world, but to open up the possibility of a more fulfilling ecstasy while they are here. This book will find readers, perhaps through word of mouth, since library catalogs won't be of much help.