'First seek Poverty, and then think what you will' 
Shortly before his death on October 3, 1226, St Francis dictated a Testament summarizing the religious ideals he wished to bequeath to his followers : 'And those who came to receive life [i.e. became Friars of the Franciscan Order] gave to the poor everything which they were capable of possessing and they were content with one tunic, patched inside and out, with a cord and short trousers. And we had no desire for anything more. And we were simple and subject to all.'
The Peace of Poverty and the Poverty of Peace
Today the term ‘poverty’ has become - almost exclusively - an economic term, and nobody would (rightly) want to have poverty in this economic sense (of not possessing 'basic needs of survival') or think it to be desirable. But lying underneath this understanding of poverty, it is also possible to excavate a subterranean notion of poverty which simply means ‘purity of heart’. In this latter sense (derived from Soren Kierkegaard, but its roots go farther back into Mediaeval history, as the above quotation reveals), poverty means wanting one thing and not being distracted by the presence of many others. Poverty is the freedom from anxiety and the desperate attempt to fill up the ‘I’ with ever-increasing wants, so that such poverty instead involves exposing the self to the realities of grief and to the possibilities of recognising and understanding loss, tragedy, and despair in one's own lives and in the lives of others. Poverty is the sensitivity to the presence of others in their vulnerability, and this rules out any bitter struggle for power in which others are made to pay the price of our fears and anxieties. Poverty can be understood as a sign, in the midst of these tortured and broken lives of ours, of the possibility of a healing future in which we recover the freedom to grieve, to be unassertive and to be passionate for a more equitable community.
None of this implies that the lack of material possessions is a good in itself. What I am referring to here is not poverty as material privation (in the economic sense) but poverty as a certain orientation of the mind, the body, and the will. The poverty of the first kind remains an important challenge but if I do not write about it here it is not because I regard it as not worthy of consideration but because I am not qualified enough to do so. I shall confine my reflections, therefore, to the poverty of the latter type which goes hand in hand with ‘true desire’. True desire means that I understand (not simply in a cognitive but also an existential sense) that I am (metaphysically) incomplete and need something in order to become real myself. ‘False desire’, in contrast, assumes that I have an invulnerable solidity and demands that I ceaselessly absorb things towards myself; I thereby become a consumer who goes on assimilating things to myself because I am afraid to face up to my true desire. The latter is attentive and seeks a journey in and through which one grows endlessly. False desire wants to attain once and for all a state of self-sufficiency in which one does not have to go on stuffing things into oneself. True desire can live with an unlimited horizon of expectancy while false desire demands the satisfaction of immediate hungers, forgetting that hunger is a basic state of human existence and cannot be eradicated.
It is this true desire that is possessed by and which possesses those who are truly poor. To see poverty in this light implies a very different perspective on what it is. Poverty is the will to allow oneself to become de-centred, to allow that there are other centers of consciousness, love and will in this world which transcend one's own. Poverty therefore becomes the opening up of oneself in a search for a wider vision. Or to put it briefly : Poverty is the true desire for one thing.
To repeat, this is not a masked defence of any smug acceptance of the lack of basic goods (food, shelter, medical facilities and the like) that millions of people suffer from. If I say that we need to become 'poor', I do not necessarily mean that we cast away such goods to the winds or that we do not try to give them to the ‘poor’. What I am concerned with here is an understanding of poverty which involves a reinterpretation of the very notion of desire and how we structure our desires. Desires should be understood in the context of a sense of growth, a suspicion of final solutions and promised utopias. To seek for peace we must first reintegrate ourselves and only this will lead to a genuine mutuality among ourselves and other selves. Or to put it in other words, what is needed is an active form of contemplation in which I seek to realise the non-centrality of my ‘I’ through an expression of relations with others in the world.
The seeking for peace and the desire for poverty are therefore directly connected. Campaigning for peace is futile until we have restructured the pattern of our desires. The search for peace is not a question of removing an extraneous upper layer to reveal a deeper unproblematic structure. Many American students who came to India in search of ‘peace’ in the late 1960s and 1970s had precisely such a misunderstanding of the notion of peace : they mistook peace to mean a form of refined pleasure which is why peace was so often confused with ‘altered states of consciousness’. Rather peace is a painful process of ‘dying’, a confession of non-self-sufficiency : what needs to be given up is the understanding of the self as an actor in a drama centred around itself. Peace, however, is not be confused with ‘passivity’ of a paralysing type, for peace involves a constant state of attentiveness, a search for what we can do whole-heartedly and a questioning of whatever stands in our way. Peace is the art of poverty because it is a series of unceasing actions that requires from us the virtue of contemplation. It is therefore not the same thing as ease. Rather peace demands from us a constant state of profound un-ease at the world and its illusions as they work their ways in and through us.
This makes it easier to understand why the attempt to withdraw from the ‘world’ to seek a deeper isolation may (note that I say 'may' and not 'will') lead to a misunderstanding of the notion of peace. This attempt may sentimentalize ‘death’ into a long and comforting sleep, into a zombie-like uterine peace and set before the self the hopeless task of seeking the false desire of attaining a state of sufficiency without any genuine costs. That is, peace as a passive repose is as much an expression of false desire as an aggressive self-assertion. Since we are beings of desire, being moved to wherever our desires draw us, we must structure our desires through the ‘death’ of the old corrupt self and participate in the passion for the 'birth' of an unencumbered will possessed by a reborn non-fragmented self.
One way of summarizing the above is to think of the peace of an artist. The artist at his/her work is at a kind of peace which is a lack of distractedness and of any need for diverting sensation. It is the peace of self-absorption but is not a solipsistic peace for art is a peace that emerges out of an engagement with and a response to the world. Peace can therefore be understood as the process in which one's speech and actions are offered not as an imposition but as a Gift to the listening Other. In brief, then, to seek peace we must first become poor, for otherwise, we shall simply be following our false desires in our claims that we are striving for peace. But as I have tried to show, poverty, in this context, refers in the main not to material lack, though this remains a very important aspect of poverty, but to the inability to de-centre the self and then re-centre it within an ever-expanding horizon of inter-personal mutuality (this is simply a different way of expressing the old view that even a poor man can be happy); and peace refers primarily not to a state of mental repose or post-prandial passivity but to the fearful and agonizing conflict that is involved in this painful process of ‘dying’ that such a de-centring and a re-centring requires from us.
Today the term ‘poverty’ has become - almost exclusively - an economic term, and nobody would (rightly) want to have poverty in this economic sense (of not possessing 'basic needs of survival') or think it to be desirable. But lying underneath this understanding of poverty, it is also possible to excavate a subterranean notion of poverty which simply means ‘purity of heart’. In this latter sense (derived from Soren Kierkegaard, but its roots go farther back into Mediaeval history, as the above quotation reveals), poverty means wanting one thing and not being distracted by the presence of many others. Poverty is the freedom from anxiety and the desperate attempt to fill up the ‘I’ with ever-increasing wants, so that such poverty instead involves exposing the self to the realities of grief and to the possibilities of recognising and understanding loss, tragedy, and despair in one's own lives and in the lives of others. Poverty is the sensitivity to the presence of others in their vulnerability, and this rules out any bitter struggle for power in which others are made to pay the price of our fears and anxieties. Poverty can be understood as a sign, in the midst of these tortured and broken lives of ours, of the possibility of a healing future in which we recover the freedom to grieve, to be unassertive and to be passionate for a more equitable community.
None of this implies that the lack of material possessions is a good in itself. What I am referring to here is not poverty as material privation (in the economic sense) but poverty as a certain orientation of the mind, the body, and the will. The poverty of the first kind remains an important challenge but if I do not write about it here it is not because I regard it as not worthy of consideration but because I am not qualified enough to do so. I shall confine my reflections, therefore, to the poverty of the latter type which goes hand in hand with ‘true desire’. True desire means that I understand (not simply in a cognitive but also an existential sense) that I am (metaphysically) incomplete and need something in order to become real myself. ‘False desire’, in contrast, assumes that I have an invulnerable solidity and demands that I ceaselessly absorb things towards myself; I thereby become a consumer who goes on assimilating things to myself because I am afraid to face up to my true desire. The latter is attentive and seeks a journey in and through which one grows endlessly. False desire wants to attain once and for all a state of self-sufficiency in which one does not have to go on stuffing things into oneself. True desire can live with an unlimited horizon of expectancy while false desire demands the satisfaction of immediate hungers, forgetting that hunger is a basic state of human existence and cannot be eradicated.
It is this true desire that is possessed by and which possesses those who are truly poor. To see poverty in this light implies a very different perspective on what it is. Poverty is the will to allow oneself to become de-centred, to allow that there are other centers of consciousness, love and will in this world which transcend one's own. Poverty therefore becomes the opening up of oneself in a search for a wider vision. Or to put it briefly : Poverty is the true desire for one thing.
To repeat, this is not a masked defence of any smug acceptance of the lack of basic goods (food, shelter, medical facilities and the like) that millions of people suffer from. If I say that we need to become 'poor', I do not necessarily mean that we cast away such goods to the winds or that we do not try to give them to the ‘poor’. What I am concerned with here is an understanding of poverty which involves a reinterpretation of the very notion of desire and how we structure our desires. Desires should be understood in the context of a sense of growth, a suspicion of final solutions and promised utopias. To seek for peace we must first reintegrate ourselves and only this will lead to a genuine mutuality among ourselves and other selves. Or to put it in other words, what is needed is an active form of contemplation in which I seek to realise the non-centrality of my ‘I’ through an expression of relations with others in the world.
The seeking for peace and the desire for poverty are therefore directly connected. Campaigning for peace is futile until we have restructured the pattern of our desires. The search for peace is not a question of removing an extraneous upper layer to reveal a deeper unproblematic structure. Many American students who came to India in search of ‘peace’ in the late 1960s and 1970s had precisely such a misunderstanding of the notion of peace : they mistook peace to mean a form of refined pleasure which is why peace was so often confused with ‘altered states of consciousness’. Rather peace is a painful process of ‘dying’, a confession of non-self-sufficiency : what needs to be given up is the understanding of the self as an actor in a drama centred around itself. Peace, however, is not be confused with ‘passivity’ of a paralysing type, for peace involves a constant state of attentiveness, a search for what we can do whole-heartedly and a questioning of whatever stands in our way. Peace is the art of poverty because it is a series of unceasing actions that requires from us the virtue of contemplation. It is therefore not the same thing as ease. Rather peace demands from us a constant state of profound un-ease at the world and its illusions as they work their ways in and through us.
This makes it easier to understand why the attempt to withdraw from the ‘world’ to seek a deeper isolation may (note that I say 'may' and not 'will') lead to a misunderstanding of the notion of peace. This attempt may sentimentalize ‘death’ into a long and comforting sleep, into a zombie-like uterine peace and set before the self the hopeless task of seeking the false desire of attaining a state of sufficiency without any genuine costs. That is, peace as a passive repose is as much an expression of false desire as an aggressive self-assertion. Since we are beings of desire, being moved to wherever our desires draw us, we must structure our desires through the ‘death’ of the old corrupt self and participate in the passion for the 'birth' of an unencumbered will possessed by a reborn non-fragmented self.
One way of summarizing the above is to think of the peace of an artist. The artist at his/her work is at a kind of peace which is a lack of distractedness and of any need for diverting sensation. It is the peace of self-absorption but is not a solipsistic peace for art is a peace that emerges out of an engagement with and a response to the world. Peace can therefore be understood as the process in which one's speech and actions are offered not as an imposition but as a Gift to the listening Other. In brief, then, to seek peace we must first become poor, for otherwise, we shall simply be following our false desires in our claims that we are striving for peace. But as I have tried to show, poverty, in this context, refers in the main not to material lack, though this remains a very important aspect of poverty, but to the inability to de-centre the self and then re-centre it within an ever-expanding horizon of inter-personal mutuality (this is simply a different way of expressing the old view that even a poor man can be happy); and peace refers primarily not to a state of mental repose or post-prandial passivity but to the fearful and agonizing conflict that is involved in this painful process of ‘dying’ that such a de-centring and a re-centring requires from us.
posted by The Transparent Ironist @ 9:44 am
1 Comments:
At 28.12.04,
optice said…
"However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts."
-- Henry David Thoreau
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