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This is a Sanskrit word that means, among other things, ‘yes’. ‘Yes’ is a word worth thinking about as, I suppose, is its counterpart and opposite ‘no’. There are consequences to uttering either. Eastern thinkers might say karmic consequences but as a westerner I won’t go that far. I will simply say that no has its dangers exactly as yes does even though the Gospels tell us to confine our discourse to either. The dangers of yes are simple enough: we might say yes too quickly. We may take the pie out of the oven before it is fully baked. The problem with no is more subtle: no develops into a nasty, self-thwarting habit. Yeats prayed for his daughter to think opinions are accursed. This is futile advice, of course, for opinion making, opinion exchanging and opinion contesting are part of the sad necessary, business of life. Opinions may not be accursed but they are, perhaps, part of the curse which Christians call the fall. Opinions are acts, utterances, of determinate exclusion. An opinion says A not B. Affirmation is negation to answer the question of rapper Common Market “Why does division exist?”. Thanks to the disjunctive syllogism formal logic is binary. Further, affirmation and negation are modes of individuation. Standing within the cipher we each stake out our portion and that is how we forge an identity. This process is agonistic and conflictual. We battle to submit the whole to our part it though we risk destroying the whole and us along with it if we succeed too well. Sophocles understood this was the nature of the city and prayed that the competitive spirit drive us to deeds of emulation without ripping the city apart. He prayed that the agon continue within carefully subscribed limits. He said yes to no with the caveat that no could only go so far until it had to become yes. Yes to the state of justice in which productive conflict could occur without degenerating into civil strife. Every act of competition and emulation has to remember that no exists for the sake of yes. What we compete over are intrinsic and instrumental goods. No one negates for the sake of negation and, to return to Sanskrit again, we must always remember that ‘tat tvam asi’: you are that.   

Because if no doesn’t serve yes it can assume a life of its own. Yeats said “an intellectual hatred is the worst” leaving one “an angry bellows full of wind”. This is to a certain degree gendered in Yeats: it is his daughter who is to avoid intellectual hatred because, while men cheerfully bash each other’s skulls, women are to preserve the continuity of social feeling. We no longer, officially, gender this labor in this way though I suspect we still do so unofficially. Still, Yeats is usually right on the money precisely when he is being his silliest (he was silly like us said Auden!). In the ‘intellectual’ realm no takes on a life of its own. This is because the discursive function of the mind is analysis not synthesis: the discursive intellect is a ‘critic’. Of course, actual mature criticism is an exercise in balanced judgment. To ‘critique’ something is to judge it at its correct worth. No however has run away with the word criticism. Popularly, to critique something is to find flaws with it, the more the better. The ‘critic’ is a scold and fault finder. The critic, like Blake’s specter (the specter is in every man insane!) exists to negate not create. The specter, Blake points out, is dangerous because the specter is correct. Innocence is lost; the infant joy is ghastly if looked too closely into. A scrupulous conscience can destroy any joy we take in the moral life as we can ALWAYS find some angle from which our deeds are compromised. If the specter turns outward (because it can no longer stand looking inward) we find not self-torture but scapegoating. We assuage our guilt not by self-flagellation but by the ritual slaughter of the other as we can see of Facebook daily (where we ‘destroy’ opponents for instance).  

The higher the moral aspirations of the critic the worse the critic becomes. The critic becomes a person who cannot take yes for an answer: you will indeed find people on Facebook who keep on objecting and arguing long after the point where you have agreed with them. The critic does not want to be fooled by yes which is indeed a legitimate fear as the pie cannot come out of the oven until it is properly baked. Yet all the critiquing and calling out and heroically negating typically leaves the devotee of no a shrill monster of self-righteousness eaten to the core with toxic resentment. When seemingly every heroic act of truth telling is met, not with the humble contrition which is its due, but with indifference or even push back the critic only becomes more disenchanted with the depravity of the world. What is more, in a manner Blake understood well, the spectral selves simply replicate themselves in the other. Self-righteousness and resentment only breed more of the same leaving the ‘critic’ baffled (and even angrier) that his incisive critiques are not met with instant applause. The specter dominated critic generates only more specter dominated critics (and Blake was suspicious of mechanical generation!). That, or people who would instantly return to the Eden of a simple yes no matter how false and how naïve that return might be. These are people who wonder why we can’t just, for the sake of peace, be happy with a half baked pie. 

Of course here is where the philosophers step in with the call to say not a simple, naïve yes but a deep heroic one. Love and submit to the fate that is your own rational core says the Stoic. Will the eternal recurrence of the same says Nietzsche, even of everything ghastly! Love fate, accept that the real is rational say the philosophers and sages! Blake understood that it was not the specter that could do this. On his own terms the specter is correct: Jerusalem is not the city of peace but a harlot! He cannot be refuted by the limited form of reason he employs but must be transcended in an act of imaginative projection. For Blake this act of projection becomes increasingly bound up with a doctrine of radical love and forgiveness: you are the other, he says, in righteousness or in sin. Ta tvam asi as we said above: you are that in spite of all the abstract determinations of ‘good and evil’ would impose by way of separation and the pride of self-hood. At the same time Blake was no fan of bland, immediate unity which only papers over the real facts of difference. The specter is, to that extent, the expression of a positive function. Eden or ‘heaven’ is constituted in strenuous conflict; the self confronts the other in opposition yet within the consciousness of unity exactly as in the city Sophocles prayed for. In Eden we also shed ourselves of the ‘resentisement’ that for Nietzsche lies at the basis of an anti-life slave morality: it is the joy of the struggle that matters not avenging our defeats.    

This is not our city, alas, and that is why our arguments are not joyous expressions of self-hood but miserable, bitter and counterproductive. OUR arguments are not about ‘questions’ but about status. They are a zero sum game in which what is at stake is ‘face’: who has it and who has lost it. You cannot have economic life based on an ethos of pure, zero sum competition without that ethos swallowing all other forms of life. If status and respect (likes!) are scarce commodities we compete over, we will never have a society in which criticism is given and taken with love (as in Blake’s Eden!). We will never have a city in which emulation is overcome in the positing of it. We will have arguments in which we seek to ‘destroy’ each other but not dialogue. Even critics of our adversarial, agonistic economic and social frameworks replicate their vices in their daily interactions to a shocking degree as in our battles over who is more woke than who. I have seen progressive critics of capitalist competition disembowel each other verbally over apparent trivia. A Trump voter is clearly a person who feels he has lost ‘face’ publicly and will support the president no matter how he lies or fouls up because they feel he has restored it to them. This is why Blake says there is no restoration, no revolution, that does not begin by overcoming the private ego with its fears and anxieties, it jealousies and resentments. Moralism, of any kind, is not such a liberation: as Paul says we cannot be saved by the law because the law is dualistic. We might begin then as I did this essay; considering the monistic thought of the Vedanta and other corresponding philosophical traditions in the west that have existed for millennia though we have barely begun to assimilate their true significance.