“Transcendence for Beginners” is not a biography, though many lives are caught up in its weft. Instead, it’s a book about why life-stories matter. Both of Carlisle’s professions grapple with the value of human life, but philosophy veers toward the abstract, and biography toward the specific: a single individual with a mother and a given name. Whereas “Socrates went around Athens asking, ‘What is a human being?,’ ” Carlisle writes, “I want to know who this singular person is.” As a biographer, she attempts to create art, too, “to bring something new and singular into the world”—a world that “the philosophical part of us wants to declutter.”
Some philosophers will balk at that diminutive “declutter,” as though the great thinkers who built visions of the world were nothing more than metaphysical Marie Kondos. Not me. Carlisle is entitled to make fun of her colleagues for overestimating the power of rational argument and for preferring false simplicity to complicated truth. Her contrast is, in any case, provisional: she’s open both to moral philosophy that makes use of the individual and to art that does philosophical work.
But there’s a residual tension in Carlisle’s book, and it has to do with her touchstone, the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. To those who know his ideas, the notion of a Spinozist biographer will seem about as logical as a vegan butcher or a pacifist contract killer. For Spinoza, there is one substance only, a depersonalized God, and everything else is simply a “mode,” or modification, of that substance, a ripple in the ocean of being. We are all ontological froth. As Carlisle argues:
On its face, biography is the genre of the integral subject—a person interacting with others but distinct from them, not dissolving in a sea of substance. For Carlisle, though, the “metaphysical selfishness” of a world composed of discrete human beings “reinforces moral selfishness, and vice versa.” Spinoza is an antidote to self-conceit. But what room is left, in his metaphysics, for the value of an individual life?
Carlisle finds an answer in the microcosm. If everything is an aspect of God, we can divine the value of the whole—the divine itself—within a single person. This way of looking at human life is radically democratic. Carlisle’s book begins halfway up a mountain in Dharamshala, India, in her twenties, when she meets a man who makes his home in a small cave, tending a stone shrine, selling concessions to tourists for a living. At sixteen or seventeen, he left the temporal world behind for a life of ascetic devotion. What moves Carlisle most is how ordinary he seems. “Over the years I’ve met a few people who exuded a palpable spiritual quality, some rare insight or depth or stillness you could feel in their presence,” she notes. “The man on the mountain was not like that.” Later in the book, we meet another ascetic, Ramana Maharshi, who spent his life on a sacred Himalayan mountain named Arunachala. Maharshi became a renowned spiritual guide, fictionalized by Somerset Maugham in “The Razor’s Edge.” Both lives are noble, both beautifully evoked: for the Spinozist biographer, it makes no sense to prize one over the other, the famous over the nameless, since they are merely different faces of a single peak.
Carlisle argues, then, for the value of unheroic lives. The argument is most overt in relation to works of art: George Eliot’s heroines, for example, or Celia Paul’s attentive portraits of her mother. Eliot, who produced the first English translation of Spinoza’s “Ethics,” lived in a time that idolized “great men”: in 1841, Thomas Carlyle wrote “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Representative Men” was published in 1850. Eliot’s riposte was “Middlemarch,” in which Dorothea Brooke devotes herself to her self-deluding husband Edward Casaubon, before discovering that his great work is a fraud. Dorothea lives a smaller life than she had hoped, but her life still matters, as the final lines of “Middlemarch” sing out: “For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
