The Geometry of Illusion — Part III

Part I proposed that the passions might act as systematic sources of interpretive error. That is an attractive sentence. It is also too easy to use badly. If I dislike your conclusion, I can call it pride; if you dislike mine, you can call it envy. We have explained nothing. We have merely turned an ancient vocabulary into a device for winning arguments.

So let us do what the tradition itself asks: discriminate.

In section 20 of Texts on Discrimination in Respect of Passions and Thoughts, Evagrios the Solitary considers an avaricious thought. He separates four elements: the intellect that accepts it, the apprehension of gold, gold itself, and the passion of avarice. The point is decisive. Gold is not the error. Nor is the bare capacity to think about gold. The moral and spiritual difficulty concerns the relation a person forms to it. [1]

Part I distinguished a real object from its false apparent position. Evagrios makes an analogous distinction, but not the same one. He does not offer a theory of optical images. He asks how an object, represented in thought, becomes entangled with an appetite that directs the thinker. The term passion belongs to an ascetic account of the soul. It cannot be substituted without remainder for “cognitive bias,” “emotion,” or “preference.”

Still, the fourfold analysis is useful because it prevents a category error. Consider a person who hears that a rival has won a prize. The prize exists. The announcement exists. The person may even correctly estimate its prestige. Then a further relation appears: this victory subtracts from my worth. That relation is neither printed on the prize nor entailed by the announcement. It may be produced by envy. It may also be produced by a real institutional injustice, by a history between the people involved, or by several causes at once. The ascetic hypothesis has to face the evidence; it does not get to replace it.

We can write the four elements of the example without pretending that the notation is Evagrios’s:

O = the object or event;
I(O) = the observer’s representation of it;
A = the observer’s attachment or aversion;
J = the judgment made about the event.

The question is not whether J depends on A in every case. The question is whether, in a particular case, the observer smuggles a private stake into what he presents as a property of O. If the rival’s award is called fraudulent, what evidence supports fraud? If the evidence is simply that the award wounds me, I have mistaken an effect on myself for a fact about the award.

Evagrios’s text complicates a common caricature of ascetic thought. It does not require that created things be denounced so that the soul may become pure. The object is treated as real, and the analysis asks what has happened in the relation to it. That is precisely why the Fata Morgana analogy remains useful. The cure for a false position is not to deny the ship.

There is a second complication. The Philokalia is a collection of texts by different authors, translated and assembled across centuries. It is not a single psychological treatise with one operational definition of “passion.” The introductory notes to the English translation themselves describe differences among Greek Fathers on whether passions are to be eradicated or transformed. [1] Any essay that says “the Philokalia proves…” before naming a text and a passage has probably stopped discerning.

For this series, Evagrios supplies a method of conceptual separation, not a scientific result. Science can investigate whether a desire changes attention, memory, classification, or the evaluation of evidence. It cannot, by that experiment alone, adjudicate the spiritual meaning of avarice. Conversely, a spiritual text can diagnose a relation to gold without telling us the exchange rate, the distribution of wealth, or whether an accusation of fraud is factually correct.

Two inquiries, then, and neither deserves to be reduced to the other. What is true of the object? What has the observer made of it? The first requires evidence about the world. The second requires honest examination of the subject, and perhaps correction from someone the subject cannot simply overrule. In Part I, the self threatened to occupy the fixed point. Evagrios’s separation begins by moving the object out of the self’s possession.

Gold remains gold. The more difficult question is what happens to the person who cannot look at it without seeing himself.

Notes on evidence

The four variables and the prize example are my philosophical reconstruction, not a quotation or measurement from Evagrios. The description of the text rests on section 20 of the cited primary source.

1. Evagrios the Solitary, “Texts on Discrimination in Respect of Passions and Thoughts,” §20, in The Philokalia, English translation and editorial notes.

Previously in The Geometry of Illusion: Part II.