On Relationalism, Part II

Or, "Harmony of the Soul: Lessons from Dead Man Walking."

Profundity from John Kelly's column in a recent Washington Post, "An unnerving Father’s Day gift has left me pondering portraiture — and the soul":

We’ve all heard about people from primitive cultures who fear photography, certain it will steal the soul. But some modern people have felt that way, too. In his memoir, the 19th-century French photographer Félix Nadar wrote that writer Honoré de Balzac believed physical bodies were made of layers of ghostly images that were laid atop one another like thin skins.

Balzac, Nadar wrote, “concluded that every time someone had his photograph taken, one of the spectral layers was removed from the body and transferred to the photograph. Repeated exposures entailed the unavoidable loss of subsequent ghostly layers, that is, the very essence of life.”

Honoré de Balzac,
photo by Nadar

Ghostly layers of the body, peeled away by photographic portraiture? I think this recondite notion is really a metaphor for the layers of the human soul, not of the physical body. I think a photo can indeed transfer one of the laminae of the soul — again, speaking metaphorically — to a piece of paper or onto a web page.

In my earlier post "On Relationalism, Part I," I talked about my belief that the "stuff" of reality actually consists of a set of relationships and is not merely an aggregate of individual, separate entities that are only secondarily in relationship with one another.

I used the analogy of a seesaw:

A seesaw is only a seesaw when a plank is balanced on a fulcrum. Otherwise, it's just a plank lying by itself on the ground and, quite separately, some sort of "upright pointy thing."

Now let me add that a seesaw is only really a seesaw when the two children we see silhouetted in the picture are playing on it. The kids are an essential part of the seesaw relationship.

OK, I admit that all this is more than a bit recherché and abstruse. You ask, what's the point? I'll try to answer that question now. To do so, I'd like to talk about the movie Dead Man Walking. (The following constitutes a spoiler for the ending of the movie, so stop reading now if you don't want the outcome spoiled.)

Dead Man Walking is the real-life story of a relationship that develops between a Catholic nun, Sister Helen Préjean (played by Susan Sarandon), and a convicted killer, Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn). Poncelet is on death row in a Louisiana prison after a jury has found him guilty of involvement in the killing of a young couple who were engaging in private intimacies while parked in a car in the woods. The young woman was raped and then shot. Her boyfriend was shot to death.

Poncelet, desperate to escape death by lethal injection, has written to Sister Helen to get her help in obtaining a new trial. Sister Helen is not, at the outset, sure why she's agreed to see him at all. When she first visits him, she finds his personality reprehensible. She can't stand the man — and neither can we, the movie's audience.

Though Poncelet adamantly maintains his innocence of committing either murder or rape, she does not feel his tale of innocence matches his personality type. Yet she has a vague notion that her Christian duty means that she mustn't simply spurn him.

Over the course of the relationship between Sister Helen and Poncelet as it develops, she focuses mainly on the fact that he is refusing to own up to the horror of what he did. He, on the other hand, insists that he did nothing except, while under the influence of liquor and drugs, bend to the will of the other man involved in the rape-murder. He, Poncelet, claims he even tried to stop the other man from carrying out his heinous acts.

Sister Helen keeps on visiting Poncelet in prison. Meanwhile, she takes it upon herself to visit with the families of the dead young man and woman, to offer aid and succor. The boy's father meets with her — his wife has left him in the wake of the loss of their son — but refuses to give up his justifiable anger. The girl's parents prove to be even angrier.

Weeks and months go by. The lawyer whom Sister Helen has interested in the Poncelet case tries every available legal strategy to get Poncelet's conviction set aside. None of the strategies pay off. With the day of Poncelet's execution rapidly approaching, that man on death row gets Sister Helen to arrange for him to take a lie detector test. The test is inconclusive. Either Poncelet is lying, or the stress he is naturally under as his execution day approaches has kept him from responding conclusively on the polygraph.

Sister Helen feels intuitively that Poncelet is lying, as much to himself as to the rest of the world. Then the day of his execution arrives. As promised, Sister Helen comes to the prison to stand beside him. This is not because she thinks him innocent, but out of the Christian realization of "the example of Jesus who said that every person is worth more than their worst act."

With just minutes left to live, Matthew Poncelet finally unburdens himself to Sister Helen. He admits, as much to himself as to her or to God, that he was in fact the one who put the fatal bullet in the young victim's head, and that he also took part in the rape of the young woman just before the other perpetrator shot her. Poncelet is now what he never could have been before: truly sad about the pain he has caused the families of his victims. It is a scene in which Sister Helen, like the movie's audience, realizes that in his act of self-honesty and repentance, Matthew Poncelet has finally found God.

As Poncelet takes his final walk to the execution chamber, Sister Helen walks behind him while placing her hand on his shoulder, steadying him. She stills his fear by telling him, "Christ is here."

*****

Diagrammatically, it is as if Sister Helen and Matthew Poncelet match up with the two individuals shown as children silhouetted on a seesaw in the illustration above. And the fulcrum between them is ... Jesus Christ. He is present in the finally fully truthful relationship the nun and the man have at last established within and between themselves at the eleventh hour of the man's appointed time on earth.

But keep in mind that Sister Helen's and Matthew Poncelet's relationship with one another was cemented well before he broke down and repented his acts to her at the eleventh hour ... and well before she arrived at the full self-knowledge by which to explain why she kept going back to the prison to visit Poncelet.

What was going on at that earlier stage of their relationship? I'd say the relationship was at that point one that had been established between two of the shallower layers of their respective psyches.

But neither person was yet being fully honest with themselves, or with each other. Yes, they were already bound together in a relationship that would eventually lead to full self-understanding and reciprocal honesty between them.

Just as David Brooks, in his op-ed piece "Personalism: The Philosophy We Need," tells us "people are always way more complicated than you think," Dead Man Walking tells us the same thing. We see two people, Sister Helen Préjean and Matthew Poncelet, who are as yet only in touch with at best an "outer" layer of their human soul. Yet the movie also winds up showing us the fullness of what every one of us truly is. It shows us, that is, the Christ within.

*****

The many layers of a human soul are a prime example of what I'm calling relationalism. One way to visualize those layers in their relational complexity comes from the nature of musical chords.

A musical chord is a combination of notes being sounded together. The piano notes C, E, and G, played together, make up a C major triad. In general, a "triad" is any group of three notes played together. If you play the notes, not together, but in rapid succession, you have "arpeggiated" the chord.

If the C of the C major chord C-E-G is the lowest note that you play, the chord is in "root position." The "root" of the C major chord is, unsurprisingly, C. The C major chord C-E-G is in root position if the lowest note that is being sounded is C — no matter whether you arpeggiate the chord or not.

Suppose you move the note C up one octave on the piano keyboard. Now the C major triad can be played as E-G-C rather than C-E-G. E-G-C is the "first inversion" of the C major triad C-E-G. It has E as the lowest note that is being sounded. It sounds noticeably different from C-E-G ... and yet the ear can also tell it's the same C major chord.

The same is true of the "second inversion" of the C major triad, G-C-E. The second inversion is achieved by moving both C and E up an octave, making G the lowest note that is being sounded. The ear somehow "knows" that G-C-E, E-G-C, and C-E-G are all in some way the "same" chord, even when different notes of the chord are the lowest sounded notes. And this is true whether the notes of the chord are sounded at exactly the same time or are arpeggiated in rapid succession.

I'd like to extend the analogy, now, by saying that root-position triads and their first and second inversions are all equally "legitimate." G-C-E, E-G-C, and C-E-G are all, if put in terms of music theory, equally harmonious. They all have just as good a place in the grand scheme of things.

The real question is, indeed, one of harmony. When the notes are in proper harmony, the music is sweet. When the many layers of the human personality are in harmony with one another, the soul is sweet.

That, I think, is what it means to find the Christ within: to experience the harmony that comes when the various layers of our psyche are all in perfect accord with one another.

Matthew Poncelet found that perfect accord just before he was put to death by lethal injection. And in finding out why she needed to be there, walking behind him, consoling him, Sister Helen likewise found the Christ within her own soul.

The analogy between musical harmony and soul harmony explains why every human is "different, yet the same." We are all, in so many ways, different. Some of us are men, some women. Some of us are laborers, some lawyers. Some of is are conservatives, some liberals. Yet, just as G-C-E, E-G-C, and C-E-G are all equally harmonious versions of the C major triad, all of us have an equal potential for establishing our soul harmony, the Christ within.

On Relationalism, Part I

David Brooks

My favorite op-ed writer, David Brooks of The New York Times, believes we have run off the tracks. In the Donald Trump era, our politics has gotten downright depraved. What's Mr. Brooks' solution? Hint: It's not just to keep lambasting Trump, his supporters, his policies, his personal behavior, etc.

In "Personalism: The Philosophy We Need," Mr. Brooks talks about a philosophical movement that tells us "people are always way more complicated than you think." That's why stereotyping, even of Trump and his supporters, is always bound to come up short. It's just a shorthand we all tend to use, but it doesn't really represent who any of us is. "We talk in shorthand about 'Trump voters' or 'social justice warriors,' but when you actually meet people they defy categories. Someone might be a Latina lesbian who loves the N.R.A. or a socialist Mormon cowboy from Arizona."

Personalism was advocated by the likes of the Polish cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła. We know him better by his later name, Pope (now Saint) John Paul II. The big idea here, writes Brooks, "is a philosophic tendency built on the infinite uniqueness and depth of each person. Over the years people like Walt Whitman, Martin Luther King, William James, Peter Maurin and Wojtyla ... have called themselves personalists."

I'm not 100% convinced by the personalist outlook, but I do believe it's worth considering. One reason I'm not totally convinced is that personalism draws a bright line between humans and animals. Brooks: "Personalism starts by drawing a line between humans and other animals. Your dog is great, but there is a depth, complexity and superabundance to each human personality that gives each person unique, infinite dignity."

(I seem to recall overhearing my cats saying to one another, "Our human servant is great, but there is a depth, complexity and superabundance to each feline personality that gives each cat unique, infinite dignity.")

OK, maybe that's a stretch. But I'm not so sure that biological evolution has made individuals of our species unique in having souls.

Anyway, I admit that the personalism advocated by David Brooks definitely makes a good jumping off point for our indeed treating one another as possessing "infinite uniqueness and depth."

*****

Yet I'd prefer shifting it over to something I'll call "relationalism." Relationalism is the idea that the world is not, as we usually think, made up first and foremost of hard-and-fast physical entities and then, only secondarily, the relationships these entities may establish among themselves.

Carlo Rovelli

I take this idea from, among other sources, an episode of Krista Tippett's National Public Radio podcast "On Being." The episode is "All Reality Is Interaction," and it's an interview with physicist Carlo Rovelli. Rovelli, author of the 2016 bestseller Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, says, "We don't understand the world as made by stones — by things. We understand the world made by kisses, or things like kisses: happenings."

This is a scientist talking. "Things like kisses": they are interactions among "stones." They involve interrelationships.

One way I can visualize this is to think about musical scales. DO-RE-MI-FA-SOL-LA-TI-DO is how we represent any of the major scales. There are also minor scales, slightly different, but most of the music we hear, sing, and hum is in one of the major scales. Here is a list of the various notes on a piano that DO can represent:

• C
• C sharp or D flat
• D
• D sharp or E flat
• E
• F
• F sharp or G flat
• G
• G sharp or A flat
• A
• A sharp or B flat
• B

You can sing any DO-RE-MI-FA-SOL-LA-TI-DO song using any of these piano notes as DO. It all depends on what your most comfortable vocal range is. Whatever note you choose as DO, your audience's ears will automatically figure out which other notes are being used as which stations in a DO-RE-MI-FA-SOL-LA-TI-DO major scale.

That's because of what musicians call "intervals." For example, the interval between the DO tone and the RE tone is called a "whole-tone interval," as is that between RE and MI. But that between MI and FA is just a "half-tone interval," as is that between TI and DO. The ear automatically takes into account where in the musical scale the two half-tone intervals fall, and in so doing the ear just naturally figures out which note is DO, the "tonic" of the major scale.

In fact, the ear does not need its possessor to have studied music theory or to have learned any of its terminology, to be able to do this. It just naturally has this ability. And because it just happens to have it means that the intervals between the notes of the DO-RE-MI-FA-SOL-LA-TI-DO are what the scale is actually made of.

Most of the adjacent notes, such as DO and RE, represent whole-tone intervals, as I say. But the MI-FA interval and the TI-DO interval are both half-tone intervals. It is the positioning of the two half-tone intervals in the scale that tips off the ear that the scale is major and not minor. The individual piano notes assigned to DO, RE, MI, FA, SOL, LA, TI, and DO are therefore of secondary importance. That's my whole point here.

To prove this to yourself, try singing as song like "I've Been Working on the Railroad." Then try singing it in a higher or lower key — which is the same thing as assigning a different note as DO. For example, if you first sing the song in the key of C major, you are accordingly assigning the piano note C as DO. If you then raise the song to the key of D major, then the piano note D becomes DO. Yet — and here's the important thing — your audience will immediately know that you are singing exactly the same tune: "I've Been Working on the Railroad."

This works because it is the intervals' interrelationships that count, not the individual notes or pitches themselves. It is these interrelationships that make the melody identifiable.

This little exercise in singing a well-known tune in different keys illustrates the principle underlying the philosophy I'm calling "relationalism." This philosophy is somewhat different from "personalism," in that in personalism it is the individual entity that is the irreducible constituent of our experience.

The irreducible constituent in personalism is accordingly not the relationships. But the relationalism I'm proposing has it that the relationships human individuals establish among themselves or with other worldly entities — such as animals — are the real stuff of our lives.

In brief: I'm saying relationships are primary ... not individual persons, animals, or other worldly entities.

*****

Another example of relationalism is the seesaw:

It's basically a plank balanced upon a fulcrum. Think of what a seesaw would be without a fulcrum in the middle. Basically, it would be just a plank lying on the ground.

Or, think about what a fulcrum would be without the plank. Actually, I don't know what we would call it, perhaps an "upright pointy thing." It's a fulcrum only when there's a plank balanced upon the upright pointy thing.

So it's the relationship between the plank and the fulcrum that constitutes the entity we call a seesaw.

The plank, in turn, is made of wood. It came from a tree. That tree was once made of biological cells. Those cells of the living tree once, before the tree was cut down, had various important interrelationships among themselves. Again, it's only when the cells — or, at a lower level, the constituent atoms of the "stuff" that living cells are made of — are in the proper relationship that there's a thing that we speak of as a tree.

If we squint our philosophical eyes and look at the atoms, the cells, the tree, the plank, the fulcrum, or the seesaw in just the right way, we can see that the relationships, and not the entities that make up the constituent "stuff" of the individual entity, that are primary here. This is what the philosophy I call relationalism is all about.

*****

And don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that relationalism doesn't — as, obviously, does personalism— affirm "the infinite uniqueness and depth of each person." It does. Just as one rendition of "I've Been Working on the Railroad," or any one particular instance of a seesaw, is uniquely distinguishable from every other rendition, every individual set of interrelationships among the constituents of a particular human body is uniquely distinguishable from every other.

So if you find you "get" personalism and don't "get" relationalism, then by all means take the former to heart and ignore the latter.

But if you feel drawn to relationalism, if not so much to personalism, there's nothing wrong with that, either.

*****

Martin Buber

In fact, look back at certain ideas Mr. Brooks incorporates into "Personalism: The Philosophy We Need." Specifically, the ideas of "I-Thou" and "I-It." These ideas come from Martin Buber's 1923 book I and Thou.

The Wikipedia article on Buber's book says:

Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways:

• The attitude of the "I" towards an "It", towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.
• The attitude of the "I" towards "Thou", in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.

One of the major themes of the book [Wikipedia continues] is that human life finds its meaningfulness in relationships. In Buber's view, all of our relationships bring us ultimately into relationship with God, who is the Eternal Thou.

Wow! Buber's book and the ideas which it expresses are super-abstruse. There's no getting around that. In fact, I first tried to read Buber's book when I took a "Philosophy of Man" course at Georgetown University back in 1965 or '66. Though it was assigned reading, I got a little way into the book and gave up. I had no idea what the man was talking about!

Decades later, I came back to the book and found I could at last grasp it. Still and all — just as Mr. Brooks alludes to when he says that "to see each other person in his or her full depth ... is astonishingly hard to do" — I freely admit I still fail what I might call the "Buber test" about 99% of the time.