The Order of the Soul

Politics of the Heart (Part 1 of 5)

Totalitarianism is different from despotism, dictatorship, or tyranny. It does not only command the body but it colonizes the soul.

Totalitarianism is interested in the psyches of its subjects to a greater degree than traditional authoritarianism is. It seeks to remake the human psyche in its own image. Theorists from Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), to Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism (2022), have emphasized this fact. The initial set of post-World War II scholars talked about the formation of an ‘authoritarian personality’ and Desmet talks of ‘mass formation psychosis.’

All seem to agree this is a particularly modern phenomenon which requires certain sociological preconditions to develop, such as the breaking up of traditional social structures, the atomizing of the individual, and the formation of the ‘mass’, subject to programming via indoctrination and propaganda. There is a lot to learn from these thinkers but in this and the essays which are to come I want to follow a different approach. These thinkers tend to still have pretty modern conceptions of what human beings are when they set about critiquing totalitarian developments. Hence, though valuable, I think their analysis and prescriptions are somewhat limited.

In this series I want to look back at another thinker who, like Arendt, was writing in the mid-twentieth century when the phenomenon was first coming under scrutiny. His contribution has been relatively neglected in our renewed awareness of totalitarianism and the contemporary forms it has taken on in contrast to the rather clunky versions which characterized the various fascisms, Nazi Germany, and Communist regimes from Stalin’s Russia to Mao’s China to Jong Un’s Korea. What recommends his analysis, in my mind, is he still had a living connection to pre-modern conceptions of the human. As a result, equipped with a robust metaphysical understanding of who we are, I think his critique goes deeper and his prescriptions are more profound.

That thinker is C.S. Lewis. Lewis is much better known for his Christian apologetic writings, such as Mere Christianity, and his Chronicles of Narnia children’s books. Though Lewis spent his career teaching literature at Oxford and Cambridge, he had trained first as a philosopher. It will be with his philosopher’s hat on that we take up Lewis.

The order of the soul

The late great Leonard Cohen, in his song The Future, speaks provocatively of:

The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul

The ‘order of the soul’; what is that? To understand what Cohen was talking about and, more to the point, to uncover an image that will be central to Lewis’ attempts to unravel our modern conundrum, we need to go back a little ways. About 2400 years or so.

In his dialogue Phaedrus, my buddy Plato tells a story about a winged chariot which is meant to represent, mythologically, something about the nature of the soul. In the story, the chariot is drawn by two horses, one dark and one light, and guided by a charioteer as it rambles about heaven looking at all the pretty sites (which are Good, True, and Beautiful). As the story goes, the dark horse is a very powerful horse that really wants to go its own way. The charioteer, relying on the cooperation of the light horse, seeks to keep the chariot on track. However, the dark horse eventually gets its head and rampages off, drawing the other horse, chariot, and charioteer after. It careens over the edge of heaven, plummeting to earth. During this fall, the chariot loses its wings. During its sojourn on earth, the more of the heavenly realms it can remember and come to love, the better it will be able to regrow its wings and return to the heavenly realm.

In the Republic, he speaks more prosaically of the soul (psyche in Greek, as in psychology). He says the soul is composed of three parts: the Reason (the charioteer), the Spirited Element (the light horse), and the Passions (the dark horse). Freud’s conception of the Id, the Ego, and the Super-ego directly mirror this, but in a way that is not open to the transcendence that Plato’s conception is. Somewhat combining the insights of both thinkers, the Passions are the deep rooted, largely subconscious drives which are powerful, and necessary, but definitely have a dark side: hunger, lust, violence. The Reason (the charioteer) is the most important part of the soul for Plato but also, unfortunately, is the weakest component. It includes what we moderns tend to associate with reason: our ability to calculate. However, for Plato it also includes our intuition and our ability to connect with transcendent truths (ie, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful). The intermediary element, what he calls the Spirited Element (the light horse) is important but harder to define. Here it is helpful to map Plato’s view onto the traditional physiological analogy: head, heart, and stomach (or perhaps the reproductive organs). The heart (Spirited Element) is associated with our feelings, gut instincts and affections.

On Plato’s account, the whole drama of the soul (because the parts come into conflict with one another) turns on the intermediary element. If it is well educated and loves what it ought to love, it cooperates with Reason and allows the chariot of the soul to continue in a good direction. If it is poorly formed and comes under the tyranny of the Passions, all is lost for the soul. Do our hearts love justice? Do they love goodness? If so, we’re in good shape. Contrariwise, do our hearts love domination? Do they rejoice in evil doing and serving our lower passions? If so, we are in bad shape.

In his Republic, Plato places a lot of emphasis on the education of citizens. This is mainly aimed at helping them learn to love what is lovable and to spurn what is bad: it is about the formation of the Spirited Element, the heart. We would say it is about character formation.

Now we can start to see what is behind the notion of an ‘order’ of the soul. On a Platonic account, a well-ordered soul, a virtuous soul, is that which achieves and maintains the proper order. The Reason should be able to guide the soul. It has insight into Truth. To do this, it will need the Spirited Element to be well formed so that it loves Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. If so, it will cooperate with the Reason to guide the very powerful Passions into a good direction. There is a hierarchy to the well-ordered soul. By contrast, a disordered soul on Plato’s account is one in which the Passions have seized control and the other elements serve it to achieve its self-centered goals. The Passions say: I want that food right now, I want that woman right now, I want to dominate you right now: I want what I want. The disordered Reason is reduced to rationalizing the desires of the Passions. As if to say, ‘here is a reason you could use to justify doing what you want to do.’ The Spirited element could fall so low that it loves the unlovable: the evil, the ugly, the false.

The heart

Now we have a decent sense of the classic philosophical vision that lies behind the popular notion of ‘the heart.’ When we look at the history of Western civilization, the heart undergoes some transformation. When Christianity emerged as a culture-shaping power, it largely took over the wisdom of the classic Greeks and Romans (especially Plato in the former case and the Stoics in the latter).

However, while many Christian theologians adopted a lot of Plato, including his view of the soul, they changed the emphasis. As the seat of love, the heart took on central importance. Christians would speak of the ‘heart of Jesus’, the ‘sacred heart,’ etc… but seldom of the head of Jesus or sacred reason. He was understood as the embodiment of wisdom, but this was increasingly understood as a matter of the heart, as a matter of basic orientation in terms of what we loved. After all, on this account, ‘God is love.’

It was this emphasis on the heart as the seat of love which would inform medieval and modern ‘romance’ (or romanticism). What we loved, not what we knew, came to be understood as central to our core identity: who we were. A ‘good person’ became a person who was capable of love and of loving the right things. So, the underlying Platonic structure of the soul, its order, remained basically the same, but the emphasis was on the crucial role of the heart. This is the connotation underlying our use of expressions like ‘she has heart,’ or ‘he has a good soul.’

The politics of the heart

This, in very brief outline, gives us the background for a richer understanding of what Lewis will be talking about when he talks about the fate of the ‘heart’ in the modern world and under threat of totalitarianism specifically (though, frankly, I’m not sure those two things don’t equate to one another at the end of the day). He is talking about the fate of ‘the human,’ with that understood from a particular traditional perspective.

To speak of a ‘politics of the heart’ might ring of sentimentalism. Well, I’m no foe of sentiment, of feeling: I tear up at the oddest things. Further, I love things I would (hopefully) die for. However, there is a sentimentalism that is associated with the manipulation of emotion by modern techniques (propaganda, social conditioning, etc…): the power to move the feelings of people is a strong power, indeed. To distinguish the more wholesome from the less is one reason why bringing the ancient Platonic and Christian metaphysical picture into focus is helpful.

Both Plato and, to an even greater extent, the Christian and Romantic traditions speak quite metaphorically about the heart. Lewis will give more solid content to the concept, but not in a reductionistic way: metaphor, myth, etc… often tell us more about something than a strictly ‘literal’ account. What we are talking about though is our core being. Who we, ultimately, are. To safeguard the heart is to protect what is fundamentally human about human beings.

As noted above, a mark of totalitarianism is that it seeks to reconfigure who we are. Totalitarianism is not, however comforting the thought may be, strictly imposed from above downward. On Arendt’s account, it marks the union of the mass and the elite. Some of us may have experienced ‘friends’ turning on them, family betraying them, or Twitter mobs, well, mobbing them: totalitarianism enforces conformity through the willing cooperation of the ordinary person as well as through the overarching mechanisms of propaganda, policing, and surveillance. Also, it is characteristic of the mass to form a cult of personality, to seek a Caesar to lead them and embody their collective will.

By focusing on the heart, we will be able to understand the strategies employed by, and the danger inherent in, totalitarianism in a richer way. We will see that totalitarians take aim especially at our hearts. They seek to dis-embed us from both natural social order and the order of the soul. The arts of propaganda seek to distort our very hearts. The assault on the heart represents the attempt to disenchant not only nature, but our very psyches: to leave us atomized, disheartened, and instrumentalized. People ‘with heart’ are natural resisters. They cannot easily be manipulated and used.

Hence, maintaining the integrity of our hearts is (as is, conversely, the regime’s assault on our hearts) a matter of politics as well as a matter of maintaining our wholeness and individual sanity and wellbeing.

This essay was first published on Winter Oak.