The Philia Proposal continuedI would like to define inspiration
as a source of energy that flows from a deep sense of agency and
responsibility grounded in the intellectual and emotional conviction
that one’s soul is attuned in spiritual unity with the wide
universe. Because of that, our selves, our actions as well as those
of others matter in ways that we cannot ever fully grasp or explain.
Motivation is what is left of inspiration when
acknowledgement of mystery is eschewed and when there is no longer
belief in an inner source of action and responsibility. In its
contemporary version, it rests on two disconnected elements:
borrowing from the idealist tradition, it attempts to influence
beliefs and engage emotions by defining moral ideals with the
language of rational argument; drawing from the materialist
tradition, it looks for external means and stimuli to condition the
desired behavioural response. One could say that motivation is to
inspiration what an hour on the treadmill is to a brisk hike up a
mountain trail: a powerful, concentrated but impoverished and
one-dimensional version of life’s complex reality. We are short of
moral oxygen, I think, because we confuse motivation with real
inspiration. Finding
a source of real inspiration will require a vision of life that
embraces Weil is clearly within
the modern materialist tradition in believing that human beings and
communities are subject to the inflexible rule of material causes.
But she sees this rigid order of things suffused with something akin
to the smile of a loved one : Beauty. The experience of the beauty
of nature, of artistic creation and of human beings, nurtures love
and compassion and holds out the promise that, through the strength
of persuasion, Good will ultimately come to rule over Necessity.
With respect to death and tragedy, Weil thinks that, much as
hurricanes do not take away from the beauty of the world, the
turbulence within that we call suffering, tragedy or loss does not
debase the dignity or beauty of human life, because this dignity is
not grounded in material causes nor in will-power or reason, but in
something more divine and universal.
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modern science, contemporary moral ideals, as well as the
reality of suffering and tragedy. I have found in the writing of
Simone Weil a vision that, I believe, can carry us through in those
moments when contact with suffering calls us to summits of moral
life.