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“In the West, you have the liberty and the obligation of finding out what your destiny is. You can discover it for yourself. But do you? … A very common experience is a student who has all kinds of possibilities and talents and essentially limitless money and becomes nothing more than a dilettante.” [my italics] (Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss)
“Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.” (Stephen Leacock, Nonsense Novels)
We can avoid landing on the path to our authentic selves in any number of obvious ways (e.g. denial, laziness, fear), but Campbell raises a more insidious and subtle trap–becoming dilettantes in our own lives.
We have to be careful about definitions here. Being a dilettante isn’t the same thing as wandering aimlessly. Wandering aimlessly is one of the best ways to find your path, like Parsifal letting go the reins of his horse. That kind of wandering is central to Daoist thought and appears in western symbolism, for example, as The Fool from the Tarot. That’s not what we’re talking about. Campbell is directing our attention to a cunning kind of threshold guardian that keeps one from wandering–and from an authentic life–by rewarding the urge to ride “madly off in all directions.”
History offers a buffet of scholarship regarding the search for an authentic life–the life you author as your own–especially in the work of Søren Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism. Campbell’s description of “the dilettante” is a perfect gloss on what Kierkegaard called a “knight of infinite resignation,” from what is probably one of the most dangerous books ever written, Fear and Trembling.*
In ways familiar to any reader of Campbell, Kierkegaard imagines a taxonomy of stages through which any human must pass on the journey from merely accepting a moral compass provided by family and society, to questioning it and then, finally, seeking out and embracing the truth about our lives. He describes these stages as “resignation,” “infinite resignation,” and “faith.” Monomythically speaking, these might be translated as “ignoring the call,” “dithering endlessly about the call,” and finally “accepting the call and everything it implies.”
*This is a book that has turned hardened atheists into Christians and evangelical Christians into atheists.
Resignation
You’ve probably noticed that, everywhere you look, people are ready to resign themselves to lives determined by others: by parental pressure (“You’re going to be a doctor!”), economic realities (“I needed this job just to survive”), or by the temptations of money and power (“Wow, you can make a lot of money in corporate law and military contracts!”). With sufficient financial reward, resigning yourself to a fate assigned by others can be sweet. You might need spiritual insulin later, but it can be delicious and satisfying in the short run.
But it’s still not your life. You’d still be living inauthentically.
Let’s say you see through this circumstance and recognize the hollowness of the life you’ve accepted. What do you do then?
You go looking for alternatives, which begins to sketch the predicament (and trap) faced by the Dilettante.
Here’s Kierkegaard’s analysis.
Infinite Resignation
Infinite resignation is that moment when we realize we have more options about who or what we can be, beyond what society has planned for us. The moment can be exhilarating: a seemingly infinite number of alternatives, each more beautiful than the last, ablaze before us in a whirlwind of sparkling possibilities.
Wow.
But now there’s a problem: how do you choose?
When you have a million options, choosing one can feel impossible. Overwhelmed, we can either retreat, fall back to our preexisting, hollow and unsatisfying lives or–and here comes the Dilettante–we can resign ourselves to this infinity of choices by searching, not for our authentic lives, but for even more options, endlessly collecting pretty shells from along the water margins of our fate. In the language of the Hero’s Journey, this is not only a failure to answer the call, but a clever way of avoiding it altogether.
In the language of the Hero’s Journey, this is not only a failure to answer the call, but a clever way of avoiding it altogether.
Kierkegaard says that those who live their lives floating in the shimmering dust devil of infinite alternatives, what he calls “knights of infinite resignation,” look like beautiful dancers, suspended in mid-air. Look at ‘em up there. They’re cool. They can do “whatever they want” because all their options are ever present.
But–and now the other shoe falls–because they can do anything at all, they never do anything at all.
They never land.
Never landing spares them the initiations–and the anxiety!–required for a fully authentic life. Following your true path is not always sweetness and light. Campbell notes, quite rightly, that “being a shaman is no fun,” for instance, but avoiding that call is worse. Campbell writes: “... those who choose to refuse the call don’t have a life. Either they die, or, in trying to lead more mundane lives, they exist as nonentities, what T. S. Eliot called ‘hollow men’” (Pathways, 113).
And that’s the downside: the inevitable crash landing. They have to come down eventually and the ground, metaphorically speaking, is unfamiliar territory. They’ve spent a lifetime avoiding the consequences of landing on a specific career, or life-partner or, well, a life–and landing makes clear what they’ve lost.
What’s most interesting (or alarming) here is that this life of never landing seems preferable to a fully-lived and authentic existence. If you’ll pardon a terrible but wonderful pun, Peter Pan remained in Never Land because growing up posed the threat of a responsible, adult, authentic relationship with Wendy. The temptation to cling to life as a candy store of choices, of Neverland-ing, is the most devious kind of threshold guardian yet.
So, what is to be done? How do we navigate beyond this kind of charming threshold guardian? Kierkegaard’s answer is a subtle take on the notion of faith.
Faith
For Kierkegaard, the solution to infinite resignation is not to fall back into the roles assigned to us by social convention, but to go forward into what he calls “faith”–something that requires a leap rather than a deliberative choice.
We’d need a few hours and a glass of wine to unpack everything Kierkegaard has to say about faith, but consider the difference between people who 1) make deliberate and careful choices about the life they want, and 2) those who “find their calling.”
Navigating life guided solely by reasonable choices seems always to be missing something–something deeper. This is especially true when those choices are conditioned by money or fame or status, rather than by the calling of those chthonic, subterranean tides tugging at the tectonic undercurrents of our lives. Failure to listen to them eventually produces earthquakes in our expectations, and we land with a thump.
Faith, by contrast, requires embracing the paradox of moving beyond the Dilettante’s wasteland of infinite choices into a zone of exhilarating (and sometimes terrifying) anxiety–what Campbell would characterize as being Master of The Two Worlds: a recognition that finding our path means going where there is no path.
Never landing lands us in Neverland. But if we accept the paradox of landing on our Path and engaging the burdens of the quest, the reward is a life we ourselves author–and the Grail of authentic existence.
Thanks for musing along.
MythBlast authored by:
Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (ISSRNC.org). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress.
This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 2, and Pathways to Bliss
Latest Podcast
In this bonus episode, Campbell discusses his "favorite definition of mythology". He also speaks to the four functions of myth, how a moral order relates to mythology, and finally retells the myth of the tiger and the goat. There is no information as to where or when it was recorded.
This Week's Highlights
“What if you want to gain some idea of what your myth is while you are living it? Well, another way to try to discern your destiny—your myth—would be to follow Jung’s example: observe your dreams, observe your conscious choices, keep a journal, and see which images and stories surface and resurface. Look at stories and symbols and see which ones resonate.”
-- Joseph Campbell
Pathways to Bliss, 112