The philosopher Hannah Arendt, who lived through the Holocaust, devoted her life to trying to illuminate this dark event and to understanding the meaning of judgment in human thought and action. For her, the function of judgment is to reveal meaning and is necessary to prevent oneself from supporting evil, for it is essential to be able to live in peace with oneself. Judgment, she said, requires internal dialogue and listening, an inner harmony. “Once you are empty,” she said, “then in a way which is difficult to say, you are prepared to judge.” Detachment is needed for judging, which is the ‘political’ activity of the mind and enables one to live day to day. In its original Greek sense, a critic was a judge or interpreter who could make distinctions, thereby separating things from one another and giving meanings. For Arendt, judgments need to be made not from on high, according to a book of rules, but individually, from the space of internal harmony. Thus, the individual must be responsible for his or her choices or actions, and this requires a clear, serene interior space, with addictive life destroys.
At the heart of creation and of recovery we meet this burden of judgment, which requires the acceptance of existential guilt. In order to create, we must continually make discriminating judgements: what to include, what to throw away, when to stop, when to continue, what fits, what can best express our vision? These judgments require us to endure the burdens of finitude. A work, whether it be the work of one’s life or one’s art, cannot be perfect. The vision of what we can create is always far greater than what can be expressed concretely in any given work of art or in any life. Thus there is a guilt inherent in the process of creation, for the creator always knows that he has been unable to give complete and perfect expression to his vision. The artist must be able to stand in the tension between the potentiality of the vision and the finite limits of the embodiment, just as a genuine work of art always contains creative tension and offers it to the recipient. This conflict – essential to the creative process – keeps many people from daring to create or to risk putting their creation out into the world. The same issue arises in the recreating of one’s life.
In order to live creatively we must learn to discriminate between the two types of judgements : those that help us honor the mystery of creation and celebrate recovery, learning to bear its tension flexibly as it leads toward growth and wholeness and those delivered from “on high” by the inflated Judge who would rather lock us up in the “little-ease” of addictive stagnation. Some of the toxic tendencies upon which the voice of the destructive Judge plays are the following : fear of failure and/or success, self pity, scorn, envy, resentment, jealousy, perfectionism, lack of containment, low self esteem, grandiosity, unwillingness to make necessary sacrifice, inability to balance and/or establish priorities,procrastination and lack of discipline to follow through to the embodiment of the creative vision. The patriarchal Judge emphasises comparing and competing, as wall as results (fame and fortune) rather than process. This impedes creativity. All of these proclamations from The Judge, who wants to be “highest,” are toxic to the creative process. In contrast, creativity requires judgments that have unconditional respect for the unique voice and style of each person and that celebrate the creative process.
One mistake of those of us plagued with harsh inner critics often make is to want to get rid of the Judge entirely. And that is precisely “The Fall” of Camus’ protagonist – to try to control by avoiding judgement. Failing that, he tried to manipulate others in order to become the highest Judge himself. But humans are neither entirely innocent nor entirely guilty. We are finite beings who stand between Heaven and Earth, who bear within ourselves the duality between spirit and matter, the cross of earthly finitude and spiritual striving.
The above is an extract taken from Witness to the Fire : Creativity and the Veil of Addiction, by Linda Shierse Leonard
Emerging From The Dark Night 