For No Good Reason
Your Director began this half term in what those charged with inventing such phrases call a Professional Development Day. Much of it was time well spent: a fascinating introduction to the world of Trauma and Attachment Theory, for example. I will not attempt to mine that rich seam here, but one idea from the day has lingered with me. It was the claim that every behaviour communicates a need.
I recall in my whippersnapper Director days chatting with the educational guru Dylan Wiliam on various matters. In the course of our, quite rightly, one-sided conversation he made a similar claim, suggesting that poor student behaviour always had a rational basis, and that teachers should therefore be more disposed towards understanding than punishing such behaviours.
Now, I do not propose to discuss the validity of such claims; better people than I have made them. But I did find in them potential for today’s paltry words. I have found myself musing this week on the question of what, dear reader, is a need? And how are we to tell one from another?
When his daughter demands to know why he needs any of his knights, Shakespeare’s King Lear responds with the line, O reason not the need! He is responding to her attempts to (amongst other things) reduce his needs to, in the great Baloo’s words, the bare necessities of life.
Lear, who once measured love in declarations and divided kingdoms with the precision of an accountant, suddenly rages against the arithmetic of necessity. What he recognises as we should, is that need cannot be reduced to what is necessary.
Upset as he is, Lear’s line is more protest than petulance. It is rebellion against a world that has mistaken calculation for wisdom. In the courtly logic of the opening scene of the play, everything must be weighed, justified and declared openly so that those in authority can approve. Thankfully, life refuses such accounting. Lear’s O reason not the need is aimed not just at his daughter but at the spirit of utility itself; that tendency to measure worth by function.
As we have discussed many several times, dear reader, we live in the age of the spreadsheet of the soul. Every choice, every hour, every subject must prove its value. “Why study literature?” I am asked with increasing predictability. “Why paint, why pray, why sit together in silence?” Everything must yield its return in employability, wellbeing, or productivity. But the richest parts of life are precisely those that cannot be justified: the unnecessary, the gratuitous, the superfluous. Our basest beggars, says Lear, are in the poorest thing superfluous. We all possess that which we do not need. And it is that superfluity, not our sufficiency, that marks us as human.
Our old friend Iain McGilchrist writes: reason is the servant of something it cannot understand. Reason, at its best, illuminates; but it cannot generate light. C.S. Lewis makes the same point in The Abolition of Man: You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. The danger of pure rationality is that it keeps seeing through until there is nothing left to see.
Lear’s despair, then, feels curiously prophetic. He senses that to reason the need is to empty life of the very excess that makes it worth living.
From that protest arises a second insight: that the true currency of life is not need but gift. Cordelia’s refusal to heave my heart into my mouth in Lear’s opening scene is not coldness but integrity. She will not quantify love. The kingdom, however, operates by measurement; love is weighed in words, loyalty in land. Her silence exposes the absurdity of the transaction. Shakespeare shows us clearly that Lear’s tragedy begins when love is mistaken for a contract.
Your Director is told by those who live in it that much of the so-called modern world echoes that confusion where we are exhorted to account for everything. In this Dawkinseque universe kindness must be psychologically beneficial, friendship mutually supportive, and compassion is obviously just a handy evolutionary strategy. In this way, we are often justifying generosity by its returns. But as we actually know, the best things in families, friendships, schools, and faiths are precisely those that cannot be justified: the joke shared, the unasked-for kindness, the undeserved forgiveness. They are ‘unnecessary’ in the best sense of the word.
In Shakespeare’s later plays, love takes on that same gracious irrationality. I don’t need to remind you of The Winter’s Tale, where Hermione forgives Leontes after sixteen years of slander, loss and the not insignificant matter of being dead. Instead of a verbal declaration, her forgiveness is epitomised by her wordless embrace of her husband in the final scene. The eloquence here is not found in words but the joy of gesture. Or we could take the case of Twelfth Night, where love’s folly redeems a world gone sour with self-love. Love, in Shakespeare’s universe, is always the interruption of reason, the refusal to be efficient. And he knew a thing or three.
It is the same impulse that animates Dostoevsky’s vision of grace; the saintly foolishness of Alyosha or Prince Myshkin, whose mercy is not deserved and therefore cannot be explained. Or in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, where Dorothea’s ‘unhistoric acts’ of compassion change everything though they are never rationally required. In this way, these authors show us that the unnecessary is the lifeblood of meaning.
And yet, for all the comforts offered to us, we apparently remain uncomfortable. Our age of reason and sufficiency is not one of contentment. In some ways, we have met our needs but found them wanting. The modern world, as Viktor Frankl observed, suffers not from scarcity but from emptiness. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl distinguished the will to meaning from the will to pleasure or the will to power. Reason can meet material need, but not the hunger for significance. Man does not live by bread alone, or by broadband, or by balanced budgets. We are creatures of meaning, not merely of metabolism.
It is striking that Lear’s insight comes only through destitution. When he has nothing, he finally sees that the thing itself, the bare, shivering human, is not enough. He needs love, not clothing; mercy, not logic. The storm that strips him of reason is also his awakening.
But I hear Prof Dawkins evolutionary chariot always at my back. Surely need is written into the fabric of life..? Evolution, after all, is a grand improvisation upon need: the ceaseless adaptation of organisms finding just enough to survive and reproduce. Every living thing is, in that sense, an answer to a question of need. And yet, even here, something exceeds the logic of utility.
Charles Darwin himself was puzzled by beauty. Why, he wondered, does the peacock possess such needless splendour? Writing to a scientist chum he apparently said, The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick! Beauty seemed to him a kind of evolutionary extravagance, an affront to the tidy story of survival. And yet it is precisely this extravagance, this superfluity, to use Lear’s word, that defines life at its most vital. Now, it is true that Darwin did later reconcile this tricky business with the idea of sexual selection. He eventually concluded that the peacock’s tail evolved because peahens preferred males with more elaborate plumage, which made them more likely to reproduce and pass on the trait. But forgive me dear reader but that doesn’t explain why beauty exists at all or why we and peahens find beauty beautiful in the first place.
And us human beings, of course, are the great offenders. We are the animals that disobey our evolutionary brief. We paint caves, write poems, build cathedrals, die for love and for causes. We create not to survive but to express, to belong, to mean. Evolution may explain how we came to be, but not why we sing once we are.
Perhaps, then, Lear’s cry is the protest of a creature who refuses to live by survival alone. O reason not the need in that sense is the human spirit’s revolt against the tyranny of adaptation. For the world of need is the world of survival; the world of love is the world of grace. The lovely miracle is that we inhabit both.
This tension between the necessary and the unnecessary runs through literature. It is the , surplus that drives King Lear, but also Les Misérables, where Jean Valjean’s mercy towards Javert breaks the chain of moral necessity; and The Odyssey, where Odysseus’s yearning for home transcends the rational calculus of advantage. Even in modern dystopiasOrwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World for example, the mark of humanity is precisely that we desire more than what reason or evolution would call enough.
Pascal when he wasn’t wagering famously wrote: Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point (The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of). Dostoevsky went further: Man needs not only happiness, but unhappiness too. And dear friend of the column, Wittgenstein, forever suspicious of philosophy’s compulsion to explain, concluded: The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. Lear, broken and bareheaded in the storm, is discovering the same truth. Only when life’s calculations fail do we begin to see life as gift.
It is, perhaps, the same insight that flickers in Tolstoy’s late writings; that meaning arrives not when we have what we need, but when we give what we cannot justify. Or in the quiet grace of Hopkins, whose poetry trembles between precision and praise: What I do is me: for that I came.
Reason can describe the world, but it cannot confer blessing. Need can sustain life, but it cannot make life good. For that we require something Lear would have called love, and theologians might call grace; that unearned, unnecessary, unreasonable gift which alone makes sense of all the rest.
So perhaps we should be careful, in our schools and in our lives, not to reason the need too much. We should remember that education, like love, is not a transaction but an act of faith, particularly an investment in the unnecessary. We study literature not because it feeds us, but because it reminds us we are more than things that feed. We play, sing, create, forgive, and wonder; all needless but all in all necessary.
Every behaviour may communicate a need; but every human heart also communicates something beyond need: a longing for what cannot be measured, weighed, or reasoned. In that sense, King Lear’s desperate cry may be the truest kind of wisdom: the moment when reason falls silent before what is most deeply human.
Until next time Happy Reading/Needing
This week’s fun answer to last week’s fun question:
A driver was going the wrong way down a one-way street. He passed several vigilant police officers, but they didn’t stop him. Why? The driver was walking at the time.
This week’s fun question to answer:
I’m sure we all remember the old chestnut which asks how is it possible to build a house where all the windows face south, and the answer is, by building it at the North Pole… But how is it possible to build a house where all the windows face east?