“Even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, (it) continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it.”(page 57, This Homeward Ache))
The “it” in this equation is Sehnsucht. Sehnsucht, a German word that Lewis cites in his autobiography as a defining point in his own spiritual journey, and which Amy Balk Lee describes in her book This Homeward Ache: How Our Yearning for the Life to Come Spurs on Our Life Today, as being notoriously prone to being subsumed by other words. Yet, “the essence” of this word is one that, by its nature, “can’t really be translated.” She goes on to cite Rebecca K. Reynolds’s work in trying to unpack a strong sense of its meaning, rooting it in a feeling that one can’t quite explain, either to oneself or to others. It is defined as, “A yearning that floats always in the peripheral vision of your soul, but which disappears every time you turn and try to look at it,” something that lends it a necessary part of its very quality and charachter. It is a word that is most at home in the mundane struggles of life, describing that basic human of an unnamed longing for a far-off land we have never seen, or a place we cannot name. (page 41)
Lee suggests this basic truism about how life works, which is that our human biological function, regardless of the beliefs that undergird our interpretation of it, actively protects us against being stuck in a perpetual state of longing. This might feel intuitive, but it’s not always obvious or recognized as we make our way through this life.
The science behind this basic truth of human function suggests that such perpetual longing connects to a further discussion of the nature of human (or creaturely) desire, and more importantly how this relates to the brain’s consistent mode of formulating predictions based on the world it is encountering. What this establishes is, this predictive function is not merely responding to dangers and rewards that are right in front of us, as though this is a simple call and response exercise dependent on what it sees, rather it appears that there is a fundamental need for our brains to seek something it cannot see and cannot name. This is why the concept of hope remains so central to the human experience. As humans, this is what our brains are (unconsciously) fighting to preserve. Without this we become enslaved to what the science could call “dysfunction” or “disorder,” which can take on many different forms. One of its most accute forms on the mental side of things would be things like anxiety, depression, and stress, and its ultimate shape melancholy, cynicism, and apathy.
Lee also cites Alan Jacobs here, saying that while we (our biological brains) do not want to be caught in a perpetual state of longing, we do want to experience joy (as an example). Lee cites this in underscoring C.S. Lewis’ own basic translation of Sehnsucht as Joy. In fact, this is at the core of nearly every spiritual practice, this idea that there is a key difference between fulfilled longings and our experience of Joy in the face of unfulfilled longings.
Here is what this seems to reveal. While our brains are wired to protect against it, this basic fact of Sehnsucht suggests that we are in fact in a perpetual state of longing. However, the crisis point, the thing our brains are responding to, hinges not on the present lack of fulfillment but rather on whether we believe the source of this longing to be true and to actually exist. This is where hope is derived from.
The real question then appears to come down to this basic idea. If it is true that Sehnsucht cannot be grasped or explained, what actually matters is a two-fold reality: first, the idea that we live according to a deeply held belief that it exists at all, and second, what this reveals about why such a thing matters in the first place.
There is a simple, utilitarian understanding of this two-fold equation. It would say, based on reducing the experience to its material parts, that the science tells us this essential human experience is the brain creating the illusion of hope, and subsequently the illusion of joy. These become necessary in order for a human to live in a world shaped by unfulfilled longings. It is, in many ways, described in terms that attach to that essential drive for survival that we find in nature itself, and in fact, nearly everything I’ve read to this end inevitably locates this within a larger section discussing the biological roots of this very drive.
In this case, the appeal to such illusions, especially once you get into the philosophers, is what then moves us from the biological grounds to the metaphysical discussion. What’s important to note here is, such ways of explaining this longing aren’t looking to strip it of its meaning, rather it is naming what that source actually is. Here, the most common move is to appeal to complexity as a sort of authority in and of itself, meaning, these illusions are built on (or are a product of) these emergent realities we call the essential human experience. This is the complexity from which we then derive our meaning. In this sense, we can speak of these illusions as a real thing, even while they are being defined as something that does not in fact exist. .
This is typically the point where this discussion finds its pushback. On one hand, Sehnsucht is comfortably positioned as something that both exists and does not exist at the same time. Complexity allows us to say, it is a true part of the human experience, and thus we can say it is meaningful. But its meaning derives from a Sehnsucht that points to something very different than that experience. Thus Sehnsucht is simply a way of naming a biological function in ways that accord with the illusion. Whether we can hold the obvious cognitive disonnance without losing our sense of hope is not the real question for such interpretations (at least from what I’ve seen), rather it is simply about whether we experience the benefits of these illusions or not. Which is where Joy, or its superficial and largely ill defined version, happiness, comes into play.
On the other hand, those who critique the coherency of this position tend to suggest that such interpretations do not have a particularly strong explanatory power when it comes to actually making sense of the human experience itself, or more accurately the world we oberve and experience. It is not simply cognitive disonnance at play, there is in fact far more at stake when it comes to why we appear to need such beliefs in the first place. One need not look any further than a life for whom hope has been challenged or even abolished. What is at stake is what we actually believe to be true about the world we observe and experience. In this case, the only way we can trust Joy is by believing it exists apart from the ebb and flow of this world we are experiencing. Otherwise it all is held captive to circumstance.
Now, it’s important to note here that, this is not an apologetic. This is not a proof argument. Rather, it is a way of attending to both the way things actually are, and how that relates to what we actually believe about this world we are inhabiting. Whether these things can be stated to have any inherent value, it seeks honesty and integrity in the relationship between these two things.
There are two other important elements here that Lee brings to the table. The first is the hard relationship between a world that bears witness to both the infinite and the finite. This is what motivated minds like Einstein to pursue their theories about existence. Which is to say, when it comes to Sehnsucht, the finite does not have the power to explain the whole. Again, we know this intuitively, but we don’t always give this basic fact about the world we observe and experience the attention it deserves. If this is the case, that we have these longings at all must be set in conversation with the infinite. The quality of these longsings suggest that we are seperated from something we don’t yet know and can’t yet see. Whether this is something our minds of “illusioned,” or whether it is something that exists, in both cases this points to something outside of ourselves. And not just outside of ourselves, but something that is beyond the very words we use to explain it. In both cases, Joy can only translate Sehsucht if Sehsucht is not held captive to our experience of Joy. It is the same for another word we often employ in service of making sense of that which cannot be known or seen: beauty. Lee writes,
“Sehnsucht is not found in but beyond beauty.”
To think otherwise is to be betrayed by something that never existed in the first place. This is the existential crisis. We can only trust beauty if it points beyond itself to its source. In the same way in which metaphor, for it to have power, must point beyond itself.
There is a second important aspect of this discussion though that Lee addresses, and that is the idea of nostalgia. Nostalgia often suffers from superficial readings and definitions in our modern day, but at its richest, Lee suggest that nostalgia is a “heartache for the homecoming,” or a “homecoming pain.” Yes, it is a longing for a setting in the past, but where Sehnsucht reveals the source of this longing it “catches nostalgia and directs it toward something more fulfilling and complete, something of which the former time gave only a hint.”
What the experience of nostalgia reveals is that our longing has always been rooted in a sense of an inhabited space. Not some disembodied future but an incarnated reality. We aren’t longing for a past that is now gone, rather we are longing for the very same thing this past is bearing witness to in its memory. If this space is in fact a product of our brain’s creation of these necessary illusions, this sense of inhabiting an unnamed Home nevertheless still defines the shape of this longing. This is the only way our brains could convince us (a slippery word in this regard) that such a hope is true and trustworthy. And if it’s true? If this Home does exist? Here is where we glimpse its true shape.
Sehnsucht is always with us. It is an integral part of the human experience. To live with that “homeward longing,” is to live with a certain hope that Senhsucht is in fact something we can trust. We can trust it enough to stake our very lives on it, as all humans do. We call these “beliefs.” Behind every human experience, be it experiences of joy, sadness, sorrow, beauty, awe, empathy, pain, love; behind each of these things is an underlying belief about the world we observe and experience, and a deep rooted trust in that belief. That is what allows us to experience these things. Not only this, but behind every human experience is this same witness to Sehnsucht, a world (and word) we cannot see and cannot expalin, but which drives our longings, even as we know they will remain unfulfilled. Here in lies our hope.
The Stories of my Life 