Jude the Obscure

Let us ask whether it is better, living, to commune with the dead, or living, to commune with the living. Grant the opposition between the two. Communing with the dead is a private affair. One carries out the work in one’s study. There is no external reward for this. Remuneration comes in the form of self-satisfaction, but also in terms of added self-control, an accrual of power by virtue of being informed by the past. One can attain local effects by means of control of language, or conduct, word being a species of deed. One can conduct goodness from the inner recesses of one’s being into the outside world, and think one has bettered it thereby, but there is always the nagging doubt that one would like to be celebrated by the world, very much at odds with the pious wish to better it.

That is a reason why the living might commune with the living. One can converse and carouse, and by impressing peers, build a career, should one have the opportunity to do so, at the culmination of which celebration would be the natural and logical outcome.

But what makes one worthy of celebration would be lost in the pursuit of it. We cannot measure ourselves by an external metric if we would be great. We ourselves have to provide the measure.

The path, then, of the philosopher, as well as the pious Jew, must be to look inwards, or rather to assimilate such outward material as lies ready-to-hand in order to exemplify what it is that we think is the potentiality that lies latent within all of us. Some conservative political philosophers would suggest that there is a chasm between the common man and the philosopher that the latter dishonors himself in thinking it possible to bridge, even insulting the former, if indeed he is a type apart, by holding out to him a potentiality he cannot reach, and claiming that he can, mocking him in effect if not in intent. This is a coherent argument. Yet it runs in the face of Socratism, which makes it its business to be out and about, mixing with people and putting the question to them with the example of one’s being. “You catch more flies with honey.” If there is an aristocracy of intellect, one arouses latent powers in others by asking them, with words and deeds, whether they are up to the challenge. Intellectuals do not wear labels on their heads. It is the retreat into haughtiness that really dishonors the philosopher, for he makes it his business to consign those with lesser opportunity to oblivion, failing to give them the education they need in order that they might realize their potential to be like himself. It is a kind of human sacrifice to the ideology of types. Therefore, if it is deceitful of oneself – that is, if one pulls the wool over one’s own eyes – to suppose everyone a philosopher, nevertheless, it is a strategy to spread joy, which is the goal of the devout Jew, rather than the philosopher, attained by philosophical means, namely the Socratic. One communes with the past, but mediates it to the present, and as absent from the interaction one undergoes, being in touch with the dead and spreading the knowledge that goodness and truth are one, beauty having no intrinsic relation to either.

Hardy knew what he did in titling his character Jude. The name in German is obvious. The man is depicted as up on a rooftop, gazing at the stars over Christminster, which he shall never enter. In this passage, reference is made to a wicked Jew, the only time the word is mentioned in English, and not just coincidentally. Jude thinks to differentiate himself from the latter in calling him wicked, seeing Jews as a type, and not recognizing his fate in their own. For he dies, uncelebrated, which is the experience of Jesus, if not the outcome. One cannot fix one’s gaze on the outer world if one would be good. The truth lies within.