Clare Carlisle Asks Why Ordinary Lives Deserve Biography

By Marcus Bennett

Clare Carlisle, the award-winning biographer of Søren Kierkegaard, has published a new book that is not a biography at all. "Transcendence for Beginners" is a book about why life-stories matter — and its central argument is that a small, flawed life is as valuable as a heroic one.

Carlisle writes her own mother into the book three times: once while teaching her daughter how to write, once as her mother is dying, and once to mourn and memorialize her. The gesture anchors a philosophical case for the worth of unheroic lives, built on the most unlikely of foundations: the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

Carlisle is a philosophy professor and the author of a Kierkegaard life that abandons chronology for thematic immersion, as well as a philosophical "biography" of George Eliot's relationship with her partner George Henry Lewes. Her new book opens halfway up a mountain in Dharamshala, India, where, in her twenties, she met a man living in a small cave, tending a stone shrine and selling concessions to tourists. He had left the temporal world behind at sixteen or seventeen for ascetic devotion.

"Over the years I've met a few people who exuded a palpable spiritual quality, some rare insight or depth or stillness you could feel in their presence," Carlisle writes. "The man on the mountain was not like that."

Why a Spinozist biographer seems like a contradiction

For Spinoza, there is one substance only — a depersonalized God — and everything else is a "mode" of that substance, a ripple in the ocean of being. We are all, as the reviewer of Carlisle's book puts it, "ontological froth." On its face, biography is the genre of the integral subject: a person distinct from others, not dissolving in a sea of substance.

Carlisle finds her answer in the microcosm. If everything is an aspect of God, the value of the whole can be divined within a single person. This view is radically democratic. Later in the book we meet another ascetic, Ramana Maharshi, who spent his life on the sacred Himalayan mountain Arunachala and was fictionalized by Somerset Maugham in "The Razor's Edge." For the Spinozist biographer, it makes no sense to prize the famous guide over the nameless cave-dweller: both are different faces of a single peak.

Carlisle contrasts philosophy's abstractions with biography's specificity. "Whereas 'Socrates went around Athens asking, "What is a human being?,"' Carlisle writes, "I want to know who this singular person is."" As a biographer, she also attempts to create art, "to bring something new and singular into the world."

What does the book change for how we read "Middlemarch"?

Carlisle's argument lands hardest on works of art. George Eliot, who produced the first English translation of Spinoza's "Ethics," wrote against an age that idolized "great men" — Thomas Carlyle's "On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History" appeared in 1841, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Representative Men" in 1850. Eliot's riposte was "Middlemarch," in which Dorothea Brooke devotes herself to Edward Casaubon, only to discover his great work is a fraud. The novel's final lines honor "the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

"Above all, Eliot was interested in the moral power of ordinary lives, like Dorothea's," Carlisle writes, "whose effects are 'not widely visible', though nevertheless 'diffuse.'"

Carlisle also turns to the painter Celia Paul, whose repeated portraits of her mother Carlisle reads as celebrations of "the beauty of those hours in which two human beings gave one another time." Paul wrote to Carlisle: "She didn't mind what I made of her, she just needed to be looked at."

The case against the Spinozist view

The reviewer — who tried and failed to write his own mother's eulogy before her death — pushes back. He argues that a mother's life matters only because she matters: "The fundamental value of the subject: this is what the Spinozist cannot see." Even if the self dissolves, as Carlisle insists, "the life remains vivid, its story compelling," the reviewer counters that valuing a person only through diffuse effects is not valuing her for herself.

He grants that "Transcendence for Beginners" is both moving and profound, and that its vision — surveying human lives "under the aspect of eternity," in Spinoza's phrase — is breathtaking. His verdict is that the shame of knowing little about a mother's life was not shame at failing to grasp a life story, but "the shame of failing in love." The disagreement the book provokes — whether the person or the events hold the value — is precisely what will keep readers and biographers arguing with it.