Christopher Hamilton is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. He believes that philosophy begins in everyday experience with the problems and difficulties we confront in our lives. However, in his book Rapture he explores moments of everyday life that provide a sense of pleasure, joy or delight, together with a release from the travails and difficulties that beset us. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Hamilton discusses these moments of rapture (or ‘moments of being’) that we find in our lives, the aim of his book, and how it departs from his usual work.
What is your work about?
In one of her essays, Virginia Woolf points out that we live most of life caught up in banal, ordinary, and uninspiring quotidian activities: cooking, cleaning, organizing our work, mending something that has broken, shopping, and so on. In this sense, she suggests, we pass most of our life in a kind of ‘non-being’. But, she points out, we find that, despite this, there are in life certain ‘moments of being’, as she calls them, and these she thinks of as moments of rapture. My book takes its starting point from this idea and seeks to explore such experiences in life. The aim is to provide reminders of where we find such moments. The model I take for this as a point of departure—but not as a definition of rapture—is sexual love, where each of the lovers has a heightened sense of the other and also of him or herself with that other. Here there is a kind of loss in the other, and yet, a return to the self and, with this, a sense of liberation from quotidian anxieties.
There are many forms of this rapture, of a sense of opening up to the world and oneself, together with a sense of freedom, and I seek to explore them in the book. For example, I explore Nietzsche’s account of his feeling of rapture when recovering from a period of illness, as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s stay on St. Peter’s Island in Lake Biel, Switzerland in September and October of 1765. Here Rousseau experienced a period of utterly rapturous release in exploring the island and allowing himself to be absorbed in his surroundings. At times, he simply drifted in a boat, allowing the currents to take them where they would. But I also explore moments of rapture in the life of the ski-jumper Steiner, as he is explored by Werner Herzog in his film The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner (1974), where his rapture is bound up with extreme danger. This is also so in the case of Philippe Petit, the high-wire walker, whose whole life is lived in a spirit of rapture, an idea I explore further in the book.
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
A fundamental point of departure for me in my work has always been that life is deeply confusing, painful, and disappointing for all of us. And this is, in part, because we are each disappointing to ourselves, so full of foolishness and so deeply flawed. Certainly, some are more fortunate than others, but we all grope through life simply trying to make the best of a bad job. And without a doubt life is a great deal more problematic than one would imagine from reading most of the works—including the great works—of Western philosophy. I have, in previous writings, tried to explore this in writing about tragedy, aging, the way in which happiness is elusive and not at all well correlated with moral goodness, and so on. It would probably be fair to say that a sense of the tragedy of the human condition underlies all my work and comes out repeatedly, not just in the book of mine that I dedicated to the topic. However, the idea that life is tragic certainly does not mean—or, at any rate, need not mean—that life is not worth living or is relentlessly bleak or the like. As I see it, the issue is rather one of learning to live with the ways in which life is as it is. For sure, for some this is simply not possible—when, for example, their suffering simply destroys them. But for those of us who are more fortunate, the issue is that of trying to live with the difficulties of life, sometimes profound difficulties, and yet carry on with a certain dignity, all the while finding the things in life that nourish us. My book on rapture is just one fragment in an attempt to think through some of the things that can nourish us in this way.
Who has influenced this work the most?
I have always been open to many influences. When I first started studying philosophy at university many years ago I found it odd that my teachers clearly believed that there are texts that are works of philosophy and others that are something else—literature, say: novels, plays, poems, and so on—and that to explore philosophical ideas it is not necessary to know this other material. But it seemed to me then, and it still seems to me now, that, for example, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, Louise Glück and Philip Larkin are exploring many of the same things as Plato, Kant, Spinoza and others—namely, the nature of good and evil, of suffering and failure, of joy and fulfillment and so on. Of course, there are variations in style here, but this is also so in those texts that philosophers generally unhesitatingly classify as philosophical—think of the difference, say, between Plato’s dialogues, so full of stories, anecdotes, literary images and so on, and Spinoza’s Ethics, with its putatively utterly watertight forms of argumentation.
For these reasons and others, I am influenced by all kinds of writers. Nietzsche has always been very important in my work, perhaps particularly on account of his multiplicity of styles, his sense that he stakes his whole life on thinking and his relentless intellectual self-questioning, even self-undermining. But, in general, I very much like essayistic thinkers, for the essay form, as Theodor Adorno pointed out, thinks in fragments, just as reality is fragmentary. The essay lays itself open to objections and claims no final truth. This is why the subtitle of the introduction to my book is ‘Fragments of a Philosophy of Rapture’—with a nod to Kierkegaard’s book Philosophical Fragments. The paradigm case of writing in this way is, of course, Montaigne, who pretty much invented the essay in this form. No one knows human limitation better than does Montaigne, and no one better captures the instability of a human life. So, although I do not explore his thinking specifically at length in the book, Montaigne’s approach, his whole style, reminds me of what philosophy can be at its best. His influence is there in the book, a voice reminding me of what I do not know. Hence, I have tried in the book to adopt a conversational tone, one that invites readers in and can claim no final authority.
Is there anything you didn’t include that you wanted to? Why did you leave it out?
Yes. For one thing, whilst I discuss in the book the work of many figures—in addition to that of Woolf, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Herzog, and Petit I also explore, for example, the paintings of Pierre Bonnard, a short story by Chekhov, as well as some aspects of the philosophy of Simone Weil—there are others whose work I did not include as I felt that I did not have a deep enough grasp of what they do to be able to say anything especially helpful. So, for example, the writings of Clarice Lispector are marvelous and often explore the notion of rapture, but my understanding of her is rather undeveloped at the moment. Again, I would have liked to include the work of Thomas Bernhard, but I am holding this over at the moment for another project on which I am working at present. A more general omission concerns the notion of rapture in a religious context. I deliberately left this aside as I wanted the work to be relevant to believers and non-believers alike, but there is no doubt that the whole religious dimension or placing of rapture would merit close study.
Do you see any connections between your professional work and personal life?
Yes, certainly. As I have already said, I see philosophy as arising out of everyday life. But the connections between my writing, my teaching, and my personal life go beyond that. I came to philosophy as a young man full of burning existential questions about human life. They have never left me. For me, philosophy has never been merely an abstract, intellectual activity. Long before I read Wittgenstein, I had thought there was little point in a philosophy that helped one think about abstract questions but did nothing to improve one’s thinking about everyday life. And everyday life means, of course, at least in part, one’s own life—how one relates to oneself and to others, how one makes sense of pain and suffering, how one finds pleasure and delight in life. In the book, I explore the last of these, in part, by focusing on the rapture that is there to be had in everyday life through attention to small things. We all need to slow down, notice things, learn to find delight in the seemingly insignificant things of existence—I know I do! Nietzsche says that we should start each day by asking ourselves what we can do to make the day better than it otherwise would be and this involves attention to the small things of life—sunlight, the foods we eat, whether to go for a walk or not, and so on. He is surely right that mismanagement of such things is a large source of human frustration and suffering, so he points out the rapture we can find in paying attention better to these details of everyday life. The same lesson is there in Montaigne.
More generally, I see my work and personal life as connected insofar as I have the sense that, through all the reading and writing I have done, I am able to think a little more constructively about my own life than I otherwise would have at times. It is extremely hard to say in what way this is so and the risk of self-deception is very great here, as one can so easily suppose that one has gained some insight which really is, after all, illusory. Indeed, I do not think that there can be anything other than hope here—hope that things are a little better than they otherwise would be. La Rochefoucauld remarks that philosophy triumphs over evils past and future, but that evils present triumph over philosophy. If that is right, it means that all philosophy can teach one is one’s weakness. But that, if one could learn it, would be a great lesson.
Christopher Hamilton
Christopher Hamilton is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. He works in philosophy largely from an interdisciplinary perspective, exploring philosophy’s connections with literature and film. He is particularly interested in the different ways human beings make sense of their lives, or fail to do so, as well as in the resources that philosophy can bring to thinking about such questions.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
