Disillusionment. It’s a feeling we encounter to different degrees throughout life, when reality doesn’t live up to the ideals we hold in our minds. But what is the philosophy behind this particular brand of disappointment, and does our experience of disillusionment need to be completely negative? This gently reflective song by Peggy Lee may hold the answer.

A yearning for the sublime

I remember when I was a little girl
Our house caught on fire
I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face as he
Gathered me up in his arms and
Faced through the burning building out on the pavement

And I stood there
Shivering in my pyjamas and
Watched the whole world go up in flames
And when it was all over
I said to myself
Is that all there is to a fire?

Lyricist Jerry Leiber, who penned this song in partnership with Mike Stoller, is said to have taken inspiration from a particularly despondent short story by German writer Thomas Mann, entitled Disillusionment. In it, the story above is recounted very similarly, and expanded upon:

… it would be wrong to say that my fancy could have painted anything much worse than the actual burning of my parents’ house. Yet some vague, formless idea of an event even more frightful must have existed somewhere within me, by comparison with which the reality seemed flat. This fire was the first great event in my life. It left me defrauded of my hope of fearfulness.

What’s interesting about disillusionment, which I think is captured by both Leiber and Mann in the passages above, is the mismatch it represents between expectation and experience. What is disillusionment, after all, but an unveiling – a literal dispossessing of illusion? And while it must surely be a relief to live through a catastrophic experience unscathed – to withstand danger and fearfulness in all their unexpected banality – perhaps in doing so we experience a form of loss or letdown. I can feel similarly about the medical emergency I experienced last year: is there nothing more to it, for your world to be turned upside down? For me, as well as having its moments of pain, scariness and sadness, the reality was often rather mundane.

This, of course, leads to a strange contradiction. For Mann, the fact that, in his experience, real pain isn’t rich or sharp enough is the cause of a duller, flatter, but arguably even more painful form of melancholy:

Many a night I lay wide-eyed and wakeful; yet my greatest torture resided in the thought: “So this is the greatest pain we can suffer. Well, and what then – is this all?”

Behind this paradox is the idea of a pain so exquisite that it’s worth suffering through; an awe-inspiring, overwhelming, transcendent form of agony that regular discomfort just can’t live up to. In aesthetics, the branch of philosophy concerned with beauty, there is an idea that seems to capture this: “the sublime”, a kind of immense, unmatchable greatness. If you’ve ever gazed at the stars or down a canyon and felt just how small you are in comparison to the universe, you might have some idea of the sublime.

For eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke, who describes the sublime as “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”, we are closest to sublime terror when we don’t know exactly what it is that we fear. Those monsters under the bed ignite our dread precisely because they are shadowy, unknown objects of our imagination. The same is true of a house fire: the idea of the blaze, in all its powerful malignancy, could well be more awe-inspiring in our imagination, than it turns out to be in reality:

“To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.”
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Perhaps that goes some way towards demystifying Mann’s paradox – but there’s plenty more that philosophy can say on the topic of disillusionment.

The metaphysics of disillusionment

And when I was twelve years old
My daddy took me to the circus
The greatest show on Earth
There were clowns and elephants, dancing bears
And a beautiful lady in pink
Tights flew high above our heads

And as I sat there watching
I had the feeling that something was missing
I don’t know what, but
When it was over
I said to myself
Is that all there is to the circus?

Our ideas about the world aren’t always matched by experience. Just as a house fire is more scary before we undergo it, sometimes a circus is more exciting in our imagination than it turns out to be when we visit one. But what is the source of these vivid ideas that we have? What is it that reality is missing?

Metaphysics (the branch of philosophy exploring the nature of reality) has a few things to say about this.

Plato, for example, held that there are two different realms of reality: the world of appearances, where we have our (imperfect, often disappointing) experiences, and the world of the Forms. For Plato, the Forms are eternal and unchanging and represent true reality; the world of appearances is but a pale imitation. On this view, it’s perhaps no wonder that our experience of a circus wouldn’t live up to the perfect Form of Circushood. But I’m not sure this theory can explain disillusionment as it stands, because for Plato, only a very select few people can come to know the Forms. Surely we need these perfect ideas to be there, already formed (so to speak) in our minds, if we are to be disillusioned when reality doesn’t measure up.

For Descartes, everything begins with ideas: it’s where all our knowledge starts. If a thing exists “out there” as well as in our ideas, it also has “formal reality”. (But there are plenty of things that only exist as concepts: unicorns, Russell’s teapot, perhaps even selfless good deeds.)

Descartes divides his ideas into three types: the very basic innate ideas that come built-in (like the truths of mathematics), the “adventitious” ideas we get from experience (like the feeling of fire), and the creative ideas we have when we invent something new.

Among my ideas, some appear to be innate, some to be adventitious, and others to have been invented by me. My understanding of what a thing is, what truth is, and what thought is, seems to derive simply from my own nature. But my hearing a noise, as I do now, or seeing the sun, or feeling the fire, comes from things which are located outside me, or so I have hitherto judged. Lastly, sirens, hippogriffs and the like are my own invention.
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

So, could it be that when we come up against a mismatch with reality and feel disillusioned, it’s because we’ve been thinking about our ideas in the wrong way? We might have thought that our idea of a circus was one that is innate, or one that had come from experience – but until we’ve actually been to the circus, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it the picture we had conjured was an invention. (A bit like our imagined monsters under the bed). If so, then no wonder “something was missing” in an actual encounter with the circus: it just didn’t have all the same characteristics that young Peggy Lee had invented in her mind.

This this theory of disillusionment ties in with Burke’s thoughts on the unknown versus the known when it comes to terror, but what I like about it is that as well as disappointment it can equally well account for wonderful surprises. Not all of us are perpetually disillusioned by the world around us; thankfully most people have also been struck by experiences that have made us catch our breath, delivering over and above our expectations and beyond our wildest dreams.

Love, loss and stoicism

And then I fell in love
With the most wonderful boy in the world
We’d take long walks by the river or
Just sit for hours gazing into each other’s eyes
We were so very much in love

Then one day
He went away
And I thought I’d die, but I didn’t
And when I didn’t
I said to myself
Is that all there is to love?

Romantic love is everything, while we are feeling it. And yet, all too often, the feeling fades, for one party or both. How is this possible? The disillusionment described in this verse is an expression of disappointment that the absence of love – however inconceivable before it occurs – is ultimately survivable: “I thought I’d die, but I didn’t.”

The realisation that love can end (or even just fade a little) reminds me of a Smiths lyric that I used to regard with horrified fascination as a teenager:

Nothing’s changed
I still love you, oh, I still love you
Only slightly, only slightly less than I used to, my love
The Smiths, Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before

To my younger self, the idea of love was of an emotion so all-encompassing that for it to wane seemed conceptually impossible. Any level of cooling-off, as alluded to by Morrissey in that song, would be an admission that the assigning of Love to such feelings hadn’t been warranted after all. Philosophically, I suppose it would be akin to admitting that God has imperfections. However small these imperfections would be, they would render the concept of “God” redundant, because to be God is to not fall short in any way (even just a little bit).

It might help to think of love differently, as something that exists fleetingly, when the time is right. It’s no less of a precious gift for being impermanent; like everything, it simply has its season. That’s a view expressed by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus:

What you love is nothing of your own: it has been given to you for the present, not that it should not be taken from you, nor has it been given to you for all time, but as a fig is given to you or a bunch of grapes at the appointed season of the year. But if you wish for these things in winter, you are a fool. So if you wish for your son or friend when it is not allowed to you, you must know that you are wishing for a fig in winter.
Epictetus, The Discourses

Underlying the Stoic tradition is an emphasis on acceptance. It’s about understanding how things really are, accepting that we can’t fight them, and living life accordingly. The Serenity Prayer, written a couple of millennia after the Stoics in 1934, sums up the thinking well:

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.”
Reinhold Niebuhr

Practised effectively, this type of acceptance should help us to eliminate feelings of disappointment, or at least, not to get stuck dwelling on them. Perhaps questioning “is that all there is”? is the first step towards accepting, “Yes, that’s all there is. Where do we go from here?”

A liberating realisation

I know what you must be saying to yourselves
If that’s the way she feels about it
Why doesn’t she just end it all?
Oh, no, not me
I’m not ready for that final disappointment

Because I know
Just as well as I’m standing here talking to you
That when that final moment comes
And I’m breathing my last breath
I’ll be saying to myself

Is that all there is
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friend
Then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

Deathbed revelations must come in many forms, but I’m not sure I’d be much comforted by “that final disappointment”; the shock of realising that there’s nothing “else” to life or its ending. But what if we make that realisation now (if indeed it’s true), while we still have a life to live?

Admitting “that’s all there is” – that there is no further meaning of life – could be described as a form of nihilism. There are moral nihilists that deny the existence of objective moral values, and metaphysical nihilists that think our experiences are an illusion. Those who believe in an absence of meaning or purpose are known as existential nihilists.

There’s an understandable historical backdrop to the rise of existential nihilism in philosophy. With the progression of scientific discovery in the nineteenth century, many cherished beliefs about the place of humans in the world were dashed. The theory of evolution put paid to our need for a divine Creator, while geological revelations about the age of the universe made people question what was really true. This existential doubt gave rise to a nihilistic outlook for thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (who declared that “God is dead”). In turn, the nihilists set the scene for early twentieth-century existentialism, which also arose in the wake of the horrors of Nazi holocausts and nuclear destruction.

Accepting the inherent meaningless of life in an indifferent universe, existentialists such as Sartre and de Beauvoir formulated a new way forward where humans can forge their own path and make their own meaning:

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness

According to the existentialist, you’re on your own. And if you’re open to that idea, it can be incredibly liberating: we are free to to take responsibility for our choices, to live authentically, define our own values and pursue our own paths.

It might seem eminently sensible, then, to “break out the booze,” and enjoy yourself the best way you can. If there is no other meaning, why not make the pursuit of happiness your goal, as Epicureanism recommends? This brand of philosophy, known as hedonism, is not as bacchanalian as it sounds, however. While the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus admitted that we do find some joy in sensory pleasures like drinking, he thought that another type of happiness is more valuable. With ataraxia (peace of mind) and aponia (the absence of physical pain) as his goals, Epicurus aimed to live a modest, moderate life focused on balanced wellbeing.

But in the end, if we are to listen to the existentialists, the path you choose is up to you. What’s important is to be authentic and true to yourself. If drinking and dancing is where you find meaning, then as a nihilist it’s probably the most rational way forward. (Unless… there’s any chance that’s not all there is… but that’s a blog for another time.)

Cheers!

Further reading and related links

The first version of this song I heard was a PJ Harvey cover. You can find it on YouTube here:

• Is That All There Is? John Parish and PJ Harvey

The Thomas Mann short story is only a few pages long and is worth a read if you’re a fan of this song.

• Disillusionment by Thomas Mann

Here are some places where you can follow up the ideas introduced in this blog:

• The sublime: A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, by Edmund Burke
• Platonic Forms: Plato: a Theory of Forms in Philosophy Now
• Epictetus and the metaphor of a fig in winter: Discourses by Epictetus (scroll down and the passage I’ve quoted is highlighted)
• Existentialism: Existentialism entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Hedonism: Hedonism entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

What do you think?

I’d love to hear what you make of the sentiment in this song, and whether for you it’s depressing or uplifting. And also, how do you yourself answer the question, “is that all there is?” Post your comments below!