The Virtues of Disillusionment

Steven Heighton

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781771993241
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Most people go through life chasing illusions of success, fame, wealth, happiness, and few things are more painful than the reality-revealing loss of an illusion. But if illusions are negative, why is the opposite, being disillusioned, also negative? In this essay based on his inaugural writer-in-residence lecture at Athabasca University, internationally acclaimed writer Steven Heighton mathematically evaluates the paradox of disillusionment and the negative aspects of hope. Drawing on writers such as Herman Melville, Leonard Cohen, Kate Chopin, and Thich Nhat Hanh, Heighton considers the influence of illusions on creativity, art, and society. This meditation on language and philosophy reveals the virtues of being disillusioned and, perhaps, the path to freedom.

Always begin with a mystery — in this case an equation that for some reason doesn’t equate, or doesn’t seem to. Or call it a paradox of the kind that Zeno of Elea, the Ancient Greek philosopher and cognitive provocateur, might have appreciated.

A basic principle of both arithmetic and language is that two negatives multiplied — or, in the case of words, compounded — yield a positive. The simple math operation (-1) × (-1) gives + 1 every time. Likewise, combine the negative prefix “un-” with a pejorative term like “burden” and the result is a semantic positive: the verb “unburden,” to relieve someone or something of a physical or conceptual load. Of course, language is not math. Word meanings are contextual and often equivocal. All the same, if you tell us, “I’m not unhappy with x or y,”we can be pretty sure you mean, more or less, “I’m happy with x or y,” or at least “I’m content / satisfied / feel OK about x or y.”

But now let’s look at one of the only, and perhaps the most psychologically telling, double-negative paradoxes in English. We can set up this mystery disequation by agreeing that the word “illusion” is almost always construed as a negative term — or, in semantic terminology, a pejorative. You never tell anyone “I think you’re trapped in an illusion” and mean it as a compliment. Even if your motives are benign — say, you’re trying to coach or console a heartbroken friend through a divorce or other disappointment — you’re still warning the person about a problem, an issue, a toxic psychic phenomenon. You’re telling your friend he’s clinging to a false conception; you’re saying she’s bought into a lie, a delusion.

We all accept or create illusions and cling to them. Anyone outside the walls of an ashram or Zen monastery — and, come to think of it, most of those inside as well — stumble hypnotized through their lives, lured and at the same time sedated by their illusions, mistaking figments and projections for reality.

In several Asian religious traditions, and in the Sanskrit language of their source scriptures, illusion is maya, a noun at times personified as a kind of spirit performing a many-veiled dance. She, or he, or them — the gender of the embodiment is irrelevant — is a deceiver, a decoyer, a confidence trickster, a caster of spells and weaver of entrapping webs. Even teachers who embrace Buddhist principles of non-judgment warn that the illusions we cling to are limiting and damaging — hence negative. Sure, you can talk about “harmless illusions” and be understood, but the fact that the term in this usage requires a neutralizing qualifier is revealing. Illusion is, pure and simple, a minus one.

What about the other side of my paradoxical equation, the prefix “dis-”? Its Latin root means simply “not,” or “un-,” and in modern English the term works the same way. It’s a little tag or module of negation, a valence-reverser, a semantic fridge magnet you clip onto the front of a word to invert its meaning. Mathematically speaking, it’s a minus sign. Disproof, disorder, disgrace; displease, disobey, disenchant.

If we agree that “illusion” is a negative and the prefix “dis-” a kind of minus sign, then logically and by mathematical analogy “disillusion” and “disillusionment” must be positives, no? And yet in common parlance they’re anything but.¹

FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT, and in accordance with logic, let’s suppose now that “disillusionment” is in fact a positive term defining something good and desirable. What, then, could create the impression (in fact, the illusion) that it’s a hateful condition you’ll want to avoid at all costs?

“Warren was a weary, disillusioned man.” Or, “The last time I saw her, Irina seemed depressed, regretful, disillusioned.” These sentences are readily understandable, and any reader who isn’t sociopathic will instantly empathize with both Warren and Irina. Everyone over a certain (very young) age has endured disillusionment and knows it to be an acutely painful sensation. “Sensation” is not nearly a strong enough word. We’re talking about a pain that can suffuse our very cells and rapidly metastasize into depression; a pain that seems, symptomatically, to have much in common with the knock-out body blow that a jilting, an abandonment, or other rejection can inflict. Perhaps disillusionment is a kind of jilting / rejection? It can leave us feeling we’ve been dropped by the world, existentially dumped; the cherished belief we were embracing like a lover has turned out to be a cheat, a false friend, a zero, and the pain of that epiphany is lonely and isolating.

To be disillusioned is to be Dear Johned by a spectre. There we stand, ears scalding with shame as we realize how grotesquely we’d given ourselves to the illusion that something about ourselves or the world was true.²

I FIRST NOTICED the mathematical / logical singularity of “disillusionment” some years ago, but I didn’t understand the implications then. It simply struck me as a pleasing paradox, an interesting little insight, and I must have thought I was clever to note it. But I did nothing about it. It didn’t change the way I lived or the way I regarded — failed to recognize, I should say — my own illusions.

It was in 1996, in the weeks before my first child, a daughter, was born. I was trying to finish the first draft of a first novel. I was writing fast, by hand, around 2,500 rough words a day, inspired by a sense of both urgency and excitement. Urgency because I wanted to get the first draft down before the child came and upende...