What Is Biography For?

I had occasion, a year ago, to draft my mother’s eulogy. Unable to swallow, with advanced Alzheimer’s, she was being fed by intravenous drip. The end seemed imminent. Helpless and uncertain, I set out to write her life.

My mother grew up in Hull, on the northeast coast of England, the youngest child of a large family. She took care of her mother, who lapsed into dementia; she married my father, quit her hospital job, and raised two children, my brother and me. The outlines of her life were clear but the insides dark, lit up by vivid memories here and there. I recall a newspaper cutting from before I was born, with a glamorous black-and-white photo of my mother as a radiotherapist, beside an impressive-looking medical machine. Later, there were trips to the local library, where I inherited her love of reading, and the speech she gave at my wedding, shaking but determined. My mother never liked to be the center of attention, and those around her generally obliged. If only I’d tried harder to push through her reticence, to ask her more about her life when she still remembered it.

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As it turned out, my mother’s eulogy could wait. She recovered, as she had after a similar episode once before. But the biographical imperative rankled like an unpaid debt. Why did telling her story seem so vital and so fraught? And why did my inability to do so foster so much shame?

Clare Carlisle writes her mother into her new book, “Transcendence for Beginners,” three times over: once while teaching her daughter how to write; once as her mother is dying; and once to mourn and memorialize her. Like me, Carlisle is a philosophy professor; unlike me, she’s an award-winning biographer, the author of a life of Søren Kierkergaard that eschews chronology for thematic immersion, as well as a philosophical “biography” of George Eliot’s relationship with her romantic partner George Henry Lewes. If anyone could explain the value of writing a life—what I owed to my mother and why—it would be her.

“Transcendence for Beginners” is not a biography, though many lives are caught up in its weft. Instead, it’s a book about why life-stories matter. Both of Carlisle’s professions grapple with the value of human life, but philosophy veers toward the abstract, and biography toward the specific: a single individual with a mother and a given name. 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 attempts to create art, too, “to bring something new and singular into the world”—a world that “the philosophical part of us wants to declutter.”

Some philosophers will balk at that diminutive “declutter,” as though the great thinkers who built visions of the world were nothing more than metaphysical Marie Kondos. Not me. Carlisle is entitled to make fun of her colleagues for overestimating the power of rational argument and for preferring false simplicity to complicated truth. Her contrast is, in any case, provisional: she’s open both to moral philosophy that makes use of the individual and to art that does philosophical work.

But there’s a residual tension in Carlisle’s book, and it has to do with her touchstone, the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. To those who know his ideas, the notion of a Spinozist biographer will seem about as logical as a vegan butcher or a pacifist contract killer. For Spinoza, there is one substance only, a depersonalized God, and everything else is simply a “mode,” or modification, of that substance, a ripple in the ocean of being. We are all ontological froth. As Carlisle argues:

Spinoza’s conception of a human being is much more dynamic and fluid, its boundaries more porous and provisional, than the everyday notion of selfhood embedded in our grammar, which distinguishes the ‘subject’ from its own actions and properties as well as from the ‘objects’ it encounters.

On its face, biography is the genre of the integral subject—a person interacting with others but distinct from them, not dissolving in a sea of substance. For Carlisle, though, the “metaphysical selfishness” of a world composed of discrete human beings “reinforces moral selfishness, and vice versa.” Spinoza is an antidote to self-conceit. But what room is left, in his metaphysics, for the value of an individual life?

Carlisle finds an answer in the microcosm. If everything is an aspect of God, we can divine the value of the whole—the divine itself—within a single person. This way of looking at human life is radically democratic. Carlisle’s book begins halfway up a mountain in Dharamshala, India, in her twenties, when she meets a man who makes his home in a small cave, tending a stone shrine, selling concessions to tourists for a living. At sixteen or seventeen, he left the temporal world behind for a life of ascetic devotion. What moves Carlisle most is how ordinary he seems. “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,” she notes. “The man on the mountain was not like that.” Later in the book, we meet another ascetic, Ramana Maharshi, who spent his life on a sacred Himalayan mountain named Arunachala. Maharshi became a renowned spiritual guide, fictionalized by Somerset Maugham in “The Razor’s Edge.” Both lives are noble, both beautifully evoked: for the Spinozist biographer, it makes no sense to prize one over the other, the famous over the nameless, since they are merely different faces of a single peak.

Carlisle argues, then, for the value of unheroic lives. The argument is most overt in relation to works of art: George Eliot’s heroines, for example, or Celia Paul’s attentive portraits of her mother. Eliot, who produced the first English translation of Spinoza’s “Ethics,” lived in a time that idolized “great men”: in 1841, Thomas Carlyle wrote “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Representative Men” was published in 1850. Eliot’s riposte was “Middlemarch,” in which Dorothea Brooke devotes herself to her self-deluding husband Edward Casaubon, before discovering that his great work is a fraud. Dorothea lives a smaller life than she had hoped, but her life still matters, as the final lines of “Middlemarch” sing out: “For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Daringly, Carlisle reads even Eliot’s more morally ambiguous protagonists as “a manifestation of God. . . . a glimpse of something shining, perhaps not far away at all.” Carlisle guides us to a metaphysical summit from which we survey human lives “under the aspect of eternity,” in Spinoza’s phrase, filled with love for them as facets of a divine reality. It’s a breathtaking prospect, and “Transcendence for Beginners” is both moving and profound. But is its vision true? Or, to make this personal, how far does it illuminate the need I felt to write my mother’s life and the pain of being unable to do it well?

“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.’ ” My mother died soon after I tried, and failed, to write her eulogy. Like Dorothea Brooke, she lived an unhistoric life, and that things are not so ill with me as they might have been is at least half owing to her. I am grateful for that. Yet to value my mother in these terms, for her diffuse effects on me, or on other people, is not to value her for herself. For the Spinozist, the value of a life is the value of a sequence of events—waves in God’s ocean—not the value of the person living through them. “Even if the self dissolves, or never existed in the first place,” Carlisle insists, “the life remains vivid, its story compelling.” But my mother’s life—everything she did and everything that happened to her—only matters because she matters. The fundamental value of the subject: this is what the Spinozist cannot see.

If what we’re interested in are events, we will gravitate toward dramatic ones, and, though Spinoza reassures us that a small, flawed life is as much an expression of God as a heroic one, that doesn’t mean our interest is misplaced. It’s not an accident that Carlisle has published biographies of Kierkegaard and Eliot, not of her mother or mine: as a rule, we are more intrigued by bigger lives. There’s nothing wrong with that—unless we lose track of the fact that every person has a value independent of the life they happen to live. The “metaphysical selfishness” that Spinoza disdains—the world of discrete human beings—makes room for moral selfishness, true; but it makes room, too, for the dignity of the singular person.

For Carlisle, the artist Celia Paul’s repeated portraits of her mother celebrate the episodes in which they were created, “the beauty of those hours in which two human beings gave one another time.” But what is made in those beautiful hours is not a biography, nor the painting of a chapter in a life, but a picture of a person in time. Painting is not a narrative art in the way that life-writing is. The value of a portrait lies less in telling a life story, or part of one, than in sustained attention to a particular human being, the individual whose substance Carlisle and Spinoza dissolve. “My mother was never properly seen in her daily life,” Paul writes to Carlisle. “She found the attention I gave her healing in some way. She didn’t mind what I made of her, she just needed to be looked at.”

“I’ll see you when I see you”: the last full sentence my mother said to me, over the phone from the hospital, several years ago, before her power of speech fragmented. You could hear it as self-deprecation: I don’t matter so much, no need to rush to my side. You could also hear it as a vow of loving attention. We love people, first, and not their lives; but when we love them well, we look toward them, wanting to see them better. The shame of knowing so little about my mother’s life was not the shame of being blind to the value of a life story, but the shame of failing in love. ♦