metonymy4u

The desire to understand ourselves as thinking creatures has enchanted and plagued humanity at least since the dawn of writing. As expressed by Richard Rorty, it manifests as the classically liberal question of how to balance the individual’s need for self-creation (private irony) against our needs for solidarity as a social species (public hope). One way to resdescribe and apparently resolve this tension is to create some sort of story concerning the “state of nature” which inevitably informs and shapes humanity’s experiences. Whether one subscribes to a notion of a will to power (Hobbes, Nietzsche), will to authority (Descartes, Kant, Sartre, Bloom), will to freedom (Hegel), or will to pleasure (Freud), the basic paradigm is the same: the devolution of the private-public tension upon the primacy of our “truer” natures. Franz de Waal calls this the “thin veneer theory” of human existence: the notion that civilized behaviors represent but a thin layer over coating our more primitive, driven and primal nature. The classical liberal tension is thus characterized as something merely epiphenomenal: an illusion to be dispelled when we re-encounter our true natures sublimated into their socially acceptable forms, concealed and, as it were, sicklied o’er by the pale cast of nurture. Though the history of the west has indeed been the tale of our struggles with our aggressive habits, there is in fact another story to be told about these struggles. The alternative thread, which one could perhaps nickname the existentialist thread, traces itself from Plato and the Buddha, through Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Skinner, Hesse, Kundera, Dewey, Rorty and de Waal to modern iconoclasts like Carol Gilligan, Beverly Tatum, Martin Luther King, Eduardo Duran and the erstwhile “Seattle Crew” (Linehan, Tsai, Kohlenberg, Jacobson, Martell, et. Al). From the existentialist perspective the duality of self and other is like the duality of life and non-life: a forever perplexing knot that need not be undone. It is this group who I believe have revived the sense of humanity in context, a model which was present at the beginning, but which was drowned out by centuries of reification and essence searching in a Europe plagued by the sense that life is elsewhere. Sitting with contrariety, living in perplexity, admiring the tensions of irony and hope is all that becoming need be and, finally, simply, the ladder that we throw away from under us.