metonymy4u

The tendency to engage in what therapists today call “cognitive fusion” has been around for at least 2500 years and likely is some part of the enduring experience of human suffering. In short, cognitive fusion means taking your thoughts more seriously than other events. Today, we also call this “reification” which refers to the notion that our ideas name something real out there in the world. Plato called this the theory of ideas, and it cropped up over and over again throughout centuries of western history: Christianity’s notion that “in the beginning was the word and the word was with God,” Descartes’ notion that “I think, therefore I am,” Leibnitz’s description of eternal, indestructible substances called “monads,” Kant’s description of hypostatization, Hegel’s description of the workings of “world spirit,” Nietzsche’s ever present “will to power,” or Freud’s model of “the unconsious.” Richard Rorty calls this the “Plato-Kant Tradition” and describes it as the tendency to believe that “nothing is closer to the mind than itself,” and that “the most knowable is the most real.” Wittgenstein famously tried to convince us otherwise through his famous statement “wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen“ (“What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence”).

What factors tend to reinforce these habits and what can we do about them? I believe that western culture’s fascination with securing freedom in a world of scientific determinism is one answer to the former, and the answer to the latter starts with simple awareness. Awareness of a geneaology of values which has placed freedom upon a pedestal from which we refuse to allow it to be threatened, not realizing the extreme irony of our enslavement to an ideal of freedom. It was such a concern which led Kant to search tirelessly for a deductive proof of the right to possess and use such concepts – a project which no doubt led to many useful insights, but which also led to what Kierkegaard later termed the “ventriloquism of an age.” This was the notion, ironically also expressed earlier by Kant himself, that modern humans remain in a state of intellectual infancy in which we perpetually look to others for our moral, intellectual and spiritual guidance, becomming nothing but inert mouthpieces, players in a scripted stage act. Kierkegaard promoted the courage and audacity that Kant had adumbrated but somehow not fully realized because of his apparent commitment to resurrecting the ontological proof of God’s existence (“I must destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith”). What the great Dane realized was that this effort, when not redescribed by each individual person for themselves and by themselves with courage, fear and trembling, had such a corrupting influence in the reinforcement of our tendency towards cognitive fusion as to be something indeed “more honored in the breech than the observance.”

The problem is that as soon as we start to write things down (on paper or in our minds), we long for that which we do not have and we begin to believe that it is the object of longing that is the key to life, thus forgetting the nature of the process itself. It reminds me of a slogan I saw running around the internet recently: “Please do not leave your longings unattended.”