metonymy4u

What amazes me about humanity is that we can be so clever as to figure out how to live in the deepest oceans, on the highest mountains, in the hottest deserts and in the frozen vacuum of space, yet we cannot seem to figure out how to live in peace with our own minds. The roiling cauldron of what Nietzsche called the Dionysian, Freud called the id, Buddhists call dukkha and Linehan calls emotion mind continues, as it has for thousands of years, to confound, frustrate and mystify us. One model for approaching this phenomenon is what I call the knowledge based model: if we only once we could grasp the truth of our “other” we could master it. To this end, Plato created dialectics, Descartes created skepticism, Kant created transcendental idealism, Nietzsche created the myth of eternal return, and Freud created psychoanalysis. And whether the wish is to create a new species called “the over-man,” “philosophical man,” or “analyzed man,” the goal, I believe, is the same: to use Truth to save ourselves from ourselves.

Looked at from another angle though, don’t these approaches make the same mistake over and over again? That is, don’t all of these theories have in common the age old belief that the process is the product, that knowledge (Platonically understood) is its own reward and that “the truth will set you free” – a favorite slogan of the platonist/christian academics of the middle ages? What the Buddha said, on the other hand, was that the end of suffering, though a desirable goal, was not an automatic product of understanding the causes of suffering. The 4 en-nobbling truths according to Buddhist tradition require that the cause of suffering be understood and then actually let go of. Behaviors don’t just change because we’ve decided we want them to. Actual productive and systemic changes require an active input of energy–thank you very much, 2nd law of thermodynamics!

So it seems to me that what we learn from the Plato-Freud tradition is the need for understanding. And what we learn from the Buddha-Linehan tradition is the need for wise action. If anxiety is indeed the dizziness of freedom then I think the question we face is whether we will dare that abyss, tolerate once again the arrow of endeavor and brave the vertigo of our awareness that would forever distract and control and frighten us? In such a project I am inspired by figures like Mahatma Ghandi, or Martin Luther King, who insisted that thinkers become active members of a community, refusing the punishment of public hope and daring to embody the demands of a private, all-too private, irony.