metonymy4u

To understand the nature of the phenomenological patterns that I collectively experience as “rationalism” consider the following passage by Shakespearian scholar and Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt as he reflects on his mother’s experiences of living with anxiety and panic disorder:

I understood early on that my mother’s “heart”—the palpitations that brought her and everyone around her to a halt—was a life strategy. It was a symbolic means to identify with and mourn her dead sister. It was a way to express both anger – “you see how upset you have made me”—and love—“you see how I am still doing everything for you, even though my heart is about to break.” It was an acting-out, a rehearsal, of the extinction that she feared. It was above all a way to compel attention and demand love. But this understanding did not make its effect upon my childhood significantly less intense: I loved my mother and dreaded losing her. I had no resources to untangle psychological strategy and dangerous symptom. (I didn’t imagine that she did either.) …Lucretius’ words therefore rang out with a terrible clarity: “Death is nothing to us.” To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death, he wrote, is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed. He gave voice as well to a thought I had not yet quite allowed myself, even inwardly, to articulate: to inflict this anxiety on others is manipulative and cruel.

Notice how his language confuses, through a logical fallacy called “affirming the consequent,” effect with intent and concludes with the common post-Freudian assumption of “unconscious motivation,” even as he himself struggles to extricate himself, on the basis of Lucretian philosophy, from the darkened pit of despair built by this notion. The resources to untangle “strategy from symptom” are exactly what I believe our culture is wanting so badly in this war-weary, conflict ridden, perfection mad and power hungry culture we breathe in and around us every day of our lives. What indeed is the antidote to the poison of the western world? On this question hinge our lives, our fortunes, our several and tenuous honors.