metonymy4u

Ever since Plato, western thinkers have been concerned with the problem of how to resolve the needs of the one with the needs of the many. One common resolution was to seek an absolute truth about the universe which, once revealed to all, would extract obedience from both the recalcitrant one and the hegemonic many. Obedience to the single authority of truth, virtue or God would then resolve all the ancient boiling tensions. The latest iteration of this attempt can be seen in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and has had a great deal of influence on our current thinking about human nature. It goes something like this: In the old days, according to Nietzsche, people struggled against the influences of society and the gods. The pagan gods of classical Greece were often mischievous, capricious or downright evil and individuals (“heroes”) were thus compelled to identify their individuality by defying the gods. In the classical world, tension between self and other (heroes and gods) was thus productive of self-identification and self-definition, it promoted life and cultural flourishing. For Nietzsche, human existence is thus defined by power struggles. His critique of modernity is that by undermining the possibility of absolute knowledge, which was the “gift” of modern science and liberal democracy, modernity has taken away what is essentially human: the possibility of individuation through struggle. Even the Judeo-Christian god challenged humanity at crucial times: when he tested the ingenuity of Noah, the will of Abraham, the fortitude of Job and Moses, or the faith of Paul and the Apostles.

Such periodic challenges are for Nietzsche part and parcel of our growth as humans and when the bow of conflict is unstrung, as it is by our modern, “enlightened” heuristics of knowledge, then humanity comes to its end, looks into the abyss of nihilism. So for Nietzsche the answer is to re-present our need for struggle. To promote this, he re-invents the Christian concept of original sin, re-packaging it as the Dionysian spirit. In modern parlance we would call this the id—that essential part of us which is hopelessly addicted to aggression and desire and knows no restraint but what is uncomfortably placed upon it by the demands of society.

Once again we have the classic formula, articulated at the dawn of the enlightenment by Thomas Hobbes: humanity in its natural and essential state is brutal and driven to aggression and is tamed only by an equally aggressive sovereign force (that force being either the state itself or our internalized version of the state – our “super-ego”). And for the past 100 years at least, we have lived with this model, not questioning its wisdom or its recommendations. For several generations of sociologists, psychologists, economists, politicians and therapists we have, I think, blindly followed the classic synthesis of the ancient dialectic: to find the true truth which will lead automatically and authoritatively to a resolution of self and other.

Recently, however, several authors have proposed an alternative strategy. Richard Rorty has proposed that we view the ancient dialectic between self and other as perhaps unresolvable, at least in our present state. He proposes a very clever spin on Nietzsche’s desire to restring the bow of humanity: he says “let’s see what happens when we just sit with the unresolved contradiction between the idiosyncratic needs of the one and the power hungry inclinations of the many.” The first he calls private irony and the second public hope. Like Marsha Linehan, he proposes that we simply observe and describe the dialectic and use the polarity as a spur to asking such questions as “what is being left out?” Not interested in the “one truth to rule them all” Rorty is therefore able to rekindle our curiosity without recourse to Nietzsche’s “will to power” or Freud’s “id.”

Being willing to sit with uncertainty and not fearing the threat of nihilism which drove Nietzsche back to an inverted version of Christian authority, Rorty is thus able to risk his own life on the hope of a more useful creation. Rorty restrings the bow of his own longing not by threatening us with the abyss of meaninglessness or the anxiety of moral decision, but by challenging our innate wisdom that knows two things that are true at the same time: that the individual’s voice matters and that the cruelty of the community is the worst thing we do. The dialectic looks unresolvable, true, and so I should think we are in the vicinity of something important. To stay in uncertainty, to chance the unresolvable thus is for Rorty the modern Abrahamic challenge. The dialectic of self and other is our contemporary Isaac, called to sacrifice upon the alter of the threat of nihilism and the dizziness of freedom. Our challenge, our glory, is to make that journey through the desert with our most cherished companion, the fruit of our faith, not knowing the outcome, just knowing our inner hearts as dear Richard did his.

And of course, more recently, Franz de Waal has proposed that we examine the roots of human nature by examining the native behaviors of animals related to us. Mammalian behavior, he has discovered, is rich with instances of empathy, love, compassion, self-lessness and altruism. The plethora of data on this, combined with modern neurophysiological research on phenomena like theory of mind, mirror neurons and the healing power of compassion and validation, give the lie to what he calls the “thin veneer” theory of human nature (the theory advanced by Hobbes that in the state of nature human existence is essentially “nasty, brutish and short.”)

In this way, both authors have rekindled an alternative theory of human existence, one which was also present at the outset in the works of the philosophers, but which through historical accident failed to amplify. This is the notion that we are not in fact bound by any essential nature to live in a world of power struggle and misery. That we may in fact have the seeds of a compassionate, kind and loving creature within us, just waiting for the right soil to spring to life in. On this planet I suspect there are many types of earth in many places, and it is my hope that someday we discover the plot of reconciliation, the one with the other.