metonymy4u

When we are young I think we live with a biological kind of faith. The hope of youth is necessary to get us out of the nest into a dangerous world to create and pro-create. And so our ancestors sent that trait on to us, and we experience it during our growing up years. But then we age, and the illusions are stripped away. Dreams die. The reality of a punishing experience sets in. We realize, as Kant pointed out, that there is no there there. And we may try, as Nietzsche suggested, to transform our stories from a “so it occurred” to a “thus I willed it.” The hope of youth being gone, I find this ineffective. For me each attempt gathers a senescence of faith, a recurrent knowledge of decay, and a greater understanding of futility. Each disappointment, each death, each squandered hope, each conformation of the world to the entropy of a meaningless universe is something that the hopeful illusions of youth are no longer able to gloss over any longer. At times I wonder if Schopenhauer was correct when he suggested that life for humans is an illness, and death the only cure. What do you think?

Read Full Post »

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.

Read Full Post »

One could ask: why philosophize? Why write philosophy? I do it because it is helpful for me. I have a very emotionally vulnerable brain. My emotional states often take over my entire body, and emotions then become my only facts. Writing helps center me. The usefulness of this activity has been verified by scientific investigation. When teens are in an overwhelming emotional state of mind, we teach them to take out a piece of paper, write the alphabet down one side and then come up with an animal name for each letter. This activity activates additional neural circuits that can balance the emotional urges and feelings that are threatening to overwhelm the individual and also helps fill short term memory with alternative, emotionally neutral cues. I have no problem with the hypothesis that our urge to think may be driven in part by our hugely emotional brains. Kierkegaard asked, “What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ – that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.’”

Read Full Post »

Just last week I had a conversation with a therapist colleague about the nature of suicidal and self-harming behavior in humans (a behavior that also occurs in other primates, btw…). We were actually discussing a specific case that she wanted to refer to me for behavioral therapy. She considered herself a psychodynamic therapist. She referred to the suicidal and self-harming behaviors exhibited by the client as “masochism.” I found it interesting that she would conceptualize the behavior as intentional and perhaps even a bit pleasurable to the individual, since my experience with such clients is quite different. In my experience suicidal and self-harming individuals are experiencing unbelievable levels of pain and are often not at all in control of their own behaviors. If they were, I actually have no doubt that they would seek other solutions to their problems. The difference in our experiences of the same event brings to my mind the difference between a symbolic experience of life and what I will call a phenomenological experience. The symbolic experience of life is well expressed by the following quote by Hegel: „Jede Vorstellung ist eine Verallgemeinerung, und diese gehört dem Denken an. Etwas allgemein machen, heißt, es denken,“ which I would interpret as follows: “Every representation is universalization and this belongs to thinking. To make something universal means, is, to think.” (From: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse). For those with the symbolizing habit of thinking therefore, to act is to express something (consciously or unconsciously) and to express something is to symbolize, symbolization being the primary form by which we universalize our experience. Thus for my colleague I hypothesize that self-harming behavior symbolizes an unresolved experience of violence or deprivation in her growing up years that she is compelled, by unconscious forces, to repeat over and over again until it can be resolved through interpretation and proper analysis. For me, on the other hand, the events are what they are and nothing more. For a phenomenological thinker, events are experienced in a manner well described by Sartre: “There is no longer an exterior for the existent if one means by that a superficial covering which hides from sight the true nature of the object….The appearances which manifest the existent are neither interior or exterior; they are all equal, they all refer to other appearances, and none of them is privileged. Force, for example, is not a metaphysical inclination of an unknown kind which hides behind its effects (accelerations, deviations, etc.); it is the totality of these effects” (from: Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology ). One can see, I hope, how vastly different experiences of the same clinical material might inform a very different clinical response on the part of the therapist. Students often question my ongoing emphasis on the genealogy of ideas. I hope that this very common, everyday example of the different schools of modern psychological thought demonstrates the utility of remembering the history of our cultural habits.

Read Full Post »

One common feature of human and chimpanzee culture is that social power is always potentially up for grabs. This pattern is not observed in all animal cultures. Amongst Bonobos, for example, power is distributed in a much more rigid hierarchy governed by blood relations. The result is that everyone can relax a bit more. One result of living in human or chimp culture is that assaults are much more frequent. Any given individual, when presented with the opportunity to grab power over another can often barely resist the urge given the learning history of our species. What I have learned about myself recently through repeated exposure to these sorts of assaults is that I tend to respond to the signals of violence with the same thoughts and urges. Whether it is urges for violence towards myself or towards others, it has become clear to me that the learning history which shaped these responses is the same. Having grown up in a culture of violence during my developmental years, those neural connections are very solidly built. They represent my automatic response patterns, over which I have very little immediate control – like someone pulling their hand away from a hot stove before they are even aware of the pain. To change these automatic, emotional responses therefore requires a great input of energy to the system, because neurons are physical events and obey the laws of physics, one of which is inertia. I have to work very hard to change my own automatic responses which were shaped in a culture of violence. I also have to remind myself that these responses were created by forces beyond my control. I did not ask, during my growing up years, to be repeatedly exposed to violence and aggression. This situation is not of my own making. Therefore I have also learned that turning towards my experiences with compassion rather than shame and self-hatred is the more skillful approach.

Read Full Post »

In times of extreme stress, one is forced to define more clearly one’s values. Who am I as a human being and what do I want to become? What behaviors will I not engage in under any duress, any circumstances? In our current social context, assaults are numerous and brutal. One consequence of being assaulted is that one learns who one is when assaulted.

Read Full Post »

I was at a poetry reading several weeks ago. Most of the readings were in the narrative, “post-confessional” genre. I liked a lot of the readings very much. The host of the reading afterwards said he didn’t care for that genre. That it didn’t take poetry seriously enough. That poetry for him was about expressing a feeling, not about who can tell the most entertaining story. I was glad to hear him say that. I feel the same way. I want to integrate what I learned from them into an emotional story. The way a musician learns from the title of the work. I want it to exhibit the courage of words.

Read Full Post »