metonymy4u

Following Augustine and Rousseau, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard both accepted the risk of writing their own philosophical legends. Why did they do this? I think it was because they realized that the time had come for the individual to step onto the world stage. The categorical imperative for them was an imperative for an individual. A real living breathing individual and not just an individual as a representative of an ideal category or universal world spirit. For them, to kill reason and save belief intimated a faith that required the individual to risk everything in an uncertain universe of brute force. It was (and is) time for Aristotle’s hero of individuality, the epiphany of each and every singularly unique substance, to climb out of the shadows. For “what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and people — each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature — are therefore shot wholesale nowadays.”

Read Full Post »

Once upon a time our view of the world around us was very different. For example, we humans had the notion that space and time were either unchangeable features of God’s universe (Newton) or a priori essential principles of reason (Kant). But then some new data was discovered that was inconsistent with these notions and Einstein decided to build a new theory that rejected the idea of the constancy of space and time. Rather than trying to fit new data into old models, he simply proposed new models. The fact that the new models contradicted all of our traditional prejudices about the way the universe worked was not an impediment to him. Likewise, modern psychologists have discovered that it is more useful to fit concepts to contexts rather than the other way around. In this approach, concepts (words) are simply events which are more or less useful in a given context. They are not gateways to an eternally anchored truth. It’s kinda like what Audubon said about birding, “When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird.”

Read Full Post »

The 2nd amendment to the US constitution reads as follows:

“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

This language leaves no doubt whatsoever that the right to bear arms is reserved only for members of a well-regulated militia. A militia is a military force of citizens who are not paid a regular salary and do not serve for a specified period of time, but who function to secure communities during times of war. A well-regulated militia is one that that is under control of the professional military commanders with jurisdiction in the region, during times of war and enemy incursion to homeland territories. (In fact any militia which was formed outside of the jurisdiction of the state and its professional military would be considered treasonous.) The right for citizens operating outside of such a context to bear arms does not exist. It is a fabrication of the NRA which is in their best financial interests to promulgate on a weak and ineffective government which has abrogated its responsibility to protect the public health and welfare.

Read Full Post »

Today I want to speak to you of the banality of evil. That phrase was used by the 20th century political theorist Hannah Arendt to describe her experience of the Nazi war crime procedures in Jerusalem. Although I acknowledge the controversial nature of many of her conclusions and theories, still I think the notion has its uses. What it says to me is that evil is not something special. It is not brought by men in black cloaks, riding dark horses, speaking foreign accents or wielding special dark powers. Evil is something plain, every day, unremarkable and common. Evil is our own behaviors performed in a different context. It has been said that the truth is the first casualty in war and the victors write the history books to suit their own political aims. We see the validity of these ideas all over the world every day. The victims become the oppressors and the cycle of violence and reprisal never ends. One of my teachers once told me a story of a client who had killed their own children in a delusional episode. The client was then lucid again and incarcerated for life, but working towards emotional growth and recovery. My teacher observed that “there but for the grace of god go I—because I have the same brain as my client.” Until we learn to see evil as something banal, unremarkable, every day, something we are all capable of, indeed something we have all perpetrated on one level or another, we will never be able to change our habits of stigmatization and devaluation. Until we learn to describe the problem accurately and compassionately, we will never be able to solve it.

Read Full Post »

Think about it for a minute: if words were gateways to truth, then we could never learn another language. If words somehow corresponded to some sort of firm, determinate truth out there in the world independent of the words, then we would remain forever anchored to that truth through the words of our native language. We would never be able to break free of this necessary connection. We could never learn another language but the one we were raised in. But we do learn other languages. And we learn to use our mother language in new ways. So words do not correspond to anything called truth. Words are events and follow other events in sequence, while everything else remains the same. And when my speaking is done, your listening is done. That is all. There is no problem.

Read Full Post »

Humans seem to frequently focus on differences between “objective” and “subjective.” For example, the “hard” sciences like physics and mathematics are often seen as more “objective” than “soft” sciences like sociology or psychology. Frequently I think this is ascribed to the fact that data in physical sciences is seen as precisely quantifiable whereas data in the social sciences is seen to depend on “observational judgments.” Take, for example, the measurement of the speed of light and the measurement of depression. The physicist might claim that precise instrumental observations yield exact numerical data about the speed of light and that this process is much less subject to “bias” or “error” as a human being gathering observations about a person’s affect and behavior. And yet the psychiatric mental status exam has been shown to have a high degree of reliability (inter-rater reproducibility). And so the claim to objectivity comes down to a claim of greater validity. And validity, as we all know, can never be proven. What I think we are overlooking is the fact that in both cases the performance of the behaviors we call science is dependent on a community of like-minded observers who have all trained themselves to see the world in similar ways. The physicist with her instruments is simply following different “rules” than the psychologist with her “subjective” terminology. By that I mean that the physicist has simply been conditioned by a different set of discriminative stimuli. Why on earth would we simply assume that one set of stimuli is, a priori, more valid than any other? The distinction between subjective and objective is, to my way of thinking, itself just one more set of interesting events in a distinctive language game, a game which we can choose to play or not. What I think is unfortunate about our ignorance of the principles of psychology and learning is that we fail to solve problems that have consequences like the recent events in Newtown, CT.

Read Full Post »

I am very grateful to have been born in 1967. Because it means that for a very brief period I shared this planet with my hero the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He is my light in this darkness.

Read Full Post »

The behavioral model of depression suggests that it is amplified by a lack of adequate contextual positive reinforcement. The antidote therefore is to identify those contextual events that do provide such reinforcement and increase their frequency. Of course, what is reinforcing to any given individual is somewhat idiosyncratic and requires some development of awareness skills. This is the theory behind the dialectical notion that we all must work to build a “life worth living.” The model of response contingent positive reinforcement becomes a set of recommendations for giving meaning to one’s existence. And, as Nietzsche said, “If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.” In my own case, I have observed that whenever I do attempt to find such a reinforcing context, I am unable to fit in to it in some critical fashion, and that it finally is not reinforcing to me. This has been my predominant experience in life, and I do not believe it is a cognitive distortion to say so. What does the model say, I wonder, to a person who is starting to realize that there objectively is no “meaning” to be found in their own existence? For whom life itself is the pervasively punishing condition?

Read Full Post »

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 »