metonymy4u

The Buddhists talk about several kinds of stress. There is the stress of living in a mortal body, the stress of having experiences we don’t like, of not having experiences we do like, and the stress of change. For the past 5 years or so I have been experiencing stress and pain so great that at times I thought dying would be the only way to end it. I experienced the stress of having everything I didn’t want: depression, isolation, loneliness, aging. There was also the pain of not having the things I did want: companionship, respect, trust, commitment, love, time, children, family, strength. I used to go to bed wondering how long my brain could endure the apparently never ending pain. A walk up the stairs, a glimpse of a couple holding hands, a child’s smile – all of these could become the occasion for more and more pain and then pain generated by pain upon pain. There is no doubt: at times I would have preferred to die than go on living with the pain. It’s like I knew that somewhere over those hills was a sunset so stunning I could not bear to live without its beauty in my eyes at least once.

But now I feel something different. Now, I can feel an emotional experience as just one single event. It arrives, often unexpected, it unfolds as difference, as one signal amongst many sensed by my brain, and it passes away. Events are impermanent. They are both suffering and beauty at the same time. Now a walk up the stairs can be painful, a glimpse of a couple holding hands, a mother with her child, a thought, a memory. All of these are pain for me still. The difference is that I breathe with the pain instead of frantically trying to escape it. I have no doubt that my life will be lived in pain for some time to come. The difference is, that I’m not afraid of it any more. I am not the pain. Once I learned not to edit my “self,” I was free to live.

Isn’t it time that we left behind ideas of right and wrong and learned instead to see our thoughts merely as events in an endless and mysterious universe?

These days I’ve learned that if I experience a powerful thought or feeling (often painful), it is helpful to stop and realize that if I’m feeling a strong emotion, then something important must have just happened. I’m not always aware of, nor can I “figure out” what that important something was. That’s no longer the point. Because in trying to “figure that out,” I was in fact voting on the validity of my own emotional experience. And that’s not helpful. What is helpful is to accept that something important is happening. To me. Right now. Trying to talk ourselves out of our emotions is something we’ve been doing for the past 2500 years. Isn’t it time for something different?

I would like to re-present the question of authority in a manner that I don’t believe anyone currently alive today can answer. The question I’m raising is how do we solve the problem of the apparently never ending “war of all against all?” Granted that, pace Nietzsche and Freud, human aggression is not the sine qua non of our existence, yet we still have to confront this question. To this point in human history most of the answers given in the west have been variations of the notion that “the truth will set you free,” whether that is the truth of a sovereign charged primarily with maintaining a civil truce (Hobbes, Locke) or the truth of an inner light which necessarily leads everyone to relinquish the use of cruelty (Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud). In an interesting and weird twist on Marx’s historicism, Rawls proposed to distribute justice by requiring those who hold power to relinquish power. This gives me pause, and I often wonder what our world would look like if every citizen were required to spend one week on a long term residential, psychiatric unit and one week attending the poorest school in their home state. I love Rawls’ vision, but pragmatically I don’t know how he ever proposed to implement it. Of course, utopian theorists often don’t know how to implement their vision, though I’d rather hang out with their lot than with pragmatists like Lenin or Jefferson, thank you very much! In the end I prefer figures who lead by example rather than by fiat (the authority of effort as opposed to the authority of commandment.…)

We can learn any skill we can conceive of as urgent. Think about someone whose skills and abilities you admire and who you despair of ever being able to emulate. I promise you that the day that person was born, she or he did not possess any of those skills which you so admire. They learned. So can you.

I could say to you that if I dropped this apple it would fall at a rate of 9.8 m/(sec*sec), and you might agree. Then I could say that because we agree on what a meter is and what a second is and what it means to fall, that therefore that’s the way things actually are. That as soon as I clear up any confusion about each term in my statement, we must, on the strength of the empirical data, agree that apples actually do fall towards the earth when dropped and that they actually accelerate at the rate of 9.8 m/(sec*sec). But a pragmatist might jump in here and object that in fact I just pulled a philosophical sleight of hand. That the statement that an apple will fall at a rate of 9.8 m/(sec*sec) and the statement that that’s the way things actually are, are two different events, not necessarily or even empirically related to one another in any clear and distinct manner. The first is a matter of pragmatics, she might observe, the second of piety. And she would, I believe, have no trouble accepting the first even as she severely desires to punish the second. Thus in this way we can equally embrace all the statements of science as well as Derrida’s desire to break with the entire tradition of Western Faith. Because one need not have anything to do with the other. The problem, as I see it, is when self-conscious poets like Derrida get hit on the head and want to steal science’s thunder. Then they change their name to Lacan. For although we have ample data to suggest that faith and poetry are events that promote healing and recovery from illness, to then turn over control of the cancer drugs to the poets and the priests would be utter madness. A fact that I suspect Derrida unfortunately appreciated towards the end of his life as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. And even though for most of my adult life I have considered him a charlatan, I have continued thinking about him and it was just there in light of these very considerations that I finally learned to adopt a new attitude towards him. Indeed, based on these considerations, one could begin to see, pace Nietzsche, all “-isms” as normative theories masquerading as descriptions.

I’m trying to figure out how to use science to help people. To put it another way, I’m trying to figure out how to allow my behaviors to be shaped by the behaviors of people who look like scientists, in order to shape the behaviors of people who look like clients.

i think that the word should is as useful as believing that because you own the land, you can make the waterfall run backwards up the hill. in fact, i think i’m beginning to experience “should” as one of the most massive failures in the history of human linguistic experimentation.

Bergson stated that Kant had confused space and time in a mixture and proposed to advance our understanding of human reason by unmixing them. A deliberately poetic metaphor that begs for some redescription. What I believe Bergson wants to express is the fact that we often measure time by measuring space. And because we believe space is infinitely divisible into innumerable little packets, each one uniformly the same as the other for everyone everywhere in the universe, we therefore also believe the same about time. This model ostensibly helped Kant undermine the 17th century Cartesian notion that thinking substance is essentially separable from material substance. For if, as Kant proposes, space is merely the expression of our external awareness of these innumerable little packets and time merely the internal awareness of the same, then the 17th century dialectic (subjective vs. objective, thinking vs. material substance) devolves upon a cognitive description of homogenous awareness applied to a heterogeneous world of mere appearances. In a manner redolent with Cartesian solipsism, Kant proposes that we offset the instability of a world of experience with the consistency of the manner in which we experience that experience. Property dualism is undone by a description of cognitive monism. How neat.

What Bergson proposes is that we redescribe Kant’s idea of the homogeneity of our intuition of space and time as sets of quantitative heuristic tendencies (our sense of space and time as infinitely divisible) and sets of qualitative heuristic tendencies (our sense of change or “duration”). For Bergson the idea of duration functions to alert us to the distinct character of qualitative metaphors such as the difference between “anger” and “joy.” Such comparisons cannot rest on quantitative descriptions, but are expressed through qualitative comparisons only. Bergson thought that Kant had used his model of space and time to describe our sense of quantity only, mixing them together into an ineffective blend of “quantitative multiplicity” and thereby neglecting our qualitative sense. Thus Kantian space and time become for Bergson the manifold of quantitative understanding only, whereas Bergson’s idea of “true internal time” (duration) becomes the manifold of qualitative understanding. This was the clarification that Bergson hoped to promote by speaking of time and space all mixed up in the mind of old Kant. One might as well describe our sense of constancy (manifolds that can be counted) and our sense of change (manifolds that cannot be counted but only experienced).

After Bergson, two questions then arise: One is in regard to the impact of a model which no longer views space and time as the absolute unchangeable entities that they once were. What happens to our notion of cause and effect when the only identifiable constant in the universe is movement (change)? And furthermore, if nothing can be known as being where we think it is, at a given point in space or time, what can be said to exist? Finally, by redescribing duration (internal sense of change), as something distinct from space (external sense of constancy) doesn’t Bergson just get us into another (inverted) solipsistic trap, like a hole in space that has been neatly turned inside out but which still holds us tightly bound at its quicksand depth?