Tag: civilization

The cult(ivation) of self

 

The following video was recently shared by Glen Brauer of Philosophy Dinners. I think it is a good synthesis of mindfulness, philosophical enquiry and the state of knowledge in the neuroscience of emotions, and so it is a good starting point for an exploration of the limits of some pervasive concepts in the world of what is often called self-development.

Now obviously I have nothing against self-development per se, or I wouldn’t be writing this blog. And I think Chade-Meng Tan sets the idea of self-awareness out, in the video, in a contemporary manner which already avoids some of the traps, even if he is still constrained to some extent by language. Thus it is obvious that what he means by “mindfulness” is not an awareness only of the mind or of cerebral processes, but also, to the extent possible, of somatic processes and in particular of emotion. This idea (“bodyfulness”) in itself already takes us beyond the mind/body split which we inherit from Hellenistic philosophy, and I think it is very valuable. He also indicates that the result of self-awareness should be an increased flexibility in ones mental range of action: that the ego becomes a tool and not a driving force. So far I agree. However, before zeroing in on what seem to me still to be some limitations in this paradigm, a brief excursus is required.

The Socratic exhortation to self-knowledge is historically inseparable from an exhortation to self-discipline, as Plato’s development of it, and its political economy, make clear. Socrates in no way was advocating a truly open-ended spirit of self-enquiry. Plato and Aristotle assume all number of things about the universe, none of which is founded in sensory data. In my opinion, there is nothing in the Western philosophical tradition before modern times which encourages or even allows for a phenomenologically based calling into question of social institutions. The dictates of logos, imagined to be self-evident, apparently led everyone to conclusions which are now mostly incompatible with major swathes of scientific knowledge about the human condition. The exhortation to follow the promptings of conscience was in reality an exhortation to conform, and one which led to no revolutionary insights at all, and no degree of authentic being.

There have been, of course, dissenting voices to the Socratic tradition, even if they have been marginalized by history: the Epicureans, the Cynics, Boethius…. But each of these has (of understandable necessity) sought a consolation compatible with the established order, even as they rejected it. The French Revolution was doubtless the first time that philosophy played any sort of a role in a mass political uprising, and it was hardly in the driving seat.

I know next to nothing about the history of Zen Buddhism, but the question arises of whether the particular form of the movement and its characteristic doctrines do not represent a similar accommodation. To ask this question, I would argue, is to answer it. Therefore, we should be on our guard for likely omissions in the doctrine which would have rendered it marginalized or existentially endangered, and thus have not survived to this day or are, like liberation theology, only in the process of formulation.

Primitive societies would struggle to understand our concept of self-awareness. To them it would be utterly alien to imagine that not only could an “I” exist separate from the tribe but that it could be so much an object of attention and cultivation that the tribe disappears almost entirely from view. At times it might seem like the whole spiritual tradition of “civilized” societies is a roundabout, almost absurd means to rediscover and enter into an unio mystica which to a hunter-gatherer is so immanent as to be self-evident. The hunter-gatherer, whose senses are already honed to perfection to his/her environment and peers, has no need of a doctrine of self. Perhaps we only privilege it because we have lost all else?

This view is more radical than I am able to be right now. However, it affords a neat perspective against which to evaluate some of the claims of even a progressive theology of mindfulness, and especially its equation with self-awareness. Tan’s presentation seems to draw on models of the emotions within neuroscience which embody an implicit limitation in the scope of knowledge to the self, at least de facto. This seems to pit self-awareness against other-awareness in a manner which betrays significant cultural bias and I am not sure survives a phenomenological audit. Tan seeks in this way to obtain “mastery” over experience. But who is it, in this case, that masters, and in the name of what? What scope does this leave for rapture and for the numinous? To give just one example, but which is telling, is one seeking to “master” the sexual act? Is this the mode of experience of it which is most authentic and most felicitous? Intuitively it seems not. And when we are “honest” about our limitations, are we as aware as we should be that what we really lack is a not a self-audit, but a critical perspective on society?

I think Tan is at least guilty (judging only on the basis of this presentation) of allowing his audience to persist in cultural biases which he might have helped them to overcome. If that cultural bias predisposes to individually and collectively unhappy outcomes, which I believe in the aggregate it does, his disciples can listen to their bodies and emotions all they like, they will still be zombies walking a path to global ruin.

It may be objected, of course, that we have nothing else than sense-data, and hence that Tan’s position is a tautology. I do not dispute this; but everything is in how matters are framed. I could quote Bourdieu at this juncture, but I will content myself with Rumi, whose precocious prefiguration of social constructivism is breathtaking. “Speak a new language, so that the world will be a new world.“

The Will to Power

I have recently been thinking about what Nietzsche referred to as the Will to Power.

Nietzsche’s concept expresses, glossed in modern terms, the intuition that there is, in our biological constitution, a source of self-becoming which is identifiably and subjectively moral and yet individual and innate.

Nietzsche was dissatisfied with Schopenhauer’s concept of the will to live and with the Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest. For all that he challenged in German moral philosophy, he remained convinced that man had an innate, if often latent, moral drive and that this was biological in nature. Had Nietzsche lived later, he would surely have found Freud’s “pleasure principle” just as reductionist. The Will to Power itself is amoral in nature and its biological foundations are not really explored: morality is a second order effect that Nietzsche expects to emerge from affirming this basic drive rather than repressing it. What a world would look like in which people lived in accordance with the will to power is not Nietzsche’s concern, and at first sight the notion seems as compatible with altruism and benevolence as it does with despotism and misanthropy. On closer reflection though, the charge of misanthropy must be a misunderstanding, because the superman derives no benefit or pleasure from subjugation of others; he speaks “badly of man but not ill of him”. As for subjugation of nature, Nietzsche views it as an intrinsic folly.

So the question is, what is the biological basis of the will to power? It seems to me that Nietzsche misunderstood Darwin in imputing to him a necessary dependence on utilitarian notions. From at least a modern perspective, this seems not really to underlie Darwin’s discoveries. All that really would seem to matter is that I pass my genes on, and not that I am happy with my life.

Nietzsche posits that vitality is the root of man’s creativity and the best of which he is capable. As such, the will to power seems to rest, biologically speaking, upon the drive to procreate. It is this, seemingly so basic, drive, and which can undeniably also be experienced as entirely trivial, that at the same time is so inextricably linked to our most compelling experiences of dissolution and ecstasy. Whereas Freud thought that moral effort was needed to channel sexual energy into the achievements of civilization, Nietzsche is much more trusting in the natural propensity of this creative energy to overflow into the entirety of man’s social and inner experience: it does not need to be directed, it only needs to be unleashed.

The will to power and the drive to procreate or to experience dissolution are not, however, precisely the same thing. If this were so, the will to power would be everywhere; it is hard to imagine how societal forces would keep it in check. Descriptively however, few people seem to embark on the journey to which their vitality invites. For those people, and I count myself among them, allowing societal forces to prevail over ones inner sense is simply an impossibility; it is inherently immoral, however noble might be that to which one is exhorted.  The only moral being one possibly can be is the one that one is. Of course one exercises judgment, discernment, in practical action but this is really not very difficult because one is not at war with the outer order of things, one is simply awake to the opportunities to change it that may arise. All else is tension, and counter-reactions to it are assured. If morality arises from the natural state of man, moral crusades can never lead anywhere. All I need to do and all I can do is to take you, if you are ready, by the hand and lead you to places which can trigger your own awakening. Force is available to me, but it is useless. As I have written before, meditation is my only moral imperative.

But, you may protest, if I see injustices of which I am not the author, do I not have to act?

No. But at least I may. If I embrace the will to power, I am no longer powerless, no longer trapped in knee-jerk reactions to external events, reactions which are almost entirely determined by my own inner struggles. I am serene. I can act. My power is available to me and I have clarity as to the potential rewards of my action. And as such, I am finally a moral subject. Certainly, good deeds may contribute to mankind’s well-being, but they do so proportionately to the inner serenity of their authors.

Ultimately, it remains a mystery why most of mankind, like the animals from which we are descended, is in a state of more or less deep sleep. The will to power, in conscious form, seems to characterize only the few and at this stage of our social and perhaps biological evolution it is a pure leap of faith to imagine it as potentially characterizing the many. We are left with the mystery of consciousness, this quality which suffuses nature and yet is distinct from it, seemingly, in an evasive sense, superordinate to it; which erupts into human minds and human history more as a messenger from another realm than as an expected basis for our being. It is alien to us, yet our deepest nature; we long for it, but have mostly no idea where to look. Humanity as animal plus consciousness is an aspirational equation, even a self-delusion at times. Grounded in our biological nature, the will to power necessarily impels us not simply to recreate the conditions of a more natural life, although this is a precondition, but to be something which, so far and with rare exceptions, humanity has not been.

What’s the big deal? Thoughts on resistance

I’ve recently been led to reflect on the question of what it is that makes us so afraid of looking inside to the circumstances which lie historically at the origin of our neuroses – frequently to the point of utter terror and/or total blindness even to the fact or possibility of repression. After all, we frequently face much more objectively threatening circumstances in life, like major illness and operations, with much more stoicism.

It is not a question that I think standard psychoanalytic theory really has an answer for. Sure, we are afraid to dismantle the ego. However, this unremarked importance of the ego simply appears as exogenous or as a mere mediator between the pleasure and reality principles. Its apparent tendency to calcify very early on is not really explained. One might link this to a biological developmental calendar, but then the apparent successes of therapy in sometimes bringing down the edifice would be very surprising. Why then do we freeze emotions in the body and hold them down long after the apparent, original need to do so is past? Why can’t we (or at least why don’t we), like the animals, just pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and move on – years and decades after the event? When you think about it, it is really, really strange that humankind is the only species that appears to have this strange dysfunction of its innate healing capacity. And even if we have some idea of how to unblock it, we have little idea of what gets it blocked in the first place.

I can only offer some clues as to how it appears to me.

At the basis, we need to remember that our species has evolved in small, interdependent tribal groups, and what mattered for the survival of our puny organism was being smart and acting in concert. This has led, via mechanisms which I shall perhaps discuss on another occasion, to an unparalleled emotional attunement to other members of the group. Most of this, of course, is a deep mystery – we do not know why we have a spiritual instinct and in what ways it differs from other species, and we do not know why it is so important for us to receive and to give love. These things I will have to take as a given, at least for now.

The Rousseauian view, expounded also by Osho, and perhaps bought into by Reich – all for their own reasons which I understand – that “observed” man is the product of social processes which have perverted the pristine and beautiful natural state of man, has, I believe, to be dismissed as naive. Freud was not wrong in believing that civilization required a sort of suppression of natural drives. On the contrary, the mechanism of acculturation is innate in our species and even what most defines it; it is not maladaptive; it is just misfiring under the conditions of modern life.

If we are happy enough to trace cerebral patterns back to reptilian times, I believe we should be a bit more accepting of our less remote ancestors and what they have bequeathed us. A scientific view of our, or of any, species cannot consist in simply choosing (and idealizing) one forebear over others. Thus, we cannot identify with certain bonobo traits merely because we do not like those of chimpanzees. That we do not like the warlike, selfish part of our nature certainly tells us something, but it does not disprove its existence – only the lengths to which the acculturation process goes to redefine and rechannel this truculence through mechanisms which are entirely social – social learning processes which result in the transmission of norms of behavior from generation to generation and group to group, norms which constitute as important, though far more diverse, a part of our patrimony as what is chiseled on our DNA.

If Darwin, evolutionary psychologists and classical economists have all made a mistake, as argued in Sex at Dawn, it is a perfectly understandable mistake, deriving from first-order principles which one may not like (for the reasons I just mentioned) but must defer to. In all higher species we see collective behavior which is imposed by social mechanisms on instincts which are far more egoistic. And ultimately, this process of acculturation is what has led to the second stage of evolution and the emergence of a creature such as man. Indeed, only social learning processes can result in cooperative behaviour – it cannot be innate.

So: guilt and shame are primary emotions and manipulation of them is a primary process.

Seeing this helps enormously, because there is no need any more to feel – well – guilty about feeling guilty. It is hardwired into our species to feel guilty when we fall short of social expectations, as it is hardwired to manipulate this feeling in order to obtain and maintain group cohesion.

I guess we would all like our children to be generous and patient. But that is not their natural state. Even allowing for incipient neurosis at the earliest stage, I do not believe any child anywhere on the planet has ever been born naturally sharing and thinking of others. Indeed, this is implicit in the standard developmental model, and pretty much a logical evidence: the child first has to develop a concept of self before it can develop a concept of others; the concept of the other can never be ahead of the concept of self and there is thus always a self-bias. So, the younger child must learn, and the adult or older child must teach.

What drives the young child to accept the social yoke, and what approach to childrearing optimizes the transmission of needed social norms? On the child’s side, this can only be the need for love and acceptance. I do not see any other candidate. That the sense of self is impacted by social disopprobrium – for when being reprimanded, however patiently and lovingly, the child will feel such disopprobrium – is natural. From its standpoint, love and acceptance are maximized and guilt is minimized when the child is aligned to social norms. In fact, I would even go further than this – it is not just the sense of self which is impacted, but the very fact of self. A human being living in isolation is not human.

Trying to bring about such alignment must, however, take account of the child’s natural rebelliousness and nascent sense of self. If the primary motivation to align is love and acceptance, it is obvious that bringing about long-term alignment through fear and violence is an inferior and unstable recourse, because love and acceptance create bonds which fear does not. However, fear and authority are not maladaptive either – they are highly adaptive to situations of stress and highly effective in such situations. The balance has just been lost because the circumstances in which we have evolved to exist are no longer those in which we do exist – and this estrangement becomes self-reinforcing. The child learns to suppress aspects of its behaviour which are perfectly healthy and unthreatening to the group, just because the former-child-now-adult can’t handle them. This repression and these patterns of behaviour maximize its payoff in terms of acceptance under the circumstances which it is powerless to change. However, they do so at a tremendous cost in terms of vitality, which is passed on to the next generation.

So to return to the question with which I started, it must be that the energy which cathects the fear of confronting our inner traumas when we start to do so, i.e. the energy of resistance, is the same energy which holds the neurosis in place at other times, i.e. when it is unchallenged. In other words, our fear is our neurosis. It follows that it is functionally identical to the fear experienced in response to the primal events – ultimately, in almost all cases, the fear of losing the sense of belonging and thereby of what it is that defines our nature as human.

And yet: we will not. Objectively, no such risk exists as adults, certainly in a therapeutic situation, when all the traumatizing factors belong to the past. Why is this not obvious?

I think I detect the reason, and it is this. In fact, our desire for love and acceptance is never met. It was not met during our formative years, and it is still not met today, because the endemic character of neurosis means that there is almost no-one able to love as we are meant to be loved and as we need to be loved. This is why we cling on to the strategies we learnt as children, although in no absolute sense did they work either then or now – they merely optimized subject to inordinate constraints. In fact, we are not failing to substitute them by a better strategy: there is no better strategy available to us. We have also chosen partners subject to the requirement that our strategies to gain acceptance initially worked with those partners. We have grown up emotionally paralyzed because of a lack of nurturing and we realize that we, all of us, continue to face the same situation, and whilst the needs of an adult are not those of a child, the meeting of those adult needs is the only thing that can start to demine the unexploded ordinance buried in our past.

It’s Catch 22.

The notion that we as adults are sufficient unto ourselves and can get all the sustenance we need from our physical environment, with no need for comfort, touch, contact is just a perpetuation of the lie and the violence at the heart of humanity’s traumatized existence.

Love and compassion are necessary to our physical and mental health as a species, and they are necessary to the therapeutic process and personal growth. Our mind, that place where we feel in control, because it works so well without others, strives after technique, but such technique is meaningless and ineffective without compassion, and secondary when compassion is present.

Facing our traumas is terrifying because we are innately afraid, under prevailing and persistent conditions of emotional starvation, to lose the little acceptance we have won in the world, and with which we reluctantly content ourselves. We lose sight and faith that anything more is possible, even though we know, deep down, that this way of existing is impoverished, is not satisfying and is not human.