Telos

"It is an intellectual catastrophe that the concept of telos has been scrubbed from modern psychology; philosophers from Artistotle to Hegel have found the universe impossible to comprehend without telos. If the universe is truly interpenetrating and interdependent in all aspects, then not only does the past shape the present, the future also shapes the present, just as an electric current will not leave one terminal until the distant terminal is grounded."

Ken Wilber, "Odyssey: A Personal Inquiry into Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology" (1982)

Acceptance and resignation

"It is of capital importance to understand this distinction between acceptation and resignation. To accept, really to accept a situation, is to think and feel with the whole of one's being that, even if one had the faculty of modifying it, one would not do it, and would have no reason to do it."

--Hubert Benoit, The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought (1955)

I came across this passage in Benoit's book (which has been slow, rich reading for me) last week, and it has stuck with me. It reminded me Nietzsche's concept of eternal return (or eternal recurrence), which, to me, is one of the most striking thoughts (or thought experiments, if you prefer) I have encountered. It illustrates so well the value of philosophy for living one's life better.

To start, here is a succinct formulation of the concept of eternal return--aphorism 341 from The Gay Science (1882), translated by Walter Kaufman:

“The greatest weight.— What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

It is arresting. One may choose to ignore the thought experiment, but if one chooses to engage with it, an immediate reappraisal of one's life seems inevitable, if only for a minute or two. What if you had to live your entire life over, into everlasting time, every single moment the same? Would this prospect cause you anguish, or has there been a moment in your life, just one moment, that would make the whole thing worth living again and again and again? And not just worth living again, but that you would want, as Nietzsche emphasizes, nothing more than to do this living over and over.

It is interesting to add in a nuance that Benoit mentions--the idea of being able to choose this fate ("even if one had the faculty of modifying it"). In other words, if you were given a choice to change any aspect of your life as a whole, would you?

I imagine that some people would immediately answer yes, and some would immediately answer no. But others would probably take a moment to think, and perhaps arrive at the answer: the only thing I would change is my desire to change anything. In other words, I would venture to say that most people, from children to adults, have aspects of the life that they have lived thus far, that they would like to change. And I would go further to say that most people would not change many other aspects of their life thus far. In other words, there lies an ambivalence within the person as to the prospect of complete acceptance (as Benoit says, "with the whole of one's being"). Nietzsche's concept confronts this ambivalence directly by removing the prospect of choice. In other words, he does not acknowledge of the possibility of being able to modify one's life situation. His question is not, as I phrased it above, "if you were given a choice to change any aspect of your life as a whole, would you?" This option is taken off the table, and the questioned person is left with the starkness of the demon's statement: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more."

What then? For Nietszche asks us if we will accept, or, better, embrace, the demon's pronouncement, or gnash our teeth in despair. This further step of embracing is important--it is reflected in the reply, "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." For embracing goes beyond acceptance. It implies, as in the physical act of embracing, a whole-bodied experience (again, Benoit's "whole-being"). When I embrace someone fully, no part of me is holding back. 

Further food for thought: earlier in The Gay Science, Nietzsche offers a preliminary response to his own thought experiment (he would later explore the theme in greater detail in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885):

For the new year.— I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year—what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer. (aphorism 276)

Adonaïs

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.-Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!-Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

--from Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Adonaïs" (1821)

Aggression and property

I suppose that Buddha, with his own penetrating insight into the necessary relationship between attachment, fear, and hatred, could probably have put it all very simply. For according to Buddha, hatred and aggression arise wherever there is attachment (clinging and grasping), for one mobilizes to defend one's attachments. Aggression, in this sense, is property defense. Even in the animal world, aggression almost always occurs as a simple defense of territorial property. But man alone of all the animals has a property in his person, and thus a new form of aggression: man alone will lash out blindly to defend his egoic immortality status and "save face" (save the mask). Each attachment, each property, whether internal as self or external as possessions, acts as a stick point or lesion in choiceless awareness that will fester with the stench of hostility. This lesion, this person/property defense . . . can fuel both oppression and repression, for one aggresses internally and externally to protect the person/property. 

--Ken Wilber, Up From Eden (1980)

I've obviously been reading a lot of Wilber lately. In fact I am in my second big wave of reading him (the first was a year ago, when I read six or seven of his books). This time around has been just as fruitful as the last, and I am more capable of seeing the deep logic in his incredibly complex theoretical system. As I have said elsewhere, philosophy is at its best when it helps one to live better, and Wilber's writings do just that for me. The above quote resonates with my experience lately, in which I have been trying to pay more attention to the moments and occasions when I feel aggression. The notion of "property defense" helps me to interpret many of these instances of aggression, because I am forced to ask myself just what it is I am defending, and why. This process also points up the value of aggression, for in evaluating what I am defending and why I am defending it, I sometimes come to the conclusion that both the defense and the aggression are useful in the specific case. As I have discussed elsewhere, aggression, like anger, is a strong motivator for change, and is thus something to be listened to, rather than suppressed blindly or acted on blindly.

Also illuminating is the recognition that aggression reflect both internal and external property. This internal property is the self. Again, there is a time and place to defend one's self, but I am trying to be more aware of which aspects of my self I seek to defend most passionately, and why.

Ambivalence and the shadow

Ambivalence is as inevitable in behavior as in belief. Every way of being and acting has antithetical alternatives, and to be conscious of one is to be conscious of the other. The inherent logic of English (and other Indo-European languages) promotes this by providing logical opposites: a word such as kind is meaningless without the antithetical concept, unkind. In order to think of himself [form a self-image] as kind, a person must be aware of what he would do if he were unkind. Indeed, he expresses his kindness as much by abstaining from cruel acts as by performing kind ones. He is necessarily aware of his capacity to be either kind or cruel, but he does not necessarily permit himself to be aware of his desire to be both.

--Snell and Gail Putney, The Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society (1964)

The concept of the shadow, first termed by Jung but having its roots in several aspects of psychoanalytic theory from Freud et al., relies on the ambivalence described above. It is a complex topic, but basically: an impulse, desire, experience, etc. that is deemed undesirable or otherwise unacceptable is alienated or repressed, cut off from conscious awareness, but does not disappear--instead, it makes its presence known in various ways, most notably through the process of projection (which can be described as perceiving one's shadow in the mirrors, as it were, of other people).

Ambivalence lies at the heart of one's relationship with the shadow. It is aptly named--we can never escape our physical shadow, but we can ignore it and keep it from view.

In the field of ego psychology, it has been found that individuals who have confronted and integrated their shadow in a thorough manner emerge with a high "toleration for ambiguity" (to use Jane Loevinger's phrase). This ambiguity (or ambivalence) has been present since the early years of the person, but it can now be approached with a greater sensitivity to the interdependence and polarity (as Putney and Putney describe above) of all thoughts, actions, desires, etc. It requires a willingness to accept seemingly contradictory desires (e.g. the desire to be both kind and cruel, even to the same person), instead of ignoring or repressing one or the other, which was the way the ego dealt with such contradictions in the earlier stages of its development. This is another important aspect of the shadow: for the most part, everyone has some un-integrated shadow material because of the nature of ego development. As Freud pointed out, the ego begins its life in the early years of childhood as a weak and feeble entity, and thus does not have the strength and means to manage and organize all of the impulses and desires of the self (in his system, mainly deriving from the id), so it is forced to split off various aspects of the overall self in order to conduct its business with the outside world.

The superego also contributes to this splitting (note: in psychology, "splitting" has multiple meanings, so I am not using it here in any precise sense), by emphasizing certain desirable aspects of the personality, other aspects are deemed undesirable and are easy to ignore or dissociate from the overall personality. But the superego, as much as the young child would like to believe about its parents, is not the final authority, and its pronouncements are often too simplistic (e.g. "anger/aggression is bad") and can end up stifling the ego's development. So, the ego, once it has developed to a certain stage, can return to the projected, alienated, repressed aspects of the overall self, and confront the ambiguity and ambivalence that at first seemed so confusing, but turns out to be much closer to the nature of the world. Again, as I described here, a more accurate map is created for the territory.

The pioneer

Referring to Freud, from Harry Guntrip's Psychoanalytic Theory, Therapy, and the Self (1971):

It is not the function of the pioneer to say the last word but to say the first word. That is the most difficult step. All the pioneer has to begin with is a problem, which has always been there, but hitherto no one has looked at that phenomenon in this particular way. The pioneer suddenly asks a new kind of question. Once the all-important start has been made along some new line of investigation, those who come after have only to faithfully follow up every possible line of inquiry it suggests. Some of these will be false trails, others will lead somewhere, but all have to be explored.

Working with constructions

When one discovers or realizes that some aspect of their life is constructed, not given, there can be a feeling similar to the child’s when he finds out that there is no Santa Claus--disenchantment. For example, reading Denis de Rougement’s Love in the Western World was illuminating for me because it demonstrated how constructed our culture’s views of romantic love are, by revealing the history behind it, but also somewhat disenchanting in revealing how constructed certain aspects of the experience of romantic love are. When one considers the many other manifestations of romantic/sexual love in other cultures and other time periods, it becomes more and more difficult to consider one’s own system necessarily the “natural" way to proceed in matters of romantic love. Instead, one is able to reevaluate one’s assumptions about romantic love (for our assumptions contribute to our constructions), see through the mythology that we have adopted, and approach the particular relationship with new eyes. Mythology is useful--it can provide meaning for individuals and societies, as Joseph Campbell tirelessly emphasized--but it has its limitations, especially when it is taken as literal truth.


For when you notice something that has been constructed, you are free to leave it as it is, or to restructure it. And this is possible with emotional habits, prejudices, belief systems, neuroses, even entire states of consciousness. 


Step back. When you realize you are wearing glasses, you can choose to put them on or take them off, at will. And you can take them off and admire them, for the complexity and intricacy of the particular structure. They become just another object, and cease to be the (unconscious) subject.


We are responsible for the structures in our subjective worlds, even though many of them were created in our pre-rational years and influenced by forces outside of our control, like our parents and cultures. But at a certain point of maturity we must accept responsibility for who we are, the lenses we see through, and the structures we may be unaware of, but that may be stifling our life and hurting other people.

Returning to the experience of “falling in love”: this experience has been built up for several hundred years (its origins are placed around the 12th century) in Western culture. But one of its crucial elements is the hide-and-seek we play ourselves in order to allow this experience in our lives. Although we may not want to admit it, we make ourselves fall in love—not simply in the moment (for it is part and parcel of the mythology that it happens in a moment, although it may be led up to: “I think I’m falling in love with you”) but as a result of a series of assumptions and decisions we have made long before that moment. The young girl reads, watches, listens to stories culled from the mythology we have created: the princess and her Prince Charming; romantic comedies and novels. Even some boys, usually later, take an interest in the mythology and begin placing the structures in place, “setting up” for the experience. What are these structures? Specific images of ideal lovers form, fantasies are created, expectations are formed.

But the hide-and-seek is that we don’t notice ourselves making these subtle choices and distinctions over the years, so that we enable ourselves to perceive the process, if it happens, as “falling.” We hide from ourselves so that we can find something we have wanted for a long time. There is nothing inherently problematic with this, as this hide-and-seek process manifests at self at many different levels of life (and according to Hindu tradition is the very nature of the universe), but it can be useful to become aware of the process.

NOTE (6/27/12): Although I do still see value in de Rougement's pointing out the sociocultural construction of one particular form of Romantic love, upon further thinking I would like to also acknowledge the deeper, cross-cultural aspects of romantic love which seem to be more universal in the history of human beings. While there are certain "surface" features of the European traditions of romantic love that are unique and socially constructed, there are other aspects to this fundamental human relationship that cannot be accounted for in terms of social constructionism.

Digestion, pt. 4

Metabolism--One of the central tasks of the self is to "digest" or "metabolize" the experiences presented to it at each rung of development. "The basic assumption of developmental theory is that experience must become 'metabolized' to form structure." Object relations theorists, such as Guntrip, speak of pathology as "failed metabolism"--the self fails to digest and assimilate significant past experiences, and these remain lodged, like a bit of undigested meat, in the self-system, generating psychological indigestion (pathology). The basic structures of consciousness, in fact, can be conceived as levels of food--physical food, emotional food, mental food, spiritual food. . . . These levels of food, as we will see, are really levels of object relations, and how the self handles these "food-objects" ("self-objects") is a central factor in psychopathology.

--Ken Wilber, Transformations of Consciousness (1986, co-authored by Jack Engler and Daniel Brown)

Alienation

Alan Watts once said, "knowledge of self is knowledge of other, and knowledge of other is knowledge of self." Since I came across these words, I have held them to be true, on some level. In working with my shadow recently, I have come to a deeper understanding of this statement.

One method (described in Integral Life Practice, reprinted here) that I use to work with the shadow is by recognizing people and characteristics of people that I come across every day that irk me, annoy me, anger me--affect me in a negatively emotional way. The principle is that other people are mirrors for the self. And by recognizing that the things I don't like in other people are simply reflections of things I don't like in myself, I begin to see a certain truth of Watts' statement. Parts of my self that I have alienated, cut off, repressed, ignored, do not disappear, but instead make their presence known in the mirror of other people. The process of reclaiming these parts of the shadow is painful initially, but it leads to a greater, more total, more integrated sense of self. And, somewhat paradoxically, it leads, at least in my experience, to a greater feeling of unity with other people.

Putney and Putney (in The Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society (1964)) comment:

To become autonomous, it is necessary to move beyond hatred. Yet, when a person first senses that what he despises in others is a mirrored image of latent potential in himself, he is fearful. It seems that if he looked closely he would discover that he was the antithesis of all that he hoped to be. A hitherto unconcealed aspect of the self does loom large at the moment of recognition, but once it becomes familiar it slips into place in the totality of the self. Only the man who can honestly admit that "nothing human is alien to me" is capable of self-acceptance.

It is the last sentence of that paragraph, with the quote from Terence, that really links up to what I'm saying. When I notice something in someone else that I don't like, I am pushing that part of them away, under the impression that I don't possess that quality, but they do. It can be something as trivial as a woman at the cobbler who, in my eyes, was being obnoxiously nitpicky and holding up the line. I lead myself to believe that the nitpickiness I notice is clearly something she possesses, not me. But in this appraisal of things, I am alienating not only her, but the part of myself that is nitpicky. So when Terence says, "nothing human is alien to me," his words can be interpreted as referring to a state of affairs where any sense of alienation I feel from other other people is a direct result of alienating the parts of those people that I recognize in myself (whether it is nitpickiness or the desire to murder). And when I take the qualities that annoy me about other people and recognize them in myself, I simultaneously feel less alienated from the person and less alienated from myself.

Mapping the territory of the ego

"Mapping" is another of my big topics. There is a strong explorer/cartographer spirit inside me, and I especially delight in examining philosophical and psychological maps and systems. Economist E.F. Schumacher has much to say about this in his Guide for the Perplexed (here is an excerpt), and Ken Wilber has dedicated much of his intellectual work to creating some of the best theoretical maps I have come across.

I'd like to talk about maps in the context of "psychological space"--namely, the ego. As psychologists since Freud have determined, the formation of the ego in childhood and adolescence rests upon the formation of an accurate self-image. Its accuracy, as elsewhere in life, lies in its adherence to the data; the data in this case is the behavior, emotions, desires, thoughts, etc. of the self, of the ego. The self-image is formed to match what is experienced by the self, whether this experiential data comes from the opinions of a parent ("You are a good boy"), a peer ("You are fun to be around"), society (e.g. taboos), etc. The individual's emotions and actions contribute to the self-image as well--if I experience myself feeling the safe in the arms of this person, part of my self-image becomes a particular emotional attachment to my mother.

This is a process of mapping the territory--the map is the self-image and the territory is the experience (which is largely comprised of the individual's relationship with its environment) of the self. Again, accuracy is important; from the basic level of being able to perceive that this painful sensation of touching the stove is painful because my body is sensing it (the image of the body becomes part of the self-image) to the more complex level of sensing a desire to be around other people and interpreting that as my wanting to make friends (my sociability also becomes part of my self-image). Sensations and desires, along with more complex forms of behavior, are the territory, and they have to be represented and acknowledged on the map in order to create an accurate, healthy self-image.

Now the second part of this story is that the map, the self-image, must be acceptable to the self. This is the source of much pathology and neurosis, and it is something I am working with intensively right now. Snell and Gail Putney, in their Adjusted American: Normal Neuroses in the Individual and Society (1964) comment:

As he [the developing individual] internalizes the norms he learns from others, he applies them to himself and wonders if he is acceptable. As he acquires models to pattern his developing self, he accepts standards against which he measures his self-image. It is not so much that he learns to appraise an existing self-image; it would be more accurate to say that his self-image and his evaluation of that image are acquired together [the creation of the map occurs simultaneously with the evaluation and judgment of the map]. The very idea of being merges with the appraisal of modes of being; the process of self-evaluation is simultaneous with the process of self-discovery. Man needs not only an accurate self-image, but also one that he can accept.

 Because the territory we are speaking of is one's own self, not an "objective" space like a forest or a set of philosophical ideas, the map is wrapped up the self's sense of self-esteem and dignity, which provides much of the criteria for the acceptability of the self-image. The difficulties that arise between the dual desires of accuracy, which seems simple enough, and acceptability, which is more complex, account for many common neuroses, fixations, etc. And one common manifestation of this is the sacrificing of accuracy for the sake of acceptability:

. . . he may fall into the ineffectual but common attempt to make the self-image acceptable by rendering it inaccurate. This is a basic misdirection, involved in a fundamental--but normal--neurotic pattern. Through a process of self-deceit, the individual may pretend that those aspects of the self of which he disapproves do not exist. The difficulty is that such a deception, precisely because it is self-deception, inevitably fails. It is because he does perceive in himself elements of which he profoundly disapproves that he seeks to hide these things. . . . Fulfillment does not result if he attempts to sacrifice accuracy for acceptability.

In other words, pretending that there is not a dangerous cliff a couple of miles away, and neglecting to represent this cliff on the map one is drawing, does not remove the cliff from the landscape. It is an inaccuracy that is more harmful than helpful. And, again, when the territory becomes one's own self, this inaccuracy, this self-deception, is harmful. There is a dissonance between the territory and the map: I register a desire to kill someone who has enraged me (territory), but I (or my superego, if we want to divide things like that) disapprove of this desire, so I refuse to acknowledge it on my map--I refuse to integrate this impulse into my self-image, into my ego. But it is there, just like the cliff was there, and I am only deceiving myself by pretending that it's not.

I'm not going to discuss projection here, but that is usually the next step in this kind of process: I refuse to acknowledge and accept the desire in myself, so I project it and perceive it as outside of me, in my environment. I perceive others as being hostile towards me, instead of accepting that the hostility is my own.

Putney and Putney provide a good example of a healthy way of creating an accurate and acceptable self-image: "He can deal with this conflict [between accuracy and acceptability] by attempting to make his conception of acceptability one which stresses choice between elements in the self (e.g., "I am capable of being a bully, but I choose not to be"), then acting so as to minimize aspects of the self of which he disapproves."

There is a fascinating relationship between thought/desire and action at work here. Freud realized that the id, the source of much of what becomes unacceptable in the later formation of the self-image/ego, cannot differentiate between image and action. The id uses images as representations of its particular desires or impulses--when the id registers hunger, it conjures the image of food. This is the source of processes like wish-fulfillment, where the id's desire is frustrated (there is no food available) and tries to satisfy its desire simply by conjuring the image (of food). Freud linked this process to the dreams and daydreams, where one's thoughts/images and actions are the same (i.e. I can conjure an image of food in a dream, and it magically appears).

The ego, on the other hand, develops by recognizing that the image and the real thing are not the same, and that it needs to go and find food instead of just thinking of food in order to satisfy its hunger. There is a distinction created between image (which does not need to take into account the outside environment) and action (which needs to negotiate with the environment). And this is just what Putney and Putney refer to above: in creating an accurate and acceptable self-image, the ego acknowledges that although it feels something that it (or the superego) disapproves of, it chooses not to act upon that feeling. Instead of assuming, as the id does, that the feeling and the action are the same (incidentally, the superego also assumes they are the same, which is why one can feel guilty for just thinking something morally reprehensible), the ego separates the two, and is thus able to acknowledge both the disapproved feeling and the approved choice to not act on it.

Digestion, pt. 3

From our present vantage point it now appears that what Freud was trying to accomplish during the thirty years between 1890 and 1920, when the unconscious mind reigned as the sovereign concept in his psychological system, was to discover those determining forces in personality that are not directly known to the observer. Just as physics and chemistry make known that which is unknown about the nature of matter by means of experiment and demonstration, so the task of psychology for Freud was to seek out those factors in personality of which we are ignorant. This seems to be the meaning of Freud's statement that "our scientific work in psychology will consist in translating unconscious processes into conscious ones, and thus filling in the gaps in conscious perceptions." Freud is merely acknowledging the well-known fact that the goal of all the sciences is to substitute knowledge for ignorance. For example, man is not directly aware of the process of digestion as it takes place, but the science of physiology can tell him what happens during digestion. This knowledge does not enable him to perceive (be directly aware of) his own digestive processes as they are occurring; nevertheless he knows (understands) what is taking place. In a similar manner, one is not aware of unconscious mental processes, but psychology can teach him about what is going on below the level of awareness.

--Calvin S. Hall, A Primer of Freudian Psychology (1954)

Closing the gap between reason and emotion

All passions have the same end—personal dignity and self-esteem. But each passion, though tied by its own logic to all the others, tends to become obsessed with its own objects and outlook. Each follows what it takes to be an optimal strategy; but from a more inclusive view it is evident these individual strategies conflict and interfere with each other. These are strategies that are virtually always disastrous (like running backward in football). It is the business of rationality to eliminate or modify them, to organize the passions in a co-ordinated effort, joining them together toward a common goal (which means, however, that some of them will have to spend most of their time on the bench). Moreover, it is possible that even a co-ordinated strategy will be less than optimal, even disastrous. Thus, I shall argue that rationality is the search of the passions for optimal strategy for achieving self-esteem. What is called wisdom is the attainment of this optimal strategy, the “harmony of the soul” that was so celebrated by the Greeks, harnessed from the enthusiasm and chaos so encouraged by the Romantics. It is what Aristotle called eudaimonia, “living well,” surely not devoid of passion, but not devoid of reason either. Indeed, it is only when this insidious distinction begins to disintegrate that the ideal of “self-esteem,” “wisdom,” and classical “harmony of the soul” will begin to make any sense for us.

---Robert C. Solomon, The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion (1977)

Term(inal)s

The principle is that all dualities and opposites are not disjoined but polar; they do not encounter and confront one another from afar; they exfoliate from a common center. Ordinary thinking conceals polarity and relativity because it employs terms, the terminals or ends, the poles, neglecting what lies between them. The difference of front and back, to be and not to be, hides their unity and mutuality.

--Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology (1962)

As usual, Alan Watts points out something in my everyday experience of language and logical thinking that I never noticed and which reveals to me the limitations of my usual way of experiencing the world--namely, the hidden meaning of "term." Much has been said about language's role in filtering and structuring Reality, and I will probably return to this topic.

Watts recognizes that our usual experience of language, for the sake of clarity and efficiency, ordinarily concerns itself with opposites (good and evil, life and death) and distinctions, and that it follows the structure of our logic--the law of the excluded middle. But, going back to an image I introduced here, this is a matter of observing the branches (a symbol of the diversity of life) but forgetting their source, the trunk.

But it goes even further than that--the terms not only share a source (good and evil both stem from the "trunk" of morality), but they are interdependent. Watts hammered in this point throughout his entire career--you cannot see a figure without its background, so it is more accurate to say that you are seeing a figure-background instead of simply a figure. You didn't just buy something--a buy-sell, a transaction, just occurred. And you can only recognize yourself because of everything else that is not-you. But just as you are not seeing a figure, but a figure-background, you are experiencing yourself as a you-not you.

There is also the notion of "spectrum." I won't elaborate here, but suffice it to say that a particular language's terms sometimes fail to capture aspects of experience that lie along the spectrum between such terms, in the cracks, as it were, of the ranges of experience language is capable of capturing.