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.