These days I work as a therapist. It is a new role for me, but one I feel well suited to.
Therapists are concerned with helping others live better lives. Therapists are then necessarily involved in the question of what it means to live well. The question of what it means to live well, as a human being, is a general or universal question, not a simply particular question. Some folks would assert that living well, or happiness, is a radically subjective phenomena: there are, allegedly, as many good lives as there are individuals. I am not persuaded by this claim. I think there are many general or universal things that can be said about what it means to live well.
Here I am concerned principally with two images or ideas of the good life: the artist and the philosopher. In modern philosophy the image of the artist has become more and more predominant over that of the philosopher. Ancient philosophy, on the other hand, had an ambivalent relation to artists or 'poets' (makers in the broadest sense). The artist is a being of creation; the philosopher is a being that pursues the truth of nature.
The tradition of psychotherapy that I was trained in, existential-phenomenological psychology, certainly favors the image of the artist over the philosopher. In favoring the artist, EP psychology is following a general thrust of modernity that finds intense and hyperbolic expression in the major existential writers: Sartre and Camus. Their writings were deeply indebted to perhaps the wellspring of existential thought: Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is a much more powerful thinker than either Sartre or Camus. His relationship to art, poetry, and the question of the good life is far more complex and subtle than theirs. I am still working on thinking through his writing, and still reading more of him. Camus devolves into ridiculous statements about 'the artist giving the void its colors,' and living your entire life as an act of rebellion. As if I don't have to go to work in order to not starve. Sartre lauds a silly form of radical freedom in which I necessarily strive after godlike control. That the human being necessarily reaches toward the divine I do not contest. But I do not believe that hubris is a necessary condition of a human life. Humility, piety, and faith are all real and important possibilities for our lives.
Even Heidegger, however, ends up abandoning 'philosophy' or 'metaphysics' in favor of a kind of 'poetic dwelling.' Again, Heidegger's thought is incredibly subtle. But he still belongs to this camp that gradually moves away from the image of the philosopher and replaces it with the artist.
There is something troubling to me in this lauding of art, or creation, as the highest good. I often felt frustrated by signs I saw around capitol hill, Seattle, that said "Fucking Make Art!" or bumper stickers that say "Earth without Art is just Eh." I say this as someone highly involved with the making of 'artistic' things. I have been painting seriously for the last year and a half. I have been writing poetry, stories, and essays more or less organically for the last 10 years. My father is a prolific multimedia artist. I could call myself an artist if I wanted to. But it is unclear to me what it means to be 'an artist'. I also don't really call myself a writer. I talk to my friends that I read and write with about this. They much more readily call themselves 'writers.' I prefer to call myself a maker or a thinker or something like that. I would call myself a philosopher but I'm not that vain and I regard that term principally as an honorific. I do not claim it for myself and hopefully never will. I am still too busy trying to understand what philosophy even is.
What is it about the modern world that has led to the image of the artist being one of the principal images of the good life? What is it about 'creativity', about 'freedom', about 'passion' that we all find so appealing? I of course admit that freedom is good, but not unqualifiedly good. Freedom to do what? To laud freedom in an unqualified fashion is to laud the freedom of the capitalist to exploit their workers just as it is to laud the ability of the worker to make art.
I want to explore the idea that the modern emphasis on creativity, and the modern valorizing of the artist, is connected to the fundamentally theological or biblical character of modernity. The early modern founders, as I have understood them, were attempting to bring about transformations in the fundamental structure of society. Their chief target was the Catholic church. In order to contest the rule of the church, the alleged divine authority of the pope and his priests, the notion of God underwent some sort of transformation. The precise nature of this transformation is not yet clear to me. It is either a rebellion against the idea of God, a failure of the idea of God, a modification of the idea of God, or something like this. In any case, modernity, or the Enlightenment, was an attempt to do away with the fundamentally theocratic character of politics and to found governments solely on human reason. The idea of God, however, did not disappear: it became humanized.
The core of modernity, in other words, is an attempt for human beings to become godlike in some sense. In my last post I spoke of Feuerbach's explicit claim that the task of modernity was to recognize that what we had previously called God was really a part of humans that we had misidentified. Indeed, something like this is the ultimate conclusion of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which Keir and I spent an agonizing 8 months going through together. Fabulous. I also noted that Descartes' claim that the modern natural sciences will make us 'masters and possessors of nature' is expressedly theological. Descartes understood that the sciences were about control, and that the biblical god was the model for this spirit of mastery or sovereignty. The modern natural sciences then ought to be understood principally as a tool for the waging of a philosophical war against the catholic church.
The most significant feature of the inception of the modern natural sciences is that the word nature undergoes significant modifications. Caroline Merchant, a brilliant historian, Leo Strauss, and many others, have helped me see that modernity is in part a shift from a teleological (or organismic) conception of nature to a mechanistic conception of nature. Defining nature as a machine, Merchant argues, frees human beings from moral imperatives and restraints that existed in an organismic or teleological account of nature. For if nature is an organism, or if goodness is natural, then science, as an attempt to think and act rationally, must defer to natural forms of goodness. When nature is defined as a machine, however, it is free to be manipulated and dominated. We can do what we please to a nature that is fundamentally a machine: human action is fundamentally liberated by any constraints imposed upon it by a theoretical order. The only limits of human action are self-imposed limits. The human being is essentially a god or can become godlike.
Indeed, the work of Richard Kennington, Paul Rahe, and Robert Roecklein has convinced me that the early modern founders were keenly aware of the political import of the new mechanistic sciences. Machiavelli actively looked towards ancient forms of materialism and Spinoza spoke openly of his attack on teleology. Both of these men were considered dangerous and heretical thinkers during their time and far beyond. That they were so involved with these questions about the meaning of nature should cue us into something strange. Through the mechanistic sciences human beings have indeed achieved profound mastery over the natural world, ourselves included. Transhumanist writers now speak openly of becoming technologically immortal.
Because the modern redefinition of nature was principally meant to utilize an attack on the catholic church, certain elements of the biblical tradition became integrated into this project. I am proposing that the notion of 'creation' was co-opted from the biblical tradition and made a major object of the modern natural sciences. Indeed, Bacon envisioned 'the arts' (i.e. the technical sciences) as providing human beings with fantastic new inventions or creations. He wrote in The New Atlantis, his utopian novel, of new species of plants and animals, never before seen, that could be created by the new physical sciences. Descartes wrote, similarly, of an 'infinity of devices' that would now be possible.
The notion of 'creation' is a biblical notion. I have been reading the first 15-20 pages of Genesis recently. I have never read it before. It is amazing, at 32, to be going through a book, no, the book, that shaped the Western world. The status of god as a creator, moreover, is quite strange. I am hung up on what it would mean for god to have knowledge of the things he created. If he created them, how can he have knowledge of them? Knowledge, to me, implies a stable type of understanding. We can know something because it exists in a capacity beyond us. If God made it, then can't he unmake it and make it into something new? Then doesn't that thing not have a nature outside of god's having created it? Then God only knows himself, not the things he makes. I don't know what to make of it.
The modern natural sciences, which were expressly theological in the early- and mid-modern writers, took over this fundamentally 'creative' character of god. We, the human being, was now the site of creation and creativity.
I am suggesting that the exaggerated notion of creation and creativity, and the lauding of the artist, is connected at some level to the fundamentally biblical character of the modern natural sciences. The reason that Sartre and Camus are able to speak so flippantly and comically of the radical freedom and creativity of the human being is because the modern project has been about cultivating a godlike stance for the human being. Sartre and Camus are full of these kinds of theological images. But they don't seem to perceive the link between their hubristic claims and the fundamentally hubristic character of the modern project as an outgrowth of biblical consciousness.
I do not believe that the image of the artist is sufficient for the question of what it means to live well. The good life is not necessarily the creative life, although a good life will probably involve 'making' things in some capacity. But making and creating feel quite different to me. So far, in my work as a therapist, I do not find anyone I am talking with to be a radically free being. We are sacrificial beings. We make compromises. We are shaped and coerced by institutions. We are frail and stand in need of others. We are anything but gods.
I am more interested in the image of the philosopher as opposed to the image of the artist. The philosopher, as I said above, stands principally in relation to nature, not creation. The bible knows no word for nature; creation is the closest equivalent. Nature here must be understood in the organismic or teleological sense outlined above: nature is a place in which natural ends exist; in which species and individuals have forms of goodness that are specific to them. The nature of a being, then, is identical to what is good for that being. The human being, being a political animal by nature, thus is coeval with the question of the good or best political order.
This concept of nature as teleological makes the fundamentally creative conception of the human being impossible. Because nature is a nature of natural ends it is not up to us what is good for us. There is a larger, theoretical order that we are beholden to. Our task is to rectify our ignorance of that external order by pursuing knowledge of it.
In pursuing knowledge of nature we are attempting to overcome our original way of understanding: the opinions of the political community. This is why for Plato and Aristotle the pursuit of 'natural' knowledge is always pursued in contradistinction to 'conventional' knowledge. We are born in the cave, witnessing the shadows of the artifacts, fooled into thinking that the illusions and prejudices of the community are simply 'how things are'. Philosophy is the desire to know nature rather than the illusions of the cave; philosophy is the desire to ascend from conventional opinion to knowledge of nature. This is not a creative act. It is an act of longing; a pursuit of something that we piously and faithfully relate to. Socratic piety is perhaps the faith to continue pursuing nature despite the fact that all of our inquires continue to land us back in the world of human opinion and construction. We must have faith that there is 'a way things are'. Asserting the alternative, that there is no 'way things are' strikes me as absurd, dangerous, and driven by a spirit of control.
Our bodies will break down and we will die. If that isn't proof to you that there is an order greater then us, then I don't know how to speak to you. Perhaps the fragility of your body and the needfulness of your soul are seen as shameful to you.
I have never been so happy to acknowledge my weakness and to revel in the knowledge that I am beholden to so much beyond myself.
The freedom of the artist, of godlike creativity, is indeed alluring. But the pursuit of nature, the life of philosophy, offers its own kind of freedom. It is not always a practical freedom, but a freedom of mind and spirit: a theoretical freedom. To be in pursuit of nature is to know that the conventions that structure life, the roles and rules, are not 'natural', but incidental. That I am a therapist is a contingent fact: had I been born two hundred years ago rather than in 1987 I would not be a therapist. I would need to be something else because a totally different set of conventional structures would prevail. But because I am aware of the contingent, historical, or constructed elements of my life, I am able to ask myself what is natural in them, what I can do to become more human, in the broadest sense of that term. I must participate in capitalism. But I am free to wonder what in the midst of these creations is more than merely created.
Healing is a natural phenomena; the role of therapist is not. Justice is a natural phenomena; the injustices of capitalism are not. Friendship is a natural phenomena; Facebook and Instagram are not. I am only free to pursue these questions about nature because they show themselves to me through conventions.
The role, the constructed social part, is my only avenue to nature. I have no choice but to travel through artifice to try and understand what it might mean to be natural. We are never free from convention. We are never free from our roles. The philosopher, in being in pursuit of nature, is free from the domination of laws, customs, and illusions that are the fundamental human creations.
There is no problem being in the cave. It is okay to have to occupy roles. But do not think that the roles are all that exist.
There is something otherwise than creation. It is called nature. And it only shows itself through the created, made, or constructed.
The image of the artist will not do. We do not create all of this. The image of the philosopher offers something different; a sense of deference to things beyond us.
Isn't it a relief, knowing that this isn't all up to you? Isn't it comforting to think that we may be able to discover what is good for us?
I cannot bear the work of the gods. I am too weak; too wounded; too needful. I am not sorry.
I suspect that the people I will be working with and speaking to as a therapist also will not be able to handle the work of the gods. They, too, are weak and needful.
Perhaps I can work with them to discover what, by nature, is good for them, or me, or us.
No comments:
Post a Comment