The title demonstrates the trajectory of thought that I intend to trace here. I do not intend to do much more than sketch said trajectory. It is Friday evening. My working, reading, learning, and acting feel strained. I continue my study of DuBois and Douglass. I have just received Albert Murray's The Omni-Americans in the mail, along with Leo Strauss' The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism. I continue to be divided.
I begin with the problem of sacrifice. I speak of sacrifice in a very broad sense, but generally denoting the way that human life lacks harmony. We are composite both interpersonally and intrapsychically: we are many, both as we appear in society, and as we appear within ourselves. In order to manage this many-ness, we must make sacrifices: we live and (hopefully) choose among options, both interpersonally or intrapsychically.
Interpersonally, or socially, we occupy many roles throughout our lives and even on a single day. Monday through Friday 830-5, I am a therapist, case manager, coworker, employee, (or 'team member' if I want to abide by the language that my employers use to obscure the hierarchical relations between use), and many other things. During that time I may also be a customer, a pedestrian, an acquaintance, a friend (and what myriad things go into being these things?) Outside of those hours I am a roommate, a friend, a son, a brother, an image on a screen (both for myself and others). Roles roles roles, abound.
Intrapsychically, or within myself, I am also many. Both Plato and Freud thought it sensical, or at least expedient, to divide the soul in three: nutritive, spirited, and rational, for Plato; Id, Ego, and Superego for Freud. I grasp neither of these tripartite divisions sufficiently. But they point to an intuitive enough set of divisions within the soul: I recognize a part of myself that can think clearly; I recognize a part of myself that acts and 'thinks' at a level 'deeper than my thinking; and beneath all that my heart beats, my stomach digests, my body sleeps, heals, and cares for itself in a way that is deeper and more automatic than both my rational thinking and my semi-conscious bodily activity.
Socially, I fill roles, and am therefore both one and many.
Within myself, I am rational, habitual, and nutritive (physiological, automatically biological), and am therefor both one and many. (I imagine a particular friend, and others, who may take issue with the claim that we are one at all. I think this a signficiant but not insurmountable claim and bracket it here).
To make our way in the world as these composite beings we have to make sacrifices. Socially, we have to decide that we want to go to this school as opposed to that school; fill this role rather than that role; pursue this relationship rather than that relationship. Intrapsychically, we have to choose that this hobby is more important than that; this set of emotions worth honoring more than that; this 'part of myself' more worth nurturing than that.
I believe that the problem of sacrifice is unavoidable for we composite beings.
If we are lucky, our sacrifices can become duties. By duty I mean something like: "the sacrifices we are happy to make." R.G. Collingwood, my first great philosophical love, elaborates his notion of duty in rich and concise ways, chiefly in The New Leviathan, but by other names in The Idea of History and other places. Duty, for him, is the act that is both possible and necessary, that speaks itself chiefly in the form of tautology: 'This is what I have to do because this is what I have to do.'
When we understand the situation that we are in, which includes our roles and what transcends them, and the parts of ourselves and what transcends them, we find that the situation is compulsory. We have choices, naturally. But the way to choose is not simply by choosing capriciously or following some overriding instinct. The most sound form of choice is rather to understand the situation and to understand ourselves, and to listen to the logos latent in the situation and in ourselves as deeply as possible.
If we have listened to the situation deeply enough, if we have sufficiently communed with the logos present in our situation and in ourselves, we will find that there is a 'best' option for us. This 'best' option will still involve sacrifices, both socially and intrapsychically. But it will no longer be a burdensome sacrifice: it will be the sacrifice we are happy to make.
To deny the possibility of duty is to be captive to the fiction that the human being can be a god: that we can make our way in the world without compromising, without fitting ourselves in relation to others and to other parts of ourselves.
How does one know what is a sacrifice and what is a duty?
I am interested in a possible answer from Jonathan Lear's wonderful lectures in A Case for Irony.
In the first lecture Lear defines irony as a form of 'erotic uncanniness', meaning that irony seizes us in moments when the familiar has become unfamiliar, when we experience the uncanny. But in the moment of this dislocation we are not left in the void, as our modern sensibilities might lead us to suppose. Rather, we are left erotically charged, longing for the truth about the thing that, moments ago, we thought we knew. Socrates, Lear claims, was ironic in this sense.
This is why Lear claims that irony shows itself most clearly in the form of tautology. "Among all the therapists, are there any therapists?" In the first instance the word stands for the socially available roles that are available to us as a matter of course. In the second instance the word points to a deeper possibility reality, ie therapist not as social role, but therapist as genuinely healing person. The tautological question, 'among the therapists, are there any therapists,' can thus be rephrased: 'Among all those who occupy the socially designated role of therapist, do any of them function as agents (persons, sources, sites) of healing?' The answer is surely yes, but my point isn't the answer. My concern is with this notion of irony.
In the second lecture Lear argues that this species of irony, as erotic uncanniness, is particularly significant in light of the human search for wholeness. Lear claims that we are generally given unrealistic and simplified images of life's harmony and the possibility for wholeness. In my master's thesis I made a similar claim, railing against Carl Rogers' and others' calls for 'congruence' and authenticity. These words point to real things. But Lear is on point when he claims "Ironically, the unity that is available to us is a peculiar form of disunity. In trying to work out the family of concepts that include rational will, action, and agency, philosophers have tended to rely on an idealized conception of unity that does not really fit the human soul." This is akin to the point I made from the outset concerning manyness and sacrifice: we cannot simply be whole. We are many, in many ways.
Lear believes that it is precisely our need to occupy social roles, and our need to fragment ourselves psychologically, that leads to this disunity that is our source of unity. The word sacrifice, however, occupies no significant place in Lear's analysis; it appears only once in relation to his depiction of Plato's Republic, where a character exits to make a literal animal sacrifice. Yet I find the notion implicit all over Lear's book.
Lear goes on to argue that 'unconscious fantasy' is one of the best places for psychic unity to emerge, in the peculiar way that it is possible for us. I don't understand this sufficiently, and I'm tired, so here is my best shot right now. Lear argues that 'individual formal causes' show themselves most clearly in the workings of unconscious fantasy. When we can allow ourselves, through dreams, or through psychoanalytic speech, to give voice to unconscious fantasy, we will encounter a sort of individual entelechy, a self-organizing care that is internally generated internally by the soul or organism. "The claim then is that the self tends to have a formal cause, unrecognized as such, which stands at significant odds with the conscious sense of practical identity."
If it is possible for us to have duties, rather than mere sacrifices, then something like this internal formal cause, this internal directedness, is necessary. If there were no internal formal causes, if I weren't 'a particular type of critter, with particular natural ends', then I would just be some malleable thing that social roles and intrapsychic organizations can just be imposed upon.
Why do certain roles fit better than others? Why do certain ways of relating to myself feel better than others? Why, in short, do I seem to have ends that are native to my particular being and not just the being of my species?
What Lear is talking about, then, is the discovery of duty as opposed to sacrifice. Because, again, these internal formal causes cannot just show themselves, willy nilly, without social form. We require social form. But certain forms are better. Why? I don't know why. But that seems to be what nature is, and it seems that we can listen to our natures.
I think Lear is onto something significant that is fundamentally correct. But I want to argue that 'unconscious fantasy' needs to be understood as emerging from a particular relation with 'embodied life', in a peculiar sense of embodied.
Here I follow the lead of Eugene Gendlin, who I am still hard at work on. Gendlin developed a somatically informed mode of thought that he referred to as 'focusing' and 'thinking at the edge'. Gendlin argues that words, or formulations, are most true if they correspond to an intuitively felt sense of things. Words don't just mean what they mean; words what they mean in situations. When I say the word 'slab', I may mean many different things, and the word functions in different situations in different ways.
If we want to follow our unconscious fantasies so as to understand our own unique entelechy, we need to listen to our bodies in the way Gendlin describes in Focusing and basically in every single one of his writings.
I am done.
We are many, never one. We are many in many ways. To navigate our many-ness means we must make sacrifices. But there is a unique species of sacrifice that is known as duty. A duty is a sacrifice we are happy to make because it accords with our nature. The best way to know our duties, or our internal formal causes, is to listen to the unconscious fantasies, as Lear puts it. And unconscious fantasy must be attended to in the experience of the body as Gendlin describes it.
Okay thanks bye I'll flesh this all out some day when I'm not so tired.
But I am convinced of the soundness of this trajectory.
