I recently told my friend Eric about my developing thoughts on the relationship between life process and artificial structure.
Animals throughout nature seem to use tools, to take up and modify elements of their environment to elaborate and further their life processes. Otters and apes use stones to break open food; birds build nests to hold their young and attract their mates. Many forms of life find ways to 'use' things in ways they weren't 'intended' to be used. A blowfish's toxin is not meant to intoxicate a dolphin in a pleasurable way, but apparently dolphins have found a way to 'use' them in this way.
Human beings are apparently the most complex artificers, tool users, on this planet. We, too, make things in order to further or elaborate our life processes. Humans kill animals and wear their skins to keep warm; we create fabrics and materials to make slings to carry our young; we fashion instruments to cultivate and hunt food to eat.
Eugene Gendlin's work on life process is absolutely decisive in my understandings here.
Perhaps the most notable human artifice is the symbol, or the separation of patterns from their instances. 😀 This smiley face, for example, is a symbol that is an abstraction from the life processes of the human body: the face that reveals the experiential processes of the organism.
Symbols are crucial in our ability to organize ourselves socially and politically. When a group of people arrive at a camping site, for example, they may divide the necessary labor: you go get water, you go get the food started, I'll stay here and get the fire started. In that moment, each of these people acquires a symbolic role within the whole of that 'unit' of people, that 'society'. Roles are implicit in that moment: fire starter; water fetcher; cook.
A role is a peculiar form of symbolization whereby a particular person is made to fill a general role. The filling of roles is essential to human experience. We cannot be ourselves (particular, being) unless we also are something that we are not (generic role, non-being). I worked for many years as a barista, and currently as a psychotherapist. In one sense I 'was' a barista and 'am' a psychotherapist. In another sense I am neither of those things. Those roles are a symbolic artifice that I take on in order to further my life processes.
It seems that human beings are the type of animal that cannot live without symbolically structuring itself.
Because human life requires the occupation of roles, human life thereby requires sacrifice. I cannot be what I am apart from 'fitting' myself into the activity of the community. Therefore all of my potentials will not, cannot, be actualized.
And this brings me to the point that I've been groping towards for many months or years now: the existence of esoteric texts, as uniquely human artifacts, is evidence of the type of animal that we are. We are a political animal, which also means we are a sacrificial animal and a symbolic animal. Because we are a political animal we have permanently ambivalent interests: we have the unique developments of our person, and the developments of our community. Both of these developments require sacrifices.
Esoteric texts, layered texts whereby individuals navigate the tension between individual and communal goods, are the natural artifact that is unique to the sacrifical-symbolic animal. An esoteric text allows a human being to develop a life process that is incredibly complex: How am I to further my growth as a unique, thinking being, when I am also a communal being that belongs? The esoteric text answers: I will further both of these processes by living a double life in which I care for myself in private while also preserving my belonging to a symbolic community.
Alexei Leontiev, an impressive Soviet psychologist I have recently made contact with, speaks of the 'double life of symbols'. On the one hand, they function publicly, designate roles, delineate abstract rules. On the other, symbols enter into unique relation with our individual souls, take on deeper meanings an intricacies.
The esoteric text is a perfect instantiation of this double life of symbols. And, I would add, it is evidence of the struggles unique to our animal.
The esoteric text is the artifact that is essential to understanding the unique life processes of this kind of animal we seem to be.
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