Reflection on  Human Nature and World

Welt and Umwelt (world and environment). But it is much more complex. Imagine a young wolf, born a thousand years ago in what is now Yellowstone National Park. The young wolf would have an ideal environment to which it would become within its wolf pack perfectly adapted, perfectly healthy – always with a little luck.

     I think we human beings are also created (and evolved) into something like this – our environment (Umwelt) though is a world (Welt). Our natural world: a loving, caring family, a genuine community where everyone has a useful and valued role to play; a community that has preserved its cultural treasures and has a worldview that makes sense of its past and present, and relates its members to the world as a whole, perhaps what transcends our possible experience of the world; a community to which young people become habituated by acquiring the skills and above all the spiritual dispositions necessary to live in community with other members (common sense wisdom, justice, courage, self-restraint, mercy, etc.); a community that thoroughly knows its place in nature (including awareness of its ignorance) and can live from that place without diminishing or destroying it – I could go on. Something like this, I believe, is to us what Yellowstone is to the wolf.

       Now the human “Yellowstone” – the world most natural to human beings –  has been almost everywhere destroyed. Whenever it begins to recover for a group of people, it gets destroyed again. It has been destroyed partly because human societies almost everywhere come to be dominated by a power elite that arises when the production of needed goods surpasses what we need. It then controls the means of production, dominates the political decision-making process, and determines the forms of work and leisure. (Yes, I learned this from Marx, but it’s true. Jesus also preached as much.) This is partly a result of competition between groups within a society and between societies for the control of resources. We are correspondingly not only cast out, but become to some degree insane – as a young wolf would be if ripped out of Yellowstone and thrown into downtown Detroit. What is natural to us comes to seem like a mythical Eden. What is unnatural changes our nature over time. We live east of Eden.

. . .

Capitalism and bodies. Summer fashions for girls and young women - lots of skin, showcasing legs, waistlines, tummies, shoulders, backs, and bottoms: as if displaying their wares in a shopping window. Those with nothing to sell, like me, pull the curtains over our bodies as best we can. 

 Nietzsche and Truth

The love of truth and the love of the world. I used to be disoriented by Nietzsche’s attack on truth:

 

Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment; in this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating. (Beyond Good and Evil, Kaufmann trans.)

 

It doesn’t make sense on many levels. What is in truth life-promoting or species-cultivating? Well, Nietzsche apparently thinks he has the truth about that: the unfolding of power, which implies an unfolding of our highest capacities, which in turn makes culture, which in turn makes a world a man can affirm – or so I would paraphrase it. He is sure there is no reality but nature, as he understands it (a mix of Darwin and Schopenhauer as the matrix for his special addition – the will to power).  No God and no ‘other world’ exist – they are fantasies produced by the weak to make life bearable. They are laced with underlying fantasies of resentment and revenge against those able to master and so affirm life. Morality is an illusion that flows from the same source. Nature knows no morality. Nature is indifferent to human suffering. I could go on.

        At the deepest level, it seems, the hostility to truth is bound with a rather dim view of the world. If the world is horrible, then it is understandable that the truth would make life unbearable. We would need all kinds of illusions – comforting illusions as well as illusions that make us seem great in our own eyes. Whatever works! But what if Nietzsche is wrong about the world and wrong about us? His whole philosophy, his recommendations at least to the “strong” ones among us depend on its truth. If he is wrong, if his judgments are not true, then his philosophy, well, sucks.

       You will inevitably find that those who don’t care about truth are nihilists, openly or under the surface: that is, they believe in a meaningless, perhaps cruel interpretation of nature and human nature that places no inherent limits on the will. Like Nietzsche, they will just assume that nature and the world are amoral, indifferent bundles of matter and energy, and appeal to a kind of secret society to which their readers, if they desire to be cool, obviously want to belong – “we strong ones know the world sucks and the weak need their pitiful illusions.” It is yet another form of self-flattery. It is a bubble, a self-authenticating view of the world and their place in it.

            The love of truth, the practice of truthfulness as a virtue, as spiritual demeanor, is also not neutral. It makes sense only if the truth is good because the world and nature of which it is truth is good, is meaningful. The world and nature offer enough evidence for both views. The world is ambiguous, underdetermined. What is deeper? What is on the surface? We don’t understand our own lives and how to live without caring about the truth of such matters. In any case, the attitude to truth depends on the attitude toward the self, others, the world, and God. For me I can’t be a nihilist because I love my children – among other things – and have had occasion to be glad of life and the world. It is understandable to me that the people of Gaza or Sudan might have a different take on things. And that more than anything casts doubt on my view. 

 Anxieties about the Future of my Country- and Theses

  

  Trump did not initiate a crisis of democracy in America. He is only the latest form this crisis takes. Since 1980 corporate power has increased to the point where they are a de facto branch of government, and not the weakest branch. Wealth has been concentrating at the top while people who work for a living have been getting squeezed and have had to deal with real insecurity - while the situation for those at the bottom has only gotten more hopeless. The corporate concentration in media and its takeover of the Internet - started long before Fox as a matter of policy both of Democratic and Republican administrations - is itself a crisis in democracy. The flaws in our constitution prevent facing this reality and indeed have only eased this symbiosis between corporate power and government. This situation could not even be articulated in our politics before the advent of Bernie Sanders. 

 In the present, I struggle with this: there are two camps of Americans; these two camps of Americans see each other as enemies and threats – not just political opponents, not just as Americans who disagree, but as enemies such that Vladimir Putin is an ally against these other enemy Americans. In fact, only one of these camps sees the other as an enemy, but given that they have declared war on the other camp – a Cold War – the other camp has no choice but to see them as enemies. Within these two camps, there are factions, but they don’t matter now.

   And this Cold War is in the head. It results from a set of ideas about what is real. It is in the soul as well. It results from a spiritual disease. Here are some random thoughts or theses on this situation, which I will try to understand using the analogy of Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s and insights of Karl Marx and Hermann Göring.

 

 

Thesis One

  Hermann Göring said in an interview with an American psychologist names Gilbert after the war:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. [emphasis mine]

 

That works not only with countries as a whole, but also in factions within a country. Since Clinton became President, a host of TV and radio propagandists, led by Rush Limbaugh, labored to get working Republican voters to see Democrats not as political opponents but as unpatriotic enemies of the people. They denounced Republican politicians who were willing to compromise on policy issues, portraying them as compromising with the devil. A group of pragmatic, patriotic Republicans did persist – John McCain and Mitt Romney being the two most prominent examples. But their position within the party became increasingly precarious. Under Trump’s control, such pragmatists who cared about policy results and were committed to the country have all but disappeared.

    One way to understand their “achievement” was that they tapped into working men’s (mostly white men) resentments and created both an epistemological bubble that featured the Democrats being utterly corrupt perverters and destroyers of everything America was supposed to stand for, every that made America “great” in their minds. ‘Democrat’ became almost synonymous with ‘traitor.’ Fox News came along to nourish this epistemological bubble. The bubble was protected by constructing an echo chamber – an echo chamber that discredited information from any source other than the now official sources of Fox, Limbaugh & Co. The mainstream media was reduced to being the propaganda mouth of the enemy. [The corporate media has been problematic for democracy for many reasons, but that is beyond my purpose here to discuss. See Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times, 2000. A bit dated, but details the corporate takeover of media and the interpretation of the 1^st Amendment.]

 

The fruit of this pre-Trump attempt to demonize the enemy was the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party.

The enemy was the Democrat, the Liberal, i.e. who are really “socialist.” Like the West Europeans.

Part of the demonization was motivated by the need to stay blind to the fact that working people have it incomparably better in European states because the states actively work to patch up the worst effects of capitalism. In Germany, for example, I and my family are completely insured and even supported in ways that are unimaginable for working Americans. There is no college tuition so I don’t have to worry about being ruined by my children’s education. There is a wonderful public transportation system so those who can’t afford or who don’t want a car can live a normal life. Etc. Thus Bernie Sanders was such a threat. Trump was put up to counter that threat, to demonize people for wanting in the US what working people take for granted in Europe.

    These propagandists, aided by the loss of the USSR as the prime enemy, prepared the way for the Trump takeover.  They broke with the post-War consensus that framed political disagreement between the two parties and between factions within the parties.

   Now the two camps live in alternate universes, and the MAGA universe is completely untethered to facts. With their own active complicity, the MAGA faction has become epistemological equivalents of flat earthers or creationists or  astrology believers. No common-sense evidence can refute their views.

‘Trump won the election. He has proof.’

‘But his own Attorney General, head of Homeland Security, and FBI all stated unequivocally that the election was fair. He presented his evidence, such as it was, to the courts in 61 cases and lost every case – many overseen by judges he appointed. Massive evidence of his conspiracy to steal the election was presented to the Jan. 6 committee by his own people.’

‘The courts are part of the deep state. His AG and other folks sold out to the Democrats. The Jan 6 was a partisan propaganda circus.’

‘Use your common sense!’

‘I am. It makes no sense to me that a great man like Trump would lie about such things!’

Etc.

 

Thesis Two

  How can that be? What made so many people susceptible to irreality? Here some random suggestions.

·        Deplorables: many people have been made to feel ashamed for holding views – about sex, family, marriage, etc. – that not long ago were taken for granted. Many were made to feel ashamed of latent racism or being seen as racist for opposing particular policies like affirmative action. (I don't think the 'culture wars' were started by the right; the right just pounced on them and used them.)

·        Inferiority complex: in our DNA there is a suggestion: whoever is not rich and famous is a loser, and being a loser is your own fault. A kind of primitive nationalism is opium for this: ‘OK, I am a loser, but I am an American (white American); America is the greatest country; therefore, I am great.’ Or liberals who flaunt their college educations rub salt into this inferiority complex: ‘Trump will show them!’ etc.

·        More objectively, the uprooting and insecurity that has attended the near total destruction of rural farming life as well as the traditional manufacturing base – largely seen as a result of ‘globalization’ and ‘internationalism’ (American first!).

·        The squeezing of the middle class by the super-rich and corporate America – something MAGA has to camouflage and blame on the Democrats.

·        The evangelicals have always been a group apart. The Southern Democrats used to get them. After the Civil Rights Movement, they fell into the lap of the Republican Party. Their interests consist of laws banning abortions, protections for religious schools against public schools to keep their children in their bubbles - which I can partly understand, being not uncritical of the culture of the Great American Funhouse myself - and otherwise to be left alone. They have become politicized because they see secular society threatening their families and belief systems – somewhat like the Amish fear of ‘America.’  They tend to be single-issue voters indifferent to public life (except when it infringes on their lives). But now Christian Nationalism is a big part of MAGA. It’s like: we can only be safe from secular society if we control or have a veto over government policy. Many of these people see Trump for what he is, but see him as a tool to gain control over the government.

·        The absence of roots. We are the most rootless people that have ever existed on earth. If roots are a deep human need – and I agree with Simone Weil that they are (see her Need for Roots) – then we suffer emotional damage for the lack of roots. This is partly what explains the insanity of ‘identity politics.’ The deep need to latch onto some external category, whether be of race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever. Thus politics transforms from (ideally) debates about what is just or what serves the common good to who a person happens to be – which as a question of ‘identity’ is beyond debate. That is a recipe for fanaticism. 

 

At some level, we are creatures of ego. We are drawn to what elevates or consoles the ego, repelled from what lowers it or makes it feel bad. These things are mediated by ideas of what is real and good. What I see is a massive system designed to elevate and comfort the egos of a portion of the population that suffers most from the economic regime they are de facto supporting and protecting.

There is something wrong. They sense that. As Umberto Eco has his enlightened monk (i.e. his nominalist monk), Brother William, say in The Name of the Rose: "The common people feel a truth that is perhaps truer than that of the theologians [the pundits] but they waste this feeling in ill-considered actions.” These people have chosen to live in a comforting, in an ego-elevating fantasy, and thus have become a threat to anything good that can come of the country. They have chosen to wallow in self-pity and victimhood rather than act according to their true interests and situation.

 

Thesis Three

   What interests did the new Republican propaganda machine serve? Where did the resentments come from that this machine fed? Complex questions to which I can only suggest directions for research.

   Marx wrote:

  The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.

 

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

 

What were the economic conditions following the end of the Cold War? Both Democrats and Republicans agreed on the corporate capitalist structure of the economy. The situation was not, as it was in Germany during the Great Depression, whether a communist revolution that would end capitalism would succeed, and force capitalists (as it did in Germany) into a choice between surviving under Hitler or losing everything under the German Communist Party (they had given up on the ability of the Weimar Republic to protect capital). Capitalism was the agreed-upon foundation for the country. To criticize capitalism put you outside the mainstream on the fringes (where I have spent most of my adult life).

     The ideological conflict was between Roosevelt’s New Deal – largely but not completely abandoned by the Democrats themselves until Bernie Sanders came along – in which capitalism would be forced to make compromises for the sake of working people and the good of the country as a whole. Corporations and the super-rich would have to pay their fair share of taxes, be subject to regulation from the state, etc. It was not an existential question of their survival but rather one of sharing power (e.g. as is taken for granted in German capitalism today). As opposed to this is the corporate drive – under pressure from corporate raiders in the form of hedge funds – to remove all barriers to profit maximization, to minimize or eliminate paying taxes, to regulate themselves, to be free to buy influence in government (money = free speech in the Supreme Court’s corporate-friendly ruling).

      It is not a question of capitalism versus socialism (i.e. public ownership of the means of industrial production and finance) but unfettered turbo-capitalism versus the control over capitalism that Roosevelt achieved to save it from itself during the Great Depression. That is the main (not only) underlying structural reality that has given rise to the Cold Civil War, as sections of the capitalist class finance ideological campaigns that seem remote from its main interest but in fact serve to protect their freedom and power over government policy at every stage.

   What is good for the corporate or billionaire bottom line is good for the country vs. the corporate capitalist class is one part of society that must, like the other parts, make compromises for the common good – those competing principles underlie the conflict. And a big part of the economic elites are willing to change the regime of the country to protect their interests if they have to.

   Within this complex, different industries – banking and finance, oil, military-industrial, pharmacy, etc. – have different and sometimes competing interests. But what unites them all is the agenda of maximizing control over the State in terms of policy and the minds of the public ideologically.

   Given the fact that the devasting effects of ‘globalization’ could no longer be denied, that they had given rise to a serious national candidate, Bernie Sanders, it is no surprise that a Trump followed soon thereafter, mirroring the much more existential decision of German capital to support Hitler as a protection against communist and socialist opponents. Not that all of American capital has thrown its lots in with Trump. Some see his type of fascism as a threat to their autonomy. Others are hedging their bets, waiting to see who comes out on top.

 

Thesis Four

   Not that this underlying structural power dynamic forms the motives of most individuals. These fight it out in the realm of ideas – ideas that often mirror the underlying conflict in distorted ways but are sometimes unconnected to it. The main ideological areas in which “the base” fight it out are the following:

·        Immigration and the replacement of white Americans by ‘minorities’

·        So-called ‘Woke’ progressivism

·        The legitimacy of the State and the rule of law

·        Abortion

·        The meaning of “America” and “democracy”

·        The legitimacy of the international liberal order erected and held up by American power since the end of WWII

 

In all these areas the issue is not one of policy differences. Each area is seen as part of a Democratic attempt to control the state and dominate and oppress the other camp. So the complexities of immigration policy give way to a Democratic conspiracy to replace the hard-working white majority with reliable voting blocks of lazy Hispanics, Muslims, or whatever, cementing the Democrats' power over the state and the “real Americans.” The same for all the other issues. 

 

Ego and Meaning (and Reality)

                                                                   Devil's Lake (Teufelssee)

The Ego-Drama. The thing that blurs our access to reality the most is the ego-drama, our little drama, the drama of our ‘self’ – I (my ego) produce it, write it, direct it, and of course star in it. It occupies most of us non-saints constantly. I make it up, this film, according to my own lights for my own purposes. (Facebook, Instagram, etc. did not invent the Ego; they merely amplify and empower it – pouring gasoline in its fire. Not that I would reduce all uses of such platforms to the ego drama.) The terrible irony is: while in this mostly extremely sentimental, and to an objective observer, an extremely boring low budget movie, we don’t even know who in the Hell we are. Until I break out, unplug myself; until something else becomes real, good, beautiful, lovable, joyful (or their opposites), as ego-centered I have no life. I think a big part of our culture is based on this. I accept you (your film, your spin on yourself); you accept me. There is nothing ‘out there’ to judge our pathetic little films to. 

       Now, this is very precisely described as the deadly sin of sloth: a lack of zeal for the life of the spirit-mind; an apathetic attitude toward truth; an indifference to others, your relationships to others and to the community, to nature, to myself. Thus the ego-drama is not only inherently uninteresting; it is downright bad for me. What gives a river purpose, energy, and a direction is the firmness of its banks (John Henry Newman). In a world of ego-dramatists, there is a placid, oxygen-poor swamp, or a kind of Devil’s lake, as we have here in Brandenburg – bodies of water without movement, going nowhere. I write this here because though someone otherwise starring in nothing but his ego-drama can maybe do some science or program a computer, it is impossible for that purpose to every connect with reality, to ever achieve even a modest measure of truth, understanding, wisdom. 

      All real religion and philosophy get you out of the ego-drama so that you can encounter in some way the real. A step before religion or philosophy, because it also requires suspension of the ego-drama, is to learn something: a foreign language, the piano, math – things which are real, that cannot be reduced to ego, that force you conform yourself to them. Even higher: love someone. What does the real good of my children, being the individuals they are, require from me as a father – a very demanding task of understanding! (“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.” – C. S. Lewis) Of course, acknowledging these criteria external to my ego do make demands on me, sets me up for failure. It does take courage, too.

     To understand anything or anybody requires the suspension of the ego-drama. God save me from “the clean, well-lighted space” of my own little ego" (Hemingway)! How joyful, in contrast, to discover something objectively wonderful! And there is nothing more objectively wonderful than my children. 

Foucault and Plato’s Cave

They seem so similar and are yet at bottom so different. For a long time, I had my prejudices against Foucault: his writing style (at least in translation) but above all I tend to read a thinker’s philosophy in light of his biography – which Foucault himself encourages everyone to do: “One must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.” In Foucault’s case, I cannot view the way he lived with anything except pity. If that makes me seem intolerant or worse, I must accept that.

     But for some time now I have been struck by the way he in his writing absolutely nails down certain truths in an unforgettable way; I experience things constantly that bring him to mind; and I do see the world differently having thought his thoughts. And I am struck by how similar to Plato are large veins of this post-philosopher. Just take a couple of quotes ripped out of context: 

 

Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms. 

 

All teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power.

 

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. 

 

Truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it.

 

Do I think these descriptions are insightful? Absolutely. Do I think they are true? Depends on how the key concepts – truth, knowledge, and power – are understood. I think of Plato’s Cave, and all apply. In the Cave truth and knowledge are conditioned by, in a sense are manufactured by, power. And power is defuse, unclear. Some of the constructions projected against the wall of the Cave – the screen – are consciously designed to hide the power of the ruling social class. 

     The way these and other constructions are disseminated in used are put in the service of power in the sense the individuals reflect the striving for power, a striving almost innate to a society in which the self is a product of constructions without any true Ideas to measure them by. What Schopenhauer and Nietzsche believed the basic (metaphysical) principle of reality – the will-to-life or the will-to-power – is natural only when one steps back and contemplates social reality in the Cave, and then sees that as an expression of nature, of reality. The conscious life orients itself to power because it lacks a Northern Star. 

    Well, love can penetrate the darkness of the Cave and its constructed truths, its constructed regimes of knowledge. We know God’s love even during the darkest night through the light of the stars, a light that doesn’t seem to come from the Cave precisely because it has nothing to do with power or ego-promotion or class-elevation. That we live in a Cave is itself a view from inside the Cave. The stars – the concept ‘star’ – is a social construction of reality and thus belongs to the Cave only insofar as you don’t see the wonder in the sky, as those who see God’s love in the light of the stars do. But of course, that love can be socially constructed to be part of the Cave world too – as we know, for example, from Church history. 

      Where I think Plato and Foucault differ, radically differ, is here: Plato would always put quotation marks around “truth” and “knowledge” as used by Foucault, as used in the Cave. Plato believed, as do I, that reality transcends our socially constructed reality of Cave and Screen. Beauty, love, truth – all these may be constructed and absorbed by the society of the Cave – indeed must be for there to be a Cave at all; the foundation of the Cave is built from constructions of the central metaphysical ideas. For Foucault, there is only Cave; Cave is the whole of human reality, and the only temporary escape is negative: to rebel in whatever way against the Cave.

  I would differ from both Plato and Foucault in that I believe some Cave shadows can in happy circumstances be the shadows of something real and good. The further away you get from power, the more likely to find shadows of what is real and good and the less likely that the shadows are of fantasies that prop up ego power.

       To step back from the Cave, from life, as did Foucault but also Marx, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and interpret (conceptualize) the deepest principle of the life of the individual in society as involving some principle of power, of little centers of power that define themselves and ultimately compete against other centers of power, that define society, nature, and reality as such in terms of this defuse and underlying competition – those interpretations are judged by each of us according to our own experience of life in the Cave, of life in this interpreted world. But as to whether the Cave is the sum of reality – or not: all these wonderful thinkers (except Schopenhauer) just assume that reality is a human construction, nothing more; Schopenhauer thought the logic of the Cave expressed a metaphysical principle; Nietzsche and Foucault just assume any idea of a reality beyond the Cave was wishful thinking in the service of power.

        They might be right but would have to be able to get out of the Cave to prove it. They don’t try. Where I part company with Foucault and side with Plato is in this:  reality, logically, conceptually, cannot be reducible to our self-elevating ideas of it, or the ideas of it that elevate groups of power elites. That much of experience is determined by such ideas of reality I do not dispute.  But even if it is impossible to offer definitive, objective proof that I am right to believe that reality is bigger than the Cave – and everyone must speak personally here – I know in my heart that there is beauty that breaks the heart; there is love that makes the bullshit of Cave and the screen bearable; there is injustice in the world and the rare occurrence of justice is intensely beautiful; there is truth beyond ideology critique. As dragged down by social constructions of reality and self that I in fact am, my heart knows more. Perhaps in some moments, Foucault did too.

 

. . .

 

Constructed and intimate selves. Very little moves me more than the knowledge that a person, particularly women I have known, has been constructed by the fashion industry, by the reduction of human worth to social worth, the reduction of social worth to sex appeal, and the reduction of sex appeal to a very physical ideal of the taut body of a thirteen-year-old girl, hairless, with long legs, thin hips, and firm, protruding breasts. I can’t imagine any crueler way to damage the soul of women (and thus of men), despite any fleeting moments of heightened pleasure when they get their bodies to approach this procrustean ideal and get some brainwashed man to gaze at it, lust over it, or even find her ‘love-able’ because of it. (The female image constructed by the pornographer is soul-destroying.)

       And yet I have been moved when confronted by some accoutrement or accessory of a woman bought from the fashion industry to enslave herself to its standards. It is as though some of her own self has passed into these objects (chains) and transformed them into something human, into some part of her. Like she has not only been objectified and degraded, but she has at the same time humanized the very instruments of her subjugation. I don’t know whether this is pity, a kind of compassion, or another kind of love. Perhaps it is sentimentality I should purge. 

       In any case, I find it strange. This little personal experience is also the kind of thing that flows into concept formation. Concept formation is a very complex, complexly human miracle, though you wouldn’t know that if you studied semantics or mainstream academic philosophy.  

The Allegory of the Cave - Today [corrected]

‘Seeing as deeply imprinted by social ideology. Plato’s allegory of the cave is so deep, illuminating so many aspects of life. I want to adapt the allegory to my time.

 

    The allegory begins with prisoners who have lived their entire lives chained inside a cave. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners are people carrying puppets or other objects. These cast shadows on the opposite wall. Plato would have used the screen for his allegory were he alive today. The prisoners watch these shadows, believing this to be their reality as they've known nothing else. These prisoners do not understand that they are prisoners. They do not understand that the shadows that they take for real are social constructs. These social constructs appear on the cave wall (the screen) only because it is in the interest of the constructors – those with the power to construct – that the prisoners internalize their particular constructs as real. If there are power conflicts among the constructors of what passes for reality, then conflicting social constructs will compete. Epistemological bubbles might form as in our cave, and echo chambers discredit any source that puts forward competing shadows. The Cave consists of the technological and ideological power to get people to uncritically take over a set of constructs, which are their invisible chains. The people who are more or less of the chains are still chained, but unhappy.

 

     The idea is that the power holders construct images of the things we experience, including deep concepts like ‘soul’, ‘self,’ ‘human nature’ ‘nature,’ ‘beauty’, ‘pleasure,’ ‘valuable’, and ‘justice.’ The constructions project all the varying particular shadow-images we perceive, and which form our minds and our ideas of things. We take these shadows of constructs for reality, mostly unaware that the shadows are formed by constructs and the constructs are projections of power and will, desire and fantasy.  Today we don’t need to image shadows on the walls of a subterranean cave – the subterranean cave wall is the screen on which we watch TV and get assimilated by social media.

 

        The way we conceive our bodies is an excellent illustration of this. I used to walk around with the feeling: ‘here am I; there is the natural world’, my environment, so to speak, that which surrounds me but which I am not a part of. A forgetting that I and my body are one, and that my body is nature pure. I have long known that our current regime, capitalism-science-technology, conceives of nature as a ‘resource’, sometimes as a pure object, sometimes as a contrary beast to be domesticated, to exploit, to rape. And our bodies are nature, and they are seen as a resource, as a pure object, as a contrary beast to be domesticated. Michel Foucault insightfully (and perhaps unintentionally) describes the body as conceived from the perspective of the constructors in the cave: 

 

The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. (Foucault Reader, 1984, 83) 

 

They have studied the body in the field of historical demography or pathology; they have considered it as the seat of needs and appetites, as the locus of physiological processes and metabolisms, as a target for the attacks of germs or viruses; they have shown to what extent historical processes were involved in what might seem to be the purely biological base of existence; and what place should be given in the history of society to biological “events” such as the circulation of bacilli, or the extension of the lifespan. But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. (Foucault Reader, 173)

 

      And ‘I’, who am one with my body, am an ‘I’ manufactured by the regime in which we live, capitalism-science-technology, as Wendell Berry calls it, emphasizing how inextricably intertwined the three pillars of the regime are. So this regime has conditioned my understanding of self and reality - and everyone else's who was born into it. Republicans hate democrats but both see a forest either as picturesque scenery or natural resources to exploit. We see our bodies as the constructors within capitalism-science-technology construct them and the rest of nature (not usually consciously): as objects to mine for pleasure, or for profit; as an aesthetic object designed to impress – as a French garden or an urban development project; some of us gentrify their bodies; other use them as billboards for counter-cultural advertising slogans. Some despairingly see theirs as a garbage dump; others as a nature preserve, scenery to be enjoyed by tourists. Some bodies are ok to brutalize, in shop windows in red light districts, as some landscapes are – some of us, prostitutes and factory workers, are Appalachian strip-mine bodies. Women’s bodies are always constructed by the reductive masculine gaze, which many come to make their own gaze or resist in a difficult rebellion. Pleasure can be perverse. But Reality will have its say. Our little bodily ecosystems are doomed to death and decay, one and all we are fellow travelers to the grave. The universe will outlive our fall. 

         Now it is clear: much of our ‘I’ (a concept like any other) is just as much an imprint of the shadows projected not only from the ideological constructs of capitalism-science-technology, but the very structures of daily life – obedience on the job, the idea that a man or a woman has economic value only to the extent he or she becomes a tool of another’s profit: such conceptions translate into the concrete ways we structure work and the power relations at work. And the same goes for so-called free time. This structuring, which is the translation into physical processes of idea-constructs, also forms the ‘I’ that takes over the constructs of the body, work, and so on. Not totally. Of course, imprints from our formative years in the family matter – also socially constructed, but perhaps not completely obliterating nature, reality in the form of parents loving and caring for children. But at some level the world is a cave of the mind we cannot get out of, or at least not completely. Even in rebelling against the cave we are defined by it, though negatively. It is through the sublime that we glimpse reality, if only temporarily and partially. No one lives entirely in the light.  Marxists thought they could reconstruct a society outside of the Cave. We saw where that ended up.            

        This defines the task of education for those who like myself believe there is a world outside the cave: first, to turn away from the shadows and understand the constructs and why they are made as they are, and then train the mind and heart to imagine a world in which images are not subject to the spider web in which the drive for power over nature, including human nature, dominates. Of course, even in the cave some light finds a way in. If we have known anything close to genuine love, we can’t be completely cut off from reality. We have been left treasures from those of us who have glimpsed reality outside the Cave, including Plato and his teacher Socrates. (And reality always transcends our ability to understand it, even as a great poem like the Iliad transcends our ability to make a final translation of it valid for all times and places.) Some believe that the maker of reality outside the Cave - Christ - has enlightened us, though we know how even the most sublime teachings get reduced back to the categories of Cave life.   (Think of the Cave projects for which Christ has been pressed into service. Think of how uncharitably, ungenerously most people who call themselves Christian see the world and other people. Alas!) Still, even in the darkest night we can see God’s love in the light of the stars. We must train our minds and hearts to treasure this light as well. 

 

   I will end with thoughts of Iris Murdoch, keys to getting out of the Cave:

 

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Understanding the reality is the work of love, justice and pity. Love is an attending to the individual conceived as an independent reality.

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

 

More Reflections on the Soul, and the Mind, and our Place in the World

No proof or evidence for the tone deaf. We can only emotionally connect – or not – to transcendence, and consent or refuse consent to those responses. The emotional responses to transcendent, when not sentimental, are experiences of the sublime, or the mystical in Wittgenstein’s sense. The fact of such responses and the importance of their role in the spiritual lives of human beings are not proofs that anything beyond the ordinary is ‘real’; they are not objective evidence either. But they are a kind of subjective evidence, an intimation to weigh against the possibility that the real, for example, is nothing but what physics can study. 

   ‘There are more things in heaven and earth …than are dreamt of in your philosophy or science!’      True or false? No experiment or equation can answer that question. No experiment can prove whether one’s experience that a certain waterfall is sublime is an experience of reality or a subjective-psychological-evolutionary illusion occasioned by some otherwise meaningless collection of water molecules. What we are left with is men and women speaking and writing: ‘Wow, that waterfall is awesome”’; ‘Gee, what a sweet waterfall.’ Compare: ‘Just listened again to the fugue in G minor – no words to express how deeply beautiful that is’ Teenage rapper: ‘Well, I listened to part of it – it was so boring I couldn’t go on. No action!’ Not all responses are equal.

   

     Before modernity – science, technology, industrialism, capitalism – it was common sense that our emotional responses were more or less in harmony with reality, “believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt (C, S. Lewis)”: that, for example, Wordsworth’s joy – later expressed in the well-known poem – in beholding the daffodils by a bay disclosed something real about the daffodils and nature (beauty and more). Therefore, it also belonged to common sense that emotions needed to be educated. Before we can conceptualize the truth of beings and nature herself we need to feel the truth. Indeed, we cannot intellectually apprehend truth without first knowing it emotionally. Thus just as the ignorant teen above was tone deaf to the music of Bach, we tend to be tone deaf to nature and much of reality, including our own.

 

. . .

Different pictures of the soul, or the self, or human nature are involved here. Interestingly, how you understand yourself depends on how you understand nature, reality as a whole.