by Alan Ford
The Golden Mean, the Middle Way
etc., in its many forms seems as ancient as philosophy itself. For western
philosophy Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, is the luminous
example, but Plato and Socrates had said similar things before, and Daedalus
had told Icarus to ‘fly the middle course’ between the sea spray and the
heat of the sun. The Buddha taught the Middle Way, Confucius taught that excess
is like deficiency, Thomas Aquinas argued that virtue observes the mean, and
the Koran teaches the Middle Way too: ‘We have made you a balanced, moderate
nation’.
It is easy to
pick holes in this, especially if one hasn’t read any of the above works, but
it is right that the ‘golden mean fallacy’ should be elicited when it is
misinterpreted as meaning that one should always seek a compromise, no matter
what. This is obvious if one thinks that The Mean means accepting as right and
virtuous a compromise between the truth and a blatant lie. Yet this is an epistemological
argument and, for instance, Aristotle is arguing about ethical virtues,
propensities to act in virtuous ways, in short about character, identity. An
oft-quoted example from Aristotle is that courage is a virtue, but an excess of
this would lead to recklessness, while a deficiency would produce cowardice:
just like Confucius’ notion that excess is like deficiency. I shall show how
this happens.
This
structure, of too much of a virtue on one hand and too little on the other, in
order to describe a virtuous identity, can be transformed and illuminated by
examining Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair in his The Sickness Unto Death,(1)
where the sickness is at not being able to become oneself. He analyses this in
two broad forms: a) where he describes the ‘factors’ from which a self is
composed: and b) from the point of view of consciousness. The former describes
the parameters of the self from which we begin, (genetic makeup etc.), our raw
individual potential, and, perhaps, our initial environment. Here we are
pre-cognitive beings, potential persons, with rudimentary minds and bodies: a
mere “negative unity”.(2)
It is only
when true cognitive consciousness dawns that we can begin to become persons,
and only then can choice and responsibility for oneself arise: when the self
begins to be aware of the Other and consequently of itself.
So, to examine despair as viewed
under these factors of the synthesis.
The factors of
this synthesis of the self are, according to Kierkegaard, the opposing notions
of Infinitude/Finitude, Possibility/Necessity. The self can lose
itself in pursuit of one side of these syntheses. But we’ll talk in terms of
Freedom and Necessity, for brevity and clarity’s sake. You will notice that, as
in Aristotle’s analysis above, the faults in identity are couched in terms of
too much and too little, but Kierkegaard takes these further.
The despair of too much freedom is where
necessity is suppressed in a fantastic bid for freedom, where action in the
real world is put on hold, where contemplation becomes lost in the infinitude
of thought and logical possibility, where imagination reigns and facts are
evaded. Feelings become lost in great abstractions, like ‘love of the masses’,
the perfectibility of man etc. The only castles ever built are in the air. For
if one is totally free, a possibility only within imagination, one cannot be
free, for freedom depends on action, and one cannot act if there is no
resistance, which this ploy of escape into ‘freedom’ is designed to avoid. I
can jump only because the floor resists me. Freedom, like action is not an
abstract absolute. Outside action for some worthwhile and realisable scheme
knowledge becomes an expansion of itself, or thought doing no work, as
Wittgenstein once put it.
In the
opposite kind of despair, despair of too much necessity, (too little freedom) a
person might avoid becoming a person in losing himself in everyday ‘reality’,
suppressing imagination and thus possibility. He merges with the crowd as if a
thing with no freedom and hence no responsibility to act as a person, a perfect
citizen in a totalitarian state, fitting neatly into the party machine,
paradoxically free from the responsibility to act as a person. Above we saw
expansion into impotence and oblivion, here we see contraction into
narrow-mindedness and meanness of spirit. Yet both obey a paradoxical dialectic
where too much freedom flips into no freedom, since freedom depends on the
ability to act to a purpose; and too much necessity flips into freedom from
responsibility by evading action. Both in fact evade the real. For one all is
possible, for the other nothing is possible: which comes to the same thing. If
all is possible, then nothing is possible.
This dialectic
of the detached self is spelled out in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (3) at 5.64 where he
writes:
Here it can be
seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides
with pure realism. The self of philosophy shrinks to a point without extension,
and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.
But this must also operate in the
opposite direction since there is no identity, no sense of self that could
prevent this! A being without identity is in the state as illustrated in these
two ‘equations’. Too much freedom and too much necessity ends in deep flaws in
personhood and identity, and 5.64 shows the impossibility of identity if based
on mere subjectivity and objectivity, that seemingly fundamental distinction
upon which Descartes placed true knowledge and the nature of the self, spawning
the mind-body, fact-value problems. We shall return to these after we examine
despair from the point of view of consciousness.
* *
*
But then for Kierkegaard :
…despair must
be viewed under the category of consciousness: the question whether despair is
conscious or not, determines the qualitative difference between despair and
despair. (4)
Consciousness is involved in the
notion of despair, although the person involved need not be conscious of his
despair. He goes on:
Generally
speaking, consciousness, i.e. consciousness of self is the decisive criterion
of self. The more conscious, the more self, the more consciousness the more
will, and the more will the more self. (5)
So, after the
initial pre-reflexive synthesis, where the person is merely casually aware of
the Other, he becomes aware of himself. He is capable of being something more
than an organism. This comes through cognitive consciousness, where the person
becomes intentional and therefore capable of real action, with a real self in a
real world.
For
Kierkegaard there are several categories of despair under the aspect of
consciousness, which is simplified here, beginning with despair that is
unconscious of despair, through consciousness that is conscious of
despair and in which there is both despair at avoiding responsibility of
becoming oneself, and one in which despair wills despairingly to be itself. The
last, the ‘highest’ form and the most dangerous is ‘the despair of defiance’,
on which we shall concentrate in a moment. Yet the model remains the same: from
the virtually unconscious to those highly conscious of despair. Those feebly
conscious can be seen as those who evade, retreat from the real: Aristotle’s
deficient side of virtue. Those highly conscious can be seen as excessive, who,
in their egotism, defy the real. Both are forms of unreality and
irresponsibility.
Fully
conscious despair consists of two possible outcomes.
A) One
might become aware of one’s self in all one’s freedom, finitude and necessity,
relating to oneself but also to that infinitely greater context that
Kierkegaard calls “the power that posits me”. This might be likened to
‘maturity’, or the awareness of one’s real faults and virtues, where one comes
to terms with the real. For Kierkegaard the power that posits is God, but to
avoid the thickets of theology I would suggest this power could also be seen as
the personal and cultural contexts of the person in relationships with others.
Yet, for Kierkegaard, other persons as such seem forgotten.
B) The
Despair of Defiance: the highest but most extreme form of despair, which refuses
to come to terms with the real.
The
Despair of Defiance relates itself to itself in the most merciless way, but
refuses to relate itself to the power that posits it: the personal and
impersonal other (or God). The enterprise of self-knowledge is taken on but
dependence is refused, the ego is inflated and pride becomes devilish!
So, such a
person although capable of relating to himself, refuses to lose himself
in his essential dependence upon the power that posits, however understood.
It’s so close to an identity, but an abuse of it, and thus infinitely remote
from it. He relates to himself but refuse relationship to the other, the real,
in the pride of his inflated ego.
The self now
becomes an abstraction, unable to love, bereft of boundaries that the other
would provide. It moves into infinite freedom and possibility: the illusion of
Lucifer at the Fall. The arrogance is devilish, the consequent charisma
seductive!
Kierkegaard
adds:
He is not
willing to attire himself in himself, nor to see his task in the self given
him; by the aid of being the infinite form he wills to construct it himself”. (6)
Although searching for
significance, despite his ‘magnificence’, and because of his detachment, he is
fundamentally lacking seriousness, since meaning, seriousness, is dependent on
a context, a form of life that makes sense of action, and must in large part be
other than one’s self.
Since all is
possible for this self, nothing is possible, for:
…just at the
instant when it seems to be nearest to having the fabric finished it can
arbitrarily resolve the whole thing into nothing. (7)
The ultimate indignity for such
despairers is that God’s world, or the Other, is not as perfect as his abstract
one, which he sees as a great injustice. He clings to his hurt so he can put
God/the Other in the wrong: he plunges, Satan-like, from the dizzy heights of
infinite possibility, to the depths of necessity. Since he can’t be God, he
will put existence in the wrong, making God an unjust tyrant or life a mistake,
even evil. In this way he still remains special: this pain marks him out. To
relinquish it:
… might rid him of
his … infinite advantage over other men…
He clings to it:
… in order with this
torment to protest against the whole of existence. (8)
One thing is
clear, both those who evade the real and those who feel superior to it are
morally wanting.
* *
*
What now seems striking is that
these two kinds of escape from reality have the same form as the seemingly
fundamental, Cartesian, distinction between subject and object, with the
infinite self as the former, and those bound in necessity the latter, resulting
in the necessary instability remarked upon at Tractatus 5.64. Too much
necessity (deficiency) escapes responsibility by becoming like a thing with no
freedom: ‘I was only following orders’, or ‘it’s my genes that made me a
murderer’ etc. Too much possibility (excess) escapes into vast possibility and
when the other refuses to conform to this, responsibility is projected on an
evil, meaningless world ruled by a wicked demiurge, ending in millenarian
groups like the Cathars, who saw themselves as too pure for this world (9),
Nazi Germany, for a while, fell into this dialectic without a synthesis when
Hitler became the all-knowing Subject to the people’s Collectivist Object, The
former, true to type, found the German people wanting because they’d failed
him. Both sides were in retreat from the real: that middle way where identity
can separate fantasy from reality.
But how can
these ungovernable reversals be checked? By creating a more adequate theory of
the identity of the self. But, since this paper is too long already, we shall
have to await another posting.
Notes
(1) Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling & Sickness Unto Death,
translated by W. Lowrie. (Princeton
University Press 1968).
(2) Ibid p146
(3) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, (Routledge
& Keegan Paul, 1961).
(4) Kierkegaard op cit. 162.
(5) Ibid.
(6) Ibid 202.
(7) Ibid 203.
(8) Ibid 206.
(9) Norman Cohn The Pursuit of the Millennium (Paladin 1970)
No comments:
Post a Comment