Even if receiving the most dire news from a doctor, the one question I would hope never to ask is: Why me?
For no question is more metaphysically naïve and egocentric than this request not only for meaning, but for a coherent narrative that unfolds in relation specifically to one's self. This may be all too human, but it's all too shameful for a philosopher.
For a philosopher should know better than attempt to explain, justify and integrate a random event into a
personal life story, or start asking crypto-theological questions of the universe.
And even if the question is more rhetorical than anything else - a venting of natural emotion - it should still never pass the lips of a philosopher; i.e., one who always remains stoical, always refuses to take things tragically, and always favours the Warholian response when given terrible news: So what? [1]
Notes
[1] See The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again), (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), in which he writes:
"Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, 'So what.' That's one of my favorite things to say. 'So what.' [...] I don’t know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget." (Ch. 7)
What price 'amor fati'?
ReplyDeletePhilosophy, to follow Heidegger, is a unique kind of discourse organised around the privileging of the question (and its own self-questioning), rooted in the question of Being itself (Seinsfrage). As such, I'm not sure how this authoritarian image of the philosopher as some kind of compulsory stoic and/or peculiar kind of tragedian fits with the demands of self-reflexivity (two 'shoulds' in what is a comparatively short text is odd for a blog that claims to have done with judgment) - or indeed TTA's own stated aim to 'interrogate everything' (which, in the interests of intellectual decency if nothing else, ought surely to include its own - in this case - massive assumptions).
If the 'rage for order' is so objectionable, why is the 'assumption of randomness' any less so as a picture of the cosmos? Life may not be wholly ordered, but it is far from random either - as anyone who has experienced the eruptive power of synchronicity will readily attest. Not for the first time, I would suggest it behooves the thinker not to settle for these crude dichotomies.
Hediegger, of course, also looked back to the Greeks, for whom the notion of (daimonic) destiny was pivotal to their world-view - for which, demonstrating their sophistication in this domain, they actually had four words: Μοῖρα; Αἶσαa; Πεπρωμένον (applied, in fact, to tragic destiny) and Ἀνάγκη.
Perhaps the 'little Greek' could metamorphose into a big Greek and comment here?
'Why Me?' is, in fact, the paradigmatic question concerning personal fate, which James Hillman explores with marvellous psychological dexterity in his book THE SOUL'S CODE. In short, life isn't all about you - unless it is all about you (which it usually is in some way or other)!
Is 'the eruptive power of synchronicity' a genuine experience, or just a failure to understand statistical inevitability in the search for pattern?
DeleteI was disappointed you ended with Hillman; I expected a reference to Michael Gelvin's 'Why Me? A Philosophical Inquiry into Fate' (1991), which addresses this subject without resorting to mysticism.
I’m not sure I follow the logic of your argument here, Simon, or understand the relevance of the reference to the Greek notion of fate and necessity or indeed where your objection lies, other than to your perceived ‘authoritarian’ image of the philosopher projected in the post (interestingly, you cite the use of two ‘shoulds’ in a short post as indicator of such, only to follow suit with an ‘ought’ of your own).
DeleteWith regard to the ancient Greek notion of fate and necessity, to which not only mortals but the gods must, to an extent, submit, I would think it underlines a belief, on the one hand, that life – human life, at least – is predetermined and preordained by forces outside of human control and that one’s destiny is more or less irrevocable and inescapable. (This inevitably raises the question of human agency, although it does not entirely absolve humans of accountability, but this is another issue.) The Greek poet Kavafis has explored this idea of fate in his poetry. At the same time, fate and necessity, as understood by the ancient Greeks, whilst conveniently enabling them to come to terms with the haphazard, the random and the irrational, also expose a disturbing (Dionysiac) awareness that life is not necessarily ordered or patterned or meaningful and that things don’t happen for a reason.
For me, such an outlook on the world renders irrelevant the egocentric premise of “Why me?” that seeks to impose meaning and instead responds with an ironic “Why not?”. It places humans in a cosmos that remains largely indifferent to their need for order and understanding. Thus framed, “Why me?” becomes as equally absurd a question as is the expectation of Godot’s much anticipated arrival and the promise of deliverance this may bring.
I find Warhol’s “So what” a more joyous, a more Nietzschean affirmation of life that brushes aside the solipsism, morosity and endless introspection of “Why me?”.
Thank you, Maria, for your rare and hence welcome comment on TTA. If I follow you, you mainly seem to reduplicate the view of the original post in its conclusion. (Have you always felt this way, I wonder, especially given your thesis on Yeats, which could hardly be more counterposed to the Warholian gaiety you trumpet here, in terms of Yeats’ intense focus on the inner life, mythic destiny, and prophetic utterance?)
DeleteI’m rather perplexed by your own perplexity about where I’m coming from. The starting point for my interest in the question of (Greek) fate was the very question that triggered the writer – viz, ‘Why Me?’ Such a question is self-evidently, I should have thought, the quintessential query regarding personal destiny. My initial interest, in amplifying the topic, was to try to grapple with how the Greeks clearly had a far more sophisticated concept of fate than we moderns, since they had a number of words and concepts for it viewed under different aspects. You don’t address this complexity directly, though I’d be interested to see how it plays out in Kavafis’ oeuvre. (From my initial research, his poetics appears to be quite nuanced and also to insert desire into the mix, i.e. he isn’t merely a poet of passive resignation.)
I don’t really follow what you say about Dionysos and his supposed correlation with some kind of randomness in the fabric of things. I recognise of course he is connected to disruption and chaos, but I don’t think it’s right to regard this as some kind of manifestation of 'haphazardness' (unless one is over-identified, like Pentheus in 'The Bacchae', with political order)? Rather, I suggest, his divinity forces upon the paradox of chaotic ordering. He is a god and as such governs from within his own sphere of divine law. As his mythos is also bound up with the Apollo-Dionysos contrariety (see Nietzsche’s 'The Birth of Tragedy'), finally, I would be rather cautious of over-isolating his image on pain of splitting an archetype.
What I’m specifically interested in is where the ancient tragic idea that ‘the gods don’t care’ takes on a daimonic dimension in Greek thought - when fate, if you will, gets personal. As you’ll know, in Plato’s 'Republic' (the 'Myth of Er'), each soul chooses a life and receives a daimōn, whose task is to help them live that choice. Socrates, of course, is the pivotal figure in this transition, who speaks of it as a voice that comes to him and always forbids him to do something but never commands him to do anything. Interestingly, for him, this daimonic voice thus tends to operate negatively, manifesting in prohibitions and warnings. Nevertheless, Socrates is clear it is lodged in him in a unique way.
James Hillman’s work amplifies this Socratic legacy into an image of destiny which Hillman construes in the formula ‘character as calling’. You’ll be familiar with, I’m sure, Heraclitus’ fragment 'ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn' (A person's character is their daimōn), which lights Hillman's blue fire. One’s aliveness, if you like, carries a kind of personal necessity and destinal density. For us moderns, this imperative returns in the poet Rilke’s angelology ('You must change your life') and Heidegger’s uncanny 'call of awareness'.
Against this backdrop, ‘Why Me?’ becomes, I suggest, nothing less than a paradigmatic enquiry into the mystery of personal being, as commemorated in the Peter Handke poem 'Lieder vom Kindsein' (Song of Childhood) that opens and permeates Wim Wenders' magnificent European film 'Der Himmel Uber Berlin':
'Als das Kind Kind war,
war es die Zeit der folgenden Fragen:
Warum bin ich ich und warum nicht du?
Warum bin ich hier und warum nicht dort?'
[When the child a child was,
it was time for the following questions:
Why am I I and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?]
I wonder what you think a 'genuine experience' is? There are really just experiences, aren't there, unless, once again, you want to insist on some kind of personally legislated, extra-human distinction between what's real and what isn't . . .
ReplyDeleteI also think it's an easy/lazy (and less than well-informed) reduction to construe synchronistic phenomena as 'mystical'. Jung called it an 'acausal connecting principle', both psychic and material (like the archetypes themselves, of course), and there are a very considerable number of well-attested experiences of such phenomena across the literature, which open-minded TTA readers will do well to look into. The question, to which I think Jung also himself alludes, is not that we observe these phenomena - it's that we don't observe them more often! In this respect, I would suggest, they can be thought of as like dreams, which psychological science suggests we are undergoing all the time, but the noise and bluster of the so-called real world crowds and shouts them out. My own synchronistic experiences, for the record, are compellingly empirical, and relentlessly conducive to wonder.
Things are, for me at least, quite the other way about from 'searching' for patterns, whatever that means. Rather, life itself forces one to adjust one's image of what its principle of dis/order is through our continuous exposure to it. (Indeed, what else other than existence could do this?)
I might be passingly interested to leaf through the Gelven (note correct spelling) book, though Amazon's gloss - in advertising it as 'dismissing the mysterious or the psychological' in favour of imposing a 'rational sensibility' on the material - hardly draws one in. Reason/ratio generally explains very little in life in my view, since it is such a limited part of the human mind. As a poet, I suggest, imagination is a far better guide. In any case, it's more a matter of bearing experiential witness to existence rather than rationally elucidating its reality. A sensitivity to mystery keeps poets humble. As the myth of Oedipus teaches, by contrast, ratiocination tends toward dangerous hubris.
Do you remember that remark from Nietzsche in The Gay Science (III. 126): "Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even shallow". It was spot on then: and it's spot on now.
DeleteAnd so, Jung can dress up his idea of synchronicity with scientific-sounding language - it's an 'acausal connecting principle' don'tcha know - but I'm afraid, at best, it's a harmless bit of easily explained nonsense and, at worst, a completely delusional way of thinking.
"My own synchronistic experiences, for the record, are compellingly empirical ..."
If that's the case, then why don't you publish a paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and turn the world of physics on its head; revolutionising our understanding of causality, quantum mechanics, and the relationship between consciousness and matter.
Indeed, I'd venture to suggest if you could could provide rigorous and reproducible scientific evidence that synchronicity is a real, objective phenomenon, you would almost certainly pick up a Nobel Prize.
But then, I suppose, as a humble poet, your task is to bear 'existential witness to existence' and be sensitive to 'mystery', rather than 'rationally elucidating its reality'.
PS: thanks for the parenthetical correction, which adds a nice touch of condescending pedantry.
I fear/feel your comment mainly exposes your authoritiarianism, deep (and/or shallow) prejudice, judgmentalism, and I'm sorry to say, lamentable ignorance of these fascinating topics, Stephen. I also think taking a single remark by Nietzsche (who, ironically for your purposes, is self-confessedly looking for more psychology, not less) or by anyone out of context (something you warned me against when it suited you in his case) is an unhelpfully fetishistic apporoach to discussing anything.
ReplyDeleteI also find it, once again, frankly embarrassing how you seek to reassert orthodox science's replicability criterion (as if this is some kind of self-evidently indefeasible epistemic test for anything, ignoring as it does the material impacts of variable contexts on outcomes, the quantum discovery of the observer effect, and the reality/meaningfulness of singular events) while making special pleading against any request for decent consistency/accountability over time in your own person. It really is a recipe, I'm sorry to say, for disappearing up your own (lack of) fundament. Do you ever - in all seriousness - reflect on these disturbing dichotomies? It really appears not.
Like it or not, Jung was a trained and learned psychiatrist and hence an expert in the science of the psyche, its pathologies, and its therapy. It's not his problem that you're such an over-determined anti-psychologist (i.e one standing in need of analysis) you approach him with such extreme prejudice, though I believe in your case there's an element of trying to live down parts of your own (despised) past.
Thank you for your deliberately impossible invitation to me to go ahead and try to win Laureate honours in this domain, but fyi someone has already got there first. To dispel some of the alarming gaps in your own awareness, the key conversation is between Jung & Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel-winning quantum physicist. Pauli entered into an extraordinary correspondence with Jung about the philosophical and psychological implications of quantum theory and synchronicity in ways that go on being much discussed, whose edited letters have been very influential in consciousness studies and the philosophy of science.
The late F. David Peat was a British holistic physicist, Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, and noted international academic who published one of the most respected integrative books on the topic: Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind (Bantam Books, 1987). Henry Stapp is another physicist who explores how consciousness might relate to quantum processes. These figures would be further starting points to conduct a reconnaissance of the field. Danah Zohar's The Quantum Self (which refuses to separate the philosophical and the spiritual domains) I have in my own library. David Bohm & Basil Hiley are also pivotal to any discussions of the 'implicate order' and holism.
PS No need to thank me for the correction to that author's name - you've done the same yourself before and lectured me before on why it's so important to get these things right (and sometimes telling when one doesn't). Mind you, consistency be damned, eh?
Dear Simon,
DeleteYou are becoming quite the master of that rhetorical technique known as the gish gallop. Nevertheless, I'm not so overwhelmed as to be unable to make a number of points ...
Firstly, I couldn't help noticing that a significant portion of your reply focuses on my character rather than the issues raised in and by the original post. And that's a shame. Why do you feel the need to be so abusive and condescending?
I'm grateful for the reading list. Unfortunately, however, citing these works doesn't bypass the requirement for empirical evidence and, not for the first time, I note your penchant for simply name-dropping.
It’s clear we have fundamental differences regarding what constitutes science (and what might best be described as quantum mysticism). My concern is that in appealing to physicists such as Pauli and Bohm in order to validate claims made within analytical psychology, you are confusing very distinct disciplines.
Many of the claims made by those you name would be considered as unorthodox or highly speculative in nature by other physicists.
And when it comes to Peat and Zohar, are they not simply using quantum theory to explore metaphysical and/or psychological topics? In other words, their work whilst informed by physics, is not science in the strict sense of being based on repeatable experimental evidence.
Finally, yes, the Nietzsche quote was 'out of context'. But then, technically, all quotes are (as an editor, I would've thought you'd know that).
The natty phrase gish gallop (which I'd not heard) mainly makes me feel you seem confused about speed - depending, as ever, on whether you're writing yourself or dealing with someone else's power. One moment (today, in fact) you're trumpeting the unavoidability of keeping running (rather than, at least sometimes slowing down for the decency of self-scrutiny), now you're upbraiding me for racing along like a philosopher-horse on the make. Two bodies; two rulebooks. Have you never ever heard the phrase what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Why not just be honest and agree you write on the premise of your own exceptionalism? (A post on this topic would be fascinating right now.)
DeleteIn my previous reply, I literally used a handful of adjectives right at the start about how you (or actually, and more precisely, your writing) come across to me as your reader - hardly a 'significant' portion of my post. Calling it/me abusive I call exaggerating to the point of gaslighting so that you don’t have to deal properly with the range of points I am raising, which actually show by implication extensive respect for (if also disagreement with) your own content.
Your latest demand for 'empirical evidence', even though I have summarised in good faith the work of renowned physicists (one of whom won the Nobel) and noted inter-disciplinary academics in this domain, illustrates all that I'm saying. You drop a painfully ignorant bomb, I help you and your readers out of the hole it’s blown in the ground, then you shift the goalposts once again with another screw-tightening demand. However, neither Jung nor Pauli (nor I for that matter) have to be organised by your shapeshifting chicanery, even though they and I have plenty of such evidence. (In fact, Jung insisted with justification that he was a thoroughgoing empiricist, on which grounds he also influenced the radical empiricism of Deleuze, insofar as he worked as a clinician from observation and personal experience. Even his most apparently esoteric texts, such as 'Seven Sermons To The Dead', are grounded in subjective testimony.)
For the record, I don't have to 'namedrop' and am not doing so. I have Jung's 20-volume Collected Works on my shelves, most of which I've read, a stack of secondary literature, have taught archetypal psychology for the University of London, and attended a C G Jung workshop for two years with the Jung scholar Andrew Burniston, who himself worked on the Jung-Pauli correspondence. Again, you're gaslighting the TTA readership as well as insulting me by misrepresenting who I am and my motives in a way I find frankly embarrassing and manipulative. Once you've gone away and actually studied this topic, we can perhaps converse further. In the meantime, your desperate clinging to the word 'mysticism' - even though you've not even defined it – resembles a kind of fig leaf torn from a Nietzschean playbook. Who is really 'name-dropping' here , if anyone, I leave for TTA's readers to decide.
Considering you yourself publish a bog that is self-avowedly (and some might say recklessly) promiscuous and boundary-crossing in its approach, why is interdisciplinary thinking suddenly so confusing to you? I’d call that a pretty clear red flag. If you suddenly want to make a self-contradictory/ authoritarian plea for orthodox physics and/or 'strict' science (because, I don’t know, you had sausages for breakfast), that's your lookout. It doesn't change the fact that science has always evolved via paradigm shifts, of which quantum science (not 'mysticism') is the latest manifestation. As I pointed out, Jung was trained and rooted in medicine and psychiatry, which gave him a credible context for his many cross-disciplinary dialogues. Pauli, once again, was a Nobel-winning physicist with a deep interest in analytical psychology. They weren't 'confused', and neither am I – they were doing brave, original, groundbreaking work only the wilfully stupid or easily threatened could refuse to learn from or be stirred by.
Edit - 'bog' = 'blog' (thought it's a funny typo for an Irishman)
DeleteWhilst I appreciate your passionate engagement with (and knowledge of) this topic, I'm tempted to discreetly exit the dialogue and allow you to return to the comfort of your library.
DeleteHowever, I'll try once more to refocus on a couple of the key issues - the nature of empiricism and the role of paradigm shifts in science - without engaging in personal abuse or challenging your credentials ...
But firstly, allow me to indicate how your racing horse metaphor may mislead some readers into thinking that Gish gallop implies only a rapid delivery of arguments, when, actually, it's more about quantity of information supplied and the number of claims made, rather than the speed of their conveyance. This is what results in an asymmetry of effort required on behalf of an opponent.
In other words, the sheer volume of material assembled - including numerous references - makes it extremely difficult to address everything (as I'm sure you'll be aware, it always takes far more time and energy to refute a proposition than to make one).
It's telling that you equate a request for empirical evidence with 'gaslighting'. I'm pretty sure that asking for the former is acceptable within an intellectual exchange and is not, as you suggest, a 'screw-tightening demand' intended to forever fix you in place and impose my authority.
Simply dropping a hat full of names names and providing a biography is not a substitute for argument and to suggest that Jung's 'subjective testimony' satisfies the requirements of scientific discourse (i.e., that personal experience and physical law operate under the same evidentiary rules) is simply mistaken.
You argue that Jung was a 'radical empiricist' because he worked from clinical observation. But surely we must distinguish this from the scientific empiricism required for a paradigm shift in physics?
To confuse and conflate what Jung is doing as an analytic psychologist with what those working in the field of physics are doing, is not just interdisciplinary promiscuity, it's a category error; see what D&G write on science contra philosophy in What Is Philosophy? (1991).
As for those paradigm shifts ... I checked with a friend of mine, who happens to be a scientist, and they said that whilst, yes, science evolves through shifts - rather than the strictly linear accumulation of knowledge - these are nevertheless built on rigorous mathematical formalism and experimental verification (not Seven Sermons to the Dead).
I would first clarify that, since TTA is a blog and not some kind of symposium, my comments (which, despite this, are sometimes extensive and invariably as generous as I can make them) necessarily reflect the compression of the medium. In fact, on the platform you've chosen for it, the length of a reader's comments is, as you know or ought to know, restricted for whatever reasons. However, I think I've done more than dropping names here through a decent effort at concision, if I say so myself, for those who have the curiosity and good faith to follow up my suggestive research indicators.
DeleteLeaving aside the bare-arsed/wilful double standards I continue to point out re your comportment as writer (which, I note, you continue to avoid engaging with), I'm sorry, amongst other things, you're apparently unable to wrap your head around the reality of personal, experiential (not rigid and/or, ugh, 'repeatable') knowledge. Dreams are a fine illustration here. Generally speaking, even with recurring dreams, they never repeat exactly, but one would have to be an utter philistine to think that, on that basis, they cannnot and do not confer (often profound) self-knowledge and knowledge of the cosmos - which is what the word 'science' means, and how, for example, Chaucer sensibly and generously used it.
Newsflash: Orthodox/classical science of the kind to which you seem so dogmatically attached has been superseded by quantum science in the modern era - and at the very least paradigmatically and momentously critiqued by it (since normative science was unable to critique itself). Whatever Deleuze and Guattari might say about 'science vs philosophy' is irrelevant to Jung and Pauli's real conversation as men of science - one the founder of analytical psychology; the other a founding figure of quantum mechanics (which you've seemingly either never heard of or are simply pushing your fingers in your ears and hoping it might go away).
Briefly, Pauli was fascinated by Jung in part because quantum physics suggested limits to deterministic causality at the subatomic level. Jung’s hypothesis, based on extensive observations and groundbreaking thinking, that meaning might connect events acausally represented to Pauli a potential psychological correlate for his own discoveries. At the heart of this was - and is - nothing less than the nature of the relationship between psyche and matter as intervolved in a unified non-causal order. For Jung, the archetypes are patterns of potentiality in the psyche that can manifest in synchronistic events, lending the latter their characteristic uncanny/numinous experiential quality.
One would be hard pressed to find many more important examples of interdisciplinary collaboration in modern times.
Finally, I'm not sure why you think my library (which you've never visited and is, in fact, still partly under construction) is some bourgeous place of 'comfort', however fortunate in other ways I am to be there. As the poet Rilke affirmed, I live - and strive to live - in conditions of continuous existential and spiritual anxiety, and always shall. Once again, try to remain alive to your own assumptions.
Have just had an email from some called Ron S. Foelles and he has kindly sent me a metacommentary on our recent exchange here, which I'll publish in the form of a post tomorrow.
DeleteIn the meantime, thanks for this typically dense (and highly defensive) comment, which oscillates between scholarly sophistication and personal irritability.
And remember: scientific legitimacy is determined by a field's methodology and empirical rigour, not by the reputation of its interested observers. Thus, whilst the collaboration between Pauli and Jung is an interesting interdisciplinary dialogue, it does not magically grant analytical psychology the status of a hard science.
Thanks for this - I have read Foelles' (mostly even-handed and interesting) remarks, and added a few of my own (which I suppose make them 'meta-meta' comments now).
DeleteYou seem rather fixated with my supposed/perceived 'defensiveness', which is ironic, as I see myself, in many ways, as dangerously - and even naively at times - undefended. For 'irritability', I'd prefer the word 'sensitivity' or 'criticality'. Better that, at any rate, than anesthesia!
If you want to go on being a poster boy/policeman for 'scientific legitimacy' by upholding its classical assumptions, be my guest, but be clear I don't share your own identification with such master narratives, as I've now made very clear, I think. Meanwhile, it is alarming to see TTA now lapsing into the kind of uncritical endorsement of phallogocentric language ('hard science') that you rightly jumped on, for example, during your teaching at Morley College. The whole point of both Pauli's revolutionary scientific work and his dialogue with Jung is that it is changing - both softening and redrawing - our ideas of what science is, about which you seem to be writing as if we were still living in the 19C.
Anyhow, over and out!
PS Why is my pedantry necessarily 'condescending' (unless, I guess, one sees these things through the hypersensitive lens of power)? I'm an editor, and it's important to get these things right.
ReplyDelete