Introductions
And so, for the sake of momentum
I'm condemning the future to death
So it can match the past.—Aimee Mann
I am unduly optimistic, perhaps, in starting this venture. For the past almost 10 years, I’ve been in hibernation as a writer at least in part (who can ever know complete stories?) as a result of some difficult experiences, disappointments, and, indeed, shocks at the sticker price of life. But also in part because I still find myself in some surprise at where I have arrived, for now, philosophically. That’s a long story, starting mysteriously in 1995 due to a conversation with Alasdair MacIntyre in the break room of the Duke Philosophy Department (Don’t worry, I don’t plan to name drop often!). In fact, that conversation also included his talking about another topic that also turned out pertinent to where I am now in a different mysterious way. The ways of lunchtime conversations are not always ours to understand at the time. The owl of Minerva and all that, I suppose.
Anyway, having begun, I should admit that beginnings are tricky for me. I learned that a gazillion years ago when I was trying to write a dissertation. I get tangled up in figuring out the first step and just decide not to take one—or try to take too many at once. (I am told that the use of hyphens is frequent in AI use results, so I’ll just note here my allergy to AI use and most of the discourses around it). But this post is not going to be an origin story. Instead, I’ll start with the present.
In one of my courses this semester, I am beginning each class session with a song thematically linked, I hope, to the topic of the day. As we were reading Nietzsche’s striking essay “Schopenhauer as Educator,” I chose George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” as the linked song. In listening to it again, I was taken by the following couplet:
As each unconscious sufferer
Wanders aimlessly
I thought to myself that at least those wandering are taking steps, whereas I’ve been in a state of writing paralysis for a decade. But that was just me feeling sorry for myself. Then I thought “we all have unconscious lives.“ The inference is obvious—after all we’re all just lucky to experience ordinary unhappiness (and here I part company with one strand of contemporary psychoanalysis as part of my own return to Freud) rather than misery, but misery is what we so often find in our aimlessness, or our momentum, as Aimee Mann reminds us.
But are we suffering unconsciously because we are wandering aimlessly or are we wandering aimlessly because we’re unconsciously suffering? Years ago, my analyst pointed out to me a saying from Nachman of Breslov, “Know that a person has to cross a very narrow bridge in this world. He shouldn’t make himself fear at all.” Well, in wandering aimlessly—or as David Letterman used to say, being hopelessly lost but making good time—you might find yourself at the foot of a narrow bridge. Then what? Gephyrophobia is a real thing, as I know all too well. More directly, a narrow bridge is just a scary thing to encounter without my adding my own fear onto that experience. But much of the time we do make ourselves fear more than is necessary. That fact suggests that our suffering is behind the aimlessness or our wandering, which I’m now eliding with how we tend to experience what happens to us. But does the wandering caused by our suffering need to be only aimless? Narrow bridges are things we arrive at sooner or later whether we’re aimless or not. But what’s an alternative to aimlessness? Aimee Mann notices that it might be momentum—what I’ll think of as a plan—but then tells us that our momentum allows our fears to get larger than life.
Yikes! Life is scary enough without bringing along additional fears and the momentum they drive. After all, most of what we consciously do is a result of our acting defensively to avoid certain types of anxiety or thoughts of loss. Stanley Cavell names some of those defenses as forgetfulness, habit, hope against hope, humor, hysteria, and fantasy. In both of my professional lives (though these are also intrinsically personal lives as well), that of an academic and that of a therapist, I see these defenses used often as reasons for making specific plans (the way that “treatment plans” get in the way of effective therapy is an important topic I won’t address now). So, I guess I’m suggesting that we search for some third thing instead of aimlessness and defensive momentum. (It’s worth my stating here that my own gephyrophobia evaporated during the course of my analysis, though we never focused on it. Such is one of the many mysteries of analytic change).
And now I return to Nietzsche’s essay. I found especially resonant this time through it his reminder that there are only present steps available to us in any desire to move onward (whether that desire is aimless or not) and that everything hinges on what step one chooses next in life, since no one can see so far ahead as to know their destination. At the same time, he challenges the reader (me) to recognize how many possible steps are ones that others want us to take, or perhaps rather more accurately, are chosen out of some unthinking momentum driven by unconscious fears. And he mournfully warns the reader that a sure sign that we are making the wrong step is that we’re doing it for the sake of happiness: “As long as anyone desires life as he desires happiness, he has not yet raised his eyes above the horizon of the animal, for he only desires more consciously what the animal seeks through blind impulse.” I’m not totally sure I understand this thought, but I choose to think that he‘s simply reminding us that living (in a genuine sense) is a frightening task, and not one for those averse to pain. (As an aside, here Nietzsche seems helpfully to be secularizing Ignatian consolation, but pursuing that idea is for some other time).
What am I trying to get at here? What’s another way of wandering between aimlessness and with momentum? I guess if I could name that, it would be helpful. One potential third way would be to think about following. But then how do we choose who or what to follow? Must we become a disciple? After all, Nietzsche is hardly a disciple of Schopenhauer even if he found reading him an education. Do I need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows where I am? Or as Van Morrison has sung, there’s no guru, no method, no teacher. But then what?
Now I find myself remembering a part of Cavell’s discussion of the movie “His Girl Friday.” In that movie, the experienced newspaperman, Walter, has an exchange with his female ex-lover and erstwhile colleague, Hildy, in which he tells her “Hildy, you’re stepping up into a new class!” Cavell’s discussion of just this interaction is rich and has many threads. I only want to recall one of those threads here, which involves Hildy finding her way into her vocation as a newswoman through this statement, a statement that Cavell links with others between them to find that there is a sexual element to the conversation. Cavell in one of his wonderful leaps of thoughts then lines up the idea that humans are political animals due to their capacity for language with the broadly Freudian theme that our desire manifests socially but is rooted in biological need. (This is a clear example, but one that guides my intuition that almost every sentence Cavell writes has some Freudian aspect to it). So Hildy’s making that step up professionally, according to Walter, expresses her sexual desire, that is, a self-recognition of her sexual freedom, which is an intrinsic aspect of her freedom as a human being. Cavell’s telling word for Hildy’s recognition of the link between the social and the sexual is “insight.”
"Insight," here, signifies making a connection with our desire and in doing so achieving that next step in our journey, however narrow the bridge is that we have to cross. I want to hold on to the bridge allegory because it signals something important to me--not just the inherent vertigo that occurs when we encounter our desire but the recognition that our journey, my journey, is not grounded but suspended, as it were, in mid-air. Recall Wittgenstein writing, "The difficulty is to realise the groundlessness of our believing." The earth over which I walk is only as solid as the elevated narrow bridge I wander along. The notion of the bridge, then, serves as an image of the difficulty of encountering and acknowledging my desire, but as I hope I'm coming to understand, that desire is in fact how I know what step to take next. Whoever, whatever, allows me to be to connect with my desire is my educator.
A lot remains to be said about desire, and I I'm sure that I will talk about that as I continue this first step toward encountering a desire to write, if in fact one still exists in me. Now I arrive at the end of this post, but an end that I trust is only the first step of a journey that I can only hope is not aimless. In rereading what I've written here, I'm not sure what I make of it. The voice sounds like mine as it wavers between the colloquial and the overly earnest.
By the way, I went to the bookstore on Tuesday--new release day!--and bought the three books pictured below. Not sure which one to start first, though I do recall those heady grad school days in which I thought that trying to understand Ficino was enough to keep my philosophical desire going! Also, I recently watched the film "Materialists" and, hoo-boy, I have things I want to say about that experience.
