As we all know, shit happens. Our education system aims to prime us with qualifications so that we can get the job we want with the salary we want and look an attractive proposition to the partner we want. Our political system, at its best, tries to reduce the miseries of deprivation in society. But these are only economic initiatives. Even in a seemingly 'prosperous' nation full of adequately-remunerated workers, people will still hate their parents, misunderstand their kids, feel ugly, lonely, unloved and unfulfilled, fear old age and death. These turmoils decline into depression, addiction, violence and suicide, and our political and education systems do exactly NOTHING to prevent it. The media and the health services will offer cures, but society has made no attempt to develop in its individual citizens a robust mental and emotional life, a spiritual immune-system to ward off ‘the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to’.
This is what philosophy can do. It is something I believe STA can do too by the simple plan of looking at the world, seeing what it is (rather than our projections of what we think it ought to be) and harmonising ourselves with that reality.
Few people commit suicide because they’re faced with reality. They are, more likely, mired in the quicksands of misconception. They have been forced inwards, narrowing themselves and shutting out objective reality, rather than opening themselves to it. Depression and stress are complex problems with a million individual manifestations, arising out of social and cultural expectations. This is not for one second to underestimate their often-devastating reality. An experience of depression is every bit as real as an experience of looking at a tree, and very much more intense and deeply-felt. But the objects of the experience do not possess equal reality. The tree is unquestionably, unconditionally real. The circumstances which triggered the depression (and I acknowledge that it can be caused by purely physical chemical factors in some cases, but am here referring to the many cases when it has psychological or environmental causes) – a broken relationship, financial pressures, even buried childhood traumas – are not unconditional. They are based on social and cultural expectations, beliefs of what is right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, ideas of how you should behave, deeply ingrained beliefs which most people around you, books and TV programmes will reinforce, but which nonetheless are only conditional, contingent opinions without a basis in objective reality. People think of themselves as ‘failures’. In nature, in the real world, there are no ‘failures’. ‘Failure’ and ‘inadequacy’ are just socio-cultural judgments based on entirely made-up principles. Different cultures will always have different mores, but as individuals we can decide for ourselves how to respond to our experiences. We do not need to ‘live up to [anyone’s arbitrary] expectations’ – society is a congregation not a church. Outside your brain there is an infinite billions-of-years-old reality. It stretches farther than any telescope and smaller than any microscope can see. It is unconditional. The tree is not a cultural expression. It knows and cares nothing about the man who thinks he owns it. Reality is independent of social expectations.
Perhaps a tree seems a small beginning, but it is real and all the universe around it – from atoms to galaxies – shares that reality. That, rather than our opinion about it, is a solid, fixed point from which to begin.
Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews (National Gallery)
Suffolk c. 1750, and a landscape brimming with many millions of unique, equal and interdependent living beings. This scene has been much misinterpreted.
I am not so crass as to claim that staring at a tree, still less reading these pages, could effect a magical cure for depression, which may require individual medical treatment rather than a bloke banging on about how real reality is. But I would maintain that STA, this focus on objective reality, which is something buried very much deeper than we generally imagine below deep strata of pre-conceptions, received opinions, fashions, customs &c is the most reliable and long-lasting source of equanimity available to us.
We have brains, minds, imaginations, wonderful capacities which produce extraordinary results. It’s thrilling to think and imagine so much. But all our thoughts are interpretations and extrapolations. We can make nothing from nothing. Every notion we have – even the wildest fantasy – is based on another notion. We can only invent another world because we have experience of this one. I am not suggesting for a second that we should not use our minds or imaginations. I simply suggest that the basis from which we draw our ideas should be reality, and that a life and philosophy based on solid reality will be more certain than one based on acculturated concepts. Of course, we need not feel guilty for an evening at the Bingo or watching TV. The works of acculturation are not the works of Satan. But neglecting reality can be dangerously addictive.
The tricky point is that, ultimately, politics and romantic and family relationships are equally conditional and unreliable, though our culture is less ready to admit this. For many people these attributed realities are the keystones of their lives, the brain-inventions on which they depend. But they are no less inadequate for all that.
Before we fling ourselves into relationships, it’s wise to have the safety-net in place. And that safety-net, far from being a fussy piece of Health&Safety equipment, is, in fact, Indra’s Net, the entire cosmos woven together with, stitched at every knot and representing every being in the universe, a pearl in which we can see reflected every other pearl. We have literally everything to live for.
Joan Miro, Constellations - the Poetess
So, having laboriously delineated what I believe to be reality, it is probably time to investigate what the consequences are for us in our daily lives. In short, what do we do about it?
At this point, the philosopher David Hume gets edgy. He complained, ‘In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning … when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual … is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or ought not. The change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence.’ I will not be so sneaky. This paragraph is a klaxon warning that I am here moving from the IS to the OUGHT.
We need OUGHTS. We cannot move without a motive, and an OUGHT would seem to me to stand more securely on an IS than on a MIGHT BE or a WOULDN’T IT BE NICE IF or an uncritical THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO. STA has tried to examine what we radically are – pre-socially, pre-culturally, almost as though speaking to the newly germinated (for we are certainly socialized and acculturated in utero) – and thus how we would act if we were totally ourselves. It does not lead to capitalism because that is based on artificial constructs like money and property; it does not lead to fascism because that is based on artificial hierarchies and group identities; it does not lead to communism because that is anthropocentric and denies the importance of individuality; it does not lead to religion because we have found no evidence of gods or after-lives.
Instead
if this is what is,
if this ‘is’ is characterized by ceaseless making,
if everything made, including us, is utterly unique and, therefore, equal …
… we have some clear guidelines
which seem to me to resolve themselves into four ‘natural duties’ –
Haecceity, Praise, Love, Creativity
[Footnote: just a reminder - 'haecceity' means, more or less, 'the innate individuality of each thing.']
You may disagree. STA is tediously insistent that each of us needs to stand still and consider the ISES around us to work out our OUGHTS. But from the investigations made over the last twenty one chapters, STA makes the bold or comically foolhardy claim that . . .
This, in fact, is such a bold claim that it deserves its own paragraph (which I would festoon with fairy-lights and daisy-chains if I knew how).
STA makes the bold or comically foolhardy claim that the ‘duties’ I will elaborate below reflect our true nature, uncorrupted by outside pressures. Haecceity, praise, love and creativity are not just laudable aspirations, but actually how the world works. By fulfilling these ‘natural duties’, it adds blithely, we can slipstream nature, minimising friction, enjoying, as Christopher Alexander phrases it, ‘a subtle kind of freedom from inner contradictions,’ being most fully ourselves, which is good for us and good for everyone and everything else. [Chorus of ‘Hoorah!’ ‘Bravo!’ ‘For he’s a joll…] This sounds so simple-minded, it is embarrassing to write; you must be cringing. But it is not (yet, at least) demonstrably wrong on that account.
These ‘natural duties’ also call upon our wisdom in choosing the best of various alternatives. Wisdom, I would say, is the use of our intelligence uncorrupted by selfishness. Our intelligence is part of our haecceity – a physiological fact rather than an assumed habit – and so we should use it. Balancing our knowledge of the illogicality of selfishness, our inevitable death, the not-usness of our nearest relatives (the irrelevance, in other words, of close genetic ties) and the understanding of ourselves as equal – neither inferior nor superior – to every other creature, we can calibrate our actions at any juncture to what seems objectively best. (And I wish I could have expressed it less pompously.)
Of course what seems best may not always be what is best. Our perspectives are necessarily limited and, if we remain alive to experience, they change as we and our circumstances alter. For which reason I suggest that we simply respond as best we can to what we meet in our daily lives, much as any other creature does, adopting a sacral rather than aggressively instrumental approach. It is an unfounded arrogance to think that we are the guys who can ‘fix’ the world. The world does not need fixing. It just needs to be not fucked up.
Comments