Author: Meng-hu

Every nuance to the word “simplicity” is a necessary understanding of the very concept: simplicity as uncomplicated, simplicity as innocence or naivete, simplicity as directness, simplicity as candor. But simplicity as more than attitude or speech means applying a concept to behavior, action, and habit. How to make our daily lives uncomplicated, innocent, direct, and candid is, first, an aesthetic issue and, secondly, an ethical one.

Aesthetics is human reflection on a natural setting and creation of a comparable model and applied as criteria to what is read, heard, seen, or otherwise experienced. That assumes the role of an artist deliberately creating an object of art that will achieve the aesthetics that he or she believes best conveys thought or feeling. But unspoken in the artist’s mind is that aesthetics is also given by nature and life. Do we interpret what we see or interpret what we feel?

We may have definitions in terms of functionality or ornateness but they must be applied to something concrete. Thus we may see the complexities of the Chartres cathedral as ultimately simple but likewise the little cottage. Or is the sea simple when in a raging thunderstorm or must it be calm and glassy in order to be simple? Is a song or poem simple just because it is sparse in words but is otherwise not well expressed, not successful?

In the realm of ethics, simplicity can have a mix of aesthetics and ethics. Or as Kierkegaard says, the right aesthetics, consciously applied, will inevitably make the right ethics, as long as the continuum of values is the same.

The aesthetics of solitude, reflected in the austere huts of hermits, classical poetry, rounds of meditation or hours, modest herbal gardens and wooden eating bowls, and the like, are aesthetics that point to ethics in terms of lifestyles and disengagement from the world. We can glimpse these intimations, color or dilute them somewhat for lay people in urban settings, and still imagine what simplicity is. Of course, if these aesthetic suggestions do not seem motivating, we will probably not succeed in simplifying our lives, throwing our hands up in despair at how remote our daily lives are from genuine simplicity.

And in modern times, it may well be impossible to be simple without fading away from public life altogether, from media, technology, and communications like — ironically — the Internet. Pushed hard enough towards radical simplicity, we can begin to perceive a radical ethics in simplicity, not merely aesthetics or a “bourgeois” ethics.

Kierkegaard indirectly offers a discussion of simplicity when he compares the Christian and the “pagan” in their notions of lowliness. The Christian, maintains Kierkegaard, is lowly, but he is a Christian, and that justifies his lowliness, gives him a spiritual prototype so that his simplicity is not in vain. The pagan, however, sees simplicity as a “being nothing” and therefore must despair, especially despair of not being consoled by God.

That is Kierkegaard’s logic, but he is not really convincing, I think, because he then points to the bird as an example of a lowliness that is not aware of its lowliness and therefore does not despair, unlike the pagan.

Like the free bird when it soars highest in its joy over existing, just so does the lowly Christian soar even higher; like the trapped bird when it hopelessly and fearfully struggles to its death in the net, just so the lowly pagan, even more pitiable, desouls himself in the captivity of nothingness.

Two points glare at us. First, the premise that lofty joy really is the lot of the Christian, a kind of perpetual confidence, if not ecstasy, based on faith and hope; but, secondly, the absence of a sense that consciousness — that wound of human beings that deprives them of the simplicity of the bird but also introduces the critical human faculty that makes of lofty joy a projection of belief but not an intrinsic part of nature and reality.

The bird and the Christian do not soar in equivalent joy, as Kierkegaard suggests. Indeed, in a following essay, he brilliantly skewers the ethics of joy as a human contrivance that is short of the first prerequisite: “Seek first the kingdom of God.” As Kierkegaard states in the first sentence of his essay “The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air”:

From the lily and the bird as teachers, let us learn silence, or learn to be silent.” (emphasis his)

Truly the beginning of simplicity is silence, for only silence ends the adornments we add to feelings, the adornments we append to idle thoughts, the gravitas we assign to even our deliberate thoughts. We must be neither the exultant Christian nor the aggrieved pagan but the bird, whose absence of consciousness lets it exalt and grieve in natural order or sequence, with a kind of ruthless necessity that consciousness ever shields from us.

Does the thoughtful person incline to a life of aestheticism? We are inevitably beings of our senses as much as our minds, and aesthetic criteria is derived from the senses. But this does not isolate sense-objects as our only context in life. The implication otherwise is that the senses will always overrun us. We are more complex: the organs symbolize a variety of complex interactions. Thus we are senses but also mind, heart, and strength.

Aesthetics does not equate to a life of decadence and vice but a life of simple pleasures according to the original proposals of Epicurus. Not the pursuit of active pleasures from specific activities but what Epicurus called “katastematic” pleasure, or the absence of pain, fear, and distress, the state of balance and equanimity. As mentioned here before, Freud saw this reality principle overriding the pleasure principle. And should it be surprising that the loftiest philosophical and spiritual concerns are for such a state, not for euphoria, mystical excitation, or engagement.

Aesthetics, not pleasure, becomes an avenue for attaining this state. Aesthetics falls into the third of Plato’s triumvirate: Truth, Goodness, Beauty. Undertood in this sense, beauty is a psychological consideration that avoids the necessity of asserting beliefs, tenets, or opinions — or, rather, finds them to be human contrivances that do not bring equanimity.

This is a necessary irony, that a belief or maintenance of an aesthetic life signifies the absence or suspension of belief or opinion. But it does not. Such a life defines values without insisting that they are entirely available to anyone else. Thus, a religious person may well rest in the aesthetic comfort of ritual, music, readings, recitations, etc., all within an inviolable solitude. Another person, lacking any such beliefs, will nevertheless find an active pleasure in the same music and readings, but will use them only as a complement to a larger psychological state of equanimity and solitude.

Solitude is a useful bridge for bringing many tastes and techniques into unexpected compatibility. Thus does the solitary learn tolerance, by carefully perceiving what each solitary needs, regardless of personal beliefs.

But the person engaged with the world will only make aesthetics a vehicle for furthering the wrong attitude, the wrong sentiments, the wrong psychology. For such a person, aesthetics becomes a source of active pleasure and distraction from worldly avocations that already lead down wrong paths. From the inevitable corners of conscience comes not a cautionary remorse but a loud egotism, indifference, and decadence.

Aestheticism when derived from a creed but expressed as a beauty of its own stands separate from the creed in providing a distinct psychological function. This inverts Plato’s order but does so without assumptions or prejudice. Wisdom becomes available not from notions of Truth or even Good but from the silence that observation, contemplation, and appreciation engender.

Simplicity can then work to strengthen the positive feelings that come from our soft and gentle experiencing of solitude and silence or our earned lull from worldliness. Simple things like long walks, the crafting of diet, our work in a garden, the selecting of poetry to read or music to prefer — let alone artistic creation and meditative reflection — all become constructive aids to our solitude. Others would call them aesthetic pursuits, but they are more than that when consciously guiding our self-awareness, when more than mere entertainments.

Schopenhauer views aesthetics as entangled with the will, wherein the will strives for fulfillment of desire, and aesthetics dampens desire, redirects the will, and rescues the self from despair and pessimism. And aestheticism for Schopenhauer is as far as the self will get, culminating in the insights to be had from music (and the younger Nietzsche also saw music as the highest aesthetic expression). However, the important insight is in terms of not a philosophical system or tenet but, rather, the whole state of mind, heart, and being. Otherwise, we fall back on a creed or belief to define our intuition, our experience of the world, of nature, of people and society.

Aesthetics can contribute to the crafting of life, to right conduct, to an identification with the beautiful (in Plato’s sense, regardless of posited ideal forms). Aesthetics is an imitation of ways and harmonies, that make us part of nature. When we derive the form of our lives from what is beautiful, we must distinguish what our emotions alone call beauty if it is mere excitation. For beauty is in the quiet harmony of nature and the universe, not in the contrivances of society or the desires of the human animal. Schopenhauer saw this but failed to offer a formula of transcendence. And perhaps there is none. But rather, we must make one.

Kierkegaard at last points out the necessary understanding about aesthetics. He argues that aesthetics only calls up the sensual and emotional in us (as already suggested above) but that our affirmation of these sense-desires is not a choice of a path at all. He argues that by choosing we are essentially becoming conscious (with mind and heart and will) and thus capable of more than a passive enjoyment. And choosing our goal is to be, as he puts it,

at the crossroads in such a way that there is no way out except to choose, and choosing, one will choose the right thing.

Thus conscious living engenders the insight to choose the right thing, the right way of living, the ethical life (in Kierkegaard’s sense). By choosing, we use the will to assert a character to our lives. The simple things that contribute to our sense of solitude and insight are actually ethical acts — not so much a choosing between good and evil, as most creeds will want to portray things, but a choosing to live deliberately.

Thus , there is a continuity between aesthetics rightly understood and used, and ethics. For Kierkegaard, what distinguishes sensual pleasure from “katastematic” aesthetics — though he never uses the word — is clearly the will. At that point of choosing, aesthetics returns in full the beauty of existence. It brings us the insight that permits us to use the world and not to misuse it, as Kierkegaard puts it. Thus he sums it well:

The aesthetic in a person is that by which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is.

No more, no less. Nothing further: neither potential nor actualization. And yet, there is a further:

The ethical is that by which the person becomes what he becomes.

Robert Bly translates “Soledades,” the first collection of poems by the celebrated Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939), as “Times Alone.” The literal meaning of “soledades” is “solitudes,” which does sound awkward in English. Times alone are instances of solitude. They are, superficially, times when one is alone, but Machado is writing memories, dreams, images, symbols, sentiments. The totality of the poems evokes solitude, but individually they are solitudes, not simply times or moments alone.

The images of solitude in Machado are universal. In Japanese poetry, the wistful sense of wabi-sabi is especially revealed by seasonal images combined with the poet’s precise reflection upon them. In Machado, the images are everywhere: raindrops across windowpanes, children’s voices on a distant street, the stolid eyes of a mule, a long and solitary corridor, the scent of jasmine, a ruined old house, the flight of a stork, a black and gnarled tree against the horizon.

Less evocative and more philosophical, perhaps, are Machado’s poems about paths or roads. In “Campos de Castilla” (“Countryside of Castile”) he writes (these are my translations, not Bly’s):

All things pass away and all things remain,
but our task is to pass on,
to go on making paths,
paths over the sea.

Thus our road, our path, is not so distinct, so proud, as to even be distinguishable in time. We make a path over water, over the sea, and nothing is noticed.

In another poem of this collection, Machado writes

To die … To fall like a drop
of the sea into an immense ocean?
Or to be what I have never been:
one without shadow or dream,
a solitary who goes on
without a path and without a mirror?

What is death and dissolution: is it the image of dissolution or union? And what remains of our shadow and our dream, which has always been our own all along? What a sense of solitude to lose even these ephemeral aspects of ourselves?

But in his anthology, Bly omitted the famous but not-yet-overly-familiar Machado poem about paths. Here is the wonderful translation by Betty Jean Craig of poem 29 of “Proverbs and songs” in Machado’s “Countryside of Castile.”

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road —
Only wakes upon the sea.

The hermit has always existed on the periphery of society, both physically and mentally (the latter being the range from psychological to spiritual). The periphery is that zone neglected and disdained by the circles of pleasure and power. The periphery is in part a physical place, in part a cultural and social place. It is not geography alone, city versus country, or even part of the city versus another part. Periphery can be a state of mind and habitat that alone enriches the solitary heart, regardless of where a person is physically.

One of the first questions occurring to the solitary, to the person on the brink of embracing their solitude, is whether they should work, how should they live their daily lives. The religious person finds resolution in a community of ideas, taking the edge of the question of solitude and blunting it with a community that is like-minded, as much as possible. For everyone else, the question underlies any other practice, whether one reads and thinks, meditates or not, lives in the city or the country.

Some resources are suggested by history, but time has irrevocably dissipated the precious models of the past. The modern hermit will find the question of work, labor, money, etc. not addressed in attempting to apply the past to the present.

In ancient China, eremitism became a philosophical option distinct from an occupation that required physical remoteness. The hermit was not a subsistence farmer in that he or she did not grow for gain; not a wood-cutter or charcoal-burner in that these entailed physical isolation but did not require eremitic values to accomplish them.

The hermit typically lived on the physical periphery, in a small dwelling, growing or finding the food needed for self. The rest of life consisted of the natural world, and minimal needs for food, clothing, books, devote objects, perhaps an inkbrush or incense, or a religious tool or a garden tool.

The Chinese hermit Stonehouse, for example, fits this image of life on the periphery. Mary Rotha Clay and others have documented how medieval English hermits were often occasional bridge-tenders or toll-keepers, or maintained roads or cleared trails, occupations not unlike the wood-cutter and charcoal-burner. Europe did not extol the hermit as did China, and a livelihood was a minimal necessity for those without a patron, short of begging. The protagonist of Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees lived first as a shepherd and then as a beekeeper. The protagonist in Donald Hall’s hermit book for children, The Man Who Lived Alone, worked a few weeks of the year to pay his taxes.

The question of how the solitary provides for daily necessities can overshadow his or her project of cultivating a refined philosophy of solitude and philosophy of life. The ideal setting is simply what the solitary can do.

There are just as many hermits in the city with regular employment as in the country, as many in the streets as in the mountains. As Emerson has written: “The solitude of Nature is not so essential as solitude of habit.” The Zen saying: “Can you be a hermit in the city?” begs the same question. But all sorts of animals live in cities, many in gutters and behind cage bars — and humans are even less immune from the trepidations of crowded urban life or vapid suburbia than animals. Cities have the essential function of nurturing the mind of those with leisure and wealth with art, culture, and learning. For the rest it is not so providential. The solitude of cities is a ghostly sense of alienation tranquilized by consumption. The overwhelming number of people suffering involuntary solitude find refuge in cities, like their medieval (and now globalized) counterparts, countryside victims of drought, famine, or attack.

The opportunity to experience nature is the opportunity to rediscover the sinews and blood that courses at once through rocks and rivers and soars up trees and mountains — and is identical with the self, with the human body. Heidegger in his hut undoubtedly derived important insights, late in life, into the concept of releasement. Edward Abbey in the desert, as a “desert solitaire,” experienced an intensity of living that his fiction never managed to convey. We speak of society as contrivance when compared to the genuine creativity of the mind and heart, yet the city is the heart of both our best and our worst human efforts. Only the inspired spirit, based on memory or dreams or a deep insight, makes the breakthrough out of mundane life and into solitude, regardless of the setting.

Based on his convictions, Tao-chien abandoned the city for a village, stamping the red dust from his perpetual chase after office, throwing his lot at last with the reclusion of a distant farming place. But that was the 5th century C.E., when the mountains were unmined and the air was clean, and villages really lived simply and (to use the Buddhist sense of the word) wholesomely. Today, bedroom communities of commuters, satellite dishes, and ponderous gas-guzzlers poke out of bucolic settings to announce the triumph of civilization over nature.

It is not only China, of course, but every corner of the globalized world that has been polluted by the modern world. The destruction of nature represents the destruction of hermit habitat, as much as the habitat of so many other creatures. All people suffer from the wholesale targeting of any one natural place. Ultimately, the mutilations of the earth are like self-mutilations of human mind and body, driven by a desire for amusement and contrivance, fleeing as quickly as possible in the opposite direction of silence and self-examination.

We search in vain today for a corner in which to still view the stars, for some little place where water can still be drunk unfiltered, where no human sound like an airplane’s can be heard. Truly the gods must be crazy — except that they are gods of our own making. The whole world has no place left for simplicity, neither geographical nor mental. How can the collective mind appreciate its environs when the inhabitants of modern society put as their first goal upon awakening to hear packaged news and eat packaged food, ignoring the song of birds, the presence of a new flower, the dew trickling down a green leaf, a moment for meditation?

Meditation itself continues to be commodified as a device for relieving stress, just enough for resuming the vicious cycle. The heart’s search for solitude is shunted off as a psychological aberration hostile to society and culture. But who can live like Kamo no Chomei, the Japanese poet of the 12th century, who carried his house with him, a symbol of evanescence and the vanity of society and civilization around him?

We do well to monitor the signs of the times and stay safely on the periphery, safeguarding our few virtues. The first desert hermit Paul, when visited by an important and admiring dignitary, exclaimed, “How fares the world? What new empire holds sway?” The words are reported by St. Jerome, who himself struggled between the plaudits of urban life and the serenity of the solitary desert. But in the words he attributes to Paul he rightly captures the hermit ethos. If the modern world contains such deserts … somewhere on the periphery.

We, too, should carry this sense of detachment, geographical but also mental and spiritual, wherever we happen to make our cell. To cultivate our soul is to cultivate a garden, whether the latter be truly of dirt and vegetables or of reflections and dreams.

The word “path” refers to both the physical and psychological. Our trajectory in life is called a path but we both follow a worn path trodden by predecessors (the totality of what we call culture and society) and a path of our own making. We assume the latter to be our own making and feel guilty when it does not please or gratify or reward us, but the path of our own making is seldom so autonomous.

Working with images of paths helpfully illustrates this. Our usual image of change and decision-making is that of a forking path, illustrated by, for example, the letter “T” or “Y”.

If we begin at the bottom of the stem of the letter and proceed up, we soon encounter a fork on the path. We must make a decision about our path, which we will presume was never so clear or resolute that we could be sure that we did not want to proceed.

As the poet Heine notes, the tension at the fork is overwhelming, beyond our strength to simply hold the tension, to stay where we are and refuse to go forward. We seem to instinctively want to choose one of the choices and be done. We are lured by what we hope may be a better scenario, a path wherein we can retain our identity while enhancing and improving our lot. Thus, Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

We take the gamble, not fully understanding what we will discover, clinging to past and projecting the present. Hope reigns stronger than reason, desire clings to an intuition.

If we have understood what Buddhism calls the Ground (and here may be illustrated by the stem of the letter), then the path that is manifested does not really fork but just continues. The fork is an interruption, a decision, an existential pausing, scanning, and continuing.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

We look back, imagining how far we have come, and what good things lie before us. If we get to the end of this new path — the arm of the stem on the Y or the crossbar of the T — we can conceptualize our point on the path. If we recognize the Ground, we are merely changing the appearance but have the opportunity to incorporate where we are, the new here and now, as simply a continuation. We begin to become the path, as the popular Buddhist saying goes.

But we may doubt. We might turn around again, proceed along the path we have just trodden. We want to go back and not face change or decision. But we will only come to a crossroad again, another fork in the path. It is not the same fork because we are now looking at it from another perspective, yet we are back where we started. Everything will look different, everything will look strange and unexplored, and perhaps vaguely familiar, but we are lost. We cannot go back again because the consciousness we held at the beginning is now different, even at the same physical point of the path.

And when we recognize the notion of path as a psychological or even spiritual one, we can realize why we cannot go back, even if we go back to the same physical spot.

This can be further illustrated by an anecdote. Someone goes back to the city or town of their birth. The house of their childhood is still there, the neighborhood grid of streets and other dwelling-places, something of the curve of the road and the landscape are familiar.

But everything is in a different light. Time has passed, the same people are no longer there. You realize that they are gone. A new set of occupants is there, strange faces staring out of windows or appearing at their doorsteps in suspicion. Time has passed, but space is compressed and seems suffocatingly so. What seemed vast and indifferent for a child is now almost claustrophobic, crowded and stifling. The very air, the sunlight, the absence of familiar sounds or voices, are all changed. Where are they?

The path once known cannot be recovered. That which was comfortable and familiar is now hostile, like an animal occupying new territory, driving away the bird or mammal that once occupied the nest, the den, that once ranged the field now barren and pathless.

Perhaps nature is more definitive, more “realistic” than we are. When something is irrevocable, nature seems harsh and unrelenting, while we demand more time to evoke a wistful nostalgia for our old path, our old self. It is then that we find our emotions merely accentuating a pathlessness, a feeling of not belonging anywhere, or having lost identity or psychological reassurance. Nature wants to reach equilibrium as soon as possible.

So Frost writes of what we should end up doing, of the way to accept change and to act by not acting. We must take a path intuitively, not for any rationale presented to us by the world, not for money, comfort, prestige, or social opportunity.

Oh, I kept the first [path] for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

We can be less certain that the path less traveled is the better one. It is, as Frost says, simply different, and we will have only one chance to do the choosing, and the telling.

More important is the criteria for our choice, for there is no fork in the path, only a continuation of the same path, only adjustments to the path we are creating. The path less traveled of Frost’s last stanza below is simply the path we travel. We don’t have to keep the first path for “just in case.” We have to make the present (new) path the path.

And while the material or psychological outcomes of change or decision-making may not be exactly what we demanded, they, too, may represent a path that is open to change, to a new fork, if we need it to be. The only outcome to satisfy is, after all, in the heart, in the spirit. If we are wise in our path, that is the “all” that makes “all the difference.”

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Kierkegaard approached doubt in the opposite way of Descartes. Descartes’ methodical doubt is an abstract product of reason, therefore conquerable by a systematic application of reason. But Kierkegaard recognized that doubt is a subjective product of consciousness, not of reasoning. Kierkegaard saw that the Greek skeptics had rightly defined doubt as the product of perception or interest, that “they could cancel doubt by transforming interest into apathy.” This apathy is not indifference but disengagement (apatheia). And “interest” is based on its etymology: inter esse,” meaning “being between.” We literally step into something, take an interest in something, and by recognizing the contradictions of consciousness, propose doubt.

But by this stepping away from interest or wanting not to be in the middle or in between, we find disinterest or disengagement, which dissolves doubt because it dissolves mediacy. Doubt arises from the demands of our consciousness. We do not silence doubts by bludgeoning them with reason and logic, but by stepping away from the contradiction represented by doubt, perceived by consciousness. This method has familiar counterparts in Eastern traditions.

The sequence of Kierkegaard’s argument is found in his essay “Johannes Climacus” — no relation to the historical writer and mystic.

Kierkegaard asks “What is it to doubt? What must the nature of existence be in order for doubt to be possible?” Knowledge stands in direct and immanent relation to its object and is known not in an inverse and transcendent relation to a third. Hence doubt exists — like knowledge — within consciousness, not outside it like a counter-logic or a counter-reason. Immediacy excludes doubt because it is fully conscious, to the point of absorbing consciousness. In a state of immediacy, wherein the mind is fully engaged, everything is “true.” In fact, there is no “relation” to anything because everything is fully immediate.

As soon as this immediacy wavers or breaks, we create indeterminateness, and things — now “other” things — become “untrue.” As Kierkegaard puts it: “If consciousness can remain in immediacy, then the question of truth is canceled.” Of course, it cannot so remain.

Consciousness cannot remain in immediacy, for then it would not, could not, be consciousness. Immediacy is reality. But mediacy and immediacy presuppose one another. They become concepts, ideas. Mediacy simply reflects on things. The moment this reflection begins, contradiction begins. And this contradiction, says Kierkegaard, is the very nature of consciousness. We are forever experiencing what he calls “duplexity.”

The duplexity Kierkegaard sees is reality and ideality on the one hand and consciousness as relation on the other hand. Because immediacy is something our consciousness can grasp only fleetingly — that we can grasp this seamlessness of reality only in a flash, in a moment of insight — we must acknowledge that the whole universe is nothing but reality, nothing but unbrokenness — unbroken immediacy — because no consciousness extrapolates relations with objects. Rather, all objects in reality simply are. It is we who introduce duplexity, we who because of consciousness create in our minds an interruption of seamlessness. This interruption is what Kierkegaard calls doubt.

Even if we consider these issues to be mere expressions of language, our very transformation of this consciousness yields mediacy, yields time, space, dimension, engagement. We bring ourselves into relationship with things that are not the real or true relation (which would exist only in immediacy), but are rather our own idea of it, our own perception of it, our engagement.

This is the source of Kierkegaard’s radical subjectivity — or, rather, subjectivism. It is based not on feelings but a logic of its own.

Kierkegaard shows that we create or perceive two contradictory levels, one in immediacy, another in mediacy — one when we (in this ideal state) do not engage consciousness because it is already one with reality. The other is the contradictory level of mediacy, fully engaged, fully related to, between, and conscious, unable to draw back. Consciousness is reflection, our reflection on things. Says Kierkegaard (and emphasis his):

Reflection is the possibility of the relations; consciousness is the relation, the first form of which is contradiction. … Reflection’s categories are always dichotomous.

Why contradiction? It is because “consciousness emerges precisely through the “collision” of ideality and reality. Contradiction between ourselves and the objects around us comes about through reflection on difference, separateness — though of course perception is an intrinsic mental function. Perception is executed in mediacy. The collision of real and ideal exists in the realization of perceived differences. Kierkegaard calls this the perception of repetition, the emergence of recollection. Yet recollection is neither of the ideal nor the real — conjuring the ideal from thought, conjuring the real from memory. These are contradictions insofar as they involve irresolvable tensions.

Further,

Recollection is not ideality; it is ideality that has been. It is not reality; it is reality that has been — which again is a double contradiction for ideality, which, according to its concept, has been, and the same holds true of reality according to its concept.

Doubt is intrinsic to reflection because doubt is consciousness applied and engaged — and unable to epistemologically “break through” since consciousness can only truly discern reality through disinterest, by being so engaged as to lose focus on foreground. Doubt is not a product of logic or reason but a byproduct of simply having consciousness. And when we reflect on this, our consciousness is one that knows and realizes this as a supreme irony.

The previous post highlighted some of Freud’s post-World War I speculation about the reality principle and the death instinct. In short, the pleasure principle is not a debauchery principle but a reality check that makes the self or organism strive for balance, stability, and equilibrium, avoiding excitation — the opposite of what pleasure is usually considered to be. The pleasure principle is here revised by Freud to be the reality principle.

If this is the unconscious goal of the natural organism, then what we witness in society and culture is not a striving for pleasure but for something else. The sexual instinct is largely sublimated by society into rituals and symbolic actions, but a large element is no longer natural (compared to, say, animals) and is the result of frustration, repression and what might be termed cultural excitation or even peer excitation. Here enters the element of narcissism, aggression, and violence, which Freud considers products of the sexual instincts gone wrong.

If the reality principle otherwise governs the human psyche, then the natural emergence of the instincts is what Freud calls Eros, a larger sense of creativity from individual creativity to the creation of civilization. We cannot be too hasty in condemning civilization as a whole insofar as it is the macro vehicle for the preservation of our smaller and more modest creative efforts: poetry, art, music, thought, etc. To condemn civilization outright risks the destruction of these products of human ingenuity so vital to our individual understanding of reality.

But as individual creativity unfolds, overlapping with society and culture, the individual encounters serious obstacles to his or her efforts, until the creative product is largely absorbed by the demands and structures of culture. The flowering of art and intellectual work witnessed in grand epochs of history is a confluence of cultural forces working together, regardless of class or power — at least for a little while, during, say, the 5th-century B.C.E. Greek or the Renaissance eras. Otherwise, Eros hovers around our easel, workbench, writing desk, lab, shop, but never gets too far in influencing the rest of hapless society.

The mystic’s quest, ironically, is not for equilibrium but for excitation. It makes its quest an analogy of the sexual instinct. Though this is denied by scholars as a mere parody, there is a strange and unconscious venality when one reads the works of mystics and poets from the Song of Songs to Rumi to Teresa of Avila, who make their relationship with God (or equivalent) to be a courtship, seduction, and intercourse.

One is tempted to think that these individuals have the wrong vocation, what Freud would call transference. One suspects that psychological substitution or repression is at work. Despite our desire to find the poetry or prayer or analogy ennobling, it is somewhat tawdry and earthbound. William James (in Varieties of Religious Experience) quotes a number of such examples from the writings of minor religious figures that are painfully awkward to read today. Indeed, if these writings were broadcast today, the edifice of conventional mysticism might collapse.

This is not to say that mysticism is false or contrived, but that it is unnatural — at least in Freud’s sense, and his sense can be extrapolated to a rational argument. For if Eros is the “preserver of all things” at the individual and cultural levels, the individual must find a creative outlet, and ought not to be left to analogies of the sexual instinct. Culture must provide these creative channels, or the individual becomes either frustrated (neurotic) or aggressive (psychotic) or uncommonly creative.

(In Western and Hindu religion, the object of mysticism is a personification, and this further complicates the instinct for identification, leading to a too literal concept of God, who becomes a surrogate love partner. Contrast this psychology to that of the East where the Tao cannot even be named, let alone psychoanalyzed.)

We are expecting support for creativity from society, but, of course, society is the very structure or circumstance or confluence of behaviors that stokes the antithesis of the natural trajectory Freud speaks of. Society stokes competition, rivalry, xenophobia, hatred, aggression, violence, and war. So there is little to look for there unless we have a discerning mind to appreciate the products of Eros and of the sages along the way.

As Freud puts it, the primary process of the mental apparatus is to “convert their [the instincts’] freely mobile cathectic energy into a mainly quiescent (tonic) cathexis.” In other words, our instincts are inherent energies but our consciousness and reason need to channel these energies fruitfully.

To deliver ourselves to the confluence of society is to deliver ourselves to a whirlwind of oppression, control, aggression and violence, to what Freud ultimately describes as the “death instinct.” Death will have its natural place in the order of creativity, but as a natural flow or trajectory, not as an aberration.

Whether the mystic analogy is a flirtation with death as reality principle or an excitation derived from a frustrated expression of the pleasure principle is in neither case a true path. In contrast, mysticism differs significantly from enlightenment, which is precisely an equanimity, equilibrium, a stability — and yet a union with the universe as well.

Freud began edging away from his theory of sexual instincts dominating all neuroses when he witnessed the traumas of World War I, traumas involving no physical causes or lesions, no obvious childhood context. He had already begun to extend the concept of sexual instincts into larger creative or life-giving forces, Eros, as he shifted from individual case work to larger theories not involving clinical practice. Freud called this phase one of “speculation, often far-fetched speculation,” but it was one of fruitful meta-psychology.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), the decided shift begins. Rather than viewing the pleasure principle as rooted in sexual instinct, Freud is describing this principle somewhat like the Epicurean — not a debauchery or licentiousness but a natural ebb and flow, where the principle involves not the search for pleasure but the search for lowering of tension and excitation. It is the avoidance of pleasure, not the production of pleasure, that governs the self. “Unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure to a diminution.” [emphasis his] This was an important step in understanding the self.

Freud also speculated that our tendency towards pleasure is never absolute or dominant. We naturally seek not pleasure but constancy, meaning self-preservation. In the external world, self-preservation replaces the pleasure principle with what Freud called the reality principle. And the reality principle is nothing more than the instinct to postpone satisfaction in favor of self-preservation. We intellectualize this reality principle by formulating goals. We put off satisfaction in some things for a larger goal. Ultimately, as Freud says, Western culture was to formulate this principle into the core of its religion: we postpone satisfaction in this life for pleasure in the afterlife. Thus an intellectualized extrapolation of the reality principle.

But the reality principle can be overridden by stronger impulses, namely the sexual instincts, which in fact are always working to override the reality principle. A core such perversion is narcissism, of which he wrote during this period. Yet Freud was already identifying these libidinal and egoistic instincts with creative and live-giving instincts. The self uses a number of ways of adapting the libidinal instincts to creative and life-giving work. (Indeed, Jung used Freud’s term “libidinal” in this larger sense of creativity, with Freud nearly coming round to accepting the revision for himself).

Freud cites the compulsion to repeat as one life-preserving mechanism. This compulsion to repeat is witnessed in children, unconsciously in adults whose lives seem to repeat the same themes, failures, or tragedies, but also in larger society with ritual and memory. Another mechanism is transference, wherein instincts and feelings are displaced onto other people or cultures to dissipate what is threatening one’s own self or group. But ultimately, “all the organic instincts are conservative, are acquired historically and tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things.” We must monitor these tendencies in our own lives in order to fully understand our personal goals, fears, behaviors, and zones of comfort.

Perhaps the most interesting speculation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle addresses the primitive organism and the germ-cell, as Freud called it. These basic living beings, completely dependent on external stimuli, are consistently attempting to return to a conservative state. In such a primitive cell, however, the next level of conservation is to become inorganic again. Every cell, of every complexity, likewise seeks to preserve itself absolutely as it came into being, to avoid external stimuli altogether. One cannot posit a pleasure principle here. At this level, all is reality principle. Reality is stasis, no change, no growth. And, Freud says, no life. Self-preservation intends not life but death, or rather, the organism intends death in its own manner and not in the manner of outside stimuli.

Despite evolution and the development of higher faculties in human beings, we see no instinct in operation towards perfection or growth or development so strong as that which is self-preserving, avoiding stimuli, and desiring balance, equanimity, constancy, stasis, and what Freud describes as wanting to die in one’s own fashion and not as dictated from outside the self. Thus is the posited death instinct, which, when perverted into a dynamic (a dynamic urge for satisfaction) becomes the aggressive instinct.

The aggressive instinct is the opposite of the libidinal instinct. The aggressive instinct overthrows the trajectory of life towards a reconciliation and quiet death (so to speak). The aggressive instinct overthrows the reality principle, perverts the creative energy of the sexual instincts into destructive energy, and becomes a parody of the pleasure principle.

And yet, with the evolution of civilization, we have seen the means of expression of the aggressive instinct grow in leaps and bounds, overtaking Eros as the death instinct. The aggressive instinct infects the very lifeline of the self. We are inured to it and accept its inevitability. We struggle in vain to reconcile it with morality, accept it as a necessary evil, give it a place in our society and politics. The aggressive instinct dominates our social and cultural lives. Society, like Saturn, consumes its children, its creative efforts. From this sense of the tension in the world and the tension other people inherit from society and culture, is born a deep sense of eremitism, a deep sense of solitude as a way of understanding (that is, preserving the understanding of) how things are.

From the opening lines of section (or chapter) 1, the Tao te ching of Lao-tzu plunges into the depths of reality and the paradox of being. In turn, the nature of reality governs the mind and our disposition towards living.

The first lines are famous in whatever translation: “The Tao that can be named is not the Tao …” The Lau translation strips away the exoticism and usefully sets up the parallel verse structure.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.

Here are two primordial elements: way and name. The fundamental one is “way”, derived from the sense of the way or manner of doing things, of getting on. The intellectual and abstract element is “name.”

A similar juxtaposition is found in Western thought with the named being the logos, allowing formulations of knowledge and articulated descriptions. Behind this, more fundamental and not describable, is the unnamed, the way, which does not manifest itself until it is “getting on,” which is then some action or revelation that is nameable or describable — an action or revelation, but not the essence or way itself. At that point, the true way slips back into namelessness.

The next lines address these characteristics:

The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.

The “myriad creatures” or the “ten thousand things”, etc. are favorite Chinese ways of indicating indefinite numbers of things or creatures, but not infinite collectivity.

Thus the unnameable is the sources of beings, but the nature of this source is nameless, meaning not subject to description. The named is so subject, however numerous its engenderings. The named reveals itself by this action, subjects itself to description, however speculative. Myth is the attempt to plumb this “named,” to give it character, personification, anthropomorphizing it. We grapple with its motive and purpose and teleology. Cultures create or engender religions in order to describe this source of myriad creatures, to give texture to the story of creation, the drama of multiplicity, to the purpose of things, this coming-to-be. But the effort never fully succeeds, for it is merely describing what is seen, not telling us what the purpose is, the “why.”

When we remain in this realm we go round in circles, chasing description, hearing names, enchanting ourselves with drama, emotion, action, beauty, symmetry, feeling, synchronicity. We are mesmerized by a grand and inexplicable order. And yet we cannot penetrate meaning, because we cannot penetrate the logic of myriad creatures. We cannot grasp a “why” to this extravagance of beings pushed out by the mother of the myriad creatures. We only know that it is so, and that words (names) fail, or, rather, that they function when we agree upon their meanings. We don’t even realize, not for a long time, that there will be no adequate logos in this realm, this foreground, this illusory word. We are desperately trying to assign names, meanings, like trying to capture bubbles.

In the third set of lines comes the first and essential advice of Lao-tzu upon presenting the nature of things, the duality of nameless and nameable:

Hence always rid yourself of desires in order to observe its secrets;
But always allow yourself to have desires in order to observe its manifestations.

Here “it” refers to the way, the fundamental nameless, which contains secrets but as the background, with manifestations as creatures in the foreground. How do we penetrate the nature of this duality? By both having and getting rid of desires. Desire is the near equivalent of the classic psychological ego, of which we must have enough to know ourselves and the world, but then be able at a certain point to get rid of it, to discard it as no longer necessary for getting on in the path.

We need desire or ego in order to appreciate the nature of the world, of society, culture, and people. We need a clear and honest self built upon knowledge, logic, reason, discernment, critical thinking, judgment, self-awareness, discrimination, temperament, personality, strengths and shortcomings. We have to be aware of all of these, in a deep, honest, sense. That is the core of integrity. We cannot assume to penetrate the secrets of the unnamed if we have not mastered self knowledge, knowledge of the mind, heart, and spirit — plus insight into the nature of the world, of the ten thousand things. We cannot enter solitude based on self-deception, clinging to what belongs to creation and creatures, to impermanence, to what is merely entertainment and distraction.

When we have used ego or self or desires to understanding the world, then we must rid ourselves of that very same tool, that ego, self, and desire. Only lacking these can we approach the secrets of the nameless, says Lao-tzu. Emptying ourselves of desires means emptying ourselves of the accretions of the world, society, culture. It means renouncing the deluding comforts of self and entering a profound solitude, a condition that is stark and real, the condition of all selves and egos once distinguished from the myriad names, the ten thousand names we give to what is surrounding us. We distinguish, then renounce, the biases and comforts of society, the web of cultural accretions. We enter a true solitude, a true eremitism of soul. We lose our soul in order to save it, to quote the Christian saying so rarely understood.

But this solitude is profound, unnerving, scary. Such a solitude amounts to a loss of self and personality, and contradicts the insight and fullness that seems to be the object of this reflection.

Solitude is not merely the emptying of accretions of the world, society, and culture, but the fullness that occupies the emptying, the fulfillment that satisfies the desirelessness. Lost are ambitions, dreams, comforts, but gained is a transition to what is the root of every one of the myriad creations: solitude, a profound aloneness with one another. This is the fruitful canvas on which the rest of our lives can be worked out as an insightful way or path. Yet it is not as if the path is there to be discovered like a pearl or a hidden treasure in a field. It is a path engendered by our very consciousness. That pearl is within us, that treasure within the field of desolation.

Named and nameless form a seamlessness, and our inevitable vacillation between desire and desirelessness provides no necessary assurances. We can only enter a suspension of desires, deepening into what Eckhart and Heidegger call a “releasement,” an openness to the way or path. Between the named and the nameless there is a distinction, and yet, as the Lao-tzu says:

They are the same;
Diverging in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mysteries —
Gateway of the manifold secrets.

D.T. Suzuki’s little 1957 essay “East and West” is one of the more succinct statements contrasting ways of thought and observing. To illustrate his point, Suzuki uses a poem of Basho and an equivalent poem by Tennyson. We learn something about poetry, culture, and mind in his little lesson.

Both poems speak of a flower. Here is Basho’s haiku:

When I look carefully
I see the nazuna blooming
By the hedge!

As Suzuki explains, the poet writes of a single moment, probably walking slowly along a garden lane and coming upon the beautiful flower peeking through the hedge. The sight elicits a moment of sheer joy, admiration, fascination. The poet reflects the Easterners’ closeness to nature, notes Suzuki, not simply the awe-inspiring setting of mountains, mighty seas, or splendid sunsets but the humblest manifestations such as a blade of grass, dewdrops, or a flower in a remote and unexpected place.

In contrast, there is Tennyson, whose short equivalent poem is well known:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;–
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower — but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Both poets have been impressed by a flower, but as Suzuki notes, Basho does not pluck it. He looks at it, nearly wordless, filled with a deep and full emotion. Tennyson plucks the flower out of the wall. He literally tears it out, the whole root, thus killing it. He must satisfy his analytical curiosity, even at the price of the flower. The scientific method par excellence. Tennyson then goes on talking about the flower, or, rather, talking about himself — and he goes on, and on.

Tennyson intellectualizes life experiences. Neither he nor the flower are God, nor man, but he isn’t clear how to go about his intellection, what he really expects to learn from this now-dying flower. He never lets on that the flower has any aesthetic quality that stirred him. The flower is a scientific conundrum, though one expects that something about it drew his initial interest.

At this point Suzuki can compare and contrast “two basic characteristic approaches to reality. Basho is of the East and Tennyson of the West.” One may object that the Easterner, especially today, is not immune to the intellectualizing and analytical frame of mind, or that among Westerners there are mystical and reflective souls. But these are often in spire of rather than because of their culture. The ascendancy of Western technology and materialism works feverishly to undermine, even destroy, Eastern culture and premises. Like Tennyson, the West yanks the flower of the East from its roots, from its lifeline, and so it dies.

Suzuki is considering a set of values, a persona of culture, a continuity of being. Not surprisingly, he can refer to Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu as the core of that culture, just as he can refer to Basho and any number of Eastern poets to make the same point. To see the dying culture lying rootless before us is to fail to have seen the living, breathing flower that surprises us as we saunter down the bylanes of history, as we sit reflectively in the garden of time now torn down and scattered. We have so little time to try to understand.

Suzuki closes his short essay with an explicit list of contrasts, beginning with what Denis de Rougement pointed out as characteristic of the West: the person and the machine. Eastern philosophy has no need of the machine because the machine, any machine, usurps human functionality and quickly escalates into something that the person (that other Western invention) cannot control. The person is burdened by responsibility, celebrated as free and individual, but there is no compartment of life where the person really is free — free that is, from machines, which in fact are made explicitly to assure that persons are not free. As Suzuki puts it:

The machine, behaviorism, the conditioned reflex, Communism, artificial insemination, automation generally, vivisection, the H-bomb — they are, each and all, most intimately related, and form close-welded solid links of a logical chain.

And that chain is intellection in the Western sense of science, politics, culture, and structure. When the West encounters chaos, paradox, and the nameless forces in the universe from stars to flowers, it creates concepts and theories to explain them, even calling the theories and concepts inexplicable and tentative. What is needed is to stop the concepts and intellection and technology that is destroying the world and wiping out cultures and to simply see what is right before us.