Finding Yourself in Questionable Times
Sifting through the fascinating but intimidating task of the Western history of ideas regarding the comprehension of human nature, one could do worse than visit some major Hellenistic and Roman endeavors to spell out their sense of personal identity.
A prime contender for the Greeks’ self-appreciation was the school of the Cynics. Hardly diplomatic, they were the insufferable critics of society. Their audacious flaunting of authority and disdainful manners might herald them as the prime predecessors of the hippies of our Vietnam War era.
Are the Cynics Cynical?
Do they lambast for the sake of attention, no, they wanted politics and culture, even religion, to heed the laws of Nature? Anything less keeps one wandering in bondage to ignorance, susceptible to the duplicity of civic life and the seduction of shopkeepers. Unless you take your lead from Nature, freedom remains but an empty dream. A lesson to be learned is how the seasons succeed one another, displaying their independent bounty and versatile beauty unperturbed by the vacillating conventions of human society. In their minds, philosophy, the quest for intelligent living, justifies itself as a practical endeavor in order to liberate citizens from their sycophant tendencies to arbitrary laws and vacillating rulers. Like Socrates, they urged citizens to put aside their communal fears and examine themselves. With humor, learn a lifestyle that subverts the commercialization of daily life.
A famous figure, Diogenes, known popularly for his thankless venture of walking about the city holding up his lantern “peering for an authentic man,” was asked whence he came. Instead of the conventional response of naming his town, he replied: I am a cosmopolite. This reply would have sent a shudder through his neighbors. It means I am a citizen, not of society, but of the world, the Cosmos. His stark remark foretells the breath of his own self-understanding. He was recognized as a feisty interloper who spoke his mind and urged others likewise. One ought to have contempt for lawful conventionality, legal codes, petty aspirations, and political correctness. The Cynic ego is the anarchist who prefers a more humane path, bawdy at times, to expedient privileges. Rumor states that his lantern never shown upon his anticipated goal.
For the Cynics, the privilege of existence is unhampered only when reason rules ego’s incessant ambition and thus protects freedom. People forget so easily that rationality is the mirror of the objectivity of Nature. These iconoclasts weren’t exactly popular with the temple worshippers.
Are Stoics as Stoical as They Seem
From here our investigation moves to the emerging school known as the Stoics. One could argue that this group culminated the Cynics’ ethical legacy. It is equally important to remember that the various teachers in these schools of philosophy differed with each other in the prominence of their ideas and the practical emphasis for public attention. One has to study their writings to get the exact flavor that each contributed to self-identity.
Championed by Zeno, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Cicero, among the more notorious, these gentlemen preferred the willful stance that one should learn early to distinguish between those things within your control and those outside. Only pay attention to the former and be indifferent to the rest. Forget about dividing life into good and bad, pleasurable and repugnant, take things simply as they unfold. Stop blaming the world for your troubles, learn to adjust, mishaps or not. As far as they are concerned, it’s really all in your attitude.
Keep your poise separate from your passions. With emotion checked, no inner disturbance. Hold your ego aloof to the vicissitudes of culture. Don’t let family, affection, career success or failure, seduce or inflate you. Do what the situation calls for, but the results are not part of your essential self. Melancholy, like your self-esteem, is evoked, not by the world, but by ourselves. Get over it. Overcome life’s stresses by more appropriate choices in the interpretation of events. We are not meant to be strangers to feeling but only to indulging irrational passions, morally wrong impulses that prevent virtuous conduct and fulfillment of duty. Aspiration is not to be virtuous in order to do good, rather, do good in order to be virtuous.
The aforesaid paragraphs attempted to give the reader a glimpse of how they engaged people with moral aphorisms. Reading them reminds one of today’s advice columns. Speculative theories were not their strong point.
One could argue that Stoic independence at his finest hour espouses a laissez faire, rational ego, socially savvy but flouting convention, living in dutiful accordance with the deterministic laws of nature---the only way to wisdom. The Roman legions loved that dutifulness in their recruits.
A Leap to the Twentieth Century
The 20th century brought forth a menagerie of investigators into human nature and its foibles, soon called theories of personality. Terms and approaches changed radically during those hundred years, competing for preference among the professionals. Instead of the Ancients’ adherence to developing virtues, modern professionals speak of undergoing psychotherapies by the hour. Some of their theories attempt to reinvent the nature of humanness, with no interest whatsoever in the riches of the Perennial Philosophy of the West. By that very dismissal, one should immediately be on guard.
The most prominent portion of the movement yet made a laudatory notice to Western tradition by putting together the Greek name for mind, psyche, with its studied efforts at mental analysis, hence psychoanalysis. As the decades went on, other schools spun and split off and invented their own curious jargon to explicate the essence of humanity. Behaviorist theories placed the emphasis on the impact of the external environment, while Humanistic theory stressed subjective experience and personal growth. The field of psychology became acknowledged in the public eye as the definitive source for knowledge about one’s ego.
The Author of the Freudian slip
The name that comes to the forefront at least in terms of chronology is the Viennese physician, Sigmund Freud. With the excitement of Darwin’s point of view, Freud portrayed the world as a purposeless mass of energizing matter.
The absolute law of being was constant discharge of energy. Now cast human nature into this erratic cauldron, where unconscious instincts arise building up inner pressure to release. The human self or ego lives in dire conflict with itself through its own instinctual drives, always contending with competing inner demands that need expression and gratification, especially related to sex and aggression. At best, the ego’s job was to delay gratification of one’s urges to seek appropriate outlets. Here lies the attempt at moral virtue. However, don’t get your hopes too high, for Freud biology is destiny. To put it smugly, you’re stuck in your caldron. No wonder psychiatrists got so wealthy. Unfortunately, history caught up with Sigmund the legend when it was discovered that he invented data to order to ‘prove’ his theories. Now he became known as Freud the fraud.
The Man who Loved Symbols
From across the Alps, comes a new colleague, Carl Jung, at first an ally then a courteous opponent of Herr Freud. He shifted emphasis upon the individual away from all those irrepressible sexual tensions to the broader field of the active, but unknown regions of the mind: the personal and collective unconscious. The two-fold description is necessary because he poses that humans are innately born with a customary memory and, more, an arcane heritage of mankind’s evolution (Darwin, again) built into the brain structure. He views us influenced by a bundle of emotionally charged images and thought forms that have universal significance, manifesting in dreams and cultural symbols---the famous archetypes. Perhaps the most obvious archetype is the ‘persona’, the public self, our resume, that masks our private ego.
Instead of instincts ruling us, we are influenced by these arcane memories that show up in unlearned tendencies to experience life in certain ways. We love to imprint. Hence our fascination and participation in dreams, fantasies, folklore, mythologies, rituals, and art. We can’t help but seek to be nurtured from these primordial resources. From our undaunted love for the hero and the Guru, to the smirking approval of Robin Hood and Bonny and Clyde, we seek spiritual sustenance from personifications.
Freud, of course, did not give fatherly approval to Jung’s obsessional interests in these occult matters. Hence Carl was no longer in line as heir apparent.
Freud gave up on humankind, doomed inexorably to its past; whereas Jung although possibly a reluctant, closet misanthropist, still springs hopefully upon the scene the moment anyone gets up some steam about living a life of virtue. With his mentor, Jung still advocates that we accept our essential, treacherous, demonic proclivities. The Shadow Side, as he labels it, lays in wait for our most loving and truthful efforts. Would suppression of evil allow one to have a balanced life? Like it or not, the human plight, he ventures, is akin to original sin in Christian theology. As for the ego, would it not be the managing director of forces, the overworked conscious referee of a complex of fierce daily whims and intimidating furies from the colossal, primordial, ancestral unconscious. As you get older, since you are androgynous, persevere balancing all those opposing images, urges, and memories to improve your persona, who faces the world at large; at least give the Self archetype a chance to be less selfish.
A Teleological Surprise
Another breakaway from the Viennese inner circle was Alfred Adler. He resisted separating people into the Freudian conglomeration of energy mechanisms and conflicting parts. His tact was the power of self-determination. More than the other colleagues, he maintained that people could reach within themselves, as it were, and make choices, revise their mediocre standards, adjust to life, compensate, and strive for maturity. Purpose is all. Your metabolism proves it: always charging to stay on course and make adjustments to mend and stay well. Get with life and select your guiding goal. He seemed to be most interested in the kind of character you wanted to become. He’s almost a heretic. Do we hear echoes of the Ancients? Perhaps he had a cheering section for his clients.
He viewed a lot of the paraphernalia of his colleagues as fiction. As he put it, “We are self-determined by the meaning we give to our experiences.” Period. So, stop fussing with your alleged trauma. Less divide and conquer, he proposes the emphasis be upon the future. Life beckons. Recognize that seasons change. To sit around and rehearse the past only makes one gloomy. Your choice, though, if you want to score the future by replaying the past. Why spend so much time uprooting yesterday’s history? Be creative. Risk adventure. Learn to live more socially and improve with the community’s prospective orientation. “This sense of belonging that cannot be denied anyone, against which there are no arguments, can only be won by being involved, by cooperating, and experiencing, and by being useful to others. Out of this emerges a lasting, genuine feeling of worthiness." Careful listening to the clergy’s moan that life is a vale of tears. A healthy self-love never hurt anyone; besides it’s the best guarantee that you can approach others without salacious agendas.
When things got tough, Adler would not recommend running off to a hermitage; rather, integrate into the community for staying healthy. This man even trusts the unconscious to invite itself for ample inspection when the situation requires it. Leave the Jung’s lurking Shadow on the radio.
His strong point was not for dividing people into hierarchies of sections, energies, compartments, issues, conflicts, projections, higher and lower mental equipment, etc. Take people as they are, a whole person out there functioning to earn a living, making mistakes, raising a family, and coping with Minnesota winters. You feel inferior…so what? Who doesn’t have warts? Who says tackling the future can’t reverse your pet anxieties. Shape up your day and take on tomorrow. Go talk to an athlete. Your ego is what you make of your whole being in aiming at the future. You create your destiny, your telos. In his eyes, only you, not the therapist, redeem yourself.
It’s a Bird, it’s a Plane
When Abraham Maslow arrived late on the scene, he had the marvelous advantage of surveying all predecessors before him. Unlike so many of his retired colleagues, he took a radical departure. He proposed the query: if I want to discover what health is about, do I start with ill patients? Where is that going to get me? Instead, let’s start with consummate examples of healthful individuals. What a novel idea. The ghost of Freud and soon to be all the other schools were terribly upset by this unorthodox maverick.
Do you get to the Olympics by studying also-rans? Do you get to play football by endorsing the silly movie about the Notre Dame bench warmer “Rudy”? Do you learn to meditate by imitating stress filled work-alcoholics? Applicants with these orientations resemble Charlie Brown who kept whining: how can I lose when I’m so sincere?
With Freud and Jung, one gets the feeling that birth means victimhood. Forecast: unlikely to outgrow that heritage. With the rest of the medical field, birth means co-dependency with physicians. With Maslow, we put our inner child up for adoption and sail on.
What if we looked upon life as it occurs instead of only admitting features that protect our predetermined preferences and desperations. For Maslow, the neurotic is not emotionally sick; he is cognitively wrong. Who doesn’t have pressing needs and fears? But let’s put them into the context of where I am going in life (Adler is smiling). Let’s line up my needs from the most obvious to the more subtle. Don’t knock the gross ones, otherwise they’ll come back and bite you later.
Here we have the beginning of a holistic approach and a natural methodology. Understand your nature first. Instead of rehearsing whether you got sufficient toilet training by the age of three, why not study all the people that evidence admirable qualities and contributed to the enrichment of living. What do their careers reveal about human nature?
Maslow examined for years a host of verifiable human experiences and perceived a creative essence in people at all age levels. He shocked his colleagues by showing a serious investigation into “The most wonderful experience or experiences of your life, happiest moments, ecstatic moments, moments of rapture.” Instead of hinting at ‘mysticism’ he stayed out of trouble with the Vatican and settled for ‘peak experiences.’ Besides, this term could apply to a broader field of human endeavor, instead of just having religious connotations.
Maslow appreciated that reality, besides encompassing our creative efforts and chance interruptions, was fairly ordered (Freud is frowning). Not only in observing Nature’ reliability (Stoics are smiling), but in coming to terms with oneself as an embodied, intelligent, self-reflective being, with untapped potentials that one could choose to manifest. Could we not call that self-actualization? Isn’t that the context where health belongs?
For him, the acknowledgement of the basic goodness of life, the opportunities provoked by society for exploring one’s potential, the enticement to take risks, enables one to continually supersede personal history (Freud is frowning, again). To touch those moments of astonishment, to go where no man has gone before, to feel the enrapture of living, ah, shall we call it peak experiences. He also called it self-transcendence. Perhaps self-expansion would be more apt. Nonetheless, everything contributes, however modest or middle class, to expanding self-knowledge without which one wanders lost in a scary world.
Today’s World of Seekers
Most people are not planning for peak experiences, self-realization, transcendence, reliving Archetypes, mystical moments, or following their bliss. They want to be left alone in peace, with as little annoyance from the taxes and by-laws of society as possible, to follow their private and social activities. Most Americans aspire, not for the road less travelled, but the ordinary, conventional jobs and careers acceptable to their peers. Concurrently, the personality experts made us aware of the multiple handicaps and embarrassing barriers as we struggle to make ends meet, as well as the profound possibilities available that exceed even our ordinary dreams. Yet did they view modern man as qualified to critique the culture in which gave him birth?
Our brief excursion to the Ancients showed a definite preference for personal autonomy in contretemps with the ruling regime and an appreciation that we would recognize as ecological harmony. For them, only assiduously forming an ethical life of practical wisdom protected one from the chicanery of society and the vicissitudes of fate. They would adjudge that most problems in their era came as a result of betraying or not acknowledging this ethical lifestyle.
It would appear that the citizens of those yonder years felt less self-conscious about their approval rating and less apprehensive about the future than those in our electronic age. Concomitant in our Western era, one also finds an enormous decline in the traditional moral restraints of early twentieth century culture.
The sociological currents of the last several decades offered ample invitations for an amazing array of pundits that told society what made them tick. If you take Freud’s concept of humanity, for a surprise, and turn it inside out, you get a close resemblance to B.F. Skinner insights. Still feeling the reverberations from sixty years ago, Harvard’s famous Behaviorist investigator cheerfully announced that we are the sole product, not of those aggressive inner impulses, God forbid, but of our environment. No wonder realtors claim that location is everything. Ideas are illusions, posturing makes the person. No fair enjoying the fruits of your actions since society shaped you that way. What sage advice can one expect from a professor who assured us that studying rats was all that was necessary to understanding human beings? For him, manipulation was the goal of civility. Law enforcement officials extol his approach.
Along with the Behaviorists, Americans have been judiciously educated to resort to both the older and the newer schools of Psychiatry for their concept of human nature. Instead of philosophers, we have the new, improved version of savants: Psychiatrists. At this point, certain reservations may be in order.
The idiosyncrasies and deviant behaviors cited by these latest preceptors are classified as brain ailments and mental diseases. Of course, the customary designation of disease is a physical disorder or biological abnormality. Yet, curiously, the mind does not show up on any anatomical chart as a physical organ. To equate the brain with consciousness seems to beg the question. In ordinary conversation, we don’t speak of the mind or consciousness as a mental thing or body. On that basis, how can we apply the predicate disease to it? Would it not be a lot safer to point out that if the mind acquires ‘maladies,’ these disorders might fair better under the genre of mistakes and errors of judgment. Besides, if one’s consciousness is prone to disease, can stem cell research help here? So far autumn vaccinations are available to protect against flu but not against misunderstandings, impoliteness, and faulty logic during winter months. Could the notion of a diseased mind be nothing more than a semantic slip of the tongue, even a myth?
Today’s cultural language has absorbed a web of medical metaphors, labels, and problematic jargon that centers on medicalizing our understanding of human consciousness. People aren’t wrong, they’re depressed. Children don’t misbehave; they have ADHD. Adulterers don’t exploit; they are just unappreciated. Bankers don’t really want to steal the money on those mortgages, rather their mothers put them on the bottle too early. Could these therapeutic evaluations be apocryphal excuses, so rampant in our culture, and nothing more than a dubious substitute for a serious discernment of what constitutes self-responsibility for good or evil actions. Is life truly about medical alibis for human desire gone askance or sublime?
If we aren’t accountable for unethical conduct, then we are chance products of Darwin, Freud, and Sagan’s universe. Life’s values are merely competing fashions. If we aren’t personally responsible for our actions, then we simply take drugs to regain socially correct behavior. If we are not culpable for perverting the truth, then we simply obtain a sedative to quell any guilt feelings. Not before long, pharmaceuticals will soon overtake oil and munitions manufacturers.
If we have any suspicions that we can determine our lifestyle, choose to be socially responsible for it, then we just need to listen more attentively to the medicalizers who can educate us into understanding that the practice of freedom of choice can generate diseases that require drugs for resembling sanity. The notable deceit of the medicalizers is to insist that symptoms of errant behavior infer a pathological construction of consciousness itself. Sorry, Virginia, but your lingering hopes for Santa Claus only goes to prove your psyche is afflicted with the Xmas disease.
It hardly needs mention that a psychiatrist’s worse nightmare is a self-responsible client who critically assumes more and more autonomous control of his daily life, willing to risk the adventure that the future presents, and respects others for the same. How dare anyone replace ‘behavioral controls’ for a life of intelligent courage and contributing to the betterment of society.
Since we are talking about human intention and action, psychiatry and all its imitations are fully, although they protest denial, in the ethical arena and so can be judged by the moral principle that human beings have a natural, innate desire to become the best possible person by their own choice.
Maslow’s perception over decades was that people don’t need drugs; they need a philosophy of life. How revolutionary.
Would he not concur with the Stoics that the avoidance, for whatever reason, to take yourself seriously as a goal oriented being is the root cause of unhappiness or psychopathology, to use the medicalizers imaginative term. More accurately, who would not seek a validated, usable system of human values that we can believe in and devote ourselves to, because they are true rather than because we are exhorted to believe and have faith. Who would sanely resist a self-determined lifestyle toward unity of personality, toward spontaneous expressiveness, toward full individuality and identity, toward seeing the truth rather than being blind, toward being creative, toward being good, and a lot else. It goes without saying that even psychiatrists would definitely concur obviously, if they found the drugs for it.
Could it be, when all said and done, that human fulfillment---self-realization, if you will---may be ethical living taken to its final flourish?
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