Transcript Existentialism: Historical Background

Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss
and the Modern World
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Founders of existential psychotherapy
Dasein: definition
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past and future as implicit in present dasein
the unity of the experiential field
– the study of being (ontology)
– experience as reality: we are our experience
– the construction of the subject/object duality
» mind (unreal) reduced to matter (real)
» subject (unreal) reduced to object (real)
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“without a subject, nothing at all would exist to
confront objects, and to imagine them as such. True,
this implies that every object, everything “objective” -in being merely objectivized by the subject -- is the
most subjective thing possible.”
– Boss, M. (1958). The Analysis of Dreams. New York: Philosophical
Library
Meaning as a primary phenomenon
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“what we perceive are “first and foremost” not
impressions of taste, tone, smell or touch, not even
things or objects, but meanings.”
– Binswanger, L. (1963). Being in the World. New York: Basic Books,
p. 114.
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Endowment of meaning: Binswanger: Marduk’s net
– the revelation of exploration
– the a-priori ontological structure
» the world design, or matrix of meaning
» History or the great father
» Determinant of meaning endowment
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Disclosure of meaning: Boss: Tiamat’s re-emergence
– the revelation of the object
– the emergence of the phenomena: the numinous
» “the very word ‘phenomena’ is derived from phainesthai, i.e., to
shine forth, to appear, unveil itself, come out of concealment or
darkness.
Problem: the phenomena determines
the world view determines the
phenomena
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When an object is explored, its motivational
significance is constrained (generally, as a
consequence of the specific goal-directed nature of the
exploratory process, inevitably predicated upon a
specific hypothesis -- is this thing good for (a
particular function? -- but not any number of other
potential functions).
The question in mind, implicit or explicitly formulated,
determines in part the answer “given” by the object.
The object is always capable of superseding the
constraint, in some unpredictable fashion.
This infinite potential finds its symbolic
expression in the self-devouring serpent,
the mercurial spirit of transformation.
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While considering these ideas, I dreamed that a small
object was travelling above the surface of the Atlantic
Ocean, in the center of a procession of four hurricanes
configured as a square divided into quadrants, one
quadrant per hurricane; tracked by satellites, monitored
carefully and apprehensively by scientists manning the
latest in equipment, in stations all over the world.
The dream scene shifted. The object, a sphere of about
eight inches in diameter, was now contained and
exhibited in a small glass display case, like that found
in a museum.
The case itself was in a small room, with no visible
exit or entry points. The American President -- symbol
of social order -- and the crippled physicist Steven
Hawkins -- representative of scientific knowledge (and
of disembodied rationality) -- were in the room with
the object.
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One of them described the features of the room. Its
walls were seven feet thick, and made of some
impervious substance (titanium dioxide (?)) -- which
sounded impressive, in the context of the dream. These
walls were designed to permanently contain the object.
I wasn’t in the room, although I was there as an
observer, like the audience in a movie.
The object in the display case appeared alive. It was
moving, and distorting its shape, like a chrysalis or a
cocoon in its later stages of development. At one point,
it transformed itself into something resembling a
meerschaum pipe.
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Then it reformed itself into a sphere, and shot out
through one wall of the case, and the room, leaving
two perfectly round, smooth, holes -- one in the case,
and the other in the wall. It left with no effort
whatsoever, as if the barriers designed to restrain its
movement were of no consequence, once the
“decision” had been made.
The object was an image of God, the uroboric serpent,
embodied in matter (powerful enough to require the
accompaniment of four hurricanes, as attendants).
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At least two years after experiencing this dream (and a year
or so after writing it down) I was reading Dante’s Inferno
(Ciardi, J. (1954/1982). The Inferno: Dante’s Immortal
Drama of a Journey Through Hell. New York: Mentor
Books). In the ninth Canto, a messenger from God appears
in hell to open the Gate of Dis, which is barring the divinely
ordained way of Virgil and Dante. The approach of this
messenger is preceded by a great storm, described in the
following manner :
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Suddenly there broke on the dirty swell
of the dark marsh a squall of terrible sound
that sent a tremor through both shores of Hell;
a sound as if two continents of air,
one frigid and one scorching, clashed head on
in a war of winds that stripped the forests bare,
ripped off whole boughs and blew them helter skelter
along the range of dust it raised before it
making the beasts and shepherds run for shelter.
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The room was a classification system, something
designed (by the most powerful representatives of the
social and scientific worlds), to constrain the
mysterious phenomenon.
The object transformed itself into a pipe in reference to
the famous painting (by Magritte) of a pipe, entitled (in
translation) “This is not a pipe” -- the map is not the
territory, the representation not the phenomenon. The
capacity of the object to escape, “at will” referred to
the eternal transcendence of the phenomenal world, of
its infinite capacity to unexpectedly supersede its
representation, scientific and mythic.
A ModernVideo Analog
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Folding Hat
by John Baldessari
1971, 29:48 min, b&w, sound.
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http://www.eai.org/eai/titleOrderingFees.htm?id=2081
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Folding Hat is a deadpan conceptual exercise that represents a
dashed attempt to rescue an object from the meaning assigned
to it.
Whistling an aria from The Barber of Seville, Baldessari
bends and folds a simple hat into numerous configurations.
However, for the duration of the exercise, which unfolds in
real time, the object never loses its "hatness.”
In the end it is untransmutable -- no escape can be made from
its meaning.
Although Baldessari tries to drive a wedge between the
signifier and signified, the viewer never misrecognizes the hat.
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I dreamed, much later (perhaps after a year) of a man
suspended in a cubic room, equidistant from the floor,
roof and walls, about arm’s length from each. The
surfaces of the cube curved inwards, towards the man
(as if the room was constructed of the intersection of
six spheres).
All surfaces of the cube remained at the same distance
from the man, regardless of his pattern of movement. If
he walked forward, the cube moved forward with him.
If he walked backward, the cube moved backwards, at
precisely the same rate, with no discontinuity
whatsoever.
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The surfaces themselves were covered with circular
patterns, about four inches in diameter, inscribed
within squares of about the same size. Out of the center
of each circle dangled the tip of a reptile’s tail. The
man could reach in any direction, grasp a tail, and pull
it out of the surface, into the room.
This dream referred to the capacity of man to
(voluntarily) pull the future into the present, so to
speak. The serpent was the uroboros, contained in the
phenomenal world. The tail was a three dimensional
cross-section of a four-dimensional totality (and, as
such, was a symbol of the phenomenal world itself).
The potential for the emergence of something new was
present in every direction the man could look, inside
the cube. He could determine what aspect of being
would reveal itself, as a consequence of his voluntary
action.
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“Man’s option to respond to this claim or to choose not
to do so seems to be the very core of human freedom.”
– Boss, M. (1963). Psychoanalysis and Daseinanalysis. New York:
Basic Books, p. 271.
The thrownness of Dasein
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Specific historicity
A priori rules and limitations (the rules of the game)
– Its absurd nature
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Inauthenticity as subjugation to thrownness
thrownness as functionally equivalent to
unconsciousness
– victim of a priori circumstances
Motivational constructs
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emotion as an aspect of dasein
attraction of (embedded, revealed) possibility (the
unknown) as prime motivational construct
authenticity as the transformation of revealed
possibility
freedom predicated upon acceptance of thrownness
– adaptation as the use of possibility against actuality
Pathology: Fear and Guilt (existential
and neurotic)
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Existential guilt and fear as debt to possibility: the
revelation of responsibility (conscience)
Failure to shoulder existential burden results in
neurotic guilt and fear
Uncanniness as origin of anxiety: the revelation of the
unknown
Apprehension of the uncanny as dread
Fear of loss of world as root of existential anxiety
– Failure to follow revelation: Boss
– Failure to adjust epistemological structure: Binswanger
Pathology
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Neurotic Guilt
– unpaid “debt” to existence
» clean up your room
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Neurotic Anxiety
– constriction of world-design
– defense as
» unrecognized world-view
» unmet revealed meanings
The dreadful consequences of
inauthenticity: the social
psychopathology of the mass man
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The concentration camp
– England, Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia, Yugoslavia
– 66 million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union
(1918-1959)
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Jung stated at some point that “any internal state of
contradiction, unrecognized, will be played out in the
world as fate.” This statement, of course, carries with it
the stamp of mysticism.
How could the world play out a psychological
condition (or the refusal to recognize a psychological
condition)?
Well, the purpose of abstraction is to represent
experience, and to manipulate the representations, to
further successful adaptation. If we both want the same
toy, we can argue about our respective rights to it; if
the argument fails -- or if we refuse to engage in it -we can fight.
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If we are suffering from moral uncertainty, at the
philosophical level -- and cannot settle the internal war
-- then our behavior reflects our inner disquiet, and we
act out our contradictions in behavior, much to our
general discredit.
Thus the means of settling a dispute cascade, with each
failure, down the chain of abstraction: from the word,
to the image, to the deed -- and those who will not let
their outdated identities and beliefs die, when they
must, kill themselves instead.
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“A. B------v has told how executions were carried out
at Adak - a camp on the Pechora River. They would
take the opposition members “with their things” out of
the camp compound on a prisoner transport at night.
And outside the compound stood the small house of
the Third Section.
The condemned men were taken into a room one at a
time, and there the camp guards sprang on them. Their
mouths were stuffed with something soft and their
arms were bound with cords behind their backs.
Then they were led out into the courtyard, where
harnessed carts were waiting. The bound prisoners
were piled on the carts, from five to seven at a time,
and driven off to the “Gorka” - the camp cemetery. On
arrival they were tipped into big pits that had already
been prepared and buried alive.
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Not out of brutality, no. It had been ascertained that
when dragging and lifting them, it was much easier to
cope with living people than with corpses.
The work went on for many nights at Adak. And that is
how the moral-political unity of our Party was
achieved.”
– Solzhenitsyn, A.I. (1975). The Gulag Archipelago (Vol. 2). New
York: Harper and Row, p. 390.
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“The most ghastly moment of the twenty-four hours of camp
life was the awakening, when, at a still nocturnal hour, the
three shrill blows of a whistle tore us pitilessly from our
exhausted sleep and from the longings in our dreams. We
then began the tussle with our wet shoes, into which we
could scarcely force our feet, which were sore and swollen
with edema. And there were the usual moans and groans
about petty troubles, such as the snapping of wires which
replaced shoelaces.
One morning I heard someone, whom I knew to be brave
and dignified, cry like a child because he finally had to go to
the snowy marching grounds in his bare feet, as his shoes
were too shrunken for him to wear. In those ghastly
moments, I found a little bit of comfort: a small piece of
bread which I drew out of my pocket and munched with
absorbed delight.”
– Frankl, V. (1984). Man's Search for Meaning. New York: Washington
Square Press, pp. 51-52.
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“In cold lower than 60 degrees below zero, workdays
were written off: in other words, on such days the
records showed that the workers had not gone out to
work; but they chased them out anyway, and whatever
they squeezed out of them on those days was added to
the other days, thereby raising the percentages.
(And the servile Medical Section wrote off those who
froze to death on such cold days on some other basis.
And the ones who were left who could no longer walk
and were straining every sinew to crawl along on all
fours on the way back to camp, the convoy simply
shot, so that they wouldn’t escape before they could
come back to get them).”
– Solzhenitsyn, A.I. (1975). The Gulag Archipelago (Vol. 2). New
York: Harper and Row, p. 201.
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“O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm,
Hath found out thy bed
Of crimson joy
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.”
– Keynes, G. (Ed.). (1966). The Complete Works of William Blake,
with variant readings. London: Oxford University Press, p. 213.
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“Fire, fire! The branches crackle and the night wind of
late autumn blows the flame of the bonfire back and
forth. The compound is dark; I am alone at the bonfire,
and I can bring it still some more carpenters’ shavings.
The compound here is a privileged one, so privileged
that is almost as if I were out in freedom -- this is an
Island of Paradise; this is the Marfino “sharashka” -- a
scientific institute staffed with prisoners -- in its most
privileged period. No one is overseeing me, calling me
to a cell, chasing me away from the bonfire, and even
then it is chilly in the penetrating wind.
But she -- who has already been standing in the wind
for hours, her arms straight down, her head drooping,
weeping, then growing numb and still. And then again
she begs piteously: “Citizen Chief! Please forgive me!
I won’t do it again.”
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The wind carries her moan to me, just as if she were
moaning next to my ear. The citizen chief at the
gatehouse fires up his stove and does not answer.
This was the gatehouse of the camp next door to us,
from which workers came into our compound to lay
water pipes and to repair the old ramshackle seminary
building.
Across from me, beyond the artfully intertwined,
many-stranded barbed-wire barricade and two steps
away from the gatehouse, beneath a bright lantern,
stood the punished girl, head hanging, the wind
tugging at her gray work skirt, her feet growing numb
from the cold, a thin scarf over her head.
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It had been warm during the day, when they had been
digging a ditch on our territory. And another girl,
slipping down into a ravine, had crawled her way to
the Vladykino Highway and escaped.
The guard had bungled. And Moscow city buses ran
right along the highway. When they caught on, it was
too late to catch her. They raised the alarm.
A mean, dark major arrived and shouted that if they
failed to catch the girl, the entire camp would be
deprived of visits and parcels for a whole month,
because of her escape.
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And the women brigadiers went into a rage, and they
were all shouting, one of them in particular, who kept
viciously rolling her eyes: “Oh, I hope they catch her,
the bitch! I hope they take scissors and -- clip, clip, clip
-- take off all her hair in front of the line-up!” (This
wasn’t something she had thought up herself.
This was the way they punished women in the Gulag.)
But the girl who was now standing outside the
gatehouse in the cold had sighed and said instead: “At
least she can have a good time out in freedom for all of
us!”
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The jailer overheard what she said, and now she was
being punished; everyone else had been taken off to
the camp, but she had been set outside there to stand
“at attention” in front of the gatehouse. This had been
at 6 PM, and it was now 11 PM.
She tried to shift from one foot to another, but the
guard stuck out his head and shouted: “Stand at
attention, whore, or else it will be worse for you!” And
now she was not moving, only weeping: “Forgive me,
Citizen Chief! Let me into the camp, I won’t do it any
more!”
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But even in the camp no one was about to say to her:
All right, idiot! Come on in!
The reason they were keeping her out there so long
was that the next day was Sunday, and she would not
be needed for work.
Such a straw-blond, naive, uneducated slip of a girl!
She had been imprisoned for some spool of thread.
What a dangerous thought you expressed there, little
sister! They want to teach you a lesson for the rest of
your life!
Fire, fire! We fought the war -- and we looked into the
bonfires to see what kind of victory it would be. The
wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire.
To that flame and you, girl, I promise: the whole wide
world will read about you.”
– Solzhenitsyn, A.I. (1975). The Gulag Archipelago (Vol. 2). New
York: Harper and Row, pp. 147-149.
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“- for whence
But from the author of all ill could spring
So deep a malice, to confound the race
Of mankind in one root, and Earth with Hell
To mingle and involve, done all to spite
The great Creator?”
– Milton, J. (1667/1961). Paradise Lost (and other poems), annotated
by E. LeComte. New York: New American Library, p. 71, Part II:
380-385.
Human beings are emotionally attached to those whom
with they identify; sympathy for the victim of injustice
means inability to perpetrate such injustice.
Identification with tyranny, on the other hand, means
temporary effortless surcease from painful (intra and
extrapsychic) moral conflict.
Such identification merely requires denial of the
injustice committed to one’s own person, and the
subsequent falsification of individual experience.
This falsification cuts the empathic bonds, connecting
prisoner to prisoner -- connecting man to man -connecting man to himself:
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“I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul will pity me:
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself.”
The victim who finds personal security in identity with
his persecutor has become that persecutor; has
eliminated the possibility of further adaptation,
integration and growth; has voluntarily forfeited
possibility of redemption.
Solzhenitsyn describes the reactions and actions of
staunch Communist Party members, imprisoned and
devoured by the system they supported and produced:
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“To say that things were painful for them is to say almost nothing.
They were incapable of assimilating such a blow, such a downfall,
and from their own people, too, from their own dear Party, and,
from all apearances, for nothing at all. After all, they had been
guilty of nothing as far as the Pary was concerned -- nothing at all.
It was painful for them to such a degree that it was considered
taboo among them, uncomradely, to ask: “What were you
imprisoned for?” The only squeamish generation of prisoners!
The rest of us, with tongues hanging out, couldn’t wait to tell the
story to every chance newcomer we met, and to the whole cell -as if it were an anecdote.
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Here’s the sort of people they were. Olga Sliozberg’s
husband had already been arrested, and they had come
to carry out a search and arrest her too.
The search lasted four hours -- and she spent those four
hours sorting out the minutes of the congress of
Stakhanovites of the bristle and brush industry, of
which she had been the secretary until the previous
day.
The incomplete state of the minutes troubled her more
than her children, who she was now leaving forever!
Even the interrogator conducting the search could not
resist telling her: “Come on now, say farewell to your
children!”
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Here’s the sort of people they were. A letter from her
fifteen-year old daughter came to Yelizaveta Tsetkova
in the Kazan Prison for long-term prisoners: “Mama!
Tell me, write to me -- are you guilty or not? I hope
you weren’t guilty, because then I won’t join the
Komsomol, and I won’t forgive them because of you.
But if you are guilty -- I won’t write you any more and
will hate you.” And the mother was stricken by
remorse in her damp gravelike cell with its dim little
lamp: How could her daughter live without the
Komsomol? How could she be permitted to hate Soviet
power? Better that she should hate me. And she wrote:
“I am guilty.... Enter the Komsomol!”
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How could it be anything but hard! It was more than
the human heart could bear: to fall beneath the beloved
axe -- then to have to justify its wisdom. But that is the
price a man pays for entrusting his God-given soul to
human dogma.
Even today any orthodox Communist will affirm that
Tsetkova acted correctly. Even today they cannot be
convinced that this is precisely the “perversion of small
forces”, that the mother perverted her daughter and
harmed her soul.
Here’s the sort of people they were: Y.T. gave sincere
testimony against her husband -- anything to aid the
Party!
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Oh, how one could pity them if at least now they had
come to comprehend their former wretchedness! This
whole chapter could have been written quite differently
if today at least they had forsaken their earlier views!
But it happened the way Mariya Danielyan had
dreamed it would: “If I leave here someday, I am going
to live as if nothing had taken place.”
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Loyalty? And in our view it is just plain
pigheadedness. These devotees to the theory of
development construed loyalty to that development to
mean renunciation of any personal development
whatsoever!
As Nikolai Adamovich Vilenchuk said, after serving
seventeen years: “We believed in the Party -- and we
were not mistaken!” Is this loyalty or pigheadedness?
No, it was not for show and not out of hypocrisy that
they argued in the cells in defense of all the
government’s actions. They needed ideological
arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own
rightness -- otherwise, insanity was not far off.”
The task of life
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Independence from “thrownness”
realization of meaning
“The evidence is intolerable -- so
much the worse for the evidence!”
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Ideology confines human potential to a narrow and
defined realm; adaptation undertaken within that realm
necessarily remains insufficient, is destined to produce
misery, as it is only relationship with the transcendent
that allows life to retain its savour.
Ideology says “it must be thus,” but human behavior
constantly exceeds its realm of representation; the
capacity for exception must therefore be denied, lest
faith in ideology vanish, and chaos, intolerable chaos,
reappear.
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“... for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him: round he throws his baleful eyes,
That witnessed huge affliction and dismay,
Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate;
At once, as far as angel’s ken, he views
The dismal situation waste and wild;
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed, yet from these flames
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No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all, but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.
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Such place Eternal Justice had prepared
For those rebellious, here their prison ordained
In utter darkness, and their portion set,
As far removed from God and light of Heaven
As from the centre thrice to the utmost pole.”
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Every act of repression -- every lie -- creates an
intrapsychic reservoir, so to speak, of disregarded
experience -- of truth, unsettling and disturbing. In this
reservoir lives the re-animated dragon of chaos, ready
to devour, in an unguarded moment, the quaking and
deceitful soul.
Every act of suppression limits potential for action and
representation; weakens the total personality;
constantly increases likelihood for continued and
expanded suppression of experience:
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“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he
shall have more abundantly: but whosoever hath not,
from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”
(Matthew 13: 12).
Repression of the truth ensures the deterioration of
personality; assures transformation of subjective
experience into endless meaningless sterility and
misery.
 Acceptance, by contrast -- in the spirit of ignorant
humility, courage disguised -- provides the necessary
precondition for change.