Tom Pepper
Why try again? This is the question I’ve been asking myself every day lately. Is it worthwhile to try one more time, to attempt to “fail better”?
In Eudemian Ethics Aristotle suggest that “Children, invalids and lunatics have many views, but no same person would trouble himself about them; what such people need in not argument but something else: either time for their opinions to mature or else medical or penal correction”. I’d suggest our culture, the family and educational ISAs as well as newer ISAs like social media and the entertainment industry, have succeeded in producing a critical mass of lunatics, mental invalids, and the permanently immature. No argument can work with them.
My concern, then, is to raise the question: whom exactly are we hoping to reach with attempts at intervention in thought? Is there an audience capable of reasoning about such things? Or might it be better to try some other approach, one aimed at producing some kind of intellectual maturity and, perhaps, sanity? What might that look like?
Over recent months I’ve begun and abandoned a couple of projects, mostly because I think they say things I’ve said before, and didn’t have any real impact the first time.
I had considered trying one more time with the problem of ideology, beginning a book I called “Deficiencies of Ideology” but abandoning because I don’t think an audience for this exists. Here’s the main idea, from the introduction:
These days we seem inundated with problems that are commonly explained as the result of too much ideology—both too many different ideologies and ideologies so powerful they prevent us from clear and rational thought. Extreme divisiveness over matters ranging from politics to vaccinations is usually explained as the result of “echo chambers” and a general inability to escape our ideologies and think objectively.
My argument is that this gets it exactly wrong. The problems we face today, from the collapse of the global supply chain to the battles over Critical Race Theory, are the result of, and intractable because of, a deficiency of ideology.
Our ideologies are deficient in both senses of the word. There are too few of them, with many people living outside of ideology most of the time. But those we do have are also inadequate as ideologies, failing to accomplish what we need ideologies to do.
When I mention this to people, I rarely get past the first sentence before they stop hearing what I’m saying. This happens because most people use the term “ideology” to refer to something we in fact do have too much of in our world: weakly-held, unsubstantiated, and not quite clearly understood opinions about everything from how an economy works to religion to the science of viruses. The first task, then, is to explain what I mean by ideology, and why we need it and should seek to produce it. Then I’ll explain how our ideologies today fail to do what an ideology should. Finally, I’ll attempt to make a case for a particular kind of ideology we might produce today, which I believe is the only kind capable of saving humanity and the planet.
I can’t see that one more attempt to explain the vital need to consciously produce our ideologies would be of interest to anyone except perhaps the couple dozen people on the planet beside myself who already see that this is so.
Then I thought I’d attempt another essay on the cult of mindfulness. This was prompted by two things: the use of forced “mindfulness” sessions in my local school district, and a recent visit to an addiction rehab in which there are now daily mindfulness sessions and weekly lecture about mindfulness although nobody there seems to have any idea at all what they mean by the term. The idea that one can be forced to perform a kind of non-surgical lobotomy on oneself, and that this would somehow make kids better at school and cure addicts of their addiction is troubling. Of course, it doesn’t do a great deal of harm. Kids just put their phones on their laps and ignore the mindfulness teacher, and treatment for addiction already had a 100% failure rate anyway. But what it does is excuse educators and therapists from trying to come up with something that might actually fix the problem they are being paid to solve. Instead, they can just accuse the failing children and relapsing addicts of not being mindful enough!
In thinking about this, I came across a post Glenn Wallis wrote a decade ago on his Blog: https://speculativenonbuddhism.com/2012/02/10/mindful-lobotomy/ I don’t think I can say it better, or that I would get a better response than is evidenced in the comments on Glenn’s post.
So, this may not be an intervention, except in the sense that it is asking both readers of this blog to think about this problem: is “fail again, fail better” anything more than another bourgeois bromide? Might it be best to find altogether new ways to force people to think? Are we just reasoning with madmen and children?
And if a new approach is needed, what might it look like?
Interventions 
Thanks for this reflection, Tom. I think–agonize, get depressed, wonder, despair–about each of the several questions you pose here. I do so daily, hourly even. My own conclusion (for the time-being) is just to keep going as I am able. I would love to find a new approach, one that would cut through the cacophony and land the punch I desire. But I don’t believe there is such a thing. We live in the Tower of Babel. Beckett’s “fail again, fail better” can certainly serve as yet another bourgeois bromide, but not in your case. In your case, it will function much differently, indeed. I encourage you to jump back in with both feet and, yes, fail you will, but maybe better.
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Hey Glenn,
I don’t know. All I have to offer would be logical argument and concrete evidence–which I am told won’t persuade anyone these days. You can’t reason with a child who won’t let the nurse do a strep test (I know this from experience with my own child). Merely telling them that sticking this swab in their throat might save their life doesn’t work. And merely pointing out to people that pretending to be mindful as a cure for addiction could kill them won’t work either. There just must be some kind of maturational process first, before reason can be of use. I’m not sure what that might look like, though. Or how to get anyone to look away from TikTok long enough to even register how miserable their lives really are.
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I don’t like anything I’ve read from Henry James. But I do like his response to the question of what the artist does: “we work in the dark, we give what we can, we give what we have.” I like that saying because it so exactly matches my own experience and struggle with persuading people, or, indeed, just having an informed, intelligent dialogue. I think the James quote continues along the lines of “our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.” This may sound somewhat Romantic, but it also captures so well my own experience with this business of thinking and writing and teaching. And that’s what is important to me., to get some uplift and encouragement. The same goes for Beckett and Zen when they speak on doubt and the need simply to go on. I quite literally can’t go on. The life dedicated to thought and transformative change is too full of despair. I can’t go on. And I will go on.
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This might be the most important post on this blog yet. How do you “intervene” in a discourse in which thought is forbidden, mocked, despised? Is there any point in even trying to do this? I don’t know what the answer to this is, and struggle with that fact daily and even hourly, as Glenn says. I’m young enough to retain some naive hope in the possibility of convincing people about the importance of ideology, but also old enough to be cynical too. I go back and forth between the two depending on the day.
So, is it worth trying? As you know, Tom, just the act of trying might be the only way to stay sane and not lose your mind. I mean that literally, of course: trying and failing again better is the only hope at keeping the collective mind you are a part of alive. Your writing helps people like me clarify and increase our understanding of the problem of ideology. Will this make a difference? Hard to say. There’s a good chance it won’t. But remaining faithful to the truth requires keeping the truth alive in some collective mind. When I’m not working to keep this collective mind alive, I start to lose it. And I become a subject I’d rather not be. That is, I’m either reading and writing, trying to keep a critical collective mind alive, or I’m rotting away. There is no in between, there is no giving up on humanity without giving up on myself.
Again, this might be my youthful naivety speaking. But for me the problem is ensuring the truth remains possible to think, even if the prospects of incorporating many more people into a collective mind that can do so are not encouraging. Really, the only other option in losing your mind completely.
Still, the need to find some new strategies strikes me as obviously important and something to think through. I’m afraid I’m at a dead end there. I will just say that the only way to come up with new ways of reaching people is to increase our understanding of ideology. Really, this could be the only point in a scientific theory of ideology, if there is such a point. Continuously writing, even if you are making the same arguments, can help those bad subjects who might be open to them more likely to clarify their own position. I know it seems like this never happens, but clearly it does. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.
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Reblogged this on Non-Buddhism and commented:
Over at the stimulating new blog, “Interventions,” Tom Pepper asks: “Why try again? This is the question I’ve been asking myself every day lately. Is it worthwhile to try one more time, to attempt to ‘fail better’?”
If any of you, my readers, have ever tried to incite change in our collective thought and action, change that you deem valuable, even necessary, then you know the struggle animating Tom’s questions. Read on!
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I’m still doubtful that it is worth the effort to write a book like the one I had planned, and certainly don’t think there is anything to be gained by yet another essay on the evils of mindfulness. Reasoning with children and lunatics accomplishes nothing.
I don’t know what kind of experience would lead to maturation, to a cure for our anti-intellectual insanity. The assumption for most Aristotelians (and Thomists, I believe) is that the general culture, the community or polis, will gradually teach children to reason, and eventually to enjoy the use of their intellects. Clearly, the goal of our ISAs here in the US is the opposite, though. And once one reaches adulthood hating thought and disdaining reason, it is ever possible to overcome this?
Today I read that the next five years are expected to bring record high temperature, with disastrous effects for food and water supplies. And all those psychoactive drugs they’ve got everyone addicted to? Now you can’t get them because of “supply chain issues” and low profit margins on generic drug production–so there’ll be hordes of folks withdrawing from drugs meant to treat imaginary mental illnesses. Perhaps these things combined will bring sufficient chaos under heaven to push people to think? Probably not, though. But it would make for an interesting alternative to the ubiquitous “and then a mysterious illness decimated the population” post-apocalyptic novel. What if the apocalypse didn’t diminish the population at all, and was not an accident of nature but humanly caused?
I’d like to think that something other than a disaster could prompt people to think, but I can’t see what would do it. And until we start thinking, we can’t possibly produce more adequate ideologies.
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Hi Tom, I’ve read those same articles in the Times and the “smart” comments from people who for the most never quite see that the juggernaut of capitalism just doesn’t hold any real solutions to any of them. Try saying something outside the box, unorthodox or outside the circuit of the profit and very few will pay you any attention.
This morning I pulled your Indispensable Goods from my shelf and starting reading it again. It really feels good to dig into it again, like an old friend. What a masterful piece of work it is! Of course I am mostly just a dusty old guy, but I must say it’s the most important book I’ve ever had my hands on. Thank you for that, Tom!
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Hey Danny, great to hear from you. Yes, I’m just a dusty old guy myself. I’m glad a few people got something from that book. I may have to withdraw it from Amazon for a time, though. They’ve changed their pricing, and I’m going to have to edit and “republish” the book to try to keep the price down. It’ll give me a chance to correct a slew of typos, though!
I think one of my concerns is whether it is worth the time in front of the computer to revise a book that probably nobody will ever buy another copy of. I party wrote it to give to my kids when they finished college. Well, my oldest has graduated, I gave her a copy, and she wouldn’t even open it. But still, it’s there if she ever wants to, I guess.
I had thought I’d try writing a much shorter and more “accessible” (I hate that word) book about what is wrong with our ideologies today, and what happens when we are without ideologies altogether. But I don’t know that I have the mental capacity to write such a thing anymore—which is why I wrote “Indispensable Goods” when I did.
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I wonder if Nietzsche’s distinction between passive and active nihilism is relevant to the issue of this discussion? His warning about passive nihilism certainly galvanized me into action as a young man–however little that action may have been worth. Thoughts?
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I’m not sure how useful Nietzsche can be in this matter. I have Covid, for the second time, so I’m not really able to write a clear response right now. But my initial thoughts are that Nietzsche’s idea of active nihilism depends too much on an illusion of extreme individualism. This seems to be the problem haunting “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”—the idea that we should each create our own meaning, that we should depend on nobody.
Personally, I think nihilism takes things too far. Certainly it is true that all of our mind-dependent reality, our values and social formations, are open to change. But just as certainly there are truths that are not. Some of them will limit what kinds of social formations we can thrive in. We are rational animals by nature, social beings, and have an innate need to understand the world and to participate in the choice of our collective projects. When we are denied these things, we are not fully human, and are miserable. When we don’t even know we need these things it is even worse. My approach has always been to encourage collective discussions—we cannot create meaning individually, beginning from nothing, indifferent to others. Meaning is always and only a collective thing—despite Nietzsche’s fantasy, we cannot even feed or clothe ourselves without the cooperation of a community.
So, sure, it would be great if everyone saw the social constructedness of our values as an opportunity for freedom, instead of seeing it as a source of despair. Most young people today seem to have embraced the passive nihilism that is encouraged by our hegemonic ideology. I don’t know that Nietzsche is the best alternative to this.
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I also just finished reading Indispensable Goods again and really enjoyed it. It seemed much clearer to me now than it did three years ago. Deacon’s The Symbolic Species (helping me to understand how symbolic communication may be a central feature of human nature) and Spinoza’s Ethics (helping me see more clearly how human freedom can be understood as the ability to exercise our natural capacities) have been especially useful, I think, in clarifying some crucial points for me since my last time reading it. I might add that Adler’s “How to Read a Book”, mentioned, I think, by Sonoran Ghost a few years ago on Tom’s blog, has also been quite helpful. Until I read it, I hadn’t even realized that I was reading rather poorly.
It seems to me that we are still trapped in the dilemma that Adorno describes somewhere in his Minima Moralia: On the whole, we can only see the two options of either remaining a “child”, attached to a disempowering fantasy of a world without effort, or becoming an “adult” and adapting to the world as it is (i.e. taking the capitalist market and other existing cultural practices as beyond question) – options which we often seem to combine to some extent, for example by being an “adult” at work and in (some aspects of our) personal relationships and a “child” in our pursuit of entertainment. What remains mostly unthinkable for us, it seems, is that there may be a different kind of maturity which avoids and transcends both of these positions that leave us unsatisfied. At least, I would say that this has been my personal experience for most of my life so far.
My sense is that learning usually appears to most of us – even intelligent and relatively educated people – like an activity firmly in the “adult” category, just a boring matter of memorizing more knowledge authorized and fixed in advance by the Other, useful at best to “win” the discussion at the next family dinner. Either that or it feels unsettling because it seems to threaten to take away the “child” position from us. It reminds us that we could, in fact, be doing something more satisfying than playing video games or watching videos on YouTube – and because we cannot see another option, we think that this would mean we must become “adults” (in the sense described above) permanently.
A while ago, I read an article by a neuroscientist (here’s the link for German-speaking readers: https://telepolis.de/-4780309) who argues that arguments and evidence never really convince anybody and that only creating a personal connection between people can do so. His conclusion seems to be that we ought to consider “human warmth” as more important than the “ice queen” truth. But I’m not quite willing to accept that these two things just must be mutually exclusive. Is there perhaps some way to make truth (an integral part of) a “third thing” we all have in common (as in Brecht’s poem “Praise of the third thing”)? Something that can bring us closer together precisely when we all try to be close to it?
Of course, that’s not an answer to Tom’s question. I have occasionally wondered whether a truth-friendly ideology could be produced by a video game designed in the right way. But as far as I can tell, one of the major appeals of video games for most people is precisely that they offer “activity” that requires no engagement with real-world questions, sort of like a daydream turned into an object one can interact with. So I doubt it, but who knows.
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Hi Ian, good to hear from you.
I used to use that Adler book when I was teaching a class called “Inventing Literature.” Adler is usually seen as a stuffy old conservative dimwit–and his book on Aristotle is certainly terrible; but “How to Read a Book” is quite useful in an age when actually reading and understanding what you read is generally frowned upon.
I would agree that it is in fact the case that solid arguments an concrete factual evidence will not convince anyone today. I just don’t believe this is a feature of the human brain; it is a result of the hegemonic (capitalist) ideology. As Badiou describes this ideology, there are bodies and there are opinions. The goal of the neuro-everything disciplines is to convince us that the current dominant ideology is in fact hardwired into our brains.
I still believe that if we can get people to question their ideology, recognize that it is an ideology, then they will be capable of being persuaded by arguments and evidence. Personally, I have often been persuaded to change my position when I encountered new evidence or better arguments. I remember once reading about an incident involved the economist John Maynard Keynes. He was accused of being a hypocrite because he changed his position on something (I don’t recall what). His response was (paraphrasing) “I change my beliefs to fit the evidence; what do you do?” This, of course, is not the way people generally operate today. If you alter your position when presented with new evidence, you are accused of being a weak-minded opportunist, and are no longer to be taken seriously.
I’d agree that video games, in my limited exposure to them, seem mostly to be in the realm of childish fantasy–like most movies in America today, where there is always someone with a super-power. Unfortunately, literature seems to be following that path as well: the “literary” is pure fantasy wish fulfillment.
I like your way of putting this: either we are adults, who accept capitalism as the structure of the very universe, or we are children living in the fantasy world of comic books and video games. What is that third alternative?
By the way, do you have a copy of that Brecht poem? I just looked through my copy of the collected poems of Brecht, and it isn’t in there, so I suppose it is from one of the plays?
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The poem I mentioned seems indeed to be from the play “The Mother”. It is included in my (German, my native language) copy of Brecht’s collected poems and that’s where I know it from. I don’t know the play myself, but I’m guessing that in Brecht’s text the “third thing” refers to some kind of revolutionary, collective project. A mother explains that she has been able to keep close to her son because they were both engaged in this third thing, common to many people.
The only alternative I can see (or, rather, glimpse) to the “child” and “adult” positions is the one I take you, Tom, to be advocating throughout your writing: engaging, together with others, in efforts to understand and to transform the world with awareness that what we do is not demanded of us by the universe or our biology etc. I have been fantasizing for a while now about trying to find or start an in-person group that engages in the kind of work done on this blog or in Imaginary Relations or even just studying the work of thinkers like Danziger, Taylor, Lacan, Marx and so on. But, so far, I have not had the courage to attempt to go through with this idea. The few unskillful attempts I have made so far to discuss some of the things I believe I have learned with people I know did not really go anywhere.
I am currently undergoing a CBT-based inpatient treatment, having been diagnosed with OCD when I went to a psychologist in a state of despair. I have been attempting to use the experience as an opportunity for a kind of anthropological study. It is my first time seeing CBT and, more generally, the DSM-based psychiatric-medical apparatus first-hand.
Now, I don’t want to suggest that the treatment is all bad. I think my stay has helped me to some extent (and several other patients have stated that it has helped them), but my personal impression so far is that this is not so much because of the CBT (let alone the mindfulness training – I didn’t think I’d ever “do mindfulness” again since my encounter with SNB 10 years ago) but mostly due to the fact that interactions with the staff and especially the other patients have restored me to a tolerable level of interpellation into *some* ideology – even if it means being perpetually exposed to things like a taken for granted belief in the medical model of mental illness.
Earlier this week I started rereading Kurt Danziger’s Naming the Mind. At first, the evidence from ethnopsychology that Danziger describes in the first chapter confirmed for me that the medical model of mental illness is based on demonstrably incorrect assumptions about human nature. But a few days and some conversations with psychologists and fellow patients later, I find it difficult to remember this point (and others) at all. Importantly, it is not that I have learned anything, some kind of evidence or argument that put into question my beliefs. Rather, I feel like my motivation to think and to hold on to the beliefs I have arrived at through my (however feeble) efforts at investigation simply fades away to some extent and it is a struggle to regain it. Perhaps it’s a bit like what Russell Jacoby called social amnesia: Views that do not fit in with the hegemonic ideology are just forgotten.
Then again, I’m not really sure if what I am trying to describe here is a more or less universal feature of how ideology works for everyone or a more personal problem. I wonder if other people have similar experiences? At any rate, I’m reminded of a method the great mathematician Felix Klein once recommended to protect oneself from the force of established doctrine: Move 600 kilometers away from the place where it is established and see how things look from there. One will be astonished, he says, how many apparently self-evident views will suddenly disappear. For me, this blog can sometimes function as a place 600 kilometers away from the dominant discourses about human conduct, a place that I can move to for a short time.
On a different note, I have been working on an essay on freedom and choices (inspired originally by reading Spinoza’s Ethics and Chaim’s essay on The Ethics of Desire) for a while now. I’m not sure if it’s really an intervention in the sense of this blog, but I try to untangle and correct some of our common-sense assumptions about freedom and the importance of choices. It’ll probably take a while longer for me to finish, though.
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Ian: I’d love to read the essay on freedom and choice when you’re done with it. This is a topic I’ve spent considerable time on–most young people today seem to be thorough determinists about everything and everyone else in the world, but maintain the belief that they alone have complete “free will”, whatever that means.
I’m curious about the Brecht poem partly because I’m currently working on a novel with the working title “The Third Thing”; the title comes from Lucretius: “There has to be some cause for motion beyond mass and motion, some third thing which is in us, which keeps the mind from being matter’s slave” (my own, very loose translation).
I’d be very interested to hear about your experience with CBT. I can’t imagine how it could possibly work with OCD. I’ve had many, many students in the last decade who were diagnosed with OCD (I’d say upwards of thirty). They generally said they were given medication, not therapy. I do know that CBT for substance abuse and depression have been total failures–but it is still considered the only “empirically validated” treatment for those problems. And nowadays we have to add some vague new-age “mindfulness” nonsense to every kind of treatment, from cancer to poor school performance to schizophrenia.
I almost always feel like I’m 600 kilometers away from whoever I’m talking to at the moment.
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Tom: I am also always puzzled when people speak of free will, wondering what exactly they mean by this. Actually, I rarely experience people explicitly using that term (outside of philosophical writing on the determinism-free will debate). When they do use it, they sometimes seem to mean simply an ability to disagree with what parents or other figures of authority say. At other times, it seems that there is an underlying assumption that we have an ability to make choices that are not further explicable in any way, a Baron-Münchhausen-pulling-himself-out-of-the-swamp-by-his-own-hair-like creatio ex nihilo. I would certainly say, from my personal experience, that it is much easier (in terms of both intellectual effort and moral courage) to admit that everyone else is determined than to get even a rough idea of the concrete forces by which one has been constructed oneself.
To be fair, I did not mind the “mindfulness” as much as I initially thought I would. The instructor seemed to mean by mindfulness… well, actually, it wasn’t quite clear to me. On the one hand, we did “classic” exercises like focusing on the bodily sensations involved in breathing. But at other times, she would give us some gestalt switch pictures, asking us to look at them carefully to find the different ways of perceiving the images. Or give us some rocks and ask us to examine them with various senses. I’m not sure how these different practices are supposed to be connected. She repeatedly explained the point of mindfulness exercises as relaxation and stress relief. But there also seemed to be an assumption that we can train ourselves to notice things we don’t normally notice, that this is a separate skill that one can gain proficiency in. Occasionally listening to birds chirp or studying a flower we never really paid attention to before seems fine to me, but I doubt it will make us more likely to notice more important things such as that the existence of state-run welfare programs is basically proof that capitalism is terrible at satisfying even the most basic human needs.
Well, as I said, I’m not so sure the CBT really helped all that much in and of itself. My sense is that what helped me primarily was spending time among and with other people and coming to be part of a group again. To realize, over time, that other people don’t see me as the shit stain that I felt like. Before my stay at the clinic, I had been increasingly avoiding people for months and feeling extremely isolated and alienated from everybody. Anyway, I’ll send you a separate mail in which I try to describe some of my experiences with CBT.
There is a theoretical aspect of the treatment that left me wondering (well, actually there were several), namely the assumption in Salkovskis’s model of OCD (which was the theoretical justification we were given for the treatment approach) that intrusive thoughts such as steering into a crowd while driving, which we were told are quite common in the general population, are just meaningless “noise”. My therapist told me early on that nobody knows “why the brain does this” (i.e. produce intrusive thoughts). Perhaps I’m naively jumping to conclusions based on the bit of psychoanalytic literature that I have read, but I cannot help but wonder if such thoughts are not expressive of some kind of “unconscious” resentment that capitalist subjects have for each other. (For example, I imagine that a frequent cause of such resentment could be that, at some level, we see other people as both competition for opportunities to sell our labor power and as representatives of the system that requires us to do this in the first place.) I don’t want to suggest, of course, that having such thoughts necessarily implies being at all close to committing the acts which are their content. Still, I’ve had enough personal experiences that could have been contributions to the “Psychopathology of Everyday Life” to make the assumption that “cognitive intrusions” are just random events that have nothing at all to do with the people they occur to seem dubious to me.
On one of the few occasions where I tried to point out something that seemed questionable to me, I was told, essentially, that psychiatry is inherently fuzzy and I shouldn’t worry about the details too much. I think what I had questioned was that “thoughts” and “feelings” are totally separate things, the former causing the latter. Now, I’m no stranger to the fact that theory-building often requires making simplifying or idealizing assumptions. But this assumption seemed to me plain wrong. Even leaving aside evidence from ethnopsychology or the like, that just doesn’t seem to me to correspond with my own experience.
I’m looking forward to your novel. I read The Aristotle Book last year and found it hard to put down, finishing it within a few days. (I don’t read too many novels these days, but when I do, it usually takes me much longer to finish them. I think the only other novel that I read so quickly within the last few years was Houellebecq’s Serotonin.) I found it a bit depressing at the time because the hope of improving the sad state of the world that the novel points to tends to seem so slim. On the other hand, it did inspire me to attend a course on the “theory and ethics of the natural sciences” for a while.
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Ian: It does seem to me to be fairly typical of the cult of mindfulness for instructors to be rather unclear about what they mean by the term. It becomes a vague term for whatever they feel like doing. However, the one unifying element seems to be an attempt to convince us that we can never be anything but passive observers of our lives–everything is just sensory input that we can only watch, even our thoughts and feelings and actions are just the activity of our deterministic brains and we can’t control them, only passively observe them. OCD, then, can be explained as the result of a defective brain, in which our dualistic “deep self” is trapped. Personally, I think the psychoanalytic explanation is much more convincing. Probably the “intrusive thoughts” are the result of our position in the symbolic order. The need to avoid “interpreting” our intrusive thoughts is a part of the ideological function of psychology.
I think the common understanding of free will is related to this. The students I talked to about this always believed that everyone but them was a completely determined automaton. Only they, because of their special knowledge (most were in the field now called “behavioral neuroscience”, which basically means they are going to be trying to train children diagnosed as being on the “autism spectrum” to behave better in class; some were in fields like finance). In any case, free will is understood as the ability to act differently when put in exactly the same situation–if I were again in that same moment, with the same psychological state and the same external conditions, could I take a different action? They all believe they have this free will because of their position as (potential) therapists or financial advisors, but only they have it–so all other people can be successfully manipulated.
In CBT, the patient is tortured by a completely determined brain malfunction, and the therapist, whose thoughts are not merely accident (only his thoughts are under his control, and reflect reality–this is not true of anyone else at any time), can manipulate the patient to restore him to normal functioning.
Sorry you found my novel depressing. I suppose it is, a bit. My hope was that the reader might see what the character Liam Lyman never does, and by gaining more knowledge also gain more understanding. In the novel I’m working on now, I’m trying a different approach. Like Lanny Budd in Upton Sinclair’s “Word’s End” books, I trying to have the main character(s) actually gain the knowledge to escape the dilemma. I’ve always been frustrated by novels like Zola’s, where the reader is meant to see a truth the characters are never able to grasp–but in “The Aristotle Book” I did the same thing…
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Tom: We got some handouts that do say such questionable things about supposedly neutral observing and not “identifying” with one’s thoughts. (I would even agree that “I am not my thoughts”, just like I am not my brain. But it seems clear to me that both are essential parts of what I am. Yet this conclusion is, of course, not what the “I am not my thoughts” advocates seem to have in mind.) The instructor also made statements such as “Your brain helps you with everything you do”. The context here was that we should direct our attention to positive things, because if we think of negative things, “our brains” will amplify the associated negative feelings or something like that. There does seem to be a clear dualism here: There is my brain and then there is “me”, apparently separate from the brain and able to freely direct the spotlight of “attention” anywhere I want. On the other hand, to her credit, the instructor said to us that while we should accept bad things we cannot change, if we can change them, then we should. Of course, the big question then is what we can and what we cannot change. I suspect that most people will implicitly assume this to mean “things that I can individually change by solitary action” and consider the larger social formation as something we just have to accept.
I think you’re probably right that the “same conditions, different choice” formulation best captures the common-sense idea of free will. Someone once said to me that they considered examining how one wants to relate to one’s family a perfectly acceptable thing to do because it was part of the exercise of free will. From this (and one or two other uses of the term that I witnessed) I derived the first sense that I described above. But maybe that’s a German peculiarity and the term isn’t used in this sense by English speakers?
My current understanding of the issue would be that if I were to accept that I could have chosen differently in the past, then it would follow that the choice wasn’t determined by who I was at the time, including what I wanted or intended to do. And then it seems to make no sense to say that it was my choice at all; it would have been not something that I did, but rather something that happened to me. So either we must give up on freedom altogether or see it as a certain kind of determination, a determination by the “right” causes. The difficult question about the nature of freedom then becomes what these “right causes” are… and this is mainly the part I’m still trying to think through more carefully for my essay.
However, some people seem to believe that the choice does depend precisely on what I want to do, but what I want to do is mysterious and inexplicable, what one might call a “primitive cause”. Concretely, I was thinking of a quote from some historian that I once read. I don’t know the book that it was taken from, but in the context of the article in which I encountered this quote, it seemed to summarize his conclusions about why the Germans perpetrated the holocaust like this: “They did it because they wanted to.” To my mind, this is not an answer because it raises the question: How did they come to want to do something so horrific? That’s what reminded me of the idea of a “creatio ex nihilo”.
There was actually another idea about freedom that occurred to me that does involve a kind of indeterminism, though not in the sense of “I could have chosen to act differently”. Rather, my idea was that perhaps there do occur spontaneous events in the universe in which something radically new comes into being through a process that cannot be fully explained by causes and conditions. Basically, I’m wondering whether we should understand the coming-into-being of metaphysical objects (in the sense you use that term in Indispensable Goods) as instances of such spontaneity. The (possible) connection with human freedom occurred to me when I was reading Bruce Fink’s “The Lacanian Subject” (specifically, his discussion of Lacan’s concepts of structure, cause and metaphor). As an illustrative example, my idea was that “flashes of insight”, in which a solution to a problem that one has been working on for a while suddenly comes, could be spontaneous events in this sense. We cannot intentionally bring about such an insight directly, but we can intentionally bring about conditions that are conducive to its occurrence (and without which it is extremely unlikely to happen). The new “object” created would be the new insight or perhaps rather the subject that has been altered by it. I’m not really convinced by this story myself (because I’m reluctant to accept the idea of something that is inexplicable in principle), but I think it might be a potentially worthwhile line of thought.
I think my impression of CBT is essentially the same as yours. The idea did seem to be that the patient is a kind of perception-response machine and the therapist is a mechanic whose task is to fix some defect of the machine. The question of how the therapist can avoid being such a machine herself simply remains unreflected. (The therapist I worked with would sometimes try to soften the blow of his suggestions by saying something like “I know this sounds kind of mechanistic”, as if admitting the problem made it irrelevant.) If, on the other hand, we accept that the therapist is also such a “machine”, then what, exactly, qualifies her to help? How can we even tell what “correct functioning” is if we are all just such machines? In my opinion, you explain this problem very well in your chapter on reductionism in Indispensable Goods, which I found quite helpful: Attempts to deny (in thought!) the causal power of thought always lead to a performative contradiction.
Looking at what I wrote above, it seems that I forgot to mention what I liked about “The Aristotle Book”. By coincidence, I found a personal note the other day which I had made not too long after reading your novel: “For me, this combination of philosophical reflection and (fictitious) biography works really well: I was excited to learn about Aristotle’s thought through the protagonist’s attempt to make sense of his own life. I also found it useful that Liam Lyman explains how his views developed over the years.” Regarding the “depressing” part: it may not really have been your book that was at fault; thinking back, I get the sense that I found pretty much everything I read or watched depressing back then. So perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned this. Also, I’m afraid that I’m still not very good at reading fiction. For example, I have a tendency to take everything the narrator says at face-value, sort of as if I’m taking the idea of an omniscient narrator literally. I suspect that this tendency may in part be explicable as a consequence of having grown up reading wish-fulfillment novels like “Harry Potter”, where one submits, in a sense, to the narrative voice, in the hope of being rewarded with passive states of fantastic bliss.
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“if I were to accept that I could have chosen differently in the past, then it would follow that the choice wasn’t determined by who I was at the time, including what I wanted or intended to do. And then it seems to make no sense to say that it was my choice at all; it would have been not something that I did, but rather something that happened to me.”
This is exactly the problem. It is so difficult, given how most everyone thinks of the world today, to explain this to people.
Lately, I’ve struggled to find any motivation to write at all. I want to just sit around and read, do some little home repair projects, go for hikes. Now, I could construe this as a failure of the “will”, or on the other hand as the result of the inevitable determinism of a failed social formation. However, I tend to see it as a need to gain more knowledge, to learn what might be a useful intervention at this time.
I don’t see “freedom” as a matter of will at all, but as a matter of the use of our unique capacity, as humans, to gain knowledge about the world through the use of symbolic systems. That is to say, the question is not whether I could have done differently in the exact same situation, but whether I would do differently in an essentially similar situation but with the addition of the knowledge I gained from last time! Just as plants have the power to reproduce and colonize new areas, we have the capacity to gain more knowledge and alter our future. If that power loses out to the tendencies supposedly “hardwired” into us (greed, lust, violence, sloth, etc.), then we will simply prove to be another evolutionary accident, and wipe out our own species.
The strategy of containment that global capitalism is currently taking is to demonize thought and objective knowledge, and to minimize people’s capacity to use symbolic systems. For instance, universities today are mostly moving away from literacy skills to what they call “media literacy” or “visual literacy”: that is, the tendency to be influenced in the proper way by social media, to be affected correctly by images or music–but never to think critically about such things, which would require actual literacy, use of the written word. Anyone still advocating the importance of written words is denounced as a musty old conservative unable to keep up with the times.
I’m not sure yet what the solution is…I may not be “smart enough” to find it–that is, there may not be a collective mind of which I am allowed to be a part which can figure this out. But I hope some of the many collective minds which I am excluded from are doing better!
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In my current thinking, I make a distinction between freedom and agency. On an abstract level, I see “freedom” as I understand Spinoza to define it: as being determined by one’s nature. In the more concrete case of an animal, it seems reasonable to me to say that its actions are “determined by its nature” if it is able to satisfy all of its natural needs (or at least the most important ones). Like you, I also tend to understand our power for symbolic thought as a way of changing the future by reflecting on the past. This gives us the ability to decrease the extent to which external forces (e.g. disease) interfere with the satisfaction of our needs – and this is what I think of as “agency”.
I am also inclined to believe that all animals have a need to exercise those natural abilities of theirs that are crucial to their being: A horse needs to be able to walk and run or its well-being will diminish and a human being needs to be able to make use of symbolic systems. If this is true, then it seems to follow that an important ingredient for our freedom lies in exercising our capacity for agency. In other words, to be free, we need to make an effort to become more free. However, this is perhaps a bit confusing and so it may be better to focus on what I have called agency, as you do in your description of “freedom” above.
I have also been spending a lot of time sitting around and reading. Well, and before reading Spinoza’s “Ethics” this spring, I had been engaged in another futile attempt to “treat” my discontent by playing video games. The odd thing is that I couldn’t even really enjoy this the way I used to, yet I played for hours on end anyway. Perhaps I was mostly trying to distract myself from a severe existential disorientation. Spinoza’s book helped a little with this; I stopped playing and started working on that essay. I tend to think that the reading is still partly a form of escapism. On the other hand, I think I am also searching for some knowledge that will help me move forward. However, I don’t really have a clear idea yet what exactly it is that I should see it as my task to try to find a solution for. But what else is there to do but to keep looking?
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Ian: Yes, perhaps “agency” is just the kind of freedom peculiar to humans. Our specific “natural ability” is the use of symbolic systems.
The return to video games seems to be a kind of akrasia–I’m familiar with this tendency myself, although not with video games particularly. Spinoza suggests that to overcome a habitual passion we need to have clearer and more complete ideas…but they need to be ideas which give us some power to act in the world. At least, this is my vague summary of my vague memory of Spinoza’s “Ethics.”
That’s the big question: how do we acquire ideas which can give us agency, and so help us escape the return to the same old habits, less enjoyable each time we return.
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