A spate of publications on atheism has been thrust at us recently: Richard Dawkins with The God Delusion; Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell; Michel Onfray’s The Atheist Manifesto; Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, a follow-on to his The End of Faith, and Christopher Hitchens’ The Portable Atheist. This one is also a sequel, to God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

They raise many questions, the dominant ones being whether they give us any deeper insight into ourselves, our needs as human beings, and ways to conduct our lives, individually and collectively.

On this score I argue that they fail miserably. They are negative, destroying much of mankind’s history, replacing it with an empty nothing – and in the process, they avoid a fundamental need of the human race. And some very strong values that we have developed over many centuries.

They, of course, give their answer to a question that has engaged thinkers for centuries. God does not exist, or as Dawkins puts it more believably: “There is almost certainly no God.”

 This talk presents three concerns with The New Atheists, as they term themselves. I must point out that these concerns are not (nor could ever be) presented by a “believer”, for some of the arguments of the New Atheists are irrefutable.   And therefore acceptable. Others of their assertions, however, are totally unacceptable. Three in particular stand out: 

1. The books are extremely scathing of religious people, and deeply anti-religion. The viciousness behind their attacks on the fundamental beliefs of the great majority of people in this country is often based on a false premise, and certainly unnecessary. They lose the support of any thinking person concerned with human dignity and well-being. We will return to this point later.
2. If they want a target to attack, it is fundamentalism – fundamental Christianity, Judaism and Islam, as well as their own particular brand – fundamental atheism.  Their attacks, usually vicious, should have ended there. Instead, they embrace almost the entire human race  over most of its history
3. Their biggest failure however is understanding human nature.  Spiritual beliefs of many types have grown up over thousands of years.  They, along with our fears, our hopes, are intrinsic to human existence. Mankind started on the search for meaning long before the religions that the new Atheists attack were ever dreamed of. That search continues. I argue that the New Atheists have not even begun to join us on this journey.

Religion is a man-made device, they claim, developed from our fear of the unknown and of life after death. Our need for consolation in times of difficulty; to ask for help from a loving God, have also been causes.

Dennett takes our religious history back further, claiming shamanism as the forerunner to today’s organised religions. How witch doctors transformed their practices into Christian beliefs, however, or into any structured religion for that matter, and why they waited the greater part of human existence to do so, is not too clear.

    From these needs, from our concern with why, our need for reason, mankind has created religious and spiritual beliefs. Some, not all, of the religions created a God. The three religions that the New Atheists target in particular, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, believe in a God who created the universe. A God who created the universe, who is  loving , omnipotent, and who listens to our prayers. 

In that we cannot bring convincing empiricism either way to this argument, logic tells us that we can only be agnostic. Agnostic in the sense that we do not know. Dawkins says we cannot prove that there is or is not a God (although he comes down heavily on the atheistic side). But, if we do believe, what sort of God are we talking about?  Most of us suspect that a God who brings such horrors on the world, cannot be a loving God. And for a God that is omnipotent, including unsurpassed rational abilities, creation appears more like an idle game of draw poker than possessing any deep seated reason or purpose. We must also entertain great doubts about personal appeals to God in times of difficulty. It is certainly contradictory to see why he ignores appeals from both sides in wars between Christian nations. Or why the young and innocent suffer, sometimes cruelly, despite the prayers of the faithful.  

But we have equal difficulty with the Atheists beliefs in the creation of the universe. It is, to me,  impossible to have a universe without any beginning.  A universe that goes back and back in time, forever, is inconceivable – as unbelievable as the miracles so castigated by the current crop of writers. Nor is our understanding assisted by a universe created out of a “Big Bang”. There must have been something there to bang.  The arguments for quantum mechanics are also not so easy to understand. As the Dawkins’ quote says, anybody who claims to understand quantum theory does not understand it. Multiple universes – multiverses – in time and space are incomprehensible.

Charles Darwin, whose Decent of Man opened our minds to many possibilities about our origins, states  the obvious “the extreme difficulty, or rather impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe … (as) a result of blind chance … I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic”.

This writer, like Darwin, and I suspect Richard Dawkins, does not know how the universe was created. And whether there was a why.  Two of us at least admit to being agnostic.

To turn to their attacks on the three religions.

Hitchens’ introduction is brash to the point of being offensive. Religion is “irrational” or “evil nonsense”. It castigates the “dumb credulity” of believers, characterised by an Archbishop of Canterbury who is an “old fool” or a “cretinous” Bishop of Carlisle.  His strongest condemnation, however, must be from his God is not Great, where organised religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.” Whew! When 80% of the people in this nation classify themselves as religious!

 Read their subtitles – they are just as violent..  Hitchens’ subtitle is How Religion Poisons Everything!  Everything!? Surely not everything, Christopher?  Harris’s subtitle puts Religion & Terror together.  Dawkins’ TV series that accompanied his book is titled The Root of All Evil?  All Evil? with a question mark. Thank the Lord for the question mark, Richard.  

First prize in this slanging match, however, must go to the philosopher Michel Onfray, who writes with an overblown turgidity, without references, footnotes or an index: presumably to avoid us checking his sources for  the “nonsense” and “man-made foolery” he ascribes to today’s religions; and the “deceptive, travestied and hypocritically” promulgating of their beliefs.

 Sitting in front of your TV, watching Dawkins’ mounting aggressiveness in his interview with an evangelical preacher elicits sympathy for the preacher, not support for Dawkins. Even when you know that evangelising fundamentalists are the root of much distress in this world.   For fundamental Christianity is of great concern. But the approach of Dawkins and his Four Horsemen -  aggressive confrontation is not the answer. The Christian Right in the US is one of the causes, along with fundamental Judaism, behind the successive Middle East crises and the rise of terrorism.  It should also be noted, of course, that Hitchens supports the war in Iraq, and has been publicly embraced by the neo-conservatives. For him to saddle all believers in this world with being “allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry” and Dawkins to describe religion as “the root of all evil” are leaps that no balanced person could make.  They are statements which makes one doubt the intellectual honesty of the New Atheists and their condemnation of those with religious beliefs. 

The bellicose history of religion is a common theme of attack. “The assertion of one God, violent, jealous, quarrelsome and intolerant, has generated more hate, bloodshed, deaths and brutality than it has peace”, Hitchens tells us. Dennett, perhaps the least intolerant of these militants, is still not above describing the “fanatical” … “delusion” of believers, nor of placing responsibility on religion for the genocides of mankind.

The Four Horsemen (also their term for themselves, excluding Onfray – I presume because he writes in French, not because they consider his vitriol excessive) do have substance in asserting this evil face of religion. Nevertheless, none of them admit that the cause of war may equally be in the winning of territory, power or resources. Nor in the megalomania of unfettered rulers. The two great wars of mankind – the world wars – did not have their origins in religion.

It is true that Christianity has much to apologise for: the Conquistadors, the Inquisition, the mass killings by the Crusaders. That they are of an earlier age appears to be irrelevant, for it is all lumped together with today’s Islamic terrorism. And despite there being much today in Christianity that all of us can be proud of.

Hitchens issued a challenge: “Name me an ethical statement made, or an action performed, by a believer that could not been …performed by a non-believer”. His challenge, of course, is nonsense. Ten minutes walk from where this writer lives is a church that feeds the lost and homeless daily. Scattered over this city are church-run refuges, homes for the elderly, and community assistance programs. In the pubs members of the Salvation Army collect money daily for their charities. There are no similar atheist charities

Is the Salvation Army collector that we are all so familiar with, “the root of all evil”?

This talk is being given at a café who profits go to the Third World and whose start up funding was given by a church based organisation. Is that “evil nonsense”?

If I may introduce a personal note. A few weeks back I attended the funeral service of a woman who had lived in a rural community for close on 50 years. It was at one of those small white wooden churches that we see in the Australian countryside. Her neighbours and friends over the years with that church were there, and they spoke of this small community. It was difficult to see the “violent, irrational, intolerant” side of those people.

Hitchens’ challenge in fact, is easily reversed: To identify any organised atheist charity, replicated many times over, that cares for the disadvantaged. I do not know of any in this city.

There are, of course, secular charities, many of them. Human beings are naturally moral. Some claim that altruism, or at least cooperating with others, is wired into our genes. But a point should be made clear – secular charities are not atheist charities, and cannot be claimed as a win for atheism.  In any case, it is fortunate perhaps, that the New Atheists are not into helping others in any organised way, given the evangelical vitriol with which their current writings condemn the majority of the human race.

And although it is irrelevant to the argument, it is interesting to note that many secular charities, often put forward as arguments for atheistic secularism, are far from atheistic in their origins:  The Red Cross, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Greenpeace among those so claimed.

Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, came from a very devout Calvinist family

Bill Gates, the world’s largest philanthropist, often claimed by atheists as one of their own, is actually agnostic.

Interviewed in 1995 on PBS by David Frost, Gates stated:

 I’m not somebody who goes to church on a regular basis. The specific elements of Christianity are not something I’m a huge believer in. There’s a lot of merit in the moral aspects of religion. I think it can have a very, very positive impact.  

…..In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don’t know if there’s a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.

Melinda Gates is valedictorian graduate of the Ursuline Academy of Dallas, an independent Catholic college for young women sponsored by the Ursuline Sisters.

On environmental issues, we have Greenpeace, along with many other secular movements. Wikipedia tells us that Irving Stowe, a member of the Society of Friends, can probably be described as the father of Greenpeace.

To move onto my third and most important concern. The failure of the New Atheists is less in their levels of intolerance and more in understanding the nature of human beings. That over history the greater part of mankind has sought comfort against the fear of the unknown is acknowledged. That we also seek comfort in difficult times is also acknowledged; and very human. These needs may well be at the root of religious beliefs. But we also seek meaning in our lives. We need to have a reason for being, even though we may be no more than an accidental emergence from the primordial slime.

No acknowledgement of these fundamental needs is put forward. Dawkins gives us ten atheistic commandments. Why ten, I do not know, but it is a start. Hitchens tries with the beauties of science and nature, the consolations of philosophy, with literature, poetry, art, music and architecture. They are presented as absorptions for a lifetime that do not depend on the supernatural, or “ghostly stories” (of religious people, needless to say). Wonderful as these pursuits may be, however, they are pastimes, pleasant fill-ins, without a deeper meaning beyond the normalities of our daily lives.

The failure to recognise the search for meaning is a criticism that must be levelled primarily at the philosophers among them, Onfray, Harris and Dennett. They are from the discipline that has, for 2,000 years, been asking this question of our meaning, our identity. Two of them, Onfray and Dennett, do not even try. Harris has an attempt to examine consciousness, but does not even come close. We will look at that in a minute.

This search for meaning, for purpose, is not new. We have been building our belief systems for thousands of years.  The Neanderthals, before Homo sapiens was fully evolved, believed in an after-life. Jainism, a religion originating about the 9^th century BCE advocated non violence, self control, and an emphasis on the immediate consequences of one’s behaviour.  

Half a thousand years after Jainism, Plato wrote The Republic, argued by some as his greatest dialogue, exploring similar issues. The protagonists, including Socrates, debated whether God exists. They also discussed many of today’s beliefs and uncertainties:  the immortality of the soul, whether the world below exists for punishment, and the purpose of our individual and collective lives. All this from a world we would call pagan, long before Christianity and Islam, and when the Israelites were far away, still struggling in the desert.  Socrates’ arguments emerged as the virtue of justice. Ideal justice is realised in the outward life of the community working through the inner life of the individual. In a state which is ordered to the good of the whole we would most likely find justice. And that state is built on inner virtue. And as Julia Annas argues, this is the end which Socrates urges us to seek.

The debate has continued since. If we are to accept Socrates, then our inner need is beyond ourselves, wider than the ideals of self-fulfillment proposed by so many commentators. Beyond the sales levels and profits of those out to make a fortune, beyond our careers and our life’s work, beyond what one commentator describes as “what we put into our own lives and how we interact with our loved ones, our friends and our colleagues.”

Dawkins’ ten atheist commandments do stretch out beyond the self. Sam Harris in Chapter Seven talks about consciousness.  It is totally concerned with self. Consciousness is self. Many commentators claimed that we have a purpose – our lives, our careers, our loved ones. Yes, they all are our various purposes, as we wish them to be. But it is again all self.  Our meaning, our purpose must be wider.

If we search back through the atheist philosophies of the past, through Mill, Hume, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, we find a questioning – a gentler, agnostic questioning. A clear condemnation of the excesses of religion, yes, along with sincere doubts about a personal God, but accompanied by an acknowledgement that we do not know.

JS Mill in his autobiography draws on his father to document both his upbringing and beliefs. “Concerning “ the origin of things , nothing can be known” . “Dogmatic atheists he looked upon as absurd.”

But Mill and his father rejected as inhumane some Christian concepts, particularly that of Hell.

And when we need comfort and reassurance? When a loved one dies? Is it meditation? Is it in the beliefs of other religions that these writers did not explore? Buddhism, for instance, that has no God? Or Daoism with its Three Jewels: – compassion, moderation, and humility? Or the teachings of Confucius, who also did not require us to pray to a God?

Or the beliefs and practices of the Druze, Zoroastrians, or many other religions, such as the Jains?

We need to accept that we are a spiritual people. Sam Harris also introduced at The End of Faith, our need for meditation. He believed.  In times of trouble to ask the universe for clarity, for greater understanding, for acceptance, can help us. We can ask for that understanding on a mountain top. On an empty beach. In a crowded, bustling city, an empty church, whether or not we believe that anybody is listening, is ideal.

The two themes, the need for meaning in our lives, and the requirement on us to think beyond our concerns, beyond our fear of misfortune, of the future, have given rise to the world’s belief systems. They arose long before the religious beliefs of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that our militant atheists have attacked so vigorously.  Their attacks, vitriolic as they are on the beliefs of so many people, on what can be seen as fundamental human needs held over many centuries, are off the planet. They will not win many converts.

The militants certainly will not replace current beliefs until they give us that deeper meaning. Until they argue if or if not, there is a why. And what it might be. Their arguments, though overblown and grossly offensive, do have a degree of rationality. Nevertheless, I would urge them to go further, to think through their answers to the problems humans face, problems and needs that were at the root of the earliest evolution of religious belief. And to come up with their thoughts. Then they may have made a contribution to human development.

Good evening everyone.

As many of you will know from my previous talks, I take us through large complicated subjects, and tonight I will do it again. But this should be a fun one, and there is lots of room for dissent and broad discussion after, so I am not going to perform a lengthy introduction on the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis. I am going to get right into he meat of it.

 What is psychoanalysis? 

For those of you here tonight unfamiliar with psychoanalysis, I will give a brief overview.

 The history of the major discoveries in psychoanalysis is largely interwoven with the life and professional career of a single man, Sigmund Freud.

The book ‘studies on Hysteria’ actually marks the beginning of psychoanalysis, although the term was not used by Freud until a year later (1896). Prior to this time, he spoke of “Breuer’s cathartic method,” and occasionally of “psychical analysis.”

Psychoanalysis is primarily two things:

1) It comprises of several interlocking theories concerning the functioning of the mind.

 2) Psychoanalysis is a therapeutic method for neurotic disorders.

I will briefly address the practise, then we will get into the theory.

 As therapeutic technique, psychoanalysis is different from psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychology and the other therapies we would refer to as “counselling” in general. Its difference comes from the stipulation of the existence of a psychic unconscious. It insists on analysis of this psychic unconscious and the integration of the contents of the unconscious as therapeutic procedure.  This is, very roughly, how psychoanalysis works. The Analyst, after hearing the thoughts of the Analysand (the analytic patient) formulates and then explains the unconscious basis for the patient’s symptoms and character problems. The patient is referred to as the Analysand because their role in realistically organising their thought is crucial to the analysis being able to take place. They are called the Analysand to give them a role as a partner in the formulation of the cure. Analysis takes place in the Analyst’s office, on the famous couch, where the analysand will lay down in order to be comfortable and most importantly, relaxed. Sigmund Freud discovered this technique. The Analyst asks that the Analysand be very honest in their communications. They will then be asked to speak about their childhood, dreams, hopes, wishes, and fantasies. This process usually beings with sessions of at least an hour, several times a week. Two visits a week minimum at first.  It is the role of the Analyst to create a safe environment by being sufficiently detached so they can hear without prejudice. Eventually, the analyst will direct the speaking or make slight interjections where they see an opportunity to get the analysand to break through a point of resistance. The analyst interprets the subconscious through the so-called “controlled” conscious communications of the analysand.  The role of the Analyst after listening carefully will be to intervene in order to break through the resistance to the original event that is built up subconsciously in the analysand. This resistance is the thing that is resulting in the disorder.  This will go on for months and or most likely years. The average length of time for proper psychoanalysis is five and half years, at the rate of four or five sessions a week.  You’re probably starting to get a picture of where the problems for some people of psychoanalysis lay. “Disorders” treated tend to steer away from severe psychosis or extreme problems. Typical applications can be depression, or self esteem issues that are playing themselves out in the analysand’s life etc. The most famous Analysand in Western pop culture would have to be Woody Allen. His films have all been based on his on going Psychoanalysis. He is a good example of how the analysand will take responsibility for a portion of their own analysis.  Criticisms of Psychoanalysis as a practise are primarily three: 1)      It takes a bizarrely long time.2)      It generally costs a lot of money, although there are analysts who are trying to rectify this.3)      The largest criticism fired at Psychoanalysis is that it doesn’t work. That is, a “disease” can’t be identified and measured. Then when the “cure” is applied, seen to have removed this disease. Forever or even for a while. These claims are under dispute, but it remains a large problem for psychoanalysis. A problem particularly with legal bodies (as in its legitimisation) and science. Recent developments in neuroscience have resulted in one side arguing that it has found biological proof of the unconscious, and the other side stating that the biological discoveries proves we were wrong about an unconscious.  However, tonight we won’t be concerned so much with the practise of Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis also refers to a theory that has been interpreted as a form of scientific study. Psychoanalysis is also applied to the study of social, cultural, and religious phenomena. In this latter aspect, demanding for a re-evaluation of the mechanisms and meanings of culture, psychoanalysis has penetrated the consciousness of the wider public beyond its therapeutic limits. And this is the aspect of Psychoanalysis that we will deal with tonight. It is seen as both a method of evaluating civilisation, and the action of evaluating ourselves as human beings in the civilisation. In this way, the practise of psychoanalysis is seen almost as the testing laboratory for its own evolving theories. In other words, it is a reflexive study. That is, it is the act of itself, studying itself.  Psychoanalysis has impacted very heavily on Western culture. The idea of the sub conscious driving all our thoughts, and that problems in childhood come out later in metaphoric patterns as adults, have become a strong part of our culture. These same notions of Freud’s have been incorporated into other areas of psychology and have had measured results that support the theories.  So we don’t abandon the theories of Psychoanalysis, and in fact it is the process of psychoanalysis itself that has come up with these ideas. Freud observed his patients and the world around him to come up with these theories, and others after him have expanded or worked through his ideas. To break the basic theories down, we can summarise them thus:   ·        Psychic energy is needed to make the mind go & the energy (motivation) cannot be destroyed, it must be expressed: The psychoanalytic approach assumes that the psychological apparatus of the mind needs some kind of energy to make it go. This energy is used in psychological work such as planning, thinking, feeling, remembering. The psychic energy is thought to come from 2 main drives: Eros (or libido, the life and sexual instincts) and Thanatos (death instinct). The thinking is that at any time there is only a finite amount of energy available and if it’s busily being used say to repress memories, and deal with anxieties, then it’s not being used fruitfully.  If the neuroses can be resolved, then the psychic energy can be freed to use more creatively and productively.·        Psychic Determinism: Everything that happens in a person’s mind and everything a person does has a specific, identifiable cause i.e. psychic determinism. Psychoanalysis has no room for miracles, accidents or free will. All seeming contradictions of mind and behaviour can be resolved: nothing is accidental, e.g., it is not accidental when you forget someone’s name, drop something, say one thing and do another. ·        Humans have base instincts (unconscious urges): In Freudian psychology, the unconscious is extremely important in determining behaviour. This is a pervasive theme of the approach: that a lot of desires, motivations and conflicts are seething below the surface, below the level of consciousness. Freud believed that people are driven, fundamentally, by unconscious, animalistic, instinctual urges, particularly lust (eros) and aggression (thanatos).  ·        Topography of the psyche (unconscious, pre-conscious, conscious): Using an iceberg metaphor, the unconscious is understood to be the large part of the mind, which is hidden from view.  The pre-conscious is represented by the waterline – but it is the zone in which there are fleeting glimpses of the unconscious, “flickering” across the screen of consciousness.  Finally, the relatively small part of the iceberg which sticks of the water is seen as equivalent to the small amount of conscious awareness that the human experiences.  Freud also believed that if there was information that was too painful for the conscious part to bear, that defence mechanisms would act to push it down it into the unconscious part of the mind.·        Structure of Mind (Id, Ego, Superego): The mind has an internal structure — three parts with separate motivations: Id (irrational and emotional part of the mind); the Ego (rational part); and the Superego (the moral part). (Those theories have changed a lot in modern psychoanalysis)·        The Way Psychic Conflicts are Resolved Shapes Personality: Personality characteristics are determined by the way in which a person learns to resolve unconscious conflicts amongst the Id, Ego & Superego.  This evolves from how people handle several psychosexual stages during childhood.  Personality is very strongly influenced by early experiences. Freud was the first to really emphasize the importance of early childhood experiences.  People’s Id, Ego and Superego develop characteristic patterns of interaction, which for them resolve the urges for psychosexual pleasures.  The quality of a person’s mental health was seen as determined by the extent to which psychic conflicts had been effectively resolved.  If the forces of mind are in balance, according to Freud, then good psychological health ensued.  Personality is viewed as a dynamic set of processes, which are always in motion i.e. psychodynamic.  ·        Life is Painful, Therefore We Use Defence Mechanisms to Shield Our Psyche’s from the Pain: Psychological defences are proposed as important aspects of human functioning.  Because of human’s desire for pleasure (note, they also have destructive instincts), life is essentially too painful for the human being to endure consciously; therefore much of the pain and conflict is diverted via defence mechanisms and kept within the unconscious.  It is within the hidden unconscious that much of the conflict takes place, and these conflicts in the unconscious mind are seen as the root of behaviour and conscious experience.  Apparently paradoxical or irrational behaviours can be accounted for by these inner conflicts, i.e., psychic determinism. ·        Unconscious Leaks Into Conscious Awareness via dreams, slips of the tongue, psychosomatic symptoms, and so on: The unconscious is dynamic, and the psychic energy must go somewhere, plus there is psychic determinism.  In other words, whilst the unconscious conflicts may be largely kept from conscious awareness, they still significantly influence behaviours, psychosomatics, plus leak into the preconscious.·        Therapeutic Relief Can be Achieved Through Insight into the Unconscious: Therapeutic relief can be effected by helping a person to bring underlying conflicts, often related to past negative learning experiences during critical psychosexual stages.  To the extent that insight and understanding can be achieved, and a person can resolve many psychological problems.   Impact on Philosophy 

From listening to the basic theories of Freud, one can see how this may be of use to philosophy. If Philosophy is the study of what it means to be human, then psychoanalysis is part of the map to how we are human. Because of this connection and at the same time non-connection, Psychoanalysis and Philosophy have had a passionate and stormy relationship.

The year after Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” came out, the Surrealists embraced the notion of the unconscious to such an extent that they almost completely rejected the conscious mind, as if it were largely irrelevant. They preformed all kinds of social experiments to tap into the unconscious, eventually arriving at the idea of madness as a form of lucidity.  It’s worth noting that Freud thought they misinterpreted his point. (Personally I like the surrealist’s position on the unconscious).

Psychoanalysis did something radical when it questioned the conscious mind. Descartes notion of “I think therefore I am” was radically called into question. The concept of rationality was radically called into question. Impulses were seen to form experiences earlier in life, and the conscious mind became almost less reliable than the unconscious.

But more importantly, other branches of philosophy were interested in psychoanalysis. And why wouldn’t they be? Philosophy had been asking similar questions for years.

  For example, the existentialists. For Fichte (1794),the father of German Idealism, the absolute self-positing self was a pure assertion—I!  Schopenhauer (1818) was so enamored with the I that he believed it was the foundation for that which is both determined and that which is determining, thus The World as Will and Representation—the fundamental realty is will, a will that suffers.  And Hegel (1807, 1817) meticulously argues that Geist is a self-articulated process of becoming: essence must appear in order for anything to exist, hence to be made actual (see 1807, p. 89; 1817, p. 199).  What does this all have to do with psychoanalysis? Everything! Anxiety and death, alienation and responsibility, meaning and possibility—the very ontological conditions that inform human subjectivity as both normative and pathological.  For Kierkegaard, we live in extreme anxiety and trembling over death and dread, and despair over who we are, the very thing that defines our being, the very thing that orients us toward our future, hence our possibilities; and for  Kierkegaard, that meant the ethical and spiritual life of man.  Nietzsche also could not tolerate the herd mentality, where truth was far from being found in “the crowd;” but unlike Kierkegaard, he saw life as meaningless and in need of nihilistic revolt, of the transvaluation (supremacy) of values—to create oneself afresh—though a will to power.  But the single most unremitting question for our existential man is the nature of freedom.  Sartre was an extremist: human subjectivity was radical freedom, the unabated obligation to choose how one is to be. For Sartre (1943), we are condemned to freedom—we cannot not choose, or else we plummet into self-deception or bad faith (mauvaise foi).  The human being is not a thing, but a process of transcendence that must seize upon its freedom in order to become and define itself via its authentic choices.  Psychopathology is a failure to seize upon one’s freedom. Sartre’s magnus opus (Being and Nothingness) is a treatise on existential analysis, and in many ways shares affinities with psychoanalysis, but he had one beef: Sartre could not accept nor tolerate the idea of an unconscious mind because it fractured his very thesis that we are all unconditionally self determining.  How could we be free if choice was governed by alien forces from within?  Despite enjoying wide popularity, perhaps for this single attack on Freud, Sartre was not destined to find many followers among psychoanalysts of his day. It was with Heidegger (1927) that existential analysis began to find a broader voice, and this was largely due to the dissemination of his thought by Swiss psychiatrists, Binswanger and Boss. Heidegger’s influential work, Being and Time, one of the most celebrated texts of the 20th century, is essentially about the throws of human existence, what he refers to as Dasein—the concretely existing human being who is there in the world.  

Dasein has a relationship with itself, others, and its environment, which is constitutive of its facticity (refers to the contingent yet intractable conditions of human existence)—as a being thrown into a preexisting social ontology. This idea eased the gap between existentialism and psychoanalysis and paved the way in the future for post modernism.

Today we see the impact of Psychoanalysis in post modernism, deconstruction and other Continentalist philosophies.  The work of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Helen Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Michele Foucault, Michel Onfray just to name a few have been profoundly affected by the notions of psychoanalysis.

As an aside, one of the criticisms of Psychoanalysis by Foucault, and Deluze, is the noted fact that Psychoanalysis has become a centre of power, with its confessional techniques being the same as the Christian tradition. It’s an interesting thought.

Derrida and deconstruction is bound completely to Freud and Psychoanalysis. They exist in a dance, each resisting the other, and each working back and forth in a spiralling journey toward a purity of knowledge.

The relation to the unconscious which psychoanalysis brings into play always remains both foreign and familiar. Like the Analysand, there is no relation to the unconscious, which is not a tensed relation, one of resistance. But resistance is neither forgetting nor negation. The unconscious can be approached only through resistance, as resistance is to psychoanalysis what air is to Kant’s dove. It is impossible to fly without the resistance of air.

Derrida argues that psychoanalysis has shown us that we can’t really rely on ourselves, or rather trust ourselves, to see or come up with the universal or even with the truth. He thanks Psychoanalysis for this observation, even as he criticises psychoanalysis for it’s ideas and methodology.

But, Psychoanalysis has told us that our theories can’t be trusted, and that includes the theory of psychoanalysis itself. Which, as we have seen from tonight, is something of a duality that psychoanalysis suffers from in establishing its own legitimacy. It deconstructs itself as it goes along.

Derrida sees the move in recent years toward ‘reason’ and away from the uncomfortable resistances that psychoanalysis creates as a negative, and even worse, as a denial of thought and cutting edge understanding.

As Psychoanalysis is about the work of what happens to the mind in the business of being human, philosophy is about the business of what it is to be human Even though Derrida retains a healthy distance from Psychoanalysis (he once declared that Freud had genius for getting very close to the truth and then wilfully missing it) he saw the movement away from Psychoanalysis as a problem for philosophy. I will read the following passage because it is beautiful and an excellent example of deconstructionist literature from Derrida.

  What has happened, in the philosophical climate of opinion, if I may take the risk of characterizing it grossly and macroscopically, is that after a moment of intimidated anxiety, some philosophers have got a grip on themselves again.  And today, in the climate of opinion, people are starting to behave as though it was nothing at all, as though nothing had happened, as though taking into account the event of psychoanalysis, a logic of the unconscious, of “unconscious concepts,” even, were no longer de rigueur, no longer even had a place in something like a history of reason:  as if one could calmly continue the good old discourse of the Enlightenment, return to Kant, call us back to the ethical or juridical or political responsibility or the subject by restoring the authority of consciousness, of the ego, of the reflexive cogito, of an “I think” without pain or paradox;  as if, in this moment of philosophical restoration that is in the air—for what is on the agenda, the agenda’s moral agenda, is a sort of shameful, botched restoration—as if it were a matter of flattening the supposed demands of reason into a discourse that is purely communicative, informational, smooth;  as though, finally, it were again legitimate to accuse of obscurity or irrationalism anyone who complicates things a little by wondering about the reason of reason, about the history of the principle of reason or about the event—perhaps a traumatic one—constituted by something like psychoanalysis in reason’s relation to itself (Ibid.). 

For Derrida, to demand that things be simplified is to ignore the truth. He things we refuse psychoanalysis at our peril, even if all it has done is show us that we can’t really trust ourselves any longer.

Question:

1)      If we know that we can’t trust our ‘rational’ mind, is it right to appeal to it? Do we know we can’t trust it? Can we get rid of Freudian notions and go back to the concrete ideas of ‘reality’.

1. Introduction

 About 12 years ago a close friend of mine mentioned the name Cioran for the first time. ‘You like Nietzsche’ he said. ‘If you like Nietzsche, you’ll definitely like Cioran’. When I saw one of his books during my regular wanderings in Amsterdam book shops, I bought it immediately. Thus Bitter Syllogisms (1954) was my first introduction to the grim and dark but also wonderful and, for those who see it, comical world of Emile Cioran.  

Bitter Syllogisms, I could say one of the most famous and most admired amongst Cioran-fans all over the world – but then again that applies to practically all of his books -, was for a few years the only Cioran-book I had. And that is because Cioran writes so dense, is so engaging and at the same time so exhausting that after having read one chapter of his aphorisms – for that is the literary form he uses in Bitter Syllogisms and most of his other books – you feel like you have wrestled through several heavy volumes of philosophy. Cioran himself has said about his style: What I am saying is the result of something, of an interior process. And I give the result, but I am not writing the road and the process leading up to that result. Instead of publishing three pages, I suppress everything, except the conclusion.’  You have to read Cioran, re-read him and the re-read him again many times. Slowly it starts to sink in. And even if you have the ‘aha-erlebnis’ upon the first reading of his aphorisms or one of the short and just as dense chapters of his other works, you want to re-read it again many times to make it your own. 

Does that make Cioran your best friend, your spiritual guide in life? Not only is that a question I would have to answer in a negative way, it is also something Cioran himself would abhor. He definitely never intended to be anybody’s guiding light. ‘Aphorisms don’t convert people, don’t convince them. I don’t want to convince’, he said in an interview. If anything, Cioran teases the reader, he challenges, but as such he wants to give the reader something to think about, something that maybe disturbs the reader, that may change his outlook upon things. ‘I think that a book has to leave a wound, that it has to change the life of a reader in one way or another. A book has to turn everything upside down, put everything into question.’ Cioran hated nothing as much as set ideas, or worse: a ‘fixed’ philosophy, one might say a philosophy without room to breathe. ‘If somebody writes an essay, he starts from certain fixed ideas and he remains the prisoner of these ideas.’ Cioran hated this, reason why he chose the aphorism, reason also why he never constructed a typical ‘Philosophy according to Cioran’.  Reason why he hasn’t been the subject of much academic approach, but then again that would be another thing he would only agree upon, as he loathed the academic world. ‘I am an enemy of the University’, he said in an interview. ‘I think it is a danger, the death of the mind.’ 

Cioran continuously takes you out of your comfort zone and once you think that you’ve finally decided you are on a par with him, he slaps you in the face the next instant. Let me give you an example from The trouble with being born. ‘Why fear the nothing in store for us when it is no different from the nothing which preceded us: this argument of the Ancients against the fear of death is unacceptable as consolation. Before, we had the luck not to exist; now we exist, and it is this particle of existence, hence of misfortune, which dreads death. Particle is not the word, since each of us prefers himself to the universe, at any rate considers himself equal to it’, he said in The trouble with being born, in a reaction to the stoics, whom he much admired by the way. There are many times when I come across an aphorism and find myself annoyed. I start accusing Cioran of being a teenager who has never learned the art of growing up. I have given this presentation the title Cioran, comedian or martyr? in the first place because that was the title of one of the essays on his work I found on the Internet, but it is also a great title for a presentation on Cioran. While reading his books you think all the time: Is this guy for real? He can’t be THIS negative. When a Parisian lady once heard what titles Cioran had given to his books, she exclaimed: – ‘But this man hates life!’ – an anecdote that made Cioran himself laugh. If you read his interviews and then again go back to his books, you discover that there is so much more. That is to say IF you want to discover this. In circles of philosophers, academics and critics there are just as many people who love him as there are those who can’t stand him. Cioran has always been controversial and he will undoubtedly continue to be considered controversial. But it may by now be quite clear where I stand in this.    

I hope to be able to give you a little introduction into the work and the world of the man I consider one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century – if not THE most important thinker -, and I am not the only one. Amongst his many admirers is French writer Michel Houellebecq.   

Cioran could indeed be called an heir of Nietzsche, even though that would be another title he would most strongly reject, in spite of his admiration for the German philosopher. Nietzsche is always being labelled ‘the philosopher with the hammer’ and as such it wouldn’t be a bad idea to label Cioran ‘the philosopher with the sledge hammer’. Not a bad title for a man who said that ‘An aphorism has to be like a smack in the face.’  

When I told my friend in Amsterdam that I was planning to do a presentation on Cioran, he said that that is almost impossible, as the only way to do him justice is to quote him extensively. I am happy to give you some quotes from his work, but I also think that there are certain recurrent themes in his work, even if it may not be a ‘closed’ philosophical system. But let me first tell you something about his life.   

2. His life 

Cioran was born in 1911 in the Transylvanian village of Rasinari as the son of an orthodox priest. He always refers to the first ten years as the happiest of his life. He loved life amongst the simple peasants, who were mostly illiterate. One of the famous anecdotes that abound, is that he used to play soccer with the skulls he found on the local cemetery. When his father took him away from the village when he was ten years old – he had to go to college in the small city of Sibiu – Cioran felt like he was taken out of paradise. All of this has left a heavy mark on him as a person and as a writer.   

As an adolescent he suffered from insomnia, and he has many times acknowledged that this has been very influential on him as a writer. It made him sombre and withdrawn. His insomnia resulted in his first book in Rumanian, On the Heights of Despair, published in 1934. Clearly the work of an adolescent, it contains all the germs for the thoughts he would elaborate in his later works. The title is a take on news items on suicide that always start with: ‘On the height of despair Mr so and so has taken his own life…’etc.  

Cioran always stresses the relieving effect of writing. Writing is for him a necessity. He has said both that he would have become a murderer and that he would have committed suicide if he wouldn’t have had the possibility to write. The idea of suicide is a recurring idea in both his books and his interviews. For Cioran the possibility of suicide, the possibility to end our lives on the moment we select ourselves, independent of some higher might, is a liberating idea that paradoxically prevents many people from actually committing this deed. ‘We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.’ [The trouble with being born] ‘I don’t support suicide, but I suport the idea of suicide’, he has often said. And he also said many times that without this liberating idea, he might indeed very well have committed suicide. But he also said that many of his readers came to him to tell him they would have committed suicide if they wouldn’t have had Cioran’s books.  

About the relieving effect of writing he said in an intreview: ‘If you detest someone, just take a piece of paper and write 10, 20, 30 times: X is an asshole. And after a few minutes, you will feel relieved. You detest them less.’  

The fact that he didn’t want to be anybody’s guide is also associated with the role his writing had for him. Cioran wrote for himself, to get rid of his demons. 

Of course On the heights of despair was embarrassing for the son of an Orthodox priest. His mother once told him: ‘If I would have known that you would become such a miserable person, I would have had an abortion.’ In many interviews Cioran comes back upon this moment, as it was essential for his life and thoughts. After his mother had said this, he realised that life was a coincidence and as such it was a liberation for him, as he realised that life was meaningless. We will see further on which mark this left on his work.    

Cioran studied philosophy in Bucharest and he graduated on a thesis on Bergson. In this period he also started to get fascinated by the movement of the Iron Guard, a sort of nationalistic/fascistic organisation in Rumania. Later in life he seldom spoke about this and as I know hardly anything about it, I am not getting into this any further. 

In 1937 he wrote his last book in Rumanian, Tears and Saints, for me his first really great book. I will come back upon it later when I talk about his thoughts and philosophy.  

He convinced the University Board that he needed a grant to continue his studies on Bergson in Paris. In 1937 he left Bucharest for Paris, never to return to his native country.  

Initially he continued writing in Rumanian, but while translating the poet Leautaud, he suddenly realised what nonsense it was to continue writing in Rumanian and from that moment onwards he wrote only in French. He finally got rid of his insomnia by exhausting himself through making long bicycle rides in the French countryside. His first book in French appeared in 1949 and was rewritten four times after Gallimard had accepted it. ‘Precis de decomposition’ – ‘A little history of decay’. In the piece he wrote on the occasion of Cioran’s death, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy said: ‘In this book everything has been said and the only thing left for him is to repeat himself luxuriously, which he did.’ – I couldn’t agree more, as I consider this Cioran’s most important book and the basis for his ‘philosophy’- if he has any. 

Cioran has often told how Gallimard was stuck with the 2000 copies of A short history of decay for the next 25 years.

Even though he was a well-known name in (some) literary circles, it would take a few more decades before a wider audience would discover Cioran. Not that he cared a lot. He lived a low-profile life in the simple Parisian apartment where he would live till the end of his life, working on and off as a translator and proofreader while working on new books. In the fifties Cioran met Simone Houe, who would remain his partner for the rest of his life. They never married, nor did they have any children.  

Even though Cioran led a low-profile life, he did move around in literary circles in the fifties and sixties. He was friends with the French/Rumanian writer, playwright and founder of the Theatre of the Absurd, Eugène Ionesco, and he also befriended another famous absurdist playwright, the Irish/French writer Samuel Beckett, best known for his play Waiting for Godot. Beckett would later end their friendship because he found Cioran too pessimistic.  

As the years progressed, Cioran became more and more of a recluse, while his literary fame was rising, especially since the seventies. His books started to appear in translation and Cioran was sometimes invited for literary occasions, where he did interviews, a lot of which were published in the book Entretiens (Gallimard). Only available in French, if you speak the language highly recommended as it offers a very clear, simple, readable and at times funny account of Cioran’s world. 

In the second half of the eighties he gave up writing; he’d had it and he thought he had written enough. He continued doing interviews though, until he became the victim of dementia and lived his last year in forgetfulness, hardly recognising the few people visiting him in hospital. He died in 1995.  

3. His ideas. 

Many say it is hardly possible to say anything in general about Cioran’s ideas, but I don’t agree on this point. I think there are some recurring themes throughout his work, even though as a whole it keeps a highly fragmentary nature.  

In his book Anathemas and Admirations Cioran calls himself  ‘The skeptic-on-duty of a decaying world’. That word, decay, is a key element in Cioran’s world. But what exactly is ‘decay’ – as I think it is one of many words that have been used too extensively, reason why its meaning has been somewhat eroded. 

You could say that for Cioran decay started with creation itself, to be more precise; with the creation of mankind, homo sapiens, with the focus on ‘sapiens’. Knowledge created man’s downfall and the idea of original sin is another key element in his work, if not THE key element everything can be carried back to.  

I have told you before about the moment his mother told him she would have had an abortion if she would have known Cioran would be such a miserable person. I have also told you how this was an ‘aha-erlebnis’ for Cioran. This made everything clear; life had no meaning.

A recurring theme in his work, and the main theme in A short history of decay, is pride or haughtiness. The biblical idea of original sin: man deeming himself at least as important as God, if not more important. According to Cioran man cannot live with the idea that life has no meaning and that his own existence is insignificant. Man wants to see himself as the centre of the world, and according to Cioran that’s where the trouble starts. Life must have a meaning. Man starts creating ideas, in itself no drama, as an idea as such should be neutral. But man cannot live with neutral ideas and has to attach his own passions to them. To make clear what Cioran means, let me read the following parts from the opening chapter of A short history of decay; Genealogy of Fanaticism: 

“In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy…whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games.Idolaters by instinct, we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional. History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he then feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike. His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.” 

“Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith – of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth.” 

“Here certitudes abound: suppress them, best of all suppress their consequences, and you recover paradise. What is the Fall but the pursuit of a tuth and the assurance you have found it, the passion for a dogma, domicile within a dogma? The result is fanaticism – fundamental defect which gives man the craving for effectiveness, for prophecy, for terror.” 

“A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable.” 

“It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say “we” with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke “others” and regard himself as their interpreter – for me to consider him my enemy.” 

“Every faith practices some form of terror, all the more dreadful when the “pure” are its agents.” 

“All of life’s evils come from a ‘conception of life’” 

“The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.” 

And in the next chapter, The Anti-Prophet, he says: 

“History: a factory of ideals…lunatic mythology, frenzy of hordes and of solitaries…refusal to look reality in the face, mortal thirst for fictions…” 

“The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseperable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions…” 

From this it may become more clear why and how Cioran was opposed to systems, be it religious, political or philosophical. As Bernard-Henri Levy said in the aforementioned article: ‘He puked on builders of systems.’  

The above idea of man as the centre of the world, his world, is closely related to the Nietzschean idea of ‘Der Wille zur Macht’ – The will to power. Cioran was fascinated by man’s underlying motives for his actions. This is an idea we may come across in the work of many thinkers throughout the ages, but for Cioran it was a key element in his work. Man is an opportunistic animal, an ‘indirect’ animal, as he calls him in A short history of Decay. ‘Whereas the animals proceed directly to their goal, man loses himself in detours; he is the indirect animal par excellence.’ Thus all our actions have an underlying motive and this is another key element in Cioran’s thoughts, related to the above.  

I mentioned the book Tears and Saints as the first real important work by Cioran. When he suffered from his insomnia, he developed an obsessive interest in the lives of saints, this in spite of the fact that he didn’t believe in a god himself. He always said he would have loved to be able to believe, but he simply couldn’t. Nevertheless, he started talking to ‘God’ when he suffered from insomnia. As there was no one else to talk to, the idea of a ‘God’ presented itself automatically, he said in an interview.  

In Tears and Saints the idea of ‘the will to power’ is a central theme. Cioran sees in the suffering of saints a means to (in the end) exert their will and thus their influence – say: make sure their meaningless lives become important, even beyond the grave. The following aphorism is a good illustration of this idea:  

“Could saints have a will to power? Is their world imperialistic? The answer is yes, but one must take into account the change of direction. While we waste our energy in the struggle for temporary gains, their great pride makes them aspire to absolute possession. For them, the space to conquer is the sky, and their weapon, suffering. If God were not the limit of their ambition, they would compete in ultimates, and each would speak in the name of yet another infinity. Man is forever a proprietor. Not even the saints could escape this mediocrity. Their madness has divided up heaven in unequal portions, each according to the pride they take in their sufferings. The saints have redirected imperialism vertically, and raised the earth to its supreme appearance, the heavens.” 

Cioran was looking for nothingnesss, the void, the Buddhist nirvana. Only when man has reached this, real freedom and real happiness is possible. You could say that he was looking for Nirvana via dark and negative means, where Buddhism takes a somewhat lighter path. But in the end they are looking for the same, and it is no surprise that Buddhism was the only religion Cioran felt any affinity with. ‘Buddhism shows you your non-reality’ he once said, and that must have been music to his ears. But in the end he realised he couldn’t go all the way with Buddhism, even though he recognized everything; renouncing the will, destruction of the self and as such victory over the self. He acknowledged for instance that he got angry very easily, and that is completely unacceptable in Buddhism.  

4. The importance and place of Cioran. 

You may wonder why I am so fascinated by a writer who is not easy, nor positive, and I have to admit that I have asked myself that question many times. Maybe Cioran himself gives the best answer when he says that ‘the optimism of utopians is depressing and merciless’. I couldn’t agree more. When people try to point out the idea of progress, Cioran points to history which he calls ‘the antidote of progress’. I can’t really blame him, even though I see things a little different and more optimistic.  

For me Cioran is somehow the best medicine against depression. After a few pages Cioran I always feel mentally invigorated. Reading Cioran not only confirms that the world is a meaningless place full of evil – and it is very nice when this is being acknowledged – it also leaves the freedom he is talking about, the void we are looking for and that I consider a void that has to be filled by myself, in a way I want, but without a system, utopia or ideology that weighs too heavy on my shoulders. At such I consider his quest for nothingness, for the void, as the search for something new, the search for real liberation. You can’t construct life on a false base. You are nowhere if you don’t first detect the flaws and shortcomings of life and especially of human existence. 

I recognised myself in the following words of Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater in an interview with Cioran; ‘In all your books, next to the aspect we could call pessimistic and black, there shines a strange joy, an inexplicable but stimulating happiness, even life-encouraging.’  

And this week I happened to be leafing through an old copy of the French Magazine Litteraire, dedicated to the theme ‘Hate’. The article on fundamentalism ended with the following lines, which perfectly explain why I can’t get enough of Cioran: 

‘These days there is a lot of talk about the end of all utopias – I doubt it, but the end of utopias wouldn’t be a terrible blow: One would finally find the time to focus on mankind itself; maybe that would be a new chance for humanism.’  

Finally I would like to give the word to Cioran himself, who said in The trouble with being born: ‘The certitude that there is no salvation is a form of salvation, in fact it is salvation. Starting from here, we might organize our own life as well as construct a philosophy of history: the insoluble as solution, as the only way out…’ 

I hope I have given you some insight in the life and work of Emile Cioran. Even though I have been reading him for ten years, I often have the idea that I’ve only just begun. Cioran definitely is one of those writers you could devote your life to and there is a lot more to say about him, as I had to leave many things out. 

I know he is very controversial and like I said before: I don’t have the idea that that is going to change, nor would I want it to change, because that would mean the definitive death of Cioran.

 ______________________  

Emile Cioran [1911-1995] Some aphorisms: The trouble with being born: ‘Seen from the outside, harmony reigns in every sect, clan, and party; seen from the inside, discord. Conflicts in a monastery are as frequent and as envenomed as in any society. Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere.’ 

‘Look neither ahead nor behind, look into yourself, with neither fear nor regret. No one descends into himself so long as he remains a slave of the past or of the future.’ 

‘I suppressed word after word from my vocabulary. When the massacre was over, only one has escaped: Solitude. I awakened euphoric.’ 

‘A book is a postponed suicide.’ 

‘I begin a letter over and over again, I get nowhere: what to say and how to say it? I don’t even remember whom I was writing to. Only passion or profit find at once the right tone. Unfortunately detachment is indifference to language, insensitivity to words. Yet it is by losing contact with words that we lose contact with human beings.’ 

On the heights of despair: 

‘I do not like prophets any more than I like fanatics who have never doubted their mission. I measure prophets’ value by their ability to doubt, the frequency of their moments of lucidity.’ 

‘To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life. Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.’ 

Cioran in an interview with Swiss journalist Jean-François Duval: 

‘From the moment you have accepted existence, you have to accept prostitution.’ 

 Anam Cara  is a book that was a best seller in Ireland- but its not that well known around the world.  Anam Cara is a book about the Celtic Philosophy, however, it is by no means a detailed study of the Celtic traditions, rather an exploration of contemporary living with reference to aspects of the Celtic and early Christian societies of Ireland.  There are those who just love this book, and I’ll say up front!! there are  others who find it totally confusing –  Anam Cara was written by John O’Donohue, who is an Irish poet philosopher still living in the West side of Ireland.  John uses his understanding of the Celtic traditions of his homeland to offer a message to both the individual and to the modern corporate world where he is well sought after as a speaker. John grew up in the West of Ireland with a devout catholic family deeply connected to the land.  At an early age, he entered the priesthood and studied in Germany, where he obtained his doctorate of philosophy in 1990, and later returned to serve in a parish in Ireland.  After 19 years as a priest, he resigned to dedicate his time to his writings and produced several books, including the best selling Anam Cara that I will discuss today. Anam Cara means in Gaelic, soul friend, Cara means friend, Anam means Soul.  In Celtic understanding, an Anam Cara was a person who was joined to you in a deep and personal way, someone who would share “your innermost self, your mind and your heart”p35.  But John takes this term one step further, and looks at our friendship with ourselves and our connection with the outer world.    In this book, there is one main theme, and that is the circle.  John tells us that the Celtic world was one of circles, where everything flowed naturally, from one to the next.  So his book, Anam Cara is written as a circle, with chapters that move from awakening of friendship, through discovery of our senses, and then inner solitude, to the external world of work and action, and finally to ageing and our encounter with death. But beyond that, there is a thread that is timeless, and draws the work into a circle, just like  a day which has an awakening, a discovery, a solitude leading to work and action, a time for reflection, and then the inevitable, night time.   And at every stage, John uses both traditional and Celtic philosophy to connect to our Anam Cara, our own soul-friend.  In his work,  John O’Donohue questions our modern, and often disconnected, way of life.  He does this, not just from an intellectual perspective, but also from the emotional and our deeper  spiritual perspective.  His style is to use both logical analysis of, and emotional connection to the Celtic traditions of his Irish homeland. These two styles – one of logical analysis and the other of emotional, even spiritual connection, are interwoven throughout the book, which means that the reader has to move to from one to the other.  So a logical thought is followed by a poem or a beautiful and evocative wordplay  which engages the emotions.  So to make this clearer, I am going to use a little play of my own.  When I am talking about John’s logical and scholarly comments, I will wear have the black hat.  And when I am immersed in his Celtic roots, I will wear the green hat.   

(Black Hat)The Anam Cara experience is not just  a Celtic one – John uses quotes from many spiritual sources,  including the Bible, and Buddhist writing, from literature, English poets and German authors, from philosophers and thinkers, such as Jung and Freud,  and he shares stories of wisdom from tribal cultures of other countries.  In the first section of Anam Cara – the awakening  -John talks about Plato’s symposium and the myth that each person is in fact two selves and that you spend your life looking  for the other half.   Once found, that friend needs nurturing.     John writes “often people devote their primary attention to the facts of their lives, to their situation, to their work, to their status”.  John is a passionate student of the 13th Century German mystic and philosopher, Meister Eckhart and he refers to  Eckhart’s concept that  that most people wonder “what they should do, when in fact they should be more concerned about how to be”. p47 

(Green Hat)The Celts were a nature people, and the Celtic people had a deep sense of the circular nature of our life journey.   Friendship, once awakened, completes the circle of the self.   John writes “In Celtic tradition the anam cara was not merely a metaphor or ideal.  When your affection is kindled, the world of the intellect takes on a new tenderness.  You look and see and understand differently” p38 . John  comments that “most fundamentalism, greed, violence and oppression can be traced back to the separation of idea and affection.”  So the Celtic way of connecting idea and affection is to offer good thoughts which will, in true cyclic form, come back – the more given away is the more received.    John comments that our words are our art “bringing sound out of silence”and our way  of connecting to our friends.  His own poem to his friend “Josie”makes this gift of words and ends with:“may a slow wind work these words of love around you,an invisible cloak to mind your life”.  

(Black Hat) In the next section, John discusses the world of the senses.  He talks of the Plato allegory of the cave, where prisoners, all chained in a line, see the images cast from a fire behind them and they believe the images are reality.  He talks about the senses, and the narrowness of our vision.  John writes about our perception and how it is influenced by our mindset – if we are resentful, or indifferent, our view of the world is like the shadow on the cave wall.  He asks us to ask ourselves the question “what way do I behold the world?” 

(Green Hat )In the Celtic world there was no separation between the body and the soul.  And the senses, rather than the intellect  are the link with nature and the divine. Celtic nature poetry alerts the senses, and revives our awareness of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell.   These lines are in one of the many poems of the book, this one is John’s own poem:“May your senses gather you and bring you home.May your senses always enable you to celebrate the universe and the mystery and possibilities in your presence here”. 

This chapter is confrontational for those raised in traditions where the divine is external and powerful.   Here we begin to see John as the mystic, who connects with the internal and gentle wisdom of the physical body.   

(Black Hat) Chapter three is about our inner world.  John talks about  our modern day obsession with spiritual programs, which are linear.  He again quotes Meister Eckhart as saying that “there is no such thing as a spiritual journey”.  And that the real conversation with yourself is not external.  John O’Donohue also writes about the difficulty of re-discovering that inner world,  and of the power of solitude and meditation to awaken the mystery within. He suggests that we  “view ourselves a complete stranger” to liberate ourselves from the “numbing stranglehold” (p123) of habits and complacency. 

(Green Hat) In the same chapter, John shares with us what is believed to be the first poem ever composed in Ireland (ed by P Murray p 128)                        

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea           

I am the wave of the ocean            

I am the murmur of the billows           

I am the ox of the seven combats           

I am the vulture on the rocks           

I am a beam of the sun            

I am the fairest of the plants           

I am the wild boar in valour           

I am the salmon in the water           

 I am a lake in the plain            

I am a world of knowledge           

I am the point of the lance in battle           

 I am the God who created fire in the head. 

This poem is about one-ness and our connectedness as John says (Black Hat)  

“this poem outlines the ontological depth and unity of the anam cara experience.   According to John  this is a reversal of Descartes “cogito ergo sum” , I think therefore I am.  In fact, while John advocates solitude, he warns against negative introspection, and excessive self-analysis.  By returning to the solitude within, we come into rhythm with ourselves and find the life we love, rather than the one that is expected of us. 

The way that I see this is that our world is defined by our senses, our hearing, seeing, tasting, touching and our sense of smell.  And we form an image of ourselves based on those impressions – we are programmed by these senses.  Many modern psychologists are interested in our self—image and develop techniques for positive change, and some are based on considerable self-analysis.  As someone who has been a student of the Buddhist approach, I see some parallels here with the NOW of Buddhist meditation.  In Anam Cara,  John is showing how the Celtic understanding works more with the present, and the presence,  rather than the past. 

(Green Hat) In the next chapter, John talks about our actions and our concept of time.    The Celts believed in divine presences, and of sacred outdoor places in nature.   The recognition of presence and the celebration of nature was part of life and of time.  Imagination is not linear, and often takes a curved path, releasing creativity in action. This change in our way of thinking involves risk.  John comments “When you are faithful to the risk and the ambivalence of growth, you are engaging your life.”p164 

(Black Hat)Anam Cara challenges our attitudes to work. John warns us “if you awaken only your will and intellect, then your work can become your identity.  Just like the epitaph on a gravestone “here lies Jeremy Brown, born a man, died a grocer”.  So the person’s complexity of spirit becomes their work identity, a linear time line often moving much too fast.   He discusses the modern workplace and how “the world of quantity is always haunted by competition”, and he asks us to re-think these values and transfigure our workplaces to creative spaces, where we are empowered and engaged.  

I find this relevant in the modern workplace or small business, where  creative thinking, engaging our imagination, can restructure both our private and our working life.  By releasing our imagination, we are able to participate more fully in the work activities.  And at the same time, we can rethink our day,  so that  we have the space to be more than just a professional identity, to take up some sport,  play an instrument, paint,  or follow an interest, maybe even join Philo Agora!  This work of Anam Cara is right at the leading edge of developing new business models and more flexible workplaces where creativity is valued. 

(Green Hat) In Chapter 5 John again returns to the notion of the circle.  The Celtic world was a three level world,  of an underworld, the middle world of humans, and the upper world of the heavens, with each merging into the other.   The year is a circle, and the seasons flow into each other in a continuous loop.  The Celtic tradition had a sense of eternal time woven through our human linear time.  John uses one of the many Celtic stories in the Anam Cara book to tell of the Celtic concept of two levels of time, one eternal and the other human.  And the myths suggest that the “anam”, the soul or spirit, lives partly in this eternal time.  When we lose ourself in some passion, some music or some intense memory, then we are in this eternal time.  The Celts also recognised the negative side, “an addiction to the bleak shadow that lingers around every human form” (p244,) and one that “gnaws away at our belonging in the world”.    This negativity, often resulting in modern day depression,  can “make us a stranger in our own life”.    But John writes about how this negativity can become the force for “renewal, creativity and growth” (p245). 

(Black Hat) In this latter part of the book , John uses this concept of time to question our ability to inhabit present time.   As we age, we may feel  challenged by what we regret or what we have not done, and many people are anxious about the future, especially when loneliness may be part of that future.  We are a knowledge based society, without a real sense of the rhythm of living.    In this book, John moves from the mind of the scholar, to the Celtic connection to the natural and spiritual.  He has therefore moved away from the external God  of his Catholic training, to a concept where the physical body and its connection with nature is celebrated, and where the physical becomes the link to a spiritual dimension which is internal rather than external.    Anam Cara does not seek to be confrontational, and there is no rejection of John’s past training as a Catholic priest.  Instead, this book is a positive view of a new way to become part of  nature by understanding the Celtic Mind. 

Why do I like Anam Cara? – for the past 10 years I was a student and sometimes lay teacher of the Buddhist path, and, as such, totally rejected our dependence on a benevolent God, to seek a self reliant path of cause and consequence.   So John’s delving into the spiritual was for me an about turn – but not quite.  While John talks about our spiritual nature, he very much aligns with Celtic understanding, of a universe where our natural rhythm forms our spiritual connection, where logic is only one aspect of our being. I have been in small business ventures most of my working life and now use this knowledge to show others how to run their small businesses.  I arrange workshop leaders to teach hiring, business planning, export, sales and marketing.  What we also teach is that business is a circle, and not linear.  The relationship with clients are best when they repeated and when there is interaction.  The best team is one that is engaged and involved, the best products are those that are sustainable, and can be re-used, re-made or re-cycled.  The linear economy was about ..take, make and use, then throw away.  We now talk about the cyclic economy, and I believe that we need this new approach to all aspects of our modern living and working.  And to conclude this brief overview of the ANAM CARA experience: “The Celtic Imagination” loved the circle.”   John’s work is a reflection, rather than an analysis.  It is not a linear, logical thought process, but a circular exploration of what it means to live, to work, to experience external life,  to find our interior selves, to age and to die.  Anam Cara means soul friend, which  is not the “soul friend” or soul mate that we understand from romantic novels, but a transfiguration of our own deeper self, and an awareness of a deeper connection with others.  John O’Donohue uses the Celtic traditional stories, not to convert us to believing in fairies, or other magical forms, but to release in us a new sense of our own depth, an expanded sense of time, and powerful ways to re-connect with the natural world. 

In this modern time that we now find ourselves, living and working in cities, disengaged from the land and with scarcity of time for friendships, the message of Anam Cara is most significant.  We live in a linear world, where we take from the planet what we need, use it, and throw away the waste.  John O’Donohue has used the Celtic tradition of Anam Cara, to  show us how to be a soul friend to ourselves and to our world, and how to transfigure our way of life from a disconnected line to a connected circle of belonging.              

As it turns out, The Prophet is not about Islam, and is not divisible by any number I know.

Now let me tell you what it is about.

The prophet begins with Almustafa, the chosen one, who was a dawn unto his own day, seeing a ship in the distance. This ship has come for Almustafa, to return him to the isle of his birth, after 12 years of exile in the town of Orphalese. The people of the town all notice his ship and know what it signifies, they all drop what they were doing, and hasten to see Almustafa with a sudden sadness and pain. “Suffer not yet our eyes to hunger for your face”. They beg that he not leave and put an ocean between them, to make only memories of their years together, but Almitra, a seeress, a woman of strength and wisdom, steps in and asserts that “their love would not bind him, nor their needs hold him” from returning to his true home. But she asks, before he leaves them, to tell the people of Orphalese what he has learned from them, to tell of their truth, to tell of that which is between birth and death.

And so he does, at their request he speaks to them on topics from love to death to beauty and freedom, and the manifesto which results, is intended to emancipate the people of Orphalese.

Now, before continuing I shall read to you from this book, and you should also know that it was first published in 1923, in English, the language it was written in.

 AND one of the elders of the city said, “Speak to us of Good and Evil.”And he answered:Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts, it drinks even of dead waters.You are good when you are one with yourself.Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house.And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among perilous isles yet sink not to the bottom.You are good when you strive to give of yourself.Yet you are not evil when you seek gain for yourself.For when you strive for gain you are but a root that clings to the earth and sucks at her breast.Surely the fruit cannot say to the root, “Be like me, ripe and full and ever giving of your abundance.”For to the fruit giving is a need, as receiving is a need to the root.You are good when you are fully awake in your speech,Yet you are not evil when you sleep while your tongue staggers without purpose.And even stumbling speech may strengthen a weak tongue.You are good when you walk to your goal firmly and with bold steps.Yet you are not evil when you go thither limping.Even those who limp go not backward.But you who are strong and swift, see that you do not limp before the lame, deeming it kindness.You are good in countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good,You are only loitering and sluggard.Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles.In your longing for your giant self lies your goodness: and that longing is in all of you.But in some of you that longing is a torrent rushing with might to the sea, carrying the secrets of the hillsides and the songs of the forest.And in others it is a flat stream that loses itself in angles and bends and lingers before it reaches the shore.But let not him who longs much say to him who longs little, “Wherefore are you slow and halting?”For the truly good ask not the naked, “Where is your garment?” nor the houseless, “What has befallen your house?” 

Kahlil was born on the 6 January 1883 in the town of Bsharri, a lush region in Lebanon situated near Wadi Qadisha (the Holy Valley) and the forest of Holy Cedars on Mount Lebanon. Humans already have the tendency to idealise our youths, and the deep tradition and cultural potency of Bsharri would serve as an Eden for the rest of Kahlil’s life. His childhood however was less than idyllic, with an abusive alcoholic and corrupt tax collector for a father. His mother Kamileh was his saving grace. She was the daughter of the village priest and a woman of fierce strength and conviction.

Kahlil developed a taste for solitude young to escape his parent’s rows, finding solace in the hidden monasteries of the mountains, often with his drawing pencils in hand. They were a poor family, too poor to afford an education, but the local priests, seeing Kahlil’s natural intelligence, took it upon themselves to nurture his mind with knowledge of history, science, and language.

One event in his childhood which struck me as significant occurred when Kahlil was 10 years old and fell off a cliff, badly injuring his shoulder. In order for the bone to set straight, his arm and shoulders were bound to a wooden cross-like contraption for a period of forty days. Considering Kahlil’s character and the strong interest he developed with Jesus of Nazareth, this incident is said to have left a definite mark on his psyche.

In 1895, when he was 12 years old, Kahlil’s mother packed up her four children and left for New York, leaving behind her debt ridden husband, who was also fresh out of prison. The time in New York was one of healing for their family, Kahlil studied hard, and returned to Lebanon to a college aged 15 for a short time where he excelled in subjects which consumed him- Arabic literature, art, and especially poetry. On returning back to America, Gibran’s talent for drawing was soon spotted by eccentric philanthropist Fred Holland Day, who launched his career as an artist, and also introduced him to a headmistress named Mary Haskell, a woman who then supported Kahlil financially and in many other ways, for most of his life. He studied art in Paris with Rodin, and began writing poems and stories. The most important thing to know about Gibran’s life occurred between 1902 and 1903. His sister Sultana and his brother Peter succumbed to tuberculosis, and his beloved mother to cancer, all within a period of just 18 months.

The philosophy expounded in the Prophet, and in all of Gibran’s work for that matter, is what he and many have called “the philosophy of the heart”, which I will have to defend to you in a moment.

Gibran intends to capture the human condition, in its fundamental nature, he takes humanity and strips away the placidity and knowledge which we use to rationalise our world, and he sees it in a single pure moment. In that moment we are beings of overwhelming light, and terrifying darkness.

In understanding the philosophy of poetry we can understand Kahlil’s writing. Etymologically and operationally academic philosophy comprehends bits of reality, whilst poetic thinking seeks to understand “the whole”. Of course neither is superior. Poetry, and one might add specifically, ‘good’ poetry, transfers information to us through empathy, by being guided to feel through this information to then be able to establish some intellectual understanding of it. Critics tend to label this as sentimentalism, but this may be a viewpoint which thinks that it understands more about life than it actually does. In a way poetic text is a humble acceptance of the vague notion of reality and of language.

In defence of sentimentalism, one could argue that you can pick up a book of for example Kant, and throughout it you will find a treasury of ideas that will bend and stretch your perception. But they don’t always reach you, their importance can be lost within a tangle of words.

Where our intellect can conquer ideas until they become fused into our pool of understanding, our emotion is another way of receiving information, and one which has a residual effect. Gibran is extraordinary, because first and foremost he was a poet of immense ability. We hear his poetry and it moves us, and though we might not completely understand some of its metaphors, or take it as a simple cliché, the idea will have permeated us somehow, waiting for a relevant circumstance at which to be recalled from our subconscious, and reinterpreted alongside our own experience.

This philosophy of the heart in many ways is highly appropriate when dealing with matters such as the human condition. Where Descartes looks at thinking to assert his existence, Gibran would tell you that the overwhelming melancholy of life is what asserts his. This melancholy was most definitely a formative element for Kahlil.

The thing is that one of the most or maybe the most major issue in life, is learning how to cope with it. Coping with the loneliness, with our painful attachments to other people or things, the struggle to know how to give and when, how to be a good person, as well as the ever present knowledge of our certain demise of which we understand nothing.

It is typically human to distract ourselves from the discomfort of such inner conflict, but Kahlil faced this struggle as an artist, and in the most honest way he knew.

His manifesto approaches all the subjects just mentioned, and more.

Of giving he declared to the people:

“You often say, I would give, but only to the deserving.The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.” Of joy and sorrow he says:“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.And how else can it be?The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”  

Of marriage or relationships he states that we should

“Love one another, but make not a bond of love:Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.”  Kahlil’s philosophies are many and varied, but they all encompass an idea of identity, of remaining whole with oneself, and remaining aware within ones existence, in all its shades and ambiguities, and not to condemn one element as good and another as evil. To speak with the voice within our voice, an honest speech, to seek out our friends with time to live, not time to kill, to work with love, to eat with a conscious knowledge of our place within nature, to marry but remain singular, to move with passion, and rest in reason, to strive to be like our children, but seek not to make them like ourselves, for life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.  I could go on, but I’m already by no means doing these ideas justice, it would be better for you to read it yourselves. 

As in many books, the author’s persona resides within his protagonist, so too does Kahlil Gibran transport himself within the prophet Almustafa. In fact it is said that the 12 years spent in exile is the 12 years Kahlil spent in New York before beginning to write the prophet (at a time when he had formulated a plan to return to Bsharre indefinitely). Orphalese is New York, Bsharre is the Isle of his birth, and Mary Haskell is Almitra. In acknowledging the personal nature of the book, an understanding of its ideas must be accompanied with an understanding of its author.

Kahlil was very solitary by nature, and coupled with his significant losses and his sensitivity, we can see why and how he came up with his thoughts on life. It was in a way a coping mechanism. I’ve heard of many people turning to religion when they have faced some horrific circumstance in their life, and I think to some degree, Kahlil did this. He was engrossed with the teachings of Jesus and Mohammed, even publishing whole books on the subject, especially Jesus of whom he once said a wonderful thing: “Jesus was not sent here to teach the people to build magnificent churches and temples amidst the cold wretched huts and dismal hovels. He came to make the human heart a temple, and the soul an altar, and the mind a priest.”

But all the while Kahlil had somewhat of a disdain for all organised religion which he felt was loaded with hypocrisy but more importantly, lacked love and connection with people. Kahlil felt that, to be closer to God, one should be closer to people. He hated what he called the “Ineffective traditions and the unnatural laws that hurt the innate laws of human nature” and he wanted to help heal the social woes caused by these. Let me read to you what he says on religion.

 And an old priest said, “Speak to us of Religion.” And he said: Have I spoken this day of aught else? Is not religion all deeds and all reflection, And that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom? Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations? Who can spread his hours before him, saying, “This for God and this for myself; This for my soul, and this other for my body?” All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self. He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked. The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin. And he who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage. The freest song comes not through bars and wires.  And he to whom worshipping is a window, to open but also to shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul whose windows are from dawn to dawn. Your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whenever you enter into it take with you your all.  And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children. And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending in rain. You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.  

Can I just say that I’m not here to put down religion, and I think it would incredibly hypocritical if I did. The idea is not to abolish anything, what Kahlil disliked was the idea that people believed that all religion consists of is a church attendance, and an application of a few moral guidelines, often encompassing things they can’t do, and things they should disapprove of. The qualms Kahlil Gibran has with organised religion, is the element of it which is not of the spirit, and not of love, and that it can lead people to believe they are spiritual without even knowing true compassion.

Organised religion was paired with authoritarian governments in Kahlil’s books, in their part in the prevention of growth of the individual to develop a self identity. The chapter on laws truly embodies his ideas on the matter.

 Then a lawyer said, “But what of our Laws, master?” And he answered: You delight in laying down laws, Yet you delight more in breaking them. Like children playing by the ocean who build sand-towers with constancy and then destroy them with laughter. But while you build your sand-towers the ocean brings more sand to the shore, And when you destroy them, the ocean laughs with you. Verily the ocean laughs always with the innocent. But what of those to whom life is not an ocean, and man-made laws are not sand-towers, But to whom life is a rock, and the law a chisel with which they would carve it in their own likeness? What of the cripple who hates dancers? What of the ox who loves his yoke and deems the elk and deer of the forest stray and vagrant things? What of the old serpent who cannot shed his skin, and calls all others naked and shameless? What shall I say of these save that they too stand in the sunlight, but with their backs to the sun? They see only their shadows, and their shadows are their laws. And what is the sun to them but a caster of shadows? And what is it to acknowledge the laws but to stoop down and trace their shadows upon the earth? But you who walk facing the sun, what images drawn on the earth can hold you? You who travel with the wind, what weathervane shall direct your course? What man’s law shall bind you if you break your yoke but upon no man’s prison door? And who is he that shall bring you to judgment if you tear off your garment yet leave it in no man’s path? People of Orphalese, you can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?

Something that I can see prominently in the Prophet, is this idea of accepting our humanity. This is why he has a problem with strict rules and regulations, or any form of oppression, because they condemn the shadows of our humanity, and in doing so, will never allow the citizens they govern to embrace themselves. Only in embracing every aspect of humanity can a person love themselves, and relinquish their shame and fear.

This is why the prominent message is an introspective one.  The prophet states, “You are the way, and the wayfarers”. We have landed on this journey in life, and the direction we should take is within us.

The prophet also says- “In your longing for your giant self lies your goodness, and that longing is in all of you.”

 In such as we are connected to the power of everything we exist within, humans contain within them innate emotional and spiritual reservoirs that enable us to grow and develop into what he called our “giant self” or “vast self”. This giant self does not oppress impulses which others have said are wrong, but has an intuitive sense of good and evil, and is the basis of a society that would reach its utmost potential. This giant self is a changing entity also, and in accepting its changeable nature, it allows the world around it to grow and adapt.

 In some way, Kahlil has replaced conventional religion with this idea of the Giant Self. The giant self, is the ideal, it is the perfect version of our humanity. It is good, kind, compassionate, strong, and full of love. And it is not deified; this is just a human we are talking about, and it not so far away that we must look to the heavens to glimpse it, only to then return back to the reality of our inadequate human flaws. It is a dimension of humans, and something that every person has within them.

This giant self is also our comfort, because it is a worthy aim, and justification for all that we suffer. In every struggle, our self is shifting, and the more we face it, the more we embrace it, of course, the greater our power becomes, the more we become vast and giant.

  Surely there is no greater gift to man than that which turns all his aims into parching lips and all life into a fountain.” Kahlil’s message is a resoundingly positive one. In accepting that true knowledge of life is within our hearts, and not our intellect, one feels more able to access a greater wisdom. In accepting that a key undercurrent to life, is to become more and more vast, in ones own way, using ones own intuition, and that no entity can judge this, a person might feel perhaps a little emancipated.  

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My talk will consider the thesis that the main source of human anxieties and fear is the fact that we all subconsciously know that we are mortal, that our experiences of loss remind us of this on a subliminal level at least and yet we deny our own mortality in our daily lives. My talk is about how such metaphysical anxiety leads to sociological problems such as aggression and fundamentalism as well as depression. So in a roundabout way my talk is about the relevance of philosophy to our daily lives. 

2          Why accept our own deathSocrates and Plato believed that “moral maturity” and “purification of motives” are partly possible by accepting mortality through “practicing death”.Chuang Tzu said “Man’s thirst for survival in the future makes him incapable of living in the present”. According to Buddhist philosophy life is a serious opportunity and a “precious and fragile” gift. The omission to constantly acknowledge death erodes this sense of preciousness and fragility. Yet we human beings, perhaps westerners in particular, have instead a “ defensive, controlling and fearful” quality, avoiding the “nakedness” of our souls  and our vulnerability to decaying and death.This talk will focus upon the views of Ernst Becker, Pulitzer Prize winner, who discussed the sociological consequences of this denial of our own death.  

3          The link between not accepting our own death and anxiety and aggressionThrough the study of cultural anthropology, Becker was interested in finding the psychological motives of man’s deeply rooted violence and aggression. He argued that on a personal level the motives stem from our awareness of our mortality. He further postulated that this awareness is the source of our anxiety.Failing to openly acknowledge our mortality and our vulnerability, leads to a sense of falsehood of the self. As the philosopher Heidegger asserted “only in moments of dread and the certainty of death are we sometime aware that to live authentically and be(,) must come from recognizing our inauthenticity”.On the social level there is a strong urge to have “ immortality systems” – as Becker refers to them.These immortality systems include religious groups, “political affiliations” and cultural beliefs. These immortality systems also give an “ inflated” sense of meaning, truth and the feeling of righteousness that human beings crave. These value systems become very valuable to us and need to be protected at all costs. As a result, there are clashes of different meaning. Examples include; capitalism vs communism, Arabs vs Jews, Khmer Rouge vs intellectuals, Spanish Inquisition vs Heretics, Catholics vs Protestants. The most recent one is terrorism vs modernity/west/civilization. In all these there is a strong urge for the “untruth” to be defeated at all costs leading to aberrant acts of violence and aggression as people defend their “immortality system”. This is what Becker claims to be the birth of Evil. 

Fromm on the other hand, in his book “The Art of Loving” saw these affiliations of meaning as an attempt to overcome our sense of separateness from our world and from each other. In other words, these affiliations are an attempt to overcome our existentialist anxiety that we have by reason of our self-awareness arising from when we were expelled from paradise and became aware of not really our own nakedness, but rather our separateness from each other. Or to put it another way, these affiliations are our way of overcoming that lack of unselfaware connectness enjoyed by animals with our world. But at the same time Fromm also acknowledges that this desire to overcome separateness, which involves the desire to know the secret of man, can be through love but it can also result in an urge to power over another, with terrible cruelty and violence and physical violation as a result. Much like a child who in curiosity pulls the wings off a butterfly. 

4          I now want to talk about a possible link between Becker’s ideas about the denial of death and depressionBut it is not only in defence of immortality systems that the denial of death leads to negative social phenomena. In his bestselling book (“Dark Nights of the Soul”) Thomas Moore writes that at one time or another, most people go through a period of feeling sad or of loss because for ex of the ending of a relationship, the death of a loved one, that is so disturbing and long- lasting that it can be called a “dark night of the soul”. He claims that today our modern society labels these experiences as “depression.”I am of the view that the experiences of loss to which Moore refers lead to a state of melancholy because of, firstly, attachment and secondly, because the experiences of loss are a dim reflection or reminder to each of us, on a subconscious level, of the ultimate loss, that is to say, of our own death. Anxiety effects that result are therefore occasioned by a loss and our own attachment to what we have lost, but also because of the reinforcement those experiences give to the reality of our creatureness and the fact that we die, in contrast to the western tendency to banish the idea of death.   

6          So what to do ·        Be self aware of  the “deaths” or losses  that we have experienced, ·        Acknowledge our latent self-awareness of our own impending death, ·        Acknowledge our “immortality systems”·        Appreciate the connection between our latent awareness of our own death and our defence of our “immortality system” and avoidance of our creatureness to both our anxieties, and, if relevant, to the manifestation of those anxieties in various deviant behaviour affects. In this way we can crystallise in our own mind the “strings, pulleys and levers” affecting our behaviour; and thus give ourselves the capacity to take control. In this way we can achieve psychological self-determination. Further reframe the experience of loss as a “rite of passage” and face rather than avoid, what such rites of passage echo: our own passing.Given the resistance of consciousness – particularly in the West where the subject is largely taboo – to an open acknowledgement of death as a personal reality; what I propose  represents a serious challenge to each of us.  

7            Another theory on the source of aggressionThere are a range of theories about the causes of anxiety and deviant behaviours, other than Becker’s theory about the denial of death. Freud for example, says the individual’s tendency to individualising aggressivity (what we might label “deviant behaviour”)  is “normal”, “natural” and observable in human beings from a very early age. According to Freud in “Civilization and its Discontents“, it is only because of the intervention of community/society, which needs to undermine individualising tendencies – such as the intimacy occasioned by sexual relations between two individuals and the tendency to aggression – that sexual and aggressive impulses are delegitimated and, in the case of aggression, internalised to become “guilt”.  (Freud, S, p 74). In other words, the logical follow-on from Freud’s theory is that in responding to the aberrant behaviours of individuals by bringing them back to each individual’s fear of her own death, we may  actually be part of the civilising process to which Freud refers.  But if that is correct, so what?  The problem with Freud’s theory about the nature of violence of human beings, and one which is aptly highlighted by Becker’s discussion on “immortality systems” is that it is readily observable that aggression is often carried out on behalf of value systems, rather than objective self-interest. If one accepts this, then such a factor is more consistent if not empirically, then at least logically and intuitively to an assertion of self in the face of a particular anxiety that those value systems protect, that is, the fear of annihilation, not only socially but in every way, through death.  

One final endnote if I may: When talking about the origins of aggression it is important as Fromm does in another of his books “the Anatomy of Human Destructiveness” to define firstly the kind of aggression about which we are speaking. Aggression in the service of self-interest which is the kind of aggression to which Freud seems to be referring is quite a different thing from aggression in the pursuit of pleasure obtained from cruelty and torture, a form of aggression which is unique to man. And possibly cats, although Fromm says that such an observation is just our anthropomorphism in operation.    

 How do we define altruism?  The word itself was coined by the French philosopher Auguste Comte in the mid 1800s, and is based on the Italian adjective altrui.    He coined the word “altruism” to refer to what he believed to be our moral obligation to serve others and place their interests above one’s own.  Through his philosophy of positivism it was introduced into English and was popularised by the advocates of his philosophy.     

The word may be less than 200 years old, but altruism is older than humankind itself.   We can see altruistic behaviour in evolutionary biology.  An organism is said to behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms, but at a cost to itself.   This behaviour may reduce the number of offspring produced, but at the same time increase the chances of more offspring being produced to another like-organism.  There are many such examples:  the insect world with intricate social arrangements; vampire bats which regularly regurgitate blood for other members of the colony who have failed to feed;  animals warning the group at a risk to their own safety. 

 In human understanding the action of helping another person is a conscious action.  In the biological sense there is no such requirement.  Natural selection may have favoured humans who genuinely care about helping others. Consider child raising, it is easy to predict an evolutionary advantage associated with taking good care of one’s children.  As a result, caring, altruistic parents will have a higher inclusive fitness, and spread more of their genes, than parents who do not care.  Humans behave more altruistically towards their close kin than towards non-relatives, as within the animal kingdom; and we tend to help those who have helped us in the past – not dissimilar to the reciprocal altruism displayed in the animal kingdom – you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours!  

  “The Golden Rule” is a moral principle which is a corner stone in most major religions and cultures.   Basically it means “treat others as you would like to be treated.“   

    Confucius talks about shu, which is translated as altruism, saying to his disciples: “Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you”; similar words are used in other religious scriptures.   Altruism is an extension of this reciprocity.    Examples of how it crosses religions or cultures include:

 -   Aristotle:  lists benevolence as one of the virtues.   

The Qur-an: If you give alms openly, it is well; but if you do it secretly and give to the poor, that is better. - (Qur-an 2:271a) 

 In Islam, zakat, or the giving of alms, is the third of the five pillars of Islam. Various rules are attached to the practice, and a set amount is stipulated.  The recipients include the destitute and the working poor, those with excessive debt, strangers and others who need assistance.  The general principle is that the rich should give to the poor.  

Buddhism recognizes three kinds of charity: giving material offerings, sanctuary and protection to animals and giving doctrinal lectures. In Buddhism, alms or almsgiving is the respect shown by the giver to the Buddhist monk, and is offered in return for prayers. 

   In Judaism, the term for charity is tzedakah, which derives from tzedek, meaning “justice.”  I like this concept – it gives respect to the person receiving the charity.  An example of Judaic altruistic behaviour is Ruth  when she places the needs of her mother-in-law before herself; or the commands in Deuteronomy to leave a portion of crops for the poor to glean.  

 Altruism is central to the teachings of Christianity. Think of the Sermon on the Mount, and the parable of the widow’s mite.   

 Although altruism means helping another person without expecting a reward, there is often an “internal” benefit for the subject, a good feeling, a sense of satisfaction, a fulfilment of duty.   If one does something for another person, simply with the view of gaining something for oneself then it is not really altruistic.  

With this in mind let us think about the above examples, each of them has an accompanying reward for doing good.    Aristotle recommends adopting the virtue of beneficence to advance one’s standing in the community.  A person adopting such a virtue will not only benefit others, but will generate a response that will likely bring benefits in return.  Within the other doctrines there is a concomitant reward, Ruth married the rich landowner, the golden rule is all about reciprocity, the Christian and Islamic doctrines focus on a better after-life – laying up treasures in heaven, other religions suggest good karma such as rain to grow crops.  Even old adages – such as what goes around comes around, suggest that if you do the right thing by someone else, you will get your reward.    

  According to the theory of psychological egoism, while one can be outwardly altruistic in the practical sense, there is no such thing as pure altruistic motivations. That is, while one might very well spend one’s life helping others, one’s motive for doing so is always the furthering of one’s own interests. One claiming to be an altruist might get a great deal of pleasure from helping others. That pleasure, according to this theory, is both the motive and the resulting benefit one gets from the act. 

   We do need to recognize that there are powerful external motivators for altruistic acts.  But does this mean that there is no such thing as true disinterested altruism?  I don’t believe so, people acting altruistically are not consciously calculating the benefit that they are gaining for themselves each time they reach out to help another person.  Research with young children, demonstrates how a toddler will help somebody struggling with a task, suggesting that we are indeed hard-wired to be altruistic.  Neurological research has found that a particular area of the brain – the posterior superior temporal cortex – is activated by altruistic behaviour. 

   800 years ago, Maimonides, the mediaeval Jewish philosopher drew up a golden ladder of Charity. 

1. Giving grudgingly
2. Giving to the poor less than one should, but in a friendly manner
3. Giving to the poor after being asked
4. Giving to the poor without being asked
5. Giving when the recipient knows the donor but the donor does not know the recipient
6. Giving when the donor knows the recipient, but the recipient does not know the donor
7. Giving when neither the recipient nor the donor know each other
8. The highest degree of all is one who supports another reduced to poverty by providing a loan, or entering into a partnership, or finding work for him, so that the poor person can become self-sufficient.

  Today 3 percent of the Australian population climb to the second highest rung on the ladder when they give blood, knowing not the donor, nor the donor knowing who gave the gift of blood.  

  There are multitudinous examples of altruism:  the kindness of strangers; the Salvation Army making prison visits; our spontaneous response to the Tsunami victims; the philanthropic gifts of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet; Geoff Dixon’s $70 million donation to Parkinson’s research. Then there are the truly heroic altruists; the soldier who gives his life for his mates, the person who jumps into a swollen river to rescue a drowning child; Oscar Schindler;  Raoul Wallenberg. 

 The term the Good Samaritan has entered into the vernacular.  It is one of the most well known stories exemplifying selfless giving.  The parable was told by Jesus in response to the question “And who is my neighbour?”  

  In brief, a man was set upon by thieves and left for dead on the side of the road.  A priest came past saw him, and crossed to the other side of the road.  Next a Levite, an important religious official, came past and he too crossed the road.  Then along came the Samaritan.  Now Samaritans were despised religious outcasts, but the Samaritan when he saw the victim, helped him, fixed up his wounds, took him to an inn and took responsibility for his on-going care.  

 Two Princeton researchers (Darley & Batson) wanted to test the psychological motivators behind the behaviour of the Good Samaritan, and by extension our own supposedly altruistic behaviour.  They took a cohort of students at Princeton Theological Seminary with different religious and moral orientations. As each subject arrived, he (I think they were all men) was informed that he was to give a talk in another building and was sent on his way. On the way there, there was a “victim” slumped strategically in a doorway and clearly needing help.  The question was under what conditions would a subject stop to help the victim?

  Half of the subjects were assigned to talk on the Good Samaritan Parable; the others were assigned a different topic. Some of the subjects were told they were late and should hurry; some were told they had just enough time to get to their destination, and some were told they had lots of time.   The results showed that only one of these variables that made any difference was how much of a hurry the subjects were in. Subjects in a hurry were far less likely to stop and provide assistance than the other subjects.  

 What does this indicate?  These were all Princeton divinity undergraduates, students who you would expect would be switched on to helping those in need.  But they were easily manipulated by an instruction to hurry. Even making the parable of the Good Samaritan a part of the actual experiment had no real effect on the subjects.  

 The standard interpretation of the Parable focuses on the moral character of the people, the goodness of the Samarian as opposed to the religiosity of the priest and Levite.  But this interpretation is wrong because it overlooks situational factors.  In this case the important situational factor is how much of a hurry the various agents might be in.   I will come return to this later.  

In light of the above we can re-evaluate our reactions to certain situations.  For example, why did Australians give so readily to the Tsunami victims, but have overlooked the famine sufferers in Daifur?  I contend that situational factors are behind our altruistic response or lack thereof.  The dramatic nature of the Tsunami, the proximity to our own shores, the sense that they, the Tsunami victims, are not responsible for their fate, the acute presentation over the chronic problems of Africa.     

 I have a second Samaritan story for you to consider – the story of Kitty Genovese which demonstrates a phenomenon which came to be known as the Bad Samaritan Complex and I would also remind you that there have been similar occurrences recently in Australia.  

In 1964, Kitty Genovese was murdered in New York while thirty-eight people watched without intervening from their Queens apartment block.  This was in middle class New York, but where, one might ask, were the heroic altruists on that day?   The circumstances of her murder and the apparent lack of reaction by the neighbours who watched it was reported by a newspaper article published two weeks later.  The incident prompted investigation into the psychological phenomenon that became known as the bystander effect the “Bad Samaritan Complex” or “Genovese syndrome”.

     Darley and Latané conducted a series of experiments to tease out this problem. In one such experiment,  a subject was put in a waiting room to fill out application forms.  The subject was either alone, or there were two other people in the room filling out applications.   Then smoke began pouring out of a hole in the wall.    The researchers were interested in ascertaining who would report the presence of smoke.  The results?  Three quarters of the people who were alone in the waiting room reported the smoke before the experimental period came to an end (6 minutes).   When there were three people in the room only one person out of 24 reported within the first 4 minutes, and only 38% reported it within the 6 minutes.  Basically people were twice as likely to report the smoke if they were alone than if they were in groups.  Darley and Latané’s other experiments produced similar results.  

 The researchers offered several possible explanations for these results. One hypothesis is diffused responsibility: passing the buck assuming or hoping, that others will intervene; the fewer people present the greater the sense of responsibility.  Another explanation is that subjects interpret the situation as other people around them do, rather than making their own judgement.   Suppose a person is staggering in the street, we may not know whether he is drunk or suffering a heart attack. If we look around and see others paying no attention, we are more likely to ignore the situation, and assume the person is drunk and can therefore be ignored.   

 Maybe people are concerned about how they appear to others around them, and don’t want to make fools of themselves; when alone, people do not worry about their image and are therefore more likely to act. There have been other experiments which show that people are influenced enormously by the perceptions and behaviour of those around them. If we don’t help because no-one else is getting involved, we might help more when we are given the lead by other people helping.   

As an aside – To counter the bystander effect when you are the victim, the  recommendation is to pick a specific person in the crowd to appeal to for help rather than appealing to the larger group generally. This places all responsibility on that specific person instead of allowing it to diffuse.    

All too easily we attribute character traits to people in order to explain their behaviour, the priest was bad, the people in the apartment block were morally suspect, Oskar Schindler was a saint (he wasn’t); remember that until recently Bill Gates was not universally admired. But we can so easily be wrong as people behave differently in different situations.  In trying to explain why someone has acted in a certain way, we concentrate on the person, their supposed character, and ignore the situation.  What I believe is that in another situation, another time, another place, if he too was in a hurry, the Samaritan could have passed by on the other side of the road.     

Why is this important?  Understanding the complexity of altruistic behaviour can help us understand our motivations, the triggers that make us commit to a cause, why we don’t all give, why we are not always generous or why we don’t behave to others, as we should.    

I would now like to move on, to take you away from the standard view of altruism and its underlying psychology, and introduce the philosophy of Peter Singer.  

 In 1972 at the age of 26 Peter Singer published a seminal essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”  This essay challenged, and still challenges, contemporary philosophers and ordinary citizens alike.   It was confronting, it asked a lot of hard questions about the moral obligations the west in light of world poverty and the unequal distribution of global resources – an issue still going on in the environment debate.   Singer is an unabashed utilitarian, and he uses utilitarianism to argue that we are obligated to do something about it.  We need to ” give aid until giving any more would hurt ourselves more than it would help recipients”, and ”whatever money you’re spending on luxuries, not necessities, should be given away.” 

  Today Singer admits that he himself falls short of the standards that he set in this seminal essay but he is still writing and enjoining the affluent west to face up to their responsibilities.  Recently he wrote a long article which was published in the SMH setting out clearly how targets to alleviate world poverty could be reasonably met.    

The pressing philosophical questions now are: what in the way of humanitarian assistance do people who have more than enough owe to those who do not have enough?  What are our obligations?  Is the alleviation of harm of higher moral good than prevention of harm?  And once we recognise our obligations and act accordingly, then are our actions no longer altruistic, but a requirement or duty?  

In his final chapter in the book A Darwinian Left – Politics, Evolution and Co-operation, Peter Singer takes an ambitious leap past the view of altruism that I have presented today, he enjoins us to move beyond ourselves when he says, and I quote.  

We do not know to what extent our capacity to reason can, in the long run, take us beyond the conventional Darwinian constraints on the degree of altruism that a society may be able to foster.  We are reasoning beings…… Reason provides us with the capacity to recognize that each of us is simply one being among others, all of whom have wants and needs that matter to them as our needs and wants matter to us.  Can that insight ever overcome the pull of other elements in our evolved nature that act against the idea of an impartial concern for all of our fellow humans, or better still for all sentient beings?

By Derek Maitland

Tuesday February 20^th 2007

I want to open this talk by recalling what I rank as the most elegantly apocalyptic dilemma ever posed about the existence and future of mankind. It comes from the prolific works of the celebrated and controversial British philosopher of the 1940s, Cyril Joad, and when I first read it I knew I had to begin studying philosophy myself.

Joad wrote: “Is the human mind a fundamental feature of the universe, a key to the interpretation of the rest, or is it a mere accident, an eddy in the primeval slime, doomed one day to finish its pointless journey with as little significance as it once began it?”

Isn’t that just wonderful? Doesn’t it make you feel glad to be young and alive?

Now, there are various ways in which that statement can be interpreted, but I’ve always looked at it this way: Are we intelligent beings with a free will – capable of a creativity and resourcefulness that will survive everything to come, or are we simply organic robots, physical bodies with built-in computers that simply react to the demands and challenges of our environment?

Or let’s put it this way: Are we completely governed as human beings by an incredibly complex neurological wiring, or circuitry, that is part and parcel of our organism, or is there truly another force, what we call the mind, or the soul – certainly something metaphysical – which drives and guides the body through a higher level of desires, aspirations and needs which are far loftier than our physical senses?

It’s a question that lies at the heart of philosophy, and indeed has been debated furiously for centuries. I say it’s a purely fundamental question because of the bigger issues that bloom in great blossoms of thought from it – the whole of metaphysics, for example – whether in fact there are two distinct realities to our existence, one the physical reality of matter; the other a dream-like reality of ideals, thoughts, beliefs and concepts.

This fierce debate is raging still – fuelled nowadays by the steady advances in neurological research. And by that, I mean that they’re finding more and more little nooks and crannies and patterns or networks of circuitry in the brain which not only deal with emotions, desires, even projected aims and goals that many thinkers have claimed for the idealistic side of things, but suggest that what we would regard as the separate, free-thinking mind is simply a neurological function: a product of the human machine.

In our day and age, with the level of intellectual and spiritual debate that many of us are attaining, the very last thing we’d like to hear about ourselves is that we are perambulating organic computers.

Yet it may well be – and I, for one, sincerely hope it isn’t – that the concept of mind or soul as a separate, more elevated force within our consciousness will ultimately turn out to be an invention of religion – an emotional flux, born of faith, in which we’ve been able to correspond with another of our inventions – the gods.

If we take the Darwinian theory of existence and evolution, we can certainly say that our brains have grown and become more and more complex – fantastically so – in response to increasingly complex demands and challenges of our environment.

So have our minds – if indeed we have what we regard as separate minds – required to deal these days with an enormous, ever-growing, whirling storm of moral, ethical, intellectual, occupational, imperatives and dilemmas with each step on the rung of human development.

In that respect, we have another immediate question that we have to deal with: Is the human brain, as with the circuitry of any man-made computer, completely a-moral, dispassionate, absolutely objective, concerned only with the health, safety and welfare of the body itself – while it’s the mind or soul that’s responsible for the abstract issues and functions like truth, good, beauty, morality and the like?

Remember, we can build a computer now that’s more powerful in terms of calculation and multitasking than the human brain itself, yet the next step – artificial intelligence – making it possible to think for itself – deal with the abstract demands of the intellect – is so technologically daunting that it really is as if we have to develop a mind to go with it.

OK, I’m not saying that there’s definitely a separation between body and soul, brain and mind, but we can go back – as in most other things philosophical – to Socrates and Plato to prove the many centuries in which that distinction has existed.

Socrates referred obliquely to a separate mode of command and thinking when he spoke of permanent natures of justice, courage, and right and wrong, that were not of the bodily senses. Like Plato’s so-called “eternal natures” – which, of course anticipate the ages-old debate on immutable values – Socrates saw these as not perceptible to the senses and apprehended by understanding only.

Plato himself came up with that other definition of mind – the soul – which he saw as a link between the material world, the world of matter, including the human body, and the eternal, unchanging, values-based world of ideas.

It then becomes apparent that Plato shared with Aristotle the theory of the soul being a cause, separated from and working independently of the body – causing bodily movement by “exciting desires,” as in creating those desires.

In that respect, we begin to feel the first stirrings of that rather formless, nameless, almost undefinable impulse, or life-force, within us that Schopenhaur later called the “will.”

Plato wrote that the body can only move when pushed by others or when, as in living things, it is set going by a soul or principle of life within it. But then the question begs: what moves the soul? And Plato’s answer to that was a force that he called the  “unmoved mover” of the universe – God.

And when you read that, you begin to appreciate how much of Plato’s theories and those of his fellow-thinkers made their way into the Christian religion. Not that Plato saw God in quite the same way as the Christians have since regarded Him.

Plato’s God was not the maker of the world, which he said was in itself eternal. Nor was God the soul. Rather, he was the perfect being – perfect and in need of nothing beyond knowledge. In fact, Plato saw the human soul itself as separated from the physical body, to be sure, but part of God’s eternal soul.

Anaxagorous, who is said to have taught Socrates the principle of the mind, regarded it as the force that animates all matter, has power over all things that have life, is infinite and self-ruled. In fact, Anaxagrous spoke of mind or intelligence providing order to the diversity and chaos of the world, and in doing so he again reached out to the theory of eternal natures, immutable values – the mind in quest of the intelligible will – the common good – the divine plan.

Beyond that, I think we can say that the mind, as the separate, non-physical, idealistic master of the body, prevailed in philosophical thinking – supported by religion — right up until the empiricists of the 17^th century, when the first real surge of scientific discovery and culture, with its accompanying strict limits on the supernatural, began to point toward the sharper debate on mind over matter that reigns today.

Is the mind, as we regard it, purely a function of the brain – and therefore an electro-organic product of matter – or is it a separate, idealistic, driving force that connects us all with an eternal common consciousness of true, immutable values and laws?

Why do we say on the one hand to others: “Use your bloody brain,” and on the other: “Surely your intelligence would tell you …”

Kant didn’t have much truck with the mind as a pre-eminent mover and shaker of all things. You’ll recall he’s most famous for asserting that, if there’s a mind at all, or more likely an intelligence in his way of thinking, it’s incapable of taking we mere mortals across the great philosophical divide to that fabled realm of idealism, wherein all things abstract reign.

Kant said the mind can obtain knowledge only from what it perceives of the material world through our senses.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, on the other hand, was among those thinkers who began attributing the mind, or soul, with a kind of supreme purpose, and harnessing the physical world, and us, to achieve it.  Fichte reckoned the soul itself saw nature, or the material world about it, as a kind of obstacle course with which to exercise itself and, and. ultimately, to successfully overcome – or even as a means through which to communicate with other souls.

Then we have Hegel, who took Fichte’s obstacle course and went a huge metaphysical step further. Yes, the mind or spirit needed an external world in which its striving to know and use might develop its own capacities. In other words, sharpen and develop its knowledge and reason.

But, says Hegel, the external world only serves this purpose because it sets before the mind, as an object for its study and appropriation, a nature which is in truth the mind’s own. And, having opened up the question of reality actually being what we ourselves perceive it to be, Hegel went on to define reality itself in terms of mind over matter – body and soul.

I think it’s so compelling and powerful, the way he puts this thesis – if for no other reason than you can actually understand what he means.

Hegal contended that the thought of an ultimate reality which is rational or intelligible – for that is practically what is here meant by “God” – is the thought of something which is certainly not perceptible by the senses. To appeal to the senses for verification would be unreasonable.

The only verification of which we could reasonably talk, he continues, is that supplied by the actual progress of knowledge, as, under the pressure of the questions which the mind puts to it, the world yields up one secret after another.

But the whole business of putting the questions, distinguishing the answers, and seeing what new questions these answers suggest, is all carried on by the mind in the strength of conviction – that in thinking logically, that is in following the laws of its own nature, it is tracing out the actual structure of reality.”

Can we prove the existence of mind over matter – a higher, independent intellect, if you will, that says we must walk before we can run, that a stitch in time saves nine, that pride goeth before a fall, and all the other little nagging safety and ethical messages we mentally download when we have time to stop and think?

Well, we can’t see the mind, or soul, or do a digital trace of it. All we have to go on at this point in time, I think, is to think of the analogy of man and computer.

And at this moment, I’m moving into the realm of existence as Derek Maitland sees it, with answers that are purely intuitive and must not be taken in the same light as those wide-eyed, slightly manic men we see with cow-licked strands of hair, whipcord neck muscles and spittle flying from the lips, bawling the word Truth at us from soap boxes in the Domain.

So, it’s my intuitive theory that as human beings, we are the mainframes in which our brains are the computers.

These computers can operate the body, interpret its perception of the material environment about it, store and build memory, master an inestimable range of tasks and supply commands, energy and chemical at required times to stimulate an emotional response to what it senses.

Of course, there are celebrated philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle, who wrote “Concept of the Mind” in 1949, who insist that this is where it all stops — in what he calls the super-mechanical capacities of the body and brain. Ryle claims that the idea of mind as an independent entity, inhabiting and governing the body, should be rejected as a redundant piece of literalism carried over from the era before the biological sciences became established.

But I’m not sure of that – intuitively, that is. To me, it is the mind that drives and masters the body through the brain. It is we ourselves, by analogy, sitting at the keyboard telling the computer what to do – making it respond to desires, aspirations, aims, goals, codes and yearnings that the computer, concerned only with “tasks” – and that’s the keyword – tasks – cannot understand.

And from that thesis, we go back to my philosopher mentor, Cyril Joad, and three steps in his own analysis of mind over matter.

Step 1: Joad asks: “If the purely mechanist view of evolution is to be accepted, how does man fit in – so poorly equipped for his environment, compared with other species striving for higher forms of life?”

Step 2:  Joad continues: “I shall assume, that is to say, that both life and matter are real – in the sense that neither can be derived from the other and must find accommodation for each other in the universe.”

Step 3:  Joad’s clincher – “The notion of a non-material form of life acting upon and using material bodies is therefore no longer so difficult to sustain, as it was when the older physics held sway.

“The body is a machine, and, if appropriately stimulated, will work as a machine works. Life may be conceived to be intimately associated with it, but independent of it – an activity, rather than a thing, which uses and moulds the body for its purposes, playing upon it as the fingers of a skilled pianist play upon his/her

instrument.”

That’s another most beautiful analogy, and to it we can add the athlete, whose sense of challenge, ambitions and pure will to win drive the body hard for victory. And the body delights in this mastery and drive – frisking and leaping, like a horse when the reins are let, in anticipation of each new challenge.

If I can round off this talk with another example of my own intuitive thinking, I would ask this: Why does the human body, the human self, put itself through such horrible trials, risk such injury and death and deprivation, unless there’s a power of mind over matter, some commanding force which can override its own natural instinct for safety and survival?

And I’ll leave you with this example of this overriding power from my own experience.

It’s one, you can laugh at — my decision, three years ago, to take the world’s second highest bunjee jump in Helsinki, Finland.

My mind had an aim, a goal, you see – insane as it was — and my body, ever-trustful that my mind would do the right thing, allowed itself to be winched up 400 feet on a huge crane over the Helsinki waterfront – standing on the edge of a small metal cage, legs roped together with the bunjee cord and two jump-crew hunched behind me.

My mind had absolutely no doubt about whatit was going to do. And it wasn’t until I reached the top, and the two Finnish guys behind me swung me around to gaze out over what I swear was the worst thing I’ve ever seen — an absolutely awesome, awful, terrifying empty expanse of Helsinki rooftops and traffic — that my body finally rebelled.

“What in the name of Christ are you doing?” it screamed. “This is suicide. This is how one kills oneself. This is against all the laws of human existence and self-preservation, for fuck’s sake! Stop this insanity. Get back. Go back down. I will not allow you to do this to me, us!”

Behind me, I could hear the two Finnish crew gently preparing me for the jump. “It’s gonna be beautiful, Derek. You’re just gonna love this. Now, on the count of three … One …. Two …”

And in those tiny moments, that’s where I encountered the pure and absolute separation of mind over matter, mind over body. My body was absolutely terrified. It was like a dog being dragged on a chain to a cold bath, ears back, neck straining, all paws frantically dug into the floor for traction. 

But in those apocalyptic split seconds of decision, my mind – believe it or not — could not bear the abject humility of turning back, stopping the jump, being lowered back down to the beach with everyone for miles around hooting with derision. And me at 60, I think it was – silly old fool, get him down before he does himself an injury. Who let him up there in the first place?

And the secret of bunjee jumping became plain to me too – it’s the mind, the will, overriding the body’s natural terror, that makes it as horribly thrilling and ultimately triumphant as it is.

Yes, I think we have a mind, or soul, that’s separate to and independent of our organic, computerized frames. It’s what makes us do such awesome, terrifying and wonderful things. It’s what, in the final analysis, makes us human.

]]> http://philoagora.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/the-death-of-democracy-peter-bowden/feed/ 0 philoagora http://philoagora.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/dividing-the-community-the-medias-role-john-millard/ http://philoagora.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/dividing-the-community-the-medias-role-john-millard/#comments Thu, 04 Jan 2007 04:39:03 +0000 philoagora http://philoagora.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/dividing-the-community-the-medias-role-john-millard/ ]]>

]]> http://philoagora.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/dividing-the-community-the-medias-role-john-millard/feed/ 0 philoagora http://philoagora.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/the-death-of-god-sam-alexander/ http://philoagora.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/the-death-of-god-sam-alexander/#comments Thu, 04 Jan 2007 04:34:05 +0000 philoagora http://philoagora.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/the-death-of-god-sam-alexander/ ]]> 1. Introduction