My last “essay” wasn’t really a traditional essay at all, in the sense that it should have stated a thesis and worked out various implications or some kind of a proof statement. Starting from an exploration of the divide between civil society and the parallel rise of an explosion of “intimate societies” in opposition to the rules and defining consensus of the civic realm, it went on to explore the fundamental instrumentalism inherent in modern conceptions of public relationships, and the slow but effective infection of the private sphere with the instrumental norms and binary notions of “you’re with us or you’re out” that enable instrumental relationships to be at once fluid and innovative but also deprive them of any possibility of transcendent meaning to their participants. It wasn’t an essay so much as a story, but I think a particularly relevant story for those of us living in the contemporary, mass media steeped, anthropocentric Western world.
I ended with a bit of an assertion, namely, that an instrumentalist approach to human relationships was in the long run untenable because it fails to address the existentialist curse of the modern self, namely, the sense that there is “something” basic to being a self which is not expressible in terms of object. There is something ineffably pointless to being a sentient human being which gives rise to our feelings of malaise, to the search for meaning, to the search for being a part of an exercise which will carry us beyond the trap of isolated selfhood. Most of us attack this by discovering “missions” – it could be parenthood, it could be engagement with a social mission, it could be placing ourselves in service to art, or beauty, or learning – but in my experience, both my own and my observations of others, this is a temporary shakeoff of the problem. Eventually we will look at our mission and face the same issue we started with: what is the point, really, except more self-referential – anthropocentric – achievement which is itself ephemeral, grounded only in a temporary understanding of what “the good” is, defined by us in mutual concert either in a civic dialogue to develop a broad consensus of what is good, or in a subversive reaction to that amongst a smaller number of “true believers” in our intimate societies?
Most moral philosophers have gotten around this problem by asserting that because human sentience and human capacity for consciousness is so unique – to our knowledge, completely unique in the universe – its aims and objects have a prior claim on any notion of the good. This is an extension of older Enlightenment tradition but it’s been repeated and reinforced by the Romantics and those that would follow them. Modern moral philosophy sees this as a kind of historical hangover from older classical and then Christian assertions of an ontic good beyond human definition – a Platonic idea of the good of the logos, a Christian idea of the unknowable but recognizable love of God – which in an age which increasingly viewed God as either simply the initiator of a universe of impersonal law or as unnecessary altogether, asserted the notion of a human “good” in what was viewed as our essentially charitable and benevolent nature towards one another.
Neitschze in his last works makes a final radical break with this, declaring that the attachment to the idea of human beneficence is our last but most powerful chain holding back our power to be ubermensch, but his approach evades the existential crisis of meaning – for what purpose other than shallow vanity and self-aggrandizement does the ubermensch act? – and why should any one ubermensch be preferred to another? and doesn’t this just plunge us back to a Hobbesian state of nature where ubermenschen simply assert their apodictic statements of their own good without check or confirmation? As an attempt to break out of benevolent assertions of the “good”, it may have offered a different path (or at least does so for humans willing to equate their sentience with godhood) but as an attempt to define a human existence which could address the fundamental uniqueness of the experience of sentience in a way which could alleviate the alienation of that experience, it failed.
Another angle to this doesn’t ascribe a value of good, but it nevertheless ascribes a point of unique privilege which serves much the same purpose. David Christian, the author of Big History, makes the claim that going back to the Big Bang, the history of the universe can be readily told as a narrative of the removal of barriers to negative entropy, or the ability of energy and matter to coalesce in forms of greater and greater reproductive complexity, with human consciousness being simply the most recent and most complex evolution of that trend, and since it is the most recent and most complex variant, it has a special claim of our attention – not because it’s about us, mind you (it’s not simply navel-gazing) but because it is the most interesting single thing in the universe. This is taken up actually by several cosmologists who draw an identical conclusion: consciousness is a unique and as yet unexplainable phenomenon in nature, and its inability to be explained according to currently understood principles of the physical world gives it a uniquely privileged position from which to understand those principles themselves. A sentient observer, in other words, is fundamentally different to a Schroedinger or a Hawkins than a simple on/off switch.
These approaches don’t really hold for me. It’s not that I don’t see sentience as something qualitatively different, and therefore worthy of awe. It’s that the recursive capability which, I think, is essential to sentience – the ability to open-endingly and unendingly ask the same “why” question to the answer of a previous “why” question – makes me wonder what will happen next. Obviously I’m incapable of imagining it, but I can imagine – and I actually think playing out the historical idea of increasing reproducible complexity being an ongoing trend forward in the evolution of the universe – that there will be something beyond the sentience which we can currently experience as humans today. At that point, sentience will be the equivalent to what sexual reproduction is to us – an observed factor in some higher varieties of increasingly complex reproducible life, part of what links the new beyond-sentient super being to all forms of life, but not that which defines it as the observed “most complex object”. Sentience is interesting, in other words, but I don’t see a reason to privilege it beyond the way we would treasure any rare and interesting phenomenon.
I also don’t think that there is a good in human relationships and human understanding which is observable. There is plenty of “good” in a childish way of saying it, but there is just as much “bad.” We define each, after all, in self-referencing ways, as humans I mean: good behavior is what makes other humans feel valued, or loved, or healed, or avoid pain, or deal with necessary pain. Bad behavior is the opposite. But in times past, and even today, some of what we define as “good” behavior is viewed as bad if others are viewed to be undeserving somehow, undeserving again being entirely self-defined. And we give license to ourselves for some “bad” behavior when it is part of a larger (again self-defined) canvas of circumstance or a broader journey of discovery or charity. Utilitarianism is famously guilty of this: even if there is an impulse within us as a species (as any species will) to drive towards objects which describe better and more sustainable physical conditions for all, that impulse often gives me license to drive towards objects which are patently terrible for specific individuals considered as themselves. And since those individuals also possess sentience and therefore have an independent view of “the good” which has no a priori reason to be rejected in favor of mine, we are stuck with either asserting the good – a non-rational assertion of preference – or flipping a coin, accepting that there is only contingency and no good which rises above anthropocentric self-reference. I’m deeply uncomfortable with this idea of giving ourselves credit for doing things that we have defined ourselves as being good. I’m perfectly comfortable labeling it as neutral, or describing it as “good for us, without respect for any universal value it may or may not contain.” But this is to shy away from concepts of “the good” in human behavior, which I think is necessary if one is to be intellectually honest.
Allowing oneself to be comfortable with this assertion of the good in human sentience is one easy way out of the existential trap, but I think it’s easy to see that it’s not sustainable. It’s basically an agreement with oneself to stop asking questions about what the good is – to allow oneself an avenue of some faith. We don’t want to believe in God to define the good, for a variety of reasons (seems mechanically unnecessary, can’t explain the existence of evil in a world which contains a God who otherwise defines good, massive variety of what God could be potentially makes it clear the idea of God is just a filler), so we look to ourselves to do so. Why? Well, if we privilege human sentience above all other phenomenon in the universe, I guess it’s our right to do so – but doing so we would, at least rationally, be forced in some future horizon to submit ourselves to a good defined by super-beings who have something beyond sentience if we ever discover such beings, and I have a feeling we won’t go so quietly into that slavery. Rather, I think the assertion of the good as being something inherent in human beings is just another kind of faith in an other.
Without that crutch, though, an instrumental view of human relationships is destined to fall into an existentialist trap: there is no transcendent meaning in a world viewed as being purely an object for human sentient engagement if humans are just neutral, if they have no particular propensity to an externally derived good. And while sentience is fascinating, and fun, and gives us means of expressing beauty and wonder and awe and fear and desire that are beyond the pale of our animal friends who lack it, it also is amazing in that it gives us the ability to imagine that there is more that we cannot understand, that is beyond our capacity to understand but which nevertheless holds the possibility of existing. Because our sentience gives us the ability to comprehend how different we are from dogs and whales and apes, it also gives us the ability to comprehend how inadequate we would feel if we were to encounter whatever comes next on the daisy chain of increasing complexity and negative entropic evolution.
How, then, to get out of the trap?
Viktoria proposes one such pathway in her comment on “Public Intimacy,” where she says that the private sphere – our relationships with our lovers, the adults with whom we come to love – is where we can reclaim it, and we can do so by (and these are my words) re-energizing the private space as being the only space that lives beyond the boundaries of public violence, both the violence of words and of actions. I agree with her that the private space is the only realm where this can take place, but not necessarily because it is safer – it’s because the private realm has been vacated by objective pursuits, making it ideal for the kind of “play” which is required in this task. The last hundred and fifty years have gutted it: civil society and its shadow of intimate societies have asserted their ownership of the instrumentalism of nearly every part of what was once regarded as sacrosanct amongst a family – and in so doing, have gone further and essentially asserted that all aspects of life is instrumental, or can be viewed and treated as a collection of end objects. Physical intimacy, affection, education of the young, order, cleanliness, access to economic production and its outputs – all of this is now viewed in a scientific and civil society as essentially driven by a point, a desired outcome or object, that because it is definable and comparable amongst other outcomes is thus open for interpretation, review, and discussion in the public spheres of civil and intimate discourse. There’s nothing left.
Except there is, and that is the essential unknowable quality of being sentient and being alive in sentience as its own experience. I can no more describe to you what it feels like to be Peter Freilinger than you can explain what it is to be you, but it is still the most essential element which distinguishes me from you and me with respect to all things and beings. Moreover, I can’t give you any point to being me, at all. Indeed my “meaning” will die with me – the meaning ascribed to my life by others after I’m dead will be irrelevant and meaningless to the dead me, and it will have only a random and unpredictable relationship to what I felt when alive and sentient, experiencing the actual meaning of “being me”. That space – the space of the self withdrawn from any constructive object – remains completely private, in each of us. While it may seem that I’m simply asserting the existence of such a space, as a thought exercise, try to imagine being a modern self without a space of non-objectivity, without any ineffability or a space beyond comprehension. It ends up feeling quite strange – quite non-modern, quite constrained and unfree. Despite our mad rush to objectify and assert instrumental ends, it’s actually the existence of that space of non-objectivity that announces our selves as being modern and being released from the bounds of a single conception of a unifying logos or God-head from which we derive our meaning.
I’d argue that that space is also the real basis of a positive assertion of what the private sphere really “is”, and the expression of that assertion is what Viktoria suggests, the open and unconditional love that sentient beings have the ability to give to one another without objective. We don’t do that in practice within our society, by observation: as children we are trained (in schools and a society steeped in humanist utilitarianism) to look for objects in all things, for reasons and points, including our relationships. We seek out others for physical intimacy, for encouragement and affirmation, for security. But loving another person in the way I’m talking about is to ask for nothing but to place on offer our sense of self, our sense of what it is to be human in the instantiation of our individual body and mind and spirit and heart, unshielded (despite our self-awareness that it is incomprehensible to others and therefore will inevitably strike others as sometimes horrifying, sometimes unspeakably beautiful, sometimes boring, sometimes irrelevant). The point to doing it, such as there is one, is to recognize the plight of being human in another person, and in the experience of offering up one’s own plight, to gaining a bit more self-understanding of what that plight really is.
The private space of traditional societal forms was negatively defined; it was what left when that which was thought of as concerning to the public space had been defined. The negatives attached at certain obvious levels – for most Greek polises, women, slaves, poor artisans, and anyone not from the polis were irrelevant to public life, making in fact most sentient humans (although admittedly not viewed fully as such) out of the scope of public life. More than that, though, the private was a space in which took place those items which were reserved as being not essential to the polis qua the polis; it had a background role in reproducing the physical conditions of the polis (economic and human), but as humans would cultivate and reproduce in absence of the polis anyway, these activities were not viewed as essentially “human sentient” activities. The private, therefore, was almost analogous to the animal, or the primitive; the public was the realm of the human, and beyond that, where the human mind would then explore the transcendent (in the form of God, or the gods, or the Logos, or what have you).
I’d suggest what is necessary for the modern world to recover a sense of balance and shake off its essential discomfort, in which the public sphere – in its evolved form of civic and intimate dialogues – has absorbed anything instrumental into itself and gone so far as to redefine the non-objective in instrumental forms wherever possible, is for the private sphere to be reimagined as that which is fundamentally non-instrumental, which is solely that which defines what it is to be the sentient self qua itself. It is a positive assertion of the scope of the private which the former definition lacked. In this private space, we open ourselves up for a process of discovery within ourselves but only enabled by becoming aware of others who open their selves to discovery as well. We cannot, in other words, live alone in the private space and still “understand” ourselves in our sentience and our humanity. We need to partner, and from there explore hopefully still further. To stay “alone” in the private space is to doom it – it is to embrace the ennui of the modern self, instead of viewing it as a platform for its own kind of exploration radically different from the objective scientific exploration we perform on the object-driven public sphere.
Our conception of what it is to “explore” has unfortunately been slotted into a single paradigm coming out of the instrumentalist and material public spere, and in the ensuing playing out of modernity, the result has been the disenchantment of our relationships, one by one – starting with our relationship with the transcendent but devolving as well to our relationships with family, with child rearing, with love itself. We have come to seek objects of return even in our children, even in our partners in love – we look for someone to fulfill our physical needs, someone else to fulfill our need for intellectual stimulation, in each we demand the right mix of time availability and time away, who smells good or who can cook or who can pair off against our desire to wash dishes and our desire to leave them on the counter and not put them away. Such an approach is no different to the desire to find in an employee the right mix of experience and general knowledge, coupled with good social skills and leadership potential for growth: we want the qualities so as to do something with them. The private sphere has become desiccated under the creeping influence of this kind of instrumentalism.
I’m essentially stating that we need a new charter for the private, starting not in objects – those things or ideas or feelings we wish to keep to ourselves, which in any event can be shared in intimate spaces which are still “public” in the sense of being driven by constructive dialogue forms and which acknowledge that others can share our appreciation for an object – but instead starting in that which is within our selves which lacks any object, which senses the realm of beyond-us but in so doing acknowledges the lack of access we have for objectifying anything in that beyond-us realm intelligibly for us in our own experience of sentience. That private space is truly deserving of the term because the ways in which we experience it are only fully comprehensible by ourselves within ourselves, beyond language (because we sense it only by integrating across all of our self’s capabilities, including those which are non-intellectualizable), and subject to only to the limitations of our own creativity and exploration capability. No one will ever understand our private space, but by opening ourselves up to sharing, we can sense that we are not alone in the search, and we can experience the sensation of owning that personal space without the fear that our journey is alone.
This is enough for me, I think, although the literature I’ve been exposed to of late would probably beg the question: is addressing a sense of loneliness – which is inherent to the modern experience of self as a fully individuated exercise – enough to address the full existentialist dilemma posed by a fully instrumentalized social experience? I’d say it’s a good place to start because the means by which you address the loneliness – to endow “private space” with a dedicated non-instrumental “purpose”, making it the privileged zone for pointless exploration and open sensation, and developing a practice and discipline within it of opening one’s self and exposing one’s self to other selves in the private sphere – also has the virtue of creating what doesn’t really exist in principle today, namely, a reserved space for non-instrumental speech and sensation. I think the objections will really come from what we’ve become intensely habituated to, namely, there will be questions of “what one does” in this new space. What will we do with the other people we open ourselves to which is different from what we do currently?
Well, simply put, one shouldn’t do anything, except to remove barriers to understanding, both those internally that one is aware of and those which seem to be barriers to the others we invite into the private space. That is, the private sphere becomes a zone of radically different intention. In the public space, in the pursuit of instrumental aims such as career, affection, political engagement, education of ourselves or others, happiness, our intention is direct, and while some ends (happiness) are ephemeral and thus can be re-pursued even if discovered in time at some point, all ends have a material expression. In the private space, our intention is not direct and it is not directly expressible; the intention is to continue to unfold and open up more than before, and to recursively continue that unfolding without end. There is no expression of the goal of openness.
In my own experience, the challenge to this really lies in the separation – or alienation – that this leads to over time from more objective, instrumentalist goals. The richness and depth of what I find in my own non-objective self but even more so in others and what they have shared with me, makes the externalized public world of instrumental goals seem fairly, well, dull. Kicking in of course is my physical desire to not be uncomfortable – will work for gin and a decent one bedroom apartment with comfy furniture, of course, and will seek out sexual pleasure and intellectual stimulation as appropriate – but beyond those rudimentary, almost foundational aims, other instruments seem truly ephemeral. But that’s a different kind of malaise – in fact it isn’t really a malaise at all, it’s just a reflection of the fact that in giving myself room to explore my non-instrumental self, I’ve started to overturn the previously accepted purely instrumental logic that drove my decisions and sense of worth in the past. That will be ongoing – there will be shifts in my perception and interpretation of instrumental reality over time as my non-instrumental reality is given more room to explore its own sensations. There will be times, like now, where that is more disruptive to my instrumental sense of purpose, but I also know there will be times when that non-instrumental reality is skew, if you will, to my instrumental aims, and at such times I won’t sense much of a connection at all between my private exploration and my public “face.”
One concrete impact of shifting the notion of private space would be to shift what we think of in our most “intimate” relationships. I acknowledge here that the simplest understanding of “intimate relationships” is quite different from what I’ve described throughout these essays as “intimate space”, but that’s intentional on my part: I think intimate relationships have become instrumentalized, be it adult partnership or romantic relationships, or families. If we now reserve private space for non-instrumental exploration, our private relationships in this space – our most intimate relationships, those with children who we parent who accept us as parents, lovers who we partner with, adults who we accept as teachers and who accept their role as teachers – will change as well. Our concept of “love” should shed any residue of instrumentality that the word has acquired over the past few centuries; it should shed even the idea of primary beneficence that the Romantics attach to it. Love instead should be the extension of our open, pointless exploration of self to the open, pointless exploration of selves in concert, seeing through the layering of what we do together and instead sensing and living in the sensation of how we exist when the points of doing are exhausted or put aside.
That too is a practice, and much like what we do as individuals, it lives beside the physical instruments and ends which our relationships still need in the objective world – physical presence and time, adequate financial resources, some alignment of both material and abstract instrumental objectives so as not to create unnecessary objective conflict. But to think that a reliance on finding meaning in instrumental objectives alone is sufficient is, I think, demonstrably false. By observation, those who, either as individuals or in their relationships, rely solely or predominantly on material or objective ends to derive meaning eventually and inevitably fail. They pursue so much that they become incapable of having any depth of meaning; or they achieve their objectives and are left with nothing further to pursue and they have lost any sense of meaning beyond that; or they find that their goals keep getting further away; or they isolate themselves or else are consumed by others’ instrumental aims as they attach themselves to others out of fear of isolation. Those who keep a practice of holding a space for purely non-instrumental play and sensation, on the other hand, seem to avoid any of these pratfalls.
I’ll end this soon. I’m proposing something here which may be bunk, or it may be too abstract to be relevant to anyone other than myself. But I think exploring approaches to the dead ends of our current societal consensus, in which moral philosophy is an extension of a broader evolution which has driven us all into an engaged instrumentalism without room for the transcendent or for that which cannot be expressed as an end, is essential right now. I say “right now” because we’re at that moment where we’re becoming instantaneously global. In the past, different, largely isolate or at least functionally non-exchanging societies existed independently around the world, and within each one, different approaches could play out. We don’t have that any longer; we are coalescing into a single human society. As mass media and connectivity evolve language towards greater homogeneity, as resource scarcity and global environmental issues force coordinated responses, and as material possibility and material wealth spread in a great, uneven wave, we’re faced with greater instrumental complexity that could threaten to overwhelm us. We could become so driven by instrumental needs that we will lose our grip on our non-instrumental selves – and indeed, I think this danger is at the root of what we think of as the existentialist crisis of modernity.
To totally lose the connection to the pointless exploring selves within us, to lose the connection entirely to the radical and inexpressible openness of sentience, would be to become mere machines, programmed by our ancestors but having lost the knowledge of how to code ourselves. The ruthless logic of materialism drives us in that direction but in our experience of life beyond object – which we all have inside of us – is the constant call to remind ourselves that that direction is false. Or, at least, it isn’t enough. It captures some of what it is to be alive, but not nearly enough. My private spaces remind me that life is both a collection of objects and an access to the pointless infinite. Life is both, and this is an attempt to participate in life in its combined fullness.
Which, if I’m honest, I haven’t done enough of lately – I’ve gotten a bit caught up in the objectives, in my case career and where to live and the like. Even this writing is awfully driven by a point I’m trying to make – this is constructive speech. So I’ll put my pen on this stuff down for a bit and, while I’m gallivanting about over the next few weeks, I’m going to try to keep it more observational.
On that note – summer has been creeping into the scene, both in Maine and in Seattle. It’s that pivot point where it seems like everywhere in the temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere is having the same day – it’s roughly 20C / 68F, sunny, breezy, and green everywhere at once, that brief moment before some areas start to get brown and parchy from midsummer heat while cooler areas start to get invasions of mosquitoes and freakishly fast plant growth in their shorter but more intense growing seasons. The dog is getting older but this is still his favorite time of year, the barbecue promising better table scraps and ice cream cones starting to appear for him to enjoy. June starts next week. It feels on schedule this year.