We are many bodies

Psychosis/Enlightenment 2

MT, we started by talking about Plato, and you pondered what would happen if we stripped away our illusions. Would we end up as the Dalai Lama or as Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger? Would we spiral towards madness or find serenity?

So I pondered Plato. Reality is a manifold, with some layers more illusory than others. Plato found the sensory layer most illusory (as do the Buddhists I presume), but he didn’t see it in black and white terms (illusion bad, reality good). Even the sensory layer is an important first step, a pointer to the next layer, which then seems “real” to us until we get one step deeper, etc. MT, you’re becoming a Platonist despite your own resistance.

Note Plato’s assignment of sensory data to the lowest level (most illusory) of reality/truth seems to pit him against the empiricist epistemology that dominates our current Age of Science (late 17th century to present); however, one of the foremost thinkers of the emerging Age of Science, David Hume, who carried empiricism as far as it could logically go (much to the consternation and inspiration of Kant), concluded much the same – that following the truth of sensory data (empiricism) leads us to conclude that sensory data tells us nothing about the objective world “out there” but only tells us about the imprints some presumed world out there makes on our personal sensory registers. The only difference between Hume the empiricist and Plato the rationalist is that, after they’ve both deconstructed the idea of gaining knowledge about the world-as-it-really-is via sensory data, Plato seeks a deeper layer through rational inquiry while Hume says that’s the end of it and goes out for a pint and a game of backgammon (and my Scottish friends can take that as an insult or a compliment, as you will).

I like your Dalai Lama or Meursault reverie, but I’d go a step further and say that these are the utopic and dystopic outcomes, respectively, of stripping away our illusions.

Although at first glance it seems cute but false to say that madness equates to “stripped of illusions,” it seems believable when I think of illusions as filters. To lose all of your filters would seem a form of psychosis. Someone — was it Aldous Huxley in Doors of Perception? — suggested that consciousness itself evolved not as a way to increase access to the world but as a filter for limiting access to the world, for blocking all the “ambient noise” as it were, so we could focus on a smaller zone of input more efficiently. And if the Huxley/Doors reference is right, I think he went on to say that hallucinogenics remove filters, quite literally expanding the scope of consciousness (and he struggles with whether the output is more akin to psychosis or enlightenment).

For the psychosis side of the equation, see psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his sometime follower, Julia Kristeva. In my primitive understanding of Lacan, we pass through three “orders” in the formation of the psyche (or rather we build up three layers, like rings in a tree). The “real” order is the hidden kernel to which we have no analytical access. Like the noumenal world in Kant’s metaphysics, it is merely a logical assumption that we must make in order for later stages to make sense. We enter the “imaginary” order when we one day see ourselves in the mirror, so to speak (maybe around a year old), see an entity with clear boundaries, and come to imagine ourselves as separate individuals surrounded by external people and environments. Later, we enter the “symbolic” order with the formation of language skills. We begin to process the world through a symbolic overlay (e.g., the sound “tree” symbolically represents the concept “tree,” which isolates and defines a whole range of sensory inputs, the sound “me” represents…, etc.). We now define our personhood relative to that symbolic overlay. We have entered the symbolic order.

In trying to access the “real,” we can only “imagine” it as an undifferentiated flux, or conceptualize it via the symbolic order (as a logical presupposition, an object of psychoanalysis, etc.). Either way, our view is mediated through imaginary or symbolic orders – we have no direct, unmediated access.

Kristeva followed Lacan in theory and focused in practice on “borderline” patients, patients whom I think she found permanently stuck between imaginary and symbolic orders, with perhaps some tantalizing glimpses of the “real” (alas, I’ve lost my original notes on Kristeva and Lacan to Hurricane Katrina).

Back to Huxley’s inference about hallucinogenics, he might say that they strip away the layering of the symbolic order, the webs and webs we have thrown over the flux of original experience, dividing it up into regions we can name and render intelligible. If you strip away all that layering, all those illusions, and get back in some fashion to the lived experience of the “imaginary” order or even the “real,” is the result more akin to psychosis or enlightenment? I think Huxley tentatively concludes that it can give you isolated moments of personal enlightenment but that it is inconsistent with everyday life; it inhibits your ability to function successfully in the workaday, social world (which seems consonant with my personal LSD experiences). In other words, you can strip away the illusion and dip into those pre-symbolic levels of experience, but you have to come back up to sustain your everyday life, since the very enlightenment you feel on the personal level renders you psychotic relative to the social order within which you must live.

Then again, there’s always the Dalai Lama.

Prequel:  Psychosis and Enlightenment

A Defense of Plato

Dear MT,

Per your comparisons, I don’t think Plato is as eager as Nietzsche or Kierkegaard (or perhaps MT) to separate men into two groups and condemn the ignorant masses. Plato’s myth of the cave is more about PROCESS than about passing judgment on the ignorant. It’s sort of like a rational correlative to the Buddhist process of enlightenment. We ALL resist the truth when it first dazzles us and we’re used to shadows. Plato’s myth is about the process we ALL have to go through if we want to achieve enlightenment. And yes, some are not strong enough, some have to turn back. But for Plato I think all rational beings have the capacity if they can find the fortitude. And he quite explicitly says that the enlightened ones should go back and help those who are still in the cave. In this sense he’s more Buddhist and less condescending than Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (especially Nietzsche in my estimation). In this process-orientation, Plato is actually not far from Aristotle’s notion of entelechy, where all things strive unconsciously toward their ideal destination, like the acorn strives toward becoming the oak. In fact, the wedge between Plato and Aristotle is somewhat forced. They have different emphases, yes, but they share a lot of fundamentals. Aristotle learned his Plato well.

In metaphysics, I think your resistance to Plato is a resistance to a straw man version of Plato – as if his formal world is like the Christian God with the beard who sits somewhere in physical space. I find it hard to believe Plato would be so naïve. He is just saying, in the cave and elsewhere, that there is an intellectual reality, a kind of Jungian collective unconscious, which is a hidden prerequisite to all the contingent truths we find in our everyday (transitory) reality. Whether we realize it or not (and most of us don’t), the contingent truths we structure our daily lives by would not be intelligible were they not undergirded by that collective unconsciousness, that conceptual substrate of deeper truths. And the deeper we dig, the closer we get to eternal truths and the more deeply we understand the prerequisites of our surface knowledge.

So you’re right that your idea of a perfect car may not match my idea of a perfect car, but were it not for some abstract concept of perfection implicitly acknowledged by both of us, neither of us could have ANY idea of a perfect car. The concept of perfection is a presupposed premise of your idea and my idea. So now we can talk about a concept of perfection that, albeit abstract, is a necessary prerequisite to our contingent and various concrete ideas. Now we can ponder things at a deeper level, and delve dialectically deeper into the roots of our own consciousness. That’s what Plato is all about.

Re politics, of course Plato’s politics does sort men, but the sorting is not as damning as in Nietzsche. He just says that few men will find their way out of the cave and stay out, and those should be our leaders. And he is undemocratic in the sense that he seems to believe that order requires hierarchy – a practical consideration more than an existential judgment about master and slave races a la Nietzsche. We moderns tend to dismiss hierarchy as a prerequisite to political order, but go back just to the late 18^th-century Enlightenment and you will still find strong and intelligent voices (e.g., Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson) arguing that without hierarchy is chaos. So I don’t agree with Plato here, but I’ll give him a pass on politics. (From what I hear, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book, Plato at the Googleplex, presses Plato harder on the human implications of his politics, but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.) Anyway, as I’ve said, I don’t think politics is the most compelling branch of his philosophy, but I still agree with Bertrand Russell’s mentor, Alfred North Whitehead, that “Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.”

And with due respect to Nietzsche’s wit, I think Plato would be the more amiable drinking companion.