Aporia

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death. This idea of necessary partialization is enormously useful in thinking about mental illness, socialization and maturation, art, everything. Later, Becker puts it more plainly: 

When we say neurosis represents the truth of life we again mean that life is an overwhelming problem for an animal free of instinct. The individual has to protect himself against the world, and he can do this only as any other animal would: by narrowing down the world, shutting off experience, developing an obliviousness both to the terrors of the world and to his own anxieties… We cannot repeat too often the great lesson of Freudian psychology: that repression is normal self-protection and creative self-restriction —in a real sense, man’s natural substitute for instinct. Rank has a perfect, key term for this natural human talent: he calls it “partialization” and very rightly sees that life is impossible without it.

That is, we use repression and partialization —the former a truncation of the self, the latter a truncation of the world— to achieve a stable, bearable relationship with overwhelming reality. We cut the universe down to an ergonomic size, stuff it in our carry-on with our business papers; we shrink ourselves, cram ourselves in there too; it is manageable for the duration of the flight, at least, although we might fear that a change in cabin pressure will cause us to burst, to spill our secret selves, to open up to the unmediated mysterium tremendum et fascinates.

If it were possible to modify your consciousness, would you rather (1) receive supplemental human instincts, instincts to guide you in social, professional, cultural situations through which you presently muddle self-consciously, laboriously; or (2) have your lifelong, unconscious efforts at partialization undone, largely or completely, such that you were restored to the childhood state of constant wonder, awe, and fear?

Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death, the thesis of which can perhaps be summed thusly: humanity sublimates its fear of death through the causa sui project: the construction of meanings which are enduring and non-contingent despite our mortality and ludicrous, creaturely contingency. Society, culture, and the illusions on which we depend are the fruit of this “immortality project”:

The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system… It doesn’t matter whether the hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value…

Heroic roles might include “breadwinner,” “mother,” “shaman,” “scientist,” “hedonist,” or any other designation which indicates how a person justifies their exertions and sufferings, pleasures and triumphs. Even to claim total purposelessness is a kind of assertion of meaning: a modest refusal to participate in hero-systems is a kind of heroism, a sought-out exceptionalism to this organismic problem of individuation and death. Indeed, when we talk of meaning as such, perhaps we are merely describing those symbols which exceed the individual but do not disappear into the inhuman cosmos, those ideas which are not organismic, will not die with the matter or, if they do, will somehow still suffice to justify its existence.

Becker’s work fascinates with its elucidation of how death drives this search for meaning and how the accidentally-developed and arbitrary illusions which provide meaning can both support the transcendence we require and enslave us. Indeed, Becker devotes much of the book to neurosis, which he suggests occurs when illusions fail, when hero-systems malfunction, and when the creature cannot escape his mortality:

What we call the well-adjusted man has…the capacity to partialize the world for comfortable action… [T]he “normal” man bites off what he can chew and digest of life, and no more. In other words, men aren’t built to be gods, to take in the whole world; they are built like other creatures, to take in the piece of ground in front of their noses… [A]s soon as a man lifts his nose from the ground and starts sniffing at eternal problems like life and death, the meaning of a rose or a star cluster, he is in trouble. Most men spare themselves this trouble by keeping their minds on the small problems of their lives just as their society maps out these problems for them. These are what Kierkegaard called the “immediate” men and the “Philistines.” They “tranquilize themselves with the trivial” —and so they can lead normal lives.

What we call neurosis enters at precisely this point: some people have more trouble with their lies than others. The world is too much with them, and the techniques they have developed for holding it at bay and cutting it down to size finally begin to choke the person himself. This is neurosis in a nutshell: the miscarriage of clumsy lies about reality.

Both the neurotic and the artist are people for whom society’s hero-system and culture’s roles and meanings have failed in some measure, but whereas the former responds with ineffectual or destructive compulsions —misguided efforts to control and organize the terrors of organismic life, or to imbue them with specious meanings— the latter attempts to ”justify his heroism objectively, in the concrete creation.” But the two are not so far apart, as everyone familiar with the association between neurosis and creativity knows:

The neurotic exhausts himself not only in self-preoccupations like hypochondriacal fears and all sorts of fantasies, but also in others: those around him become his…work; he takes out his subjective problems on them… The neurotic’s frustration as a failed artist can’t be remedied by anything but an objective creative work of his own. Another way of looking at it is to say that the more totally one takes in the world as a problem,  the more inferior or “bad” one is going to feel inside oneself. He can try to work out this “badness” by striving for perfection, and then the neurotic symptom becomes his “creative” work; or he can try to make himself perfect by means of his partner. But it is obvious to us that the only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection, or you objectify that imperfection in a work on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life… He takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, and then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem. This, as Goethe saw in Faust, is the highest that man can achieve.

I am partial to that definition of art, incidentally: a fashioned, human answer to the problems of the interiorized world of a given artist. Becker continues with a cold, obvious, and sadly persuasive point:

From this point of view the difference between the neurotic and the artist seems to boil down to a question of talent… [The neurotic] can glorify himself only in fantasy, as he cannot fashion a creative work that speaks on his behalf… He is caught in a vicious circle because he experiences the unreality of fantasied self-glorification. There is really no conviction possible for man unless it comes from others or from outside himself in some way —at least, not for long. One simply cannot justify his own heroism in his own inner symbolic fantasy, which is what leads the neurotic to feel more unworthy and inferior.

And what gives you your sense of meaning? Into what role do you pour yourself, and by what sort of creation are you satisfied? Do you, like me, sometimes notice with horror that your idle time is spent trafficking in the most pitiful and empty fantasies —shortly to be forgotten, a waste of daydreams— and your working hours pass with your nose to the ground before you? Have you a causa sui project, or have you found your meaning on a shelf, readymade for you? Are you quick to critique the hero-systems of others, or do you feel a kinship with all who seek meaning, who at least talk of purpose, love, death, as opposed to the goddamned news?

Jonathan Swift in “Cassinus and Peter”; he again lamented the simultaneity of the sublime and the scatological in Caelia’s person in “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” in which two characters, Strephon and Betty, take a “strict survey” of the contents of her dressing room:

And first a dirty Smock appear’d,
Beneath the Arm-pits well besmear’d.
Strephon, the Rogue, display’d it wide,
And turn’d it round on every Side.
On such a Point few Words are best,
And Strephon bids us guess the rest;
But swears how damnably the Men lie,
In calling Celia sweet and cleanly.

In addition to sweat stains on her smock, they find evidence of dandruff, “The Scrapings of her Teeth and Gums,” tools for shaving and plucking, and, most horrifyingly, her toilet:

For Strephon ventur’d to look in,
Resolv’d to go thro’ thick and thin; 
He lifts the Lid, there needs no more,
He smelt it all the Time before.
As from within Pandora’s Box,
When Epimetheus op’d the Locks,
A sudden universal Crew 
Of humane Evils upwards flew;
…
The Vapours flew from out the Vent,
But Strephon cautious never meant
The Bottom of the Pan to grope,
And fowl his Hands in Search of Hope.
O never may such vile Machine 
Be once in Celia’s Chamber seen!
O may she better learn to keep
“Those Secrets of the hoary deep!”

I feel bad for Swift, who is offered by Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death as an exemplar of our pathological discomfort at mortality and physicality as exemplified by defecation. Becker cites extensively Norman Brown’s work on anality, summarizing it by asserting that to “say that someone is anal means that someone is trying extra-hard to protect himself against the accidents of life and the danger of death, trying to use the symbols of culture as a sure means of triumph over natural mystery, trying to pass himself off as anything but an animal.”

He continues later:

The upsetting thing about anality is that it reveals that all culture, all man’s creative life-ways, are in some basic part of them a fabricated protest against natural reality, a denial of truth of the human condition, and an attempt to forget the pathetic creature that man is.

Perhaps we find Swift’s deranged discomfort to be amusing, or even misogynistic, but it seems clear to me that it is not about women but all humanity, himself included; for many men, women are the locus of such anxieties because they are the most concrete manifestations of beauty, unassailable and sacrosanct, in their lives; like all idols, they are subject to resentment and attack.

More to the point, he seems hardly alone: the way that the ordinary people in my life often feel about shit, piss, sweat, hair, teeth, pores, gums sometimes seems to me psychotic. To detest and grow sick at the thought of everything that comes from your body, everything that demonstrates your corporeality! To spend one’s life pretending that one’s asshole isn’t there, one’s hair isn’t there! That no men, no women have them!

(I should add that am not judgmental about this. I will never forget when I first saw that nude women were not smooth and featureless like unclothed Barbie dolls: I was shocked, aghast, and it seems, in my memory, to have taken years for me to accept it).

Ernest Becker, in one of my favorite books. The answer to Nietzsche’s question is clear: yes, there are neuroses of health. The acquisitive and organizational urge run amok that defines consumerism, for example; or the preoccupation with a plastic aesthetic over the corporeal, with its attendant concealment of pores, sweat, hair, anything organic and unruly; or the obsession with cheeriness that makes self-esteem, a low sort of self-satisfaction, into a virtue without which one might as well be naked.

There are as many neuroses of health as there are neuroses of illness. What we must use, then, to define real mental illness, as opposed to simply characteristics that are socially undesirable, is this question: does the quality or behavior interfere with the individual’s ability to freely self-determine, to create himself as he wishes?

Ernest Becker, quoted by Mise en Abyme. Becker is my favorite psychologist-philosopher by far; The Denial of Death is probably the most important non-fiction I’ve read. There are too many excellent notes on psychology going around right now.

I recently read a rather more poetic way of reminding us of looming death, a Sir Thomas Browne sentence that supplied William Styron with a title: “It cannot be long before we lie down in darkness and have our light in ashes.”

The longer I reflect on those words, the more chilling they seem. And of course, they’re true.

Friedrich Nietzsche. Ernest Becker once referred to the necessary “partializing” of our perception and consciousness that occurs as we leave early childhood: we strangle our innate awe and limitless imagination, which is spontaneous and uncontrollable, because otherwise we could never navigate the world.

There is a critical partialization of empathy, as well: if you stop and reflect on the sum of suffering in the world, and on suffering’s intransigence, empathetic collapse and despair is all but inevitable. From that broken position, not only can you not live, but you can’t even help. The partializing of empathy, which takes the form of “not thinking about” the horrors of the world, is often criticized as narcissism in the West, as indifference; but there are anthropological limits to our empathy. This world is too large; the scale of horror is too great.