Thoughts for the Day: 25 January 2021

 

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy

All metaphors drawn from the senses will lead us into difficulties for the simple reason that all our senses are essentially cognitive, hence, if understood as activities, have an end outside themselves; they are not energeia, an end in itself, but instruments enabling us to know and deal with the world.

Kinds of Power

James Hillman

I do not want to believe that we are essentially a people obsessed with security (safety, insurance, prisons, protection, labeling laws); nor that we are a people enslaved to consumerism; enchanted by the media, entertainment and celebrity; dependent on relationships; or that we are a narcissistic society in love with its own childhood to the utter denial of our national tragedies, unable to imagine a meaningful future. These diagnoses observe symptoms only, without getting to the fundamental syndrome of which the symptoms are but fluctuating and fashionable manifestations. The deeper syndrome is inertia of the spirit, a passivity that feels no vocation and shies from imaginative vision, adventurous thinking and intellectual clarification. That we imagine ourselves today as a nation of victims attests to a vacuum in the spirit of the nation. These are symptoms of the soul in search of clarity. Clarity is the essential. The soul is desperately seeking the power of mind to be applied to the powerlessness it experiences.

Natural Born Heroes

Christopher McDougall

That’s why our courtships are a dance, not a death match. Apes and elks battle for the right to reproduce and take multiple mates by force, but humans have a more runway-model approach: rather than fight, we flaunt.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

When his [Abraham Maslow's] students began to talk to one another about their peak experiences, they began having peak experiences all the time. It is as if reminding yourself of their existence is enough to make them happen.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 6 November 2020

 

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Despite the right hemisphere's overwhelmingly important role in emotion, the popular stereotype that the left hemisphere has a monopoly on reason, like the view that it has a monopoly on language, is mistaken. As always it is a question not of ‘what’, but of ‘in what way’

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

But the term “ingenuity,” I decided, served my purposes better than “ideas.” On one hand, it was narrower: I wasn’t interested in all ideas—after all, they can range from Stephen King plotlines to chemical formulae for anti- cancer drugs—but only in the subset of practical ideas that we apply to our practical problems.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[E]conomic optimists usually downplay events and facts that raise serious questions about their worldview. Problems like global climate change are dismissed as scientifically groundless or, at worst, minor inconveniences that can and will be surmounted by human creativity.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

When his [Abraham Maslow's] students began to talk to one another about their peak experiences, they began having peak experiences all the time. It is as if reminding yourself of their existence is enough to make them happen.

Essential Spirituality

Roger Walsh

 Zen practitioners recite: Innumerable labors brought us this food, We should recall how it came to us.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 3 November 2020--Election Day USA

 

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Increasingly, only the collective human ego—what I call “the Big I”—bounds and defines this constructed world. We subordinate, alter, and reinvent almost everything around us according to our own interests, from the mountains of Vancouver Island to the Isle of Dogs and the very sky overhead. Seduced by our extraordinary technological prowess, many of us come to believe that external reality—the reality outside our constructed world—is unimportant and needs little attention because, if we ever have to, we can manage any problem that might arise there. And, in any case, as the pace of our lives accelerates, we have less time to reflect on these broader circumstances.

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

The left-wing critique of liberalism is chiefly an attack on liberal faith in reform.

History Man

Fred Inglis

This biography . . . stands in a tradition. It is the tradition of good lives, inaugurated by Aristotle, amplified by Aquinas, liberated from Christianity and given the doctrine of the “civil affections” by David Hume and Adam Smith. Our tradition is rooted deep in its own history by Hegel as being the only foundation it could possibly justify, and thereafter domesticated by the British tradition that made Hegel tolerable and culminates (for our purposes) in R. G. Collingwood.

This tradition teaches that a good life may be lived only in terms of those virtues which an individual truly possesses and is capable of. The trouble with the word “tradition” is that it has, damnably, been so monopolised by the political Right, which contrasts the stability of tradition with the crazy enthusiasms of revolutionary struggle. But a moral tradition is no less than the embodiment through time and in a place of those principles which permit that version of a good life to be lived, revised, challenged, and transformed in the biographies of the traditionalists.

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

Maslow’s ‘holistic’ model of the psychic organism led him to three major conclusions: (1) Neurosis may be regarded as the blockage of the channels of self-actualization. (2) A synergic society—one in which all individuals may reach a high level of self-satisfaction, without restricting anybody else’s freedom—should evolve naturally from our present social system. (3) Business efficiency and the recognition of ‘higher ceilings of human nature’ are not incompatible; on the contrary, the highest levels of efficiency can only be obtained by taking full account of the need for self-actualization that is present in every human being.

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

 Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it.

Two Essays on Colin Wilson: "World Rejection and Criminal Romantics" and "From the Outsider to Post-Tragic Man" by Gary Lachman

When your first encounter a book by Colin Wilson and begin to investigate what else he wrote, you can very quickly become intimidated by the number and scope of his works. After looking over his impressive body of work, you can find some recurring recurrent topics among the titles, but you’d have a long slog to find a common thread without a guide. In 2016, Gary Lachman published what I believe constitutes the definitive long-form (book length) guide to Wilson’s work, his biography of Wilson, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. But some might be intimidated by a book-length dive into Wilson. So, is there a work that allows one to dip one’s toe into the water, so to speak? In this case, I can recommend Lachman’s Two Essays on Colin Wilson: “World Rejection and Criminal Romantics” and “From Outsider to Post-Tragic Man.” The two essays date from 1994, thus pre-dating the end of Wilson’s career (as a writer he was truly prolific), but they still capture the essence of Wilson’s project.

Colin Wilson

The first essay plunges the reader into Wilson’s ideas about optimists and pessimists and how they arrive at their respective positions. The pessimistic view (‘world rejection’) gained the upper hand with the advent of the Romantic movement, and it has continued to maintain its prominence, especially in the artistic class. Of course, Wilson and Lachman can identify vital counter-examples (e.g., Nietzsche (his dourness and occasional vitriol notwithstanding), William James, and George Bernard Shaw), but many writers and artists in the 20^th century tended toward ‘world rejection.' After discussing various viewpoints, Lachman makes the following point (referring to Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov)

The whole point of Wilson’s The Outsider [Wilson’s first book and the one that brought him widespread acclaim-sng] and practically all of his subsequent books is that any halfway sensitive consciousness is faced with this dilemma: which vision is true, Alyosha’s or Ivan’s? In a way it comes down to a variation on Pascal’s wager: if the universe is pointless and worth rejecting, then to act as if it isn’t, as if it is meaningful and worth affirming, is a mistake with no worse consequence than any action or belief in a meaningless universe. But to act as if it is meaningless and worth rejecting when it is indeed meaningful and worth affirming is to throw away the possibility of having the kind of experience that Alyosha does when he feels that his consciousness is linked to the stars, or Nietzsche when he felt “6,000 feet above man and time,” or the Steppenwolf’s vision of “Mozart and the stars,” and the other visions of meaning and affirmation that Wilson has catalogued throughout his enormous body of work.
The thing to be remembered is that the affirmative vision is not the outcome of a reasoned argument, although after it one can use reason to remind oneself of its reality. The affirmative vision always arrives unexpectedly, from some source in ourselves deeper than our conscious egos. 

Lachman, Gary. Two Essays on Colin Wilson: “World Rejection and Criminal Romantics” and “From Outsider to Post-Tragic Man” (Colin Wilson Studies Book 6) (Kindle Locations 148-157). Paupers' Press. Kindle Edition.

Gary Lachman

Throughout the remainder of the essay, Lachman continues to explicate on this fundamental theme, just as Wilson did throughout his lengthy career. Both Wilson and Lachman embrace the view that life is worth living and counter the arguments of the world rejecters, although both Wilson and Lachman eschew Pollyannaish views on the subject. It’s not that evil and suffering don’t exist, it’s that these realities don’t carry the day.

One of Wilson’s key insights is that one overcomes the abundant prompts toward pessimism by “peak experiences” (Maslow’s term; Wilson was an admirer, then friend and biographer of Maslow). Of course, the Romantics (the originals and their descendants) craved peak experiences and sought them, often by drugs and alcohol, but Maslow and Wilson both believed that peak experiences were not “gifts of the gods,” but how ordinary consciousness should work. Indeed, the “criminal” part of the essay, reflecting a part of Wilson’s investigation, is the fact that at least some criminal behavior is sparked by the need for thrill and adventure, as well as power. While greed and simple lack of self-control (e.g., alcohol consumption) are behind most crimes according to my 30 years of experience as a criminal defense lawyer, in some cases, the motive seems to have been the thrill of it all. (Two check-kiters (back in the day) pop into my mind; they loved to tell how played the game so well—for a while.) Wilson cites many instances of either actual and imagined debauchery pursued by artists to heighten and engage consciousness to the level of a peak experience. But whatever temporary high they achieve then dissolves and becomes merely an elusive vision of a paradise lost. Some writers, like “William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer” almost deify the criminal and debauched elements in their writings, as against, for instance, Shaw, who created characters who sought out the extraordinary and to achieve and aspire greatly. (Again, my 30 years of experience with “criminals” prevents me from giving any credence to romanticizing them; the overwhelming number of them were simply occasional screw-ups; some wise-guy blow-hards with a bit of luck; and the congenitally anti-social. I never mustered any admiration for my clients, although I hasten to add that I always treated them with dignity and respect.) Thus, Wilson-Lachman (it is hard to separate the thinking of the two within the context of these essays) don’t have to work very hard to convince me of the folly of the romancing the criminal, or of ‘world rejection’ in general. Yet, because these authors are still read and perhaps have some following (beyond English departments?), the exercise is a worthwhile one.

So, while some of the essay critiques the futile (and to me, frankly boring) worldviews espoused by the pessimists, the other part looks at the problem from the affirmative perspective. Lachman notes:

While the Criminal Romantics treat the symptoms of what Wilson calls ‘life-failure’ by throwing themselves into one adventure after another, Wilson addresses the source of the problem.
That source, ultimately, is consciousness itself. Two things, Wilson argues, are essential in understanding the problem of ‘affirmation consciousness’; one is the curious relation between the conscious and unconscious minds, the other is recognizing the fact that we are all in a state of what he calls ‘upside-downness’. Since Sigmund Freud’s ‘discovery’ of the unconscious, the popular notion has been that the conscious mind is in a sub-ordinate relation to the unconscious. We are all, the common myth goes, driven by unconscious forces. There is a one-way relationship between the two; in computer-talk, the unconscious ‘downloads’ into the conscious mind, but not vice versa. With Freud this scenario is exceedingly dark, since for him the unconscious is a kind of cellar full of nasty business we’d rather not think about. In Jung the situation is better; for him the unconscious is not a dumping ground for ‘repressions’ but a creative, purposeful centre in the psyche. But still, in Jungian psychology, the unconscious calls the shots. 

If. 619-628.

Wilson posits that the opposite may be the case: that the active, conscious mind may affect the unconscious to our benefit. In other words, our conscious, intentional acts—our active mind—may be the vehicle of our well-being and not a passive, “leave-it-to-the-unconscious” attitude that depth psychology (Freud and Jung) suggests. It’s certainly more than just “think happy thoughts,” but does begin with “don’t focus on negative thoughts.” Some balance, some lines of communication, between the conscious and unconscious mind must be opened, and Wilson suggests (and Lachman agrees) that the conscious mind can have a much greater role in promoting this increased communication that all too many have heretofore believed.

In the second essay, “From Outsider to Post-Tragic Man: Colin Wilson and the Case for Optimism” many of the same themes are further explored and developed. As Lachman explains in the opening paragraph:

Colin Wilson is a very good example of what Isaiah Berlin called a hedgehog, he who “knows one big thing.” Whether he is writing about the Düsseldorf sex murderer Peter Kürten or the Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, Wilson’s subject is invariably the same, and has been so since his first book, The Outsider. For nearly forty years Wilson has been fascinated with the potentials of human consciousness and has produced under this rubric a massive and highly readable oeuvre on topics as diverse as existential philosophy, the occult, crime and the psychology of murder, literary criticism and sociology. In pursuit of his investigations, biographies of such dissimilar characters as Bernard Shaw, Wilhelm Reich and Grigory Rasputin have emerged from his pen, as well as many novels and much incidental writing. His output is unquestionably prodigious: at last reckoning the number of volumes from Wilson’s hand exceeds 100.

Id. 734-740.

Lachman’s opening comment that Wilson is a “hedgehog” according to Isaiah Berlin's distinction between thinkers as hedgehogs and foxes is a designation that wouldn’t on first blush attribute to Wilson, as I alluded in the opening of my review. His array of book topics, non-fiction and fiction, is astonishing, but Lachman is right: an overriding theme ties all of Wilson’s work together. Wilson is all about the potentials of human consciousness. As Lachman aptly puts it: “[W]hat is the “one big thing?” Put as briefly as possible, Wilson’s underlying theme is that questions of the meaning of human existence cannot be satisfactorily addressed without taking into account the intensity—or lack thereof—of human consciousness.” Id. 743-745. If like me, you perceive everything that we humans do as motivated by a desire to alter or sustain a particular state of consciousness, then you realize that Wilson must be right. Feeling sleepy? Then change to sleep consciousness (which has various levels as well). Hungry? Act to alleviate that uncomfortable state by eating. Bored? Turn on the television or attend to your smartphone (which may well lead to greater boredom, but it may distract you for a while. Horny? Well, you get the idea. Of course, my examples focus on basic needs and drives, but we can say the same about the need to create, to be inspired, to share emotions with a group, to feel the body in action, and so on. We constantly act to alter our state of consciousness. But not all courses of action are useful, and some are counter-productive to our (often ill-defined) intentions. I think that this is what Wilson (and Lachman) are getting at.

In the remainder of the essay, Lachman catalogs the developments of Wilson’s thought through his Outsider cycle (five books at the beginning of Wilson’s career). By the time he’d completed these books, Wilson had developed an alternative take on the existentialism of Sartre and Camus. A positive existentialism, if you will, is outlined in Wilson’s An Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966). In this work, Wilson pens his answer to Sartre, Camus, and others in their line of thinking. Husserl’s phenomenology and its emphasis on intentionality and Whitehead’s distinction between ‘causal efficacy’ and ‘presentational immediacy,’ are the main ingredients with which Wilson brews his ‘new existentialism.’

Lachman continues his explication to include the “St. Neot margin” (a peculiar phrase but based on a terrifically telling story told by Wilson that brings it alive), ‘life failure,’ ‘the robot,’ and ‘Faculty X.’ Each of these terms expands and clarifies Wilson’s essential insights. In fact, my notes and highlights go on at some length in the book from this point, but I’ll stop here because for the few dollars it will cost you to buy this and read it on your Kindle (or free Kindle software), you should. Just writing the review makes me want to go back and read the two essays again cover-to-cover. The team of Wilson and Lachman is a potent one and one that you can return to repeatedly for inspiration and insight. To me, this is high praise indeed.

The Caretakers of the Cosmos by Gary Lachman

Another Lachman was on deck

At the end of my review of Gary Lachman’s Beyond the Robot, I joked that I now had a conundrum to resolve: whether to read another Lachman book next or one by Wilson. As it turned out, I had Lachman’s The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World (2013) on my Kindle, so it got the nod. Upon plunging in, I realized that I’d read it before, rather hurriedly, probably right after completing A Secret History of Consciousness. I hadn’t reviewed it, and my enthusiasm spurred by an appreciation of Beyond the Robot, I dove back in. I glad that I did.

As he demonstrated in Beyond the Robot and The Secret History of Consciousness, Lachman is a master of exposition, gathering and summarizing the thinking of scientists, philosophers, artists, and occultists with an exemplary thoroughness and economy. He conveys the message of those with whom he disagrees as well as he does for those he promotes. But in addition to the admirable exposition of thinking and history that I’ve quickly come to expect from Lachman, this is not the primary value of his book. For in addition to its exposition of a variety of thinkers and thinking about our place in the cosmos, Lachman has also written a manifesto. To sum up his manifesto in a sentence, I suggest the banner: “It’s our cosmos now, and we ought to do right by it.”

Early in the book, Lachman identifies examples of thinkers whom he believes don't do right by our (human) place in the cosmos. He singles out the French biologist Jacques Monod and the British philosopher John Gray for a more thorough consideration. And later in the book he identifiesSteven Pinker, James Lovelock, Steven Weinberg, Stephen Hawking, Bertrand Russell, Daniel Dennett, and John Searle as those who undervalue, if not deprecate, the role of human agency.   (These are just the names that I recognized, Lachman discusses others, too.) Each of these thinkers in some manner deprecates human agency (conscious decision-making entailing meaningful choice) by emphasizing chance or causal determinism or genetics or entropy or our physical insignificance. But as Lachman points out, if we human are so puny, insignificant, and determined, why do they spend so much time and effort trying to convince us of this? Is it worth the effort? Can you rationally persuade such determined creatures? (I will say that it can be damned hard.). What Lachman is pointing at is a performative contradiction: you contend for a proposition that your actions in making the case negate. Lachman later in the books makes the same point about extreme cultural relativism: how can one argue for all cultural values being equally valid without positing a value that entails negating cultural values that say “our way the only way”? We living, breathing human beings—not chance, genes, or some scientific principle—must make value judgments and choices that affect our world. We humans, as individuals and as a society, are the most complex entities in the known universe. I agree with Lachman: I think we’re pretty damned special. (And also often quite a wreck of a species.)

In distinction from those who hold a pinched view of the role of humans in the cosmos (a term that Lachman unpacks early in the book), Lachman details many examples of those who defend humanity’s unique position. From the myth0-poetic realm, Lachman provides examples both familiar and occult. Among the better-known accounts of humanity’s crucial role in the cosmos comes from the Jewish tradition of Kabbala.  In short, creation is purposely flawed, and humans are dispatched by God to work to set it aright by tikkun, a healing function. This line of thought, this metaphor for the imperfection manifest in the world in which we humans find ourselves, is similar that that found in the Hermetic tradition dating back to the early period of Western culture. In this tradition, Man (used traditionally as including both sexes) is part material and part spiritual and must work diligently to resolve the rift that creation has allowed to occur. Healing this rift gives humankind a divine mission. But what of those who poo-poo such accounts as the stuff of children and want good, sound science and logic? Lachman attends to these as well.

Philosopher-scientists like Henri Bergson, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead, to name three of the more well known among those mentioned, all see the cosmos and the human role as alive with consciousness and possibility in distinction from their more staid peers. Whitehead, it seems, is of particular importance because of his ideas about ‘prehension’ (a measure of experience applying even to inanimate objects) and the contrast between ‘presentational immediacy’ and ‘causal efficacy.' But perhaps of even greater value is Lachman’s reclamation of “philosophical anthropology” in the work of three now largely neglected 20^th-century philosophers, Max Scheler (1874–1928), Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), and Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948). Each of these philosophers worked in a different philosophical tradition, but each them grounded the dignity of humanity in its agency (i.e., consciousness) in addition to its biological origins. What all of these thinkers have in common is their appreciation of the importance of consciousness for apprehending the human condition and project.

Two scholars merit attention because of the importance that Lachman attaches to their work. The first is Abraham Maslow. Maslow’s identification of the hierarchy of needs, ranging up from those associated with the physical survival of the organism through those of sociability and esteem, finally up to the level of self-actualization. Maslow’s hierarchy grounds an account of human life on a narrative of an upward arc that endows life with significance and rewards. Maslow’s view contrasts with those others mentioned at the beginning of Lachman’s book (and this review) who tend to ignore or downplay the role of human striving. In writing about Maslow, Lachman also addresses one critique of Maslow: that Maslow’s emphasis on “self-actualization” comes at the expense of concern for society. On one hand, the criticism can be quickly dismissed to the extent that it assumes that self-actualization comes at the expense for regard for others; quite the contrary. Those self-actualized have a greater capacity for helping others. But a stickier problem presents itself: not everyone reaches the panicle of self-actualization. Why not? Many are called; few are chosen. To some, this is an affront to their conviction that all men [sic] are created equal and that inequality arises solely as a result of social and political failure. Lachman slights this perspective. A more nuanced approach is appropriate. Both Plato and Marx are right. Social and political injustices outside of their immediate control play a role in people’s lives. And gifts of genetic endowment and their early environment allow some individuals to climb higher on the ladder of self-actualization and to attain even spiritual heights that most people, even the wealthiest, just don’t aspire to. Lachman reports how Maslow struggled with this issue (which I’d not been aware of before), and Lachman does so as well. The conflict is a real one, especially in a time of rampant demagoguery (you know of whom I speak). The resentment, anxiety, and fear that fuels the lurch toward easy, populist policies is irrelevant—and often detrimental—to traveling the steep road of deepening and expanding consciousness. (Such policies and candidates also are almost always short-sighted if not utterly foolish.) The problem of inequality is one that goes back to Plato (and probably well before), and that does not admit to a fool-proof solution. (For recognizing and exploring the complicated relationship between social-political injustice and individual frailty (sin), I find no better guide that Reinhold Niebuhr.)

The other guide that receives (and deserves) particular attention from Lachman is Iain McGilchrist, the literature professor turned psychiatrist, and author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World. In McGilchrist’s work Lachman has a scientist who explores the cultural attitudes that allow us to fall into what Colin Wilson described as “the fallacy of insignificance.” McGilchrist’s scientific background allows him to identify and explain the structural and functional differences in the brain that endow humans with two very different modes of perceiving the world and that can easily come into conflict. Indeed, the humanist side of McGilchrist demonstrates how the history of Western civilization can be seen as a contest between these two perspectives that, when balanced, can provide explosions of artistic inventiveness and human consciousness, but when out of balance, cause suffering and dislocation. Alas, all too much of the 20^th century, on into the 21^st, has been marked by an imbalance that encourages the fallacy of insignificance and promotes intellectual defeatism and widespread anxiety. Thus, while McGilchrist doesn’t speak directly to the cosmic significance of the human project as do other thinkers discussed by Lachman in this book, McGilchrist’s grounding in science gives his work a unique value when looking at the most immediate realm of current life.

Finally, while realizing I’m leaving out a great deal of the figures and topics that Lachman addresses in this combination of exploration and manifesto, I want to note Lachman’s reference to the work of Owen Barfield. Lachman is no new-comer to Barfield, as I mentioned in my review of A Secret History of Consciousness, Lachman gave Barfield a lot of attention in that earlier work. In this book, Barfield’s ideas about “participation” receive attention. Barfield believes that humans have undergone—are undergoing—an “evolution of consciousness.” Early humans, arising out of the natural world, went from a sense of “direct participation” in the greater environment to the perspective of a detached observer. Now, Barfield suggests that humanity is in a position to obtain “final participation,” which reunites human consciousness with the phenomenal world. This can all seem so abstract, but in using language or in attempting to appreciate history, we find that if we cultivate our awareness of an environment and allow it to sink in, the greater the sense of the situation that we’re contemplating and participating in. John Lukacs's essay, “Putting Man Before Descartes,” uses ideas expounded by his friend Owen Barfield, and he draws upon both history and 20^th-century physics, arguing that knowledge can never be “objective” or its converse, “subjective,” but it  is always “personal” and “participant.” Lukacs writes:

Knowledge, which is neither objective nor subjective, is always personal. Not individual: personal. The concept of the individual has been one of the essential misconceptions of political liberalism. Every human being is unique, but he does not exist alone. He is dependent on others (a human baby for much longer than the offspring of other animals); his existence is inseparable from his relations with other human beings.

But there is more to that. Our knowledge is not only personal; it is also participant. There is—yet there cannot be—a separation of the knower from the known. We must see further than this. It is not enough to recognize the impossibility (perhaps even the absurdity) of the ideal of their antiseptic, objective separation. What concerns—or should concern—us is something more than the inseparability; it is the involvement of the knower with the known. That this is so when it comes to the reading, researching, writing, and thinking of history should be rather obvious. Detachment from one’s passions and memories is often commendable. But detachment, too, is something different from separation; it involves the ability (issuing from one’s willingness) to achieve a stance of a longer or higher perspective. The choice for such a stance does not necessarily mean a reduction of one’s personal interest, of participation—perhaps even the contrary.

Lukacs, The American Scholar, Dec. 2008

Indeed, Lukacs goes on:

           

And now a last step: We must recognize, contrary to all accepted ideas, that we and our earth are at the center of our universe. We did not create the universe, but the universe is our invention, and it is, as are all human and mental inventions, time-bound, relative, and potentially fallible.

Because of this recognition of the human limitations of theories, indeed, of knowledge, this assertion of our centrality—in other words, of a new, rather than renewed, anthropocentric and geocentric view of the universe—is not arrogant or stupid. To the contrary: it is anxious and modest. . . .

The known and visible and measurable conditions of the universe are not anterior but consequent to our existence and to our consciousness. The universe is such as it is because in the center of it there exist conscious and participant human beings who can see it, explore it, study it. (For those readers who believe in God: the world and this earth were created by Him for the existence and consciousness of human beings.) This insistence on the centrality and uniqueness of human beings is a statement not of arrogance but of humility. It is yet another recognition of the inevitable limitations of mankind.

Id.

(Some good news: Lukacs has a new book scheduled for release next month, We Are at the Center of the Universe, which, judging by its title and the publisher’s website, will further develop his thoughts on this topic.)

Thus, through the musings of another great thinker, Barfield’s insights gain new credence and application.

In the end, as a formal matter, I take the position of agnostic on the issue of the ultimate or cosmic significance of my life and that of my fellow humans,  past, present, and future. Such an ultimate conclusion, like some of the greatest issues confronting human existence, may be unknowable, at least to a limited, fallible, and spiritually myopic person such as me. However, drawing on Pascal and William James, I shan’t let this stop me. From Pascal, I’ll take the idea of a wager; not on the existence or non-existence of God or of heaven and hell, but on a more immediate issue: the value of a significant versus an insignificant life. Is a life informed by a sense of significance, whether emanating from the love of family and friends and community—even without cosmic significance—better than a life without significance and meaning? I can’t have read and attempted to digest so much of Gary Lachman or Colin Wilson—to name just two immediate culprits—not to answer with a resounding, affirmative “Yes!” And from William James, I take the will to believe. James, in the midst of a disabling ennui, chose to believe in free will and in his ability to make choices and improve—and he did. Thus, we can opt to say “Yes” to life, to meaning and significance even without an assurance of an ultimate guaranty. We can endow life—even the quotidian affairs of daily life—with meaning and significance that will give us the ability to carry on, and perhaps find even more meaning and significance emerge in our lives. The emergence of meaning and significance is the story of humankind (which Lachman addresses and I’ve shortchanged here). Humans have become more significant, more free, and more vital over the course of human civilization. Progress? In some measure, certainly; guaranteed? Not in the least. But in the end, I think Lukacs is right: we humans—frail, sinful, ignorant (chose your term) are at the center of the world, even the Universe, and we should get to it. 

New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution by Colin Wilson

After writing my recent appreciation (and critique) of Colin Wilson, I found that one of my favorites books of his was available on Kindle, so I bought it and re-read it. I’m glad I did. It reminded me of what I find so valuable in Wilson (and it reminded me of some annoyances as well). This is Wilson at his best. He started the book as a biography of Abraham Maslow, with whom he met and corresponded, but it turned into more than that. In addition to it's appreciation of Maslow, it’s a history and appraisal of how psychology developed from the early moderns through the publication of the book in 1972. 

Wilson reports that when he first came upon Maslow’s work he ignored it, only to have it come back to his attention at a later time. We should be happy for that second look. Wilson’s first book, The Outsider, and continuing through a cycle of books that bore the imprint of the first, explored the contemporary human dilemma. How do we successfully engage in life? In the Outsider cycle, Wilson examined the dilemmas of modern life through extraordinary individuals, many of whom failed to find a satisfactory resolution to their problem of existence, such as Van Gogh, Nietzsche, and T.E. Lawrence, to name but three. Wilson explored the European existentialists such as Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger, but he found their responses unsatisfactory. Wilson went on the construct a “new existentialism” that gloried in choice and will. When Wilson got around to looking at Maslow’s work, he found a kindred spirit. Maslow’s most well-known contributions to psychology, his hierarchy of needs and the reality of peak experiences, fit with Wilson’s growing belief that we ignore opportunities and abilities to summon peak experiences at will.

After some initial reflections touching on many of Wilson’s favorite themes and examples, as well as a brief introduction to Maslow’s work, Wilson begins a summary of modern psychology and philosophy starting with Hobbes and Descartes. I found this brief history valuable and instructive. Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, despite their rationalist-empiricist differences, all premised their understanding of humans as essentially mechanistic with little (if any) room for free will. But there is another current of thought that blossoms later in the 19th century. It manifests in the work of Brentano and Husserl on the Continent and in America through the work of William James. Wilson quotes James a lot, and rightly so. Wilson finds James, especially in his essays, pointing in the right direction, although James doesn’t connect all the dots for Wilson. But while James was pointing in the right direction, Sigmund Freud was taking a different perspective in Vienna. 

Freud gave us depth psychology, but his “depth”, with its reference to hidden sexuality and Greek myths, overlays a deterministic and mechanistic outlook. While prying deeply into psychic injuries, Freud's theories reflected a rigid idea of how our psyche works. Freud, who had a deep personal rigidity about him, dismissed various disciples who tried to take the master’s work in different directions, like Adler, Jung, and Rank. Wilson does an excellent job of mixing biography and ideas in this section (something that he tends to do well). Each of the three apostates (Adler, Jung, and Rank) pointed psychoanalysis in new and promising directions, identifying different sources of psychic disturbance and motivation. But still, Wilson concludes, this viewpoint focused on the disturbed, unhealthy individual. 

After this informative and entertaining history of psychology and philosophy, Wilson turns to Maslow’s biography and work. I was surprised to learn that Maslow started in the rat and monkey business. Stimulus-response theory was all the rage at the time (1930’s), and Maslow worked that angle. He also came to terms with Freud and considered himself a Freudian. However, Maslow realized that Freud and his cohort focused on the sick individual, and Maslow decided to explore the psychology of the healthy. Maslow follows a path similar to Wilson’s in turning his focus from the sick to the healthy. Wilson explores and appreciates Maslow’s insights and how Maslow developed his theories. The down side of the tale is that Maslow died relatively young (bad heart) and wasn’t able to further develop his perspectives. 

In the final chapter, we get Wilson’s synthesis of his own insights, Maslow’s, and a host of others, especially those connected with “existentialist psychology”. Existential psychologists, such as Victor Frankel and Rollo May, draw upon Husserl’s intentionality and its concern with will to help put a patient back in control of his or her destiny. Meaning, intentionality, and will once again become important aspects of psychology. As Wilson does, he dances between psychology, literature, and anecdote to make his points. This trait is both delightful and frustrating, as Wilson can be. But Wilson is a man of ideas, not a scientist or academic who does the necessary grunt work of the lab or field, necessary as that is. Sometimes Wilson seems dated, as in his adherence to the right brain-left brain dichotomy or his understanding of schizophrenia, but I don’t think that these dated conceptions have much affect on his arguments. (I am interested to learn if Leah Greenfeld’s work Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Experience of Culture on Human Experience about mental illness or Ian McGilchrist’s work on the different brain functions in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World provide any vindication of Wilson’s larger perspective.) 

I’ve read about six or eight Wilson books, and other than perhaps the first two works in the Outsider cycle (The Outsider and Religion and the Outsider), this might be the best book to jump into. Wilson’s speculations—his strength and his weakness—are tempered by his commitment to Maslow’s project and by his exposition of the history of modern psychology. Thus, we get the best of Colin Wilson’s enterprise here in a balanced, informative, and thought-provoking work.