The burden of consciousness lies in its inevitable awareness of the fact that our individual self, and this individual consciousness itself, is only a temporal thing in a process of dying, i.e., movement towards non-existence. Add to this the spiritually crippling idea that everything is moving in the same abject direction and this ‘consciousness’ can be thoroughly devastating.
Truth is terrible, and terribly hard to bear. As such we create possibilities, alternative conceptualisations of reality that allow for a continuity and allow the universe and our existence in it to become a bearable, purposeful thing. Most of these fictional narratives take the form of religions, which are institutions that can, collectively, bolster anti-natural theses that will quell the burden of truth. Through these narratives, what our consciousness reveals about reality becomes a lie, a misperception of reality, because reality is far more subtle than human consciousness ever realises. But the negativity of religions lies not just in their fantasies but in the fact that, in humanistic terms, they are anti-human, oppressive forces, that diminish the importance of our humanity and have negative rather than potentiating effects on consciousness.
Neverhteless, it still remains true that the ugly truth revealed by consciousness needs to be transcended. To take this leap without humbling ourselves and subjugating our individual consciousness to an imagined monotheistic omnipotence, consciousness’s focus on ephemerality needs to be superseded by concentrating on the collective reality of human consciousness and the positivity and power that this change of perspective generates. For the systemic nihilism we currently suffer to be overcome, humanity must first develop itself authentically as Humanity (with a capital H), and develop societies capable of uniting rather than dividing the consciousness of the human race. Individual mortality can only be overcome if the collective memory of humanity endures. The seemingly inevitable process of dying can only be transcended via an enduring collective consciousness. Likewise it is only a well-tuned and well-exercised collective consciousness that will be capable of making the creative and technological advances that will allow humanity to dream of an eternal existence in which even cosmological-death scenarios can be remedied. To overcome the burden of consciousness we have to concentrate on making it eternal.
Part of the brilliance of Cervantes’ Don Quixote is that he remains such an easily recognisable symbol of the human condition, but to make the symbolism even more significant for our contemporary state of being we suggest changing the perspective of Cervantes’ narrative somewhat, do away with the realism of the Quixote/Sancho Panza duet and relocate the dreamer Don Quixote as a figment of the pragmatic Sancho Panza’s fantasy world.
This radical distortion of the original theme would bring the symbolism of the Quixote tale closer to a contemporary audience for the greater part of humanity are now really Sancho Panza figurines: modelled into, concerned with, and driven by the pragmatic dictates of modern life which, depending on what part of the pragmatic-life spectrum one belongs to, lies somewhere between a 24/7 quest for survival and an eternal struggle with the question ‘what should I do today?’. We would like to think that this pragmatic world protects against the dangers of wild fantasy, but in fact we are overwhelmed and swamped by reality, or at least until we can find the time to slip into the transcendent realm of imagination – either our own or through the stories of others created for our consumption – in which we can indulge in Quixotic, escapist dreams.
In other words, Sancho Panza is the real, and Don Quixote is an escape valve from an overdose of that reality.
Don Quixote’s madness, as such, is, in the contemporary world, really Sancho’s escape from the madness. Sancho Panza has to imagine the idealist, romantic, free-spirit of Don Quixote in order to liberate himself from the mundanity and drudgery of his own pathetically, practical life, which is really just a constant wading through an unstoppable accumulation of reality’s stuff that makes existence more of an endurance than a life.
So, while in Cervantes’ original narrative, Don Quixote is the dreamer, to contemporise him he must become merely a fragment of the frustrated Sancho’s imagination, but this is complicated by the fact that today there are two types of Sancho Panza: (a) the traditional Sancho who hallucinates a Quixote figure from his own imagination that this traditional Sancho is convinced exists and should be followed, and (b) a second type of Sancho who knows that Don Quixote is just a product of his own imagination and so, although he knows he needs the transcendence of the Quixote-figure he envisages, his Quixote-fantasy can be re-constructed or re-configured according to individual desires and needs. This latter, more contemporary version of Sancho Panza we will refer to as the enlightened Sancho.
For this enlightened Sancho, Don Quixote is a kind of Übermensch; the Superman that Sancho knows he will never be, because he does not dare to take the leap away from the pragmatic life that holds him into the stuff of the reality that oppresses him but must be endured because it is reality.
This modern conception of the Quixote as Sancho’s dream differs not just in the form and placing of the narrative’s voice, but in the historical viewpoint of the Quixotic ideal itself, although this is different according to whether we are talking about the traditional or the enlightened Sancho. Therefore, for the traditional Sancho Panza, the ideal, like the original Quixotic ideal itself, comes from an origin that was embedded in the past – an ideal grown decadent and corrupt – whereas the Quixote of the enlightened Sancho’s pragmatist’s dream, has to come from the future. The ideal lies no longer in what we used to be but what we could become.
By splitting Sancho into two, we are able to point to our current ideological separation, in which humanity is now composed of these two types of Quixotic figures: the Quixote in the mind of the traditional Sancho, with their dreams of an immaculate origin that needs to be reinstated through cultural purification, and the Quixote of the enlightened Sancho, who also fantasises about a better place and a better form of humanity, but a new form of humanity that has never previously existed but could be born in the future.
Of course these ideas are deeply antagonistic and great civil war of to come will be fought between these Quixotic fantasies of the two forms of Sancho Panza. A struggle between two very distinct ideas of what humanity is: i.e., (a) either the product of a determination (usually considered to be God’s determination, but which is really the determining forces imposed by civilisation) that have grown decadent or been perverted and must be rejuvenated, or (b) the image of humanity as a determining force in itself, capable of sculpting a better future for itself out of intellectual projections of what a better future would actually be like.
We must always put our egos, our affirmations of the I, in the midst of the not-I from which all our motivations and our ways of understanding ourselves come from. We can only properly understand ourselves through the great complexity of what we are not.
Nevertheless, it is not for our differences that the not-I stand in conflict, quite the contrary … it is precisely our differences that makes what-we-are-not interesting for us and allows us to be desirable for each other. Our own I is possible only through our relationship with the not-I. The not-I is always another-I and it is within this idea of the another rather than the other, that a recognition and mutuality can be engendered between us.
The recognition of the not-I as that which is another-self is what holds the intersubjective framework of societies together. It is what makes us capable of feeling empathy for the not-I and its importance can be seen when it is lacking, as in the case of psychotic criminals who lack any kind of faculty of empathy.
We are the same and we are different. We are different and we are the same.
Presently we are witnessing the collapse of the current globalised civilisation and experiencing the advanced stages of an historic process toward a world-wide mesh of apocalyptic dystopias. For globalisation to work again it has to been made to function in a positive way and in order to do that it needs to be revaluated and reconstructed from a will to embrace what globalisation itself implied – i.e., A universal culture, by which we mean a truly human culture in which all our not-I-ness could be united in one all-embracing We.
Perhaps the most correctly defining idea for our species after the label of the Homo sapiens belongs to one of our distant ancestors, the Homo habilis, the hominoid manipulator.
In truth, the notion of discovery and understanding embedded in the idea of sapiens and the concept of manipulation in the term habilis are entwined. Together they lead to technological development, creativity, the arts and sciences, and almost everything good we can imagine about humanity, but also to everything loathsome. In fact, there is probably nothing that encompasses all our positive and negative qualities so completely as the concept of reasoned manipulation, for not only has humanity manipulated our natural environment for better or worse, we are also constantly and unashamedly manipulating each other. Having said this, it is also true that the term manipulation has mainly negative connotations, and this reveals a great deal about the way we perceive each other as well as ourselves. It is as if we are born with an enormous potential but cannot help but screw it up when we put that power into practice. The result is the sense of guilt and guilt-ridden anxiety that was exploited by religions through the concept of sin. Nietzsche was probably the first thinker to unravel this ambiguous, psychological relationship we have with our manipulatory nature when he developed his idea of the will to power. It is the gifted nature of humanity which needs to be wrestled with in order to turn our inherent power into something positive – this is what Nietzsche believed. And in the essential part of his argument Nietzsche was right, but he failed to see the common sense embedded in our own sinful anxiety over our manipulatory nature. Let me repeat, we feel guilty about our blessed abilities to take control because when we do embrace it we tend to screw it all up.
For the most part, with or without the will to power on the one hand or any religious morality on the other, humanity is drowning in a deep sea of constant negative manipulation. This is done psychologically, through language and feelings, symbolically, through money, ideologically, institutionally and, as such, bureaucratically through the systems (government or private) that are set up to organise human societies.
Capitalism is an evolutionary result of the acceptance of our own negative manipulating instincts. It is the philosophical apologist for unbridled exploitation par excellence. To manipulate things is to be human, but it needs to be understood and processed in an ethical way by rationality in order to dampen those negative effects of manipulation and channel our manipulatory skills so that they flow through the positive fields of creative invention and artistry, focussing on survival rather than on a blind, self-destructive sense of manipulation that serves greedy desires related to over-consumption and wealth accumulation rather than any authentic human progress.
By focussing on the positive sides of our human essence we will be able to create a constructive, authentic mood for humanity which will lead to a more authentic human relationship or humane relationship between human beings.
From an existentialist point of view (and here we mean existentialist in the literal sense of the term, i.e., concerning the existence and the potential non-existence of conscious life in the universe) the decision that the dominant political forces manipulating humanity (our ersatz representatives) made when they multilaterally decided to embrace capitalism as the engine for all individual and social exchange, was a fatal choice. Fundamentally so because once the inspirations of the decision had been submitted to and absorbed on a global scale, it took on the form of a singularity, and by doing so made all alternative systems seem unfeasible in a practical sense.
This fundamental decision is grave because it has made all alternative decision making impossible despite the fact that changing circumstances have rendered the original principles and course of action toxic. Today’s principal problem stems from the manipulative decisions human beings made generations ago and its seriousness resides in the fact that we find ourselves incapable of escaping from the blunder.
Only by changing our stance on our system’s assumptions regarding the necessity of perpetual economic growth and on our submissive acceptance of the manipulatory, exploitive instincts of capitalism might we save the planet and save ourselves.
The phenomenon of war is a tragic, amplified cultural exaggeration of our individual psychological issues surfacing from the reality of the ego’s encounter with the Other, and developed by an inability to resolve the issues that this encounter entails.
In other words, the roots of war are embedded in the psychological question of the Other, and because of that, in these tragic times, with the Russian invasion of the Ukraine is in full swing, it might do well to reflect on how that problem can be resolved.
If we can believe Freud, then our first other is our oedipal opponent, the father. He is the first challenge to our central position in the universe established by our enclosed condition of self that gives us a feeling of being essential – or, as Hegel called it, the essentially real.
The problem of the Father-Other or this First-Other, as well as the Lacanian Real Other (the Mother) are resolved by the family.
The concept of the family is a unifying balm for the tremendously conflictive relationship between the self-contained individual and the others that challenge the inherent solipsism of our early experience of the world.
However, once the issue of the first others has been resolved by absorbing the self into those others within the family, the family itself finds itself surrounded by others – those other families, the neighbours.
This second phase of confronting the Other can either be resolved by the families allowing themselves to be absorbed into a community of families that communicate and share their experiences of reality, or the confrontation can be exacerbated by building fences behind which each family unit hides itself and experiences the Other as something unreal, because never truly experienced and only appreciated through judgements made from mere glimpses over the fence or fleeting superficial encounters in the street.
The community is therefore the second solution to the problem of the Other, just as the family was the resolution at the primary level.
The process of resolving others expands outward until we get the political geography of the world today delineated by the borders of nation states and empires. Nation states have been around for hundreds of years and we have had kingdoms and empires for thousands, but the big leap to the Big Resolution which would dissolve the problem of the Other in Humanity has always been overlooked, undermined or quite simply resisted through ridicule and the presumption that such a development is impossible.
Impossible or not, the only way that the tragedy of war and the existential threat it is today will ever be overcome is through a conscientious grappling with this problem of the Other and a serious political will to resolve it through an authentic globalisation of humanity, not economically but psychologically via a striving toward an authentic human community that would be the Big Resolution that would end wars forever.
The sciences of sociology, history, and politics, along with economics, are vehicles that civilisation uses in order to understand itself, as well as to propagate its own vision of itself. But because of their intimate tie with civilisation these social sciences are not particularly useful instruments for modifying, least of all revolutionising, the enormous organisation of our lives that we call civilisation. If we want to change an individual’s behaviour we need to firstly carry out a psychological study of their conduct, and, likewise, if we want to change the political, social, and economic frameworks running our lives (i.e., change civilisation) then a macro-psychological approach is needed. But what would this macro-psychology of the System look like?
Let’s begin by applying classic, psychological thinking to this bigger picture and start with Sigmund Freud. If we use Freud’s structural model, then we can see an historically deterministic process taking place, in which civilisation has taken control of the super-ego through religions, nationalisms, and ideologies, tapping into our id via the creation of desires in order to make the ego submit to its control. In Freudian macro-psychological terms then, Civilisation is the Super-ego.
THE MACRO-PYCHOLOGICAL EGO
However, we need to be careful with Freud’s terminology because it can be misleading: whereas ego is the Latin term for ‘I’, Freud’s ego is an ‘I’ with a reality principle, i.e., an ‘I’ situated in society and in the world. It is through the reality principle of the ego that we are able to assess the reality of the external world and act accordingly. Reality in this sense, forces the individual into an intersubjective relationship with the other people and things in the world and the mature reality of the ego is therefore we. The mature reality principle of the ego is its ability to say ‘I am a human being. I am part of humanity. I am us.’ In order to analyse the macro-psychological ego, we therefore need to analyse how we see ourselves in the world, and how we as a group are able to assess the reality of the outside world and remember that this is the function of the macro-ego not the macro-Super-ego. The decisions made in the reading of the reality principle in the ego are those that determine our free will, but the will is only free when it can analyse its reality principle according to a purposeful narrative. Because of this, surrendering to vain, nihilistic narratives is a negation of the freedom in free-will. At the macro-psychological level, freedom can only be found through the ability we collectively have to work toward a purposeful goal. All vain purposes are negations of freedom; false purposes are negations of freedom. Only when the ego takes purposiveness into account when celebrating its reality principle, can it feel fulfilment in itself – which is fulfilment of free-will.
In macro-psychological terms then, the ego of our civilisation is infirm because it has no clear purposiveness for human fulfilment, being lost in the realm of the pleasure principle at the great expense of the reality principle and all pan-human purposiveness.
CAPITALISM AND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
Through capitalism, our global village civilisation nurtures the pleasure principle, and in this way it forever drags us back to the needs for instant gratifications manifested by our infant id. The more powerful consumerism becomes, therefore, the more infantile are our societies.
A mature society refines pleasures with purposiveness. In the mature society the reality principle is applied because we want to go somewhere together.
OUR NEUROSIS
In macro-psychological terms, capitalism’s rebellion against the reality principle in favour of the pleasure principle creates a neurosis and our civilisation has become an omnipotent neurotic culture of infantilisms.
The great problem of being locked in the pleasure principle however, and the one that is manifest in a macro-psychological way in all pleasure-principle culture, revolves around the question of how our satisfaction can be obtained when the really important object of our desires, which is our purpose as a pan-human civilisation, manifests itself. What happens when we realise what the authentic purposiveness in the reality principle of our collective, macro-ego is?
That which is out of reach and difficult to grasp can only be a source of constant frustration for the pleasure principle – for the pleasure principle needs instant gratification. So, if the object desired cannot be bought, how do we get it?
The reality principle on the other hand, tells us to be patient and diligent. The things of authentic importance for humanity which we desire can be achieved if we possess these two qualities of patience and diligence.
However, the reality principle can only ultimately be satisfactory if it takes into consideration the false nature of the reality we experience in our present age. The reality principle can only be valid when we know what our reality is. It can only be trustworthy once we have stripped reality of its own veil of lies. For the reality principle to be truly satisfying it has to come from a purposeful position. And what we lack at the moment is precisely that. Hence the first object of the macro-psychological search needs to discover what human purpose authentically is.
SUPER-EGO
Our super-ego has changed. It no longer aims for perfection, or if it does it is a perfection beyond this reality – in the super-ego fantasy of the afterlife. It condemns real-world utopias as fantasies and gives credence to afterlife illusions as possibilities. It no longer works in contradiction to the id. In fact, it encourages the pleasure principle and makes us feel guilty when we are not enjoying ourselves enough. It muddies the sense of right and wrong and makes us feel guilty for making black and white affirmations.
In short, whereas the super-ego and id used to be at war with each other, with the ego being the arbitrator in between, now the first two have formed an alliance against the ego.
With this betrayal by the super-ego we have lost our conscience and our morality. It is up to the ego now to somehow recover those psychological virtues, even if it has to bear the burden of them itself.
The human individual does things for itself and for the other. In a qualitative sense, our lives differ according to the kind of experiences we can enjoy and suffer between these two experiential blocks. In other words, our lives are an amalgam of the time dedicated to ourselves and the life devoted to others, and the good life must be found through some kind of harmonious relationship between the two pillars of this duality.
It would be difficult to imagine a person who only did things for him or herself, and likewise hard to conceive of a person who only did things for others. Nevertheless, some do more for themselves than others, and others do more for others than themselves. On the surface what we are saying here seems obvious and simple enough, or at least until we start defining the protagonist elements of the duality itself: In any individual case we know what the person itself is because it is the one we are concerned with, but who or what is the other?
The answer to this question has deep, qualitative significance in our lives. Most individuals will have an enormous amount of different others passing through their lives making the answer seem too complicated to warrant a reply, but if we group the separate others into common groups and make Venn diagrams of them we should be able to draw up a workable picture of the Big Others that we all do things for. For example, in almost all cases there will be one circle in the diagram to represent the people that are close to us (our friends and family), another to represent the thing called money (to which we can attach the subset of the work-place), another circle will represent the society, which will in part be both within the other circles and out of them, and these will all be enclosed by the greater sets representing culture and country, God or religion, and these will all be enclosed partly or fully by the greater subset we call civilisation.
In rare instances there will be other others that are more difficult to place in our Venn diagram. The others of the arts and sciences, which could be either in or out of civilisation; and also the other of humanity, which in most cases will be the smallest subset of all, for only a very small minority of humanity dedicate any time to humanity.
Logic would suggest that humanity should envelope all those other different fields for we are talking about collectives of human beings or collectives of things that are human creations. Nevertheless, this would not make sense in our diagram, because we are trying to represent what human beings are concerned with in their lives and what is the influence of the others that we do things for.
Seen in this way humanity presents two problems: Firstly, where should we situate humanity in our Venn diagram? And secondly, why do human beings dedicate so little of their lives to humanity itself? When we do things to make money or to help our family or friends it very rarely would be of any benefit at all for humanity. Humanity in our Venn diagram, may touch on all the other sets, but only slightly. In reality, most human beings would hardly dedicate any of their time to humanity at all, and this is symptom of the state that humanity finds itself in. If the parts do next to nothing for the whole, then the abandoned whole will soon find itself to be infirm and dying. Perhaps, in fact, humanity is already long dead. Those who are dedicated to humanitarian causes are alike to students of Latin, or a life-support machine maintaining the vital signs of a patient in a deep coma: They keep the dead thing alive, but barely.
Dead, but not completely. Might there still be a chance that we can resurrect it?
There is a common belief propagated by both psychology and philosophy that the self-conscious mind finds itself cut off from any of the satisfaction and security created by a feeling of being reconciled with the world. This idea echoes the biblical concept of the Fall with its message that humanity has been condemned to an eternal yearning for a return to the Paradise lost.
Alienation is a real, psychological phenomenon and the source of untold human anxiety. The basis of this angst lies in our lack of a sense of wholeness. However, if we approach the problem of fulfilment as a question of the development of our sapiens potential rather than the loss of our relationship with the natural world, then the anguish becomes rooted not in what we have lost but in what we have not yet been able to obtain. The more we learn the more we realise how ignorant we are.
Our natural thirst for learning is so unconsciously strong that many just give up. The vanity of trying to learn everything is overwhelming. Buried in all human self-consciousness is this spirit to know our world and the Universe around it. It is the most powerful driving force we have if it is allowed to blossom. It can be seen in our so-called Oedipal complex and it is responsible for all human greatness as well as all our dismal failings. It is forward looking and the dissatisfaction and insecurity we feel in our lives is derived from the subconscious fear that we are not progressing, or not progressing enough, or even that we are falling behind.
What the myth of the Fall does, however, is turn that drive-for-knowing completely around so that our yearning works in a perversely backwardly orientated and nostalgic way. This not only distorts the perspective of our feeling of alienation, it also instils a fear of our authentic drive for knowing. From this fear came the Faust myth, which reinforces the biblical idea of the relationship between knowledge and the devil.
It is what we lack that we desire. And it is the power that makes lack a motivating spirit in itself … the spirit of lack. But fir that spirit to be purposive and positive the lack it strives to obtain has to be situated in the future, as that which needs to be obtained, rather than struggling for that which has been left aside. Only when we can escape from the nostalgic narrative that burdens all human societies, will we be able to make substantial and meaningful progress toward authentic human fulfilment.
The stars are so far away. We know this now, but we also know that we must try and reach them, just as we were able to reach the most distant isles and sail around our world. We see where we must go, but the vision is frustrating because we know that our own lives will be too short for us to get there, that humanity itself will become extinct before we can achieve our ultimate purpose.
But this is a short-sighted pessimism, what we constantly forget is that we are just part of a process which has still hardly even begun. A human process that has been constantly thwarted by the anti-human historical process propagated by our civilisations, but also an authentic and real potential in humanity that has to one day evolve, because it needs to evolve.
Necessity deems that our epoch be a birth or death time, a period of transition or disintegration. An evolution unto the sapiens spirit of humanity or a decay into the self-swallowing finality of the anti-human process that our civilisation is pushing us toward. To avoid this finality the human spirit must break free of the anti-human historical narrative and allow an authentically human historical process to emerge at last.
Our humanity, as such, is in a foetal stage, evolving within the womb of its own nemesis, the anti-human, waiting to be born.
This will happen when our sapiens from has grown from its lava body, metamorphosing into a shape that it is too big for the anti-human structure of civilisation to bear anymore. The birth of the authentically human will be difficult at first, the new spirit of lack will have to learn how to crawl forward by itself and nourish itself, but when it is born it will be protected by purposiveness and the hunger to know and create anew from the new authentically human perspective that is anchored in a deeply forward-looking, anti-nostalgic spirit of lack.
THUMOS (Homer): “There is no general consciousness in the Iliad … The thumos, which later comes to mean something like emotional soul, is simply motion or agitation. When a man stops moving, the thumos leaves his limbs. But it is also somehow like an organ itself, for when Glaucus prays to Apollo to alleviate his pain and to give him strength to help his friend Sarpedon, Apollo hears his prayer and ‘casts strength through his thumos’ (Iliad, 16:529). The thumos can tell a man to eat, drink or fight … Achilles will fight ‘when the thumos in his chest tells him to and a god rouses him.’ (9:702f) But it is not really an organ and not always localised …” [1]
ERLEBNIS (Dilthey): “… any cognitive, affective or conative act or attitude which is conscious, but distinguished from the object to which it is directed, and not itself the object of any other act or attitude. Erlebnis are too intimate to be focal. We do not know, feel or will them; we know, feel and will through them.”[2]
Whilst reading Dilthey’s idea of Erlebnis, I could not help but be reminded of the Greek idea of Thumos. On the surface they seem completely different concepts: Thumos is an inspiring agent whilst Erlebnis is a vehicle through which our inspiration is made possible (but fundamentally, that could be the same thing). Erlebnis is experience itself, whereas Thumos is a motivating force, yet Dilthey says that we know, feel and will through these experiences, and that is what gives Erlebnis the feeling of Thumos – Erlebnis is also a motivator.
Homer places thumos like an organ in our body, and makes it a kind of receiver, through which the gods are able to stimulate and move us to action, or turn us off at their will, and the god Apollo uses Achilles like a toy in this manner.
But what is Apollo? Does Erlebnis describe what the Greeks believed was an intervention between the gods and mortals?
The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy describes Erlebnis as immediate experience: “(it) denotes experience in all its direct immediacy and lived fullness,” and should be contrasted with Ehrfarung: “denoting ordinary experience as mediated through intellectual and constructive elements.” Erlebnis is the experience that is not mediated by the intellect – it is pure and direct – which for the Greeks meant that it came straight from the gods; straight from Apollo.
C.D.P.: “As immediate, Erlebnis eludes conceptualisation, in both the lived present and interiority of experience. As direct, Erlebnis is also disclosive and extraordinary: it reveals something real that otherwise escapes thinking … Typical examples include art, religion and love, all of which show the anti-rationalist and polemical uses of the concept.”
By drawing a link between thumos and Erlebnis a new light is shed on each one.
In Julian Jayne’s thesis on the Bicameral Mind, he claims that thymotic inspiration was a fundamental feature of the human mind some three millennia ago, and he sees vestiges of it remaining in what is now called schizophrenia. But Jaynes’ thesis was more concerned with the neurological significance of thumos than with the inspirational power of direct experience. For Jaynes, the inspirational power of our pre-self-conscious ancestors, came from the voices they heard in their schizophrenic minds (part of Jaynes’ theory is that the human mind evolved away from a commonly schizophrenic condition some three millennia ago when the proliferation of city-states formed closer human communities in which hearing voices became an annoyance rather than an inspiring tool).
But could it be that, whilst the voices have disappeared, the direct inspiration of experience has not – and this is what Dilthey was expressing through his concept of Erlebnis.
[1] Julian Jaynes, THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND, Mariner 2000, p. 69
[2] Wilhelm Dilthey, SCIENCE OF PHILOSOPHY (translator’s preface)
The most iconic scene in Stanley Kubrick’s historical adventure “Spartacus” comes towards the end of the film. Set in republican Rome, the revolt of the slaves, led by the gladiator Spartacus, has been defeated by the consul Crassus. Most of the slave army is dead, but a few hundred survivors have been captured by the republican soldiers, amongst them Spartacus himself. Crassus approaches them and offers to spare all their lives from a horrible death by crucifixion. But … on the condition that they turn Spartacus in. Spartacus himself stands to announce his surrender, but, before he can, the slaves who are chained to him and who are obliged to stand with him, say that they are Spartacus. One by one, all the survivors stand and pronounce their own death sentence: “I am Spartacus”.
The scene portrays an emotional example of collective sacrifice, with all the sentimental force that this kind of epic cinema can convey, ending with a close-up of a very emotional (and teary) Spartacus, who is lost for words over all the tremendous loyalty taking place around him, on his behalf.
With the new millennium, the spirit of this scene has been taken up on repeated occasions to show solidarity for a victim, with the proclamation that “I am (the victim)”. It is a statement affirming that a “part of me” has also died, or been imprisoned, with the victim’s fate.
Nevertheless, this contemporary gesture does not change anything, apart from making that identification with the victim and expressing one’s sense of indignation or loss. Yes, there may be some cathartic self-satisfaction derived from it, but the act is fundamentally an expression of impotent resignation: If you are going to take the life of Spartacus/any-victim, then why not take us all? If there is a defiance it is a kind of game of chicken. The question asked to the aggressor is: How far are you prepared to go? Do you have the guts to kill us all?
A more active, and potentially revolutionary gesture, would have been to explain to Crassus that he too was Spartacus; and to convince him that his problem is that he does not understand that Spartacus is a part of all of us, just as Crassus is a part of all of us.
Obviously, this could not have happened in the historical film, because this revolutionary gesture never took place. The slave rebellion ended with Crassus’ victory, and the rebellion was never a revolutionary act anyway. It was merely a desperate attempt of the slave-class to acquire a sense of dignity. They did not want to overturn the Republic; they wanted to escape it.
Slavery is a human problem; and it is a psychological problem that is deeply embedded in our anti-human-created psyche. This provokes a vicious circle that makes it seemingly impossible to solve. One cannot resolve the psychological dilemma because the real problem is the psychology itself.
Whilst our psychology is dominated by the “I” and the “I am …”, all our political, social, economic, religious (spiritual) relationship problems will be unresolvable. The interests of all our collective “I am(s)” will never be able to exist in a harmonious way.
The only way to solve our human problems is to disassociate ourselves from the “I” and embrace the “we”. We are Spartacus, and we are also Crassus. We are the victims of terrorism, and we are also the terrorists. We are the victims of the State, and we are also the State.
From this human, psychological perspective, real solutions and real change are possible.
pauladkin 