Other
“Man is something that shall be overcome.”—Nietzsche
“Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous: there begins the song of necessity, the unique and inimitable tune.”—Nietzsche
Every religious or metaphysical system of thought I am aware of—and I’m pretty sure the countless others I am unaware of—assumes another dimension parallel to conscious, physical reality. This dimension is felt by the adherents of the system that assumes it, and it is sometimes simplistically, often brilliantly, represented as myth, sometimes acknowledged as unknowable—but always there. It is a habit of thinking sometimes called dualism.
The spirit of the Enlightenment that created modernity resists recognizing it. Consider a few isms: scientism—only scientific method can access truth; monism—a rejection of the abstract half of dualism; positivism—only empirically provable assertions are valid; materialism—all aspects of reality are derived from matter.
But consider the elephant in the room: empiricism can illuminate countless careers’ worth of the mechanics of a human being: the body, the brain, the genetics, the environmental influences—but it can’t represent what it feels like to be a human being. You can spend a lifetime of energy on how? with plenty left over, and deny the legitimacy of why?—but the question why? is built into the essence of consciousness. We often equate understanding a phenomenon with its translation into a language we can grasp—always a reduction: no language can express the immensity and subtlety of human experience. We are tempted to say the only part that’s real is the part we can translate, and all the rest is epiphenomenal. Reminds you of kids, or politicians—but I repeat myself—covering their ears and walking away from a sandlot game crying We won! We won! when they didn’t. I just call “all the rest” the “Other.” I would say “the spiritual,” but that would tilt the distinction to one side before it’s earned, or “the psychological,” but so would that. Which only proves that the culture concocted the duality. Since it prefers, requires, the definitive, and disallows its preference being seen as common to other, competing systems, there is no word for “both and neither,” only those three words. The point is—there is the reality we are living in conscious, physical time and space, which we assume we all experience in common—and then there’s this other dimension, something beyond daily physical life that doesn’t physically exist but is psychically real, accessed by intuition. In the fundamentalist camp of our culture that can apply only to the dominant religion, capitalistic Christianity—but not to anything else, since it would be a latent validation of it.
But it does apply. Duality pervades all human thought.
A word on “culture” and “language,” which are actually inseparable. As a former English teacher I’m familiar with people fearful of saying something “wrong” around me. They needn’t worry—there is no such thing as “wrong” language. Whether language answers to the prevailing (“standard”) usage is a practical, not a moral, matter. Much of the world’s great unrecognized poetry lives in dialect. There are no Lords of Language, only guardians of a particular incarnation of language, isolated for political purposes. Language is a folk, a “hive” phenomenon, greater than any individual, group, or culture, and nobody has a clue how it originated in the communal human mind. But one thing’s for sure: it wasn’t handed down fully-formed by some linguistic Moses. The only “right” language is the way it has evolved.
This is true of social and economic systems as well. In spite of the occasional Cyrus the Great or King David or George Washington or Karl Marx, social and economic systems are hive creations, beyond the work of individuals, too complex to grasp. For example, modern western societies are driven by economic capitalism. You can tell this by the generally positive connotations the word “capitalism” has in the West—in spite of the fact that along with elevating the lives of millions, it has been disastrous for millions. I hear the people who think in couplets screaming Communist!—relax, it’s true of socialist systems too. But that’s not the point. The point is, nobody’s driving the bus. Nobody invented capitalism—it evolved alongside industrialization, and, like language, has been described and codified after the fact—and though there are groups of people who temporarily seem in control of it, it is capitalism itself that is driving. You can tell this by the fact that if all the power brokers and billionaire financiers and entrepreneurs du jour, and their paid lackeys, politicians, suddenly died, new ones would rush in to fill the void. This is not driving the bus, this is changing seats.
Social and economic systems are themselves “Other.”
The remoras that swim along with the shark, capitalism, are everything that sustain and support it while pacifying and distracting people from seeing that it is a shark: political melodrama, corporate entertainment, comfort-food propaganda, sports, religion, chemicals. None of this is done consciously to sustain the exhausting (sharks have to keep swimming) production and consumption that fuels capitalism—just as if fish had words, they wouldn’t have one for water. Except perhaps for the very wisest among them, who might also have hypothesized air. Einstein T. Bass.
Reality is not things and objects and creatures, but countless evolving processes in deep time where such things are snapshots. Enlightenment rationalism has rendered the world into things and organisms; it operates by separating reality into components. There is obvious usefulness in that, on man’s time scale, but also a precluding of redemptive Other ways of seeing. As Freud argued in Civilization and its Discontents, the instinctive striving for individual fulfillment, and the demands of large-scale community, are in direct opposition.
Man needs Other. It provides a context into which our human experience can fit. It is a source of meaning for something that has no inherent meaning; it gives us a place to be when we escape our egos; it provides an explanation for why humans have the potential of gods in the ephemeral lives of houseflies.
The Other does not physically exist, which is why it is always constructed from the elements of the physical reality of its time and place. Jesus had a vision or an experience or something that assured him of the reality of the Other, and offered the idea of a “Father” and his “children”—as later, Freud would connect the human need for religious (“oceanic”) feeling to our infant longing for the Father. In the kingdom of heaven, we are under the protection of the Father always. Same for the other Abrahamic religions. Engineers see people in terms of mechanics, computer programmers see them as hardware/software. Chardin, scientist and Jesuit, came up with “noosphere.” Today, technical geeks often sense that the Other is a “simulation.” On that one, I think: what difference does it make? We are anyway. It’s just a shift from one abstraction, God, to another, superior intelligence—the same thing. Romantics find the Divine pervading nature. Physicists find the laws of physics doing the same thing. Other is an abstraction.
Buddhism sees physical life as “samsara,” which is pain, and Other, “nirvana,” a liberation from the tortured, eternally grasping human mind. The Hinduism that beguiled Schopenhauer framed the duality as “atman” (individual reality) and “brahman” (ultimate reality), and liberation the realization that atman and brahman are the same. That is, Other is self-knowledge—which is escape from self. The Tao, closest to my heart, offers an All without personality, that can be harmonized with but never contained. Transcendental meditation provides the gratifying experience of consciousness without ego.
For me, living without alternatives as a conscious bi-ped in a capitalistic culture, I would say the highest human calling is to imagine/create/discover an original Other—because it is the only way the ingrained (invisible) hindrances of an effete, spiritually bankrupt culture, or self, can be made visible and eventually changed—in the case of culture not by revolution or war, which never turn out to be more than a political swapping of places, but by an evolution of human consciousness; and in the case of self also an evolution, perhaps with an epiphany or two, but always with the gratification of the self’s deep intuition that it is part of something greater than itself. Most people just live with anxiety and stress as inevitable, and settle into a pre-fab Other, but since open-mindedness, hard, original thought, and resistance to the pervasive propaganda of a culture fiercely devoted to its own survival, are the mental attitudes most conducive to the enterprise of growth and liberation, these followers make no contribution to the enterprise, and in fact by keeping the status quo in place, hold it back.
Because the culture is so effective at preoccupying its denizens with faux Others—infantile political fights over the tableware as the Titanic sinks, military chauvinism, spectacles, well-tailored belief systems which require a waste of creative energy to make them appear true, transferring the deep-rooted, complex problems we face onto the latest link in the chain, Them, and since we are all mutually responsible for the problems of our culture and vulnerable to their consequences, clinging to the childish belief that the replacement of Them by Us will change anything—most just take the flip-flops in the bargain bin.
The few who do devote themselves to the enterprise of challenging the stress of modernity look like losers or fools and are sent by the state church, which doesn’t differentiate between “unfamiliar” and “wrong,” straight to hell—unless enough time goes by that those fools can be repurposed as enablers and sponsors of the state program. If anything can be more ridiculous than using an enlightened Jewish prophet from 2000 years ago devoted to providing an alternative to the dominant culture, poverty, and non-resistance to evil, to justify the rapacity and moral blindness of our monetized culture, I don’t know what it is. Well, maybe people saying that slaves were happy, or people forced from their homes wanted to go to refugee camps.
These resisting people are not heroes or gods or saviors—they are symptoms. They are only following their own natures. We’ve always had these “neurotics” alienated from the dominant culture among us, and even if it is a business that attracts charlatans, which are so obvious they are unseen only by the willfully blind, these marginal souls are the ones that fuel the becoming of human nature.
The stakes are high: the battle is not who wins—it’s whose Other wins.
To think at all is to seek context: consciousness itself presupposes Other. If we don’t create our own, we’ll have to settle for one off the shelf. And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how good the village-sized asteroid heading right at us called Artificial Intelligence is going to be at devising them.
December 12, 2023