Tag: desire

The Absent Self

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Christopher Horner

Insist on your self; never imitate. —Emerson

How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself? —Dostoevsky

The key promise of the modern world was the freedom of the individual. It was the motivating cry of the great revolutions of the modern age, meaning two things, at least: first, the removal of the external barriers to freedom: no more oppression by kings and priests, and later, freedom from the democratic masses themselves: the ‘tyranny of the majority’. Second, freedom as the ability to be oneself, to express who one truly is; the ideal of authenticity. The free, unique individual, able at last to to express their unique self. But this ‘real’ self needs to be found in order to be freed, and this has proved to be more difficult than the removal of oppressive rulers.

Authenticity

The authentic self is hard to reach. Something keeps getting in the way. Perhaps the culprit is an inauthentic self, a mask or double woven by social convention, and adopted through self deception. So one becomes two, or perhaps three. The alienated self must discard the false in order to find the True Self. The great task for moderns is to be authentic and unique.

That this should seem natural to us may be because we have been shaped by the brave new world of bourgeois freedom that followed the Age of Revolutions. Mill, Constant, de Tocqueville, Emerson, all have it for their theme, which was also that of much romantic art of the period. Here is Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay Self Reliance:

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. [1]

Emerson continues in this vein at some length, in a high flown peroration. He refers repeatedly to the evil effects of the crowd, the multitude the mass of men (it’s always men) who threaten to suffocate the genius of the individual. This can seem like tedious over insistence. It still finds an audience, especially in the self-help and get-ahead-in-business circles that dream of the remarkable person who achieves success, by liberating their unique self with all its talents.  Read more »

Monday, May 13, 2024

Unconscious Freedom

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Christopher Horner

Become That which You Are —Nietzsche.

What is it to lead a free life? Perhaps it is doing what we want with the minimum of external constraints, so we can follow our desires. Also to be free from anything within us that would prevent us from choosing wisely and acting effectively. I don’t want to bungle an action, I don’t want to get things wrong that might lead me  to misread a situation, and I don’t want to be knocked off track by some outburst of the irrational, blind anger or a neurotic compulsion that reaches me from my past. The ideal of a free life includes in it the notion that I can to identify with my actions as my own, to stand by them, as it were.

We picture the rational self that wills, as somehow brightly lit in the conscious mind: I know, I choose, I act, and I say: I did that. The darkness is in the unconscious, and we need the light to choose freely. However, this image of the free self is at best incomplete. [1] We know that we are being pushed in all sorts of ways, even – perhaps especially – when we think we are making a free choice. I choose A over B: to marry or not; to go on holiday here and not there; to go for a walk; to buy that laptop. Are these free, independent choices? How did I come to have just these desires, here and now? My desire for A over B was conditioned by who I came to to be, and my goals are embedded in my biology and in my place and time in history. Since desires aren’t simple and basic can I say I am free when I act on them? If not it would appear that responsibility, and the praise or blame that goes with it, are just empty words.

‘Ought implies can’

The phrase comes from  is Immanuel Kant, who was much exercised by the question, as he saw that morality implies freedom. Since my reasons for doing something are also causes, and are the outcomes of the push and pull of social life, it looks like my inclinations are anything but free, if we imagine that to mean that I could have chosen to do something else. We may feel free, but that isn’t proof that we are free. Read more »

Monday, December 25, 2023

On Not Getting What We Want

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime you might find
You get what you need —Jagger/Richard

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. —Robert Frost

Life can be full of obstacles to getting what we want. But sometimes we get it, we get there, we get the thing we wanted: the lover, the career, the promotion, the house, the holiday, the PhD. Yet after all that effort, trying, searching and perfecting, to the final goal, the success we longed for, why is it so often a disappointment, something leaving us flat, even sad?  Something is missing. It turns out getting what we want wasn’t what we really wanted. We wanted something else. But what else? Not being completely happy with what we actually get is part of the human condition: we just have to accept it, and tune our expectations better to meet the inevitable disappointments. There is truth in that, but also good reason to think that modern work and consumption is turning mild disappointment into something altogether more toxic.

Achievement Society

There is nothing new about having goals, and working towards them. Nothing new in finding that the things we thought we would get happiness from crumble in our hands as we touch them, and that doesn’t stop us from wanting things. One of the advantages of living in a prosperous part of the world is surely that such possibilities become open to more people: modernity is supposed to be about choice and opportunity. But a society so heavily pitched towards achievement of all kinds – in our careers, love lives, acquisition of things – has brought the experience of dissatisfaction to the level of a social pathology. Achievement has become a commandment, and endlessly receding horizon that entices as it frustrates. We live in an Achievement Society, in which we exploit ourselves in the pursuit of more, more of everything, more and more forever.[1]  The result is a kind of blow out, an infarction of the self, depression, burnout, since no one can keep up the relentless pace of total achievement forever.  Read more »

Monday, October 3, 2022

Attention, Please!

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

They all want it: the ‘digital economy’ runs on it, extracting it, buying and selling our attention. We are solicited to click and scroll in order to satisfy fleeting interests, anticipations of brief pleasures, information to retain or forget. Information: streams of data, images, chat: not knowledge, which is something shaped to a human purpose. They gather it, we lose it, dispersed across platforms and screens through the day and far into the night. The nervous system, bombarded by stimuli, begins to experience the stressful day and night as one long flickering all-consuming series of virtual non events. 

The result is that we find it hard to focus, to concentrate on one thing for longer than about 3 minutes. The repeated dispersal of attention, the iterated jumps and clicks of the wired individual making it harder to gather our dispersed attention in order to do anything like genuine contemplation or the relaxed appreciation of what we view or hear. It’s a familiar complaint: the spaces of leisure that might once have been the beyond the reach of of work, of consumption and gossip, are erased.

I want to suggest a few things here. One is that something has gone strangely awry with the possibilities of leisure, another that there is an existential problem that is connected to the diversion and dispersal of desire. Finally, that there are some important things the subject of all this digital attention needs to do, and that that is more than just disconnecting (although that might be a good idea too). Read more »

Monday, July 13, 2009

Desire Paths: Reading, Memory and Inscription

Posted on by Daniel Rourke

by Daniel Rourke

The urban landscape is overrun with paths. Road-paths pulling transport, pavement-paths and architectural-paths guiding feet towards throbbing hubs of commerce, leisure and abode.Beyond the limits of urban paths, planned and set in tarmac or concrete, are perhaps the most timeless paths of all. Gaston Bachelard called them Desire Paths, physical etchings in our surroundings drawn by the thoughtless movement of human feet. In planning the layout of a city designers aim to limit the emergence of worn strips of earth that cut through the green grass. People skipping corners or connecting distinct spaces vote with their feet the paths they desire. Many of the pictures on the right (from this Flickr group) show typical design solutions to the desire path. A delimiting fence, wall or thoroughfare, a row of trees, carefully planted to ease the human flow back in line with the rigid, urban aesthetic. These control mechanisms have little effect – people merely walk around them – and the desire path continues to intend itself exactly where designers had feared it would.

The technical term for the surface of a planetary body, whether urbanised, earth covered or extra-terrestrial, is regolith. As well as the wear of feet, the regolith may be eroded by wind, rain, the path of running water or the tiny movement of a glacier down the coarse plane of a mountain. If one extends the meaning of the term regolith it becomes a valuable metaphor for the outer layer upon or through which any manner of paths may be inscribed.

The self-titled first Emperor of China, Qín Shǐhuáng, attempted, in his own extravagant way, to re-landscape the regolith of time. By building the Great Wall around his Kingdom and ordering the burning of all the books written before his birth Qín Shǐhuáng intended to isolate his Kingdom in its own mythic garden of innocence. Far from protecting his people from the marauding barbarians to the West or the corrupting knowledge of the past Qín Shǐhuáng's decision to enclose his Kingdom probably expanded his subject's capacity for desire beyond it. There is no better way to cause someone to read something than to tell them they cannot; no better way to cause someone to dream beyond some kingdom, or attempt to destroy it, than to erect a wall around it. As we demarcate paths we cause desire to erupt beyond them. The regolith, whether physical or ethereal, will never cease to degrade against our wishes.

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