The Abyss Absolute: Autobiography of a Suicide (Book Two)



by Ron Puhek



PART I

THE ABYSS

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman---a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra







INTRODUCTION

THE ABYSS AND ITS AVOIDANCE

Let me start with a confession. The attempt to write anything about the subject I wish to deal with here involves me in a dilemma. I find the writing itself implicated in the very contradiction I am seeking to resolve. It is not a theory for me but a living experience that every proposition I produce dissolves itself in its own contradiction.

In essence, the living expression of this problem is simple and wellknown. Language is inadequate to understand, explain, and express actual reality; indeed, language can communicate nothing. I will not waste time establishing this wellknow fact but will try to explain how it leads me into a special kind of experiential state as well as what that state is like. This has to do not only with my ability to write here in a way that expresses my thoughts or understanding, but also, and more important, with the limits of my thoughts and understanding. Like everyone else, I have a sensation of knowing or understanding something but feel incapable of expressing it. Then I discover I really do not understand it, and finally that I really understand nothing.

I begin writing or lecturing and everything flows easily. One topic falls spontaneously into another. Examples pop into my head. It is not that I cannot "communicate" when I want to, but the reverse. Exactly when the expression and the thought seems most clear the shadow falls: "Yes, what you have said sounds and is valid, but only within the structure of assumptions you make but do not understand; the house of your knowledge has no foundation; your ideas lack unity and the whole lacks roots in life; so why continue."

In my last work in this series, Meaning and Creativity, I referred to this experience as "meaninglessness." Here I will call it "the Abyss." Both terms refer to a single kind of state, but for me today "the Abyss" has more powerful symbolic significance. The term "abyss" refers to a bottomless pit, gulf, or void. It comes from the Greek adjective as used in the phrase abussos limine or "unfathomable lake." Used substantively, it indicates just "the unfathomable." Both "the bottomless pit" and "the unfathomable lake" expand the symbolic meaning of "abyss." "The bottomless pit" stimulates the sensation of falling in darkness.

When I face this abyss, I respond to it in two ways. Either I draw back from it and continue making the web of my ideas increasingly intricate only to find the netting still too coarse as I fall through it again into the abyss, or I drop the attempt and move on to something else. But when I move on, I always do so feeling incomplete, as if I were leaving what should not be left. The moment of discomfort eventually passes as I become involved in the new activity.

One of the reasons for my enjoyment of simple yet attentiondemanding tasks is that they absorb time without requiring a commitment to them as important and so they allow me to avoid the judgment of how meaningless they are. I will never choose to get involved in these kinds of tasks, but when others impose them on me, I enjoy them immensely. When I am trying to be serious and committed to any task such as writing down these words, the abyss yawns before me. I know neither why I continue nor why I leave off to do something else. But both are a way of avoiding the abyss.

When I realize what I am doing, I become what others would see as lazy. They call those who keep writing "industrious"; those who flit from one thing to another they call "alive and energetic"; but I am lazy I see emptiness in industriousness and see escapism in variety. Yet it is worse to be lazy at heart than at activities devoted action is only a way of hiding a lazy heart, a heart that refuses to face its own abyss. Passive paralysis in external activity arises out of a reluctantly active heart.

I use this personal reflection to make two points: first, the subject I am dealing with is not distant and in the realm of ideas but is life itself including my life and the conclusions I come to have no value unless they immediately also reflect the reader's concrete life; second, the primary problem I am concentrating on is the contradictory character of life the way that everything pursued for a time ends in the abyss and turns into something other than as it began.

This second point needs clarification. The confrontation with the abyss transforms everything into its opposite. When I doggedly push on with my work and writing despite the abyss, I am no longer writing because I find positive value in it but only because it saves me from the abyss. My originally positive motive has been transformed in to a negative one and one that is substantively outside the significance of the activity itself. Similarly, when I turn from my task after seeing, even at very low levels of consciousness, how it is leading me to the abyss, then I pursue the alternative to my work not because I find it to be valuable activity but only to escape from the confrontation with the abyss. In the end, I fall victim to the temptation of power. I persist or desist because I will to. I fight obstacles to my goals not because they are wrong but because they are right because they are true reflections of my deep reluctance to act as I am acting, a reluctance that only my fear of the abyss overcomes. I fight them not because they are bad but because they are the abyss.



CHAPTER 1

THINKING AND DOING

The basis of action is thought; the basis of thought is action. Action leads inevitably to thought; thought leads eventually into action. You can act only so long before your mind is awakened. You can think only so long before action is demanded. On the one hand, if thinking leads you to the brink of the abyss, you can turn away to action, or, if action becomes an abysmal bore, you can turn to thought; or, on the other hand, in the face of the abyss arising from either thought or action, you can turn back from them into your old pattern, not because it is good but only so as to escape from the abyss.

Ordinary and analytical consciousness divides these two functions. One, thinking, is internal, immanent, invisible, and the other, doing, is external, open, selftranscending, and visible. Thought takes place only within myself; doing takes place beyond myself. The two interrelate but are mutually exclusive the more intensely you involve yourself in fighting a war, struggling for success, battling your colleagues for position, the less you can think and reflect. Conversely, the more you think, the less you do. Conventional cliches criticize one person for acting thoughtlessly and the other for "thinking too much."

You readily understand about others what you do not face in yourself: (1) that thinking and doing are both authentic parts of human existence and if you go overboard into either, but especially, into thought, you are likely to be hiding from existence by denying half of it and (2) that the motive for hiding is that existence has revealed the brink of the abyss. That you think "too much" or act "without thinking" may be true, but all who make the charge need be careful lest they criticize in others the opposite activity but the same sin they deny in themselves.

Life is neither thinking or doing. Life is poised on the chasm between them; it is the movement of selfconscious doing. Life must pass to thought and then back from thought to action. This much is clear. What is less clear is the relation the two stand in just what does or can thought contribute to life?

Obviously, thought can change life. Of the two possible ways it influences life, the second is the less obvious. First, thought can lead to acting or doing it allows you to act more effectively than you could before. Second, thought also always constitutes an immediate transformation in being. The very fact that you are thinking, the content and conclusions of your thought, and your conviction that you should realize your ideas in life all are transformations in being.

A longstanding prejudice in many areas of Western Civilization holds that only doing changes existence, and that, therefore, thought that fails to lead to action is fruitless. Countless small examples from anyone's life can show that this is not true. As a child, you assume that Santa Claus exists; you start thinking and come to understand that he does not exist; your behavior need not change, and yet the state of your being may be radically altered and the alteration will reveal itself in the changed joys of Christmas.

The assumption that thought is important only because it leads to successful action is dangerous because it ignores what thought itself achieves through its impact on being. It is not only that the process of thinking involves a change in being because it is inner, rather than outer, action, and it is not even the content or the conclusions of thought such as the conclusion that Santa Claus does not exist that involves the greatest impact on existence. No, rather what has the greatest effect is the kind of thought that is operating.

Thinking changes being; different kinds of thinking alter being differently. For example, objective or scientific thought, which treats the world as a thing to analyze and dissect, makes scientists themselves into things while they are thinking in this way, they become objects external to their objects. Similarly, of course, their objective knowledge treats other people as, and makes them into, objects. Suppose, on the other hand, that thought is subjective, emotional, and involved in fantasy; this kind of thought, in turn, makes the thinker into a subjective being, and the actions flowing from it makes others into subjects subjective thought generates poetry, drama, novels, movies, paintings, and, above all, music each of these creations and the mental attitude producing them stimulates subjectivity in others.

Suddenly, we have discovered that the dualism between thinking and doing has generated another dualism two kinds of thinking and two kinds of doing and all forms of them have an immediate and opposite impact on being. And here again we see operating the circulatory principle. One of the sides in the polarities leads inevitably into two further states subjective thought either withdraws and closes itself off from the objective world or the thinker reverses directions to objective thinking; objective thought either withdraws still more from subjective emotionalism or the thinker flips over into subjective thinking.

Countless books and articles have been written by or about objective scientists who had a deep and abiding love for the arts especially for music. Music and mathematics go together; music is supposed to be like mathematics. I suspect, however, that the real reason for the mathematician's love of music is not that music is so similar to mathematics but is so different. Of course, it is an art form that the mathematician is most likely to understand with its measures, intervals, and progressions, but the pleasure taken in music is there because it is the opposite of mathematics it requires a subjective, emotional way of knowing rather than an objectiverational way.

In his popular book, Physics and Beyond, Werner Heisenberg describes how a point of despair in his scientific life was transformed into joy when he attended a concert and how, while publicly performing music himself during the period of Hitler's rise to power in Germany, a sense of joy came to him and in the midst of it, he met the woman he was to love and marry. Here is evidence of how one form of thought may lead mechanically to another form. Heisenberg was at the brink of an abyss and could turn from it by seeking refuge in a different kind of thought and performance. On the basis of many reports, we might judge the case of Einstein to be similar.

These circlings multiply on top of each other. Mathematics leads to music leads to mathematics leads to doing; doing leads to thinking leads to music. Each of us can construct a diagram of our existence based solely on an evermore complex series of circulating opposites. And then, if we investigated fully enough, we could find the generating source of these circulations some fundamental assumption about existence that, when it is pursued, leads to its abyss and produces the primary reaction of turning from the abyss. To scientists and scientific civilization, life is action or doing; action is the goal of everything including thought. But, while convinced of this, neither civilizations nor individuals can deeply accept it as they live and thus nations will find groups in rebellion against the life of "doing" or "action" and the individuals will seek secret or public rebellion in "leisure."

Where does all this lead us? Nowhere. Human existence emerges as either (1) the fruitless attempt to select and cling to one basic reality and so actually to circulate between it and all the realities opposed to it or (2) the intolerable recognition that life is nothing but movement and cycles where there is no meaning only the movement itself. Surely, both are dismal propositions.



CHAPTER 2

MATTER AND SPIRIT

Looked at more closely, the interior of the physical sciences reveals any number contradictions where one side transforms itself into its opposite. Rumors regularly pass through the ranks of biologists and trickles down into the public press that researchers have made another advance toward, and are on the brink of, creating life by turning nonliving into living matter. Ordinary folk duly nod their heads impressed by this latest miracle of science, ignoring for the moment that the simplest living organisms perform that miracle constantly; it is the most common event on the face of the earth. Indeed, the humble lettuce leaf I crassly tear apart to compose my salad does it without calling a press conference complete with worldwide live television coverage.

Obviously, for the biologist the simple ability to create life in a test tube is not the important thing. More significant is that, if life can be created out of nonlife by means of the application of scientific theory, then the most basic secret of life has come into their possession: Whoever can perform this creative act cannot but understand the physical laws of life. Such a conclusion on the part of biologists, however, violates all experience. There are many things you can do without understanding the forces at work in the process; you sleep every night without understanding it; even sleepscientists who devote their lives to analyzing sleep are still in the dark. You can bake a cake following a recipe without any real understanding of the forces at work in the mixture; you can even create your own recipe for a new dessert without understanding how the ingredients interact. You can know that baking soda, flour, eggs, salt, sugar will generate a certain "effect", but you need not understand why or how the effect occurs.

The biologists who "create" protein in a test tube out of "inorganic" amino acids and then proceed to generate a cell from them that can take nourishment and reproduce itself may indeed have duplicated the circumstances where nonliving matter is transformed into living, but they have not necessarily gained greater understanding. They are likely, moreover, to be inspired to create life for less "scientific," less conscious, and more subjective reasons than they imagine: the creation of life from nonlife would confirm their power and reinforce their materialistreductionist orientation.

Existence again confronts scientists with a profound paradox. They spend their lives investigating the physical or material world. Looked at psychologically, they could be trying we might say to find their mother, their mater, their matter. Their lifelong quest indicates they existentially, if not consciously, believe matter to be the most important phenomenon. In fact, however, it is spirit rather than matter that they identify with. They think and they experience a passion for understanding the material world. Thought and feeling are nonmaterial even though they may be inseparable from a material expression. The living paradox involved in having a passionate faith in matter while identifying with a spiritual principle leads to a secret contradiction in the heart of the highestlevel scientist. To use some of the terms laid down earlier, for physical scientists the material world is Abyss to the spiritual world; the spiritual world is abyss to the material world. There is dualism, contradiction, and, finally, pain. Now, if one of these worlds could be reduced to the other, then no ultimate dualism or inner discomfort would exist. The discovery that life can be produced entirely from nonlife would "prove" that mother nature was not involved in a dual creation of spirit and matter or of life and nonlife but, instead, that there was but one initial act of creation and that was of matter perhaps in a big bang; then, given certain conditions, non living matter transformed itself into living. The paradox and contradiction could be resolved at least intellectually. The biologists would have found their mother.

We may confidently predict, however, that the paradox will not be solved. At best, the new transforming experiment and the subsequent theories on the origin of life and, therefore, of thinking and feeling organisms may put biologists minds to rest. They will not, however, have conquered the contradiction in existence by means of a new theory. A theory is mental, not living. We once more see the way that opposing sides in a living contradiction transform themselves into each other. The profound discomfort involved in the life/nonlife problem, which itself is only a surface expression of a deeper spirit/matter problem, leads to an attempt to prove that nonlife or matter is prior to life and spirit. Biologists enter into nonlife or matter to prove this, insist that they have discovered that matter is prior, but come to this conclusion only with their minds. Mental operations, which are part of their spiritual experience, are the basis of their conclusion that not mind but matter is preeminent. They have "escaped" the abyss of falling from mind into matter only by falling from matter into mind. The one side remains the abyss of the other perhaps no longer consciously but at least in their own hidden depths; "abyss" refers not to conscious mental judgment of contradiction but to an experiential condition. The anxiety that characterizes biologists' defense of their materialist reductionist theory reveals the extent that the theory was accepted not because it was true but became true to them because they had to accept it to maintain themselves in being.

All scientists must be careful not to fall into this psychological trap. And all must realize that even honest science can be a way of masking the truth both from themselves and from the others they instruct. In the devoted scientist the flaws as well as the talents of the normal human being are exaggerated. Biologists who are honest with themselves will recognize that even if life can be produced from nonlife: (1) it does not mean that the material or nonliving is prior to the spiritual or living; in fact it may just as well be that life is an uncovering of nonlife, that nonlife is like a seed or a number of seeds planted so that the sprouting, budding, and blossoming of matter is spirit, of nonlife is life; life may well be seen as showing to consciousness the spirit that is locked in the depths of nonlife; (2) the distinction between life and nonlife is purely conventional and has very little to do with an actual distinction the distinction may reveal an epistemological problem (a problem in the way we know and define things) as opposed to an ontological problem (a problem in the way things are). The contradiction between life and nonlife or between spirit and matter may be only one of false definition stemming from our assumption that matter or things as we perceive them are real.

This discussion of biological science leads naturally to physics. In fact, conclusions being reached by several twentieth century physicists agree with our claim that the problem that biologists see may actually be selfgenerated by the way that they conceive of reality rather than by the way it is.

Heisenberg again is a prototype. He points out that from the time of Democritus physicists took as a primary assumption that everything is composed of elementary particles called atoms until the last century when they discovered that those "ultimate" atomic particles were composed of smaller and smaller "subatomic" particles. Almost simultaneously with the discovery of these particles, they concluded that some "physical" phenomena appeared to be both "matter" and "energy." Light seemed to be both a wave and a particle or neither one. Heisenberg

concluded on the basis of his investigation of subatomic particles that they could not really be considered particles either, that the idea of particles depended on ordinary everyday perceptions of reality, such perception always was of masses of atoms, and the perception was created only to help orient ourselves to this gross world, not to understand it. (1972, Heisenberg) In other words, our impression that things exist does not prove that they do; instead, the impression exists only because it is useful to us in normal life. Impressions and perceptions serve the cause not of truth but of convenience. At the subatomic and subnuclear levels "matter" is inaccessible to our eyes; its existence is determined only by effects and described only by mathematics and mathematical probability at best.

Like most major scientists, however, Heisenberg seeks a "byss" or a net in the abyss that concepts of matter fall into. For most other scientists in a position similar to Heisenberg's, the catching net in the abyss is energy. For them, it is the most fundamental reality; matter has become secondary merely organized energy. Matter, in other words, is fundamentally immaterial. Heisenberg appeared to go farther and to realize more deeply the implications of this conclusion for physics; the principle of immateriality constitutes the suicide of physics because it leads physics to pursue the study not of physical reality but of probability and other purely mental constructs. Most physicists, nevertheless, still call themselves "physicists" as if they continue to practice the science of their predecessors. Heisenberg suggests a partial way out for physicists; they should retain the study of matter "as if" it existed because the assumption that it does is, like Newtonian physics, useful up to a point, but that they surrender the belief that physics can describe what is really there.

Where does Heisenberg end up? He recognizes that physics both the form that continues "as if" matter existed and the form that involves itself with energy and probabilities is in an abyss. He, therefore, advocates a new fundamental assumption a net to catch physics from falling. It can only be found outside of physics. Neither matter nor energy is basic. What is basic for him, as far as I can tell, is spirit.

The dramatic reversal he and a few others have wrought in twentieth century physics has not yet hit home. He has clearly shown the way that physics faced one contradiction after another and resolved it by reducing the issues to their simpler and constituent parts. In a way, the great promise of the natural sciences, built up through the previous century, has been wiped away in a single blow the grand image was that psychology could be reduced to biology; biology to chemistry; and chemistry to physics. Psychological problems were said to be produced by frustrated biological urges; biological and especially sexual urges were said to be a matter of chemistry so that a great chemical industry could develop to produce drugs to alter consciousness of the state of the psyche; finally chemistry was said to be a matter of atomic weights, measures, and relationships. But at the pinnacle of physics' greatest success, out of the depths a shadow fell: the ultimate contradiction between matter and energy, between waves and particles, can only be resolved by the abolition of the belief in the physical world as real and the affirmation of the reality of the spiritual world. The spirit that physics had battled for centuries becomes the royal religious standard borne aloft by the most eminent of physicists. At the same time a pretense is suggested that the intellectual life of physicists be split between pursuing much of physics "as if" while still knowing that the "as if" is a lie. The selfdeception is needed because the life energy will evaporate from a science that knows that its efforts are "just pretense" for the sake of "utility."

But Heisenberg has revealed the issue to the physicists the real and underlying problem in physics has nothing to do with the contradictions found in the discipline but arises from what physics has tried to deny. He calls upon them to recognize the problem as residing on a higher, more directly human and personal level than the discipline. But then Heisenberg also finds a net to save him the net of spirit as the more fundamental reality: it is unlike "energy" because it is "outside" physics but it is like "energy" because it is another net in the abyss. Just as "energy" leads the physicist to matter and matter leads to energy so that he can choose one or the other as the most basic whenever it is "convenient," so, too, spirit leads to physics, and physics leads to spirit so that the choice between them is ultimately arbitrary.

The net in the Abyss is an illusion, an intellectual construct but an existential lie. The Abyss still yawns before the physicist just as it does before the rest of us.



CHAPTER 3

IDEALISM AND REALISM

Among humans living today the experience of emotional vacillation is hardly exceptional. Life circulates from moments of passionate optimism into periods of deep pessimism. Life goes well in the morning but grows deadly by night. You watch a film or see a news report of an extraordinary act of kindness the plight of neighbors devastated by floods brings spontaneous help, hands reach out to support ethnic groups displaced by war, racial barriers are forgotten in the love of helpless little children these kinds of events can touch off a flow of unexpected optimism. Paradoxically, the very same events may touch off the deepest pessimism. The state of your feelings is independent of the nature of the conditions surrounding me.

Optimism can be enjoyable but so can pessimism. Ironically, you may actually delight in a pessimistic view of the world. Deep satisfaction can accompany your reading of darkly pessimistic novels of the future. You can find something vaguely comforting in Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, or Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor. Somehow they give your heart solace. These novels predicting worldwide catastrophe and something even slightly new emerging after the collapse can generate positive joy.

This personal experience finds its mirror image in the recent history of our civilization. The general optimism appearing in records of the past century was pervasive. Things might have been hard, but even those suffering severe hardship sounded optimistic: "If we work harder, things will get better; our lives are miserable, but our children will live better; better jobs, health, homes, lives are on the way." But at the very moment in the twentieth century when the chance of attaining a better life for all became economically possible, the shadow engulfed the light. In the midst of dreams fulfilled came the nightmare of pessimism. Now the civilization darkens and broods.

The optimistic "Yes" to life becomes a pessimistic "No!" Things are getting better and better, and suddenly things are actually worse. Pessimism is the natural and invisible Abyss of optimism. Pessimism arises not because things are getting worse but because things are getting better as we hoped but as things get better, life gets worse. Optimism is the natural and inevitable Abyss of pessimism. Pessimism predicts the collapse of the world. When it paints the picture darker and darker while nothing dreadful actually happens, the optimism returns. It returns not while things are getting better but as they are still getting worse. When things are getting bad, the pessimist finds no alternative except suicide or optimism.

Clever political leaders know this instinctively. When national pessimism is growing, the cure they administer is not a dose of good cheer but one of deeper gloom. Hidden in the heart of the deepest pessimism is high optimism; hidden in the heart of high optimism is deep pessimism. This is why so much optimism appears desperate optimistic statements, activities, dancing, traveling become more compulsive. By optimistic activity, we seek to hide a heart burdened with pessimism. Similarly, pessimism becomes increasingly dark and insistent as we strive to quell the bubbly optimism within because we know it to be a lie.

Pessimism is an Abyss to optimism, but it is not the Absolute Abyss. In fact, pessimism is actually a Byss to optimism. It is the net that catches the person and preserves him from a fall into total darkness. This is why you can take so much pleasure in news and novels. Momentarily, they match your mood; it does not feel that things are going well though they appear to be; pessimism justifies your feelings and puts your mind to rest. Moreover, pessimism is your judgment against the world; things are going badly; you are doing well. And even if you become pessimistic about your chances for success in life, the pessimism is still a judgment passed by your depths against your surface. It means you still have something to cling to.

When things actually are going badly, your feelings rebel and refuse to accept it. To both feel and see badness would be intolerable; it would conquer and annihilate you. Consequently, you reverse yourself and begin to take an optimistic stance. The twin attitudes of optimism and pessimism allow you to walk a thinning tightrope over the Abyss. Pessimists claim to see things as they really are. That may be true, but pessimism does not see them the way they are because they are that way. Rather it sees them as it does out of an invisible motive, one not based on any objective evidence. In fact, it sees nothing wrong with what is going on. Everything is proceeding as it will. What rebels is the pessimist's feeling. It tries to tear the mask off what is visible. The pessimist says the powerful few have always controlled, manipulated, and oppressed, and they always will. The talk is wholly negative and yet delivered with a gleam in the eye, because it is not objectively, but subjectively correct the negative observations themselves are pleasing.

Optimists claim to see things as they could be. Optimism does so, however, not because they could actually be that way, but because they are not that way now and are unlikely to be so in the future. Optimism expresses itself precisely because the reverse of optimism is the most likely future. Optimism uses emotional and subjective terms expressing positive feelings, but its objective negative assessment of the future prompts the optimism.

Optimists and pessimists prefer to call themselves and each other by more respectable titles. Pessimists often regard themselves and are regarded by others as "realists" exactly because they want and need to assure themselves that the facts, not their feelings justify their pessimism. "I am just being realistic." "It's about time you face the facts of life!" "Come one, live in the real world!" each of these illustrates how pessimism expresses itself to itself and to others. Others refuse to face the facts; pessimism faces them. Actually, pessimists deceive themselves whether or not the facts are as they suggest: in their insistence that the facts be accepted, they are acting not from them but for their feelings.

Optimists often prefer to be known as "idealists" and for the same reason. The term allows them to believe that they are taking an optimistic attitude not as an evasive reaction to the sad facts of life present and future but as an inner choice. They see themselves as rationally rejecting the present and emotionally affirming the future. They commit themselves to making the future better as they long for it to be. Actually, the exact reverse is true their rejection of the present is emotional and their attempt to figure out a future is rational and scientific. And this is why idealistoptimists can be so much more dangerous than realistpessimists: because of a massive selfdelusion where they think they have discovered positive values within themselves and are working toward them when in fact they have only emotionally rejected the past. When they merely reject the past but think they are positively affirming a better future, not only is an enormous energy released to work on the world but it is an energy that cannot admit error because to admit error is to realize not only that you have made a mistake but also that you were fighting not for the good but only against the present. The energy was not positive but negative, not joyful but fearful, not lifegiving but deathdealing. They fight in others and especially in realists not the enemy of their truth but their truth itself. They fight themselves. You are never more destructive than when you fight to save yourself from yourself.

Realists and idealists fight each other because they are each other. Each embodies the Abyss of the other. Each confronts the other and seeks by conquering the other to conquer the Abyss.

Most important, none need commit permanently to either side in the battle. Indeed, the very same people who are idealistic to their friends can be realistic to their families. Realistic powerdealers in the business community believe in utopian family life. Those who flip from side to side may be better off because of a longer and apparently more peaceful "life." Whoever becomes either an idealist or a realist and seeks to preserve integrity in that attitude may be better off because they will come more quickly to the end of the rope in the midst of violent confrontation with their own Abyss in others.

Finally, the way that the one contradiction that preserves you from the Abyss leads into another, generated also for selfpreservation, should be visible in the utopianpessimistic division. As part of the struggle against falling into the Abyss, optimists invent idealism and pessimists invent realism. And each helps the other to the invention. Idealists use "realist" as an epithet against the realist; realists use "idealist" as an epithet against the idealist. Yet each can accept the title or, if not the title, at least the role the two have mutually designed out of their relationship. Your confrontation with life may make you momentarily pessimistic; in the midst of your pessimism you meet an optimist. The optimist asks you to explain your position and you offer objective facts of how bad everything is; the optimist argues with you and in the argument is forced to rely on emotional longing as a basis of contradicting your facts. You begin to think of yourself as a realist; you begin to act, at least in relation to this optimist and others who are similar, as realists and so protect yourself. They become more and more emotional in their arguments defending their optimism and gradually grows into their role of idealist they present the mask of idealism to themselves and others but particularly to those who show realism. Secretly, in family relations the true realism slips out from behind it.

We may now conclude that all the roles you take on, you adopt in this way. No one teaches you roles, but still you learn them. They do not come primarily from others but from the self. Others help in manufacturing them, but you choose to accept them to hide. The tangled web you weave when you practice this deception applies most to your deception when you try to deceive; the web of deception weaves ever more complex patterns from pessimism/optimism to idealism/realism and on upward and downward spinning, spinning.



CHAPTER 4

INNER AND OUTER

You find in the facts of life an abyss to yourself. You love others, care for them for, and then watch them die and disappear into the earth. Your love is ultimately tragic; it ends in the emptiness of death. Viktor Frankl, the wellknown psychologist of "logotherapy," describes how he helped an elderly client achieve peace despite the death of his beloved wife and the terrible loneliness it entailed for him. (1963, Frankl, 178179) Frankl first asked the man whether he thought his wife would have been as lonely as he if he had died before her. The man admitted he thought she would. Then Frankl pointed out that if the husband really loved his wife, he would be glad that she had died before him since this spared her of the burden he had to carry. His suffering spared hers. The man left with a lighter heart. The pain of his loneliness remained but now it had meaning and so was bearable and even joyful.

The story's charm fails to resolve the problem. Frankl merely makes loneliness a category of necessity a form of suffering that you must endure since you cannot overcome it. The best possible alternative even he can come up with for the bereaved is to help him find a means of bearing the suffering. Love may be the end of all death, but death is also the end of all love. You may mourn the loss of loved ones for the rest of you life or you may find happiness and the end of the pain of their deaths the moment you realize a new love. At that moment, love whispers once more "forever," "immortality," and "deathlessness" into your ear, and you listen.

Surely, the relationship between love and death is the most dramatic and poignant example of the common experience of gain and loss but other examples abound. On a more trivial level, you can find yourself excited over the prospect of a new car, cycle, home, stereo set, or whatever. The excitement lasts for two weeks after you have acquired the car. Then disillusion sets in. You could respond by buying seat covers, chrome accessories, and special lights and by planning trips and excursions with the car or you could get freshly excited about making another major purchase until the disillusion of its actual acquisition also sets in. After that, you face the same alternative as you did after the car had lost is magical sheen. Disappointment is the pit your excitement falls into; new excitement is the pit your disappointment falls into. The vicious selfconsuming cycle recurs.

Our two sets of senses are often at war with each other: those senses that are commonly considered the senses proper seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, and touching on the one hand, and those that are commonly called "feelings," on the other. Both put your consciousness into contact with something in the world outside it. However, they operate as contradiction to each other. What you see contradicts what you feel. This contradiction is the basis of the idealist/realist poles in yourself and between yourself and others. Sensation dies in feeling; feelings die in sensation.

Your eyes tell you your beloved is dead. She lies there in her polished would, satinlined, jewel casket. You touch, you smell, you see. It is the touch, the scent, the vision of death. You incredulous. How is this possible your love was immortal how can by beloved be mortal? What ungodly power has taken her from me? Where is she? The source of your love is gone, but the love lingers on. She is not dead; she is "just away" says one of the sympathy cards you receive. Her soul is immortal and will rise on resurrection day says the minister. But, no. She is dead, dead, dead.

When the fact penetrates to your feelings, bitterness, resentment, and even anger stir. Yet, as the fact of her death sinks in so also does the fact of your life. You are drawn back into life, activity, occupation. You get busy. Friends make a point of not leaving you alone, at least not during the first two weeks after the funeral. Listlessness becomes busy to forget. And in its midst, a new love may arise so you finally begin to let yourself feel again. But maybe this does not happen for a long while. The facts of death have instructed you to be wary of love. Whether your beloved actually died, divorced you, or just left, ultimately makes no difference. The facts of life involve all of these possibilities and are the valley of despair your love has lead you into. You can try to live by your senses and no longer by my feelings you will love but never be "in" love again. But finally you deceive yourself, the facts of life fall away, and you enter back into your feelings.

Both kinds of senses visible, or "seeing," and invisible, or feeling tell you something about life and yourself. But, again, you separate them so you may exist more comfortably. When your beloved dies, the abyss opens before you. The abyss is your own emptiness. But you see death as alien, as what is not you, as giving you nothing, as only taking what you have and what you are. It is the abyss that induces you to stop identifying yourself with the feeling of love. Giving up your feelings and trying to live a hollow life without them opens another abyss that leads you back to feelings. Again you circulate between the poles to keep from falling. You alternate living from feelings one moment and from senses the next.

If you are at all selfconscious, you will notice the circulation. You will know that you am living nothing but fragments of your life and never living fully from your whole being at any given time. To protect yourself from such a realization, you cooperate with you to construct a divided reality. We call it "inner" and "outer." There is a world "outside" us and on "inside " us. It is not that we are masses of confused contradiction; rather it is the world that stands opposed to us. Sometimes the outer reality makes demands upon us work, taxes, other people but at other times it releases us from necessity to freedom when we can indulge what we are without interference. It is through our visible senses that we see the outer world; it is through our feelings that we see the inner world ourselves. Death becomes a category of the outer world visible to the senses; love, a category of the inner world visible to our emotions. Love is us; death is other.

The famous French existentialist, Sartre, claims "Hell is other people."(see his play, "No Exit") That makes it sound as if, like death, hell creeps into our lives from the outside, from others. In truth, however, neither death nor hell are other. It is our own inner division separating self from the world, inner from outer, that constitutes people as "other." We make other people other by the act of separating our senses from our feelings or, more specifically, the content of our feelings from the content of our senses and pretending that the senses give us knowledge only of the object, the outside, while feelings give us knowledge only of the subject, the inside. When we see people with our eyes, we then conclude that they are "other" than ourselves, but their presence will have an immediate impact on our emotions. We fear the impact or we enjoy it, but it comes to us from them, from the outside, from what we have constructed out of our senses. We reject them or love them. As long as they remain other, they are our death and our hell.

The important point to realize here in the overall sweep of the argument is that, again, a confrontation with the abyss produces a circulation between two sides, feeling and sensing; that this, in turn, leads to the creation of two polar worlds, inner and outer. Between them we also vacillate to avoid facing the abyss. Finally and most significantly, we arrive at another intricacy in the selfdeception. As a defense against facing the abyss involved in our two forms of knowledge, we set up a dualism on an entirely different level on the level of being. Inner and outer, obviously created by separating the senses and feelings (which are both ways of knowing), we take as if they are real, as if they are places in being rather than modes of perception. What is real to us we obviously establish by our capacities to know, but fear of the abyss perverts our capacities to know. Therefore, they reflect not "what is" and what we can know but "what is not" and yet what we would like to believe.



CHAPTER 5

PLEASURE AND PAIN

Whenever you recover from illness, you have access to a deep secret. You probably do not pay much attention to it, but, however mild the disease, recovery has an interesting impact on you. In even the most common illnesses slight respiratory infections, "colds," flu, for example there comes a moment in the progress of the disease when you know you are getting well, or you realize that, despite lingering symptoms, you are well. This does not mean that the pain is gone, and often the knowledge appears to have little to do with your actual condition. No, instead what makes you feel you are moving toward recovery is that suddenly the world is fresh again, interesting, pleasurable. The disease attacked not only your body but also your very perceptions. It afflicted the spirit. It made you stop caring about the world and was an occasion for selfabsorption. Books, the best of television programs, flowers nothing felt important or even interesting. But then you begin to take pleasure in the world and, significantly, even more pleasure than before you got sick.

The cycle of pleasure to pain and back is apparent in many places besides disease. Every pleasure turns into its opposite. It first becomes empty and then leads to pain, although the pain often comes on a level different from the pleasure. Sexual pleasure indulged in repeatedly becomes less and less pleasurable. Sexual activities either cease temporarily at least because of your diminished interest in them or else they become more anxious and compulsive you seek different postures, new partners, novel sensations. Physical pleasure leads to "tristesse," sadness or emotional pain. To avoid that depression, you may move still more deeply into physical sexuality. Pain is obviously the negation or abyss of pleasure, but pleasure is also the negation or abyss of pain. You pursue pleasures to keep pain away, but the more pleasure, the more pain expands before you. For long our civilization has been pleasureoriented. I do not mean pleasure in the crude hedonistic sense alone. Rather I mean pleasure as the subtle principle it has become particularly in its function as the foundation of modern thought. At least from the time of the philosopher Bentham, we have tended to see the human creature as falling under the principles of pleasure and pain: "Pleasure and Pain are the only springs of action in man and always will be."(C. A. Halveston, De l'homme, X, 173) The entire effort of industrialized society is to make life more pleasant, and, to manipulate public motivation, industrial society appeals to pleasure under the accepted notion that it will persuade everyone: work and you can get radios, television sets, skis, travel; do not work and you will suffer deprivation.

The pleasure principle attracted "philosophers" partly because they thought that society and science could calculate and quantify it. The liberal "science" of market economics has long claimed that individuals know best what gives them more or less pleasure and will make market choices based on their knowledge and that, therefore, where people are free from controls over purchase and production exercised by church or state, there public pleasure will be maximized. Pleasure appears also as a bridge between intangible human values and the empirical sciences. Pleasure and pain are something humans share with all animal life. Therefore, students of the science of the human psyche such as Freud wanted to reduce all positive human motivation to the principle of pleasure. Once that could be achieved, then all nonscientific "metaphysical nonsense" about the nature of the human being and human motivation could be dropped and replaced by the controlled physical and empirical analysis of science.

Finally, the physical pleasure principle was adopted as an ideological weapon in the war against control over human society and for liberty and democracy. Both economic liberalism (Capitalism) and political liberalism (democracy) are justified as long as pleasure is the primary value of all human life since no one can know better what gives pleasure than the individual who experiences it. Kings, generals, tyrants of all sorts are most likely to make decisions reflecting what is most pleasurable to themselves and not to those they rule.

The pleasure principle has been backfiring painfully for several decades now. Ironically, Freud himself sounded the retreat from pleasure. The very psychologist who made the principle preeminent in psychoanalysis abandoned it first. It is a measure of Freud's greatness that he did not fail to retreat from a major theory when experiential evidence contradicted it. He therefore describes two things in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: first, there is a kind of pain (in Freud's terms "a tension") that is enjoyable in and of itself such as the play and tension in sex that sometimes gets us to delay the pleasure of orgasm; but second, and more important, all organisms seek their end, their death, and the state of relaxation that comes after pleasure. Moreover, Freud illustrated that human beings seek pleasure in compulsive and nonpleasurable ways: society must forbid certain pleasures and, therefore, what it allows the person to imagine gives pleasure may actually not it constitutes an unauthentic substitute. If this is true, then the whole foundation of Capitalism and liberal democracy, of individual liberty based on the rational choice of the most pleasurable, must crumble.

Significantly, in both the economic and political realms, the pleasure principle has led to its own contradiction. The ideologies of Capitalism and liberal democracy have generated an imperialism where peoples fight and destroyed others to preserve and extend the "blessings" of liberal democracy and Capitalism to them so they would gain the liberty to choose from their own knowledge of pleasure. It has become possible to conceive of fighting and destroying others to make them "free" by basing notions of freedom on the right of the individual to determine what is pleasurable.

In philosophy, psychology, and economics the same cycle reasserts itself. From pleasure to pain: pursued to its experiential conclusion by Freud, pleasure led to a psychological theory of pain; pursued to its practical conclusion in politics and economics, the pleasure calculus led to war, revolution, and massacres, to hunger, deprivation, and starvation in the name of individual liberty to pursue the "happiness" defined as pleasure.

What makes sense to the philosopher, politician, economist, and psychologist makes nonsense to common sense. The sensibility of the poets, by contrast, constantly casts better light on the pleasure cycle. "Sweet is pleasure after pain" repeats John Dryden in his epic poem on Alexander the Great; ("Alexander's Feast or the Power of Music") the pleasures of the feast are so sweet because the pain of battle has ended. The sensibility of Benjamin Franklin's famous "Poor Richard" has also been forgotten: "Pain wastes the body; pleasure the understanding." We forgot the dialectical relationship between pleasure and pain in adopting form of thought that sought to oversimplify reality by reducing it to the crudest animal principle. That all animal life can be explained by pleasure is a patent absurdity.

Not only pleasure but also pain is a positive value. It is the automatic and spontaneous sign that something is wrong with life. "Suffering casts a light upon life." Pain is not only unpleasant but a judgment upon the pleasures we identify with. When Franklin says pleasure wastes the understanding, we are not to believe that pain is a good thing but that pain is nothing, it is a negation, a naysaying to what we have been seeking. What motivates the constant pursuit of pleasure is not the pleasure and not the disappearance of pleasure but the pain. The "pleasure" arises and appears good only because we have succeeded in desensitizing ourselves to the pain.

Franklin also implies that the two principles we regularly create out of our attempts to avoid being conscious of our pain are really both ourselves. Flesh and understanding. The body rightfully rejects pain, but the mind requires it. Pain casts light upon life; it enlightens us and makes it possible for us to choose. The mind invades our complacent hedonism and judges pleasures to be bad. Thus, the mind becomes an abyss to our pleasure and so we want to deny the mind along with the pain. Therefore, we reject our minds and their judgment against our pleasures claiming that "society" has seduced or indoctrinated them against our true selves. The sophisticated among us even quote Freud's catch phrase "where there is Id, there shall be Ego" to find a justification for rejecting the Ego's "false condemnation of our pleasures" and getting back to "spontaneity." The problem, of course, is that these desires are no longer spontaneous but created out of our alienation. We reject the mind, and the agency that performs the rejection is the mind; yet we fail to perceive the contradiction because, in hiding from our pain, we have undermined our understanding.

Again, the everspiralling cycle reasserts itself: from the contradiction between pleasure and pain, to the contradiction between mind and body. Always we do this to reduce the dualism to a monism to make one principle where there are two because the two are an abyss, an abyss to each other, and we reject the abysmal experience of negation.

Using the pleasure/pain terminology rather than escalating the dualism to mind and body and beyond, Plato in The Republic suggests the existence of three states with regard to pleasure: (1) pain, (2) pleasure, and (3) the ending of pain. (1968, Plato, 265266) The person who refuses to face the pain that is an abyss to pleasure gets caught in a cycle of moving from pain to the ending of pain while never experiencing positive pleasure. Once in a golden age, in Eden, at our mother's breast we may have experienced pleasure but, rather than face the loss of paradise and turning our faces from that fact, we seek what we come to call pleasure. This "pleasure" is, however, nothing more than the contrary attempt to avoid pain. The only hope, is, of course, that the pain is always there threatening us since only if it is can it be a goad to escaping it. With his threefold division, Plato strikes a dramatic blow at all theories of the "Golden Mean" between the extremes. Plato shows that the best conduct is the extreme of pleasure, that the "mean" between pleasure and pain is deadly. But, again, if we choose the middle ground out of fear of pain, that pain must always be present. Unlike Plato, later authors tried to build models of utopia on the basis of this middle ground falsely called "pleasure." Recent utopian models illustrate the horror created by the "liberal" notions of pleasure. Their pleasure principle undermined the very liberty they appealed to.

What is most dramatically illustrated in this utopia is the dialectic of existence, and how we may already be enclosed in a trap running from one side of the contradiction to the other in a circle, thinking we are getting somewhere using our minds to achieve "pleasure" and overcome pain but in reality only running from pain and never finding pleasure.



CHAPTER 6

FREEDOM AND SLAVERY

For more than three hundred years a rising tide of hope has brought the promise of liberty to the farthest reaches of the earth. The human being could be released from the degrading drudgery of surviving in an alien and hostile environment through the machine. Because servitude to the soil could end in this way, the need for one brutal and powerful group to use another to enable itself to live above the animal level also could end. Material liberation and social liberation are at hand Capitalists and Communists alike told us. The older Liberalism had preached noninterference by government in the economic life of individuals as a means of conquering the earth, but we found in practice that liberation from the state meant that our masters were only changed. It meant not only that smaller groups such as corporations became our new masters but also that greater and not smaller numbers of us fell into servitude. Marxistsliberals later argued that liberation had to be not only from the aristocratic/agrarian state but also from the market economy that held us in thrall to the powerful groups in the marketplace and ultimately from all classes

whether they be noble, commercial, or industrial. At the same time, however, liberal Marxism produced allegedly as only a temporary phenomenon and as a stepping stone to ultimate class liberation a massive subservience to the state and the rise of a new dominant class sometimes called "bureaucratic" and other times called "managerial," whose interest was vested not in wealth but in power. The new class did not use social power to achieve individual wealth; it used its management of social wealth to achieve individual power.

Everyone already knows that politics, political movements, economic and political liberalism all now stand for nothing but control. It no longer even occurs to us that politics and economics could even potentially be a realm of freedom. At best, we consider them only a means to it. We see freedom now existing, if at all, only on an individual basis. Society and the state are not your liberation but only theaters where you might enact your freedom. We talk of political freedom less and less and sexual freedom more and more.

The movement to "liberate" the sexes may be a good example of how the illusion that by reducing social control in the name of more individual "freedom" we end up with less: it alltoooften smells of an imperialist attempt to dictate new roles to the sexes. Men and women have been enslaved runs the argument: "Society and the state have never been a means of sexual liberation but always of sexual repression and have usually been the way one sex oppresses the other; the sexual roles that established powers have foisted upon us must be overthrown since it is by these roles that they set up their mastery over us." The movement for liberation is (1) against "society" and (2) against "roles." Women are told to seek liberation from the "wife and mother" role only to find themselves in a new servitude on the job to the system of production and to its managers. Men are told to seek liberation from the strong, silent, macho role but find themselves increasingly confused and enslaved to the fashion industry's sales of cosmetics and clothing, to a hairstylist, gels, fashion coordinates, perfume, and jewelry.

Freedom ends in slavery; slavery ends in freedom another vicious circle in the cycle of life. We move from freedom to slavery and back not because this is an inevitable and eternal pattern but because it is not really slavery we fought against even though we hate our enslavement as much as it is consciousness of the abyss. Your life as a wife and mother need not be enslaving; this much is clear and would be commonly accepted. Why, then, do you find no way of living free in it so you cannot but experience it as enslaving? Because others force you to live up to their expectations? But you may refuse to do so, and, besides, others expectations are often not less but greater outside the home than inside it. Is it because you have no alternative to motherhood? Of course, there have always been alternatives though many of them were decidedly unpleasant.

Surely, there is much undeniable evidence that all but the most determined women in the past have been discouraged from leaving the kitchen and all but the most determined men have been discouraged from entering it. Men have also been discouraged from entering nursing and secretarial positions. Discrimination against women, because its realm was public and in the external world, has clearly been much more open, blatant, and structural while that against men has been more invisible, emotional, and psychological. Whether one kind of pressure is worse than the other is not the important point here. More significantly, once we have admitted the existence of discrimination and "inequality," then we must still ask ourselves whether it is the discrimination that afflicts us or something else. When I try to be as honest with myself as I can, I must admit that the deeper motive behind my acting against role control over me is not so much the fact of control as the abysmal emptiness of the way I have lived my role life.

Like other failures, the failure of selfconsciousness is easier to see in others. Men can see in women who rebel against a conventional role not so much an action against control as against the emptiness of their lives a failure or inability to participate in the role in a way that has any chance of being meaningful. Rolefrustrated women may even discredit the very idea of men "liberating" themselves from the tyranny of job believing that men "have it made," are independent, can move from job to job if they wish, and have no cause for complaint. Rolefrustrated men respond that it is women living at home who "have it made" no timeclock, independence from the imposed schedule of a corporate job, and no reason for complaint. Students complain that universities control them by grades. Faculty see themselves not fulfilled in their roles and so feel empty. Faculty complain that they re controlled by administrators and students. Administrators complain that they are controlled by students, faculty, and the public. All want liberation, but their movement for is motivated less by servitude than by the empty abyss of the way they have been living their lives.

Once you achieve liberation, once children break from their parents, once the French overthrow their king, once the Russians squeeze out their Czar, then servitude returns in a new form. Children conform to their peers, the French bring back he old king though they call him "President," the Russians get a new Czar. The lyrics change but the melody remains the same. All because the child, the French, and the Russians were fighting not to escape servitude but to avoid facing the void. The desire to hide from the dark face of the abyss transforms itself into the personal problem of dealing with the frustrations of role; the personal role problem becomes a large or small social revolutionary movement whose success only leads to a new abyss, to new control, to new suffering.

Societies originated as instruments of human liberation. It is only in cooperation with others that we can free ourselves to live a human existence in our natural environment. Societies liberated human beings by allowing them to specialize their functions so that each of us could more effectively produce for the benefit of ourselves and others; through roles, societies liberated us both from economic and from emotional need no longer did you constantly have to protect your beloved from the attacks and enticements of others; through marriage, the group helped and supported you in the endeavor of delving farther and more deeply into the meaning of a love relationship. Society was meant to liberate you not from facing the abyss but from the distractions you use to keep it away. Marriage and roles allowed you to go beyond crudely sensual relations exactly so that the abyss involved in them could become visible and confrontable.

Ultimately, it is individuals rather than "society" or "the state" who distort roles so they can use them to hide themselves from the abyss. They choose roles as safe hiding places. That is what makes roles so fundamentally oppressive and what guarantees that the flight from one imprisoning role will only be a flight to another. This is so even though where the majority in the society are hiding from the abyss they use its power to prevent anyone else from escaping from role and facing it lest by witnessing that genuine liberation in others they be exposed to it themselves. In short, society is not the ultimate cause but only the occasion for oppression. The "social liberation" that occurs by changing structures can do little to overcome the oppression. Moreover, if the movement is radical and extreme, it cannot but wipe away the precondition for genuine liberation along with the occasion for servitude since, again, the group called society is a necessary means to liberation. When it is undermined, human beings will do nothing faster than reconstruct another, and the next is nearly always worse since it is built even less out of a knowledge of true freedom and more out of the absolute panic of losing a hiding place from the abyss.

No matter what happens, social power, the influence others have over us by virtue of their judgments of us will never disappear. It exists by virtue of our humanity and by virtue of our recognizing each other as human like ourselves. However much you try to break the control your parents have over you and succeed, you are likely to be successful only with the support of a gang of peers who equally or even more, though less consciously, control you. Whatever others expect of you, the fact of your knowing they expect it will always exercise power on you. It is well that you recognize this power, of course, since only then can you selfconsciously choose to act either in cooperation with it or against it. The power itself will always be there to be consciously or unconsciously experienced.

The dialectic of freedom and slavery going back and forth from one to the other both in the individual and society and constantly, in the force that drives the rotation, revealing your fear of the abyss, transforms itself for our "protection" into a new polarization: self and others. It is society (others) that controls you, but, of course, you know also that society can never give or take away your freedom. Only you can give and take it from yourself, and you take it from yourself when you draw back from the abyss so that you hide from it in cowardly fear of the emptiness of your existence by losing yourself in a role that only society can grant you and from the loneliness that their abandonment threatens you with; you also draw back from the abyss by the opposite strategy when you act in reckless abandon of a role and reject those others who seek to enforce it upon you by blaming the emptiness you can no longer avoid on them and it.



CHAPTER 7

LOVE AND SADISM

Surely not one of the least important paradoxes in life is the close relationship between love and sadism. From every age come histories and rumors of grotesque brutality, much of it incredible to most of us and yet also compelling and fascinating. I do not refer only to the connection between sex and sadism in a personality such as the Marquis de Sade himself but also and more significantly to the complex tortures of inquisitorial religion, the brutality of soldiers in war, the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi concentration camp, the actions of secret police they scream to us from a past we are tempted to forget at our own peril since it could become our finest teacher. In fact, we are less in danger of forgetting these than of turning them into titillations; so many people are so fascinated by the sadistic that we are in little danger of losing the stories themselves. There is great danger, however, that we will lose sight of their significance.

We alltooeasily ascribe sadism to evil people without taking the time to look more carefully at sadistic behavior and see that most of even the most monstrous of sadists were often kind and even gentle creatures. Anyone with an open mind has to be struck by statements of surprise coming from acquaintances of sensualists, mass murderers, rapists, assassins: "He was the last person you'd suspect of such abominations." We like to imagine that these acquaintances must be incredibly naive not to have seen the monster behind the mask. Similarly, we fail to consider our own motive in either anxiously avoiding or compulsively reading, seeing, and hearing as much as we can of the life and death of the monsters and their victims.

At its root, sadism is enjoyment in the pain and destruction of others. It is sadistic to enjoy watching someone's home getting bombed as it is sadistic to enjoy their bodies being beaten. I recently saw bulldozer razing a small, sturdy, stillliveable home. The maws of the jaw opened and chewed a whole room at a time. Within ten minutes the house was nothing but a pile of rubble, but the machine chewed on, until the pieces of splintered wood were small enough to be shoveled into a waiting truck. In my mind I found the destruction sad, but at a very deep, low level watching it interested and at least slightly excited me. After all, I did not have to stand there until the job was finished nor was I required to move around to get a better view, but I did. At some level, I enjoyed the destruction. It was not even a matter of fantasizing about the bulldozer but an enjoyment of the brutal power immediately expressed. My enjoyment is symptomatic of a basic kind of sadism.

Our very gentleness and love are often signs of the way that we ourselves are brutalized. We learned that the medieval god was a god of power, might, and, of course, love. The love could not conceal the brutality. We had to love God and all the terrible things God allowed to happen we had to accept. The slightest resistance was sinful. On another level, the bureaucrat whether religious or secular today and throughout all history rarely tortures us in visible ways but always enjoys the exercise of power in the fact of control over us and frustration in us. Bureaucrats can be sadistic in their very mildness; they can go home to enjoy a sadistic police story on television but also to be kindly and loving to family and friends.

Sadism leads to love and love to sadism. Sadists end in love for the object of their destructive power. Soldiers enjoying the destruction of an enemy village of innocent people can rush in to the aid of the injured at great personal risk and then work to rebuild the homes; bureaucrats who have just victimized clients may reach to console or comfort; the inquisitorial church elders who burn the witch at the stake after having just disjointed her bones on the rack, can express genuine concern for the victim and, after the victim dies, hurry to canonize her. Similarly, the most mild, most loving people can become the most sadistic. German guards at the concentration camps went home to fireside and family, full of romantic gentleness, laughed and played with small children outside the prison gate, then proceeded inside to bash little babies' heads against stone walls as an inexpensive and interesting way to kill them.

We make others the victims of our sadism because we experience being the victims of the sadism of others. But the sadism that victimizes us may be less visible so, unable to fight it directly, we become more and are visibly sadistic toward others who are innocent like ourselves. We cannot fight our victimizers because their sadism is masked as love and concern for us it even wears the mask of God. The mask they wear is what they see when they commit their crimes of violence against us and what we see as we are their victims. We could not rebel against a sadistic church in the medieval period because the churchman was good God's representative in our eyes. Using Freud's terms, we find ourselves helpless to rebel against a sadistic father or mother. This is so first, because the torture is not always visible and, second, because to us they are "good." We find ourselves placed in an impossible position. Unable to stop ourselves from being victims, we turn on other innocents with more brutality than even we had received. The bureaucrat victimized by a superior in the organization cannot strike back at the victimizer and so turns instead upon inferiors.

We must, if sadism is to be overcome, recognize that we are the victims of the sadism of others by virtue of our own choice. Thus, bureaucrats who deeply, though unconsciously, feel victimized by the organization would not succeed in ending their own victimization even were they to retaliate against that organization by acts of sabotage because the ground of their being victims is their own adherence to organized life. As those victimized by a medieval priest fail to liberate themselves by eliminating him as long as they believe the church organization is good or is of God, so, too, bureaucrats cannot liberate themselves as long as they allow themselves to depend on the god of the organization. In short, bureaucrats remain victims as long as they refuse to face the abyss. What is the abyss for them? The loss of their jobs, functions, "importance." The sadistic venom they take in, they then pour out into others; others transfer it until it rebounds back to victimize the organization's leaders who in turn pass it down to the bureaucrat distilled and more potent with each victim it has passed through and so creating an every rising crescendo of pain.

Thus, from the same sadistic motive comes contradictory behavior that is sometimes "loving" and sometimes "torture" but whatever form the motive takes, it leads to sadistic results. What most call love is as sadistic as hate. Their love can be as destructive and venomous as their hate and even more so because it appears good. The sadistic god beats you until you repent and then loves you until you can do not other than sin so he can beat you again and you can repent again. Married couples fight so they can make up and make up so they can fight their fighting is not playful but sadistic. Sometimes films show this in an unforgettable fashion "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," "The Last Tango in Paris," and "Scenes from a Marriage," bear witness to the cycle of love coming only out of sadistic degradation by one person against the other and sadistic love producing the drive to sadistic degradation. Like all art forms, films can show the problem, but they cannot show the solution. They can show behavior and they can talk of change, but your simple viewing the work of art cannot be of much help in coming to understand the invisible abyss that sadistic love in marriage often leads to or the way that the torment continues because of unwillingness to face the abyss. Either you cling to the sadistic love as the best thing in your life and continue to do damage to yourself and others or you recognize the consequent pain that seems to be coming from your partner so you attack brutally and visibly. The fight begins. You can make up without realizing the damage you are doing.

The cycle goes round and round: invisible at first to victim and victimizer, brutality then transforms its invisible depths to the surface, shifting from one dimension of contradiction to another, and finally, going from the surface back to the depths. There is always the chance that you will learn from this, but only if you realize that at the core is your refusal to open yourself to the abyss to the emptiness of what you regard as the best thing in your life, the thing you identify with the most, your sadistic love.



CHAPTER 8

MALE AND FEMALE

Despair is never far from an age that dares to ask ultimate questions while unequipped to find ultimate answers. Such an age questions the why of things without have the conceptual tools to develop, let alone express, an answer. Why are there men and women? What is the place of men? of women? in the scheme of things? Neither of the sexes has been free from suffering from its sexual status. Women may long have been the socially oppressed, but may not understand that this is partly because of the sexual insecurity and often the sexual terror of men, an insecurity that is only worse because it can be neither admitted or expressed. Men experience women as the sexually more secure not more secure in themselves but in the natural need for them to live if the human race is to continue. Women can in principle do everything men can do and bear children as well. Moreover, at least for reproductive purposes the existence of so large a population of men whose primary sexual function is to fertilize the ova is superfluous.

Biological, physiological, and sociopsychological disputes have raged for centuries over the comparative advantage of masculinity or femininity. One side argues that women are biologically superior because of their need in birthgiving, but the other side rejoins that evidence points to the essential place of a multitude of men in giving variety to evolution and care to the offspring. One side claims that women are physiologically superior they live longer, stand up to pain and even their own bloodshed better than men, while the other side answers that their strength, bone structure, and agility shows the physiological superiority of men. One side insists that women are the psychic heart of any society, and the other side claims that men are the organizing head. Both sides of these arguments have been vehemently supported by appeals to the facts and as vehemently the other side has cited facts to disprove the first and denounce it as blatant prejudice. Such is a summary of some major "scientific" positions on the place of the sexes.

The argument even spills over into the nature of original society to dispute whether it was matriarchy or patriarchy. Much anthropological evidence as well as ontogenic evidence today evidence found in upon the early development of concrete individual beings today suggests that matriarchy did precede patriarchy. Even the "original" gods seem to have been female and were only later overthrown by the male society and replaced by the male gods. Drawn from ontogeny, some psychology has viewed human history as the history of three possible types of social organization that succeeded each other: from (1) matriarchy to (2) patriarchy and from patriarchy to (3) democracy. From the rule by the mother principle over all, to the rule of the father, to the rule of brothers and sisters over each other. The life of the person may be seen as a sum of the life the race controlled by mother, contradicted by father, then, finally, selfcontrol and mutual selfcontrol. Three possible psychological principles, our biological inheritance, are said to be the social alternatives we perennially face. The fathers rebelled against maternal authority and established paternal authority; the brothers and sisters rebel against the father and set up fraternal/sisterly authority. "Fraternity" has been the battle cry in revolution for centuries.

We have found there cannot be freedom where there is inequality, but the central paradox of our era is whether there can be equality where there is no freedom. The evidence points increasingly to a positive answer.

The problem with maternal and paternal authority is the same everywhere and is the same on every level it is that both forms of authority stem form a relationship of dependence and must disappear when dependence is no longer necessary. Mother and father must release their hold on children and to mature children must strive to achieve that release or else adult tyranny ensues. In a state or a nation, similarly, paternal authority exists not for the benefit of the leader for the benefit of those who are still weak and dependent and must cease when they can be independent. But like in the family, when children demand the continuation of care long after they are independent biologically and psychologically or, worse, when parents seek to perpetuate their authority because they exercised that authority not for the benefit of the child but for themselves, then tyranny emerges.

The ideal, only occasionally neared it is true, during the earlier history of civilization was that the king and nobility ruled for the benefit of their "children." Adults in relation to the whole society were equivalent within to children within a family. The king must not rule for his own wealth or selfglorification but God gave him power for the benefit of those he ruled. Noblesse obliges. History testifies to how easily and often royalty was tempted to believe that the position it held was by right and because of some quality in the royal person. The king was to rule by divine commission, but the divine commission meant responsibility to God and not a grant of arbitrary power from God. The divine commission or, in Chinese terms, the "mandate of Heaven" could be withdrawn by the church, by the public, or by failure in service.

Like human parents, the divinely commissioned rulers often and increasingly acted as beneficiaries rather than servants of their roles. Moreover, when state religions crumbled, kings identified their personality no longer with God but with the state and power. The king who had ruled by divine commission became divine without in recent times of course taking on the form of godhead, only its function. As long as things went well, the people could even be pleased with their godly king and find it comforting that he was taking care of them they were children remaining children. When conditions deteriorated, revolutions arose and kings fell.

The story repeated itself. Gods fell, kings fell, but mostly only names fell. When the "public" and the "voter" were proclaimed the new god that appointed rulers, the new kings were called "prime ministers" or "presidents," and they ruled by the divine right conferred on them by the voters. They were the servant of the voters and responsible to them. Then again more selfcentered presidents were commissioned and increasingly wanted the commission not to serve the public but so the public should serve them. When the role became one of power and right rather than responsibility, the powerhungry, not the responsible, fought for office. Everything was fine as long as conditions remained prosperous, but when problems arose, the new "kings" were figuratively beheaded as of old but through elections that immediately replaced the old ones with new ones who ruled as badly as their predecessors.

We must understand there is a fourth alternative to the paternal, maternal, and fraternal/sisterly authority forms. It is an alternative having less to do with form itself than with motive. Beneath any paternal, maternal, fraternal/sisterly form may rest a power motive. The mother not motivated by the wellbeing of her children but by the desire to fulfill her own emptiness becomes a tyrant; the father not motivated by the wellbeing of his children or his society is tyrannical; the brothers and sisters not motivated by fraternal or sisterly concern but by power construct the worst despot ism possible. The wheel goes round and round from maternal, to paternal, to fraternal/sisterly forms sometimes nations even try to contain two or three of these in the "mixed" form of democracy combined with aristocracy or monarchy but the reality remains the same because the basic nature of the rule remains the same. We see particularly in our generation the polar opposites of paternal and fraternal/sisterly authority struggling the revolutionary brothers and sisters against the firm father. But hidden beneath that contradiction is the deeper one between conscious form and unconscious motive. The father and the brothers/sisters think they struggle over form democracy or monarchy when in fact they fight only because they seek neither. Each actually seeks power.

We may cast further light upon the problem by returning to the more personal issue of the place of men and women. The paternal and maternal forms of authority were not particularly sexual-they had less to do with being male or female and more to do with representing parenthood so they forced the bearer of authority to reflect upon responsibility to those entrusted to their charge. Fraternity/sisterhood means equality, however, and before two can be equal, they must be separated. The principles stemming from the function of mother and father arise not from separation but from, connection. The mother rules because she has established a relationship to and identifies herself with the child. Like mother, like father; and like father, like true brothers and sisters. When each exercises influence over the others because of concern for the others, there is unity, and control by one over another ends when it is no longer needed or healthy. The mother identifies most strongly with her child; she loves her child as herself but her very love is a motive to allow the child ultimate independence her very connection is an occasion for her children to realize themselves as herself as they break away. The same goes for the father. But "mothers" who are not really mothers, "fathers" who are not really fathers, and "brothers" and "sisters" who are not really brothers and sisters take and use these forms of psychological authority in an alien way.

Without a principle beyond his personality love for the other as for self, let us say the parental father is tyrannical. Similarly, without a principle beyond personality a higher standard you might call "God" the leader centers authority in the self. Finally, brothers and sisters cannot be brothers and sisters without a higher principle defining them and binding them as a human "family." They need not get a hold of such a principle as much as they have to experience it as getting hold of them.

Modern equality or fraternity/sisterhood fails because it wants to abolish all parent visible and invisible alike. It has often made equality into an absolute principle. Eventually, this absolute equality even invades the family so father and mother and children are all equal. They have "equal rights" attached to them. This may sound marvelous to most of us, but, without a principle of a higher order above the individual, the outcome is that the equality is grounded only in separation, and its individualism makes each of us an abyss to the other. The male is the abyss of the female, and the female is abyss to the male. Each male is an abyss to every other male, and every female is an abyss to any other female. No reconciliation is possible because the male refuses to fall into the female abyss and the female refuses to fall into the male abyss, and each male refuses to fall into other males as each female refuses to fall into other females. Each turns away from the abyss, and the outcome is antagonism and competition for the superior role. Thus, equality generates its own contradiction. As long as there are "mother" and "father," there can be freedom and equality between and within the sexes. The opposition, the difference between them, can be reconciled in the creative forms of "maternity" and "paternity" can be reconciled in their becoming "parents" who help each other give birth to themselves. But where each is purely individual and equal as individual, there is no basis for reconciliation.

We must now recognize that when paternal authority degenerates, it becomes male power; when maternal authority degenerates, it becomes female power. When brother and sister authority degenerate they become individual power. We also must realize that maternal authority did become female power, that paternal authority did become male power, and that the rebellions in history have been less against paternal and maternal authority than against male and female power. Why? Because paternal and maternal bear the symbolic mark not only or even principally of sexuality but of origin and care you have power over your children only because and to the extent that you care for them, help them, give birth to and sustain their flesh and mind. Male and female involves love too, but it also involves hostility. It must involve antagonism because the kind of love involves opposites. The woman essentially opposite to the man and the man essentially opposite to the woman; as long as male and female remain, the one cannot absorb the other and cannot surrender to desire to do so. The desire to do so will be called "love," and the antagonism will be either suppressed beneath the surface or expressed in bitterness toward the oppressiveness of the other.

Whenever the gang of males the team dominates as male over the group, it is tyrannical and antagonistic to women though it "loves" them and sleeps with them. Similarly, whenever society is dominated by the female, it becomes tyrannical although it may be in a less obvious fashion. It is not paternal authority but paternal power; it is not fraternal/sisterly authority that destroys most societies but fraternal/sisterly power. It is when the "sisters" and "brothers" for the sake of power rebel against the "father" and "mother" and find their primary control in a group of absolute equals that civilization deteriorates. It is the male machismo society that in demise leads to a feminist reaction. The machismo society refuses to face and enter the abyss that is woman; this prevents the woman from entering the abyss that is man. It is the turning from the abyss that is the origin of the suffering of the as well as the decline and fall of great civilizations.



PART II

THE ABYSS ABSOLUTE AND SUICIDE

"Those who approach philosophy correctly are simply and only practicing dying constantly, but no one sees them...."

Simmias laughed at this and said, "I wasn't in the mood for laughter just now, Socrates, but you made me laugh; I think that many if they heard your words would say, 'That's a good one on the philosophers.' And others in my city would heartily agree that philosophers are actually suffering from a death wish and, now they have found them out, that they richly deserve death."

"That would be true, Simmias," said Socrates, "except the words 'found out' because they have not found out in what sense the true philosopher desires to die and deserves to die and what kind of death it is."

Plato, Phaedo





CHAPTER 9

THE ABYSS RELATIVE AND THE ABYSS ABSOLUTE

At this point I must make a fine distinction too often blurred because of the flawed approach to philosophy descending to us since the time of Aristotle. Life discovers many opposites or contraries. I have spoken of a few of the most striking thinking and doing, matter and spirit, idealism and realism, optimism and pessimism, pleasure and pain, mind and body, freedom and slavery, self and others, love and sadism, male and female. There are hundreds more. Yet, strictly speaking, these are not contradictions (they are not literally "sayings against"); they are not verbal but living opposites. Each of them arises from and leads to the deepest opposite, the Absolute opposite.

Every affirmation, every definition, every living step evokes its own negation, its own abyss. Male is an abyss or bottomlessness to female; female is to male. Maleness may seem to be your basis, your definition, yourself. But then you meet female and your ground is torn away, and you fall into her as into emptiness. Every reality is a thing; every thing seems to be. But each thing that exists depends on the other; it contains and requires its own negation, its own opposite, its own contrary. Therefore, the moment you say "this is," "I am male," "it is love," you must recognize that you experience simultaneously "this is not," "I am not male," "I have not love." Why? Because each of the first statements errs in its claim to be definitive. It asserts something exists without qualification while the existence of everything is qualified by everything else; you cannot know anything until you know everything, and you cannot be anything until you are everything.

What was for the predecessors of Aristotle an experiential distinction became for his followers a logical distinction. Two levels of opposites exist in logic, contraries and contradictions. An example of a contradictory is the opposite between good and nongood; good is "yes" while nongood is "no." Contradictories are direct opposites. On the other hand, contraries are not direct opposites. The opposition between good and evil is an example of a "contrary." Evil appears logically not only a nongood but also as a positive presence, a "privation." Medieval logicians said that evil was the absence of good where it should be present. For example, when I do not have a good, let us say I do not have a piece of pie, it is different from when I do not have a piece of pie and I am hungry. The absence of the good called food in the second case would be an evil and not a nongood because it involves hunger that is my body's judgment that something is missing that should be there.

The subtlest and highest explanation of how to resolve the conflict between contraries can be illustrated by the case of a piece of pie that appears to be both good and evil at the same time. Of course, it cannot be good and nongood at the same time (it cannot be a contradiction), but it can appear so if evil is involved. The pie, you say, is evil. The term "evil" refers, not to something very bad or absolutely bad, but to an illusion of the good. The problem with the pie is not that it is laden with fat and "empty" calories and so not very nourishing to the body but the person who is hankering after it is anticipating through it a good it cannot deliver. Evil is even more characteristic of the sexual appetite where the desire for sex arises from the impression that it will satisfy the longing for what only genuine love can deliver.

Even modern science has finally rediscovered relativism or, as we now call it, "relativity." Each reality is relative to all others. Even the most basic "categories" of time and space we now understand to be relative. Yet, mostly, this rediscovery, too, is only logical, intellectual, mathematical. We have not yet bridged the gap from the scientific, impersonal, and mental to the subjective, personal, and experiential confrontation with relativity. Relativity in the sphere of the physical sciences is the exact equivalent of the relative abyss in the sphere of experience.

To our understanding, the relative abyss always appears before the Absolute Abyss, but, to our existence, the Absolute Abyss is always prior to the relative abyss. As I have said repeatedly in the first part of this work, we run to, and become conscious of, the contrary the thing opposite to what we have just focused on only because we first deeply experience the emptiness or bottomlessness of that thing. We run to female because male has become hollow. We run to doing when thinking becomes empty. Again, female simultaneously expresses both the bottomlessness of the male and a new bottom or ground; the malefemale relationship is a new thing, a new being, a new something about which we try to say "It is."

So much for relativity and so much for what the Marxian and Hegelian dialectic have become in our age. Both of them rediscovered how opposites cancel each other out but preserve each other in a new synthesis, a new being. What these physical and metaphysical philosophies did not illustrate fully is the source of the power of the dialectic. Both Marx and Hegel did make an attempt to identify this power: Marx by claiming that the movement from one side of the opposites to the other was produced by natural, biological demands built into the human organism for material wellbeing in the struggle with the environment, and Hegel by claiming a supernatural invisible force behind conflicts in history that moves it forward. Unfortunately, later scholars made both these hints increasingly abstract and theoretical. You do discover and experience the motive for better material life inside yourself, but you do not experience it as most fundamental. For the mind centered in life, the claim that it is can only be hypothetical although Marx suggests that you are not qualified to judge because your mind follows the material conditions of your life and is unavoidably alienated from the truth about yourself. My point here is not to dispute either Hegel, Marx, or Einstein. I would not even attempt to challenge the subtle genius of their arguments. More dubious is what their dialectic philosophies have become in our own time and how they have been interpreted. Even these I ignore here. My concern is solely with the experiential plight we find ourselves in and with the possibility we have not been helped out of this plight. Instead, interpreters of the great philosophers from Aristotle on down have only reinforced it. I have neither the time, the talent, nor the energy to provide a general critique of philosophers and philosophical speculation through the centuries past. Instead, let me speak from the perspective of where we are today.

Philosophy and science together have ignored the Absolute Abyss. This is largely because the Absolute Abyss is unspeakable, unutterable, while the essence of modern philosophy and science is definition. Indeed, many intelligent people practice both precisely to avert a confrontation with the void. They fill the air with inventions or discoveries of hundreds of exceedingly complex terms and avoid the silence of the Abyss. If you speak and write formally today, especially if you are most successful at it, you must occasionally wonder why you continue. Is it not because of fear that without the speaking, writing, publishing, and success a great silence would descend upon you? It is comforting to fill the silence with words, particularly when they describe the whirling vortex of the universe and the atom or the whirling contraries in human existence, so that you can ignore the absolute stillness at the center of the torrent. A culture founded superficially upon the idea of social progress and individual action and more deeply upon the principle of perpetual movement, as reflected in a science of "discoveries and novelties" and in a philosophy of words and tortuous linguistic analysis, is likely to be unwilling to realize and less to accept the truth of the deep stillness, the deep void.

Stop the motion for a moment. Stop the words from flowing into theories. Stop the activity that pretends to make better things for better living. Stop and consider not what we think or do about life but the experience of life itself. Is it not true that you turn to others because you first experience an emptiness in yourself? Is it not true that they show you this emptiness in yourself first and then you turn to them? Is it not true that the insufficient, dependent male knows deeply of this inadequacy and turns to female? Is it not true that the emptiness of thinking leads into doing? Is it not, in short, true that the hollowness, the loneliness, the void, the Abyss are the primary motivation in our lives? You buy a new car not primarily because it is good but because it helps turn your consciousness from the Abyss. If you really buy the car because it is good, why do you not remain satisfied with it? Is it really because, as modern theory says, every good is a partial good that once attained leads to something else or, as the economists say, human beings are an endless and neversatisfied "demand?" Would you really be satisfied if you had everything? Are there not moments when you have been "satisfied" with nothing?

We have discovered there is no thing that is absolutely good. All the good things that we know are only relatively good things. Perhaps we cannot be certain there is an absolute good that is not a thing, but we can be certain, from experience, that there is an absolute absence. As every contrary is an abyss to the opposites involved, proving the relativity in the value of the opposites, so, too, there is an Abyss at the bottom of every other Abyss. It is the Absolute Abyss. It is not where one thing is canceled, annulled, and preserved by another thing but where I am canceled, annulled, annihilated I am crossed out and made into nothing. Everything is made into nothing in its contrary. This is the experience of the abyss relative. However, as everything is made nothing, so, too, I am made nothing. This is the experience of the Abyss Absolute. It is an experience no longer of forgetting about one thing in seeing something else. Rather it is an experience of seeing nothing at all and not being seen at all.

There are two places where you can come to the Abyss Absolute. The first we have already explored extensively. It is the safest place but also the slowest to find. In it, the experience of the Abyss Absolute is very slight as if cracks of darkness passed through the walls of light, tiny cracks, small black sparks. Your mind, however, can begin to work with this experience and guide you to the slow but full understanding of the Abyss. It occurs when you see that your running from one good to another is not because you know that the next good will fulfill you but because you are fleeing from the lack of good the Abyss that has revealed itself in your life. The glimpse does not prevent you from moving toward these new goods optimistically but does provide you with the beginning of a deep distrust of your movement.

The second way of realizing the existence of the Abyss Absolute is the quicker, but also the more painful and dangerous path. In your mad pursuit of things you fall under the complete illusion that if you get them, you will be happy. You may be convinced you know who you are and what you want. Your strong belief gives you enormous energy. The harder you run after one thing, the farther you get from its relative abyss and the more frustrated energy you have. The achievement of the one thing allows you to turn to its dialectical opposite in an even higher energy state. You think you are having fun and leading a fulfilled life. You are likely to be the object of the admiration and envy of many. You pursue you maleness, aggressive, hardhitting more and more, success, more admiration; then, you pursue you femaleness leaping into bed with woman after woman again successful and admired. The intensity of your life, however, is the intensity of your death, you fall into nothingness. Every thing you pursue leads to its abyss; every such abyss either leads to the opposite thing or acceptance of the Abyss. Even if you choose the opposite, it, also, leads you to the Abyss or else to still another opposite and different "thing." With increasing intensity you pursue things. But inevitably you came to the end of your tether and drop from the highest height of endeavors into the Abyss the Abyss Absolute with no more nets no more things, nothingness to catch you.

We have reached a state in this discussion where we can at least consider and explore the paths into the Abyss Absolute: memory, revelation, and suicide.



CHAPTER 10

THE WAY OF THE PHILOSOPHER

"...(T)hose who tackle philosophy aright are simply and solely practicing dying, practicing death, all the time..."(1965, Plato, 466467)

These are the famous words ascribed to Socrates in Plato's most moving dialogue, "The Phaedo." Socrates, who is about to be executed, goes on to describe death as the separation of the soul from the body and to suggest that such a separation is the fondest wish of every true philosopher. True philosophers seek to break the bonds of the body that tie them down to the world and to soar off into the deep blue sky to the sun. No wonder both Socrates and Plato are considered idealists, otherworldly dreamers, and no wonder Christian theologians adopted Plato as one of their own and saw in Socrates' death for truth a prefigure of Christ's death for love. Though Socrates celebrates death, no one is less gloomy about life than he is. His life has been interpreted as comic and his death as tragic, but no one is less tragic in all the Greek world and yet not comic either. Socrates was the death of tragedy in the Greek world. He was not its relative Abyss, which would be comedy, but its absolute Abyss.

Socrates is not a philosopher of death and sorrow but a philosopher of joy and life. When he does speak of death, it is always allegorically. What can he mean when he says all true philosophy is a rehearsal for death? If his philosophy is true philosophy, where in it does he provide the rehearsal hall? The death in Socrates' philosophy is not in content but in method. It rests in Socrates' famous dialogic technique. The movement of the argument is by negation or death as the movement of life is by death or negation.

Every worldly affirmation entails a worldly denial. Every logical affirmation entails a logical denial. Every living affirmation entails a living denial. Every "yes" implies a "no." Every life implies a death. There is a thinking dialectic and a living dialectic. Thought most reflects life when thought is dialectical. Dialectical thought follows life. Other forms of thought seek first to capture life and then to lead it in captivity.

The dialogical process brings all points to nothing as life brings all things to nothing. In the opening of The Republic, when Plato shows the old merchant Cephalus the emptiness, the nothingness, of his life, he turns and leaves and goes on to make obligatory prayers and sacrifices to the gods. His is a remarkable action in that it is so unremarkable. Nothing is more typically human than to retreat from an argument once, through it, you have seen the emptiness of your life. Your retreat, however, may be by leaving the scene of the contest or by remaining but leaping to some new and extraneous extreme position. Later in this dialogue the hardheaded teacher of rhetoric, Thrasymachus, takes the second path; he remains with Socrates and continues the argument, but he leaps from extreme "realism" to extreme "idealism" from demanding that Socrates look at the way that real life rulers operate rather than talk of justice abstractly, to insisting that the ruler he himself describes as happy is not the actual ruler but the "successful ruler." Thrasymachus flips from the material to the abstract and back all to preserve himself from facing the nothingness that Socrates has exposed him to.

Socrates forces Cephalus and Thrasymachus to face the nothingness not only in their logic but also in their very lives. If the arguments of these two selfassured men are flawed, then their lives, the basis of the views they express logically, are flawed. It is not only logic but life that faces the Abyss of nothingness. Neither Cephalus nor Thrasymachus are willing to endure it. They are "philosophers" but not authentic philosophers. Why not authentic? Because they are willing to deny everything, to accept any negation of their arguments, except where it touches upon their lives. For the true philosopher, the content of the logic that flows like life is not language but life. Genuinely philosophical thought is open not just to logical negation but to living negation. Cephalus and Thrasymachus follow a method of thinking that is exactly opposite. They organize their "philosophy" not to bring them to the point of "death" but to defend their lives from the realization of negation and nothingness. Socrates, by contrast, accepts the responsibility of mirroring in logic the negation in life.

The true philosopher is Socrates. He does not prepare for death, as Cephalus does. He does not avoid it, as Thrasymachus does. He practices it. If anything were to sadden Socrates at the point of swallowing his hemlock, it would have to be, not the end of his life, but the sorrow and anger of his wife and students all gathering around hoping he will save himself and escape into exile. It is inevitable, therefore, that his final instruction to his students on the method of philosophy is that he has been practicing death. He needs to show them that his deathbed in prison is not so different from his everyday life. The person who practices music does not prepare to play music but actually plays it. Surely, practice improves our relationship to music, but the practice of true music means something different from improving it for the sake of a later performance. If music is to be practiced, it must be experienced in the here and now and not for the sake of some future engagement.

This is the way Socrates "practices" death in philosophy by constantly dissolving the illusions of reality and value he had identified his existence with. Philosophy is the experience of this loss and death over and over again. It is the same experience day by day, so that, as a result, death becomes easier and more friendly. Yet death is never wholly kind. It always is challenge, loss, and pain. So, too, is practicing music. It is not necessarily pleasant although sometimes it can reach beyond pleasure to the sublime.

Though he drank the poison when he need not have, though he could have escaped the prison, though he could have gone and lived in exile, to await recall to his native land and elevation to heroic stature in the Greek Pantheon, Socrates did not commit suicide. The charge that his death was by suicide could come only from someone who did not understand true philosophy, from someone with a worldly prejudice, from someone who could not realize that everything in the world ends in its own negation or death. The philosopher who practices death ultimately realizes not that the world is unreal but reality as such is a construct built of what is there plus artificial projections from the human mind and created for the sake of convenience rather than truth. The ultimate reality of your own self is annulled or annihilated in philosophy it is literally "brought to nothing."

If suicide could be defined merely as an act, Socrates is clearly a suicide. However, a person who commits suicide is one who chooses death, not one who accepts it on his own terms. Socrates accepts death on his own terms. There is a logical and a living suicide, but Socrates commits neither. The logical suicide is the great naysayer, the abominable "noman." The logically suicidal delight in tearing down arguments. Before they even finish articulating a position of their own or hearing one from the lips of others, they are already preparing for attack. Negation is a powerful instrument in argument particularly when it is your singleminded devotion to bring every word to nothing, but this, in turn, makes nothing out of thought, including the thought of the naysayer. There is logical, intellectual, and moral suicide.

Mental suicide has never been common in human history, but it is so much less uncommon now than in the past. The power to say nay makes and breaks reputations. Whose intellectual reputation is more securely achieved than one who has effectively said "nay" to Kant, Hegel, Newton, Ptolemy, Einstein, Marx, or Freud? In fact, all you have to do nowadays to command instant attention is to present a proof, however weak, that some "great man" was wrong. It is not that you would get much farther by saying "yea" to them and to others, but at least you would avoid the catastrophe that has befallen us today the suicide of the mind. Too much faith in the authority of great thinkers, leaders, friends has led to no faith in any authority, whether it be human persons, thinkers, or thought itself.

Instead of criticizing and negating those you reject, you should instead negate the position only of those you fundamentally agree with and continue to agree with even as you disagree. The only intellectual growth you can gain from an Isaac Newton is what occurs when you can continue your deep admiration for him simultaneously with your negative analysis. So is it in human relations. Disagreement leads nowhere least of all does it lead to the Abyss of nothingness unless you continue to love those you disagree with. A deep affirmation beneath a heavy negation.

Socrates does not begin with negation or denial; he begins with affirmation: "I agree with your position," dear Cephalus, "and I admire your life;" "I have deep affection for you, Polemarchus;" "I respect the clarity of your vision of reality, dear Thrasymachus." Socrates does not even choose to negate does not choose death. Instead, he allows the negation already present in the affirmation to come out. The true philosopher is indeed the midwife of thought and not the thinker. True philosophers take the concept articulated into a living situation and are willing to face the negation and death, not of the idea but of their faith in it. It is in this sense that philosophers do not practice death by intellectual games. Indeed, philosophers experience death and submit themselves to it through their willingness to surrender what they identify themselves with. The mind at one moment identifies with this or that theory. When it surrenders the theory, the experience is the death not only to the theory but also to the person who had identified with it.

Similarly, Socrates does not choose death when he drinks the hemlock nor does he allow circumstances to dictate to him. He clearly has choice. However, his alternatives are worldly alternatives: to escape in exile and live or to drink the hemlock and die. The dialectical fulfillment of his life as a philosopher is to drink the hemlock. You can turn Socrates on his head or upside down and say he should have accepted his death as a philosopher instead of his death as a body. This would be justified if philosophy were merely theory and something Socrates identified with. But if his life was true if it was based not upon a theory but upon wisdom then physical death was the only choice he could make. In fact, of course, nearly everyone who identifies merely with a theory, a "worldview," or a concept, will choose not to drink the hemlock when given the choice because they then will deeply, if unconsciously, realize that what they had a hold of was only a theory rather than the truth that had a hold of them. Socrates' death was the necessary test to the existence of his life as truth rather than theory. He would have failed this "test," his life would have been an illusion and a lie had he gone into exile.

Socrates does not choose death, he chooses life and truth. His physical death is a necessary consequence of that choice. It is not a desirable one. Though Socrates appears to welcome the separation of the soul from the body and an ultimate release, in fact, he is simply accepting the final test where he chooses to prefer the higher of the two dimensions he has discovered as his life. If the "body" is a reality constituted both of what is and our imagination, then we can surrender it since it is an illusion to think that it is ultimately real or more real than truth. But true life is not so easily surrendered. For the sake of preserving his life, Socrates dies. It is not even that his ideas live on that is most important. Socrates' ideas do not justify his life; his life justifies his ideas. That he died is unimportant. All flesh dies. What is important is that it is he who lived until he died. His "death" is both universally fascinating and commonly disturbing because, like Christ's, it constitutes the essential challenge and test everybody faces.

Socrates is a suicide in neither sense he commits neither mental nor physical suicide. He allows death to come. He neither chooses it nor runs from it. Socrates choice illustrates the first basic element in the path to the absolute Abyss death and suicide. It is death by your own hand. It is the death blow your Self deals to your ego or to what you identify with. It is the death of what your Self judges as less than true. It is the death of illusion.



CHAPTER 11

THE WAY OF THE ARTIST

I have subtitled this whole study "The Autobiography of a Suicide" because suicide is exactly the visible path you must take in meeting the problem of the Abyss absolute. Every individual faces the absolute Abyss constantly; no one is immune to it. Our choices are restricted to how will react. We have only two possible responses: (1) to turn from the Abyss either by retreating more deeply into what we were pursuing or by rushing to its opposite the relative abyss or (2) to allow ourselves to fall into the absolute Abyss. These are the only alternatives. There are no others.

Experience shows that selfdelusion and suffering are inevitable should the choice be to turn away from the absolute Abyss. This is because it is most difficult if not impossible for you to pursue someone, something, or some activity without the belief that a good lies in its achievement. Because the pursuit is exhausting, you welcome the achievement of your goal, but no sooner have you stopped running and have relaxed than the disquiet, sadness, frustration, tension begin to build. The message is universal and quite clear: what you thought would, at least partly, satisfy you does not. You may begin gradually to believe that the fun was in the going after and not in the getting, but you cannot get up and go until you adopt the selfdelusion, however temporary, that the value is in the having.

Without being able to fall into the Abyss, the human being lapses into what Eastern and Middle Eastern philosophy has called the problem of "attachment" or "identification." The human being should be attached to and identified with what is good. The problem, therefore, is not the fact of identification or attachment in themselves but rather that the attachment is to something whose value fails to justify the strength of the attachment. Why do you attach yourself to something you would know to be relatively empty if you really thought about it? Why do you attach yourself to worse than childish games such as golf? Why do you attach yourself to other people? Only because they are the way you avoid facing and falling into the Abyss. They are my means of staying alive and not dying. You can overcome demeaning attachments only when you are prepared to allow yourself to fall into the Abyss.

It is no use to tell others that they should not be attached unless you also show them the path out of attachment, and you cannot show them the way out of false attachments without showing them the source of these attachments. To urge nonattachment on others without allowing them to face the basic problem of their unwillingness to fall into the Abyss produces nothing but an attachment to the principle of not being attached accompanied, even more disastrously, with pride in accomplishing "detachment" and a sense of superiority to others. Just because you get them to attach themselves to a fine idea or ideal, they are in no way superior. And worse, not only may they think they are superior, because their attachment is to an intangible, they may be less able to recognize it as an attachment.

These spiritual attachments are largely responsible for the bad name and bad press religion has received in recent times. So bad is the name that those who are most religious avoid the term the way birds avoid cats. Fads, nothing other than a form of mass identification or attachment, have become so common that they are now selfconscious and whole businesses organize to predict, build, and market shortlived products to take advantage of this form of attachment. Similarly, intellectual fads come and go and have been coming and going more rapidly that ever during the past several years. Take the meditation mania as an example. To wish to communicate to others a form of mind training you have found valuable may not be bad, but it is dangerous to parade that theory or practice as the salvation of the human race by pretending that it brings "selffulfillment," releases the "highest levels of creativity," "cures mental and physical illnesses alike," and then frantically to press others to agree.

The fad of external salvation through new social and economic policies fades into its opposite salvation through the reconstruction of the individual's mind. "No one should criticize the government," said the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a famous spiritual leader of the meditation movement; "the government only reflects the minds of the people; do not seek to order society but seek to order the mind!" New forms of attachment and identification have become so subtle that they present themselves as nonattachment; detach from material things only to attach to immaterial things. Fortunately, the meditative detachment is only temporary, we are told, and the real value in it resides in enabling you to pursue more efficiently and with greater energy and seriousness whatever you have already been attached to. The cycle of avoiding the Abyss is complete from one false value to its equally false opposite.

Again, every refusal to fall into the Abyss produces a great reversal in values. What you consider the most worthless of things and activities when you are clearheaded becomes, with the fog wafting before you when you turn your eyes from the Abyss, the most desirable. You begin to live for, to find your only value and excitement in, hitting a little ball with a stick (golf), kicking a ball over a line (football), sitting and watching shadows projected on the wall in front of you (the cinema and television). This is what is most frightening about the flight from the Abyss; it activates enormous energy and expresses it in ways that violate both Self and others. The most infamous example in the twentieth century is the willingness of the people of Germany and its leaders to turn from the Abyss of a lost war and economic collapse to the illusion that allows a "Master Race" to grind human bodies like so much meat in concentration camps and toast the remains in ovens activities that the very people who performed them found, when they were clearerheaded, to be not only meaningless but disgusting and incredible. The corrupt are the most aghast at their own monstrous behavior when they can see it for what it is; they can see only by, and in, entering the Abyss, or else the monstrosity they have become they will see only projected onto the faces of others and as the responsibility of others.

I can think of no better term for the willingness to face the Abyss than suicide. We live and choose. It is our choice that is empty and leads us to the precipice on the edge of the Abyss. Your choice stems from what you attach yourself to and what you identify with. What you identify with is based upon what you are, keeping in mind that what you are is a mixture of what is there plus the mental definition that transforms its appearance. What you are is what you have made of yourself. If that leads to false values ultimately betraying you and driving you into cycles of contradiction, the alternative is the death of what you are and by your own hand.

The major character in George Orwell's 1984, a fellow by the name of Winston Smith, temporarily achieved the highest level of liberation of anyone in the novel. He commits a rebellious act in writing a dissident diary in a totalitarian society; it is an act of thought; by the act of clarifying his thoughts, he commits "thoughtcrime" and observes, "One is not punished for thoughtcrime; thoughtcrime does not lead to the punishment of death; thoughtcrime is death."(1949, Orwell, 27) Winston dies by his own hand; he dies because the life he has lived was identified with the state; he was a functionary of the state; when he sees through the illusion that the state is good and instead perceives its monstrous horror, he dies.

Winston is only one dramatic example of the many ways that the suicide might occur but always it involves the experience of death and always it is accomplished by your own action. The paradox of suicide: how can you kill yourself because killing yourself implies an agent called yourself that can make judgments against and beyond yourself? How can the self judge the self it is identical to itself? The answer, of course, is that suicide always involves two selves a split personality, a case of schizophrenia. One of the selves slays the other. In physical suicide a fantastic feat of psychological gymnastics is performed: The judgment of dissatisfaction comes from the deep, hidden, true Self. It judges the superficial identification and identity and condemns it to death. Suddenly the superficial identity seizes control and acts against a sea of troubles, opposes, and ends them. You, however, believe that it is the continuation of the deep Self that causes the sea of troubles. You fall under the illusion that by exterminating the life of your whole organism, you will finally silence the deep Self and its negative judgments against the superficial self.

Indeed, literal, physical suicide is not suicide at all at least not in the fullest sense of the word. Certainly, it is "your hand" that wields the razor blade or carries the pills that cause your death, but a hand is yours only when it reflects you. Most physical suicides take place from a lie by the superficial you that is not you. Physical suicide is nearly always actually homicide where another kills you. The other kind of suicide is suicide in the fullest sense and is not homicide. In the second form, the Self judges the surface life of the person and condemns it. This produces pain. Rather than imagining that the pain is coming from the Self, the true suicide recognizes that the pain comes from the phony life it is leading. To surrender that life means death to identity so the Self kills the self. It is not a fake, created sense of s