I’m going to share a little bug bear with you. I don’t like it much when people say, ‘what’s really going on here is blah blah blah’. A good example of this is when people talk about so-called unconscious motivations. Someone might say, ‘James thinks he is painting a skyscraper simply because he likes skyscrapers but really it is because the skyscraper is a symbol for his penis which he is strongly identified with; painting the skyscraper enacts a fantasy of omnipotence.’ Or someone might say, ‘Ordinary people might ‘think’ they are making free choices but really their every move is being manipulated by a capitalist ideology that protects the economic interests of the financial elite’. For me, the details of the ‘blah blah blah’ (i.e. the capitalist ideology or the unconscious) are less important than the ‘what is really going on’ move. Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher, refers approvingly to this kind of thing as belonging to a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. In each case, the speaker purports to exchange a supposedly naïve story about why people do what they do with a more sophisticated one, to pull aside the veil to reveal the truth that, hitherto, has been obscured: it is the unconscious not the ordinary person’s conscious reasons for acting that ‘really’ lie behind their behaviour; it is the manipulative ideology of the financial elite, not ordinary people, who are in control of their every move. That there must be some kind of linear causal narrative that is impeccably ‘true’ is never put into question. Don’t get me wrong here, I don’t think that so-called ordinary people – quite what an ordinary person is I am not quite sure, I’ve only ever met extraordinary ones – I don’t think we extraordinary ‘ordinary people’ are ‘in control’ of our own behaviour but I don’t think the causes of our behaviour originate in the actions of some kind of evil puppeteer financial elite either or in the dark desires of the unconscious, unless the unconscious and the elite are synonyms for everything that is in which case why not say that? I don’t think that anyone or anything is in control. I don’t think there are any ultimate causes.
Jacob Kantor, whose philosophy of interbehaviorism you can read a bit about on my Interbehaviorism pages, is very clear-sighted on this point. He is interested in the way in which scientists are fond of ‘explaining’ phenomena like thinking by pointing to what they consider to be the fundamental cause of thinking i.e. the activity of neurons. There’s a move, analogous to the one I’ve been describing where the unconscious, or capitalist ideology, is represented as the cause of people’s behaviour, where the scientist essentially says that, really, thinking ‘is merely’ the firing of neurons, that there just is not a thing called ‘thinking’ which is somehow distinct from this activity. Kantor’s move, as brilliant as it is simple , is to say that when someone is thinking they are thinking and when their neurons are firing, their neurons are firing, and that while the firing of neurons surely are among the unique configuration of ‘natural events’, or observable phenomena, that need to be the case for the thinking experience to exist, they should not be equated with that experience or be considered to be its prior cause in some sequential way. Kantor’s move rescues us from the strange situation in which we find people saying that consciousness is an ‘illusion’. What does this even mean? That we think we are thinking but are not really? Isn’t there something just self-evidently wrong with this sentence? I mean, sure, we might have a story about what thinking is that is incomplete in some way but that does not mean that thinking does not exist as a phenomenon, does it? The rainbow does not even know that it is a rainbow, and loads of different words have been used to describe it since the dawn of time, but there it is. There’s clearly something going on! At the risk of straying into repetition, if people are seeing blue sky, feeling the sun on their face, and smelling the aroma of cherry blossom, then they are doing these things. There is nothing illusory about this. It is also the case that there are various biological events which are among a vast, perhaps infinite, number of conditions participating in the field in which the smelling of cherry blossom aroma takes place. Nor should the firing of neurons be thought of as preceding thinking sequentially either. ‘Thinking’ and ‘the firing of neurons’ are directly observable natural events that stand in a simultaneous, reciprocal relationship with each other, along with all the other natural events that go to make up the interbehavioral field. This being so, there is no sense in extracting one element of the field out and attributing causality to it. Everything depends on everything else. Things are self-evidently happening but the causality that produces these things is a simultaneous function of an interdependent field.
In a way, Kantor espouses his own brand of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ but what he is suspicious of is the human habit of using words to construct causes which are somehow separate from and prior to the thing caused. He is suspicious of the whole idea of linear causality full stop and sees this idea, and its pernicious effects, as posing an important obstacle to any attempt to ‘know’ and ‘understand’ the true nature of things. These ‘causes’ include both verbal constructs like ‘the unconscious’ and ‘ideology’ which are obvious abstractions that cannot be directly observed but also what can feel like more concrete descriptions of an observable event like ‘the firing of neurons’; ‘the firing of neurons’ becomes an abstraction once it is treated as the cause of some other succeeding event like ‘thinking’ from which it is supposedly separate.
Does this mean that constructs like ‘the financial elite’ and ‘the unconscious’ have no value? Not at all. Kantor makes the distinction between natural events and constructs. A natural event is something that we can directly observe unfolding in time and space. It has a beginning and an end. It does not refer toanything. It simply is what it is regardless of what we think or say about it. Like a rainbow in the sky. A construct is something that does not exist at a particular location in time and space. It exists only to the extent that we talk and think about it; so, for example, we cannot touch ‘the unconscious’ with our fingers or take a photograph of it, and nor can we do this with ‘the financial elite’. That said, the talking and thinking we do inspired by these constructs is directly observable. Talking and thinking about ‘the unconscious’ and ‘the financial elite’ are natural events that exist within a field and which, in turn, participate in fields within which other natural events exist. To this extent these constructs have value, which is to say they make a difference to what exists and to how we behave. A world in which these constructs are applied is clearly different from a world in which they are not. Acting as if the unconscious and the financial elite were causes materially changes behaviour. In both cases a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ encourages us to assume that things may not be as they seem, that things that appear benign may have hidden long term costs for us, that what looks like freedom may ‘really’ be a kind of restraint. It encourages us to slow down and pay attention, to allow ourselves to notice the choices we are making without awareness and to ask ourselves whether these are the paths we really want to take or if they are simply the way we’ve been told to go. To this extent these constructs have liberatory potential. But to the extent that they merely replace one causal narrative (free will) with another (unconscious, financial elite) this liberation is likely to be short-lived. Inspired by a causal narrative which says that behaviour is caused by the unconscious, the psychoanalyst seeks to promote awareness of the parts of the psyche that, hidden from view, have had the client chasing fantasies of omnipotence; following treatment, the client is better able to accommodate themselves to ‘reality’. Inspired by a causal narrative which reveals that our minds have been colonised by the ideology of a capitalist system so that we see our wage slavery as part of the ‘natural order’, the revolutionary Marxist seeks to topple the status quo and replace it with the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Revolution, here, means replacing one centralised social system with another that, this time, furthers the interests of those hitherto excluded from power. The idea that something or someone must be in control, the idea of the centre, or the ultimate cause, what is ‘really’ going on, keeps reappearing in new guises.
What would happen if we could give up our addiction to chasing illusory ultimate causes, the arrogant fantasy of the intellect that we can definitively ‘know’ how anything comes to be? What if we could instead embrace reality in all its endless complexity, accepting that we come into existence as participants in field which stretches out infinitely in time and space? This field could not exist without us. Nothing could exist without us. And none of us could exist without the field. Together we create the world. But why we exist is not within our gift to know. If we accept this our path becomes clear. It is a path built from both confidence and humility. We must let go of that sense of ourselves as outside and above nature, let go of the urge to dominate and instead learn to attune ourselves to the music of the natural world of which we are a part, and to let this music guide us. In the end, we must learn to hear and listen to the love song of our hearts.
Yes To All Of It 