Repression of Eros

JN: There was an article a few weeks ago in the New York Times about New York City becoming the philosophy capital of the world--many leading academic philosophers are teaching there--and I was trained in that world at Harvard University. There were all these guys--competitive, analytic--and very often they were arguing about things which, to me, were completely sterile. And many people like you-I write about this in my book [The Heart of Philosophy]-who fell in love with philosophy find it was like falling in love with a beautiful woman who turned out to be frigid.

I remember I was a freshman at Harvard, in one of my first philosophy classes there. The professor started by asking-like I do sometimes, like professors do-what do you expect to get out of philosophy? I put up my hand and said, "I want to know why I'm living, why we die, Does God exist? What are we here for?" I went on an on like that, and I could see around me that there was this silence. My throat got dry, and I just felt awful. At first I'd thought that I was going to speak for the whole human race. And the professor, of course, was saying, "Yes. Go on." He knew he had one. Finally I just couldn't go on any more. Then he said, "Yes. But you see, that's not philosophy. If you want to know those things, you have to see a psychiatrist or a priest. This is not philosophy." It was such a shock.

I recovered quite well, but I had to find a few other people who shared my hunger. It is the hunger you're speaking of. That is what Plato called eros---a word that's come down to us which has taken on a sexual association. But for Plato it had to do, in part, with a striving that is innate in us, a striving to participate with one's mind, one's consciousness, in something greater than oneself. A love of wisdom, if you like, a love of being.

Eros is depicted in Plato's text, The Symposium, as half man, half god, a kind of intermediate force between the gods and mortals. It is a very interesting idea. Eros is what gives birth to philosophy. Modern philosophy [??] often translates the word, "wonder" merely as "curiosity," the desire to figure things out, or to intellectually solve problems rather than confronting the depth of these questions, pondering, reflecting, being humbled by them. In this way, philosophy becomes an exercise in meaningless ingenuity.

I did learn to play that game, and then to avoid it.

My students at State were very hungry for what most of us, down deeply, really want from philosophy. When we honor those unanswerable questions and open them and deepen them, students are very happy about it, very interested in a deep quiet way.

RW: It is really very hard to find that, I believe.

JN: Some years ago I had a chance to teach a course in philosophy in high school. I got ten or twelve very gifted kids at this wonderful school, San Francisco University High School. In that first class I said, "Now just imagine, as if this was a fairy tale, imagine you are in front of the wisest person in the world, not me, but the wisest person there is and you can only ask one question. What would you ask?" At first they giggled and then they saw that I was very serious. So then they started writing. What came back was astonishing to me. I couldn't understand it at first. About half of the things that came back had little handwriting at the bottom or the sides of the paper in the margin. Questions like, Why do we live? Why do we die? What is the brain for? Questions of the heart. But they were written in the margins as though they were saying, do we really have permission to express these questions? We're not going to be laughed at? It was as though this was something that had been repressed.

RW: Fascinating.

JN: It's what I call, metaphysical repression. It's in our culture and It's much worse than sexual repression. It represses eros and I think that maybe that's where art can be of help sometimes. Some art.

Jason Jr. wrote:Henning I think its more Like

Before we ask a question, our Ego mind blazes off and makes up some kind of worse case scenario. This illusion is what causes us to be afraid to ask the question and forcing ourselves to become anti social

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee?... The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genuis, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct... We first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them as appearance in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration whcih giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be deneid without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, whcih makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity.

In my opinion, i think sacrificing individuality for the society and society striving to create individuals are BOTH needed in our society/world today-- going into the gray area. I think people retain their individuality as well as, not being overly stubborn or hard-headed, as not seeing that they need to make this sacrifice for the greater good of the whole. After all, us humans are just little aspects of something greater, we're just part of a whole right. We still need to keep and develop our character and uniqueness-- be independent and critical thinkers; think for ourselves, to be very much aware of manipulation and exlpoitation etc. But we can't become totally self-reliant and completely independent from others because it's impossible to live that way.

In "Sketch of Contemporary Social Life" (1934), Weil develops the theme of collectivism as the trajectory of modern culture.

Never has the individual been so completely delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never have men been so less capable, not only of subordinating their actions to their thoughts, but even of thinking.

Weil is not defending the individual as laisse-faire atom but as subordinated to inimical modern forces by "production and consumption," with science, technology, labor, money, and social life turning historical means into corporate and collectivist ends.

The inversion of the relation between means and ends -- an inversion which is to a certain extent the law of every oppressive society -- here becomes total or nearly so, and extends to nearly everything.

Weil then analyzes the relationship between economics and the state, and militarism as an adjunct to extending economic control and social content to the goals of the powerful. Sometimes she uses Marxian or anarchist viewpoints to demonstrate her point; other times she uses them to demonstrate their failure to have anticipated the shrewdness of the capitalist elites and institutions to bypass and overcome the logical obstacles to their version of reality. With the modern spirit has come the systematization of accumulation, organization, and control of the range and relationships of all human activity. Power is concentrated and like a whirlpool absorbs every facet of life. Oppression is inevitably bound to productivity, efficiency, coercion. Productivity and progress, consumption, and limitless expansion of desire and power are all aspects of modern culture. And yet society revolts not against its own oppressors but against nature.

In an aphorism of "The Great Beast," Weil begins the transition from analyzing society to discovering a solution or antidote. Here her thoughts hearken to anthropological thinking circulating in the early twentieth century, which maintained that society is a project of individual relationships, a projection given life and meaning separate from those relationships, a projection to which power and thought and authority is renounced. This is not a renunciation to the fictional cooperative called "society" but to individuals as authorities, who then contrive the symbols, ploys, and coercive social structures. Anthropology called these "totems"--Weil does not use the term--which define God, religion, and the norms of society via the power of institutions to interpret and sanction.

According to Weil, the person's accession to society, the individual's renunciation of values to the collective as defined by a small group, is based on ignorance and fear, fear that without society (which is to say the state), people will collapse into crime and evil. The social and collective is seen as transcending individuals, as a supernatural entity from which nationalism and war is as normal as science, progress, and consumption. All of these evils are taking place simultaneously in a social context. The individual has probably never reflected on these issues at all, never acknowledged his or her degree of complicity in this system. But, say the apologist for the Great Beast, the individual need have no direct responsibility,

The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth. In the case of avarice, gold is the social order. In the case of ambition, power is the social order.

Thus society itself is the Great Beast, not some particular product of society, not even the state, the mode of production, the capitalist class, or any other social product. The weight of humanity is a heavy and ponderous gravity, a force but a contrived force to which the individual remains oblivious.

As long as one accepts the "totem," and subordinates all values to the collective, the contrived dichotomy of good and evil will trap individuals in fear. But the solution to the dilemma Weil depicts is not Nietzsche's transcendence of morality but a simple perception of the nature of society, of the nature of the "Great Beast."

23He saw through their duplicity and said to them, 24"Show me a denarius. Whose portrait and inscription are on it?"

25"Caesar's," they replied.
He said to them, "Then give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."

So Emerson is saying that we should have self-reliance, but it's the self-reliance of individual thinking. We still also have to depend on others, and take others into our consideration because we're all humans, as a whole. There is no excluding each other because that way, we cannot exist on this planet.

stephsquared wrote:Wait, sorry i just realized i didn't answer your initial question! whoops.

ok. So back to your original question, i agree with Jason. I also believe people repress their expression of free thoughts/ideas because they're in the state of the ego-mind. Because once a human being is born, he or she is born with a mind. This mind gets altered, mended, shaped as it faces its environment that the individual is in and it is an artificial tool for us to utilize, for better survival--since we have something called the society. This mind is loud and is manifest in ourselves. It's very noticeable and obvious because the mind holds on to our prior knowledge, holds on to the past when we approach something new. When the students wanted to ask those questions, they're inquiring from their Being/ Essence. Because they also have a mind, they're holding on to unecessary thoughts from the past-- maybe have seen or have been first handed ridiculed by asking a "stupid" question-- so they resrict themselves by writing in the margin. It feels safer for them. This result is not genuinely who they ARE. It's a result from their mind because like many people, they probably are more aware of the mind than of their own being.

From the book The Power of Now talks about the mind always being excessive. It talks about how the mind creates anxiety, fear, paranoia and of course, worry. The mind creates those emotions and also has impact on our physical body--like being under pressure gives us a bad liver-- to make us more aware of its impact/effect on us. the Being on the other hand is much more subtle and light. The Being is just simply THERE, in the core of our lives. It doesn't go into excessive overload-- it's peaceful and quite.

Not I, indeed.
Then our dream has been realised; and the suspicion which we entertained at the beginning of our work of construction, that some divine power must have conducted us to a primary form of justice, has now been verified?
Yes, certainly.
And the division of labour which required the carpenter and the shoemaker and the rest of the citizens to be doing each his own business, and not another's, was a shadow of justice, and for that reason it was of use?
Clearly.
But in reality justice was such as we were describing, being concerned however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and concernment of man: for the just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others, --he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when he has bound together the three principles within him, which may be compared to the higher, lower, and middle notes of the scale, and the intermediate intervals --when he has bound all these together, and is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act, if he has to act, whether in a matter of property, or in the treatment of the body, or in some affair of politics or private business; always thinking and calling that which preserves and co-operates with this harmonious condition, just and good action, and the knowledge which presides over it, wisdom, and that which at any time impairs this condition, he will call unjust action, and the opinion which presides over it ignorance.

It is actually the "Great Beast" we are a part of that denies our inner growth and the only individuality that it is concerned with is what furthers its aims.

Is it possible that conscious humanity could deal with the human condition far better than cogs in the wheel?

hm, Could the conscious humanity deal with the human condition, better than cogs in the wheel? I don't think so. As much as we have intellect/ knowledge, we're still ignorant and we still have the mind. So i don't think we will be able to become like parts of a whole, like cogs in a wheel. I don't think everyone can see in the way that "there is no they, there is only an us". I think people will always classifu according to levels, whether it's social, racial, appearance, sexual/gender, or just simply himself/herself vs. the world. People can't see in the way that we're genuinely all equal and apart of a whole, many people can't see that we're a human family, and that we're all connected. It depends on what they believe. I'm not sure if I'm answering your question. If I'm getting confused again, i do apologize.

I don't think everyone can see in the way that "there is no they, there is only an us".

I think people will always classifu according to levels, whether it's social, racial, appearance, sexual/gender, or just simply himself/herself vs. the world. People can't see in the way that we're genuinely all equal and apart of a whole, many people can't see that we're a human family, and that we're all connected.

Um. what do you mean when you use the word "presence". Do you mean, intelligence--wisdom/spontaneity/ intuition? (that's how I've seen it used) or do you mean by the present moment? Living in the present--fully aware of what is precisely happening in the present? Have you ever heard of the theory of time? How that there is the psychological time and the NOW?