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6. Philosophy
- State University of New York Press
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6 Philosophy Neurotic Self-Transcendence We cannot escape our determinacy. As self-transcending, as open, it is indeed this determinacy that is our entry into all value. Nonetheless, this determinacy is also our limit in that it imparts its form to the whole realm in which we are in contact with reality. Our embodiment is a wonder and a tragedy. The wonder of our embodiment is its openness. It is through the body that the whole world of significance opens up to us, and the self-transcending character of the body is our freedom to redefine ourselves and our world. The tragedy of our embodiment is that it is a legacy we can never shake. This tragic dimension of our embodiment is the truth behind myths of pollution and blood guilt that we find in such classic tales as Aeschylus’ Oresteia or Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Our embodiment carries with it the history of our family life as our neurotic compulsions, which are the memories of our initiation into the power struggles of intersubjective life as they are encoded into our most primitive bodily practices. These neurotic compulsions cannot be removed. They are the very schemata for meaning, the developed forms by which we sense. But, though they cannot be removed, these schemata, like all bodily phenomena , are self-transcending. Our neuroses figure our contact, but they figure it in a way that always invites transformation and development. The “cure” for neurosis is not the removal of these figurings, but the development of the potentials implied within the contact these bodily comportments offer us. It is this development that we should understand by the term therapy. Because “being neurotic” does not mark out the character of a speci fic set of people, but characterizes, rather, the essential human condition , we cannot think of “therapy” as a special practice that is geared only to the abnormal demands of select individuals. Rather, we must see that the traditional practices known as “psychological therapy” and the 125 traditional practices geared toward “normal” human development must in truth be recognized as variants on the same theme. “Therapy” and “education,” in other words, are in fact the same project. As we consider how this is so, we will see, ultimately, what “philosophy” is as a phenomenon of human, bodily contact, by recognizing in it the culmination of this project of therapy and education as the self-transcending of the neurotic posture. We have seen already that the family and the political order are institutions of human life called forth by the very nature of the body as self-transcending and intersubjective. The same is true for the practices of therapy, education, and philosophy, the practices of erotic discourse. We always experience our situation—our present—as a tension: a tension between aspiration and achievement, between desire and satisfaction . At the most general level, this is just a restatement of our thesis from chapter 1, that our experience is inherently temporal. In other words, we always experience ourselves as on the way toward the future that we live as our goals, on the basis of the past that we live as our memory of—our holding onto—what we have in fact already established. The present is “on the way,” which means that it is defined by its relation to those goals it has not yet fulfilled. The compulsions we experience as objects are the way these goals are felt by us as the essence of the present. In this general sense, then, the present is always a tension between aspiration and achievement. Education, in general, is learning how to act in such a way as to answer to this tension so as to satisfy these desires, these aspirations. We seek education because our situation poses a problem, a demand. In identifying the neurotic character of our existence, we are identifying a complicating and a specifying of this tension. The tensions we feel are not always immediate and passing, but can be inherent to the very form of our contact. A neurosis is the way a tension—a frustration of desire—is structured into our very approach to things. What we normally call “therapy” is education geared to this tension—education geared toward alleviating the structural tension built into our way of being in the world. We seek therapy because we experience the form of our characteristic , habitual approach to problem-solving as itself a problem. Education in general and therapy in...