I finished Morris Berman’s “Coming to Our Senses” recently. Damn good book. It doesn’t exactly “cry truth from the blood” the way that, say, Nietzsche did for me, but it’s damned on the mark.
I’m generally skeptical of such books, which claim to invalidate vast continuums of knowledge. Specifically, Berman questions the view of history as held by the entire continuum of western history and the fundamental basis of western civilization and western belief as rooted in the rejection of the body.
Most books that claim that all other books have “got it wrong” are wish fulfillment fantasies, written by authors who want to inflate their sense of self-importance and read by readers who want to feel as if they are part of a small privileged elite privy to special understanding. I detest these people. But Berman has got it right. His arguments are compelling and multi-dimensional. Even if I didn’t agree with everything, I didn’t question whether Berman was being egotistical. I didn’t think he was. Well, okay, I think it’s impossible not to be egotistical, but Berman did a damned good job of not being egotistical as far as is humanly possible.
Berman’s thesis, insofar as my understanding of it went, was that western civilization is losing touch with its humanity through the suppression of its physicality. That’s why western society is “doomed” and rapidly running into an evolutionary dead-end. Berman retraces four or so different models of western evolution of thought and outlines how they have failed.
What Berman desires is that western civilization moves away from the repetitive cycle of “isms” and their rejecting and onto a new path. He traces back the problems of western civilization to the “basic fault,” the realization that there is a “self” and “other.” As Berman would have it, primitive hunter-gatherer societies did not have such a strong “self” and “other” dichotomy and were happier. The basic fault became ingrained into society through the course of history and thenceforth western civilization sought solace in things such as “isms”, which served as transitional object. Ingrained into western civilization were binary oppositions, etc. Such as “self” and “other,” “mind” and “body.”
Society moves through “isms,” in that a certain “ism” is accepted for a time and then rejected. Society moves onto another “ism,” which in time is also rejected. Berman wants humanity to move away from this cycle. This is a sort of dialectic that Berman argues for, but it’s divorced from Hegel’s because Berman jettisons that whole “march of God through history” component. Unlike Hegel, there isn’t as much of a teleology. Well, maybe I can’t really call it a dialectic, since there’s not as much of a antithesis and Berman even brings up the Hegelian dialectic to criticize it. Berman criticizes the entire spectrum of belief and western thought for being based around dichotomies and divorcing subjectivity from objectivity.
Whatever. I really can’t be bothered to resummarize the vast amount of arguments Berman makes. But he’s quite compelling.
I found a lot of what Berman had to say quite similar what I believe. For instance, I am also of the opinion that binary oppositions are a damaging foundation of thought. And I had witnessed earlier in my life how deeply ingrained into western thought. As a case in point, take my earlier systems of thought I had created, of “judge/observer” and “true/false self” dichotonomies. I created these systems of thought when I was young and slowly moved away from them, as I progressed from being unconsciously enraptured in western societal mores and then becoming aware and disillusioned with them. So when Berman started talking about these things, I was rather pleasantly surprised.
I hadn’t thought that the self-other dichotomy as might be a merely human construct either, though I suppose I may have been aware of it on an unconscious level. Thinking about it, perhaps according to my own “philosophy,” the realization that life is meaningless I posit first is conceived because of the “self-other dichotomy.” Perhaps then a human not aware of the self-other dichotomy might not think life is meaningless on even an unconscious level?
That seems to be what Berman believes, in regards to hunter-gatherer peoples. I’m normally skeptical of such Romanticisms of the past. Because the past is long gone, people like to look at it and uphold it as pleasant as a coping mechanism. This is specifically because the past is unattainable and gone and thus it cannot be “diminished.” Perhaps Berman’s belief as such is such a sort of coping mechanism. That’s one of my critiques of him, that he might not realize this, and that if he does he doesn’t acknowledge it explicitly as far as I am aware. Still, Berman’s argument seems pretty solid (and I’m pretty sure that he does realize that his belief is a form of coping mechanism, though I feel he should have made it more apparent). After all, if this book did one thing, it was make me more fully aware of how deeply ingrained my thoughts are in the root beliefs of western civilization. How are we to say that the people of the past were like us? After all, things we take for granted, such as “family love” are fairly recently concepts historically. In earlier eras where the deaths of family members was more commonplace, it was even considered foolish for people to have emotional stock in family members. I previously thought differently. Maybe I was wrong.
Berman’s historical models were pretty good. But, I have to critique him for seemingly ignoring postmodernity. Berman’s model of the twentieth century seems to go from “modernism” to “new age-ism” without postmodernity somewhere in there. I would have found it valid if, say, he had argued that we are approaching the age of “new age beliefs” after postmodernity, but he seemed to ignore it entirely. I don’t know. He would have had interesting things to say about postmodernity, I’m sure. I don’t know. Then again, I’m the deluded fool who thinks postmodernity may be what finally allows us to break the cycle Berman describes. Well, then again, he was writing from twenty years back.
I have to criticize Berman for buying into the societal model of “art as consumption” as well. This is something that’s been around since Kierkegaard at the very least, because it comes up Either/Or, but it’s just a societal construct as well. Can’t art be divorced from the creator at times? Berman really made me realize how much my own art is a “transitional object” which I use to fill up the meaningless of my life, though. I knew that it was beforehand, admittedly, but I didn’t really consciously acknowledge it or I tried not to.
I think what Berman says is really relevant to the modern age, as well. I think I might look up some of his more recent writings. What Berman says, at first glance, seems irrelevant because the modern age of mass media is so focused on physicality (Berman was writing from twenty years back, so he may have been unable to anticipate this.) However, western society still suppresses its physicality, which is why it comes out to the fore of mass media. Mass media serves as a “substitute” or “release” for suppressed physicality. Because physicality is so suppressed in daily life, it literally explodes in forms of mass media such as films, music, etc. This is why I’m tempted to turn to towards beliefs as outlined in #19. I can’t because I’m aware of the body and the mind as inseparable, though admittedly I didn’t really realize that until I finished this book.
Still, I get the feeling the wrong people who don’t get all this stuff I outlined earlier will be the most devoted advocates of Berman. Berman may “Romanticize” the past and claim hunter-gatherers were happier than present people because of their lack of the basic fault of self and other, but he doesn’t agitate a “return” to their ways. Berman is saddened by the destruction of the Gnostics by the mainstream church but not because they had some sort of intrinsic virtue, but because they represented an interesting possibility for humanity that was cut off.
People who Romanticize the past precisely because they seek to fill the void of their meaninglessness will latch on to Berman, not understanding. They’ll shout “Yeah Cathars!” or “Yeah hunter-gatherers!” because they just want to relish in the despair of glorifying a past that is gone. These are the precise “New Age” people that Berman fears.
I don’t think what Berman advocates is going back to the self-other non-awareness he believes hunter-gatherers had but being aware of non-awareness of awareness, so to speak. Well, that was a joke, but I think Berman wants us to know both awareness and non-awareness of self and other, rather than simply distinguishing between self and other as most do. What Berman thinks is that humans must become truly aware that self and other are human concepts.
I don’t think people will get that. Sure, perhaps past people weren’t aware of meaninglessness and were happier, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t forget about it. We can find a way to be happy, a new way. Or am I falling into the trap of the basic fault by saying so?
I hadn’t realized how divorced from subjectivity I’ve attempted to make myself, and how that’s not a good thing.
I hadn’t really thought about the body’s role in terms of the meaninglessness of things, and how it precipitates that either. I wonder.
Anyway, I’m worried that the people who pick up Berman’s philosophy will be the stupid people he fears. People who advocate things without really understanding, and who live within a circle of limited dogma. Berman argues that many of the people who came before him were wrong, as any philosopher does. However, these people who I fear may pick up Berman’s philosophy will be those who attempt to invalidate all other knowledge. These will be the people who don’t even know who Lacan was, or what the dialectic is, or what Manichaeanism. And they’ll read Berman and say, “Oh yeah, I don’t need to know all of this complicated earlier stuff. It’s all wrong. Why bother read it?” and then cling to Berman as an “ism” and then move on when the next thing gets popular. Well, I can’t claim to have read Lacan or Freud or Hegel either, since my readings in philosophy are circumscribed to the Ancient Greeks, most of what Nietzsche wrote, and Kierkegaard because of the fact that I haven’t really read anything deeply in a long time.
