On the modern mind/ Contemplating Fear: Summing up Hegel and Nietzsche
I feel I’m in a state of meditative insanity. Hungry and tired, I decided to run on the eliptical while reading Nietzsche, and the idea of the heroic self-made, constantly self-seeking superman caught my imagination, as it tends to do when I willingly engage with it.
It forced me to push myself, and in doing so I experienced a mental state I usually only find in the (supposedly self-less) postures of yoga. It was a feeling of losing hold of my identity in the sense that I was unwittingly detaching myself from habitual fears and self-defeating, critical attitudes by virtue of the fact that there was so much else on which to focus: the ideas on those pages, the effort involved in keeping balance.
My imagination became entranced by this idea of a constantly renewing search for self perfection, one which neccessarily requires a stripping off of old identities, seeing the connections between this philosopher who seemed to have, from what I could understand, a problematic ethic – from a slave’s perspective, anyway, he might argue -and this dicipline of compassion and connectedness to others that yoga embodies. It was because right then, at that momement they fundamentally shared for me this ethos of self-overcoming. In that sense, they shared this urge to progress, a pushing forward of the self.
Philosophy pierces my mind these days; I unpack Sarte’s intentionality, Nietzsche’s superman and Goethe’s classically-infused, critical romanticism against a background of the questions that plauge me at the level of everyday life: given that we all have to grow up sometime, how does a person do this while maintaining the sense of youthful bravado that seems to fuel confidence and creativity?
As I notice myself aging I find the creative urge is slipping away. At one time I wrote “just because”-to unpack my thinking and determine my own beliefs about world events, philosophy, art culture, subculture, that whole host of topics that might engage the curiousity of young minds, minds that need to do something with all that free time. This paralyising fear, I don’t remember always experiencing it. Maybe I’m not recalling my younger self accurately, but it seems like at one time I wrote voraciously because I just had to, it never occured to me that it was bad, or at least I never feared my writing was so bad that I wouldn’t share it anyway, which is something I routinely do these days. In class I stop myself before I say what I fear may be the “wrong answer.” I kill my latent thoughts before I start to write what might just be another “bad idea”-though I’m simulteanously plauged with an awareness of the irrationality of this behavior. I’m writing now because I’m compelled by an urge to prove to myself I won’t let fear get the best of me.
What is it about aging that has killed my creativity? Is it time? I find these days there’s never enough, there’s too many obligations, my heart is weary the moment I awake. I lose my enthusiasm for the things I love; I lose the nerve to get up and try again. What do I do to maintain that creative urge? We all need on some level, don’t we? It becomes a vicious circle when people drop the things they love as life makes ever increasing adult demands, the passion those activities spark will diminish, and with it, the motivation to start that new project. Fears creep in and it’s harder to get them out, to put them in thier rightful place as a check on the romantic, creative impulse, not a killer of it. On some level we requre a bit of foolish impulsiveness in order to make; every act of creativity is a daring that neccessitates confidence.
And this is the fundamental appeal of these authors for me; it’s not so much an issue of metaphysics, or history that intregues me the most, but the way these authors speak to my own fears and dare me to clean up my own house. They challenge me to articulate where those fears came from and force me to account for their stranglehold on my life.
And this is where my thesis comes in. I think I always want the thesis to be that “Aha!” idea that comes with sufficient poring through books and books, stacks of ideas. I want it to demonstrate some perfection of book learning, without a tinge of the messiness of process, of everyday life, of imperfect self. However, in actuality it usually occurs in rather effortless way, dispite all my attempts to force the idea it will never come at the moment when I think I need it most, but afterwards when I’m doing something else.
When I think about it, the thesis is really an after-effect of all that labour; it takes time for the mind to suss out what’s really at stake amongst a miscalleinity of ideas and research. It will always have “process” written all over it, but this is a neccessary requirement of original work, not something to avoid or stifle, and certainly not an esxcuse to stifle the work itself.
All this time I’ve been wanting to detach my writing from my life, but when these writers are discussing nothing less significant than the status of the self and what happens as we start to become aware of ourselves as distinct entities, there’s no way to make the work not-me, something other than a synthesis of my intellecutal and workaday life. It simply hits too close to home. By engaging with these authors, I’ve neccessarily had to come to terms with so much fear that lives inside my own mind-the process of writing anything will do that to me-but these authors make that processes much more profound, because in truly engaging with these authors I have to confront the fact that I can no longer run away from myself.
And at times I answer that challenge through an exceptional bout of fear-based paralysis, because I’m afraid my own mind will never do such great works justice. Yet there’s this quiet voice in the back of my mind that keeps telling me that to retreat out of fear is to totally miss the point of these works. And this is where this fascination with courage and bravado, embodied by these works, fits in. It’s this ethos of action, of not knowing the answer and doing it anyway, that redeems all cowardace; action is the best shot we have at freeing outselves from ourselves.
What these authors are fundamentally driving at, I think, is the following. Hegel argues that the whole of history is the process of individuals, the sum total of humanity, becoming more aware that they exist as separate, distinct entities apart from family obligations, tradition, fuedal relationships, etc: moderinity is about the reification of the self.
According to Hegel, I now have the ability to think of myself as this discrete human being, I can conceptualize the existence of something so novel and problematic as free will, because I am the product of this long march of civilizational progress to self-awareness. Over time we have come to think of ourselves as distinct from community, class, family or territorial leadership, and with that we’ve developed a sense of having individual interests.
From this perspective, even angst is a privilege of modern self-conciousness, angst being nothing more than the self turning inward and worrying about its condition. Angst is like turning to the self for guidance and worrying because the self can’t come up with a satisfying answer. Hegel would argue, I think, that there was a point in society where we all just acted, we didn’t worry about what to do. Most of us looked to tradition and authority, who I guess would have been slightly more self-aware, yet would also have thier own conventions of ritual and tradition to which they’d turn. Every once in awhile you’d get a figure like Socrates who questioned all convention, and while they set the stage for greater self awareness they threatened a status quo reliant on the old ways for any meaningful thought and action.
Self-conciousness becomes revolutionary because it enables freedom, as a concept, to become not only desireable, but feasable. We’re longer living for God or even our own community, our wills either become our own, or we come to think of something so novel as a “will” being the possession of something so novel as an “individual”-even if we haven’t figured out what to do with it yet. From here it becomes possible to live in our own minds, from our own minds-and here you get the scientific revoultion, where the rational mind becomes the basis of knowing, and later on, the first person author, the autobiography, where the self is doing nothing but exploring its own mental state (Ong aruged the second point, Hegel argued the first). As far as I understand, an idealist might argue that this newfound sense of self-the concept reasonable individual-goes a long way to perpetuating the great changes in material existence throughtout history. All of a sudden we can trust our own reasons for acting, and now we can do anything, discover anything.
The Enlightenment assumed that by refocusing authority on the individual, we would not only start to desire freedom but become better able to achieve it. but fundamentally in our own minds-in the sense that the mind is the beginning and end of all inquiry, and the fragmented, yet striving for freedom self-living the vestiges of Condercet’s thought, perhaps?-is what we mean when we speak of the “modern mind.”
