NOTE TO MY READERS: AFTER TODAY, I WILL ONLY POST OCCASIONALLY, NO LONGER REGULARLY EVERY MONDAY.
To think is one thing, to attribute is another. Thought and attribution are as radically distinct from one another as is light from darkness. They differ one from the other as deeply as does redemption from sin—and, indeed, the relation between thinking and attribution might well be characterized as that between what could be called redeemed thinking, on one hand, and fallen thinking, on the other.
What has been redeemed has been restored to its wholeness, after having been broken in its fall. Thinking breaks apart when it degenerates into attribution. It is restored to wholeness only when freed from the body of such death.
2.
Thinking is commonly taken to be the business of looking for explanations of things. That would include, but not be exhausted by, the sort of reflection and study that searches for causes—the search for causal explanations.
At one point in his opus, Freud writes: “We are not used to feeling strong affects without their having any ideational contents, and therefore, if the content is missing, we seize as a substitute upon another content which is in some way or other suitable, much as our police, when they cannot catch the right murderer, arrest a wrong one instead.”* The search for such “ideational content” is just one common form of thinking in the sense of searching for explanations.
Sigmund Freud by Max Halberstadt
I will call such thinking “attributive” thinking, since what is involved is a search for one thing or state of affairs to which another thing or state of affairs can be attributed. To put it in another way, one more fitted to Freud’s observation, it is the search for something either to blame or praise for something one is experiencing.
In the remark I quoted from him a few lines ago, Freud says that we are not used to having strong feelings (“affects”)—which amounts, I would say, to any sensation strong enough to register as a “feeling” to begin with: any feeling strong enough truly to be noticed or felt at all, really—without having anything or anyone to blame for it. When we have such feelings, we experience anxiety.
In sum, regardless of whether a given feeling is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, just feeling anything at all is itself anxiety-provoking. The anxiety, in turn, gives rise to the compulsion to find someone or something to whom or to which the anxiety-provoking feeling can be attributed.
Despite how odd the pairing may appear,** Freud himself agrees with Heidegger in making at least one attribution. The two agree in attributing to anxiety a universally generative role in human life, precisely as definitively human. As they see it, and each says in his own way, anxiety is the experience of the lack of grounding of human being.
To shift from Freud’s formulations to Heidegger’s, the latter characterizes the first and dominant human response to such anxiety as anxiety in the face of anxiety itself—the anxious flight not to let ourselves know precisely what anxiety as such gives us to be known, namely, our lack of ground. What Heidegger calls “conceptual,” “calculative,” or “representational” thinking is the same as what in this post I am calling “attributive” thinking; and it is just such thinking that, according to Heidegger, springs from and then continually serves the anxious human flight in the face of such humanly definitive anxiety itself.
Put just a bit differently, thinking as attribution—thinking insofar as it is bound in such a way to the flight of anxiety in the face of itself—is the form that thinking takes when it falls into manifesting itself only as the perpetual, but perpetually failing, struggle to ground its own groundlessness. The very failure to find any solid ground, despite all such effort, just feeds the originating anxiety itself. One just goes around and around the same self-reinforcing spiral again and again, picking up speed as one goes.
To fall into the trap of such perpetually self-reinforcing anxiety is to find oneself caught in what systems theorists such as Gregory Bateson call a “self-escalating system.” Eventually, such systems escalate themselves to the point of final collapse: They break down completely. However, as Bateson taught, such points of break-down are as such also points of possible break-through—points at which one is at last given the chance to break out of the spiral.***
In the case of the self-escalating system of attributive thinking in service of the anxious flight in the face of anxiety, the breakthrough the door of which the breakdown of that system at last opens is the breakthrough into a no longer attributive thinking—a thinking finally freed to serve what truly calls for thinking, rather than compulsively exhausting itself time after endless time in our vain endeavor so secure ourselves against the anxiety that defines us as human beings in the first place.
3.
To free thought from its imprisonment in attributions was also the teaching of the Buddha, “the enlightened one.” He, too, found the true human ground in the embrace of groundlessness. He taught both by his words and by his own living presence that we should neither cling to our pleasing affects and what we attribute those affects to nor to try to drive away our unpleasing ones and whatever we attribute them to, and that we should let go the illusion that we can ever secure ourselves against all undesirable eventualities. His enlightenment came as the sudden recognition and complete acceptance of the truth that we can never secure ourselves against all the sorrows that befall all human beings, including especially the illness, old age, and eventual death to which those we love as well as we ourselves are all destined. For what remained of his own life after his enlightenment, he carried that message to all the others who came into contact with him, as those who followed him continue to carry it to this day.
Statue of the Buddha, Sri Lanka
Nor is the life that Christ came to give all who would follow him, that they might live it abundantly, anything less than just such freedom, a freedom that at last frees us to follow the admonition of Pindar, that ancient Greek pagan, and become, at last, who we are—a lesson that many centuries later Nietzsche, that self-styled Antichrist, would also learn and teach in turn.
It behooves us all—all of us who, together with one another, constitute humanity entire—to see and say no less.
To free thought!
That, and that alone, is our common human calling. It is enough—and more than enough—for us all, each and every one.
* Quoted in Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 102-103.
** A pairing the oddness of which I noted in my preceding post, “Home Today,” in a footnote to which I wrote that I might return to that odd coupling in future post/s—as I am proceeding to do in this post, at least.
*** See Gregory Bateson, “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism,” Psychiatry, No. 34 (February 1971) and my own discussion thereof in Addiction and Responsibility: An Inquiry into the Addictive Mind (©Francis F. Seeburger, 1993, 2013), available through this website.