The Gift of Self - Gil Bailie -- tape 4 excerpts

The Gift of Self by Gil Bailie tape 4

For more than 500 years, Western culture has been wrestling with how to retain the moral, social, cultural, scientific and intellectual by-products of the biblical tradition while sidestepping the 2 earth-shaking revelations that are at the heart of the New Testament and that are ultimately responsible for all the beneficial side-products. These 2 revelations are:

1) the sacrificial nature of all human institutions, culture and religion and
2) the mimetic nature of human subjectivity.

To the extent that these 2 revelations surface almost everything that is familiar to us socially and psychologically is called into question and is destabilized. The remarkable thing is that the New Testament writers had very strong intuitions in this respect. They saw that the Gospel was going to have an amazingly destabilizing effect and it was going to unleash forces toward which we would have to exercise an enormous responsibility if we were to avoid catastrophe.

So we are in the mist of a cultural crisis – a cultural crisis not just another cultural crisis but a crisis of culture itself. This crisis is irreversible because our way of concluding this crisis has vanished – we have been unable to arrest it by invoking the traditional methods for conclude it – namely, a sacrificial event in which all of our social and psychological confusions would be alleviated as we join unanimously in our violent expulsion of the victim. We have done that many, many times in the modern era – the modern era, in a way, began with these convulsions in which we tried to do that and it hasn’t worked and so the crisis continues to spread and cause social and psychological instability.

There are 2 things that I have tried to track as 2 separate things here: the cultural breakdown and the psychological repercussions of it. There are 2 biblical revelations that are coming to the surface, they are:

1) The sacrificial nature of all human institutions, culture and religion and
2) The mimetic nature of human subjectivity.

So much of what goes on in our world is an effort to thwart the recognition of these 2 things. And that is partly because all of our social and psychological reflexes are formed on the bases of the myths that the biblical revelation deconstructing. It is not as though we are being hypocritical. It is because there is a deeper kind of resistance to these 2 revelations. The questions raised by these 2 revelations are the 2 oldest questions in the biblical tradition namely; how to live without sacrifice and secondly, whom to imitate? These are the 2 fundamental biblical questions:
1) How to live without sacrifice, and
2) Whom to imitate?

The biblical tradition says; we are made in the image and likeness of God: which means to be truly human we have to, as closely as we can, approximate the model, in whose image and likeness we have been made; and secondly, the biblical tradition, at the heart is the prophetic utterance, is that we must live without sacrifice. We must do what Abraham did; we must renounce the morally unacceptable forms of sacrifice, and if need be in the interim, which is to say, in history as we progress away from the most morally troubling forms of sacrifice, to rely on forms of sacrifice that are not morally troubling for us at that time. They will become morally troubling for those who come after us so that we are always coming on to the historical scene at a moment when we recognize the moral problem of the forms of sacrifice that our ancestors used and for which they felt no moral misgiving. In history, we are having to live with less and less sacrifice and that is as it should be because as the biblical tradition has its cultural affects we are forced to live with less and less sacrifice.

So these are related questions: how to live without sacrifice and whom to imitate? And they are related for ultimately whether one can live without sacrifice or not depends on whether the model one is imitating is a human idol whose divine status is the result of the religious transfiguration of human violence on one hand; or on the other hand, truly divine. It is funny that this question seems almost amusing to us – Is the God we worship really the God or is it some kind of myth? In a way we never ask that question anymore.

George Steiner defines modernism as “the sum of impulses and psychological intellectual configurations in which the enormity of the question of the actual existence of God is experienced only fitfully or in metaphors gone pale.” In other words, we don’t think of it as a major issue – some people believe, some people don’t, some people of this or that god in their head, and so on… Everybody is entitled to their own belief which of course they are, but we never confront the significance of the question anymore. Steiner defines modernity as that age in which it is not regarded as a primary question. You could say that modernity is the age in which the significance of these 2 revelations has begun to be felt and which has tried to interpret the crisis which is upon us because of these 2 revelations in ways that keep us from really seeing what is happening.

It is over-simplistic, but as this is a kind of review so maybe over-simplistic can be allowed. There is one very subtle maneuver that made it possible for us to avoid both the revelation about the sacrificial nature of culture and religion on one hand; and the revelation about the mimetic nature of subjectivity on the other. By substituting the “individual” for the victim at the heart of western culture’s moral and social experience we were able to veer ever so slightly out of the direct path of the biblical revelation. Protecting the “individual” was a kind of Enlightenment project – a Western project. It is a very good thing and we are very happy it happened. Protecting the “individual’ became our primary moral imperative and unleashing the social and psychological power of the “individual” became our main source of cultural energy.

Now the biblical tradition is concerned with the victim and the victim is always the one left out and in Western cultural history the “individual” is always the one who is distinct from the crowd – that is the definition of the “individuality” in the West – is someone distinct from the crowd. There is an inherent connection between the victim and the “individual” but by shifting our primary cultural attention away from the victim which is where it is in the biblical tradition toward the “individual” which is where it is in the Western tradition we move slightly away from the heart of the revelation. This move was of great benefit to the modern world in a way. All of the great moral accomplishments of Western culture in the last several hundred years have to do with defending the rights of the “individual.” So it is very significant – we are pleased that it happened. But it just means you can slightly distort the biblical revelation and still get a whole lot of cultural progress out of it. So there is a genuine liberation going on.

The problem is that the “individual” as envisioned by Western humanism is psychologically implausible, sociological problematic and morally ambiguous. This is partly what is surfacing in our time.

The point I (Gil) want to make is that when we first began to realize the radical nature of the biblical revelation and how fundamentally they challenge our conventional notion of culture and our own subjectivity we tried to capture the emancipating power of the biblical revelation in terms which were secular and generic. That unleashed a tremendous moral force in the Western world – a very positive thing for the most part, at least in its early stages, however it avoids the secularized and generic version of the biblical moral imperative – it has an emancipating power, but it avoids the moral, spiritual and religious challenge that the biblical tradition embodies.

A New Testament example from the Gospel of John where Jesus talking to the Jews who believe in him and he says, ‘you think your father is Abraham, but really your father is a liar, the father of lies and a murderer from the beginning.’ In essence He goes on to say that He has renounced that father in obedience to My Heavenly Father. Right there He defines the issue: the issue is this cluster of social and psychological reflexes, which are basic this world whose structure is based on violence and mythology – the mythologization of human violence. Your god, He says, is a liar, a father of lies and a murderer from the beginning, meaning that they are inhabiting a conventional cultural arrangement that the father, in the metaphor here, goes coherence to that whole system. And Jesus says, I’m standing outside that system – completely outside that system – and I am able to stand outside that system because I am standing in identification with and obedience to the True God and not the transfigured god of human violence. The god generated by all archaic religions is the god of transfigured human violence. Jesus is saying, I am standing in fidelity to the True God and therefore I can see what you cannot see because you are still caught up in it. The people to whom Jesus is speaking then say, now we know you must be possessed. As soon as He talks about His Heavenly Father they said, aah, you’re possessed because you are talking about this other god… I (Gil) would say that we moderns are in something like that same situation vis-à-vis the biblical revelation. And we don’t realize how apropos the New Testament tradition is to the crisis that we are in. We try to ward off the revelation that it contains.


Conversation between primarily Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Rene Girard in, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World…

Last week I said that the modern crisis resembles the first stage of either an ancient cultural crisis which would end in scapegoating or the ritual re-enactment of such a thing which would end in a blood-letting sacrifice (usually with an animal victim). In other words, the modern crisis looks to those who have been doing their homework like the preliminary stage of a sacrificial crisis. So what Girard and Oughourlian noticed was that the modern crisis looks a lot like that – the difference is that we have no sacrificial way of bringing it to a conclusion. We have had sacrifices aplenty – scapegoating episodes aplenty in our world, matter of fact, that is what our world is, nothing but that – but they never resolve the crisis. So, water, water everywhere – not a drop to drink – sacrifices everywhere and no resolution to the crisis – that is the world we live in.

As the crisis proceeds however it causes more and more social and psychological undifferentiation. The nature of the crisis is that it dissolves structures – so social structures; taboos, prohibitions, institutions, hierarchies, etc – and psychological structures; that have to do with what is me and what is you and what is conscious and unconscious, the thing that gives coherence to the “individual” the person – those too get dissolved.

Oughourlian says, “Psychologically the processes of mimesis (mimetic desire) involve modifications in the state of consciousness. In the process that leads from the sacrificial crisis to its paroxysm (its final sacrificial conclusion) the participants’ state of consciousness is deconstructed (destabilized). It would be unthinkable for example for the scapegoat to be assassinated if everyone kept full awareness.” So that the early stages of the crisis dissolves the social and psychological structures that prevent the later stages of the crisis from happening. We know that when a mob phenomenon happens somebody can walk into it and being perfectly lucid, more or less, and the next moment get caught up with the frenzy of the crowd. The mimetic phenomenon has a dissolving effect on our psychological structure.

So Oughourlian says that it would be unthinkable, for example, for a crowd to kill a scapegoat unless people had their consciousness dissolve by the mimetic processes of the crowd. He goes on, “This point is confirmed by various rituals that attempts to reproduce changes in the state of awareness for those taking part, so that the end result will be violent unanimity.” He says if you look at the rituals of archaic societies you realize that they do this, they have a crisis and in that crisis the psychological and social resistance to the blood-letting that the crisis leads to, these resistances are broken down. You could say that this is for good reason in the sense how the old order held itself together – for as Oughourlian says, the murder of the victim calms everything down. So the murder of the victim calms everything down – it brings back full consciousness and lucidity – so it founds or re-founds culture. By the death of the victim it establishes difference – the victim delivers the crowd, who killed him, from the psychotic structure, and by this act restructures their consciousness. In other words, the victim makes it possible for all the madness to suddenly to become meaning and for culture to begin again with a new or renewed set of cultural distinctions and prohibitions and social differentiations. So the lamb slain since the foundation of the world makes culture possible and makes it possible for culture to rejuvenate itself.

Girard says that the mimetic process does not in our world unfold in the light of day, in crisis that involves the whole community and attains a level of paroxysm in near frenzy so that the victimage mechanism can be unleashed.

In other words, the victimage mechanism not only, do not work, but for the most part, desire (the compulsive preoccupation with the other) operates at a slightly lower level, so that they are not triggered. Every once in a while they are triggered, but they don’t work even when they are triggered. It is like a slow burn as opposed to a forest fire – something smoldering away are the effects of mimetic desire on our culture are ravenous in a way but they are below the threshold of what we would call ordinarily crisis. Occasionally when they cross the threshold and it is perfectly obvious that what we have on our hands is a crisis, but for the most part it happens below that threshold. But even below that threshold, especially since we don’t reckon with it at all, it is having a terribly pernicious effect on our social and psychological life.

Girard continues, “On the contrary, in the modern world the mimetic process dominates relationships between individuals in a subterranean fashion employing forms that possess sufficient permanence to appear to both partners in the guise of well differentiated and individualized traits of what was first called character and later reinterpreted as symptom.”

What he means by that is that relationships are suffering from the mimetic crisis. This comes as no surprise – How many marriages survive? – social destruction that we see out there just below the threshold at which we would call it a crisis. The threshold may have been raised because if we were to go from 1955 to 1994, like that (snap of the fingers) everybody would call it a crisis. But because we have come here gradually we don’t notice it much. It still flares up once in a while but we label it a managed crisis. So the mimetic crisis is now a managed crisis – it is managed by Wall Street by and large because mimetic desire is the engine of our civilization, so we are managing this crisis and it is producing all kinds of economic miracles, and so on. But it is having a tremendous effect on our social and psychological lives. This is the price we are paying for what is going on.

Girard says that at first the people involved in this crisis are able to manifest something that is well differentiated and individualized enough to be regarded as character and only much later in the crisis is it re-interpreted at symptom. We used to talk about a person having character. And then after that we talk about a person being a character. And then after that we talk about a person having a characteristic. And then where does it go from here?

In the early stages it seems like these traits are so inherently part of the person that we refer to them as the person’s character. In other words, we don’t see the other-ness of the subject at all. We don’t see the other who is in the background of that subjectivity. If you are Paul, Jeremiah or Jesus the other, that is in the background of your subjectivity is right there and acknowledged, you know it and everybody else knows it, it is not hidden at all. But in the early stages of the modern crisis there is a subjectivity whose other-ness, whose constituting other is somewhere else – not visible at all and therefore we can regard that person’s subjectivity as being his or her character. Later it becomes more obvious that there is something of a theatrical nature to character. That is to say, it seems to be concerned with the others – it looses its original ‘essence’ and becomes preoccupied with others. So then we talk about someone who “is” a character. And someone who “is” a character, as opposed to someone who has one, is somebody who is already aware of his or her effect on others – others are looking at him or her. And then you get to the question of developing characteristics in the sense of Don Quixote reads the chivalrous romances of Amadis de Gaula and he decides to be like Amadis de Gaul and to imitate his characteristics. And finally you get to the symptom of the breakdown of psychological subjectivity itself.

Personality, in the modern/popular sense of the term, which is like somebody who “is” a character – who has personality, is a mild version of the psychological distress, the later stages of which we call hysteria. One of the things that happened in the modern world is an explosion of personality. This is like the economic miracle – the economic miracle that is generated by mimetic desire in our world is powerful and the parallel to that is the emergence of “interesting personality” and the interest IN such “interesting personality.” Suddenly we have a world filled with “interesting personalities” – whether they are really interesting is another question, but the fact that we have personalities is to be noted. What Gil is suggesting in that personality in that popular sense is simply an early manifestation of the psychological distress, the later stages of which we call hysteria – which is the destabilization of the human subject.

There is a parallel of what Girard has laid out – going from character to symptom and that is the concern for victims aroused by the biblical tradition became the source of Western cultures’ moral energy and it is on the basis on that moral energy, even though we have re-defined it in non-biblical terms, it is on the basis of that moral energy that all the important accomplishments of Western culture have been achieved. However it becomes confused the further we get away from the biblical revelation that aroused our concern for victims in the first place. Likewise, this thing we call character, in the positive sense of the term, is based on a fidelity to something transcendent and it was the key to the psychological pose and reliability that we call character and it is lost or obscured when we renounce that source. So as soon as we become interested in “character” as character then we are interested in the surface and not the essence of the reality.

If I look at Jeremiah and I say, WOW, he had character and I try to emulate that character without any relationship to how he got it then what I will create is a caricature of him and that caricature will become more and more implausible the further it recedes from the truth or fidelity that Jeremiah embodied or lived out in his life. Character comes from fidelity and not some kind of array of moral or psychological qualities.

So we have to locate the ‘individual’ somewhere in that process of moving from character to symptom. If Jesus represents the supreme example of ontological density when He said, I and the Father are One, we moderns have tended to shirk the challenge to approximate that ontological density and instead have bartered it away for a shabby facsimile of it, namely desire. And that is why we cling so tenaciously to desire – why we think it is the key to everything – why we would be so reluctantly to voice any criticisms of it. Desire passes for theological orthodoxy in our world. Among believers and non-believers, everybody in the modern world, (the modern world is the Western world in crisis) desire is how we define ourselves. (Remember: desire = compulsive preoccupation with the other.)

The ontological density that Jesus incarnated is the true source of subjectivity. What the modern world has is a shabby facsimile based on desire. That is to say that desire is a powerful force, it can generate a lot of energy, and that energy can give the appearance of something psychologically formidable but finally it dissolves real subjectivity, because it does not imitate the God in whose image and likeness it was made. It imitates all others, any others, this or that other, and it does it for the most part surreptitiously.

The modern world has made a gamble, you could say that it has gambled on the proposition that its possible to generate a substantive psychological reality based on desire – one that is capable of taking the place of the kind of ontological density represented by Jeremiah, Jesus and Paul (as examples). Desire is so psychologically animating that it gives rise to what appears to be a new and exciting personality and the cultural circumstances surrounding the emergence of this new personality are such that the person defines this new feeling of social independence as individuality.

In fact, however, desire diminishes ontological density. And it does so the more it generates all the hoopla of modern personality. Real ontological density is being destroyed in the background of all the pyrotechnics of modern personality.

In cultural history generally, one always has to look at those who are on the edge, sort of speak, in order to see where the rest of us are heading. A lot of these examples we just have to notice; in the 20th century hundreds of millions of people have died violently it should give us pause and say something is going on here. Likewise if we say, humanity, more or less, got along without psychology for a long time, but then in the 19th century they had to invent it. Why? The question is, did what we invented deal with the real crisis or, like so much else in the modern world, was it an attempt to toy with the revelation without facing its religious significance?

So what we have to do is see, take another look at this invention of ours, which is modern social sciences.

Henri de Lubac: We do not know what man is, or rather, we forget. The farther we go in studying him, the greater our loss of knowledge of him. We study him like an animal or like a machine. We see in him merely an object, odder than all the others. We are bewitched by physiology, psychology, sociology, and all their appendages. Are we wrong, then, to pursue these branches of learning? Certainly not. Are the results bogus, then, or negligible? No. The fault lies not with them, but with ourselves, who know neither how to assign them their place nor how to judge them. We believe, without thinking, that the ‘scientific’ study of man can, at least by right, be universal and exhaustive. So it [the knowledge we acquire] has the same deceptive – and deadly – result as the mania for introspection or the search for a static sincerity. The farther it goes, the more fearful it becomes. It eats into man, disintegrates and destroys him.” – Paradoxes of Faith

This is the search for the “real me” – the entitative self. Where is the real me? That is what the disciples who come to Jesus at the beginning of John’s Gospel were talking about, they said to him, “where do you abide?” And he said, “Come and see.” And later in the Gospel he says, “I abide in the Father.” And then when he prayed just before his death in John’s Gospel he prayed that these friends of mine will abide in me as I abide in you. The question is where do you abide? That is a radically different from the question, where is the real me? And the search for the real me – the entitative self – the individual self – with no reference to a constitutive other is what modern psychology is all about. It is tying itself in knots trying to come up with some final answer to the question.

“…the mania for introspection and the search for a static sincerity.” It is the modern day struggle… if I could discover real sincerity then the ‘real me’ must be there – and it is the same thing for the introspection we all are told to strive for. This is a symptom of what? Using another de Lubac phrase – it is a lack of ‘ontological density’ and the search for it. This is what is happening in our world today. There is less and less of it and a more and more frenzied search for it.

de Lubac says that neither the mania for introspection (nor our) search for a static sincerity can achieve their true goal – the true goal is to arrest the process of psychological disintegration and to reach bedrock. He continues, “It is not sincerity, it is truth which frees us. Now it only frees us because it transforms us. It tears us away from our inmost slavery – to seek sincerity above all things is perhaps, at bottom, not to want to be transformed. It is to cling to yourself – to have a morbid love of yourself – just as you are, that is to say, false. It is to refuse release.”

In other words, the search for sincerity is evasion. It is an attempt to find something in the entity ‘me’ which will substantiate me. It can’t happen. That is the problem – the flaw of the modern psychological process. That is to say that it does not recognize the other-ness of the self. It does not recognize that the self is always constituted by the other. Now there are those practicing modern psychology that are using this, but we still are operating under many of the premises that Freud, Jung and others laid down early in this century in terms of how to approach the psychological crisis.

Oughourlian says that the psychological and cultural crisis cannot be separated. He says that you have to understand the psychological crisis against the backdrop of the cultural and historical one which he describes as, “…the gradual withdraw of the victimage mechanism and the protection that they offer.” In other words, the victimage mechanism makes it possible for us to terminate this crisis and rejuvenate culture and without that the crisis just continues as a slow burn. And this breakdown continues to have its effect on human relationships – causing rancor and division.

Oughourlian says, “The development of the psychopathological symptom and the place it holds in psychiatry has kept place closely with the stages of desacralization that governs our culture as a whole. Desacralization is the destruction of all the sacrificial structures of the primitive sacred that have made it possible to resolve all cultural crises. So Oughourlian is saying that the psychopathological symptom and the psychiatry that treats it need to be seen as something related to the desacralization of the world. We had to invent psychiatry because the desacralization had reached a certain stage where the psychological affects of it where too pronounced for us to ignore it any longer.

Primary psychological distress that early psychiatrist and psychologist addressed was clinical hysteria. What they found, as well as Freud and Brewer did a study on, was that the symptoms of hysteria could be cured or alleviated by hypnosis. So at the very beginning of modern psychiatry you have hysteria and hypnosis as the disease and the cure.

Girard says, “Hypnotic phenomenons were at the center of all pre-psychoanalytic and psychoanalytic controversies at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.”

Oughourlian summaries the literature and adds, “I would suggest that the most important point is that the concept of the unconscious in Freud, as well as in Jena, originates with hypnosis and therefore with the inter-dividual relations (the mimetic realization).”

When one is dealing with psychological stress one is dealing with emotions – every emotion involves another. The question is does one give sufficient weight to the presence of the other in that emotion? When these emotions arose we had to locate them coming from somewhere: either we could locate them in the inter-dividual relation – in other words you could say that this subject exists vis-à-vis the other whereas to try to regard this subject as not involved in that relation as an entity that could be studied without reference to that relation would be implausible; or one could say that these emotions are arising from somewhere…where is this somewhere? The somewhere is between the self and the other. The pathology is the problem of the self and the other. But what Freud did is that he invented this place he called the unconscious, which is inside of us, and he put all the problems there. And that completely wipes out the mimetic facts, however the mimetic facts are perfectly clear because the hysteric is one who is being influenced by another who is resents and rebels against the influence. And the hysteric has two archways of warding off this influence: one is to become autistic in a sense – an emotional disassociation – so the hysteric goes blank as a way to ward off the influence; and the other is histrionics – to act out in an effort to exorcise the other and to demonstrate that the hysteric is in fact the real subject.

Hysteria clearly is the self psycho-pathologically entangled with another. And what is hypnosis? It is the self submitting passively and willingly to another. In other words, the cure and the disease are very similar. The question is – Is there another in whom I can live, move and have my being which will ground in the truth as opposed to the others that I might be entangled with which rob me of my identity?

Hysteria is the disease par excellent of the mimetic crisis. And hypnosis is a glimpse of the cure. Think of hypnosis and think of Paul saying, “I live now not I but Christ lives in me.” Think of Jesus saying, “I only do what the Father bids me to do.” “I and the Father are One.” In other words, these two things roughly approximate the crisis and the cure. Now the problem with hypnosis is the hypnotist is not transcendent. The reason the subject is not rebelling against the hypnotist is because the hypnosis last a short while and the suggestions that the hypnotists makes are banal ones, nothing big… so that there is no reason to reject, but already you have the idea. In primitive cultures there are two forms of possession; a bad one and a good one. And the good one is the cure for the bad one. So if somebody is possessed they have a dispossession ritual, which is essentially designed to re-identify the person with the tutelary spirit who will bring him back to sanity. It is never a question of dispossessing in some radical sense. Like the story in the Gospel of Matthew 12:43-45 "Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and does not find it. "Then it says, 'I will return to my house from which I came'; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order. "Then it goes and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first. That is the way it will also be with this evil generation."

This is a tremendous metaphor for the modern crisis. That is it, now the subject is haunted by the others because there is no transcendent other. If there is a transcendent other than all the relationships with the others can be entered into in great intimacy with no destabilizing effect on the subject. But as soon as there is no transcendent then we turn each other into gods and demons and create all the pathologies and become hysteric. So I say that this thing we call personality in the modern popular sense of the word is the early stage of hysteria. What happens if we say, somebody has a very lively personality and we think that is very nice. And it is also very nice that because we are manipulating mimetic desire we are generating a great GNP. Those are very nice things. The economy is booming and we have lots of nice personalities, but what if we look up one fine day and realize, oh, my gosh, the fuel we are using to drive these two miracles is a poison. And it will destroy social and psychological stability.

Henri de Lubac: “If man could enter inside of himself and have a vision of himself both penetrating and sincere, simple and straightforward, he would no longer dare to take refuge in all the alibis of psychological and sociological analysis. He would no longer dare to imagine that anything, which is not the changing of his heart by a Stronger than he, can ever free him.” Pg 136-137 Paradoxes of Faith

Concludes with the word, abide. Where do you abide? For the most part we do not know how to abide. We give it all the best names, we call it mobility, we call it energy, we call it dynamism, and it creates some great things, we cannot complain, but the question is, where do we abide?