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CHAPTER 1

Preamble

Lived experience is always simultaneously present to itself and absent from itself.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

In the late 1930s, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead did pioneering ethnographic fieldwork in a Balinese village, using still and movie cameras to capture some of the “intangible aspects” of Balinese culture and everyday life, including trance, eating, gesture, mourning, family interactions, children's play, art, and shadow-play puppets. In her introductory essay to their 1942 monograph, Mead speaks of a Balinese passion for being part of a noisy, festive crowd. Whether a marketplace, temple court, theatrical event, elaborate carving, or close-packed array of offerings on an altar, “the crowd preference is seen everywhere in Balinese life.”¹ Women are said to love crowds and crowdedness even more than men, “and to be less able to stand the silence of empty fields.”² However, every four hundred days, Bali falls silent for the new year. At this time, the roads are deserted, families withdraw to their houses, markets are closed, and no music is heard. This change from convivial boisterousness (rame) to silence and calm (njepi) echoes another change that Bateson and Mead document in compelling photographic detail—the Balinese “habit of withdrawal into vacancy—letting themselves suddenly slip into a state of mind where they are, for the moment, no longer subject to the impact of inter-personal relations.”³ One photo shows a carver who, having completed a difficult piece of work, sits staring into space, “utterly empty and spent.” Other photos show children, with dreamy and absentminded expressions on their faces, sitting or standing close to a parent. Entitled Awayness, this page of photographs also includes a “psychopathic vagrant” sitting incommunicado in the anthropologists' compound.

When I first encountered this innovative ethnographic work in the early 1970s, I failed to see what was singularly Balinese in these images. As Herman Melville observes in Moby Dick, this oscillation between moments of association and dissociation is as true of whale calves as of human infants. “As human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the same time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; —even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulf-weed in their new-born sight.”⁴ Active one minute, an infant will grow still the next, as if taking stock of one experience before seeking another. Crying will give way to calm, and a bout of vigorous kicking, grasping, or smiling will be followed by a period of passivity, the infant seemingly absorbed by something far off or deep within. Recent research on primary intersubjectivity speaks of an infant's threshold of excitability. Beyond a certain level of arousal or stimulation, an infant will use “gaze aversion to cut out stimulation,” just as it will invite interaction when bored. Thus, from two to six months, the infant is actively regulating its relationship to the world around, alternating periods of intense interaction with periods of quietness and withdrawal.⁵ It may be, as Bateson and Mead suggest, that in Bali the “state of dreamy-relaxed disassociation” becomes the basis of trance and thereby is assigned a positive social value that it may not attain in the West, where children are discouraged from daydreaming and told to snap out of it—though prayer, meditation, days of rest (Sabbath/Shabbat), fasting (Lent/Ramadan), and remembrance, or moments of silence for the dead, may be compared to the Balinese silent and trance states. Unfortunately, Bateson and Mead—like many anthropologists—are so focused on what is culturally unique that they overlook what is existentially universal, in this case a capacity for “non-personal concentration” that is present in all human beings, even though it finds expression in manifold ways. Moreover, this alternation of zoning in and zoning out echoes the rhythms of work and relaxation, waking and sleeping, and focused and aimless action that characterize life in every human society and are essential to well-being.

This book explores some of the variations on this interplay between being a part of and being apart from the world. As such, it builds upon my previous existential analyses of elementary forms of intersubjectivity and of the indeterminate relationship between experience and behavior or experience and belief.⁶ R.D.Laing pointed out many years ago that existential phenomenology implies that existence “may be one's own or that of another,” and that, moreover, “each and every [person] is at the same time separate from [others] and related to them. Such separateness and relatedness are mutually necessary postulates.”⁷ But, Laing concludes, our being with another can never be completely physical, any more than our being apart from another can ever be psychologically viable. We therefore find ourselves in the “potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential part of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.”⁸

By implication, neither complete detachment nor complete engagement is a real ontological possibility, despite early anthropologists' claims that primitive people live in a state of mystical participation with significant others—a collective consciousness, a group mind—or the claims of sages for a transcendental and mystical fusion with the divine. Rather, these contrasted terms suggest that while human existence is profoundly social (comprising relationships with others), it always entails a sense of our own singularity and aloneness (a relationship with oneself).9 My method of exploring this oscillation between sociocentric and egocentric consciousness is dialectical. This implies that the movement between being preoccupied by others and being preoccupied by oneself is experienced as an ethical problem that seldom admits of any final resolution, as in the parable of the tragedy of the commons, in which a number of herdsmen find it impossible to work out a balance between maximizing their individual profits and preserving the environment.¹⁰ And though our awareness continually oscillates between self-interestedness and commitment to the common weal—being on stage and off stage, seeing things from without and seeing things from within, associating with others and dissociating ourselves from them—we remain, paradoxically and inescapably, both islands and parts of the main, entire of ourselves as well as involved in all mankind.¹¹ This does not imply that we are divided selves, or that one mode of consciousness is to be preferred over another; it simply means that consciousness is continually shifting from one register to another, and that these varying perspectives have quite different existential and epistemological entailments.¹² While psychoanalysis is often portrayed as a process of getting in touch with oneself and one's emotions, “getting into oneself” is productive only if it enables a person to escape “the solipsistic strait-jacket that is used to maintain a fixed image of who we are in our own eyes and what we are thus willing or able to perceive as ‘reality.’”¹³ As Henry James observed, to get out of one's self and stay out one “must have some absorbing errand.”¹⁴

FIELDWORK AS AN ABSORBING ERRAND

It is part of the received wisdom of social anthropology that fieldwork is an initiatory rite. Unless one proves oneself in the field, one has not earned the right to call oneself an anthropologist. Little wonder, then, that novice ethnographers, about to leave the sanctuary of college life and submit themselves to the perils of fieldwork, experience considerable anxiety. Daunted by the prospect of speaking a foreign language, eating unpalatable food, living in uncomfortable quarters, and questioning strangers on potentially inappropriate matters, anthropological neophytes seek assurances that they will survive this ordeal and succeed in their goals. “What should I read on ethnographic method?” I am asked. “What did you do when you first went into the field?” “How do I know that people won't reject me?” In responding to such questions, I have recourse to humor. I recount how my academic advisor at Cambridge sent me to see Dr. Hawtrey May, a physician who had been dispensing medical advice and survival tips to expedition members, colonial administrators, and research scientists since the 1930s. “Always send your beater ahead of you in case of snakes,” Hawtrey May advised. “Kaolin for dysentery. Bungs you up but stops the runs. Quinine ahead of the fever, not after, and always boil your water.”

In a more serious vein, I downplay the exoticism of fieldwork. Books on method, from Notes and Queries to the most recent manual, give the impression that one is about to enter a laboratory rather than another lifeworld in which human beings are going about their lives, caring for their children, struggling to make ends meet, getting along with neighbors, visiting friends, meeting ritual obligations, seeking respite from the daily grind. I suggest to my nervous students that they think of fieldwork as they would any other transitional experience in life—starting school, leaving home for the first time, moving to another town, falling in and out of love. Such experiences seem insurmountable when contemplated in advance but comparatively straight forward in retrospect. The anxiety of doing fieldwork is a form of stage fright or first-night nerves. As soon as one is on stage, one's panic vanishes. Finally, I tell my students to place their trust in the protocols of hospitality, which are basically the same throughout the world. As a guest, you are expected to be unobtrusive and respect the rules of the house; in return, your hosts are bound to take care of you. Moreover, abstract knowledge of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, of great books and foreign languages, will not help you reach an understanding of others unless you share in their lives as a fellow human being, with tact and sensitivity, care and concern.

AGAINST THE VIEW FROM AFAR

I have never believed that standing back from the world is the best way to see it for what it is, and I have always felt an affinity for thinkers who sought to understand the world through active engagement with it, even at the risk of appearing ridiculous. For Marx and Engels, the purpose of this engagement was to change the world, to save humanity from itself, and I spent several years in welfare and community development work endeavoring to do just this. But my real interest, I discovered, was in neither making the world an object of contemplation nor changing it for the better, but in making myself the subject of an experiment, allowing the world to work on me, reshaping my thinking and guiding my actions. Undoubtedly it was this impulse to test and transform myself in interactions and conversations with others that drew me to ethnography. So when I left the Congo in late 1964, disenchanted with the United Nations agenda for controlling and developing the newly independent, mineral-rich, and anarchic country that Leopold II had brutally subjugated eighty years earlier, I naively hoped that anthropology would provide me a way of returning to Africa as a learner rather than a master, an equal among equals.

At Cambridge it took me a year to decide on a field site and secure funds. During this time, I felt cut off from what I called the “real” world and impatient to reimmerse myself in it. Cambridge felt cloistered and claustrophobic, a place of ivory towers, antiquated rituals, and donnish privileges. It was not without irony, therefore, that six months into fieldwork in northern Sierra Leone, I found myself gazing nostalgically at the postcard my wife's friend Didi had sent us from Cambridge of Kings Chapel under snow. Driven by a felt need to visit every Kuranko village, observing critical events, interviewing informants, transcribing stories, covering every aspect of social life, as well as meeting the incessant demands of neighbors, I was quickly exhausted and fell prey to fantasies of Cambridge, where I might find asylum and indulge the Wordsworthian luxury of writing down experiences recollected in tranquility.

Since that first arduous year of fieldwork, I have returned to Sierra Leone many times and done stints of fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia and elsewhere. Every one of these forays has recalled the first: the sense of immense relief, such as Ishmael describes on the opening page of Moby Dick, when one dismounts the treadmill of a landlocked existence and can “get to sea…take to the ship.” Yet I am always mindful of the irony that, having escaped the confines of the academy and cast myself adrift in the world, I find myself, within a few weeks or months of labor-intensive fieldwork, longing to get back to the sheltered precincts from which I so elatedly sallied forth.

John Dewey argued that this dialectical movement between home and the world is the natural rhythm of human life, for we are constantly forced to rethink our lives in the light of new experiences that unsettle what we once took for granted or regarded as tried and true. Empirical method in science is simply the systematic implementation of this familiar mode of testing what we think we know against what we don't. For Dewey, philosophy should be understood in the same way—testing a hypothesis against experience in a controlled environment in order to arrive at a provisional conclusion that demands further testing. It follows that the good of philosophy is a matter of its ability to do justice to life. And so Dewey asks:

Does it end in conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful? Or does it terminate in rendering the things of ordinary experience more opaque than they were before, and in depriving them of having in “reality” even the significance they had previously seemed to have? Does it yield the enrichment and increase of power of ordinary things which the results of physical science afford when applied in every-day affairs?¹⁵

There are, of course, many ways in which one can absent oneself from the world, and many reasons for doing so, including disenchantment, dread, disablement, or a desire for intellectual or spiritual illumination. And there are just as many ways in which one can be actively present in the world, gregarious and engaged. But the task of balancing these modes of thinking and of being—rather than ranking them or emphasizing one at the expense of the other—is difficult. In the following pages I explore this problematic through a set of portraits of thinkers I have known, many of whom would not recognize thinking as a self-conscious, systematic activity at all. My interest is in their ways of negotiating the vexed relationship between being part of and standing apart from the world. My aim is to show the limits of what is practically possible rather than describe what is abstractly conceivable. Naturally I was drawn to these individuals because I saw something of my own struggle in theirs, particularly the struggle to integrate my thinking with my life, to make thought worldly rather than merely wordy, and to clarify the relationship between how one thinks and who one is. As an anthropologist, I have never sought the kind of knowledge of others that purports to transcend the world of their experience, reducing human lives to cultural representations, innate imperatives, social rules, traditional values, or global processes; my interest is in the knowledge that may contribute to tolerant coexistence in a world of entrenched divisions and ineradicable differences. To this end one needs an ability both to think for oneself and to be open to the thinking of others, and a capacity for both self-analysis and social critique.

PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION

The tension between philosophy conceived as a conversation with oneself or within a closed community and philosophy conceived as an open-ended conversation with the world at large reflects a tension that is natural to consciousness itself, which oscillates constantly between a sense of being apart from the world and being a part of it. On the one hand, the world constantly invades my consciousness, breaking into my thoughts, disturbing my dreams, and sometimes subverting my sense of who I am or would seem to be. On the other hand, I experience a countervailing impulse to leave the world behind, to put my dealings with it on hold, opening up a space in which the rhythms of my inner life govern the way the external world appears to my consciousness. I regard this tension between turning toward the world and turning away from it as an expression of a deeper existential dialectic between being acted upon and being an actor. For the world can be so overwhelming that one is swept away by it, with no time to think, no sense of being in control, no opportunity to be still or silent. But in stillness and silence we may become estranged from the joys and obligations of our worldly life. Hannah Arendt's distinction between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa captures this antinomy, though, like Dewey, she favored the latter over the former, preferring the activist to the contemplative, the man of the world to the ascetic, even though both modes of thought and modes of being are, in practice, mutually entailed.

It is to the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski that we owe the term participant observation.¹⁶ Strictly speaking, Malinowski's coinage is an oxymoron, since one cannot be at one and the same time actor and audience, player and spectator, deeply involved in an event and disinterestedly observing it. In reality, of course, an ethnographer plays these roles successively, not simultaneously. At times, one sets aside one's notebook and engages socially with others, sharing a meal, assisting with farmwork, tending a sick child, or participating in a ritual event without much thought of academic gain. At other times, one is an outsider, standing back, observing an event from a discreet distance, taking notes, making a film, recording a story. Even though one's initial separateness becomes, in time, transmuted into a nominal kinship or genuine feeling for the world into which one has ventured, one never ceases to stand out in that world—by one's appearance, accent, idiosyncratic interests, and transience. What gives anthropological writing its unique character is its interleaving of these very different modes of being-with others—relating to the other as a fellow subject (a friend) and relating to the other as an object of intellectual interest (a stranger).¹⁷

This oscillation between being a part of and being apart from is, as I have noted, not peculiar to ethnographic or empirical methods. It is in the nature of human consciousness itself, for our minds are continually and spontaneously moving between absorption in a task and reflection on it between doing something without thinking and thinking about what we are doing. What is true of thinking is also true of being.¹⁸ Although we sometimes experience ourselves as singular or solitary, this experience is always predicated upon a sense of what it means to be with another. This is what Paul Ricoeur means by the phrase “oneself as another.” It “suggests from the outset that the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other.”¹⁹ We are thus analogues of one another. Anthropology is the systematic application of analogical thought to a pluralistic universe, a way of understanding the other as oneself in other circumstances.

We compare and contrast ourselves with others in the same way that we use metaphors to compare and contrast the body of the world with the human body—speaking of the brow or foot of a hill, the head of a river, the eye of a storm. Analogies provide “objective correlatives” of our subjective states, and as such they carry us beyond ourselves. By likening moods to colors (blue for depression, red for anger, green for envy), to physical conditions (up or down, light or heavy, mobile or stuck), or to the weather (calm or stormy), we can grasp experiences that might otherwise be inexpressible and connect with others who share the same repertoire of images.

There is always a risk, in making comparisons, of not finding in the other anything that bears comparison with what one can find in oneself. Confronted by what appears to be the unthinkable alterity of the other, or the uninhabitability of his or her lifeworld, one may retreat into one's own world and make it the measure of all things. This is the danger of the nonempirical philosophy against which Dewey rails. It suggests a loss of balance between the need to distance ourselves from a situation that proves too overwhelming to manage²⁰ and the need to engage with a situation in order to test our assumptions about it.

This tension between evasion and engagement plays out in the way we think as well as the way we live.

Just as there are many languages and dialectics in the world, so there are, within in any one social universe, numerous subsets of the lingua franca, comprising argots, jargons, idiolects, and restricted codes²¹ that effectively create closed communities. Although all these languages depend on analogies and metaphors (including logico mathematical and computer “languages”), people tend to assume that their preferred manner of speaking corresponds to a privileged field of experience that marks them out, not just as specialists but as special. Schizophrenia is an extreme example of this illusion, in which the conflation of words with things leads to the conviction that one's very life, if not the life of the world, depends on the making and maintaining of one's own “successful” arrangement of objects, images, numbers, and words.

HOW WE THINK

Our ways of representing the world to ourselves give us a consoling sense that the world is within our grasp, both cognitively and practically. But our representations tend to take on a life of their own. They are felt to possess the same concreteness as the experiences and processes to which they refer. Moreover, it is believed that some representations are better than others at capturing the exact nature of those experiences and processes. While common metaphors are often dismissed as amateurish or intellectually impoverished ways of spelling out the nature of the world about us, philosophical constructions allegedly provide superior pictures of that world, while mathematics captures its essence even more perfectly. These notions that there are superior and inferior ways of grasping the essence of reality tend to lose sight of the fact that different kinds of analogical thought serve different purposes, and that the only way we may know whether or not a particul ar mode of thought has value is to test it against the experience we are trying to make sense of. Thought is a tool, a technique, a distinctively human capacity for managing the vicissitudes of life. As such, it offers itself up to a speculative thinker like Newton as a way of comprehending the nature of what he will call “gravity” as much as to an Indonesian subsistence farmer working out how to make the most of a steep slope to irrigate his fields. Newton's model is not intrinsically superior to the farmer's model, since their problems are different, and the proof in either case can only be measured by the success with which the thinker, whatever mode of thought he or she deploys, solves the problem at hand. And while we tend to draw a distinction between concrete thinking, that serves “some end, good, or value beyond itself,” and abstract thinking, that serves “simply as a means to more thinking,” we should not rank one above the other but learn to judge when each is required.²² This pragmatist conclusion reminds one of Lévi-Strauss's insistence that scientific thought and nonscientific thought “require the same sort of mental operations” and differ “not so much in kind as in the different types of phenomena to which they are applied.”²³ At the same time, in both “science” and “magic” “the universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs.”²⁴ People classify and order plants, animals, objects, and persons not simply out of practical interest but because such bricological arrangements are potentially good to think with. For example, it is easier to think of the two moieties of a Western Australian Aboriginal people as both one and not one if the relationship is likened, say, to the relationship between eaglehawk and crow, since both are carnivorous birds, yet the first is predatory while the second is a scavenger.²⁵

Our ability to grasp the world cognitively supplements our ability to grasp it practically and physically, which may explain why so many metaphors for thinking are drawn from bodily processes—grasping, understanding, seeing, comprehending, and knowing.²⁶ And it is typically when practical and physical modes of acting fail us that thought comes into its own. When we have difficulty understanding someone, we begin imagining what he or she might be trying to tell us. When we are physically disabled, we intensify efforts to think our way around the problem that we cannot solve by physical means alone. As Dewey notes:

The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or doubt. Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on “general principles.” There is something specific which occasions and evokes it. General appeals to a child (or to a grown-up) to think, irrespective of the existence in his own experience of some difficulty that troubles him and disturbs his equilibrium, are as futile as advice to lift himself by his boot-straps.²⁷

A corollary of Dewey's observation is that when life follows familiar routines and certain patterns, we give little thought to what we are doing or saying. Our behavior is habitual, not intellectual. It is when a routine is interrupted, when a calamity befalls us, when our expectations are not met, when a familiar person behaves out of character, and when we are suddenly unsure of our footing that we typically turn inward, thinking of a way out of or around the difficulty that has arisen. As Ed Tronick puts it, “when an impelling certitude is violated, it comes into awareness.” This is true from the first year of a child's life. Faced with a depressed, anxious, or emotionally unresponsive mother, a child's thoughts will become detached and take on a life of their own.²⁸ Instead of existing in relationship with the mother, the child learns to live within itself, thinking of the mother and of itself as separate, disconnected entities. In effect, the child compensates for the absence of a dyadic consciousness (in which mother and child collaboratively construct a coherent, mutually regulating neurological system) by developing isolated conceptions of self and others that may have pathological consequences. That is to say, when we cannot be a part of another's world, we are prone to think of ourselves as apart from it, and this may then deepen the estrangement unless we are helped back into the world from which we have withdrawn.

In November 1932 Aldous Huxley began writing Eyeless in Gaza, a technically ambitious novel that was also autobiographical. After two years' work, Huxley was at an impasse. Not only was he unable to resolve the issues that plagued his protagonist and alter ego Anthony Beavis; Huxley was suffering from depression and insomnia. It was as if the general sense of dissociation, intellectual detachment, physical ungainliness, nearsightedness, and world weariness that had oppressed him from childhood now immobilized him completely. In the fall of 1935, on the advice of a friend, Huxley began daily consultations with the therapist F. M. Alexander. As a result, his health improved, his morale lifted, and he completed Eyeless in Gaza, writing into the text a doctor and self-styled “anthropologist” called James Miller whose practical philosophy transforms the life of the purblind “detached philosopher”²⁹ Anthony Beavis, just as Alexander “made a new and unrecognizable person”³⁰ of Aldous Huxley who, according to his wife, became a better man, more socially adroit and sensually engaged, and in “constructive conscious control of the self.”³¹ As Anthony Beavis explains this transformation, after rereading D. H. Lawrence's allegory of rebirth, The Man Who Died: “Thinking and the pursuit of knowledge—these were purposes for which he himself had used [his] energy…. Thought as an end, knowledge as an end. And now it had become suddenly manifest that they were only means—as definitely raw material as life itself.”³²

A second and not unrelated example of a thinker redressing the imbalance between his personal and social life is that of John Dewey. Around the period 1914–1915, Dewey found that he could not write for more than a few hours without suffering fatigue and deep depression. After consulting with F. M. Alexander, Dewey realized that while philosophy was relatively easy for him, he wrote, as he lived, without much thought. This habitual disconnection of mind from body, or thought from activity, was the probable cause of his enervation and depression. Under Alexander's guidance, Dewey not only improved his vision, posture, breathing, and general well-being; he received immediate sensory confirmation of his relational theories of body-mind, thinking-within-activity, the organism-in-nature, ideas-in-context, and schooling-in-society. One of Dewey's most compelling ideas, confirmed by practicing the Alexander technique, was that we do not act on the basis of ideas; rather, ideas are retrospective commentaries on actions that have paid off. For example, it is impossible for a golfer to learn to keep her eye on the ball by being told to do this and becoming self-conscious of her tendency to lift her head when swinging the golf club. She must first acquire new habits of using her body—a series of small, mindful, controlled movements that will, as a matter of course, involve keeping the head still and the eye on the ball. Speaking of the difficulty of learning how to stand up straight, Dewey writes:

Only when a man can already perform an act of standing straight does he know what it is like to have a right posture and only then can he summon the idea required for proper execution. The act must come before the thought, and a habit before an ability to evoke the thought at will.³³

To behave decently, lose weight, stop drinking, or sit straight we cannot simply conceive the idea and then will or wish it into being; we must first have the experience, and this demands that we stop thinking about what we want to achieve in order to acquire, “through a flank movement,”³⁴ techniques for how we may inhibit old habits and instill new ones.

Does this mean that reason is synonymous with rationalization—a way of providing ex post facto justifications to actions that were not principled, pondered, or chosen? And if thought is more often afterthought than forethought, how does it differ from storytelling, which is another way we give retrospective form to experiences that defied our understanding and lay outside our control?

Consider Totem and Taboo, a work that Freud regarded as one of his greatest achievements. Despite its intellectual ingenuity and scientific pretensions, this work goes well beyond the little that was known about early hominid evolution, even in 1916, and must be read as largely mythological.³⁵

In the earliest state of human society, according to Freud's scenario, “a violent and jealous father…keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up.” One day, the excluded sons band together, kill their father, and, since they are cannibals, devour him. In consuming the body of the father, the sons “accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind's earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion.”³⁶ Freud assumed that the sons felt contradictory emotions toward their father. The sexual desire and lust for power that led them to hate and then murder him was followed by a resurgence of the affection and respect they had also felt toward him. Filled with remorse, the sons attempted to revoke their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, “the substitute for their father; and they renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free. They thus created out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex.”³⁷

It is a central tenet of psychoanalytic theory that even when our thinking appears to represent the external world as it actually is, it is freighted with subjective meanings. In effect, experience-distant language, or the invocation of history, prehistory, or societies remote from one's own, subtly disguises experience-near preoccupations that analysis may be able to disclose. What unconfided, personal issues, then, lie buried in Freud's Totem and Taboo?

In a remarkable essay, Derek Freeman proposes that Freud projected his own ambivalence toward his father onto the “imagined parricidal sons of the primeval Cyclopean family” in order to alleviate his own Oedipal guilt.³⁸ Though he had written Totem and Taboo in a state of “certainty and elation,” Freud became depressed after completing it as though, writes Freeman, he felt guilty at having succeeded in doing something his relatively uneducated father could never have done or understood, even though he had long been driven to demonstrate to his father (who often told Sigmund that he would amount to nothing) that he was worthy of his respect. Freud's reaction, however, was to doubt and demean his achievement, as though this might restore the filial piety and submissiveness appropriate in a son. Even though Freud expressed uncertainty as to whether his thesis in Totem and Taboo was a fantastic hypothesis or based on an actual event, he clung to the reality of the primal deed, writing in the last year of his life that, “I hold firmly to this construction.”³⁹ Modern prehistory provides no evidence that Freud's descriptions of early hominid social life were correct. Modern genetics refutes his assumption that psychical experiences like guilt can be genetically transmitted from one generation to another. And Freud's conflation of contemporary “primitive peoples,” children, and obsessional neurotics is absurd. Yet one has to allow that thoughts generated by a thinker's own inner conflicts can serve as ways in which the thinker works through those conflicts and as ways in which others, whose personal situations are quite different, may comprehend and cope with their particular issues. Such is the case with Freud's model of the Oedipus complex. For though it may have had its genesis in Freud's relationship with his own father, it has served countless others since Freud's time in understanding their own vexed relationships with authority figures, as well as the poignant paradox of the human condition—that the advent of all new life heralds the inevitable passing of the life that made it possible.

Whether our thoughts are concrete or abstract, fantastic or factual, they inevitably reflect who we are and the situations in which we live. Thought is a coping strategy, a way of getting some purchase on experiences that elude our grasp, some distance from experiences that are too close to be clearly seen. But though thinking, like storytelling, begins within our hidden or intimate lives, it finds consummation in the public realm—connecting with others whose incipient thoughts and stories spring from comparable experiences. This is the only sense we can give the term objective—the sense not that our thinking or storytelling has attained a final or an eternal truth, but that it has connected with the thinking and storying of others, and thus made coexistence more possible in a plural world. “This is what I call philosophizing,” writes Henry Miller in his essay on Herman Keyserling. “It is something other than making philosophy—something plus.”40

I confess that it is this “plus” that has always fascinated me as much as the manifest content of any philosophical or anthropological work; the sense that it is the work of a person struggling to become what she is before she is a thinker, to make sense of her situation, to speak rather than be silent, to act rather than remain passive, and, above all, to connect with precursors and contemporaries and so create a sense of human solidarity in a world that is all too often chaotic, incomprehensible, and divided.

These considerations inform James Miller's great biography The Passion of Michel Foucault. Not only does the word “passion” suggest that this thinker, who had erased the subject from the anonymous field of discourse “like a face erased by sand at the edge of the sea,”⁴¹ had, ironically, constructed himself as a subject in the course of his intellectual labor; it presages an exploration of how profoundly Foucault's philosophy (logos) implicated a biography (bios). “His oeuvre…seemed to incorporate both his books and his life,” James Miller writes, “and the one could not be understood—least of all philosophically—apart from the other. Indeed, some kind of biographical approach seemed warranted by Foucault's own final thoughts on the unusual kind of ‘philosophical life’ he had evidently led.”⁴²

These thoughts were recorded in June 1984, during Foucault's dying days, by one of his closest friends, the young artist Herve Guibert. “Evoking his childhood and its dreams, [Foucault] volunteered what he felt to be the deepest truths about himself.”⁴³ These truths centered on three primal scenes, or “terrible dioramas.” In the first, Foucault, as a small boy, is led by his father, who was a surgeon, into an operating theatre in the hospital at Poitiers to witness the amputation of a man's leg. The father's motive? To “steel the boy's virility.” In the second diorama, the boy walks past a courtyard in Poitiers in which a woman has been living for decades on a straw mattress. She is locally known as “the Sequestered of Poitiers,” and the boy experi—ences an unforgettable chill as he passes by. The final scene is set in the war years. The life of the precocious young student is suddenly interrupted by an invasion of arrogant young Parisians, “naturally smarter than anyone else.” “Dethroned, the philosopher-child is seized by hate, damns the intruders, invites every curse to rain down upon them.” Soon after, these Jewish chil—dren, who had found momentary refugee in Poitiers, did in fact disappear in transports to the death camps of the Third Reich.

James Miller glimpses in these anecdotes many of the themes that will preoccupy Foucault for the rest of life: wanton power (the father forcing his son to witness an amputation); erotic transgression (the woman on the mattress had been confined in a pitch-dark room by her mother and brother, given little food, mired in her own shit, plagued by lice, maggots, and rats, and driven insane, allegedly because she had given birth to an illegitimate child when she was younger); and crushing guilt (for the fascism Foucault had discovered in himself, and the fate of the powerless students he had wanted to disappear).⁴⁴ Miller's analysis is confirmed, if only obliquely, in the final interview Foucault gave before he died. In a Nietzschean vein, he confesses that all his work amounted to a kind of autobiography, and he abjures the “rhetorically evasive” form of philosophy in which he had disguised the truth about himself.

In the sketches and portraits that comprise this book, I claim no definitive understanding of the thinkers whose lives have engaged my interest. But while they are tentative and tangential, these essays touch on the question of how we might balance modes of thinking, speaking, writing, and living that have, since the Enlightenment, been seen as antithetical. When a trainee social worker or psychotherapist is told not to get too emotionally involved with his or her client, when an ethnographer is counseled not to lose sight of his or her academic objectives by going native, when an analytical philosophy has recourse to symbolic logic when working out what can be reasonably stated or defended rather than adducing examples from the world of which he or she is a part, and when a scientist speaks of subjective experience as a regrettable disturbance that must be neutralized in order for objective observations to be made, we are carrying the burden of culturally and historically determined distinctions that cannot be sustained in reality and that overlook the different contexts in which these modes of being and thinking find a useful place.

We come here to the limits of social science. To understand in depth and detail what transpires within our relations to others, we draw upon the work of social scientists, psychologists, and ethologists to be sure, but it is to the work of artists, novelists, biographers, and nonspecialists that we must also turn for techniques that help us do greatest justice to lived experience. In venturing beyond the borders of orthodox science, we may be accused of departing from empirical truth and being unprofessional, or, worse, of pure invention. But there may be a middle ground, where anecdote enriches rather than invalidates our work.

Let me elaborate by referring to a largely forgotten essay by Lionel Trilling, introducing a 1952 American edition of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Trilling begins by observing how rare it is that a writer's personal identity is fully acknowledged or fully felt in his or her writing. Indeed, both literature and science tend, conventionally, to background or occlude the author's own biography in order to give his or her characters, concepts, and conclusions greater presence and weight. But like Mark Twain and William James, Orwell “presides” over his work, eschewing any false authority and focusing on “fronting the world with nothing more that one's simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and respect for the powers one does not have, and the work one undertakes to do.”⁴⁵ Trilling goes on to speak against an etherealizing tradition, dating from the Enlightenment, that privileges abstract, rational thought over the commonplace bodily, emotional, and mental realities of our everyday lives. There are overtones of John Dewey's empirical naturalism and Bakhtin's grotesque realism in Trilling's argument against reification.

The prototypical act of the modern intellectual is his abstracting himself from the life of the family. We have yet to understand the thaumaturgical way in which we conceive of intellectuality. By intellectuality we are freed from the thralldom to the familiar commonplace, from the materiality and concreteness by which it exists, the hardness of the cash and the hardness of getting it, the inelegance and intractability of family things. It gives us power over intangibles, such as Beauty and Justice, and it permits us to escape the cosmic ridicule which in our youth we suppose is inevitably directed at those who take seriously the small concerns of the world, which we know to be inadequate and doomed by the very fact that it is so absurdly conditioned—by things, habits, local and temporary customs, and the foolish errors and solemn absurdities of the men of the past.⁴⁶

Inevitably, a mode of address that remains faithful to the facts of experience—fpedestrian, unsystematic, ill-focused, and inchoate though they often are—resists the intellectual's demand for analytical coherence and the conventional expectation of narrative closure. It also departs from a long-standing orientation in European philosophy that Ricoeur characterizes as “the school of suspicion.” In the work of the three great “masters of suspicion”—Marx, Nietz—sche, and Freud—consciousness is mostly false consciousness. By implication, the truth about our thoughts, feelings, and actions is inaccessible to the conscious mind and can only be brought to light by experts in interpretation and deciphering.⁴⁷ Although Henry Ellenberger traces this “unmasking trend” back to the seventeenth-century French moralists,⁴⁸ it finds ubiquitous expression in the suspicion that “true reality is never the most obvious, and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive.”⁴⁹ Among the Mehinaku (Upper Xingu region, Amazonia), “all the things/beings of the world are not what they seem, in a sense they are shells.” The world is a world of surfaces, “of masks (‘mascaras’/shepeku), houses (‘casa'/pái), skins (umay) and most importantly clothing/covering (ënai).” In the Mehinaku view, gifted individuals can change skins as ordinary people change clothes. Even more extraordinary is their view that everything in the world is an inferior copy of an archetypal form that is the “true version” of the replicas that appear before us in the everyday world.⁵⁰ In Papua New Guinea, the contrast between what is evident and what is obscure is likened to a leaf, one side of which is always turned away from the light. Among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, the socio-spatial distinction between kenema (open to the public gaze) and duguro (ground in) or duworon (covert, hidden, underhand) echoes the Latin distinction between the res publica (whatever belongs to or conscerns the people as a whole) and the res privata (the domain of the domus, or house). At the same time it evokes the European distinction between the open space of the agora (marketplace) and the space of oblique meanings and of allegory (allos, “other,” + agoreuin, “speak openly, speak in the assembly or market—the agora”) and thus implies a wide array of differences between activities that take place in the light of day—within the hearing and sight of others and are common knowledge—and activities that are clandestine, duplicitous, or veiled by secrecy and darkness.

These non Western perspectives suggest we might move from our preoccupation with the unconscious as a deep recess of interior being and focus on the penumbral field of being that lies about us. Accordingly, consciousness is not so much a mask that must be stripped away to reveal true intentions, ulterior motives, or real essences: the mask mediates our relationships with an encompassing world of others—precursory and contemporary, familiar and foreign.⁵¹ Foucault states this beautifully, arguing that we might think of the unconscious as an “obscure space,” an “element of darkness,” which lies both inside and outside thought. “The unthought (whatever name we give it) is not lodged in man like a shrivelled up nature or a stratified history; it is, in relation to man, the Other: the Other that is not only a brother but a twin, born, not of man, nor in man, but beside him and at the same time, in an identical newness, in an unavoidable duality.”⁵²

In Plato, light and shadow serve as metaphors for the difference between reality and mere appearance. In Plato's allegory of the cave,⁵³ a group of chained prisoners have, from the day they were born, known only the shadowy shapes of animals and objects thrown by firelight on the cavern walls. Unable to see the fire, or the things that cast the shadows, the prisoners assume the shadows to be real and give them names, ponder their attributes, and debate their worth. For Plato, art and poetry do not get us beyond such appearances. “A stick will look bent if you put it in the water, straight when you take it out, and deceptive differences of shading can make the same surface seem to the eye concave or convex; and our minds are clearly liable to all sorts of confusions of this kind.”⁵⁴ But, says Plato, reason and calculation can save us from mistakenly supposing that such magical effects are real and enable us to render the world truly intelligible. My own phenomenology is an attempt to get beyond the play of shadows without assuming that reason is necessarily superior to art. Instead of invoking the antinomies of reality and appearance, clear reason and blind emotion, or unconscious and conscious, I follow Hannah Arendt's notion of the human condition as both plural and paradoxical. Every human being possesses a unique identity at the same time as he or she may be identified with various modes of collective or species being.

Inevitably, this means that we find difficulty in reconciling our first person points of view with the views that constitute the world we share with others. As Arendt observed, though private experiences “lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance,”⁵⁵ many private experiences, such as love, are degraded by being made public, and the public sphere may assume a minatory, blob-like,⁵⁶ totalitarian form, such as Heidegger described as Das Man.57 One also thinks of Baudelaire's despair at being lost in a soulless crowd, an experience with which Walter Benjamin clearly identified (“Lost in the base world, jostled by the crowd, I am like a weary man whose eye, looking backward into the depths of the years, sees only disillusion and bitterness, and looking ahead sees only a tempest which contains nothing new, neither instruction nor pain”).⁵⁸ But as Edith Piaf's compelling song, “La Foule (The Crowd), reminds us, crowds can exhilarate as well as alienate. In this song, two lovers are suddenly separated by the crowd in which they had been happily borne along, singing and dancing. One moment they and the crowd are a single body; the next the woman is swept away, sundered from the man she loves.⁵⁹ In a classical novel of the Meiji period, Natsume Soseki expresses his ambivalence toward twentieth-century civilization, identifying it with the steam train, roaring along, “packed tight with hundreds of people in the one box, merciless in its progress.” Though Soseki is writing thirty-four years before the transports of the Third Reich begin delivering their human freight to the death camps of northern Europe, the Japanese writer recoils at the thought of the “hundreds crammed in there,” travelling at the same speed, stopping at the same places, submitting to the same “baptismal submersion in the same swirling stream.” The train signifies a loss of agency and autonomy. “Some people say that people ‘ride’ the train, but I would say they are thrust into it; some speak of ‘going’ by train, but it seems to be they are transported by it. Nothing is more disdainful of individuality.”⁶⁰

Clearly, a tension always remains between the selves we construct together and aspects of ourselves that cannot be made over to the public sphere, calling conventional wisdom into question, resisting recognized roles, refusing to fit in or swear fidelity to another sphere. Otto Rank wrote of this anxious relationship between the will to separate and the will to unite⁶¹ and, deeply influenced by Rank's thinking, Ernest Becker summarized our human dilemma as follows:

Man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can't stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can't allow the complete suffocation of his vitality. He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof.⁶²

It is this struggle between aspects of ourselves that pull away from the public realm and aspects that engage and identify with it that I am concerned with in this book. In trying to capture these shifts among personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal modes of apprehending reality, I have recourse to a style of writing that juxtaposes biographical, autobiographical, and abstract reflections, interleaving narrative and essay.