IEC 2-3 Pragmatism as the Good Anxiety

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So far, we have implied that pragmatism, an ethic wherein only our conduct matters, is basically the outward expression of an essential Anxiety that all human beings share. Anxiety, for philosophers, is not only a good thing, its also the chief way we are ‘called to conscience’. But what, in turn, does this calling imply? Hi, I’m Greg, and welcome back to Insightful’s Guide to Critical Thinking. In Level three of episode two, I want to first share with you a kind of résumé, the career of human anxiety so far. Then I want to suggest a more complex exercise for you to explore how your conscience is not entirely your own after all. Finally, we should be able to get a sense of where and when Anxiety can be put into play in the world around us.

            Recently, my wife and I were driving over a river on a freeway bridge. Suddenly, a young person appeared right between the lane and a large meridian. If one leapt over it, one would be gone, into the river. She had stopped, turned and looked right at us with a visage of great anxiousness, as if we had caught her about to do something she knew she shouldn’t be doing. And in fact, she already had placed herself in some danger, for the actual pedestrian and bicycle walkway was located on the far side of the bridge, where people could traverse it safely away from the six-lane traffic buzzing by. My reaction time was too slow. We gaped back at her for a moment and then we were past, unable to render any aid. For this was a person clearly in crisis. Her clothes were ill-fitted, and she seemed to have nothing else about her, no purse, no pack, etc. She was likely not more than twenty years old, and my first thought was, ‘what could have happened to someone so young that she found herself in this situation’, one that at first glance seemed like life and death. Indeed, her face told us that she was somewhere in that shadowy land which exists mentally and emotionally between life and death. She had become a liminal being.

            The term refers to the Latin ‘limen’, or threshold. Famously, Van Gennep uses the term to describe all those who are in the midst of an essential rite of passage; traditionally marked as birth, puberty, marriage, and death. In premodern social formations, each of these four apparently universal changes in human identity were well-demarcated, engaged in within a group or cohort, not unlike some of our education system today, where cohorts pass through professionalization and course programs and all graduate together. In these older cultures, it would have been impossible to approach one of these four thresholds outside of the prescribed rituals surrounding them. Each was too big a deal to allow a free-for-all. But in our massive and diverse society, the first with a clear conception of the individual, what was impossible has become a regular occurrence. Any of us might, in a crisis, find ourselves displaced from normal social conduct. In a word, we might be thrust into a liminal space before or even after what used to be seen as the correct time.

            So, our timing is off, certainly. No one wants to die at age twenty, for instance. Well, almost no one. Once again, I myself am now on that same bridge, staring into the face of someone who is both terrified and determined. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus once stated, ‘A man strikes a light for himself in the night, when his sight is quenched. Living, he touches the dead in his sleep: waking, he touches the sleeper’. Now this sounds awfully murky. There is a gap of meaning, not unlike the disconnect between myself and the young woman on the bridge. And this gap is manifold. Happily married, zooming along with my still youthful spouse beside me in my Lexus sports sedan on the way to a posh sushi dinner. That was me. Her? It is at precisely this point reason begins to break down, and anxiety begins to take over. Who is she? Why is she there? And what on earth is she about to do?

            Anxiety demands that we see another human being for who they are. In doing so, it forces us to place ourselves in the shoes of this other, no matter the distance between us. This, in a word, is what the ‘call to conscience’ means. Its career really begins with the Greek thinkers, including Heraclitus. For the Greeks, the metaphoric figure ‘Sleep’ is the brother of ‘Death’ himself. When I myself am sleeping, I can speak with, even touch the dead. When I am awake, I can only interact with the sleeper, a person once-removed from the ultimate human threshold. Similarly, the night is the time of sleep. It is a harbinger of the utter darkness that befalls my consciousness in death. The Renaissance composer and lutenist John Dowland, lead court musician to Elizabeth 1, wrote a song that begins, ‘Come, heavy sleep, the image of true death’. We awake refreshed, if groggy, from such repose, and we are ever grateful for it. In our own time, the legendary composer Richard Strauss pens the music for what is my favorite song, entitled ‘On Going to Sleep’. In Hermann Hesse’s poem, we understand the great gift which is sleep: ‘Soul, released from all your defenses, enter the magic, sidereal circle, where the gathering of souls commences.’ The sheer beauty of the lines calls to mind the same character of sleep itself: sleep is the pragmatic version of death. Through it we are renewed and return to life; we do not die. Though sleep and death may be siblings, they are still two different figures after all. Even so, we each of us embodies both.

            Hence the need for the awareness the good anxiety promotes. Anxiety alerts us to remain pragmatic. I say to myself, ‘I am not going to cross over a six-lane bridge on its edge, I am not going to jump off that same bridge.’ But at the same time, it also tells me that I am not going to stop my car in the middle of that bridge and leap out to try to help someone who is playing with fire. My wife cautioned me at the time, reminding me that we would cause an accident, and beyond that, that a person who is in the midst of her own highly personalized rite of passage will not admit us to her world. She dwells within a waking dream, and has thus confused sleep with his darker brother. And so, we passed on, hoping that we had misinterpreted the woman’s face, and especially her eyes, which, as another famous Greek thinker, Aristotle, reminded us, ‘are the windows of the soul’.

            That word, which seems to have so much historical and moral baggage that it has virtually become unusable in today’s world, is really just a shorthand for what philosopher’s term the ‘call to conscience’. Our ‘soul’ is made up of both our ability to feel sympathy for others as well as empathy. It is the compassionate aspect of consciousness and its ethical compass. We need not think of ‘soul’ in any metaphysically murky manner in order to understand why it is present. I’m going to suggest to you that our conscience is in fact the ultimate pragmatist: It stays firmly grounded in the world, it takes account of others to self, and it alerts my selfhood to dangers, which life experience tells me are mostly of my own design.

            So, today’s exercise is about pragmatism’s deepest expression; soul, or conscience. Remember, for pragmatism, only our conduct matters. The young woman on the bridge might have simply been attempting a dangerous short cut, and her look was that of someone who knew she was in the wrong. But even if this was all there was to it, her conduct gave her away as someone who had ignored, for a moment at least, her conscience, and thus in a sense, had also lost her soul. This sounds extreme, but consider how our conscience is directed. It alone remains the bastion of consideration, compassion, and care when the rest of our personal world seems in disarray. Anxiety calls us back to our conscience, just as sleep renews us to be able to live on even in the face of indefinite death. When I deliberately place myself in danger to no significant purpose, I ignore my anxiety and abandon my pragmatism.

            So, call now to your mind that last time you yourself acted like the woman on the bridge. What was the context? Why did you act the way you did? How did you get out of the fix you found yourself in? And, in hindsight, what would you have done differently if something similar came up? In this exercise, I am asking you to confer with your conscience, this time, without anxiety calling you to do so in the first place. Reach back into your own ethical compass, just as we reach, without danger, for the dead whilst we sleep. Pragmatism tells us that dreams are for the sleeper alone, not for those who are awake. And in our sleep, dreams express both fundamental anxieties that alert us to take waking action on the morrow, as well as less monumental moments of concern, as in having to use the washroom in the middle of the night. Notice right away that basic issues of pragmatic life need no call to conscience to get us to heed their demands. I am not, and never, engaged in some soulful self-examination when needing to use the john. But the instance you have recalled for this exercise is of a different order.

            Now, take apart that crisis in your life. What mistakes did you make that it deepened for you? And what was the threshold, or ‘limen’, that you were blithely approaching, both out of order and with bad timing? I imagined the woman on the bridge was nearing that of death, the ultimate crossing-over. Had she been ninety and not twenty, I might well have admired her in the sense that she had taken control of her own demise and said to herself, ‘its my life, so it is also my death’. And the philosopher would mainly agree with this sentiment. In Heidegger’s turn of phrase, death is always ‘mine ownmost death’; that is, it is essentially personal and no one else can die for you. So, the last part of this exercise is to examine how you came to own the crisis you found yourself in. You did, in the end, turn it around enough so that you are with me today, sharing this episode. And yet such crises remain with us in another sense. This too is pragmatic. For conscience is not born with all of its future experience already present; it too must learn what it means to be a conscience. We neither need to learn to sleep nor to wake, and this alone tells us that these kinds of things are but ‘images’, as Dowland, and for that matter, any Neo-Platonist would put it, and not ultimate things. But within anything that requires a true rite of passage, human beings are learning something essential about themselves. We do have to learn to live, and equally, we also must learn to die.

            I want to congratulate you on attaining level three of this challenging conceptual relationship, that of anxiety and pragmatism. Please join me for episode 3, where we will in its level 1 begin to explore the phenomenological idea of ‘bracketing’. See you there!