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November 2009

MysteriesPractices

How to Know Yourself, in Four Easy Steps

by Dr. Mark Dillof November 29, 2009October 20, 2018
written by Dr. Mark Dillof
How to Know Yourself, in Four Easy Steps
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Self-knowledge is very difficult to obtain, but it is surely the most valuable desideratum. It can save us from an enormous amount of folly and, therefore, from an equally enormous amount of suffering. Furthermore, self-knowledge is the prerequisite for self-realization, for liberating wisdom, for a transformed existence, for blessedness, for everlasting felicity. Might one conclude, then, that self-knowledge is a boon that everyone is most eager to obtain? So one would think, but as the song says: “It ain’t necessarily so.”

Knowing oneself is actually the least thing that human beings desire! It’s not simply that everyone has better things to do with their time than seeking to know themselves. In point of fact, nothing is more dreaded than self-knowledge. We fear it, for we intuitively know that it would undermine the very foundations of our existence. After all, being who we are is predicated on being in the dark. (In that sense, homo sapiens bear a certain phylogenetic resemblance to various molds, mildews and other fungi that cannot endure sunlight. This resemblance appears to be more apparent in some people.)

In any case, when we know who we are, the jig’s up. We can no longer be ourselves anymore, at least not in the way we had been. Ultimately, this is a very good thing, for the perception that what we are attempting to accomplish is a contradiction of terms, and therefore impossible, drives us to new “stages along life’s way,” to use Kierkegaard’s phase. But, dying to who we are is never an easy thing. As we know, it can feel like the end of the world, for it is that in a certain sense.

There are, though, rare times when we are ready to risk everything, and so we, in effect, declare: “OK, light of self awareness, shine upon me. I am ready, so do thy worst.” This risk-taking is far more likely to occur when we are in despair. Feeling that we have little to lose, we are more daring with our self-questioning. It can also happen — and this is even rarer — that we might engage in self-examination out of a sheer lust for a real life. Whatever the reason, such windows of opportunity do not last very long, for the light of truth is too withering and so closure sets in, until the person is ready again. That said, here is a very brief map, of the road to self-knowledge and self-realization, for those determined to know themselves.

1.Harness the Power of the Negative

The quickest way to know yourself is by examining the particular shape that your suffering takes. That shape can, upon examination, bring into bas-relief your hidden set of assumptions, regarding the path to happiness and fulfillment. Whether you realize it or not, you have been laboring and suffering under that set of assumptions. A person might, for example think: “I had assumed that being popular, with the public, would bring me happiness. Now I find myself popular, but more miserable than ever. I really need to question my assumptions.” Or a person might think: “I believed that devoting myself to my husband and children would be sufficient to bring me fulfillment, but there is still something missing. I must discover what it is.”

In the natural course of human life, people do, in fact, ask questions. They seek to know who they are and what life is about. But, if we wish to make faster progress — whether we be driven by perplexity, despair or a lust for life — we must be more ruthless with our questioning. Jacob pinned down the Angel, so it is that we must seize this life of our, interrogate it, and not let it go till it blesses us with its secrets.

In any case, suffering points to the contradictory and, therefore, impossible nature of our efforts to attain happiness and fulfillment. Take, for example, a relationship. People invariably place a contradictory set of requirements upon each other and when our partner fails to deliver we feel let down. Self-knowledge consists in uncovering those requirements. Few people ever think: “What am I really asking?” One may think that one knows the answer to that question, but probably not.

It has been said that when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers. So it is that it’s more devastating to be disillusioned by getting what we desire, than disappointed failing to obtain it. For example, we finally obtain the job that we have been gunning for, only to discover that we actually have traded one set of problems for another set of problems. We have elsewhere referred to this as the Conservation of Suffering Principle.

The great majority of people flee the negative dimension of their life. They are in denial about it. They childishly refuse to think about it, hoping that it will soon pass. To harness the power of the negative requires that we stop running, but instead turn around and face that which has been pursuing us. Everything changes if this is done.

2. Illuminate the Symbolic Dimension of Your Life

You may wish to illuminate the negative dimension of your life, but find it to be incomprehensible. For example, you know that eating Burger King’s Angry Whoppers are making you fat, but you still crave them. Or you don’t understand why you are attracted to a person who is bad for you. Or you find that you do not understand your addiction to gambling or you know that our fears of public speaking are irrational, but cannot seem to get over them. In instances of this sort you are unable to penetrate to the real reason for your desires, habits, fears, and neuroses, for they are written in a symbolic language.

The language of symbols and myths can be learned. Much of my purpose, in writing these essays every month, is to instruct readers in the language of symbols and myths, such that they can illuminate their everyday life. The various essays contained here can, therefore, be considered instructional case studies. This is really an art that takes years to learn, but is well worth the effort.

3. Make the Connections

It is really quite stunning to see how everything is one’s life is connected. There is, for example, a connection between the foods that we enjoy (as well as those that we abhor) and the work we do and our relationships and our hobbies and everything else about us. Of course, to make these connections, we must first illuminate every aspect of our life. What we finally grasp is our mode of being, the particular way in which we seek to satisfy the requirements of selfhood.

4. Let Go of Your Fundamental Assumptions

Having finally grasped your mode of being, you are then, in a position to challenge and let go of the set of assumptions under which you have been operating. As it turns out, there are deeper and deeper layers of assumptions. Finally, the ultimate set of ontological assumptions can be reached. Those, too, must be let go of.

Conclusion: Start from Where You Are and Keep Going

So, there you have it, how to know yourself in four steps. Easy steps? No, I was being ironic, for in truth they are difficult steps. The thing to do, as Zen masters recommend, is to walk on. And as Winston Churchill aptly put it: “When going through hell, keep on going.”

November 29, 2009October 20, 2018 0 comment
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Everyday SymbolismMysteriesObsessions & Compulsions

The Deeper Meaning of Tourettes

by Dr. Mark Dillof November 26, 2009October 20, 2018
written by Dr. Mark Dillof
The Deeper Meaning of Tourettes
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When we find ourselves perplexed by behavior that seems incomprehensible, or irrational, we turn to psychology for insight. Alas, the days of Freud, Jung, existential psychology, and all else of any depth are long gone. Instead of insights, we are offered either behavioral or biologistic explanations.

In regard to the latter, a psychiatrist might, for example, explain that a person displaying abnormal behavior is suffering from a chemical imbalance, causing the neurotransmitters in his brain to misfire. Not surprisingly, the psychiatrist’s remedy will be a drug.

This is not to deny that there exists a physiological concomitant to psychological problems — for mind and body are inseparable — and that the medicines that result from this research are of value. But a concomitant is not the thing itself. Consequently, biologistic explanations that seek to reduce psychological events — whether they be normal or abnormal — to chemical processes are unsatisfying. They leave us still wondering if there might actually be some real meaning to the abnormal behavior. As we shall see, there is.

A psychological malady is written in a symbolic language, or code. Were we to decipher this code, such behavior would become intelligible. We would discern its strange logic. Furthermore, we would realize that what a person is attempting to accomplish, by his odd behavior, is not that far afield from the activities and pursuits considered to be well within the province of normalcy.

A case in point is Tourette’s Syndrome (also called Tourette Syndrome and Turrets). Those who suffer from it are beset with bodily ticks, twitches, facial grimaces and sometimes strange sounds, such as grunts. Most cases are relatively mild, but some are rather violent. The afflicted person might, for example, suddenly burst out with a flood of obscenities. It almost seems as if he were possessed by demons. What sense, then, can we make of this syndrome? Might there be a way of interpreting ticks, twitches, grunts and all else? There is, indeed, a language of Tourette’s and a rather intriguing one at that.

Before proceeding further, a caveat is in order. The analysis that follows is neither based on my having engaged in clinical work with patients suffering from Tourette nor from an extensive knowledge of the clinical literature. It is, rather, a first person account. In other words, I myself had been afflicted with this malady, from adolescence till recent years. It has abated almost completely, although there still exist a danger that it can flare-up during times of stress.

What follows, then, is what I’ve determined to be the deeper meaning of this malady and its cure, based on my own introspections. As to whether my interpretations of various symptoms are universal — and not merely specific to me alone — will be up to other Tourette’s sufferers to decide. There are many possible symptoms; I shall explore only a few.

In the Blink of an Eye

There exists a class of mental and physical disorders, in which the sufferer is at war with his own body. Autoimmune diseases are an example. Various organs become enflamed, without the presence of an offending antigen. According to one theory, the body is actually at war with itself. There are a number of diseases of that type, from rheumatoid arthritis to inflammatory bowel disease. (See Hans Selye’s The Stress of Life, McGraw Hill, 1978, for his discussion of autoimmune disorders.)

There is a different kind of internecine war going on in Tourette’s, for it is taking place not on a cellular level, but on a psychological level. Every war has its casus belli. What, though, can be the justification for declaring war on one’s own body? The war is a fight for freedom and liberty, albeit this fight is for a lost cause. Bodily existence impedes the freedom of our will. No matter what we decide to do, our body gets tired, hungry, sexually desirous, suffers aches and pains and all else, when it sees fit to do so, apart from any plans that we may have to the contrary.

Having a body is intrinsically problematic and can invite a nostalgia for a mythic time before the fall. Here we have a somatic expression of what Paul Ricoeur, in The Symbolism of Evil (1969), refers to as “the myth of the exiled soul,” from Orphic mythology. The sense of the body as the prison house of the soul receives philosophical expression in Plato and then religious expression in Christianity. Might Turrets have its roots in this same tradition, but on an unconscious and psychopathological level?

Let us consider whether this may be so. The finitude of having a body is localized for the Tourette’s sufferer. He focuses on certain parts of the body that belie the freedom of his will. That is where skirmishes are fought. Consider, for example, a common manifestation of this disorder, the compulsive desire to blink one or both eyes. There is actually something other than the usual sort of blinking that occurs here. The eye lids hang there, drooping just a bit, which is how they are supposed to be. But the Tourette sufferer experiences this as having a quasi-moral dimension to it. The lids droopiness symbolically a certain moral flabbiness. The eyelids would seem to be particularly important, psychologically speaking, for they are the windows or doorways with which we apprehend the world.

The Tourette sufferer tenses and tightens the muscles in his eyes in an effort to assert his control over that muscle and thus to regain his freedom. He loses each battle, for the eyelid continues to droop, but there is too much at stake to admit defeat. It would mean having to confess to being an embodied being. Rather than accepting the fallen or tragic aspect of the human condition — that the soul is subject to the limits and corruption and mortality of the body — he keeps trying to gain mastery and control. Thus the compulsive nature of Tourette Syndrome.

Of course, this negative sense of one’s body — as an impediment to one’s free willing — need not be localized in the eyelid. One might, for example, experience it in one’s foot or leg, while driving. At a traffic light, one’s right foot is holding down the break pedal. One’s body has, in a curious way, become an extension of the car, which is rather ironic since the automobile was intended to be an extension of one’s body.

A person with Tourette’s might then experience a desire to tense up his leg, or press down on the pedal — even though there is no practical need to do so — or something else along these lines. The ultimate irony, though, that to a an observer the person with Tourette’s has a body that is out of control, when in point of fact Tourette’s stems from an effort to be in control of one’s body.

As with any habit, Tourette’s consists of attempting to do what we already know cannot be done — but in lieu of a better answer or of a confession of defeat — we simply do it again and again.

Back to the Old Joint

Another aspect of Tourette’s involves a struggle, not for freedom, as in our previous example, but for identity. This can find expression as a number of tics, one of the most common of which is the desire to crack one’s joints. Certainly not all people who do so have Tourette’s, but they may very well be sharing in the same threat to self-identity that prompts the Tourette’s sufferer to crack his joints.

The cracking sound that a joint makes when it is fully extended only confirms that it has been extended to its limit. Extending it to the limits distinguishes the two bones that comprise the joint. Prior to that, the identity of each bone was not clear and distinct, nor should they be, for they work in tandem.

The separating of the bones symbolizes the emergence of one’s own identity as no longer submerged in a larger process, but as clear and distinct. At the root of this compulsion is an anxiety over losing one’s identity. Apropos is R.D. Laing’s notion of the fear of engulfment as a type of ontological anxiety.

An interesting example of this compulsion involves the jaws. The Tourette’s sufferer might feel compelled to open his jaw to the maximum. The urge to do so might be compounded by another anxiety. There is a sense, that many people have, that they will never have the opportunity to express themselves, to let the world know who they are. This might be all the more a concern for more creative type. There is, thus, an anxiety that their jaw will lock before they have a chance to express themselves. They wish to open their mouth fully, to confirm that their jaw is not locked. Unless the threat to identity is overcome on a deeper level, there will still be an urge to establish one’s identity through the separating of the joints.

Reversing the Spin

I shall now speak, in the first person, regarding a certain manifestation of Tourette’s. It was one from which I daily suffered in my last years of high school and my early years of college. Basically, I had a compulsion to jerk my head upward and to the right. It actually consisted of a single jerking motion, at a 45 degree diagonal. What I was seeking, by this compulsion, was neither freedom nor identity, but rather orientation. I shall explain the connection in a moment.

My high school and college years were a time when I was feeling threatened by a terrible sense of disorientation. One might say that I had “ontological vertigo,” for it concerned what was real and who I was. In a very deep sense, I didn’t know if down was up and up was down. I mean that both metaphorically and literally. I remember once, for example, browsing in a bookstore in NY City. When I came upon Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. I began thinking that up and down were merely relative notions. That dreadful thought started the world spinning. I ran for a chair, for fear that I would faint. Looking back on those years, my life was an endless series of panic attack. Anything could make the world start spinning chaotically.

Much of my disorientation was due to suddenly being exposed to a great variety of new ideas, resulting in an overdose of relativity. In other words, having read and thought a good deal, I soon no longer knew what to believe. I needed a foundation, or ground, but the more I read and thought the more the ground disintegrated beneath me. My interest in philosophy was an effort to find an orientation, a center, one that was non-relative.

What, then, does this have to do with the compulsion to jerk my head to the right? It was, to my mind, a way of orienting my world. Odd though it may sound, I experienced chaos as having a direction. The world was, indeed, spinning in a circle, like the hands of a clock. It was being pulled that way by Father Chronos, creating a dangerous vortex. In order to prevent the world and myself from spinning out of control and into chaos, I would jerk my head, in the opposite direction, counterclockwise. This desperate movement only seemed to allow me to halt the chaotic clockwise flow of the world, for but a moment. Hence I would have to repeat the jerking of my head, again and again.

This nervous habit began to abate when I began to find the inner-orientation, for which I had been searching, and I became centered. I.E., I found meaning and purpose, which functions as a center. The world did start spinning again for me, in latter years, for deeper reasons, but then my response was not Tourette’s, but the sword of philosophical discrimination and awareness.

Casting Out the Devils

I once knew a fellow sufferer, from Tourette’s, whose primary symptom was a series of violent grunting sounds, sometimes low pitched and sometimes high. To my ears it sounded like he was trying to expel something. What, though, was being expelled? Psychologically speaking, what was being expelled was the moral defilements that Tourette’s suffer felt that he had absorbed during the course of the day or in previous days. Particularly the human realm can seem defiling.

If our hypothesis is correct then this type of grunting is related to a number of other compulsions, not endemic to Tourette’s, including the compulsive clearing of one’s throat (which is rather common), compulsive spitting, bulimia, and compulsive showering (for an example, see the film Carnal Knowledge).

The relatively rare case of Tourette’s suffers, who feel compelled to release a flood of imprecations, might be related to this desire to rid oneself of the defiling aspect of human existence. Cursing is, of course, an expression of anger. But it also is intended as a kind of emotional catharsis. One is spitting out all of the inner poisons. Alas, other people have to hear it, which means that they can become defiled. Cursing might, therefore, be an effort to cast the negative on to other people, just as the ancients would cast the negative upon a goat and then drive away the goat.

The Remedy

Is there a cure for Tourette’s Syndrome? Psychiatrists claim that there is no cure, but recommend various drugs to alleviate its symptoms. Drug therapy does not interest us here, for it only eradicates the symptoms of a malady. It does not cure the underlying malady itself. Here, then, are some thoughts regarding a cure:

1. Yoga, breathing exercises and meditation, which are calming in general, can quell the types of anxieties that express themselves as Tourette’s. Such healthful practices are certainly a good deal safer than drugs and without the side effects.

There is, though, a problem with alleviating Tourette’s in this fashion. Yoga, breathing exercises and meditation can become a crutch. Furthermore, they are essentially behavioral solutions. Similarly, it is true that getting a back massage can alleviate one’s anger, at least for a time, but it does not get to the source of the anger. Nor do these practices uncover the meaning of Tourette’s. Unless the meaning of this malady is deeply understood, it will recur or it will result in what Freud called a symptom substitution.

2. A sobering experience can cause a complete remission of symptoms, at least for a time. The most sobering of experiences come from a brush with the grim reaper. As Dr. Samuel Johnson famously put it: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

It has been confirmed by a number of neurologists, including Oliver Sacks, that Dr. Johnson had Tourette’s Syndrome. I suspect that the above quotation is the fruit of serendipity. Dr. Johnson must have discovered that upon thinking honestly about death his symptoms suddenly disappeared.

How is this possible? Acknowledging one’s mortality ends the hopeless inner warfare against the body, that lies at the heart of Tourette’s. Realizing that the war cannot be won prevents it from resuming. (This sobriety of mind has a salutary effect, not just on Tourette’s, but on other maladies problems as well.)

Alas, it is all to easy to forget this truth and so return to one’s folly. That is why practice is necessary. Christian monks used to pray in graveyards and keep various memento mori, such as skulls, by their bedsides. The Buddhists speak of cultivating mindfulness; a number of their meditation involve focusing on the transiency of one’s existence. In Carlos Castaneda’s books, we have Don Juan Matus recommending that we make death our advisor.

3. Ultimately, it is not enough to remember one’s mortality. Greater insight is needed into the deeper meaning of the various symptoms of Tourette’s. That has been the purpose of this essay, but more is needed. Like all maladies, Tourette’s is an answer to a question. The question, most generally, involves how to be in the world. Tourette’s is, more specifically, a symbolic way of satisfying the various demands of selfhood, such as freedom, identity, and orientation.

Mystics assert that the effort to attain selfhood is ultimately the narrative of the cosmic dream. When the comic dreamer awakens, he sees that what he was attempting to do was to see himself. The empirical ego is the road he takes in search of himself. When self and the world are seen as illusory, one is no longer subject to the same sort of anxieties. Ah, but this sort of realization is easier said than done.

I have presented here just the bare bones of a remedy for Tourette’s Syndrome and many other maladies as well. I’ve pointed out in a new direction, rather than laying out a precise map. Tourette’s is a habit. Here is the good news: Even a small amount of insight into a habit can be powerful enough to interrupt it, for at least a couple of seconds. That is just enough, such that it is no longer automatic.

In other words, here is what happens: a person experiences the usual anxieties that we all experience. He then seeks for his familiar answer, or solution, to those anxieties endemic to the human condition. Such answers might, for example, include twitching, grabbing a drink or a cigarette, feeling sorry for himself, starting an argument, grabbing a donut, or placing a bet with his bookie.

But those two or three seconds — which are the gift of insight — allows us just enough time to make a decision: Should I engage in my habit or should I not? Every time the answer is yes, the habit is reinforced. And every time we say “no,” our personal power increases. Here is the amazing thing, that one may come to discover: true freedom, contrary to popular opinion, does not consist in doing one’s thing. It consists in resisting the lure to do one’s thing!

If one resists any habit — be it smoking or twitching or reaching for the switch to turn on the TV set — the original anxiety, that had prompted the false remedy to the anxiety, will return. This anxiety is the perception of our non-being, our unreality, measured by the criteria that we need to satisfy in order to attain selfhood. Paradoxical though it may sound, this anxiety can sometimes be accompanied by a certain sense of inner-calmness and clarity.

Contained in this anxiety is a wealth of big questions about who one is and what life is all about. These anxiety infused questions, this unsettling perplexity, from which we sought to flee, are of great value. They are the spur, the force that drives us to our self-realization.

Summary

We have explored only a few of the many symptoms of Tourette’s and have sought to uncover their deeper meaning. (The reader may notice that Tourette’s bears a certain resemblance to obsessive-compulsive disorder.) What is at issue, in each case, is universal, for everyone seeks freedom, self-identity, orientation and seeks to expel the negative. What makes Tourette’s a neurosis is the level on seeks to fulfill psychological needs. Freud was correct in viewing a neurosis as a private religion, for a neurosis is seeking to fulfill on a symbolic level — and in the case of Tourette’s, on a somatic level — what philosophy and religion seek to fulfill on a “higher” level.

There is a great value to illuminating psychological maladies. They can offer us clues about the human condition itself. This is because a malady is an answer to the same questions that life calls upon each of us to answer. Most generally, the question is: How can I, as a person, attain happiness and fulfillment? Of course, a malady is not a very satisfying answer to that questi0n, but that is another matter. The important thing is to derive, from our investigation, clarity about the puzzle that life requires that we solve.

Afterthought: Primitive or Postmodern? And What About the Kids?

In the popular book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1970), the neurologist Oliver Sacks has an intriguing essay about a young man suffering from this disorder. Sacks contends that those with Tourette’s have an excess of nervous energy.

Like those in the psychoanalytic tradition, Sacks suggests that Tourette’s involves a surging forth of primitive impulses. Sacks does not specify what sort of primitive impulses are involved here, but perhaps he is referring to aggression or sexuality. The general sense is that Tourette’s Syndrome is due, to use Freudian terminology, to an ego structure inadequate to handle powerful libidinous forces, which all but threaten to drown it. In any case, his interests are neurological, and so he does not offer insight into the meaning of the various manifestations of this syndrome.

Louis Sass, in his book Madness and Modernism (1998), suggests that certain psychological maladies that psychoanalysists deem to be primitive aren’t so at all. On the contrary, they are reflections of the types of stresses, strains and threats to selfhood, endemic to those living in the modern and postmodern age. Although Sass doesn’t explore Tourette’s, I shall suggest that the person suffering from this syndrome is not simply suffering from primitive impulses, but to very modern and postmodern anxieties. But, most likely, Tourette’s has always been around. After all, Samuel Johnson, whom we earlier discussed, lived over three hundred years ago. These modern and postmodern anxieties, although coming to fruition in the Twentieth Century, were still there though, although far less prevalent.

This leads to another question: what about the kids? Tourette’s is a malady that often effects young children. But we have been suggesting that this malady is due to the type of anxieties that requires the sophisticated levels of self-awareness found in adults. After all, are young children really concerned with the question of life’s meaning and the relativity of values? They aren’t, in any conscious way, but such questions and concerns are in the air, such that everyone experiences them far more than we usually realize. Despite having a happy childhood and a secure home life, I remember how, at the age of seven, I was beginning to experience such anxieties.

In regard to a cure, should young children begin walking the path of philosophical inquiry? They already are walking it, but in some cases they have advanced further along on it than other children. Not all children, but for those who are showing signs of being perplexed by the big questions, philosophical counseling can prove valuable. Quite often children whose parents are divorced are more prone to such perplexities, for untoward life events has already undermined the foundations of their world.

But many a disadvantage has its corresponding advantage. In his case study of a Tourette’s sufferer, Oliver Sacks lays out certain cognitive advantages of this syndrome, such as a quick and creative wit. More essentially, though, there are advantages to all maladies. Moses, as a baby, had been cast adrift and floated down the Nile, a long way from home. So it is that those who have felt lost, at an early age, may be headed for a greater glory. They are more likely, than most other people, to one day find themselves and to gain insight into what this amazing journey is all about.

November 26, 2009October 20, 2018 0 comment
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MysteriesThe Zeitgeist

The Philosophical Calamity that Created Vampires

by Dr. Mark Dillof November 1, 2009October 20, 2018
written by Dr. Mark Dillof
The Philosophical Calamity that Created Vampires
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“The sleep of reason produces monsters.” — Francisco Goya
Myths, legends and stories about vampires have appeared throughout history, in a great many cultures and societies. The notion of a vampire is, indeed, a perennial idea, perhaps an archetype, in the Jungian sense of the word. All the same, the real fascination with vampires begins in the modern age.

There was a vampire craze in the Eighteenth Century, leading to a sustained popular interest in subject in the Nineteenth Century. It gave rise to that literary genre known as Gothic fiction. Bram Stoker’s influential masterpiece, Dracula, was published in 1897. Part of the appeal of this genre is its depiction of a Manichean struggle between good and evil, or God and the devil, cast in Christian terms.

In any case, there was something that happened, back in the 1780s, that laid the groundwork for the dark and unholy interest in vampires that we have today. It was not an historical event, but rather a philosophical calamity, occasioned by the publication of a certain book.

We are still suffering its aftermath, as is evidenced by the fact that the interest in vampires — as well as zombies and other creatures of the night — is greater than ever before. There is a plethora of books an films on the subject of vampires. What, then, was this philosophical calamity? What does it have to do with vampires? And what dark secrets does the contemporary interest in vampires reveal about the present zeitgeist?

Who Are these Bloodless Beings?

Vampires are beings that are dead, but have come to life to suck the blood of living beings. The implication is that they lack blood themselves. To a large degree, this fascination with bloodless beings reflected an emerging sense of things: people have become too civilized; they have lost their passion for anything other than money and security. The embodiment of this new spiritual illness was the bloodless intellectual. He is alive, but — due to an excess of reflection — has lost his immediacy, spontaneity and passion. He has become disengaged from life, a mere spectator or witness to passing events.

Beginning in the Nineteenth Century, there was indeed a sense that modern life was becoming overly civilized and, as a result, the body and the passions were falling into desuetude. That’s a fundamental leitmotif in the writings of Nietzsche. It is also the theme of Kierkegaard’s book The Present Age (1846). What Kierkegaard means by “passion” is activity, by an individual, inspired by meaning and purpose.

Without meaning, we have the type of frenetic activity endemic to the present age. Or we have activity bereft of any real theme — something akin to the confused plot of a typical musical video. Or we have people seeking to lose themselves in the collective, in utopian dreams, as a surrogate for genuine meaning, as witnessed by the “hope and change” crowd. Or we have people simply pursuing money.

It has always been a danger of thinking that a person can become so self-reflective as to lose his enthusiasm for life. (Legend has it that a vampire cannot be seen in a mirror. This makes sense since there has to be something there for an image to appear. Being totally reflected-out of all immediacy, there is no longer anything that appears, so to speak, in the mirror of reflection.)

An example of a bloodless intellectual is Goethe’s Faust, (Part One, of the long play, appeared in 1808). The brilliant Faust is pictured alone in his attic with his many books, hungering for life. To satisfy his lust for life, he sells his soul to the devil. Faust then pursues the innocent Margaret. His relationship to Margaret, although romantic, is like a vampire to its prey, in so far as he is sucking the innocence out of her.

Similarly, Kierkegaard, in his Diary of a Seducer, presents a picture of an intellectual seducer. Kierkegaard’s seducer brings a young woman to self-awareness and then, when she becomes self-aware — and thus a fallen being like himself — he leaves her, no doubt to seduce other innocent and immediate women.

Woody Allen, in a number of his early films, presents a humorous image of a kind of a neurotic, intellectual vampire. There is a telling scene, from the film Annie Hall (1977) that takes place in a bookstore. We see Annie (played by Diane Keaton) browsing through a book on cats, while Alvy Singer (played by Woody Allen) is looking at The Denial of Death (1973), by Eric Becker. Cats represent a certain feminine energy. Alvy’s interest in that book reveals his depth, but also hints at his vampirism.

Annie is perhaps more ditzy and scatterbrained than innocent, but whatever innocence she may have retained from growing up in rural Wisconsin, is lost after being in New York City and with Alvy, the despairing intellectual comedian. In other films, such as Manhattan (1979), we see Woody Allen again pursuing innocence. Then there is his personal life, but we won’t go there.

Today, vampires — in the deeper sense of the word — are everywhere. Indeed, there are cities that have more vampires than they do normal human beings.

The Animus Against Thinking and the Fear of Vampires

Fear of intellectuality and those who embody it is nothing new. The Greeks condemned Socrates to death for being an intellectual seducer of Athenian youth. And the Catholic Church executed Giordano Bruno for his new view of the universe. Today, most of what people learn at college is too abstract and devoid of personal meaning to be threatening in any way. Furthermore, students are trained to be inauthentic in their thinking. I.E., they keep ideas at a safe, objective distance from their life. They become glib in discussions, but remain unaffected and unchanged by what they read and hear.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was, though, a brief period in which students demanded relevance from their teachers. They wanted to graduate, not just with a trade and not just with a head full of ideas. They wanted to be transformed by education, to attain wisdom. That period of cultural openness did not last very long.

By the 1980s, there became an increasing animus against true education. College professors who taught students to think existentially, to ask real questions — the real type of questions that could illuminate their emotions and transform who they are — could be sued libel for having “experimented” on students.

Furthermore, in the 1960’s an identity crisis was a good thing. It prompted a student to abandon the cave, or “matrix,” of delusive images and to search for true reality. These days, though, an identity crisis is viewed as something that could impede a student’s career path and professional success. The 1960s certainly should not be romanticized, for the all to brief period of openness — perhaps it was one year — soon gave way to an awful degree of idiocy, from which we are suffering today.

That said, there is something to be said for devoting some time in one’s youth — and perhaps again in one’s middle age — to self-reflection and the pursuit of life’s deeper questions. We might add that the foremost management theorist, Peter Drucker, was a strong advocate for the liberal arts as a basis for business and personal success. Another great management theorist, Charles Handy, once implemented a great books program at a major corporation. Alas, today, anyone who does get people to think — not just abstractly, but in a way that could really affect them — would be branded as a vampire.

The animus against existential thinking is apparent everywhere. Few believe that thinking could lead a person to become a liberated being. That is why there is an interest in non-intellectual paths to wisdom and inner-transformation, such as yoga and meditation. Thinking is out, for there is a fear that by thinking a person will become a bloodless being, a vampire, who will then seek the blood out of other innocent beings, until they become vampires.

In any case, much of the contemporary fascination with vampires stems from the animus against thinking and those who invite others to think. Not every thinker is a vampire, but those who fear vampires fear all thinkers. We might also recall that one of the names for the devil is Lucifer, which means bringer of light. So here we have the paradox that vampires — who are incarnations of the Devil — dwell in eternal darkness, but bring the light of reflection. The Romantics, such as Lord Byron, were not oblivious to this paradox.

The Calamity

There was, as we had suggested, a philosophical calamity that had — through a curious kind of dialectical development — led to the popular interest in vampires. In 1781, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was published. Kant showed that the mind is not capable of knowing true reality, or the thing-in-itself. It really meant the end of philosophy. Kant claimed that his critique, by limiting the range of reason, made possible faith. But, for may people, the existential concomitant of Kant’s skepticism was despair.

We had earlier quoted the title of a painting by Francisco Goya The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1797). When reason became dethroned as essential to who we are, philosophers, artists and writers no longer saw human beings as essentially rational. Instead, they portrayed man as an abyss of lust, will, drives, and dark emotions. The title of a seminal novel by Joseph Conrad sums it up, Heart of Darkness (1899). Yes, a vast interior darkness constituted our being. The Gothic horror story emerged out of this sense of things.

Back in 1859, had Darwin had contributed to this dark sense of things, for the inevitable logic of his theory of evolution was that if we are descended from beasts, then — despite education and refinement — we are still essentially beasts. Freud, too, with his notion of civilization as a repression, is relevant here.

This struggle with our supposedly animalistic urges found literary expression, among other places, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Stevenson gave voice to a terrible suspicion that the animalistic Mr. Hyde represented our true self, beneath the veneer of civilization. The vampire story — and the werewolf story too — emerges out of these subterranean depths, for here is a vision of homo lupus homo, of man being a wolf (or a vampire) to man.

From Skepticism to Nihilism

Kant’s critique had a related effect. The dethronement of Reason was the despair of masculinity. To be masculine is to guide one’s life, not by feelings, emotions or blind will, but by a code of moral laws. But a code of laws must be graspable. It must, be intelligible to human reason. After Kant, we still have morality, but its connection to an ultimate, or absolute, is now lost, for — due to the limits of human reason — we cannot grasp the ultimate.

This was really devastating to the masculine spirit. It is hard to imagine people jumping out of windows after reading a philosophy book, but some did, back in the 1780s, after reading Kant’s critique. The philosophy of Existentialism is really an exploration of the everyday consequences of Kant’s conclusions. T.S. Elliot gives voice to one of the consequences of this development, in such poems as The Hollow Men (1925). They are hallow because they lack an inner core of beliefs. Such men, who hunger for life, are apt to become vampires.

We have, of course, been using the word “men” in the older sense, to include both men and women. There have, of course, been female vampires, and they have received literary rendition well before the publication of Stoker’s Dracula. Sometimes, they have been pictured as lesbians. For women, too, can — symbolically speaking — lose their immediacy and, becoming hungry for life, seek the blood of other beings. Similarly, just as men can become hollow, so can women. The decline of the masculine spirit has also had devastating effects on women, as it has had on men. The effects, though, have been different. Perhaps, we shall explore them in a subsequent essay.

Good News for Modern Vampires

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was, obviously, not the end of philosophy. Philosophers after Kant concluded that if Reason couldn’t allow us access to reality, such as the will and the intuition. Hegel and other philosophers, who followed after him, found radically new paths to wisdom. Western philosophy has, in certain respects, been a very roundabout path to Eastern wisdom. There is, indeed, a route beyond the bloodlessness that has been attributed to the intellect. The problem, though, is that few people have any great faith in the power of thinking to transform their life. Thus very few walk that path.

As legend has it, vampires only come out at night. During the day, Count Dracula remains in his closed coffin, for the rays of the sun are deadly to him. Analogously, to free the vampires among us (the hollow men) of their dark night of nihilism, what is needed is a new dawning of the human spirit. This dawning can only occur on an individual basis. The interest that many people have in finding meaning in some sort of social and political change is usually a flight from the task at hand and only leads to a more hopeless nihilism.

November 1, 2009October 20, 2018 2 comments
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Mark Dillof has been a philosophical counselor for over twenty years. You can learn more about his work, by going to his other website, www.deeperquestions.com.

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