In a free associative mood last night while reading the chapter of William James’s Principles of Psychology called “The Stream of Thought,” after taking a long walk around the lake while listening to an interview with philosopher Bernardo Kastrup in which he explained his theory of monistic idealism, which proposes consciousness as fundamental, I came to the question: Why do we strive for permanence? For things to last. For the one. To settle.
James is advancing an argument against the notion that we feel the same feeling of green every time we perceive grass – that the sensation we get from the same object is always the same, so green is green. No, he says; “a close attention to the matter shows that there is no proof that the same bodily sensation is ever got by us twice.” Instead, “What is got twice is the same OBJECT… The realities, concrete and abstract, physical and ideal, whose permanent existence we believe in… lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our ‘ideas’ of them are the same ideas” (231). All of our instant mental categorizing (a left-brain process of breaking the gestalt into bits, according to Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary) is to support that “permanent existence we believe in”: “The sameness of the things is what we are concerned to ascertain” (231).
Every sensation, however, is unique. Every experience has never been had before, and when we say we’re seeing green, we’re actually having a new sensation that the mind is rapidly categorizing as an experience like other experiences of seeing the color of grass. We’re seeing green grass because we’ve seen green grass before and it’s what we expect to see.
In “the dissolving-view-appearance of the mind” no fact that remains unchanged exists (230). This all may seem very obvious to anyone who has heard of neuroplasticity (which James described very accurately in this book from 1890) or thought about the truism of Heraclitus, that you never step in the same river twice. Change is all and everything. Every experience changes the brain; and the brain creates only new experiences.
These great phrases were all chiming with others I’d heard Bernardo Kastrup say in an interview, which tipped into an associational cascade… The mind is a flow of different feelings. We ascribe to qualities permanence, but what’s really “permanent” – from Proto-Indo-European roots per (forward, through) and men (remain) – is a fictive idea of the object as a solid unchanging thing in the world, as matter. We ascribe permanence to qualities to undergird our belief in matter.
Kastrup posits consciousness as fundamental – not matter, not the laws of nature, and not a dualistic combination – and imagines us as dissociated complexes or alters, as in a cosmic dissociative identity disorder. (Thanks here to Johanna Blomqvist, whose courageous book Hyperreality I’m editing, for leading me to Kastrup!) Consciousness is constantly flowing and changing, and hence so is the universe, which is a manifestation of it.
So why do we strive for permanence? Why do we want to believe in the permanency of objects? Why do we even believe in the possibility of permanence in the world of evident flux? Think of how basic this instinct is.
Maybe it’s because the belief in permanence is one route to meaning. Viktor Frankl said we find meaning through loving, serving, suffering (and believing our suffering has a reason) or making a work (something with the possibility of permanence). If we didn’t believe in permanence, in spite of all the evidence of its opposite, would we even care? We have to feel that our actions are directed toward and moving to some future goal. I love the way the etymology of permanence contains flow or motion within it – per, forward, through. It’s something that remains through flux.
Kastrup says consciousness is teleological; it is goal directed and might be called, instead of “universal consciousness,” “universal will.” So what is our telos, what is the ultimate goal of permanence, in so many permutations, we crave? Cessation? To become matter? This doesn’t square with the survival instinct… and yet it is the only inevitable end (goal) we know. At least we know it of others, or at least of bodies.
If we are manifestations of a consciousness characterized by ceaseless change, why would we crave its opposite and want to believe in permanence as a backdrop and end to it all?
Is it an ironic take on the fear of death, masquerading as a desire for what it represents, cessation. We long to arrive, or to settle, because we recognize, in Shelley’s words, with their paradoxical conclusion:
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:—
…
Nought may endure by Mutability.
What would it really mean to accept this? We can’t know the outcomes of any of our actions, and we’re happier when we accept we can’t control outcomes. There’s no escape from the feeling of will, from wanting, especially if this is the character of consciousness. There’s no way around the problem that we don’t know our end – in the sense of our meaning or purpose and of our death – or whether there is one. So we go on in constant flux, contriving various ends (goals) as we strive not to end, which is all we can do.
not stone nor green nor stair nor air
Some writers put this in terms of desire and love. As Anne Carson writes, in Eros the Bittersweet, in a discussion of Plato’s Phaedrus, the lover’s controlling wish to “freeze the beloved in time” (130) causes damage. “The ‘now’ of desire is a shaft sunk into time and emerging onto timelessness, where the gods float, rejoicing in reality…. When you enter ‘now,’ you remember what it is like to be really alive, as gods are” (157).
The same answer comes from so many sources: be present. And being present means going with the ongoingness of the stream, which is only hard because we are human and “forget” “the dissolving-view-appearance of the mind” is more real than the idea of permanence we believe in.
Quotes are from:
William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, New York: Dover, 1950 (reprint of Henry Holt, 1890 edn).
Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 1986.