This seems a great way to simplify things - make freedom the primary goal in one’s life - then go about living life in whichever way I wish to, which includes pursuing certain things.
As the pursuing is done with the commitment to freedom already in place it remains in the proper context of being a preference.
I can really observe this in myself, I am very committed to training martial arts for example and there are all sorts of progressions I am pursuing, with the long term goal of reaching very high competence in this particular area.
However this happens to be simply what I have chosen to do with the specifics of my life, the overarching goal/commitment (which is like a grand arena for everything else to happen within) is to freedom, and the every day expression of this commitment is the commitment to feeling good each moment again come what may.
That desire is a problematic way to happiness was well understood even by the Buddha, so no real surprises there.
Rather than telling yourself off for having desires, commit to being happy and harmless each moment again. This will reveal the limitations of a particular desiring landscape that forms an identity. With luck and persistence these can melt away quite surprisingly. This is the oft talked about dismantling of social identity, habits, psitacissms and so on.
Desire is ultimately who ‘you’ are though and it is also the way out of ‘you’.
This is a really good point because it highlights the difference between blindly enforcing a moral/belief system vs an open exploration which happens on the wide and wondrous path.
Because the traditional way is to rigidly place some moral tenets on top of this problematic desire (or any of the other passions) in an attempt to control it.
The problem is that this ends up locking one more firmly within those shackles which prevent freedom. It also tends to have the side effect of withdrawing one further away from life, this is obvious when looking at any religion really but also any particular belief/moral system say veganism for example.
I remember this from when I was younger, that sense of feeling locked away in a progressively tighter cell, no matter how much stricter I tried to be with the application of those beliefs/morals I was progressively moving in the wrong direction, away from freedom. Away from those brief experiences which I had locked away in my memory, which showed that there was an altogether superior way of living.
Taking the other approach of committing to feeling good and then going out in the world, into the marketplace and actually exploring all these things first hand is totally different. It is an open exploration which eventually as @Srinath mentions, begins to expose various limitations. So things begin to fall off but not as the result of a strict adherence to some code but rather as the result of those parts of ‘me’ being seen as silly, unnecessary, redundant, counter-productive etc. And at the same time building a greater clarity as to which path is simply more sensible, more intelligent, better off for all concerned, each moment again.
So it is intelligence in operation and it actually leads to freedom. And the great thing is, and I have found this personally is that you get to do all those things which at some point you believed that you would have to give up in the name of freedom, but actually none of that was ever needed!
And the best example of this for me was driving down to meet Dona and Alan couple years back and worrying that they would be upset with me if I drank beers at the pub, after-all they were actualists
Fast forward couple hours and we are all sat at the pub drinking beers and having a great time.
Haha yes and what I will name the “Actualist Tobacco Effect” must not be understated – as the number of actualists in a group increases the likelihood they will start smoking grows parabolically .
It is a bit strange at times. I find that I’m unable to tell myself off anymore or beat myself up for “desiring something I shouldn’t” or doing something that isn’t sensible. It just doesn’t make any more sense to do it. So there is therefore no ‘moral punishment’ for doing something ‘wrong’…
The traditional advice is that this would lead to licentiousness, that you need that moral shame or guilt to prevent yourself from doing bad things. But pure intent, sincerity and sensibility have become active enough where instead what happens is I’m just left appraising what I just did. I can see I didn’t feel good while doing it… and then I’m just left wondering why I would do that in the first place! And eventually the answer is that it just doesn’t make sense to keep doing it, so I just stop doing it… and that’s it! No fireworks or drama. It is odd but I’m becoming more used to it!
Perhaps worth mentioning that things like money, career success, exist so often as desires that those of us wishing to ‘do better’ may think that part of doing better means doing away with those, whether as desires but also as simple preferences.
As @Kub933 mentions above, this can result in an increasing strait-jacket as we add rules to our lives in an ill-fated attempt at increasing freedom.
There is nothing ultimately wrong with making lots of money, or making whatever sensibly might improve one’s career position. As with all things, whether it’s sensible or not for you at any particular moment is completely dependent on conditions - trying to pin down a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ rule is looking for a ‘way out’ of being here, alive, right now, and being in the position to live this moment.
edit:
I’m glad this post came up today, because thinking on this subject I can see several areas of my life I have been doing this. Money & career ideas have definitely been one of them
Reflecting more on this & really the height of foolishness here is not wanting this or that thing, it’s thinking that worrying about it or desiring it will help us to get them. It won’t, it’s really debilitating
So a lot of what happens here is we desire/want something → our psyches betray us via handicapping intelligence → we give up on the wanting (while subtly still wanting)
What you mention @henryyyyyyyyyy makes me think of feelings being a gross distortion of the actual. As in desire is there in an attempt to do what intelligence can now do much better.
So it’s not that wanting this or that is evil in itself, it is just that the tool of desire which nature implanted is the blind and dirty way of getting there, it has that intrinsic handicap within itself. It’s what drove organisms to act before intelligence developed.
Now there is a way to move towards that which is wanted without being blindly driven.
There are some interesting models of desire that go beyond the usual common-sensical ones. I used to find these useful and fun to contemplate and still find them compelling.
Jacque Lacan’s theory of desire is harder to explain and more convoluted. But he too sees desire as a mimetic social product than something biological. Unlike animals the human being is a unique product of language intersecting with the body. Because language can only go so far in its production of human subjects, it creates a lack - a yawning hole that can never be closed. It stays there like an existential void at the heart of human subjectivity. It’s sort of like a half rendered video game where the scenery turns to black pixels and wire mesh. From this lack desire springs - a fantasy that wholeness and closure are possible if only we get the longed for X, Y or Z which we fantasise the Other has. The Other is a hallucinated socially produced figure that we imagine to be un-lacking and complete e.g. Elon Musk, Dua Lipa or maybe just a moderately socially/sexually successful friend. Furthermore as infants our needs as babies are interpreted by powerful caregivers e.g. ‘johnny is hungry’, ‘johnny’s nappy is wet’. But our caregivers dispense not only bottles and clean nappies but also love and recognition. Over time biological needs get complicated and saturated by psychological demands for love/recognition and caregivers are internalised in the babies minds as powerful Others. But even the best caregivers, being only human are always getting it wrong and falling short. The demand for love is frustrated and what remains is desire - a sort of never-ending preoccupation with the Other and the fantasising of what the Other wants, has or doesn’t have. By this point the Other has been so thoroughly internalised that we don’t even realise we are doing it and simply experience it as desire. We are constitutionally desiring beings that desire as Others. Lacan would probably say that the goal would be to move away from demand - something that is rigid and concretely mimetic and into desire - one that is looser, socialised and tragi-comically aware of the ultimate futility of desire, yet realising there is no escaping it. Actual freedom would agree with Lacan and Girard insofar that desire is constitutional of ‘me’, but of course there it is possibly to bring desire to an end by ending ‘me’.
Hope that wasn’t too much of a head fuck Happy New Year everyone!!!
It lines up with many insights into the way I have seen this over the years.
Nature repurposes what I call “primal distress” into what becomes what psychology calls “libido”.
It’s the same thing. What can’t be satisfied, an ultimate comfort/survival becomes, a longing for the Other.
Julian Jayne’s book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” makes a similar point about the hallucination of the Other. The analog ‘I’ is a product of the social imagination of the complete “leader”.
These ideas are far out @Srinath. Still, I think I’m partial to my arguably more conventional actualism bottle (or model) to explain the origins of compulsion and desire. To each their own of course.
Was I was too quick to dismiss Lancan? I note the sequence or gradation that takes place: need → demand → desire. Or perhaps it is not so sequential given that need, being bodily, is purported to operate on a different pathway than demand and desire (desire, in this model, being a direct outgrowth of a psychological demand) but instead gets inevitably crossed or intertwined with those psychological pathways?
I recall a documentary I watched years ago about an orphanage in, I think, Romania. It was a bare bones, run-down establishment managed by nuns. There, the orphans were provided the basic needs of sustenance and shelter. But nothing else! No affection, no attention or engagement, no stimulation was provided to the infants and toddlers (much less “love or recognition”). The older children who had been subjected over the years to that bare-bones treatment developed severe developmental disorders and behaviors. Sure, they were alive. Their so-called basic needs were being consistently met. But they were horribly, mentally damaged. Many were reduced to a constant rocking back and forth, and making grunting or squeeling noises rather than speaking coherently.
Cases like that present a blurry line between bodily “need” and psychological “demand,” especially as it concerns human infants/ toddlers.
This is interesting, my first reaction was - why is Srinath going off the actualist paradigm But I read the linked article and your post a couple of times and it brought up some interesting ideas.
The other thing is this post seems very pertinent to what @henryyyyyyyyyy has been writing in his journal recently - desiring others through the belief that they possess a way towards the completeness which I am lacking. In fact I initially thought you must have accidentally posted this in the wrong thread and the reply was actually to Henry!
It is an interestingly blurry line of early development morphing into the psychological/psychic self, I always observed that people’s identities seem to be this uneasy conglomeration of the various reactionary responses to the traumas of life. It does kinda go in line with Richards observation that a mature adult is actually a lost, lonely, scared and very cunning entity.
It makes sense why the identity is so very deeply entrenched, because its development coincides with the maturation of this body from a baby into a fully grown adult. It’s like by the time one is an adult, the tentacles which are ‘me’ reach every nook and cranny of the mind. They were weaving and morphing along with the cognitive abilities of this brain developing.
I was thinking about this a while ago, how the conditioning begins whilst the brain is still developing! My 5 year old brother who can barely understand the world yet is already being taught about the existence of various truths and morals, of gods and fantasies. Those will be weaved so deeply and fundamentally that he will never think that they could be nothing but beliefs.
@rick Yeah, exactly. Infants need more than merely having their biological needs satisfied. They have to be wrapped in a kind of psychological and caring envelope for several years given how helpless and.vulnerable we are in childhood and how much there is to learn about human relating and culture.
@Kub933 I don’t claim that these ideas are ‘right’. Just that I find them compelling. At best I think they are very partial truths. Maybe they can shed light on certain aspects of human experience, that actualism cannot.
As for escaping rather than understanding Desire and the human condition, I don’t think there’s anything that comes anywhere close to actualism freedom. But I guess models like these can potentially help one understand and be kind to oneself in the meantime. For some anyway. For others they could just sound like gobbledegook and be completely useless.
I will admit to having skimmed the article… and not fully appreciating Lacan’s position.
But it seems obvious to me that the fact of the matter is that that which ‘makes up’ desire is an instinctual passion that we humans (being animals) share with other animals… and the rest is all essentially how that desire is acculturated. I don’t think these models conflict with actualism per se, rather it is that they re-define the word ‘desire’ to mean something else and then talk about that. From the Girard article:
So they simply define ‘desire’ to mean something other than this instinctual desire, which is how the word is used in the context of actualism.
To use actualism terminology, they’re both talking about the social identity and how that shapes the raw instinctual passion of desire (which they call ‘need’) in different ways. With that in mind it’s obvious desire has social elements… and of course it can rapidly become clear that desire has more to do with ‘my’ identity rather than the objects of ‘my’ desire per se…
I’m always a little surprised when I see comments like this. Is there an ‘actualist paradigm’? There is certainly actualist terminology… but it’s not that there are some things that are “true within actualism” but not true otherwise. Something is either a fact or it isn’t… is a feeling-being factually built up of instinctual passions plus social identity acculturation, a feeling ‘soul’ at core with a thinking ‘ego’ on top? I don’t think it’s a ‘model’. I think it’s describing the way it is. It’s like a description of a forest, it’s either accurate or not, but it’s not a paradigm or a model.
Someone can describe the same forest differently of course… no harm in that! For what it’s worth I always have and continue to find the actualist description to be the simplest and most comprehensive, most far-reaching, most accurate and most simple. It doesn’t invalidate other descriptions… but if both descriptions are valid there must be some way to reconcile them. If they can’t be reconciled then one, the other, or both must be wrong.
Not sure if I am going in circles or making a caricature of myself lol. Anyone else see what I’m sayin’ or am I just replacing ‘paradigm’ with ‘description’ and that’s what you meant @Kub933 ? Lol .
Claudiu, I have a different take. I think that all accounts of reality, including the actualist take on human subjectivity and structure are necessarily partial accounts. They cannot be exhaustive or comprehensive. In that sense they are models and paradigms. I think that actualism can definitely be reconciled with the above 2 models.
Ultimately it’s less important for me that a model be an absolutely 100% true rendering of reality than its utility or what it can achieve. If my point is to drive from my home to the city, then I’m less interested in the exact chemical composition of my windshield, than knowledge of how to drive a car safely and perhaps a very crude understanding of how a car mechanically functions. If I want to unknot a tangled knot, I’m less interested in knot topology than a simple technique to unravel it. This is where the strength of actualism lies. It’s a rough and ready account of how the human psyche works which serves the purpose of ending it. As the Cheshire cat said to Alice, it all depends on where you want to go.
Yeah what I mean by paradigm is a particular angle of addressing and explaining a topic, like you say we might both be describing what a forest is and yet if we both wrote a short piece describing a rain forest they might end up being 2 completely different pieces of writing. Yet still both be describing the various facts of what a rain forest actually is.
It seems that the more complex the topic the more angles it could be chipped away at, but the goal remains to arrive at facticity.
I might describe a table by referring to the fact of it having 4 legs and a flat top, or I might also describe a table by referring to the qualities of the material it is made from etc.
I mean even if we look at the writings of all the actually free people we have there is some sense of a different angle being taken, eg if I read Richards journal, Srinath’s simple actualism page and Peters Actualist guide they are talking about the same method but there are differences for sure.
So I notice in myself this desire to have these unbreakable actualism tenets and then Srinath comes along not playing along to my rules, and I notice some slight conflict within myself which is interesting in itself to look at as it is showing some kind of belief in play.
What I noticed in other areas of my life is that the more genuine understanding of a topic I have the less dogmatic I become in discussing it - precisely because I understand the core facts which we are trying to chip away at from different angles.
I suspect your main issue @claudiu is that by proposing different paradigms we are kind of proposing that we are discussing different beliefs as opposed to talking about facts.
Maybe there is a third alternative here that a fact can be approached from different angles, depending on what it is that I am trying to do (as with the table example).
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Happy New Year everyone!!!
(or model) to explain the origins of compulsion and desire. To each their own of course.
But I read the linked article and your post a couple of times and it brought up some interesting ideas.
that a fact can be approached from different angles, depending on what it is that I am trying to do (as with the table example).