Castrating Viggo

In my post-blog incarnation I’ve been hanging out on other people’s blogs. One recent conversation with Traxus at American Stranger entailed an analysis of Eastern Promises, the latest movie by Cronenberg. For me it turned into a way of reconsidering the Oedipus myth and castration, moving from Freud to Lacan to Deleuze & Guattari. Since these guys have certainly figured prominently at Ktismatics, and since maybe some of my persistent visitors have seen the movie, I’ve cut-and-pasted my comments from American Stranger.

Briefly, the story is this: A 15-year-old girl dies in childbirth in London. A nurse at the hospital, played by Naomi Watts, finds the girl’s diary, which is written in Russian. It turns out that the dead girl was raped by a local Russian mob boss. The boss’ son is an incompetent and corrupt and presumably homosexual fool, but his very professional driver (played by Viggo Mortensen) covers the son’s mistakes. The son has had a member of a rival Chechen gang whacked without his father’s permission. When the Chechens demand revenge, the father sets up Viggo to take his son’s place, having him tattooed with the marks that replicate those of his son, connoting high status in the Russian gang. Meanwhile, the diary has come to light, and through DNA testing the mob boss can be identified as the biological father, thereby establishing him as a statutory rapist of a minor and subject to arrest. So the boss wants the baby killed. Naomi tries to protect the baby, but the son kidnaps it from the hospital. Viggo happens to be at the same hospital, having survived the revenge hit by the Chechen hit men. He helps Naomi save the baby. Why? Viggo says it’s because he wants the boss out of the way so he can take over, but it turns out he’s an undercover operative of Scotland Yard who wants to put the Russian mob out of business.

That Viggo’s character turned out to be an undercover cop I thought was an unfortunate decision. How often have we seen this ploy by now, where the anomalous kind gestures of the thug turn out to be attributable to a deeper good-guy persona, and he’s being a badass in service of this higher good. If the undercover angle had been left out of the final cut and we saw Viggo do his good deeds entirely in Russian Mafia character, what then?

So we have a tough-guy Russian mobster whose heart of gold is attributable to his participation in Western law and order and the underlying morality (be nice to women and whores and babies) that it encodes. What happens if we’re left with mystery — he’s nice in some way that’s anomalous in the Western good/bad territorialization? Does it point to some sort of inscrutable otherness in the East, and is that too a cliche? But it’s not entirely inscrutable: if Viggo had, say, killed the baby himself it would have been even more strange. But we see that even the mob boss’ son didn’t want to kill the baby, so that bit of morality is presented as universal. Without the undercover cop business you’re an observer looking into a parallel Eastern reality that intersects with the West, that in its valorization of loyalty and kindness to babies isn’t completely other, but that works itself out in some way you’re never quite sure of. And Viggo: is it his other structural commitment to this foreign code or his personal agency and his autonomy from the code that motivates him? I think I’d prefer these mysteries to remain unresolved.

I wouldn’t find it confusing if Viggo exhibited some human decency which wasn’t reducible to his being under dominion of the Western higher authority. The whole story could have played out exactly as is, where Viggo justifies his actions to Naomi by telling her he wants to get the boss out of the way so he can take over. It’s a story that holds water, but you’d get a sense that there’s something else motivating him without ever knowing precisely what it is. Is it “old school” Russian values to which he’s alluded and that allies him with the curmudgeonly uncle? Is it some sort of Nietzschean will to define his own code of ethics? Enigmatic, unresolved, but not confusing, it preserves what Traxus described as “the mysterious way in which his motivations exceed all rewriting.”

It’s a distinctly low-tech movie — except for Naomi’s bike, which is a traditionally masculine machine. Viggo kind of competes with her machine, parking his limo practically right on top of the bike, and also repairing it in a manly fashion. And the tattoo apparatus is mechanical. So yeah, I can see the industrial power tools at work here, but the two “heroes” demonstrate a certain mastery of the machines.

Even though the mob boss is the biological father, by saving the baby Viggo becomes its father in reality — which is the masculine accomplishment par excellence. Likewise Naomi, though barren, becomes the mother by saving the baby. I don’t submission to the Russian mob is so much a feminization as it is a castration: a subjugation of pleasure to the Other and an inability to (pro)create. The tattoos aren’t feminine, they’re territorial markings, a renunciation of family in the name of a more powerful other. The knife slashes aren’t an invagination but a removal and a remarking, an alternative castration by another other. Even the baby of the boss is subject to castration. Both Viggo and Naomi are able to resist complete castration and so they can bear fruit, even if they aren’t biologically the reproductive agents.

Cronenberg is under no obligation to make a doctrinaire psychoanalytic movie. I’m no Lacan expert but my sense is that he degenders Freudian castration. Everyone, male and female, is subject to the master signifier. To stay alive in the game one has to renounce a measure of pleasure and power, of jouissance and puissance. To be castrated is to be neutered, whether you’re male or female. There is perhaps a movement from Freud to Lacan in the movie, from feminization to impotence. We start out with the feminization motif — the knife slice, the whorification of Viggo, the queering of the boss’ son, etc. But in fact we see the son mostly as a voyeur. He can’t seem to do anything; he can only watch others do. He can’t even kill a little baby for Christ sakes. He has been neutered by the Big Other, which very definitely takes physical form in his father. The tattoos are the symbolic order being inscribed in the body, replacing father-mother of one’s birth. The knives are an alternative symbolic order. The cops are another order, of course, to which both Viggo and the boss bow down. In obeisance to the legal order the boss even needs to chop off his own jouissance/puissance by excising his own baby. But he’s already shown that the Big Other doesn’t exist by falsely tattooing Viggo, marking him off not as a “made guy” under the boss’ protection but as a sacrificial victim to protect his own degenerate and impotent son.

The film pretty clearly establishes Viggo and Naomi as parents. Viggo wants to take the biological father’s place in the order, while Naomi by possessing the diary becomes identified with the biological mother. That they succeed in “parenting” the child is I think a further move toward what’s already been happening in the movie, redefining castration in terms of Deleuze & Guattari’s territorialization. Deterritorialization frees the flows of desire toward (pro)creation and (re)production, which we see in the last scene.

Okay, I may have been unduly optimistic in assigning the ending to Deleuze & Guattari. D&G envision a kind of utopia where reterritorialization isn’t imposed from the top-down by structure but bottom-up, with individual agency intersecting the immanent flows and continually re-marking them in an endless cycle of creation, dismantling and difference. So I was seeing the reproductive, procreative immanence flowing first through the boss and his rape victim and then redirected through the agency of Naomi and Viggo.However, I’m rewriting the last scene as if Viggo wasn’t a cop. But Cronenberg frames the story inside of structuralism, so the last scene has to be interpreted that way. And it is a very traditional-looking scene, with mommy and baby placed inside the extended traditional family. But daddy is missing — both daddies actually. Is this emblematic of the vaunted decline of Symbolic efficacy, where the master territorializers have all gone away? No: Viggo is top dog now, having somehow figured out a way either of getting the uncle back from exile or moving the whole family out of harm’s way. Viggo’s control of the symbolic order becomes transcendent — he doesn’t even have to be there to embed his little family inside the structure he has established.

The story is directly Oedipal. Viggo isn’t just competing with the boss — he is the doubled son of the boss, doing the work of the son, his body marked with the son’s tattoos. That the father sacrifices him to the Chechens is partly to protect his real son, but also to protect himself. Viggo-the-son is the threat to the king’s authority, so the king needs to get him killed off. But Viggo returns from seeming death to displace his father. He becomes the symbolic father of his father’s child, thereby surpassing the incest taboo. And in this regard it is a mythic rewrite by Deleuze & Guattari, who see Oedipus not as primal but as a micro-machinic producer of the larger symbolic order. When the social order changes, so does the Oedipal order.

English Class Assignment

Compare and contrast James’s The Golden Bowl with McEwan’s Atonement in light of the following quote:

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain: In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of musick shall be brought low; Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets: Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 12:1-8)

Dead Man Walking

Hey, I did say I might post a fleeting thought from time to time… Here’s something I realized today when writing a comment about the Fall on another blog:

In Genesis 2 God tells Adam that on the day he eats the forbidden fruit he will die. The Serpent says it ain’t so, that Adam and Eve won’t die on that day. Genesis 5 informs us that Adam didn’t die until hundreds of years later. It would seem that the Serpent was right, and God either lied or made a mistake. Let’s presume, though, that Yahweh was a God of his word. Man died on that day, but he didn’t literally die — he became mortal, he realized he was mortal, he forfeited his claim to eternal life, he suffered a deathlike separation from God, he died spiritually, etc. The text demands that the reader take God’s word figuratively.

Excerpts from My Books

As I was putting Ktismatics to bed, I decided to put up summaries and first chapters of the three books I’ve written so far: The Stations, Prop O’Gandhi and The Seven Creations of Genesis 1. See the top line of the blog to click to the appropriate page.

Time to Go

I’m going to stop writing this blog. I’ve got to refocus my energy and imagination on writing another book and maybe also getting the psychology practice off the ground. You’d think I’d be able to keep up with the blog around the edges, but so far I haven’t been able to do it. So I think I better put it aside.

When I started Ktismatics I decided to make it my main project for six months, the intent being to build a “platform” of popular interest in my Genesis 1 book. That didn’t work out, but I found that I enjoyed writing the posts and participating in online conversations for their own sake. Writing a book is a lonely undertaking; blogging is downright sociable — or at least it is for me. I feel like I’ve gotten to know the people who comment here, which I’ve enjoyed immensely.

I don’t have a lot of hope that my books will ever get published, or that I’ll ever attract any clients to my practice, but those are the only two possibilities I can picture right now. I’ll try to write an update once a week or so — maybe it’ll be an idea I’m working on, or a progress report on my other projects. Maybe once I shift my focus I won’t be able to manage even that much. Or maybe the idea for some new online project will come to mind. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

I’ll keep in touch with regular commenters. Sam and Ivan are welcome to carry on their conversation here as long as they like, though lately the spamcatcher seems to be losing its ability to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Thanks for hanging out with me.

Collapsing the Triangle

We’ve been discussing Donald Davidson’s triangular epistemology whereby our awareness of ourselves, other people, and the world all hang together holistically through the intersubjective verbal interpretation of experience. Jonathan Erdman isn’t persuaded — he continues to wonder how he can ever know that the world and other people aren’t just a figment of his imagination. Jason wondered whether Erdman wasn’t being modernistic in his solipsism. I think Jason was on to something.

Maybe in modernism each of the three sides of the triangle takes its turn at trying to become the sole basis for awareness. Through Descartes rationalistic self-consciousness becomes the basis for all knowledge, leading to solipsism at the limit. In Lockean empiricism the world shapes the mind through the senses, tending toward an extreme behaviorism where the self is a product of the environment. In continental Structuralism it’s the other that creates the self through language, economics, or some other societal force.

These are perhaps the most significant “totalizing discourses” of the modern age, in which the three interrelated components of human awareness get reduced to a single dimension that effectively denies the other two. Each of these attempts to collapse the inherent interdependence of self, world and other proves absurd when taken to the limit.

Custom of the Country

So our stuff finally arrived from France the other day. There isn’t much — we got rid of pretty much all our furniture a couple moves ago, leaving us mostly with books, china and crystal, keepsakes, clothes, and other small items. Still, it took up something like 80 boxes. When the moving men opened the wooden crate containing our boxes, we could see that it had been a rough trip. Most of the boxes were squashed and some of them had split at the seams as they were tossed between the teamsters and the dockworkers and the restless sea. But the most aggressive violators were the U.S. Customs people. They ripped open boxes, threw our stuff all over the place, broke some of it, either lost or stole some of it, then slapped their labels on the boxes proudly acknowledging their responsibility. Two boxes were missing altogether, one containing cookbooks, the other my daughter’s violin and my oboe. Hey, it’s a small price to pay for homeland security.

Eucharistic Realities 2

The Last Supper was a Seder, a Passover celebration commemorating the Exodus. Because the Jews were forced to make a hasty departure from Egypt, there wasn’t time to wait for the dough to rise or to pack yeast for the trip — thus the unleavened bread. The wine-drinking part of the celebration isn’t specified in the Bible; it got added later on as part of the tradition. Did the Jews have time to pack wine for the trip? Probably not, but hey, the Bible doesn’t say you can’t have a little wine with the Seder… So there are four ritual cups of wine, each memorializing a specific feature of God’s promise to the Jews in Exodus 6:6-7: (1) to take them out of Egypt, (2) to deliver them from slavery, (3) to redeem them with a demonstration of power, and (4) to acquire them as His nation.

So when Jesus broke the matzo bread and told his disciples to eat it, saying “this is my body,” he was using one of the components of the Seder ritual and assigning a different meaning to it. Traditionally the unleavened bread symbolizes humility and freedom, but there is no significance associated specifically with the breaking of the bread. In the Gospel of Luke Jesus does the wine thing twice. In his first “toast” he says that he won’t drink wine again until the kingdom of God comes. It’s the second toast, after supper, probably the traditional fourth cup, when he says that the wine is his blood, poured out in a new covenant. The Passover tradition is mostly about the drinking of the wine, not the pouring. Finally, Jesus told his disciples to “do this in remembrance of me.”

Bread and wine are ordinary foods. In the Bible the Jewish Passover ritual was intended to commemorate an important historical event by stylistically repeating certain components of that event. Tradition attached symbolic meaning to the components of the ritual. Jesus took the same elements of the ritual, shifted the emphasis slightly — from eating to breaking, from drinking to pouring — assigned different symbolic meanings to them, and attributed to them a different commemorative significance.

Historically the church has decontextualized the Last Supper, as well as its commemorative repetition in the Eucharist, from its origins in the Jewish Passover. The assumption has typically been that Jesus intended for the Eucharist to replace the Seder. It’s as if the ritual of the bread and wine can have only one religious meaning at a time — just as in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation the elements can be either bread and wine or body and blood but not both. But there’s no reason why multiple meanings can’t be imposed on the same elements and actions, why the ritual can’t commemorate both the Passover and Jesus’s death.

The reality of a ritual doesn’t have to inhere in the objects and actions that comprise the ritual. Rather, the reality consists of the objects and actions as embedded in a particular system of meanings. The same objects and events can participate in multiple meaning systems. So the bread and wine can participate in both the Passover and the Eucharist.

Eucharistic Realities

With a little more effort I could do this post up right, but in fifteen minutes the truck is scheduled to deliver our belongings from France. So in the French esprit I’ll offer an impressionistic post.

The idea of realities can be illustrated in the transubstantiation versus consubstantiation debate. At the Last Supper Jesus held up the bread and said “this is my body;” he held up the cup of wine and said “this is my blood.” And Jesus commanded his followers to “do this in memory of me.” What can this mean? Even after the priest blesses the elements of the Eucharist they still look and taste like bread and wine. The Medieval Catholics believed that a substance can participate in only one reality at a time, so the bread and wine had to change into body and blood. They still looked like bread and wine, but those are only the accidents, the surface properties detected by our senses. In substance, though, they really had changed into the body and blood.

Luther didn’t buy it. Jesus held up the bread and said “this is my body” — that must mean that it was both bread and body at the same time. Luther said that the substance of the thing could participate in two realities simultaneously: bread and body, wine and blood. Calvin took it the next step, saying that the transformation was symbolic, metaphorical — thereby leading to the position that the Eucharist is a conceptual reality in which the material bread and wine are assigned specific religious meanings that commemorate Jesus’s body and blood.

Triangular Knowledge: Davidson

In light of ongoing discussions here and at Theos Project, I thought I’d summarize an essay by American philosopher Donald Davidson on the subject of knowing one’s own thoughts and the thoughts of others. Davidson’s position is quite consistent with Tomasello’s use-based theory of language acquisition and related empirical findings. It’s perhaps also compatible with Gadamer’s hermeneutics, though they come from very different philosophical traditions. I know, for the most part, what I think, want, and intend, and what my sensations are. In addition, I know a great deal about the world around me, the locations and sizes and causal properties of the objects in it. I also sometimes know what goes on in other people’s minds. In these first three sentences Davidson identifies the “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” the interrelatedness of which he explores in his 1993 essay of that name.

Davidson acknowledges that probably the most common approach is to assert the primacy of self-knowledge because of its directness and relative certainty, then to derive knowledge of the external world from it, and knowledge of other minds from observing others’ behavior. He wishes to show that this approach is wrong. No one form of knowledge can be derived from either of the others, says Davidson; rather, all three are dependent on each other.

First he addresses the negative situation, which essentially comes down to this: it’s possible that someone can, without realizing it, believe a falsehood or interpret a subjective experience incorrectly. Consequently, no amount of knowledge of the contents of one’s own mind insures the truth of a belief about the external world, [and] no amount of knowledge about the external world entails the truth about the workings of a mind. If there is a logical or epistemic barrier between the mind and nature, it not only prevents us from seeing out: it also blocks a view from outside in. Further, if our experience of other minds is derived only by inference from observing their behavior, we have no basis for asserting that others’ minds are anything like our own.

Belief is a condition of knowledge, says Davidson: if I say “the snow is white” I can also say “I believe that the snow is white,” even though the first statement refers to the world while the second refers to my state of mind. In order to believe something it’s not enough to discriminate between features of the world and to act accordingly. A sunflower that aims itself at the sun isn’t acting from a belief, nor if it aims at an artificial light has it made an error in judgment. Having a belief demands in addition appreciating the contrast between true belief and false… Someone who has a belief about the world — or anything else — must grasp the concept of objective truth, of what is the case independent of what he or she thinks. And where do we get this concept of truth that underlies our idea of true and false belief? Here Davidson follows the later Wittgenstein: The source of the concept of objective truth is interpersonal communication. Thought depends on communication.

In order to understand what someone says, I need to know both what she means and what she believes about this meaning. I therefore have to assume that the speaker is logically coherent and consistent — rational — and that she is responding to the same features of the world as I am. This is the unspoken compact binding the speaker’s utterances to her beliefs, and her beliefs to my beliefs. Why should this tacit and tentative interpersonal agreement, based not on fact but on something like charity, form the basis for objective truth?

Like the sunflower orienting toward sunlight, humans discriminate between features of the world. Language assigns names to the discriminatory criteria: light/darkness, snow/rain/hail, etc. If I try to understand someone who speaks a language that’s different from my own, I have to figure out whether her discriminatory criteria match my own. And I can’t do that merely by comparing languages; I can only do it by attending jointly with the other person to various stimuli in the world, and then seeing if her words for these stimuli match up with mine. The consistencies in discriminatory criteria for parsing the world need to match up with both my linguistic categories and the speaker’s.

For until the triangle is completed connecting two creatures, and each creature with common features of the world, there can be no answer to the question whether a creature, in discriminating between stimuli, is discriminating between stimuli at the sensory surfaces or somewhere further out, or further in. Without this sharing of reactions to common stimuli, thought and speech would have no particular content — that is, no content at all. It takes two points of view to give a location to the cause of a thought, and thus to define its content. We may think of it as a form of triangulation: each of two people is reacting differentially to sensory stimuli streaming in from a certain direction. Projecting the incoming lines outward, the common cause is at their intersection. If the two people now note each other’s reactions (in the case of language, verbal reactions), each can correlate these observed reactions with his or her stimuli from the world. A common cause has been determined. The triangle which gives content to thought and speech is complete. But it takes two to triangulate.

Until a base line has been established by communication with someone else, there is no point in saying one’s own thoughts or words have propositional content. If this is so, then it is clear that knowledge of another mind is essential to all thought and all knowledge. Knowledge of another mind is possible, however, only if one has knowledge of the world, for the triangulation which is essential to thought requires that those in communication recognize that they occupy positions in a shared world. So knowledge of other minds and knowledge of the world are mutually dependent; neither is possible without the other.

The stimuli that cause our verbal responses to the world are also what those verbal responses mean, as well as the content of our beliefs about the world. We might jointly triangulate on the same wrong beliefs; however, because we arrive at an interpersonal agreement regarding meaning and belief makes it very likely that we’re right about our basic perceptual beliefs and our general picture of the world. It’s difficult to isolate a particular belief as true or false, however, because knowledge of the world, of one’s own beliefs, and of others’ beliefs are irreducibly interdependent and holistic. We can identify invariants across all three points of the triangle, but we cannot regard any one point as determinate, independent of its relationship to the other points.

A community of minds is the basis of knowledge; it provides the measure of all things… The thoughts we form and entertain are located conceptually in the world we inhabit, and know we inhabit, with others. Even our thoughts about our own mental states occupy the same conceptual space and are located on the same public map… The objective and the intersubjective are thus essential to anything we call subjectivity, and constitute the context in which it takes form… If I did not know what others think, I would have no thoughts of my own and so would not know what I think.

A Fictional Manifesto?

Walking across America, you could discover vast quantities of things that look and feel exactly like dollars and cents, but they aren’t dollars and cents until the US government creates their monetary reality. You could walk across fields and through forests and over mountains, but they aren’t fields and forests and mountains until someone creates these abstract categories and the words to identify them, distinguishing them from what they are not and separating them conceptually from their opposites. You could be walking across the surface of the third planet orbiting a particular star in a particular galaxy, but… The raw stuff is different from its meaning; to assign meaning to raw stuff is to perform an act of creation.

Once you have the idea of a universe in mind, a lot of revolutionary possibilities present themselves. The universe could be made up of things other than what happens to be the case in our universe – there could be two moons, say, or the world could be enshrouded in a perpetually gray and translucent ganzfeld, or there could be a world with no sea or no solid ground. New things could be created to populate this universe by fashioning them from raw materials. New properties could be defined for making sense of things that already exist: heavy and light, near and far, structure and function, atomic weight. Different realities could be created, based on principles other than sheer material existence: good and evil, beautiful and ugly, happy and sad, just and unjust, sincere and disingenuous.

Which is the more powerful act: to create all the things that populate the heavens and the earth, or to create systems of meaning by which the heavens and the earth become reality? An individual insect can die at the same instant that another one hatches; a whole species of insect can come into existence, thrive, and fall into extinction; mountain ranges can be lifted up from the sea, slowly crumble to rock, and sink back into the deep; a star can form, generate enough gravity to support a solar system and enough energy to support life, and then collapse and disintegrate. These are physical events involving the creation, transformation and destruction of matter. However, until they find their place in a system of meaning, these events and things have no reality.

Cups are cups because intelligent beings created a category called “cup” and stuck all the cups inside it. Men are men because God created a category called “man” and stuck all the men inside it. Matter wedded to idea is reality. If God pulled all the men back out of the category, the category “man” would persist in the mind of God, and the creature formerly called “man” would persist in nature. But the category would be empty, and the creature would be nameless…

…While writing my book about Genesis 1 I kept having the weird feeling that I was writing fiction. These four preceding paragraphs are part of that book, a book that in a world just slightly different from this one is becoming hugely influential in certain circles. Here in this reality, a couple days ago, I wrote a first installment in a “Ktismatics Manifesto.” Then the next day I wrote about a particular kid to illustrate alternative psychotherapeutic realities, and I find it a lot more fun to spin out interpretations of this one particular kid’s story and what might happen to her in those stories than to establish the abstract principles of reality theory. Perhaps the Ktismatics Manifesto would be more interesting as pamphlet that exists as part of a fictional reality, rather than as a work of nonfiction in this reality. It’s like in Donnie Darko, we find out that Grandma Death is Roberta Sparrow, author of The Philosophy of Time Travel. We know the book exists, we get brief glimpses of its cover and pages, we know that it’s changing the world Donnie Darko inhabits, but the book itself exists only in that reality. In our everyday reality that book, even if it had been written, would likely never get published or be read by anybody.

I’m starting to get the feeling that it’s time to create a fictional reality where some eccentric cat has written the Ktismatics Manifesto, and it changes that world.

Alternative Psychotherapeutic Realities

Our daughter has a friend who spent her early childhood in America before her family moved to France when she was eight. Early last school year this girl began getting physically ill whenever she went to school. It got to the point where just anticipating the possibility of having another attack would brings one on. Desperate, her parents took her to a French psychiatrist. After an initial two-hour assessment, the psychiatrist offered his preliminary diagnosis: the girl is “mourning America;” her recurrent bouts of illness are a subconscious attempt to maneuver her parents into taking her back to the States. The therapist began gathering biographical information about the child from the mother, going all the way back to the beginning. Apparently the mother experienced a significant bleeding episode during the pregnancy, leading her gynecologist to speculate that perhaps there had been twin embryos and one of them had become unviable. Now the psychiatrist begins to suspect that the problem is more deeply rooted than he thought: it’s not about school, or about America; it’s about the vanished twin. The surviving twin mourns the loss of her empathic double; she feels guilt at possibly having caused the other’s death. Perhaps the girl could benefit from regression therapy, in which she returns emotionally to the womb and reconciles herself with the lost twin.

This French psychiatrist believes in depth psychology, where symptoms manifest an underlying pathology of mind rooted in the unexamined past. If my daughter’s friend had gone to an American therapist, in all likelihood she would simply have been told that she has panic disorder, cause indeterminate. Or perhaps she wouldn’t have been given any diagnosis at all. There’s no real point in assigning a name to the problem and trying to get to the root of it in hopes of understanding what the symptoms “mean” to the patient, because there’s no way to be sure you’ve uncovered the real cause. Besides, it’s not clear that finding the cause helps make the problem go away. Just solve the problem and get the kid back in school, says the hypothetical American therapist. It’s quicker and cheaper.

But of course even the American therapist works inside a “deep” therapeutic model. The true cause of any pathology may lie so deep that the therapist cannot realistically hope to bring it to the surface. Attaining insight into what caused a problem doesn’t necessarily make the problem disappear. From the client’s standpoint the symptoms are the problem, so therapy should focus on alleviating the symptoms. Rational-emotive therapy and systematic desensitization might be the treatments of choice: there are theoretical justifications for why these treatments might be effective in getting this kid back to school; both treatments are supported by statistical analysis of empirical data which demonstrate good outcomes.

The French therapist and the hypothetical American therapist occupy alternate realities: different ways of making sense of the same phenomena. And we haven’t even mentioned coaching or acupuncture or American Indian healing rituals.

Ktismatics Manifesto — Realities

There’s more to be said about the Fink and Tomasello books. There are always more books to read and to talk about. But now I’m going to try to start laying out a systematic ktismatics – a theory and practice of creation. We’ll see how far I get, and whether it makes sense to those of you who feel like commenting – which I encourage you to do. I’m going to write it like a manifesto, with numbered points, revising them as appropriate based on discussion and subsequent elaboration. I’ll start with the idea of reality…

1. Things exist, but they have no intrinsic meaning – they just are.

2. Meaning is a mental scheme for making sense of things.

A universe can exist that has no intelligent beings in it. However, “universe” isn’t just all the stuff there is – it’s also a name for all the stuff, a way of categorizing and thinking about all the stuff. “Universe” means “all the stuff there is.” If the universe contains no intelligent beings who can think the idea of “universe,” then there can be no such thing as a universe. Bacteria and wolves live in environments, by instinct acting on and reacting to the stuff that’s around them, but they don’t have any idea of an environment.

3. Things embedded in a matrix of meaning constitute a reality.

The stuff that makes up the universe isn’t a universe. The idea “universe” isn’t a universe. The combination of the stuff and the idea is a universe.

4. There are many different ways to make sense of, or to ascribe meaning to, the same thing.

There’s an object in my pocket: it’s a thin disk, it weighs less than an ounce, it’s a piece of metal, it’s shiny and silver in color, it’s worth ten cents in U.S. currency, in a pinch it can be used as a screwdriver.

5. The same stuff participates in multiple realities.

The same object participates simultaneously in realities of shapes, of weights, of materials, of color and luminance, of economic exchange value, of tools.