In a recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast psychology professor Jordan Peterson discussed important aspects and problems of contemporary Western culture. Especially his analysis of Nietzsche's "God is dead" rang a bell for me. Building on what he said, I would like to propose further conclusions regarding the state of culture in certain aspects.
Peterson stated that by effectively 'killing' God, or rather the faithful belief in God, Western society rid itself of its metaphysical underpinnings. This left the culture in a one might say 'spritually' unstable state which is what we are dealing with right now. Peterson of course addressed this problem in regards to the recent problematic developments around the radical liberal left in the US and Canada. I will not go into the specifics of these problems for now, but would rather like to investigate this loss of metaphysical underpinnings and the subsequent 'spiritual' instability. When I use the word 'spiritual,' I am not referring to any unscientific esoteric concepts, but rather to the conglomerate of emotional, psychological and philosophical perspective which we use to navigate life.
In the beginning of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, the sage Zarathustra descends from his lonely mountain to go out into the world and share his wisdom with society. The first person he meets is the hermit in the woods who subsequently asks him whether he had not heard about the fact "that God is dead." This can be interpreted in a rather simple way: Western culture by turning towards science in the quest for knowledge discarded religious knowledge. This further was the case because of the erroneous assumption that religious or mythological knowledge claimed literal truth. If you think that religious texts proclaim a literal old man living in the sky amidst clouds, of course you'll discard that. But the meaning is not literal, it is metaphorical and in the loss of this meaning, life in some sense lost its meaning.
If you believe that life can be reduced to "Newtonian billiards" as Alan Watts called it, and further into meaningless mechanical and mathematical equations, the simple joy of being is under attack. You are more likely to feel as if you were just thrown into this world, in a way alone and isolated, because you do not feel where you come from anymore. Your origin, your history as a child of God, in that sense embedded within the world-process is taken from you, you're on your own. You're in a world that works mechanically and therefore does not care about you and as a result you may feel threatened and further hostile. On the other side however, history teaches us that religion when accompanied by ideology is easily just as detrimental. The scars of Strict-Father Morality and its "You shall not" still run deep in our veins. So, on the one hand you have the loneliness and loss of your metaphysical footing and on the other hand you have the overly restrictive ideological ethos of in our case Abrahamic religion that suffocates with its constraints. Since the figurative death of God however, it seems that the former is more prevalent as of today.
Peterson also spoke about this as the two kinds of hell that await at either the extreme of order or the extreme of chaos. Nietzsche called this the Apollonian and the Dionysian principle, the Daoists called it Yin and Yang and I, as I am a materialist, will call it Breathing and Grounding. These two areas are the two main pillars of Bioenergetics, a body-psychotherapy devised by Dr. Alexander Lowen. He found peoples' minds to be over-charged while their bodies were under-charged and advocated the unity of the organism as a measure of health. The reason why I believe that these terms fit the above paradigm is the following:
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their paradigm-shifting work The Philosophy in the Flesh describe how the mind is fundamentally embodied which means that it is much more suitable to speak of the human organism as a whole as opposed to speaking about the mind and the body separately. Further, because we are organisms, bodily experience is our primary way of relating to the world which leads us to use metaphors grounded in physical experience for knowing the world in terms of language. We say, "This is going too far" which is clearly derived from the physical experience of literally walking too far in a given situation and putting oneself in danger. Therefore, in this model breathing can be equated with the yang principle and grounding with the yin principle. Lowen believed that most people's breathing is impaired by unconscious muscular tension, held as protective armoring in a response to trauma. Breathing is reduced so that the feeling of the body and with that feelings are reduced, because that would bring up the ghosts of the past. By going precisely there and releasing the tears or the anger of the trauma, the person is again free to breathe deeply and feel more alive. This can be experienced as up-lifting and freeing. Lowen also believed that most people are at least partially ungrounded, meaning they do not feel their feet and legs on the ground in a stable way and therefore feel anxious and unsafe. Feeling physically unstable on one's legs, or not really sensing them because of numbness, renders one subconsciously afraid of falling and therefore generally afraid and off balance metaphorically and sometimes also literally. Now these two aspects are certainly intertwined, because rigid breathing musculature will usually coincide with rigid feet and legs, rendering a person impaired in breathing and partially ungrounded. On the one hand however, excessive breathing without the necessary grounding, as e.g. in hyperventilation, can lead to a person to 'take off' and become acutely frightened or in severe cases lost. On the other hand, very little breathing in combination with tightly constricted breathing muscles can lead to a person becoming entrapped by their muscular system and literally becoming depressed. These can be approximated with the two extremes of order and chaos mentioned above.
So with this in mind, let's take a closer look at our metaphysical underpinnings.
The metaphysical underpinnings are what underlies our perspective on life and what can give it a certain meaning. Without something underneath us we lose our footing, become unstable and unable to stand our ground. I'm obviously using strongly metaphoric language here, but bear with me. If the metaphysical belief in God is what 'stands under' us in order to keep us stable and metaphor is derived from bodily experience as mentioned above, what is it that literally 'stands' underneath us, underneath our center of consciousness? Well, the body* which keeps us 'down to earth.'
Going along with this it is no wonder that Lowen describes people exclaiming "Oh God!" upon first coming in touch with their bodies again and getting a glimpse of what is yet to come up. This is metaphorically understood as a descent into darkness, or the shadow-side of things which refers to the unconscious which again resides in the life of the body. So getting in contact with the body is a descent, a going down process of coming back down to earth. Expressed from the other side, dealing with one's underlying issues is a going down process, because we phenomenologically go down into the body again. Here, in going down and reinstating our foundation or underpinnings, we expand our being and come in conctact with God, with what feels like a spiritual experience. Lowen understood this and described it in detail in his book "The Spirituality of the Body." Through the body, through feeling our legs and feet in intimate contact and reliable stability with the earth we find our way home, since home is where the heart is. Maybe, just maybe by way of increasing the sensitivity of the body and going 'down there' we can recover our roots and regain our footing in this world. To sum this up one could say that the metaphysical underpinnings in that sense are the physical underpinnings expressed in a metaphorical way. Maybe finding the balance between the ungrounded lost-without-boundaries and the almost as ungrounded suffocated-with-constraints in today's day and age is to pursue the life of the body. Maybe this is one way of walking the Middle Way as Buddhism is often called, of recovering what in Zen is known as supple flesh and stable bones.
- Jan Fleischer
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| Good old Nietzsche |
In the beginning of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, the sage Zarathustra descends from his lonely mountain to go out into the world and share his wisdom with society. The first person he meets is the hermit in the woods who subsequently asks him whether he had not heard about the fact "that God is dead." This can be interpreted in a rather simple way: Western culture by turning towards science in the quest for knowledge discarded religious knowledge. This further was the case because of the erroneous assumption that religious or mythological knowledge claimed literal truth. If you think that religious texts proclaim a literal old man living in the sky amidst clouds, of course you'll discard that. But the meaning is not literal, it is metaphorical and in the loss of this meaning, life in some sense lost its meaning.
If you believe that life can be reduced to "Newtonian billiards" as Alan Watts called it, and further into meaningless mechanical and mathematical equations, the simple joy of being is under attack. You are more likely to feel as if you were just thrown into this world, in a way alone and isolated, because you do not feel where you come from anymore. Your origin, your history as a child of God, in that sense embedded within the world-process is taken from you, you're on your own. You're in a world that works mechanically and therefore does not care about you and as a result you may feel threatened and further hostile. On the other side however, history teaches us that religion when accompanied by ideology is easily just as detrimental. The scars of Strict-Father Morality and its "You shall not" still run deep in our veins. So, on the one hand you have the loneliness and loss of your metaphysical footing and on the other hand you have the overly restrictive ideological ethos of in our case Abrahamic religion that suffocates with its constraints. Since the figurative death of God however, it seems that the former is more prevalent as of today.
Peterson also spoke about this as the two kinds of hell that await at either the extreme of order or the extreme of chaos. Nietzsche called this the Apollonian and the Dionysian principle, the Daoists called it Yin and Yang and I, as I am a materialist, will call it Breathing and Grounding. These two areas are the two main pillars of Bioenergetics, a body-psychotherapy devised by Dr. Alexander Lowen. He found peoples' minds to be over-charged while their bodies were under-charged and advocated the unity of the organism as a measure of health. The reason why I believe that these terms fit the above paradigm is the following:
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their paradigm-shifting work The Philosophy in the Flesh describe how the mind is fundamentally embodied which means that it is much more suitable to speak of the human organism as a whole as opposed to speaking about the mind and the body separately. Further, because we are organisms, bodily experience is our primary way of relating to the world which leads us to use metaphors grounded in physical experience for knowing the world in terms of language. We say, "This is going too far" which is clearly derived from the physical experience of literally walking too far in a given situation and putting oneself in danger. Therefore, in this model breathing can be equated with the yang principle and grounding with the yin principle. Lowen believed that most people's breathing is impaired by unconscious muscular tension, held as protective armoring in a response to trauma. Breathing is reduced so that the feeling of the body and with that feelings are reduced, because that would bring up the ghosts of the past. By going precisely there and releasing the tears or the anger of the trauma, the person is again free to breathe deeply and feel more alive. This can be experienced as up-lifting and freeing. Lowen also believed that most people are at least partially ungrounded, meaning they do not feel their feet and legs on the ground in a stable way and therefore feel anxious and unsafe. Feeling physically unstable on one's legs, or not really sensing them because of numbness, renders one subconsciously afraid of falling and therefore generally afraid and off balance metaphorically and sometimes also literally. Now these two aspects are certainly intertwined, because rigid breathing musculature will usually coincide with rigid feet and legs, rendering a person impaired in breathing and partially ungrounded. On the one hand however, excessive breathing without the necessary grounding, as e.g. in hyperventilation, can lead to a person to 'take off' and become acutely frightened or in severe cases lost. On the other hand, very little breathing in combination with tightly constricted breathing muscles can lead to a person becoming entrapped by their muscular system and literally becoming depressed. These can be approximated with the two extremes of order and chaos mentioned above.
So with this in mind, let's take a closer look at our metaphysical underpinnings.
The metaphysical underpinnings are what underlies our perspective on life and what can give it a certain meaning. Without something underneath us we lose our footing, become unstable and unable to stand our ground. I'm obviously using strongly metaphoric language here, but bear with me. If the metaphysical belief in God is what 'stands under' us in order to keep us stable and metaphor is derived from bodily experience as mentioned above, what is it that literally 'stands' underneath us, underneath our center of consciousness? Well, the body* which keeps us 'down to earth.'
Going along with this it is no wonder that Lowen describes people exclaiming "Oh God!" upon first coming in touch with their bodies again and getting a glimpse of what is yet to come up. This is metaphorically understood as a descent into darkness, or the shadow-side of things which refers to the unconscious which again resides in the life of the body. So getting in contact with the body is a descent, a going down process of coming back down to earth. Expressed from the other side, dealing with one's underlying issues is a going down process, because we phenomenologically go down into the body again. Here, in going down and reinstating our foundation or underpinnings, we expand our being and come in conctact with God, with what feels like a spiritual experience. Lowen understood this and described it in detail in his book "The Spirituality of the Body." Through the body, through feeling our legs and feet in intimate contact and reliable stability with the earth we find our way home, since home is where the heart is. Maybe, just maybe by way of increasing the sensitivity of the body and going 'down there' we can recover our roots and regain our footing in this world. To sum this up one could say that the metaphysical underpinnings in that sense are the physical underpinnings expressed in a metaphorical way. Maybe finding the balance between the ungrounded lost-without-boundaries and the almost as ungrounded suffocated-with-constraints in today's day and age is to pursue the life of the body. Maybe this is one way of walking the Middle Way as Buddhism is often called, of recovering what in Zen is known as supple flesh and stable bones.
- Jan Fleischer
*This is not to say that we "are only heads", but rather that our uniquely human aspect of thought and aspiring to higher things needs to be balanced by this other aspect.
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