Freedom from Attribution

We should all always practice abstinence from attribution — that is, from tracing events back to what we take to be their causes. However, abstaining from such attribution is no easy thing to do.

After all, attributions are like food: We can’t do without them. What is more, they are also like sex: No one wants to do without them. Accordingly, the no usage criterion for abstinence — the criterion that applies, for example, to recovered alcoholics who maintain continuing abstinence from alcohol, never consuming it again after they once sober up —  cannot be applied to abstinence from attributions.

In what, then, does the latter sort of abstinence, the sort we should all always practice toward attributions, consist?

It consists in refraining from investing oneself in one’s attributions, whatever they may concern. Put positively, it consists in maintaining neutrality towards all the attributions we make, regardless of their content.

We cannot stop ourselves from making attributions: we make them incessantly. Furthermore, if we made no attributions we would have no science or technology, nor for that matter any art or religion. In fact, without attributions we would not even be able to accomplish daily tasks of the simplest sorts. From infancy, a large part of individual human mental development is the process whereby we first learn to make attributions (to connect things together as cause and effect), and then go on to learn more and more sophisticated strings of attributions. A large part of societal progress also occurs in much the same way. Thus, it would be suicidal of us, both individually and collectively, to attempt simply to stop making attributions, even if we could.

We can’t. All that anyone needs to do to become convinced that we can’t is to try. Even to be able to keep our minds free of attributions for a moment or two is an incredibly difficult task. Devotees of any of the many forms of meditation—from Zen breath counting, to the Hindu use of mantras, to contemporary Christian “Centering Prayer”—may literally practice meditation for years before they can detect any significant diminution of mental attributive activity. Nor does it ever cease altogether, except for relatively brief periods followed by a return to everyday consciousness, which is replete with attributions.

So we cannot completely stop making attributions even if we wanted to, which we don’t. Fortunately, however, we don’t have to.

In order to free ourselves from addiction to attributions we do not have to give them up altogether, any more than the food addict needs to give up eating or the sex addict needs to give up sex. Rather, we must learn to relate to our attributions differently, just as the food addict must learn to relate to food differently, the sex addict to sex differently.

We must learn, in effect, not to care about our attributions. We must learn a healthy, positive indifference toward them. Once we learn such indifference, we can just let our minds go right on attributing in even the wildest ways, since our attributions will have lost their power over us. We will be free in relationship to them, taking them or leaving them alone as the situation requires of us. We will be just like the recovered food addict who is free in relationship to food, having learned how to eat naturally, taking food when hungry and leaving it alone otherwise.

Shunryū Suzuki was a Japanese Zen master teacher (or “Roshi”) who came to the United States in the late 1950s and stayed to found the Zen Center in San Francisco. In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (New York: Weatherhill, 1970), which has become a classic, he tells a parable of how to deal with a sheep or a cow. What he says applies especially to unruly sheep or cattle, we might add. “To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow,” writes Suzuki, “is the way to control him” (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, page 32).  

Shunryū Suzuki

*     *     *

There is nothing new in what Suzuki says. In fact, it is an ancient insight. The same insight is repeated throughout history, in one spiritual tradition after another, with one formulation or another.

So, for example, we can take the case of Taoism, an ancient, indigenous Chinese religion. The central Taoist idea for escaping universal human bondage is to practice the “way” (the meaning of the term tao) of what is called wu-wei. That means “nonaction” or “not-doing.” However, Taoist nonaction is not to be confused with simple Western inaction. Indeed, it is perfectly compatible with a high degree of “action” in the ordinary Western sense. It is not a matter of passivity or quiescence. Rather, it is a matter of not investing oneself in one’s action, and through that investment giving one’s very own action power over oneself.

The same basic idea is familiar, as we have already seen with Suzuki, from Zen Buddhism. In its encounter with Buddhism (brought into China from India), Taoism helped to form Zen; in the latter, too, the practice of “nonaction” is central. If anything, in Buddhism in general, whether Zen or not, the enslaving role of what we are here calling “attributions” receives even greater emphasis than it does in Taoism. According to basic Buddhist doctrine, the three ultimate sources of universal bondage are desire (or attraction), hatred (or aversion), and ignorance. It is nothing but the interplay of those three that gives rise, in fact, to the whole of what is called Samsara, the ever spinning wheel of worldly or phenomenal being. Ultimately, Samsara is nothing but a gigantic illusion created by that interplay—an illusion in which we find ourselves trapped without any apparent way out. If we are ever to escape, we must first come to an experience of “enlightenment” in which we see through the illusion. Then we must practice a rigorous discipline of moment-by-moment “mindfulness” in which we detach from the continuous stream of our experience—that is, in which, once again, we deliberately hold back from investing ourselves in that experience, thereby feeding our desire, hatred, and ignorance. Only in that way can we ever attain liberation.

From Hinduism, the Bhagavat Gita tells the story of the warrior Arjuna and the god Krishna, who has incarnated as Arjuna’s charioteer and servant. Pausing before the beginning of a monumental battle between opposing forces of the same divided family, Arjuna repents of his own profession as a warrior and is struck by a disabling lethargy. In a poetic dialogue Krishna eventually convinces Arjuna that he must go ahead and join the battle, in accordance with his duty as a warrior. He must even be willing to kill and wound beloved members of his own extended family, since that is what the moment requires of him in his station in life. But he must do so with complete detachment, if he is to avoid acquiring any negative karma (inevitable moral consequences, to the agent himself or herself, of any kind of action: a debt that must eventually be paid, if not in this life, then in some subsequent incarnation). He must act as though he were not acting — that is (once again), act without investing himself in his actions through his own attributions. In that way, his actions will attain a purity of motivation, or, more precisely, a purity from motivation. That is, they will be free of the self-centeredness that otherwise sneaks into even the most apparently altruistic actions, introducing a foreign particle into the underlying altruistic intent of the action, a particle that adulterates the whole no less surely than a little bit of vinegar will sour a cup of milk. Only Krishna’s way of completely disinterested action escapes such adulteration—and with it, the karma that would otherwise inevitably accrue.

Especially in the Sufi tradition, Islam contains similar ideas. So does Christianity. With regard to the latter, it is above all in Christian monasticism and mysticism that the necessity of practicing detachment, to use one term for it, is often emphasized.

As codified by St. Basil the Great in his rules for monastic life, by which Eastern Orthodox monasticism is still governed, and by St. Benedict for Western Christianity, the monastic life has been carefully organized constantly to impel monks in the same direction of divesting themselves of their attachments. Whether living in community or in solitude, monks throughout the centuries have striven toward that same goal. From Evagrius of Pontus (345-399 CE), who had a lasting influence on both Latin and Orthodox Christian monastic thought and who borrowed from the Greek Stoics the idea of apatheia or freedom from the passions to Thomas Merton in the 20th century, Christian monks have called for detachment as the way to spiritual perfection.

From Origen to Meister Eckhart, from St. Teresa of Avila to St. Therese of Lisieux, from the anonymous author of the 14th century Cloud of Unknowing to Edith Stein in the 20th, Christian mystics, whether monks or not, have done the same.

We all should follow such paths, choosing whichever tradition is appropriate to us

Meister Eckhardt

NOTE TO READERS: The preceding post is a slightly revised version of a section in the penultimate chapter of my book Addiction and Responsibility—which book may be purchased in the “Store” at the top of this blog site. Also, after this post I am taking my usual holiday break. My next post will not be until Monday, January 13, 2025.

The Repressed Returns in the Trauma of Humanity -- Part Two: Humanity Traumatizing

 Prelude 

   Trauma can — and after a certain point surely will — cause disability. However, we need to be cautious about all of this, because it’s easy to use this information in a way that reinforces the medical model and carceral systems. Trauma is a failure of community — and government — not a problem inside an individual. [. . .]

                              — Katie Tastrom, A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice[1] 

Not only does humanity suffer trauma, but also humanity inflicts trauma. Thus, humanity is always both traumatized and traumatizing. As the first — how humanity traumatizes — was my focus in “Part One” of this combined two-part post,  which went up two weeks ago on October 28 of this year, so my focus in “Part Two,” which I am posting today, will be on the second — how humanity traumatizes.  

Katie Tastrom

 *     *     *

Part Two: Humanity Traumatizing  

The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary gives the following definitions for the noun trauma:

                                                1

a: an injury (such as a wound) to living tissue caused by an extrinsic agent

b: a disordered psychic or behavioral state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress or physical injury

c: an emotional upset

2

an agent, force, or mechanism that causes trauma

In turn, the Online Etymology Dictionary tells us this about the origin of that same word:

trauma (n.): 1690s, “physical wound,” medical Latin, from Greek trauma “a wound, a hurt; a defeat,” from PIE *trau-, extended form of root *tere (1) “to rub, turn,” with derivatives referring to twisting, piercing, etc. Sense of “psychic wound, unpleasant experience which causes abnormal stress” is from 1894.

The impending ecological catastrophe bears witness to how extensively humanity has been and continues to be an appallingly destructive force rubbing nature raw and turning it into a wasteland. We, humanity as a whole, are a destructive force attacking nature, inflicting deep wounds upon it from which—here on earth, at the very least—it is unlikely ever fully to recover.

Humanity has inflicted deep and destructive “injury” upon the “living tissue” of vast numbers of organisms that grow in nature. Think, for example, of the systematic and intentional “de-forestation” of vast stretches of the earth’s surface that for millennia provided rich soil for the roots of trees and plants to sink themselves deep and grow strong and tall. Vast forests have all around the globe been replaced by cities, highways, grazing lands, and cultivated millions of acres to be worked over to exhaustion by agricultural combines in pursuit of never-sufficient monetary profits for a small percentage of the human population.

Of course, wars are just another instance of trauma that humanity causes. In the case of wars, however, it is not just some “other,” such as plants and animals of varied species, that is traumatized. Rather, it is also human beings themselves. The bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, for example, did not just kill off plants and non-human animals, but also masses of human beings themselves.

As Katie Tastrom suggests in the lines I cited above at the very beginning of my “Prologue” to today’s post, humanity today also inflicts trauma upon itself by way of the entire consumer corporate system itself causing and ceaselessly expanding what she calls “disablement,” by which she means the way in which segments of the population are split off and “othered”—most especially by way of being placed, one way or another, in one or another form of prison, whether that be in the form of jails or in some other form, including that form constituted by public schools, placed in such prisons by the coercive power (as I call it) that defines itself precisely in such “othering.”

That combined devastation variously wrought on itself as well as on other beings such as plants and non-human animals is one major way in which ”the trauma of humanity” is the trauma that humanity itself is. It is  one way in which humanity is not only itself subject to trauma, but also engenders massive trauma, thereby itself constituting the greatest conceivable “agent, force, or mechanism that causes trauma,” to hearken back to the dictionary’s second major sense of the word trauma: one way in which “we,” humanity, not only undergo trauma, but also inflict it.     

*     *     *

Psychoanalysis, I would suggest, can […] thus help us to think, and perhaps witness, a new kind of event that is constituted, paradoxically, by the way it disappears.

                — Cathy Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History[2]

People’s capacity to speak, Freud was to find, depended on their childhood experience (people grow into their past, Freud realized, more than they grow out of it).

      — Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst[3]                                          

The Tower-Keeper: [. . .] Everywhere we must continually turn back to where we always already are.

      — Heidegger, “The Teacher Meets the Tower-Keeper at the Tower-Rise Door”[4]

Until and unless we are brought to face ourselves, we, both collectively and individually, will continue to be not only traumatiz-ed but also traumatiz-ing.

Please do all you can to face that fact!

Cathy Catch

[1] Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2024, p. 180.

[2] Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, p. 77.

[3] New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014, p. 29.

[4] In Gesamtausgabe 77: Feldweg-Gespräche (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), p. 176, in my own freely interpretive translation (the italics are in the original German text).

The Repressed Returns in the Trauma of Humanity -- Part One: Humanity Traumatized

Prelude to This Two-Part Post 

            We could understand the entire theory of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle not simply as the explanation of trauma from the distance of theoretical speculation but as the passage of the story of the child in a theoretical act of transformation. For what is the story of the mind’s attempt to master the event retrospectively if not the story of a failed return: the attempt, and failure, of the mind to return to the moment of the event? The theory of repetition compulsion as the unexpected encounter with an event that the mind misses and then repeatedly attempts to grasp is the story of a failure of the mind to return to an experience it has never quite grasped, the repetition or an originary departure from the moment that constitutes the very experience of trauma. And this story appears again as the beginning of life in the death drive, as life’s attempt to return to inanimate matter that ultimately fails and departs into a human history. Freud’s own theory, then, does not simply describe the death drive and its enigmatic move to the drive for life but enacts this drive for life as the very language of the child that encounters, and attempts [in the “fort-da” (”gone-returned”) game, as Freud dubs it] to grasp, the catastrophes of a traumatic history. 

             — Cathy Caruth, “Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival,” 

In reading those words from Cathy Caruth’s opening chapter of her book Literature and the Ashes of History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) I myself experienced the return of a call of thought that I had not managed to grasp with any clarity before that moment. This two-part post will eventually explain that experience, at least to those given ears to hear.

My purpose in writing this two-part post is the same in spirit as the purpose Adam Phillips attributes to psychoanalysts in general and Freud in particular in the following passage from Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014, pp. 7-8):

The psychoanalyst is a historian who shows us that our histories are also the way we conceal the past from ourselves[,] the way we both acknowledge it and disavow it at the same time (to disavow it is, one way or another, to simplify it; to acknowledge it is to allow complication). After “the great Darwin,” as Freud called him, another of Freud’s heroes, we are creatures of an appetite to survive and reproduce; and because we are desiring creatures in an uncomfortable world we are, like all animals, endangered by our desire and therefore self-protective. But unlike other animals, who because they have no language have no cultural history, we also feel endangered by our histories. There is nothing we want to protect ourselves more from, in Freud’s view, than our personal and family histories. For many people the past had become a phobic object, concealed in sentimental nostalgia and myths of race and national history. Through psychoanalysis — which was clearly a response to these increasingly insistent contemporary questions — Freud tried to work out the ways in which we are unduly self-protective; the senses in which modern people suffer from their self-protectiveness.

*     *     *

The phrase “the trauma of humanity,” which makes up the second half of my title for this two-part blog post, can be understood in two different ways, depending on how one takes the preposition of. One can take “of” in the phrase at issue to mean “happening to or befalling” but one can also take it to mean “which is.”

Taken in the first way, the phrase “the trauma of humanity” would mean the trauma which befalls humanity, within which phenomenon would be included such symptomatic out-breaks of what humanity has repressed as last century’s two World Wars or this century’s current war in Gaza. That is how I will take my title “The Repressed Returns in the Trauma of Humanity’ in “Part One,” today’s first part of my two-part post.

Thus, in today’s post following this three-part “Prologue” (such repetition being appropriate, given the content of the unified whole of both parts plus this prologue) I will take that phrase to mean the symptomatic return belonging to the repressed trauma that strikes collective humanity as such. That symptomatic return has been striking humanity over the ages, occurring in such events the 30-Years War, to add a third example to the two I’ve already given — of the World Wars and the war in Gaza. At issue is the trauma which repeatedly besets humanity, in all such symptomatic recurrences.

Battle of the Somme, which took place July-November 1916, during World War I

*     *     *

Then in “Part Two” of this two-part post — the part I will put up in two weeks, on November 11 of this year — I will address, not the trauma that recurrently besets humanity, but the trauma that humanity itself is.

Toward the close of that second part of this two-part post, I will consider how the two, humanity traumatized, and humanity traumatizing fit together in one whole.  

*     *     *

Part One: Humanity Traumatized

Trauma compulsively repeats itself, as Freud taught. It continues compulsively to repeat itself until it is finally faced as the trauma it is, that is, until the repression that is the flip-side of the coin of trauma, is brought to a close, and the traumatic event is at last acknowledged as the trauma it is.

Indeed, to bring the one traumatized finally to face and acknowledge that one’s trauma is the very thing at which such repetition aims. As I wrote myself at one point in “Civilization, Empire, and the Holy,” a short essay of mine published a few years ago in After Empire, the 2020 edition of A Beautiful Resistance, the annual journal of Gods & Radicals Press (Salem, Oregon: p. 103), “the last compulsive repetition of a trauma is the one that finally brings the whole traumatic series of repetitions to its goal, so that at last the traumatized can cease compulsively avoiding the trauma, and, in finally facing it, recover health and wholeness (to be redundant, since those two words, heard to their roots, say the same).”

Such repetitions of trauma constitute, as it were, “after-shocks” of the original shock of trauma, as I put the matter in my own 2020 book The Irrelevance of Power (available in the “Bookstore” at the top of this blog-site). Those after-shocks of repetition will continue to occur until the one traumatized at last stops repressing the memory of being shocked in the first place by the original traumatic occurrence.

In short, trauma always returns.

Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States at the end of World War II in August 1944

*     *     *

                        Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. 

                                                       --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Perhaps the gods have long been out to destroy us. Perhaps it is for that purpose that they sent us empire, in order to drive us mad first.

Seen in that light, empire, along with the civilization to which it belongs, appears as our collective historical insanity—humanity gone mad. In turn, seen in the same light, that madness itself is sent in order to set us up for ultimate destruction. It is sent to lead us eventually to the Apocalypse, in at least one meaning of that term, according to which it signifies a world- and time-ending catastrophe. 

Other lights than Longfellow’s can be cast, however.

Seen in one such alternative light, empire still appears as madness, but the ultimate purpose of that madness is no longer to prepare us for destruction. Its ultimate purpose is, instead, to bring us to salvation.

Seen in that different light, empire still appears as our collective historical insanity. Yet now it appears as an insanity, a madness, sent us—or, rather, into which we have been sent—in order to bring us eventually, at the end of a long an arduous journey along a meandering path that often ends in thickets and requires us to retrace our steps, back home again to true and final sanity. Perhaps our insanity is ultimately sent us by the gods so that we can at last, after such a long journey, come back again to the very same place where we began, only to know it now for the very first time (to adapt a line from T. S. Eliot).

That is how I begin my essay “Civilization, Empire, and the Holy,” already cited above. In the above passage I am addressing the trauma upon collective humanity that has kept on compulsively repeating itself for millennia in the forms of war, conquest, genocide, racism, and all the other disasters that have struck “the human race,” to borrow the English translation of the French title Robert Antelme gave his account of being arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau — a book still very much worth reading with care, by anyone who cares at all about anything at all worth caring about.

In the above passage from my own essay I am suggesting that the first bead, as it were, on the long string of beads making up by all the long and still ongoing history of repetitions in the form of wars and the rest — I am suggesting that the bead that begins that so far unending string of beads is the emergence of “civilization” itself, that very form of human gathering that took place in what are called cities, a word that derives from the Latin civitas, to give that Latin term its nominative form.

*     *     *

All of that certainly is worth serious thought, at any rate.

A child caught in the Gaza Strip War in October 1923

The Choice to Choose

Authentic reality only becomes visible when one is finally left with no other choice but to choose, at last and for the very first time, truly to have a choice. That is the point of breakdown of all duplicity, most especially duplicity toward oneself, not just to others.

Only when one finally arrives at such a crossroads — such a turning point, such a jumping off place — where one is truly faced for the first time ever with genuinely and fully making the choice to choose, and not just to remain the plaything of all the forces that try to force one to go one way or another, does one at last find true freedom.

Søren Kierkegaard saw and said that very thing in the 19th century.  Then in the 20th century, heeding the call he heard Kierkegaard to follow him down the same path of thought, Martin Heidegger said the same. Early in the 20th century, Alain Badiou followed that same call down that same path.

In a lecture Badiou gave to, and at the request of, a psychoanalytic society in Mexico in March of 2006, he characterizes Kierkegaard’s own thought-path as follows — in my own quite freely chosen translation of some lines in French from that lecture, the fourth, last, and shortest of four Voyages mentaux philosophique, “mental philosophical journeys,”   published just last year (2023) in France by Éditions Stilus:  

For Kierkegaard […] the essence of choice is the choice to choose, not the choice of this or of that. [. . .] Simply put, one can be brought to the crossroads in such as way that there will be no other way out for one except one choice. So one will make the right choice.

Alain Badiou

*     *     * 

At one point in The Irrelevance of Power (San Jose, CA: Juxtapositions Publishing, 2020, p. 183) — which is available to buy through the “Shop” at the top of this blog site — I wrote the following:  

            Whatever the expectations others may lay upon us, we all have a natural tendency, to which we are ourselves mostly blind, to fulfill those expectations. Drawing upon this tendency, expectation itself tends to engender the very thing it expects.

            We have a tendency to try to live up to whatever high expectations of us we experience others as having, but we have no less of a tendency to try to live down to whatever low expectation we experience them as having of us as well.

None of us can arrive at the “crossroads” to which Badiou refers in the quotation from him with which I end the preceding section of this post unless we cease to be blind to the very “tendency” to which I myself refer in the above lines, the tendency we all have to fulfill what we experience as the expectations “others” place upon us. We can only arrive at such a turning point, such a jumping off place, where we are at last faced with having to choose at last to choose, or else just continuing on as we remain lost not only to one another, but to ourselves.

In the same book a few pages later (on p. 217), I address what we need to do when we arrive at such an existential turning point:

Then we just have to make the choice that we have been at that moment given to make — and then to repeat that choice, which is really our choice to keep on having a choice. If we do not continue repeating that choice moment by moment thereafter, then we immediately lose it again, and return our will to its chains.

* * *

What is the right choice to make in a given situation?

Well, in any in any and every conceivable situation, to make the choice to choose is always, without any exception, to make the right choice. Only by making that choice do we set off along the path down which all free beings are called to walk.