The Irrational Man

As a result of reading first one and then another book on Zen (or Chán) Buddhism, I found that I could not really do so unless I understand a little more about Buddhism in general and Chinese Buddhism in particular and so I extended the scope of my reading accordingly. At the end of two days of such reading, I found that no matter whether it is early Buddhsim, whether it is Hinayana (Theravada) or Mahayana (of which Zen (Chán) Buddhism forms part), whether it is Sanlun (三論宗) or Tiantai (天台宗), whether it is Fayan (華嚴宗) or Linji Chán(臨濟禪宗) or Caodong (曹洞禪宗), they all attempt to deal with the problem of human suffering on a rational basis. Whilst it is possible to do so, those who succeed must remain an extremely small minority because they tend to devote all their energies towards an understanding of the functioning of human mind and human emotions and aim to control human emotions through the human mind by way of constant meditation and ritual practice, not through the empirical study of human pyschology nor of giving vent to them within proper bound.  The Chinese religious experience is thus very different from that in the Christian West which through its peculiar historical development is still largely based on two different traditions: the rational tradition which went back to Plato and another minor esoteric tradition through Gnostic mysticism. But whether in the East or in the West, whether the tradition is religious or secular, they share one thing in common: they all purport to deal with the problems of human existence. So last night, when my eyes roamed upon the cover of a book which I bought a long long time ago, I picked it up again and tried to get another perspective on the problem. The book is William Barrett's The Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1962).

In Part 4 of the book, entitled Integral Vs Rational Man, Barrett drew attention to what I think a fairly important point: the need not to neglect our emotions in our concept of the ideal man. It is chapter 11 of the book under the title "The Place of the Furies". Existentialism, different from traditional philosophy, seeks to bring into philosophy the experience of the whole man, as a concrete individual in the context of everyday life, and not man as merely his brain in the manner of a Descartes or in a slightly different way, a Plato (or in the words of Barrett, of "man as an epistemological subject--as an intellect that registers sense-data, makes propositions, reasons, and seeks the certainty of intellectual knowledge") but "as the man underneath all this, who is born, suffers and dies."  

Barrett thinks that Western philosophy since Descartes has until the rise of Existentialism, been rooted in the values of the age of Reason or Age of Enlightenment and thus has largely ignored the unpleasant aspects of life which are treated, like the Furies, as hostile forces from which we could escape, by conveniently denying that they exist or if their existence is acknowledged, by ignoring or neglecting them as if they did not or if they did not ignore them, they would then try to suppress them, repress them or manipulate them with a view of vanquishing them. He notes that it is by no means an accident that depth or gestalt psychology, came into prominence in the same period as Existentialism: when the unconscious has forced itself upon our attention. But this is not the first time that man is forced to deal with the problems of his irrational emotions. Right at the dawn of modern history, the Greeks have already gone through a similar experience. Clyemnestra killed her husband Agamemnon and Apollo, the masculine god of reason, directed her son Orestes to avenge his father's murder. Orestes killed his father but was immediately set upon by the Furies, the old matriarchal goddesses of the night and of the earth in charge of protecting the blood line for his having committed the most heinous crime imaginable: patricide.  In the last play of Aeschylus' trilogy, Eumenides, the Olympian gods themselves were divided, with Apollo protecting Orestes against the Furies and the jury gathered on top of the Acropolis to decide whether to set Orestes free or to hand him over to the Furies.  At the beginning of the play, the Pythian priestess told the average citizens that the first prophetess or seer among the gods was old Mother Earth herself and it was only later that Apollo came to occupy the temples of the oracles throughout Greece. There was a tie in the votes of the citizens and according to the rule, Orestes was allowed to go.The crucial vote leading to the tie was cast by Athena herself, a female war goddess but the Furies had to be placated by being told that every child born of woman shall be born into their protection. Athena herself was born out of the brain of Zeus and therefore in giving this concession to the Furies, she was acknowledging that they are older and wiser than she. The Furies must be given their just dues and respect. They are the dark side of human life. There are no less holy than Apollo, the god of reason. We may be the children of Apollo but we are no less the children of the Furies.

We may praise and revere our reason, our enlightenment, our rationalism, our science, our technology but we must never forget that we are born of flesh and blood and that we share with the ape 99.99% of our genes. We may fly up to 30,000 above the earth in our huge jumbo jets. Yet, at some point, the jet must land and we must still walk on our two feet, not as we used to do, on fours, upon that same ancient but no less solid, chaotic but life giving earth. Barrett wonders: "how precariously situated these reasonable ideals are ( referring to our ideals of liberalism and rational view of life) in relation to the subterranean forces of life and how small a segment of thw ehole and concrete man they actually represent?"  We must recognize that at the very heart of the light of reason is a darkness, the darkness of our animal nature. To ignore this existential fact may be what he calls "the final error of reason--the point at which it succumbs to its own hubris and passes over into its demoniacal opposite, unreason--to deny that the Furies exist or to strive to manipulate them out of existence. Nothing can be accomplished by denying that man is an essentially troubled being, except to make more trouble." Barrett warns us" "We may, of course, be able to buy off the Furies for a while; much longer than the rational consciousness that would entirely supplant them, and so they can afford to wait. And when they strike, more likely than not, it will be through the offending faculty itself. It is notorious that brilliant people are often most dense about their own human blind spot, precisely because their intelligence, so clever in other things, conceals it from them."

To Barrett, "The conspiracy to forget them or to deny that they exist, thus turns out to be only one more contrivance in that vast and organized effort by modern society to flee from the self."  We must give the Furies their due. If not, we ourselves shall reap the whirlwind!