We’re brought up topsy-turvy… Art before life; Romeo and Juliet and filthy stores before marriage or its equivalents. Hence all the young modern literature is disillusioned… [W]ith a complete knowledge of the real thing and just where and how it was unpoetical, [poets] deliberately set to work to idealize and beautify it. We start with the poetical and proceed to the unpoetical.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British writer and intellectual, known for Brave New World. This quote comes from his other novel, Point Counter Point, pp. 338-9.
Month: September 2019
Mumford on Scientific Time
The conception of time as the flux of organic continuity, experienced as duration, as memory, as recorded history, as potentiality and prospective achievement, stands in frontal opposition to the mechanistic notion of time simply as a function of the motion of bodies in space—along with its spurious imperative of “saving time” by accelerating motion, and of making such acceleration in every possible department the highest triumph of the power complex.
Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), American sociologist, author of The Pentagon of Power. Quote taken from page 391.
Understanding 9/11
I was born after 2001, so I did not get to experience 9/11. Unlike so many Americans, I cannot recall what I was doing at the moment. But I know what happened. My schoolmates and I have learned over the years.
On September 1st, 2001, a Tuesday, at 8:45 a.m., a hijacked plane struck one of the Twin Towers in New York City, setting it ablaze. About a quarter of an hour later, another one flew into the second tower. An agonizing hour passed before the World Trade Center dramatically collapsed. During that time, two other planes had crashed, one into the Pentagon in Virginia, the other in Pennsylvania, having been taken over by the passengers who fought against the terrorists onboard, sacrificing themselves, thereby saving many lives. In the end, almost 3,000 people lost their lives. The Twin Towers, located in southern Manhattan, with 110 stories, were engulfed in flames, causing some to desperately throw themselves out the building in an attempt to escape, while emergency responders, including firefighters and police, tried their best to rescue people still inside, aided by strangers on the street who, despite their fear and confusion, ran in to help, successfully leading out around 12,000 people, people whose lives, had anything been different, would have surely been lost as well. Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration was in a flurry, ordering all planes to land to prevent further attacks. The FBI was also engaged in this process. The attacks were attributed to al-Qaeda, a terrorist organization in the Middle East, which had been 
harassing the U.S. since the 1990s, meaning this was not their first offense, and which was headed by Osama bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist who had contacts with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Without delay, the Bush administration declared its infamous “War on Terror,” creating the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, whose weight we still feel today. We thus got ourselves tangled up in some unwise wars in the Middle East. The events of 9/11 inspired patriotism: American flags were raised all around the world, monuments were erected, memories were shared, and slogans and anthems like “United We Stand” were everywhere. From the crisis, we emerged with solidarity—one nation, indivisible.
I know what happened on 9/11…
But just because I know what happened, does not mean I understand what happened—and for a long time, I did not understand what had happened that fateful day.
See, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) believed that, when it came to history, you had to study it differently than you studied science, the two disciplines being polar opposites. In science, you study the laws of nature, deducing patterns from the observable world, which is taken to be fixed and unchanging, replicable, reliable. It is the study of atoms—literally and figuratively, in the sense of studying inert things. However, history looks at humans and how they interact with one another, forming societies and so on. Unlike the subjects of science, humans are immensely complex; they are variables that can never quite be understood, so diverse and multi-sided are they. It is true that the human body is physical and therefore affected by laws, yet humans are much more than their bodies, possessing freedom, consciousness, feelings—all things that cannot be reduced to mechanisms. Weber reacted against the scientific approach of his day, positivism, which studied only observable facts. What was needed, was an account of the unobservable, the interior of man. To capture this, Weber used a concept called verstehen, a German word translated as “understanding.” The term did not originate with Weber; two other Germans, Johann Droysen the historian and Wilhelm Dilthey the philosopher, used it in their works, and it is the latter, Dilthey, whose use of verstehen was most similar: Dilthey applied hermeneutics, the interpretation of written works, a recent development in the 1800s, to history, studying it as would a student reading a piece of literature today, looking for the 
“deeper meaning” behind it, trying to determine the author’s intent in writing this way and not some other. This type of analysis was his vision of verstehen, understanding. Hence, to understand something is to see it from the author’s—or agent’s—perspective, getting at their “why.” For Dilthey, then, history was a subjective discipline, one that relied on the historian’s feelings, which he introjected into the historical subjects. But Weber was no philosopher; above all, Weber remained a scientist, albeit one who studied society—a sociologist. Accordingly, Weber insisted that understanding was a scientific tool. Verstehen was more than just subjective, arbitrary judgments made by the historian; instead, it is built on research, usually comparative, drawing upon historical sources, putting them together, and extrapolating from them a theoretical perspective, a sort of framework through which to interpret the historical event. For example, to understand why someone did something, you must first know about the age in which they were living, as this shapes what they think and feel; then, you can look at their action on its own, and interpret its motive. 
This is the hermeneutic circle, where an interpreter looks at the whole and its parts in reference to each other. In this way, Weber’s theory of verstehen was both individual and collective, micro and macro, working on the level of a single person alongside the culture they inhabited with others. It involves empathizing (Einfühlung) and living-back (Nacherleben), what we might call “reconstructing the past.” Weber did not stop there, as Dilthey had, but qualified verstehen further in the scientific direction by seeing it as a means of arriving at causality. By understanding an agent’s actions, we can learn about cause and effect. Weber, through his method of verstehen, offers us a new and, in my opinion, more immersive, comprehensive way of studying—and, more importantly, relating to—history.
Today in my psychology class, we were looking at flashbulb memories, particularly strong recollections formed during important events in our lives that we keep long-term. An impactful event like 9/11, for example, strikes us so powerfully, eliciting robust emotions, that the amygdala, which is the part of the brain responsible for registering a lot of our emotional responses, focuses on the stimulus, fixing it into our memories, and attaching to it whatever emotions we were feeling, giving it its significance, its ability, upon recall, to evoke the exact feeling we had at the time, as if we were reliving it. My teacher had us watch this video. It is about the great “boatlift of 9/11,” an operation in which all the boats of New York, piloted by everyday people, rushed to the scene and helped evacuate half a million people off the island of Manhattan in a few hours. It is a typical video you would see in school, or if you are bored while searching through YouTube and are interested in a little-known part of September 11. A lot of my classmates treated it as such, much like I did at the beginning. Just another 9/11 video. But this video, this specific video, more than any other I had watched, impacted me. More than any other video, this one made me understand September 11. During the video, I could feel myself tearing up, 
my heart sinking as I listened to the urgency in the peoples’ voices, their sense of duty, their courage that seemed to issue spontaneously, urged forth by their consciences, their love of their fellow man, and the images of people running through the streets, disoriented, terrified, covered in dust and ash, crowding at the harbors, huddled together, no longer differentiated by class or race or sex, but united, helping one another, all of them moved not just by self-preservation, but altruism—a truly beautiful, awesome, and uplifting scene. Questions were racing through my mind, I was enraptured, I could feel what they felt, I wanted to do something, I was rooting for them. Until today, I had never understood what this day meant. Because it does not matter if you know what happened on this day. Year after year, teacher after teacher, we were told how traumatic, how critical, how scary that day was, how it was ingrained in their memories. We watched video after video showing the towers as they fell, the fire and smoke rising up. But none of that helped us to understand what happened. They could have given us all the facts, every single one, from the number of casualties to the weather to the names of the victims. It would not matter. In psychology, there is a thing called “psychic numbing.” This is what happens when we are confronted with large numbers, numbers that are supposed to be significant because, behind them, there are people. We read that almost 3,000 people 
died. 3,000—what does that look like? We hardly know 100 people, so how are we supposed to imagine 3,000? Who were these people? If they were just ordinary people, and if we do not know them, then why should it matter? Psychic numbing causes indifference, insensitivity. Not because we are heartless, but because certain stimuli, such as numbers, are too much to comprehend; they defy understanding. A similar phenomenon, the so-called “identifiable victim effect,” refers to our willingness to empathize with a singular person rather than a collective. When we come to know someone, when we connect to them, feel some sort of intimacy with them, when they “let us in,” we are more likely to react to the misfortune that befalls them. Some random stranger on the street affects me in no way; his fate is negligible. But a best friend, a parent, a relative—they mean something to me. I care about what happens to them. 3,000 people—what are they to me? It is but a wisp, a cloud, that number, 3,000. What does it signify?
Of course, back in Weber’s time, immersive interpretation was much more difficult to achieve. In the 1800s, scholars’ only primary sources were written records, accounts written by the people who experienced something and happened to write it down. They were lucky such records existed. Today, it is much easier. Not only do we have written sources like journal entries, but we have newspapers in the public domain, accessible through the Internet; live video footage from all kinds of perspectives; countless photographs taken; interviews with people who lived through it. It is one thing to read about what happened, another to see, another to hear, and yet another altogether to have them all. We are fortunate enough to have such a comprehensive account of September 11. We students get to watch what happened as it happened, to hear the voices as they spoke that day. What a wondrous thing! To hear the despair, the hurt, the pride in those voices, trembling, weak, unreplicable. It is the real thing. To understand what happened this day 11 years ago, to engage in verstehen, is to discover the very experience of 9/11. To live it. Verstehen is empathetic. As understanding, it is “insight,” literally seeing-into the past, living through it, standing in others’ shoes, invoking the subjective qualia of the event—its sounds, smells, colors, tastes, etc. Weber’s method was, in Bendix’s words, “a kind of ‘existential psychology,’”¹ that is, a phenomenology, a study of experience, of intentional consciousness. Understanding is grasping the intentions and motives of a person in history. Because of that video in psych, I could finally understand the importance of this 
day, something no teacher or textbook can teach. It is not enough merely to know what occurred. Sitting there, looking up at the screen, I found myself moved; it was an internal movement, effected through my interpretation of the video, my insight into the past. Weber, when he conducted his studies, would make “judgments involv[ing] an intuitive grasp of what certain conditions of existence impl[ied]” and “combine such judgments with a comparative historical check on this validity,”² wrote Bendix. That is, Weber looked at the context of an event, its historical circumstances, what was going on at the time, and from there inferred the motives of historical agents, trying to see as they saw, feel as they felt, live as they lived, experience as they experienced, backed up by evidence, so as not to fall victim to idle speculation, freely made-up assumptions on his part. Why were the New Yorkers trying to get off the island? I tried to imagine myself as a New Yorker, minding my own business on a seemingly regular Tuesday, just going about my day. I imagined how bizarre it was to see a plane flying so low, as if it were not supposed to be there, heading straight toward the North Tower, only for it to, a few seconds later, collide with it, shaking the city. I imagined my incredulity, how it would make me drop my suitcase and stare up in awe, speechless, unable to express myself. I imagined the dread, the fear, clutching me—what was happening? What was going on? 
Because “most of the people thought that the first crash was a bizarre accident.” And then I imagined watching the second plane hit the South Tower, for “[t]hen came the second crash, and everyone knew that America was under attack… The first emotion was disbelief and even denial. Then came shock and horror.”³ I imagined the exact fear that I would have felt, a mixture of anxiety and paranoia, resulting in uncertainty, panic. How was I to know whether there was more? There was no way to know if this was the end of the attack. What else was coming? I had to get out of there ASAP. For many, boats became the best bet. But did they really just flee the island like that? Sure, for who had the time to do anything else? When the whole world was collapsing around you, who had time to remember if they locked the door to their home, if they left their favorite coffee mug in their cubicle? None of that mattered. What mattered, I imagined, was getting out of there alive—then, when it was over, I could restart. Losing a pair of shoes, a car, a home—that is something with which one can cope. But to lose one’s life? 
Until watching that video, I knew how much patriotism meant, but I did not understand. To see the flag waving atop a flag pole, or painted across a home; to sit beside a stranger on a boat as you drove away from the place you called home, not knowing how long you would be away, not knowing what came next, sharing memories with someone you would never notice and acknowledging their humanity; visiting a memorial and seeing all the names; running into a burning building despite the risks, putting your life on the line so as to save someone else—I now understood these things. I imagined what it felt like to live in fear. To live in uncertainty. To worry over my civil liberties, and how many I got to keep. These were ordinary people, after all. “Not all heroes wear capes,” we are fond of saying. Today, I understood that.
I experienced something I had never experienced before today. For once, I finally felt the importance of 9/11. This occurrence that happened before I was born, nearly two decades ago, something historical—I understood it. I could empathize with the people who had been there. I understood how terrifying it was, how indelible its influence was. It did not matter how much I knew about the day, which is all I had ever been taught. What mattered most, was experiencing the day, interpreting it. Of course, it is impossible for me to literally experience September 11, 2001, because I was not in existence then. And yet, I understood it. To confine 9/11 to a textbook or a classroom lecture is exactly that against which Weber protested about a century ago. He did not see history as something dead, but something very much alive, something that we had to live in order 
to understand; history is about empathizing, for it requires us to think as others did, that we may gain insight into why they did what they did, why they felt the way they felt. It is only by comparing such records, listening to first-person reports and seeing it through our own eyes, that we can understand history. As an American, the legacy of 9/11 should matter to me. Obviously, on a shallow level, it had for much of my life. But now, having understood it, having gotten past merely knowing it as a scientist knows the atomic mass of oxygen, I can intuit its significance, what it means to be an American, to live with freedom, liberty, and dignity. From today on, I will Never Forget.
¹ Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait, p. 270
² Id., pp. 271-2
³ Fischer, Liberty and Freedom, p. 707
Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDOrzF7B2Kg
America: A Narrative History 8th ed. by George Brown Tindall (2010)
Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait by Reinhard Bendix (1977)
Masters of Sociological Thought by Lewis A. Coser (1971)
Liberty, Equality, Power6th ed. by John M. Murrin (2012)
Freedom and Liberty by David Hackett Fischer (2005)
Sociological Theory 5th ed. by George Ritzer (2000)
“The Mango”: A Poem Analysis
The poem “The Mango,” by Mary Oliver, examines the complex problems associated with the seemingly innocent experience of eating fruit, over which the hidden consequences are glossed. By highlighting the privileged and underprivileged, and by drawing attention to the blatant disparity between the two through contrast and tone, Oliver reflects on the moral ambiguity of an otherwise ordinary occurrence. As a result, she gains a new awareness, which causes her to reconsider her situation.
Oliver uses comparison in order to comment upon the injustice of her eating a mango. Beginning as a regular narrative, the poem takes a turn midway through as she begins eating a mango when, all of sudden, “things happen,” and the author finds herself transported to an entirely different scene from that in which the poem begins. In stark contrast to the “rich” and “clever” “house,” Oliver paints a gritty picture, one in which there is “death,” with “children… work[ing] in the fields,” along with “guns.” Thus, she sets up a comparison between an environment that is wealthy and luxurious as juxtaposed to a more violent, realistic one; where one group of people is enjoying themselves without care, another toiling away, unable to appreciate the fruits of their own labor. In the house, the author and her companions are sitting down at a table, eating a nice meal in blissful ignorance, whereas in another part of the world, a place totally outside of their concern, there are inhumane conditions going on, conditions that 
are utterly foreign to them. This difference is made more clear when Oliver writes of “torn-out tongues / embedded in the honeyed centers.” Her description of the mangoes can be interpreted as a metaphor for her circumstances at large: Within the sweet, pleasant exterior of the kitchen, there lies a sinister, unpleasant truth in the interior. Just as the mango’s structure demonstrates deception, so the author’s dining demonstrates deception. Unbeknownst to the guests, they are eating something whose value they do not know, taking it for granted. Through her use of contrast, Oliver questions her actions, bringing focus to what she has, versus what others do not.
Throughout the poem, the author criticizes, or at least wonders about, how she and others live their lives, and how her way of living is unconscientious. The scene of the poem is telling, as it is a dinner party, a social gathering where lots of talk is happening between people, talk about “family news” and “where to travel” and “where to buy… anything”—casual small talk, as is customary. Oliver is accustomed to this convention, yet she seems to reevaluate it when she snaps back to reality, having come out of her mental trip to “another country.” Her statement, “They were talking amongst themselves —,” does not follow the preceding line, relating to the mangoes, showing this interruption, this grounding back into reality. Having thought about where the mangoes came from, how people elsewhere live, Oliver sees her own life through a new lens, evident by her listing of the small talk, with its repetition of the “w” sound, especially in the word “where”; this repetition not only suggests that she is tired of hearing it, but also “w” has the effect of drawing out sound, making it longer, creating the sensation of weariness, heaviness, drag. Her writing here appears to be judgmental, her way of expressing annoyance at her friends’ triviality, their obsession with “brandy,” travelling, and consumer objects—empty, materialistic things, a departure 
from “the mango, / a sharp gravel in the flesh,” which is a harsh, painful image, invoking outrage and irritation. It is as if she is mad that there is talk of such petty things; meanwhile, children are “in the fields.” These people live “the way they always do”—a phrase getting at the everyday, the routine, the bland—which is unlike the mango, described as “cubist,” referencing the perspectival approach of painters like Picasso, who tried to show a scene from multiple perspectives, not just one; Oliver is saying that the mango shows her the complexities of life, whereas her friends merely talk about their own lives, neglecting other matters. At the end of the night, she writes that she and her friends “said goodbye / and kissed, on the black lawn, like strangers.” This last line, separated by a stanza break, a deviation from the rest of the poem, is abrupt and seems out of place, almost blunt, as though Oliver, fed up with her comfortable life, feels she no longer knows these people, who have become “like strangers” to her, so divorced are they from reality, uncritical and self-centered. Using tone and diction, Oliver issues a critique of her and her friends’ easy, carefree, and unassuming lives.
In conclusion, Oliver’s “The Mango” closely analyzes the eating of a mango, showing how it is a sort of betrayal, a morally questionable event. In imagining what work went into providing her dinner, and in seeing how divergent it is from her own way of living, Oliver arrives at a condemnation of everyday life, where people do things unthinkingly, not considering the trouble and effort put into making life possible in the first place.
Why Is It So Hard to Wake Up in the Morning?
You know the feeling: The alarm goes off. It is the first day of school or work. Dread. People to encounter, attention to be paid, work to be done… One more minute. Actually, how about one more day? Better yet—a week, a month. Or best of all: Never. I never want to leave my bed. So far, I have completed two weeks of school, and am about to finish my third, so the feeling is fresh. Adjusting to one’s new sleep schedule is never easy. While I am pretty good about waking up, I know a lot of my friends and classmates who struggle to get out of their beds every morning, setting up multiple alarms at different intervals, knowing that a single one is not enough to get them moving. This is not to say I have not had mornings when I have not wanted to get out of bed—we have all had them, whether they be every day, or just every now and then.
The fact of the matter is, waking up tends to suck. As soon as we 
hear that chime, we want to pull up our sheets and cover ourselves, as if it would deafen reality, as if it would protect us from the outside world, so warm and comfy, like a cocoon in which we are safe. Why can it not always be this way? Life, we can imagine, would be so much easier like this. And yet, despite our reluctance, we always somehow end up going about our days, only for the cycle to repeat. Being so universal a problem, the struggle of waking up must surely have some deeper significance beyond being comfortable and warm. Indeed, beyond creature comfort, it is an existential problem. So why is it so hard to wake up in the morning? Why do we hate getting out of bed?
In a letter to his friend Lucilius, the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger, writing on the topic of having to endure sickness, confessed that he did not want to die because his dad would suffer as a result, “And so I commanded myself to live. For sometimes it is an act of bravery even to live” (Letters, LXXVIII, 78). If we were to swap in “wake up” for “live,” then I think we could all relate: “For sometimes it is an act of bravery even to wake up.” Do we not all feel like heroes to some extent each time we step out of bed? With a sigh, we throw off the sheets, stand on our own two feet, not totally prepared to face the world, but forced to do so out of necessity. We are each like a knight who is called upon for his service, hesitant but bound by obligation, anxious but inspired by a sense of duty. 
Waking up, voluntarily getting ourselves ready—this is an awesome responsibility that rests upon our shoulders, so it is only fitting that we should see it an “act of bravery.” It calls to mind Joseph Campbell’s classic hero’s journey in that we, the protagonists, must forgo the safety and comfort of our familiar worlds—the bed—in order to venture out into the vast, dangerous unknown, the unpredictable expanse we call Life, where we must overcome obstacles and challenges that will push us and, at certain points, break us, making us want to pack up our bags, call it quits, and go home; for we are too discouraged to continue on, more enticed by the prospect of being in our beds than by the vague reward that lies just beyond the horizon, the value of which we can never really make out, causing us to question what we are doing in the first place and whether it is really worth it. By this, I mean that there are some days when we stop and think about the meaning of everything: Toward what am I working? Is there a goal I have in mind? Why do I get out of bed in the morning? It is enough to make us shrivel up in fear, coiled like a worm, so that we never want to leave our rooms again. Bravery is acting in the face of fear. To wake up, to face the world in its entirety, then, certainly requires bravery, valiance, courage.
Otto Rank (1884-1939) was a psychoanalyst who studied under Sigmund Freud, but he, like another of Freud’s students, Carl Jung, broke off from his teacher, believing Freud’s emphasis on sexuality to be mistaken, leading him to fashion his own theory of psychodynamics based on the unconscious instincts developed in response to the painfully disorienting experience of birth, a response he classified as “birth trauma.” In essence, Rank agreed with Freud that man’s condition is shaped by his childhood; however, he proposed that this shaping of later life stems from birth trauma, the separation that occurs between the infant and its mother, a separation that will haunt it for the rest of its life, setting up the key struggle with which it will have to cope until death—namely, the battle between separation and union. We are all in trouble the instant we come into this world, in other words, as that is the problem itself, that is where it all begins. Just about everything comes down to life-or-death… not literally, though. Rank was not actually that dramatic. Instead, he meant that our lives are dominated by the symbolism of life-or-death; this life-death dualism is an ontological condition because it relates to our very being, giving it a primordial, or original (it is there from the beginning), character. Let us explore this deeper.
We are humans, we are living organisms, and as living, we want to keep on living, because life—the fact of being alive—is good, and nobody wants to die. Since we are here already, we might as well continue in self-preservation. This is our natural instinct. At the moment of birth, when we emerge from the womb, we lose our means of support in the mother. 
While in the womb, we are fed, protected, and given warmth. What was there not to like? It was like living in the Garden of Eden: Peaceful, perfect. Our beds remind us of paradise, a place to which we can retreat when we are tired or sad, a safe haven, a sanctuary. In our beds, we feel nothing can harm us. Our beds are private places, highly personal to us. But then, we got expelled from the Garden and into the ugliness of reality, forced to fend for ourselves as helpless babies. A dramatic change. From then on, and as we grow up, we are on our own, expected to create ourselves. This is seen clearly in the transition from being a teenager to an adult, when we have to support ourselves financially with a job, find a home, and supply ourselves with what we need. As such, we all have a life instinct, a deep inner drive to advance, to grow, to develop. But at the same time, growth can be scary. Being on one’s own requires that one leave behind one’s only source of security in “moving on.” Young adults are excited to leave home, yet they are also hesitant to do so. We are fundamentally ambivalent. We are always torn. So life pushes us to separate (fear) and simultaneously clings to union (instinct).
Meanwhile, we also have to deal with death’s symbolism. Having come out of the womb, having forfeited our self-contained existence, it is only reasonable that we should want to go back. We would have to be crazy to prefer the difficulties of life to the wonderfulness of the womb. 
Accordingly, we can see the bed as a symbol for the womb: The bed with its blankets gives us warmth, and we love to wrap ourselves up in it, nice and tight, often in a scrunched up position, much like fetal position—an unconscious desire to return to the womb, perhaps? In contrast to the life instinct that is spontaneous, the death instinct in us calls for oblivion, the disintegration of consciousness, for this is what it was like in the womb. Again, though, there is ambivalence: We obviously fear death at the same time, and this manifests itself as a fear of union or, more technically, re-union. What does it mean to die? It means to become deindividuated, consumed, swallowed up, absorbed into nothingness, the void. And these, of course, apply to the womb. Reunion, as expressed by the prefix re-, meaning back, denotes a backward movement, regression instead of progression. Although we would prefer to be in the womb, we are already alive, and we have made it this far, so it would be a waste, an inconvenience, to reverse all we have done in returning whence we came, before birth. Death means the end—and beginning, as the precondition—of life. While we are alive, we crave uniqueness, we want to make a mark on the world, and death makes both of these things impossible.
Consequently, we must view life as a giant game of tug-
of-war, basically. Throughout our day, we are pulled, on the one hand, by life to sculpt a self out of the marble we are given, and pushed, on the other, by death to restore the marble block to its pristine condition. We are both self-constructive and self-destructive. We want to be independent, but we want to be dependent. Freud’s concepts of Eros, the life-instinct, and Thanatos, the death-instinct, are not the same as, but similar to, Rank’s theories of the life and death instincts and fears. Whereas for Freud the life-instinct straightforwardly referred to self-preservation and the death-instinct self-annihilation, Rank took a more nuanced approach, making life and death have their own distinct instincts and fears, as we have seen. The life instinct drives us to be independent, while the life fear is anxious about independence; the death instinct drives us to return to wholeness, while the death fear is anxious about wholeness. Upon reflection, we find that this adds to the dialectical nature of life and death, to the extent that they complement each other; yes, they are opposites, but they interact with each other, creating the friction we experience in our everyday lives.
How nice it would be to stay just a little longer! School can wait! My job can wait! This is all so perfect, nothing need change!
Oh, but I can’t just stay here! I’m wasting my life away! Life can’t be lived in bed alone, regardless of how comfy, and warm, and safe, and… no, I have to get up!
The problem of getting up in the morning is symbolically one of life and death, separation from the bed, and union with it. Ambivalence. Dualism. Polarity. Either-or. Dilemma. Between a rock and a hard—no, a soft, blanketed place. To wake up, is to be born; to sleep, to die.
Rank recognized that, after birth, we cope with our mixed condition by almost shrinking it down, that is, making it manageable. “Alright,” we admit to ourselves, “so we cannot return to the womb, nor can we be completely self-isolated individuals—instead, we will look for separation and unity within the world.” We project our instincts and fears onto the world, and this makes living easier for us. Throughout the world, we identify totalities, like peer groups, school, and jobs, which stand in for the womb because we identify with them, we view ourselves as members of them; and we also partialize, or cut slices out of, these things, out of the world as a totality, in an effort to carve out spaces for ourselves in which to be independent.
Freud identified libido, or sexual energy—and later Eros—as the driver of human activity. Rank obviously disagreed with this interpretation, and he talked instead about “Will.” Every organism has its own will that generates activity within it, like a generator. It is the force that lies behind the development of the self and personality. Thus, the will is closer to the life-instinct and death-fear than it is to their opposites because it aims for individuality. When we speak of “self-expression,” it is the essence of the will to which we are referring, seeing as the will is what motivates our need to have a self, to be a self. Hence, by nature, we resist rest. Once we are born, to put it in Newtonian language, we are objects in motion that, as such, will remain in motion. Whether we like it or not, the will always acts through us; we cannot choose to express ourselves or not. A realization: Realistically, we cannot stay in bed, even if we wanted.
We want to stay in bed because we are afraid of life, yet we are restless in bed because we are afraid of death—what a peculiar situation in which we find ourselves! Have you ever thought it strange how, after hearing the alarm, even when every part of you is telling yourself not to do anything, you still do it? It is sort of like the R. Kelly lyrics, “My mind’s tellin’ me no, but my body, my body’s tellin’ me yes.” In our heads, we are totally resistant to waking up. But our bodies—something deep within 
us, something unnameable—are feeling something else. The body, it would seem, has a mind of its own, as if acting according to a separate agenda. This, Rank would point out, is our will. We would rather be dragged out of bed than do so voluntarily, which is what makes our actually getting out of bed by ourselves so painful, what makes it seem like a betrayal. Our will just wants the best for us, though. The bed, which comes to stand in for the womb, is “a blissful totality which is obviously impractical in a real world,” writes Munroe.¹ The word “totality” here is connected with death in a Rankian sense: The womb is that in which we wish to be totally absorbed. Because we totalize the world, finding things in which to immerse ourselves in order to replicate the experience of being in the womb, the bed becomes the closest thing to annihilation, the womb par excellence of our worlds. When we sleep, our consciousnesses dissipate, carried away in dreams; it is as if we no longer exist, having “turned off,” similar to what we imagine death to be like. Being asleep is like being dead, and death is pre-existence in the womb, so the bed takes on this quality in turn. How many of my fellow students express their love of sleep, as well as their literal tiredness of life! Sadly, many would jokingly prefer death but, not finding it a pleasant option, opt for sleep, considering it the best alternative to the loss of Dostoevsky’s disease—consciousness.
Upon waking, we are disappointed to find that we are still here, in the world, alive, conscious. “Another day,” we sigh. Waking up is the act of shattering our bliss. But our sacred hours of sleep are limited for a reason: Because, as Munroe said, 
such an escape is “obviously impractical in a real world.” Interestingly, she says “a,” not “the,” “real world.” I take this to mean that, if we could, then we would choose a world in which to sleep the rest of our lives away; however, we cannot choose the world in which we live, for this world is given to us and, as such, it prescribes that we do something with ourselves, it prescribes work. The word “impractical” is important, too, because it gets at this notion of productivity. We spend our lives at either school or work, where we are expected to get work done. Life, for many of us, becomes narrowly defined as work. We have to wake up, or else we will not get to college. We have to wake up, or else we will be fired. But more than that, we have to wake up because our will demands it. We can blame it on the environment, we can blame it on society, whatever. Life cannot be lived in bed, though. It is not even extrinsic—not for a grade or for a job—but intrinsic—our life-instinct, our will, craves activity. As much as we love being dormant and dozing off, it is not fun, I think you might agree, to do nothing at all. If one were to live one’s life confined to a bed, then I think one would regret it at the end. To what did their life amount? Such is the purpose of the will.
According to Rank, the will expresses itself primordially as a counterwill. In other words, every action of ours tends to really be a re-action to something or someone else. The development of a mature will coincides with the development of self-consciousness, which is about the time we are teenagers, a time which, we know, is characterized by rebelliousness, revolt against authority. It is at this time that we come to recognize our selves as totalities per se. Here again we see the term totality: First, it was the womb, then it was the mother, etc. In all these cases, from our beds to our friend groups, the totality is always external. Upon reaching adolescence, though, we find that we ourselves are totalities—something upon which to be dependent, upon which to rely. Just as the womb nurtured us, just as our mothers provided us with care, and just as our beds keep us warm and comfy, so we discover that our self is something in which to invest trust. Self-consciousness is dialectical; it develops in contrast to something else. I am conscious of myself in contrast to the table before me. So self-consciousness develops in contrast to the parents; it develops as a tool of rebellion.
The process of becoming conscious of oneself is an act of the will, and as willing, it is a willing against, as a form of self-discovery. This is why the teen tries to set himself apart from his parents by embodying their antithesis—to find himself. The infant first separates from the mother; 
the adolescent then separates himself from the parents. Our counterwill must also counter the bed, as we have seen. As we cannot stay in bed forever or else sacrifice our life, the will must rebel against our tendency toward rest. Finding ourselves as agents, we must be out there in the world, doing. We now see why the struggle to wake up is an internal struggle, more than anything else. In psychoanalytic terms, I suppose there is almost a deep-seated feeling of distrust, of resentment, toward the mother—unconscious of course—at her having broken her side of the deal: We were perfectly happy in the womb, but our expulsion thence has traumatized us, leaving us insecure and anxious about that feeling of bliss. Everything that gives us that same feeling of bliss is looked at with a raised eyebrow, for we are fearful that it, too, shall be wrenched away from us, just as was paradise. The bed is no different. Despite the peace and joy it brings us, it still does not guarantee our happiness. We go to bed expecting the same thing every night (sleep), yet we end up waking up anyway. The bed does not keep its promise. It is a faulty totality.
Rank stated that the existence of the will creates guilt. Guilt exists because the will does. Why is that the case? And of what are we guilty? Part of it has to do with the fact that we feel rebellion is partly bad. We feel bad when we rebel because it is a negative reaction. The connotations of rebellion are unruly, undisciplined, wild. But the main reason is not so much the action itself as its consequences: By rebelling, we go against what supported us. Simultaneously, we want dependence and independence. A common complaint of teens is that they are “expected to behave like adults” yet are “treated like children.” This is because we teens want freedom… but not the consequences of freedom. But that is not how life works. Rank called this “ethical guilt.” Remember the ambivalence of getting out of bed? Let us return to why it is that, even though we hate getting up, we still feel the need to. I wake up, and as I adjust, it dawns upon me that I have school, and moreover, that I have work to do at school, and I am going to have to sit through my classes, dealing with people that annoy me, while I also get to see my friends—and, ugh, it all just requires so much effort!—but another voice within me is telling me to get up, it is nudging me, yelling at me to get up, reminding me of all the things that need to be done.
Ethical guilt is that feeling, that voice, which nags us in the back of our minds, that insistence on getting up and moving 
around; because we feel that, if we do not get up, we will be letting down our friends, our teachers, our bosses—we will be letting down ourselves. There is always something to do. Something to be accomplished. Unfinished work. People to see and talk with. Our conscience brings our attention to our responsibilities and duties, the very things that revolt us. If I do not get up, then homework will go undone. If I do not get up, then I will miss out on plans with friends. Ethical guilt is a call to action. Life slips through our fingers when we lie in bed. The voice of duty outweighs the voice of comfort. Our responsibilities overwhelm us, always winning out. In the end, the life-instinct wins, the death-fear wins. Through the will, we can only create through destroying, such is the nature of the counterwill. We can only become ourselves and face reality if we also separate. Here we see the separation-union theme in play again. There is an immediate conflict between autonomy (life), in which we break away from others, and heteronomy (death), in which we give into others—a life-death conflict, at base. Of course, neither comes in a pure form. We can be neither wholly autonomous nor wholly heteronomous; we must navigate the social world as an isolated self, balancing the two.
As a psychoanalyst, Rank dedicated his life to helping his patients reach a goal, a goal he judged to be the pinnacle of life: The reconciliation of life and death, separation and union, for these twin instincts underpin and guide our entire existence. How do we reconcile two things as contradictory and incommensurable as life and death? Love, said 
Rank. Love is the only way to balance independence and dependence, as love is reciprocal acceptance, interdependence, in a word. When one learns to love, one learns to recognize others in his life as people in their own right, with their own goals in life, and therefore not as enemies, but allies, fellow travelers along the same path. And instead of relying solely on them, we cultivate self-reliance, while still appreciating their existence. A good relationship is one in which both persons respect each other, fulfilling the others’ needs while focusing on their own at the same time, getting mutual acceptance, acknowledgment by the other. In sum, love as the solution to life and death consists in being oneself within totalities: We must be our own person while still being a part of something else. It is a mix between nonconformity and conformity. We can be a part of a group and still maintain our identity, our integrity. This is the goal.
Not only should we avoid worshiping ourselves like Narcissus, but we should avoid losing ourselves to groups and institutions to which we belong. What does love have to do with waking up, though? Quite simply, we lack 
love. As I have demonstrated, the struggle of waking up in the morning is one between life and death; and this, I have also demonstrated through Rank, is simply a conflict between separation and union—separation enabling us to create ourselves (painful), union to be at rest (pleasant). Clearly, we prefer the latter. There is an absence of acceptance of our condition. To combat this, we need to rebel against our beds! We must heed the guilt incurred by our remaining in bed. If we stay long enough, then we will eventually find it unbearable, strangely enough, a result of our ethical guilt, our desire for selfhood, and we will not stand a second more beneath those sheets—off with them! those hindrances. If we stay in bed, then we risk being forgotten, for this is what is signified by death, the return to the womb, eternal rest.
“With every rising of the sun, think of your life as just begun,” wrote the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. I love this quote, and think it is powerful. Somewhere—I cannot remember where—I read about how the Buddha said something similar: How every day gives us the opportunity to be someone new. We wake up each morning thinking we must be the same person we were yesterday. But why should this be so? Should we not be like Scrooge, who delighted in the idea of waking up a new man? Why should we flee from the prospect of salvation? No one is perfect, we all have our flaws. For some reason, we would expect that, if we are mean one day, then we ought to be mean the next, for that is who we are. This is not true, though, as I am sure you can relate. Nobody actually believes that. Well, to an extent we do—we want to change, we really do, but we are afraid of change. We think ourselves incapable of changing ourselves.
But think about it: Tomorrow, in those 
precious waking moments, you have the opportunity and power to decide who you want to be when you walk out the door. Do you want to be the same? Or do you want to work on a flaw? Nobody decides for us the outfit we wear once we walk out the door; likewise, nobody decides for us, except ourselves, who we will be once we walk out the door. I like to relate this to butterflies: The caterpillar larva builds its little cocoon, or chrysalis, and holes up in there for about a week or two, during which time it literally melts down, disintegrates, whereupon it then rebuilds itself, emerging new and improved—a beautiful, majestic butterfly! The moral? Birth is a painful, but necessary, process. Every time we wake up and get out of bed, we are reborn; it is like we are separating from the womb once more. In conclusion, I think Rank would like my explanation of why getting up out of bed is such a struggle: Every morning is a mourning.
¹ Munroe, Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought, p. 582
Becker on Overdependence
When we look for the “perfect” human object we are looking for someone who allows us to express our will completely, without any frustration of false notes. We want an object that reflects a truly ideal image of ourselves. But no human object can do this… However much we may idealize and idolize him, he inevitably reflects… imperfection. And as he is our ideal measure of value, this imperfection falls back upon us. If your partner is your ‘All,’ then any shortcoming in him becomes a major threat to you.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974), American psychoanlyst, author of Denial of Death. Quote from page 166.
Neologikon 