The Solution to Addiction - the Obliteration of the Ego

If addictions are tied at the hip to the ego... then focusing on our personal problem may be ineffective.

This would suggest the solution is to be found in impersonality [detachment], and this is the way of art. This is hardly surprising when you consider the traditional function of art [and ritual] was to direct the passions into something greater than the self.

Perhaps ego, ideology, and addiction are so interwoven in the socio-cultural complex dominating us today that it has become the norm.

 

If addiction is tied to ego [which is alienation/ division within our self] then what is ego?

Ego as Self-consciousness

What is the ego other than self-consciousness? And self-consciousness rises like epiphenomena from consciousness itself, which is always half hidden and seen only in glimpses. [we see through a glass darkly] But self-consciousness, that which lies on the surface, is always perfectly clear and distinct to us like the Cartesian Cogito… we can see clearly for ourselves the necessary connection between things. Not for us is the opacity belonging to less enlightened minds. We feel a power within us, and a defensive one – we are on guard, and will not be fooled, for we have escaped from illusions to take pride in our no-nonsense understanding of reality. And so we mistake this understanding for our self. And so self-consciousness becomes the ego - its driving force is the will to power, of which ideologies are the various forms. To the ego, language is power, or more strictly a power to be wrested from language. The power consists in the very constitution [self-understanding] of ourselves through the use of language. Whereas the pre-egoistic self, a more organic self, understood language as a transcendent power [the self ‘stood under’], the ego turns this relation on its head, where language comes to center on it. Language and thought come to be the mastery of technique, a technology.

Due to the normalization of a technology [and the necessary subversion of the idiosyncratic nature of language], those subjected to ideology [ego] experience an anxiety within themselves – the ego is always a superficial surface phenomenon, and so is incapacitated from engaging with the passions beneath. The mechanical/ ideological language of ego is unable to engage organically with the greater self. To do so requires the organic, or figurative, use of language… a use that the purified rationality of ego is uncomfortable with. For, keeping in mind that the ego is constituted by a particular form of language, then the use of this other form of language, a more organic one, may serve to puncture or dissolve what has been constituted. Language proves itself double-edged here – it has both the power to fetter and free ‘the imagination’. And I ‘interrogate’ that word, as there is nothing more definitive of reason than its desire to discriminate against imagination, as that which is outside the sphere of meaning and reality. Imagination is reason’s ideological Other, and in ideology the Other is always alienated and unintelligible, either to be ignored as ignorance or explained away.

And this is what the addicted ego does with inflated passion alienated from itself - it ignores it as other, as outside itself, or explains away in scientific jargon.

 

Yes, I think self-centered egoism defines our whole culture. If culture is what binds us together then you could call it an anti-culture. I think language is so powerful here.... the ideology of economics for example, where each is said to be a homo economicus to pursue their own needs. With the endless pursuit after happiness, an insatiable desire continues to expand like a black hole until it consumes our very self. I'd say there is a low-level base-line of addiction running right through our culture... it is what economies and consumption runs on.

 

Viva la resistance! I think with language. For we need to re-appropriate language, where we once again speak it creatively. This grounds us, and inculcates within us a sense of reality. Ideological language, which speaks us, determines us, determines the ego needs to be rejected. In the words of Brave Heart - 'You can take our lives, but you will never take our freedom!'.

 

I'm not sure about Ekhart Tolle. I guess I should read that sometime as I know it has been hugely popular. I think perhaps it is a but mystical, and maybe a bit eastern, for my tastes. I situate myself firmly within the classical western tradition of thought stretching back to the Greeks.

One interesting point about ideological language is its focus on the present [now]. Cultural thought tends to consist of a more organic sense of time, when not so much the 'eternal' as the historical sense is interfused with the present. The present, for us, has become an abstraction, an anachronism, a 'perma-present' largely alienating from the sense of past and future [memory and anticipation]. If ideology always wants to keep an unchanging presence/ present before us, then this perhaps throws a critical light on the 'power of now'?

Language for me is fundamentally about connection. In ideology we have the abuse of that function. Criticism frees us from that abuse in order to once again use language properly. It not only reconnects us to the historical sense, but also to each other in a culture. It that, ideally, is not individualistic at all. It's a unification of all personalities in universal meaning. This is the ideal of art, culture, and religion in contrast to mysticism.

 

You have it half right. You can not fully understand the ego as this desire to understand is itself the ego. But you can become conscious of the conditions of your self-consciousness. This is self-criticism, and is perceived best through the historical sense. There is an imaginative capacity we have within our greater selves to detach ourselves from the ego in order to travel beyond it. Something like this is described in the following for your reading pleasure.

Even though philosophy has today largely fallen out of fashion and into disrepute, its residual ideas are firmly planted within the 'public' mind of our culture. It is like the smile of the grinning Cheshire cat, disembodied upon the air, but yet refusing to evaporate.



Phenomenology of the Self: a Brief Overview [or an anatomy of the mass mind]

At the dawn of history, soon after the gods came to down to earth in our poetry, philosophy started out as a rational dialogue - and one not only between ourselves, but one also within ourselves. This is why a thinker will still speak of ‘we’ even though he might be but a voice in the wilderness, without a single follower. Philosophy originated not only in an attempt to restore the world to unity, but also [to get to the core of the matter] was an attempt to re-unify our very selves. Where the history of ideas will look at the external aspect of philosophy; that is, its metaphysical development, it is phenomenology [of the self] that looks at the internal dynamic within philosophy itself – it looks at the more subjective element. Whereas the history of ideas is orientated to the Idea, and the method, phenomenology wants to ‘zoom out’ and look at this as one orientation among others. Where abstract reason is central to philosophy, the will/ desire is central to phenomenology – from its perspective, philosophy is the will to reason.

And so phenomenology speaks of philosophy as a positive movement, a method of abstraction, which seeks to subsume all experience into a rational unity. Also from this perspective, which sees the self itself caught up in the method or technique, we could speak of philosophy as a technology of the self. In contrast to the positive movement, is the critical, negative, or reflective movement of philosophy itself that provides a phenomenology of the self. Phenomenology has the potential to return consciousness to a pre-philosophical self.

And so we see the adventure of philosophy starting out from the foothills of poetry, behind which loom the mountains of the gods in the distance. Its journey is through the long wide plains of reason. It travels through the centuries to arrive at a turning point. Like Janus, the double-faced god of old, it now recognizes two ways [backwards or forwards], depending on which way one looks. It struck out positively and technically, and more than a body of knowledge, it was primarily the desire for a body of knowledge [a desire to be forever frustrated from the critical perspective]. The body of knowledge, as a technology of self, is also the embodiment of ego. It is the constructive and inventive moment. In embodying itself in rational discourse, the self becomes the ego, for the self identifies with the ego, and the ego becomes the self.

And so the ego finds itself immersed in a discourse of ideology. Ego and ideology co-emerge, and share a common life. This is what we mean when we say that language speaks us. But, more strictly, we should say that ideology speaks the ego. The ego, should it take Socratic advice and in turn examine itself, discovers the foundations of its existence [the dis-covered moment, the critical moment]. This criticism, this consciousness of self-consciousness, this self-analysis, involves a retracing of our steps, and a return to the point of departure. In a retracement, it writes a phenomenology of itself, it underwrites itself, or rather, un-writes itself. And in doing so, in returning to the point of origin, a more phenomenal self and a less abstract and technical one, is enabled to think in other modalities of thought. In short, the phenomenal self is opened up to the vistas of artistic, cultural and religious thought, to the world of becoming. In overcoming the alienation of ideology, the self is restored to reality.

In speaking of moments [the invented moment/ the dis-covered moment], we are also speaking of momentum and movement in the etymological sense. There is a dynamic of movement and flux to phenomenological thought; thought is always considered a creative [or a destructive] process. It’s ‘anti-thesis’ - or rather it’s opposite will, it’s opposite desire - is stasis, a frame of mind which seeks the static and the immovable, the reality behind the appearances, Being or the Same, Identity or the One.

 

If, as a condiment to that question, I get an attractive and subtle smile, the poetics of my emotion will flow unhindered, like milk and honey, in the hope of stirring the great passion of eros.

 

Perhaps it is the peculiar property of genuine thought that it overlaps in part near everything whilst also retaining its own integrity. And so I see mine overlaps in part with yours, or should I say yours overlaps in part with mine.

Anyway, with this 'Venn Diagram' model of the mind in mind, I'll focus more on a few distinctions in meaning of the words we are using.

I had in mind the abstract present, that of Being. The primary impulse of ego is stasis and control through knowledge. So for example you have in Plato a kind of synthesis between poetry and philosophy - the flux of Heraclitus combined with the abstraction of Parmenides [the One]. Another world, a rationally created one, represents to ourselves reality, and this image of reality becomes identified with reality in the ideological mind. This is the moment of the ego and it has a development, an eclipse, and then a resurgence over the course of our long history. Levinas is a good read as to the way in which the ego re-presents Being in various forms of knowledge. The 'present' is an ideological present [utterly anachronistic], and yes, nothing like the being present to the moment as you suggest.

I think we have slightly different understanding of the relations between self, consciousness, self consciousness, ideology and ego. Unless the terms are defined... or rather put in a context whereby their meanings are derived, a dialogue is hamstrung from the start. Here's the way in which I use the terms:

Self - this comes first, it is the bulk of ourselves existing like the iceberg underwater. This is where all our passions, instincts, and potential addictions reside.

Consciousness - this is a property of self. Self interfaces with the world of which we are conscious. This appears as direct experience to us... before reflection.

Self-consciousness - this is reflection.... and in particular individuated self-reflection. Consciousness turns inward into itself. It constructs a model of reality motivated by power, control, the unchanging. It's pivot point is a certain kind of Truth [a pivot because this truth is also motivated by the will/ desire for power]

Ideology and ego follow on from self-consciousness. Ideology and ego are effectively the two sides of the same coin in my vocabulary. There is an ongoing dialectic between the two. To be free of the ego is also to be free of ideology.
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The significance of the above is that the 'alternative' to ego is not 'pure consciousness'. Rather, ego [and ideology] are understood to be derivative of the larger self/ imagination. In getting beyond the ego, one is reconnecting to their greater self, which in turn reconnects to all the various aspects of reality [no single reducible reality/ Being]. From this perspective, the move from ego to consciousness [or pure 'inner presence'] starts to look like an ideological 'Other' - pure consciousness looks like a projection of self-consciousness, its anti-thesis.

Something of this is seen in Kant. Kant is critical of the empirical self [the self-conscious mind, cogito, ego], and posits pure consciousness as preceding, or prior, to it, as the condition of its existence in the first place. Notice how individualistic this is, and notice that there is no greater imaginative self that is thought of as creative of the ego. Imagination, in his vocabulary, where it is reduced to outward machinery, is 'bureaucratized'. His inner primal 'unity of apperception', the 'thing in itself', is on the 'other side' of language, and nothing meaningful whatsoever can be said of it. But this is not exactly true. More strictly speaking, nothing knowledgeable can be said of it. It remains for us just an 'object' [a subject] of faith, of normative belief to which we are constrained insofar as we consider ourselves moral and rational persons. But this balance was too fine-tuned for an ideological age, and was all soon swept away.

And this bring us to language. It is the function of ideology to strip language of its figurative function, whereby language is to be taken literally - meaning [if there is any] is dogmatically literal. The rejection of ideology does not entail the rejection of language [how could we do that and still communicate?]. Rather, it is just the rejection of literalism. This has the effect of opening the mind up to new vistas - our minds become more sympathetic to the 'flux' of existence [I was going to write on the present and time here, but that is a whole different essay ].

This brings us back to Plato. He used both poetic and philosophical language, and again ideological language in his theory of the forms/ Being. You see this carried through the medieval ages, where they developed ideas of the transcendentals. Besides Truth, there were the others of Beauty, Goodness, and Unity [even in Plato Goodness was beyond Being... in Aristotle, poetry is autonomous from philosophy, i.e.; has a distinct meaning... in Kant aesthetic meaning is also autonomous]. And around these ideas [notions, or beliefs] cultures developed. With the Reformation, and the individualism and rationalism that followed on from that in an ideological age, only the unifying culture of Truth survived. And yet language refers to so much more than this literal Truth. The remnant of those other culture were to be found in art, literature, poetry, history... even philosophy etc.

And so the function of art, widely conceived, is to bring the ego back in contact with its greater imaginative self, and then that self in turn might become more sympathetic of the wider culture whist also becoming curious about metaphysical and historical matters that are not only outside the sphere of ideology and science, but too often explained away by them.

"In the beginning was the Word..."

 

There is definitely a Buddhist element to this... as there is an element of truth to everything.

The problem is fundamentally one of desire. It is misdirected desire [to the objects of the world] that constitutes the ego. But only the ego needs to be obliterated not desire per se. Desire is to be re-directed to its rightful object. It is by this redirection of desire to its proper object that the ego is obliterated.

Love, intelligence, desire, personality, all theses things are good. They just need to be rightly ordered. the essence of this ordering is in sub-ordination to a greater scheme than ourselves. The primary problem [delusion] of ego is one of super-ordination.

 

Yes, ego is all about gratification. I think we start to diminish the power of the ego when we are willing to suffer a little. The unwillingness to [cope with] some suffering is really just like an infant crying out for its sugar-coated dummy. In suffering [not flagellation] the ego begins to diminish... I think this is where the idea of a period of penance comes from - that real change in ourselves involves a process like this.