Existential reflections and personal notes -- response to Klaus

Dear Klaus,

Thank you for your generous note. I appreciate it.

Your latest note makes issues clearer to me. It came after I sent the
note on "Descriptions without Labels," so I won't repeat what I wrote.

You discuss 1) the nature and meaning of an objectivist position, 2)
language as a foundation for constructing worldview and position, 3)
and what it means someone to use the term "false consciousness."

Let me reflect more on the first two before responding.

The third question is an example of how different backgrounds create
differing assumptions and values. I see why you find the term
offensive in a way that I do not. This involves my background in
religion and psychology. For similar reasons, Keith Russell and
Michael Biggs find the term interesting from their backgrounds in
philosophy.

You stated your central concerns in a few sentences that I will copy
out from your post:

-snip-

"i certainly surmise that you, by talking about false consciousness,
do not include yourself in having it."
"ok, whatever you call your consciousness, it must be sufficiently
powerful to explore the false consciousness of other people.
meta-consciousness? superior consciousness? trans-consciousness? or
taking the god's eye view of objectivism that is not accountable for
his or her own consciousness?"

"you are accountable for whatever you say, whether you claim to speak
for yourself, for someone else, or from the position of nowhere, as a
detached observer who, without reference to his or her actions
contemplates on the reality of false (or true) consciousness."

"i have made my point repeatedly, that "false consciousness" is a
construction that, especially in the guise of having some reality,
being definable, identifiable, and usable in sentences about human
beings, has the effect of putting down those to whom it is attributed
and implicitly claims the superiority of those wielding this concept
without doubt."

-snip-

The issue of false consciousness first came to my attention as the
contrary of authenticity and transparency. In the 1960s, I intended
to be a minister. I studied psychology and education for my
bachelors' and master's degrees. The nature of human being was a
central concern in the schools of psychology that emphasized
existential responsibility and the idea that most human beings are
healthy rather than ill. Existential psychology and humanistic
psychology focus on the client rather than the therapist as the
central figure in the therapeutic relationship.

Many in the Unitarian ministry approached pastoral care from a
similar position of centered responsibility. This meant that we were
expected to clarify ourselves through personal reflection and
personal engagement. I DID include myself as one who might suffer
from false consciousness. I still reflect on this. It seems to me
that it is possible to be clear and sound in some dimensions of life
while suffering [ self-deception ], [ false consciousness ], or [
choose the term] in others.

My master's advisor introduced me to Soren Kierkegaard because he
thought I would find Kierkegaard's work helpful in my exploration of
self. I did. One result of my encounter with Kierkegaard was a
decision not to enter the ministry. The pilgrimage took several
years. I won't go into details.

My path took me to a Ph.D. in leadership and human behavior while I
considered different career choices - including different aspects of
art and design. It was only after I finished my doctorate that I made
a final decision not to pursue a career in the ministry. I remain
interested in religion and theology.

One of the key issues in religion involves the question of what it is
to be rooted transparently in the ultimate ground of being. How may
we identify properly with the spiritual while also identifying fully
with our fellow human beings? How shall we be of service? These are
difficult issues. Individual religious leaders rarely achieve a good
balance. Kierkegaard's work (see, f.ex., Kierkegaard 1957, 1968) was
important to me in exploring these issues.

One stream of philosophical and religious experience goes back to
Kierkegaard, and culminating in the existentialist and postmodernist
traditions. (Nietzsche and others play a role here, too.) This
approach to religious experience is determined by a sense of the
fragmentary quality of the human existence. It begins in the
awareness of finitude, loss, and absurdity. The conflicts,
polarities, and oppositions typical of human life trap human us.
Buddhism starts with from same position. In the midst of this
conflicted arena, some human beings seem to experience grace and
revelation. They assert a path that moves beyond fragmentation and
contradiction. Søren Kierkegaard represents this tradition. One is
not required to accept his confessional beliefs to value his
psychological depth.

According to Kierkegaard, we create a self - a symbolic inner
identity - in the act of relating the contrasting poles of body and
soul. This act does not take place once for all time. It is not done
and finished forever. This act must be constantly performed to
maintain and renew selfhood. This idea is comparable to Blumer's
(1969: 14) view on the relationship between self and society in
social context, or to Peter Berger's views on the construction of
self as developed in his sociology of religion, The Sacred Canopy
(Berger 1967: 5). I may be mistaken, but this is also the kind of
continual creation of self in social context that occurs through what
you designate as languaging.

In Kierkegaard's view, the terror of dread is born in the human
consciousness of being a self, and with it, the knowledge of
mortality and death. In an existential sense, every sentence and
every promise is implicitly accompanied by the thought, "I can die.
If I die now I won't be able to fulfill my promises." To grasp this
is to discover death as a subjective truth. This truth enables us to
make decisions now, in the moment as it is lived.

Kierkegaard's position is that we can transcend ourselves by
realizing the truth of our condition. He argues that the school of
anxiety is the education human beings require for existential
maturity. In Fear and Trembling, he asserts that anxiety is a better
teacher then reality (Kierkegaard 1967: 144). We can lie about
reality, he states, but we cannot lie about anxiety. When we face it,
anxiety reveals the truth of situation. Only by seeing the truth can
we can open possibilities for ourselves as existential beings.

The psychology of this existential view remains the same whether you
hold a Christian theology as Kierkegaard did, a Buddhist theology, a
Jewish theology, or even an atheist position. Ernest Becker held
Kierkegaard in great esteem as one of the first great figures in
modern psychology precisely because of his human insight.

I wrote on Kierkegaard in notes of September 2 and September 17. The
reason for this repeated use of Kierkegaard is that Terry's original
question involves knowing ourselves. Self-knowledge and appropriate
action is related to the design issues of phronesis -understanding
what is worth doing - and action by making an existential commitment
to what is best in life. This is the Socratic quest. It is here
inquiry into the states and conditions of consciousness becomes
important and valuable.

One of the problems of any inquiry is that we start with a term and
continue to use it in the ensuing conversation. I used the term
"false consciousness" because it formed the start of the sub-thread.
I used it in terms of the questions that Terry has now clarified. In
Kierkegaard's work, inquiry into consciousness involves the effort to
win through over false consciousness. One may select other terms with
some of the same meanings and WITHOUT taking on board all of the
meanings implicit in any one use.

For me, using the term does not involve claiming that anyone suffers
from the condition. It involves inquiry into self for understanding
and clarification. To say this, of course, is to say that any one
individual MAY suffer from [false consciousness], [inauthenticity],
or [choose a term]. For me, and for those whom I worked with, the
issue was not examining others but understanding self, and these
concepts were among the tools we used.

I hope this explains more clearly why I find the term useful.

Without holding anyone else to my view, I feel that this position
also reflects the existential therapies. I mentioned Abraham Maslow,
Viktor Frankl, Virginia Satir, Sidney Jourard, and Fritz Perls. These
and others like them are non-Freudian in perspective and in practice.

Each of the five takes the starting point that human beings are
healthy. One of the early great founders of this tradition was Victor
Frankl (1959, 1988). Frankl emerged from the holocaust with the
philosophy that each human being is a responsible individual agent
whose task it is to give meaning to life through action. Like Carl
Rogers (2002), the founder of the client-centered therapy, they start
from the position that the client knows what he or she is saying (See
also Evans 1975).

There are differences: Perls worked with dream material by inviting
each client to give voice to the dream. In Perls's approach, the
client owned the dream and worked with it in a tradition of
existential dramaturgy. Each person owns and wrestles with the
contents of his inner life. This is not a Freudian approach, even
though it made use of some Freudian insights.

Many forms of counseling emerge from these traditions. Different
streams of psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and pastoral
counseling are existential and responsible in nature. These schools
do not assume knowledge of another person's inner self, nor do they
posit a god's-eye view.

The claim that a therapist has access to material from a client's
inner life to which he has no access himself gave rise to major
breaks between older schools of therapy and the existential and
humanistic psychologies.

One break took place over exactly the points you mention. Counselors
work in many different ways with the material that they help clients
to develop.

A perfect example of the new schools of humanistic psychology is seen
in Abraham Maslow's ontological position in Toward a Psychology of
Being (1962). Maslow's work informed much that followed in the 1960s.
Maslow (1987) describes this approach to human personality, and
Maslow (1998) applies his work to management and professional
practice.

In theological terms, genuine encounter with other human beings
requires that we must be a self. Shlomo Carlebach the theologian - he
became known as a folk singer and mystic after earning his doctorate
in theology -once summarized Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue in
succinct terms: "If I am not I and you are not you, we can never
meet. If I am I and you are you, we can talk." Buber locates this in
a larger discourse of existential authenticity. Carlebach gave voice
to this tradition in song. In the traditions of Erasmus and Emerson,
I use stories and exegesis.

One of the great Bible stories reflects this idea. Moses meets God
for the first time in Exodus 3:4-4:17. At their encounter, he asks
God to tell him his name. God answers, "I AM WHO I AM." This is the
encounter of existential authenticity. Existential authenticity does
not imply perfection or even perfect clarity for a human being. It
requires selfhood and it is therefore based on self-awareness and
self-reflection.

In sharing these thoughts, I am not asking you to agree with any of
these ideas or propositions. I am saying that there are uses for some
of these concepts that do not involve putting people down or
dominating them, but rather, clarifying ourselves in the search of
existential authenticity.

I am off to a seminar for the next week. I wanted to send this note
before I leave.

Thanks again for your warm and helpful response.

Yours,

Ken


References

Becker, Ernest. 1973 The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press.

Berger, Peter. 1967. The Sacred Canopy. Elements of a Sociological
Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday and Company.

Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism. Perspective and
Method. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Evans, Richard I. 1975. Carl Rogers. The Man and His Ideas. New York: Dutton.

Frankl, Viktor E. 1959. Man's Search for Meaning. An Introduction to
Logotherapy. Boston: Beacon Press.

Frankl, Viktor E. 1988. The Will to Meaning. Foundations and
Applications of Logotherapy. New York: Meridian.

Kierkegaard, Søren. 1957. The Concept of Dread. Translated with an
introduction and notes by Walter Lowrie. Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press.

Kierkegaard, Søren. 1968. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto
Death. Translated with an introduction and notes by Walter Lowrie.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Maslow, Abraham H. 1962. Toward a Psychology of Being. Princeton, New
Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Company.

Maslow, Abraham H. 1987. Motivation and Personality. Third Edition.
Revised by Robert Frager, James Fadiman, Cynthia McReynolds, and Ruth
Cox. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Maslow, Abraham H., with Deborah C. Stephens and Gary Heil. 1998.
Maslow on Management. New York: John C. Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1998.

Rogers, Carl R. 2002 [1951]. Client-Centered Therapy. Its Current
Practice, Implications, and Theory. Constable: London.

--

Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management

Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
Faculty of Art, Media, and Design
Staffordshire University