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Looking Around for Our Real Selves By Jerome Neu [A review of Passion: An Essay on Personality, by Roberto Mangabeira Unger. 300 pp. New York: The Free Press/Macmillan. $14.95.] In his earlier work Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who teaches at Harvard Law School, attempted what he called ''total criticism.'' In ''Passion'' he moderates his skepticism in order to sketch a more positive vision. On the ruins of liberalism he wishes to establish modernism, with an emphasis on the changeability of even pervasive structures, assumptions and relations, as an ideal of social life. Again one sees the speculative philosophical intelligence at work. In this book, an extended discussion of human interaction and emotion is framed by a long introduction, in which Mr. Unger explains his method, and a short appendix called ''A Program for Late Twentieth-Century Psychiatry.'' If one is not persuaded, one is nonetheless impressed. Mr. Unger's introduction aims at a radical unfixing of presumptions, presumptions that are embodied in what he refers to as ''contexts.'' He does not do much to illustrate or explain what he means by contexts, but his first definition comes in his citation of ''problems about our situation'' that we perceive when we try to ''formulate a view of our true identity.'' ''One problem,'' he writes, ''concerns our relation to the habitual settings of our action - the routinized collective institutions and preconceptions, the personal habits stylized in the form of a character, and the fundamental methods and conceptions employed in the investigation of nature - that we regularly take for granted. We define ourselves in part by our attitude toward these settings: toward their origins, their transformability, and the standards by which they ought to be assessed. This is the problem of contextuality.'' The introduction sketches a modernism that holds that all activity is contextual and all contexts can be broken. It teaches that it is a mistake to perceive what are only conditional contexts as though they were an inevitable or natural order. The assault on false necessity is thoroughgoing, covering both conceptual and social frameworks; one should not ''mistake the established modes of thought and human association for the natural forms of reason or relationship.'' The institutional and imaginative orders of society must be seen as constantly open to revision. One sometimes wonders how such self-conscious openness and plasticity differ from the ideals of liberalism which Mr. Unger has discarded. One wonders also how they connect with the possibilities of their own enactment with the possibilities of sustained revolution. What follows once nothing is regarded as universally given or unchangeable? Does this leave one in a morass of standardless relativism (liberalism)? How is one to build a meaningful life, either individual or social? Here Mr. Unger appeals to traditions of ethical and religious thought, extracting from them hope for convergence among acceptable solutions. To make sense of our experience, we must confront the problem of solidarity - we need each other, but we also need autonomy. To meet these conflicting demands of self-assertion, Mr. Unger offers what he calls a modernist restatement of the Christian-romantic image of man, an ideal that gives highest place to love, faith and hope, tempered by a socialized Nietzschean appreciation of vitality and empowerment. Of course, modernist skepticism may undermine even this view. The introduction, which is almost one-third of the book, is nervously defensive against its own skeptical roots, at least up to the point where it sketches various ethical traditions and their problems; these passages contain some of the most brilliant writing of this kind since Hegel. When he takes up his substantive concerns, duly aware of the constraints of historical specificity and the force of skeptical doubts, he writes with a confidence more typical of treatises on human nature written by thinkers in the past. Mr. Unger's search for our shared identity takes him across a fascinating map of moral consciousness as he traces the dialectic of the problem of solidarity, a dialectic of unlimited mutual need and unlimited mutual fear. According to Mr. Unger, the passions are located in the midst of this problem, for they ''ring the changes on the relations between our reciprocal and infinite longing for one another and our reciprocal and infinite terror.'' For him, passions are essentially interpersonal; they are ambivalent moves rooted in the basic striving to be someone, someone at home in a sometimes heartless world. The story he tells is at times excessively abstract, and, as any modernist must recognize, it is really but one of many possible stories; nonetheless, it resonates with much of modern experience and it is at points most particular and acute. For example, the discussions of boredom and diversion, trust and reciprocity, death and self-consciousness, are subtle and penetrating. Everything is structured in relation to the central drama of longing and jeopardy. There emerges from the tale a self uneasily reconciled to contingency and seeking a social context in which self-assertion and self-transformation are possible, and in which love, rather than altruism, is the organizing ideal. This view of personality looks to a large theory of society. In the central sections of this book, on personality and identity, large views are described, but rarely ascribed to any specific thinker, so it is sometimes difficult to know who is supposed actually to hold such views. But one hears echoes of everything from Hegel's account of the emergence of consciousness and self-consciousness to Thomas Kuhn's account of normal and revolutionary science to Michel Foucault's account of madness and civilization, and so the analysis seems allusively (if elusively) embedded in the history of modern thought. Still, there is a great absence. In the midst of all the talk of self-knowledge and ''the others,'' one misses Freud and a sense of the possible internal obstacles to self-knowledge and self-transformation. This lack of attention to unconscious meanings and mechanisms of displacement is especially noticeable in the discussions of obsession and sexuality. Mr. Unger's picture of the divided self, with frozen character on one side and transcendent freedom on the other, is closer to Sartre's model than to Freud's. Freud does put in an appearance in the appendix, in which (among many other things) psychiatrists are urged to pick up on Freud's occasional nearness to the language of ordinary self-reflection. One may doubt that nearness, but there is nonetheless something right about Mr. Unger's focus on the twin dangers to the self - isolation from and domination by others. Empowering the self to cope with these dangers is the task of psychiatry as a practical branch of the theory of personality (which includes a normative theory of the self, of virtue and vice), as well as of social theory. The body of Mr. Unger's book, whatever one's misgivings about his modernized Christian romanticism, makes a valuable contribution to the necessary work of restoring thought about human nature to the center of moral and political theorizing. ''Passion'' belongs with
other recent books, such as Alisdair MacIntyre's ''After Virtue'' and Richard
Rorty's ''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,'' as another expression of
modernist concern with ''contextuality.'' It stands alone, however, as an
impassioned and yet austere vision of human nature and the possibilities for
self-revision, self-affirmation and self-transcendence. Jerome Neu, who teaches philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of ''Emotion, Thought and Therapy.'' "LEARNING FROM LUST" Excerpt from Passion: An Essay on Personality that accompanied the NYT review. Lust may . . . pose a radical
challenge to the imaginative foundations of social life. It may do so by
diminishing our ability to imagine the otherness of other people. The more we
deny the originality of other people, the more impoverished and rigid our
conception of society becomes. We see one another as the compulsive products of
our forms of social life and our traditions of discourse rather than seeing
these traditions and forms as partial and provisional manifestations of
ourselves. Because no set of social arrangements and cultural dogmas can ever
fully inform our practical and passionate connections, no degree of entrenchment
of a social and cultural order against effective challenge can ever justify the
imaginative denial of originality in ourselves and in others. The extreme
of this denial is our attempt to reduce others to the condition of mere
occasions for the enjoyment of solitary pleasures, if indeed pleasure is not
solitary by its very nature. A lesser extreme of denial is the view of other
people as resistant egos in a power conflict or as strategic calculators in a
system of exchange that is imagined to require only an endless flow of random
desires and a stable set of neutral roles. Here you already begin to see the
other person as a distinct and potentially opposing will. . . . Having
recognized this minimum of distinction you open yourself to the possibility of
being surprised: the desired person may succeed in forcing to your attention not
an isolated desire to be traded against a desire of your own but a unique
personality in search of acceptance, or he may give voice to a conception of the
proper terms of your material and emotional access to each other that conflicts
with yours. The radical denial of otherness and therefore of society that is
implied by lust consists in the solipsistic experience of other people as mere
triggers to moments of enjoyment. The origin of
pleasure in the body of another person is accompanied by the ability not to
imagine him as being, in any interesting sense, another person. To this extent
an episode of lust provides us with a momentary experience of what it would be
like for society not to exist. - From ''Passion.'' |