Psychotherapy East & West. Alan Watts
remain the same whether the scale lies between 0 and 100 centigrade or 32 and 212 Fahrenheit. At the same time, a contest between virtue and vice may remain as important as the contest between group A and group B. To see this, however, is to understand that the contest is a game.
All classification seems to require a division of the world. As soon as there is a class, there is what is inside it and what is outside it. In and out, yes and no, are explicitly exclusive of one another. They are formally opposed, like group A and its enemy, group B; good and bad; virtue and vice. The separation between them seems to be as clear-cut as that between a solid and a space, a figure and its background. The separation, the difference, is therefore what we notice; it fits the notation of language, and because it is noted and explicit it is conscious and unrepressed. But there is also something unnoticed and ignored, which does not fit the notation of the language, and which because it is unnoted and implicit is unconscious and repressed. This is that the inside and the outside of the class go together and cannot do without each other. “To be and not to be” arise mutually. Beneath the contest lies friendship; beneath the serious lies the playful; beneath the separation of the individual and the world lies the field pattern. In this pattern every push from within is at the same time a pull from without, every explosion an implosion, every outline an inline, arising mutually and simultaneously so that it is always impossible to say from which side of a boundary any movement begins. The individual no more acts upon the world than the world upon the individual. The cause and the effect turn out to be integral parts of the same event.
Wrestling as we are with languages whose forms resist and screen out insights of this kind, it is understandable that at present this view is only hypothetical in the behavioral sciences however well verified it may be in the physical. This is perhaps due in part to the fact that it is much easier to describe pure process and pattern in mathematics than in words, with their subjects, verbs, and predicates, their agents and acts. But we have not as yet gone very far in the mathematical description of living behavior. Yet it is not so hard to imagine a language which might describe all that man “is” and does as doing. After all, we can speak of a group of homes as housing without feeling impelled to ask, “What is it that is housing?” I do not think that such a language would be impoverished, any more than the sciences are impoverished through having given up such mysterious entities as the ether, the humors, phlogiston, and the planetary spheres. On the contrary, a language would be greatly enriched by making it easier for us to understand relationships which our present languages conceal. Described simply as pattern in motion, the mystery of what acts and what is acted upon, of how the cause issues in the effect, would be as easy as seeing the relationship between the concave and convex sides of a curve. Which side comes first?
The difficulty, however, is not so much in finding the language as in overcoming social resistance. Would it really do to find out that our game is not serious, that enemies are friends, and that the good thrives on the evil? Society as we know it seems to be a tacit conspiracy to keep this hushed up for fear that the contest will otherwise cease. If these opposites are not kept fiercely separate and antagonistic, what motivation will there be for the creative struggle between them? If man does not feel himself at war with nature, will there be any further impetus to technological progress? Imagine how the Christian conscience would react to the idea that, behind the scenes, God and the Devil were the closest friends but had taken opposite sides in order to stage a great cosmic game. Yet this is rather much how things stood when the Book of Job was written, for here Satan is simply the counsel for the prosecution in the court of Heaven, as faithful a servant of the court as the advocatus diaboli at the Vatican.*
The problem is, of course, that if men are patterns of action and not agents, and if the individual and the world act with each other, mutually, so that action does not originate in either, who is to be blamed when things go wrong? Can the police then come around asking, “Who started this?” The convention of the individual as the responsible, independent agent is basic to almost all our social and legal structures. Acceptance of this role or identity is the chief criterion of sanity, and we feel that if anyone is reducible to actions or behaviors with nobody doing them, he must be no more than a soulless mechanism. Indeed, there is at first glimpse an element of terror in this universe of pure activity; there seems to be no point from which to make a decision, to begin anything. It is not at all unlikely that some kind of slip into this way of feeling things may sometimes touch off a psychotic break, for the individual might well feel that he had lost control of everything and could no longer trust himself or others to behave consistently. But supposing one understood in the first place that this is the way things are anyhow, the experience itself would be far less unnerving. In practice it happens that just as soon as one gets used to this feeling and is not afraid of it, it is possible to go on behaving as rationally as ever — but with a remarkable sense of lightness.
Setting aside, for the time being, the moral and ethical implications of this view of man, it seems to have the same sort of advantage over the ordinary view that the Copernican solar system has over the Ptolemaic. It is so much simpler, even though it means giving up the central position of the earth. This is, moreover, the kind of simplicity which is fruitful rather than diminishing: it leads to further possibilities of play, greater richness of articulation. On the other hand, the ordinary conventional view seems increasingly to fail in what it purports to achieve.
One of the best accounts of the social and conventional character of the ego is in the work of George Herbert Mead.19 He points out that the difference between the social and the biological theories of the origin of individual self-consciousness corresponds to the difference between evolutionary and contract theories of the origin of the state. In the latter, discredited view the social community is formed by deliberate contract between self-conscious persons. He reasons, however, that the individual cannot become an object to himself by himself, and in any case no animate individuals have ever existed by themselves.
The view that mind [ i.e., the ego] is a congenital biological endowment of the individual organism does not really enable us to explain its nature and origin at all: neither what sort of biological endowment it is, nor how organisms at a certain level of evolutionary progress come to possess it.20
He goes on to show that the “I,” the biological individual, can become conscious of itself only in terms of the “me,” but that this latter is a view of itself given to it by other people.
The individual enters as such into his own experience only as an object, not as a subject; and he can enter as an object only on the basis of social relations and interactions, only by means of his experiential transactions with other individuals in an organized social environment. . . only by taking the attitudes of others towards himself — is he able to become an object to himself.21
As a result the mind, or psychological structure of the individual, cannot be identified with some entity inside his skin.
If mind is socially constituted, then the field or locus of any given individual mind must extend as far as the social activity or apparatus of social relations which constitutes it extends; and hence that field cannot be bounded by the skin of the individual organism to which it belongs.22
And that is just the paradox of the situation: society gives us the idea that the mind, or ego,* is inside the skin and that it acts on its own apart from society.
Here, then, is a major contradiction in the rules of the social game. The members of the game are to play as if they were independent agents, but they are not to know that they are just playing as if! It is explicit in the rules that the individual is self-determining, but implicit that he is so only by virtue of the rules. Furthermore, while he is defined as an independent agent, he must not be so independent as not to submit to the rules which define him. Thus he is defined as an agent in order to be held responsible to the group for “his” actions. The rules of the game confer independence and take it away at the same time, without revealing the contradiction.
This is exactly the predicament which Gregory Bateson23 calls the “double-bind,” in which the individual is called