It is said that in
ancient Greece Plato and his followers gathered one day and asked this
question; “What is a human being?” After a great deal of thought, they came up
with an answer: A human being is a featherless biped.
Everyone was happy
with this definition until Diogenes burst into the conversation with a live
plucked chicken, shouting, “Behold! I present you with a human being.”
After all this
commotion, the philosophers gathered again and refined their definition. A
human being, they said, is a featherless biped with broad nails.
This is a very
curious story that shows the kind of difficulties philosophers have been facing
all along when attempting to give abstract, general definitions of what is to
be human.
Even with no
intervention from Diogenes, it seems pretty clear that describing ourselves as
featherless bipeds does not really capture much of what it means to be human.
Heidegger was
concerned with this question also; he came to answer it in a way that was strikingly
different from many other people before him. Instead of attempting an abstract
definition that looks as human life from the outside, he attempted to provide a
much more concrete analysis of “being” from what could be called an insider’s
position.
He said that since
we exist in the thick of things (in the midst of life) if we want to understand
what it is to be human, we have to do so by looking at human life from within
this life.
If we want to know
what it means to say that something exists, we need to start looking at the
question from the perspective of those beings of whom being is an issue.
We can assume that
although cats, dogs and lions are beings, they do not wonder about their being:
they do not stress over these questions; they do not ask, “What does it mean to
say that something exists?” But humans do. So whenever we want to explore
questions of being, we have to start with ourselves, by looking at what it
means to exist.
Now, we exist through
the realms of desire, human beings are moved by inertia; controlled by time and
others desire. Perhaps, one should extend this to the very definition of
humanity: What ultimately distinguishes man from animal is not a positive
feature (speech, tool-making, reflexive thinking, or whatever), but the rise of
a new point of impossibility, the impossible-real ultimate reference point of
desire.
The often
mentioned evolutional difference between humans and apes acquires here all its
weight; when an ape is confronted with an object beyond its reach which it
repeatedly fails to obtain, it will abandon it and move on to a more modest
object (maybe a less attractive partner), whereas a human will persist in its
effort, remaining fixated by the impossible.
This must be why
the subject as such is hysterical; the hysterical subject is precisely a
subject who poses enjoyment as an absolute; he or she responds to the absolute
of pleasure in the form of an unsatisfied desire. Such a subject is capable of
relating to a term that is off limits; even more radically, it is a subject
that can only exist insofar as it relates to a term that is “out of play”.
Hysteria then, must be this elementary “human” way of installing a point of
impossibility in the absolute pleasure principle.
To understand
impossibility we must first be aware of what exactly do we want to conquer. There is a difference between part-object love
and primary object love; the former being the breast and the latter being the
mother.
This may be a good
way to explain the two-step process whereby the subject is constituted and
desire is established.
The earliest sexual object is the breast, and the earliest
source of satisfaction for
the sexual instinct is
the encounter between two partial objects, the infant's mouth and the mother's
breast.
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d),
Freud explained that the breast becomes a lost object "just at the time, perhaps, when the
child is able to form a total idea of the person to whom the organ that is
giving him satisfaction belongs" (p. 222).
Loss of the object of the oral instinct is thus a precondition of access to the total person as
a possible love object. At the same time, however, this loss opens the door
to autoeroticism for
the infant as the infant assumes a complete body image. The infant, though in a
passive position, is active with regard to a part of its own body, and this
enables the infant to find a source of satisfaction that is the first
substitute for the breast.
Later the lost object becomes the "whole person". Here
separation from the object is addressed in two ways: either the child expresses
an impulse to
master the object by breaking it, casting it aside, or incorporating it in
fantasy (and so working it over in the psyche ), or the child bypasses the need for
the object by regarding it as a lost object beyond the reach of the self.
With the recognition of the absence of the object,
therefore, the child makes a transition, as a result of working over in the
psyche, to a capacity to do without the object.
When the subject does not recognize the object as lost, as
in melancholia, the object is incorporated in fantasy, where it maintains a silent existence
within the subject. Freud described this
process in "Mourning and Melancholia."
Object loss can also provoke anxiety, mourning, or pain. Do we feel those
three elements when we aren’t able to grasp an impossible object?
The difference between humans and animals is clear now,
humans experience a loss when it comes to separation and will try to fill this
void thought their life by repetitions.
I believe there’s a feeling of impossibility within
ourselves and hasn’t been completely conquered. It’s being externalized and that
is the reason we will never find a cure. But, what is this impossible? Is it a
yearning for this un-castrated being? Oneness with a supposed “perfect” object?
A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated (castrated)
or missing (since birth?) is still attached to the body and is moving
appropriately with other body parts. The missing limb causes pain and can be
made worse by stress, anxiety, and traumatic experiences. This pain is usually
intermittent. The frequency and intensity of attacks usually declines with
time.
This may be an odd comparison but when seen this way it
appears as if we where walking with a missing limb, an imaginary extension of
ourselves that we crave for in fantasy. This appears as a constant reminder of how
loss feels and how damaging it can be to the psyche.
As Erich Fromm once said “Life is fraught with anxiety and
powerlessness because of our separation from nature and from one another.”
These feelings can be overcome through searching out and
devoting ourselves to the discovery of our own abilities and ideas, embracing
our personal uniqueness and developing our capacity to love.
Man’s main task is to give birth to himself. In doing so, he
frees himself from confusion, loneliness, and apathy.
Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,7:123-243.
Freud, Sigmund. (1916-1917g [1915]). Mourning and melancholia. SE,14:237-258.
Freud, Sigmund. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE,18:1-64.
Winnicott, D.W. (1962), Ego integration in child development. The
Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York:
International Universities Press. pp. 56-63
Zizek, Slavoj. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. Verso, UK.
Murray, Craig. (2010). Amputation, Prosthesis Use and Phantom Limb
pain. Springer, UK.
Fromm, Erich.(1999). Erich Fromm; His life and ideas. Rainer
Funk, NY.
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