[size=75]1st post to this esteemed collection of minds.[/size]
in his semi-extensive study of Anxiety (the Meaning of Anxiety), Dr. Rollo May states:
A person who represses a good deal of aggression and hostility may at the same time assume a compliant and passive attitude toward others, which in turn increases the likelihood that he will be exploited by other people, which in turn gives him more aggression and hostility to repress.
Repression increases the individual’s feeling of helplessness in that it involves a curtailing of his own autonomy, an inner retrenchment and shelving of his own power.
Should individual hostility and aggression be repressed, either by the individual or by “others”?
Existentially speaking, is repression of aggression and hostility, in the individual (by the individual), not an act of (Sartre’s) “bad faith”?
Curious about how various modes of philosophical thought (past and present) deal with individual hostility and aggression, or do they?
Also, does the highly competitive nature of being an individual-in-community (actually) promote aggression and hostility?
Should individual hostility and aggression be repressed, either by the individual or by “others”?
Repression stems from largely a hydraulic metaphor of being, that like water naturally “flowsâ€, can be “dammedâ€, can “burst outâ€, none of these of which essentially extend beyond the metaphor itself. “Hostility†and “aggression†are as much a product of this description, its inherence in the Culture that gave rise to it, as they are aspects to be governed/explained by it. Presumed in both repression and aggression is a dichotomy between the natural and the civilized, a dichotomy produced by “civilization†itself, since all things are natural.
You might be interested to check-out Robert Solomon’s, Not Passion’s Slave. Solomon has long struggled to deflate the so-called, “hydraulic” folk-theory of emotions.
Himself taking an existentialist stance, Solomon maintains that we are responsible for our emotions. In fact, he makes a case for the view that we manipulate our emotions in order to achieve our goals.
Personal responsibility was of primal importance to JP, almost certainly primal to mauvaise foi (we are condemned to be free, alone without excuses, etc.). Even if Solomon is wrong to poo-poo the “hydraulic” theory of emotions, Sartre would still say that we are responsible for them. Given that Sartre claimed that he was partly responsible for the Second World War, I rather think he’d say that you are responsible for your own flavor of hostility. And if Solomon is right about “hydraulics” then it would be in bad-faith, or at least self-deceptive of us to deny the fact that we’re using our hostility to achieve our desired ends.
“We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From this high ground we can shoot down our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.”
Salmon Rushdie, “At the Auction of Ruby Slippers”, East, West
Before responding to your initial query, I would like to address the following remarks by Dunamis:
I am led to wonder if simply dismissing hostility and repression as ‘hydraulic metaphors’ is useful. It seems that one could take something from Deleuze’s notions of metaphor in our attempts to define our terms. A metaphor may be defined as a linguistic construct which lays claim to some clear representation of reality and then attempts to link this to a reality which is not, and is not virtual. That is, a metaphor is defined as a linkage between the x which is, or is counted as a valid representation of reality and a world which is not and not conceivable by the terms delimiting the situation in which thethe relation is deployed. I describe the second term of the metaphoric relation as strictly impossible because it is not even a viruality. For example when one deploys a metaphor such as ‘I shall fight like the lion’, which establishes a relation between the enunciative voice (a the human who may be understood by humans) and that which is not human, and may never be concidered as such unless the situation changes. For such a linkage to occur one has to remove oneself from the very condition which allows for the understanding of the relation.
Now could such a linkage occur? The answer would seem to be that these relations can and do occur all the time, for the very notion of what it is to be human is itself highly mutable; new categories are invented; beings such as Foucault’s devaints and homosexuals, or Agamben’s men without content are created by particular regimes of thought. Yet if these beings are created, then that which creates them is very far indeed from a metaphor; it is an ontological motor.
Here it seems that to claim repression and hostility are simply metaphors is to somewhat miss the point. Violence and repression are real. Hostility and repression form lives, as well as mar them. However, this does little to clarify the problematic you raise. We still have not yet specified any content of the terms. Or rather, we have not defined the terms of hostility and repression in anything but a formal sense as aspects of a creative machine. It might seem somewhat odd to describe hostility and repression in this way insofar as the definition seems to invert the normativity we typically ascribe to the terms. Creation, by definition, is positive; creation is the bringing of the new, and a resistence against any notion of entropy that might color our thought. How might hostility and repression fit under this ruberic?
To understand how hostility and repression are creative we need to investigate what is opperative in the function of hostility and repression. Stripped of their normative values, which alter from one context to another and are therefore undstable foundations for any definitional enterprise, we can simply define hostility and repression instances of a machine which deploys force. The person who is hostile is the person who uses force to achive some desired end. The person who is repressive uses force to stymie or prevent a particular deployment of force. The force of the hostile or repressive person has the formal aim of destroying, undermining, or subverting the meaning of one or more terms in any given realtion. This undermining, this subversion, this attacking is always toward an particular end. In the case where this deployment of force is sucessful, then there has been a creation of specificaly a situation which was not the case before. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth’ and the moment the deployment of their discursive tactics --religion, secular humanism, etc.-- has reached its fruition, the world can be said to have been altered. A creation has occured. Or, if the obverse is true, and the meek are simply those which are ground under the combat boot of an oppressive game, then something has still been created, namely that class of beings, that group of individuals that has been defeated. If we recognize hostility and repression as those which are expressed in the use of force, then we must see that this deployment of force is always creative and this creation is divorced from the normative concerns which code any particular situation.
In viewing hostility and agression as creative deployments of force we may turn to the essential question, the question that constituted the kernal of your post; namely, are hostility and aggression ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in a particular deployment? To answer this question, we would have to investigate the particular configuration of the sitiatuon which bears witness to a particular relation of force. Clearly one would like to assert that there may be some normativity which can be brought to bear on the expression of force. This normativity is the expression of a rule or a series of rules. What says a particular realtion is wrong? What says a that a particular way of doing things is incorrect? Where does the force of the rule come from? It comes from the very game in where the rule functions and nowhere else. If an agent [/i]A does an action v[i] this action is itself without meaning when removed from the milieu in which it is deployed. Even if we wwere to invoke some sort of transcendental force here, we woulsd have to recognize that this transcendental force is only relevant in the coding of our actions insofar as it is a force in the game. Such a force would have to remain withing the confines of the game, its only meaning would come from its functioning within the game, and thus it makes no sense to speak of this force being trancendental in any way, except, perhaps, as that which provides the impetus for a movement outward. This outward movement, this seeking toward the limitations of the field, has its only meraning in the terms of the game; it must speak to us in a language that we as players of the game can understand, and it is therefore rooted in this language as much as we are. So while there may be a force movement toward a creation undisclosed, such a movement, such a hostile gesture, is only disclosed in the local inhabited by the terms in the relation. These terms, and there relation can only be jusdged through a recourse to the game in which they function. Thus to offer an answer to your question, it would seem that repression and hostility can only be judged good or bad based upon the socieity in which they function, and such a judgement has to function with the awareness that it is itself opperating within the confines of a context which may have, at the outset, delimited or precluded particular forms of creation.
A metaphor may be defined as a linguistic construct which lays claim to some clear representation of reality and then attempts to link this to a reality which is not, and is not virtual.
There is a degree to which “repression†and its explanatory value for “aggression†have been subsumed as culturally “factsâ€, that is represent essences and processes that must necessarily be. For instance, here Kath. is asking if “repression†is an act of Bad Faith, when clearly it would seem that repression and its hydraulic model would be an example of essence preceding existence. The cultural acceptance of the dynamic appears to supercede upon the philosophy. It was in part for this reason that I pointed out the essentialism of Freud’s Libido and the possible dissonance it would have for Sartrean radical freedom. I’m not saying that these two ideas would be irreconcilable, but only that their operant metaphors would have to be addressed - perhaps via Lacan.
Violence and repression are real.
No, they are not “real†in that they do not exist without interpretation. There are things (events) that exist that are called “violent” and things that exist that are called “repressed”. While conceptual “violence†has root in language and culture far deeper than does “repressionâ€, repression is but a explanatory metaphor for that “violenceâ€. If they are “realâ€, they are real in the effects of those interpretations. Valid are pursuits for their meaning, but the interpretative level, the awareness of the linguistic structuring of those experiences, I suggest should always be maintained. Unless one is simply going to psychoanalyze within a particular model.
Hostility and repression form lives, as well as mar them.
Through that model of explanation.
All the rest I find to be a more than worthy exploration of the idea and role of repression. “Repression” is a really a vast concept which can be anything from the technical analysis of Freud’s largely hydraulic thinking about the psyche, and Lacan’s more topological treatment of the subject and the signifier, all the way to the vague feeling that “we are holding something inside”, which really isn’t “the repressed” at all. One really would have to specify exactly what is meant by “repression”.
Thanks for the book suggestion! – I’ll certainly pick up a copy. I, too, lean toward believing that one consciously manipulates one’s emotions to achieve goals. So, reading Solomon will probably re-enforce what is already roaming around in my mind, looking for a parking place.
Always keep in mind that an ‘emotion,’ as it is understood as a behavioral manifestation such as a ‘repression’ of nervous discharge, can only be addressed as if it were unconscious, which is to say one doesn’t decide to sense anxiety. However, emotion only becomes meaningful when it is directed and signified.
Without a consciousness to one’s emotional reaction the stasis between repression and expression remains inconsolable to consciousness, that is, one can’t distinguish repression from expression. For example, the experience of anger can be interpreted as both an expression of rage and a repression of calm. Here, it would be impossible to determine which was the origin of the behavior and the classification of the emotion becomes lost between the two corespondent behavior types.
Repression can be mistaken as expression and vice-versa.
Solomon is excellent. Sartre, too, I might add. If you are interested in an Existential psychoanalysis of Emotion you should get up with Sartre.
I once used an example of a basket-ball game as an analogy of Solomon’s, and Sartre’s point here. The precedence of choice and intention is important when considering our emotional states when dealing with the world and its consequences. In the game, a player might miss many shots and experience a sense of anxiety or dread, because he feels that his performance is bad and that his goal to win is hindered. But this sense cannot take shape unless the player has already established that winning is ‘good,’ and that is a decision. So the players emotional response to the game isn’t pervading him from underneath, as if his response was natural. Instead, he chooses the meaning of ‘a good game’ and reacts with the following behaviors according to his own performance in the game.
Emotions are value-less outside of conscious intentions.
That’s good stuff. Beyond the metaphors there is a functional evidence for hostility that is objective and not determined by relative or subjective moral opinions and preferences. This is a strong move toward material objectivism, what I like to call it. What is the axiom upon which all else is built?
Pain.
The problem is not how to define hostility and repression, it is that society must have total control in the mediations of human interaction in order to eliminate the possibility of exception. The moment an individual is rationally justified in killing another in self defense, what altruistic objectivities exist, vanish, and the rule is compromised. So the foundation of morality can only extend into utilitarianistic principles, which it must, if absolute control is held over the individual interaction within society. Which will probably never happen.
It stands that hostility is universal as an expression of defending from, or intending, physical harm. The dilemma is this. There can never be an absolute evaluation for either destructive or productive ‘morals.’ Killing can never be considered an unecessary or unnatural event, while paradoxically the axiom for the objective truth is that pain is bad. It should come rationally that the only way this can be overcome is a totalitarian rule over every precise detail of our personal existence, or an escape into the mountains of Tibet where upon one becomes a Monk and pacifist.