I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. “Good is a transcendent reality” means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, via Maria Popova
Murdoch saw the ego as a natural and self-centered fantasy machine which is relentless in its attention to its own needs. She argued that our natural state is one of illusion, viewing the world through a cloud of fantastic reverie which protects us from pain while inflating our sense of our own importance. To Murdoch, the primary enemy of the moral life is the “fat relentless ego,” which distorts our vision of reality and of other people.
In The Burnout Society, philosopher Byung-Chul Han diagnoses a similar dysfunction in modern life, but he approaches it through the lens of the modern fixation on productivity and the narcissism required for that. While Murdoch saw the ego as a natural and selfish fantasy machine, Han argues that our modern economic system has exploited taht ego, turning is into achievement subjects who can never look away from ourselves, or see anything except as a reflection of ourselves.
Both Murdoch and Han suggest that our egos (fantasy machines to Murdoch, productivity machines to Han) prevent us from seeing the Other, the reality of people who are not ourselves. Han, in fact, goes further, arguing that the Other has disappeared. We are so obsessed with our own individual self optimization that everything we encounter, including other people, is treated as a tool for our own achievement, ambition, and success. The ego becomes so enchanted and obsessed with the Same that it can no longer reach anything truly different or external.
Both Murdoch and Han advise that we must learn to stop and look. Murdoch’s antidote to the ego’s sway is attention, a “just and loving gaze.” Han suggests living the contemplative life.
What can you bring your attention to that will take you out of yourself? Another person. Nature. An act of creation. Great ideas and theories. The key is to approach these things not instrumentally (to get you someplace, make you money for example, or bring you prestige and social approval), not out of obligation (as when you spend time with a relative because of a sense of guilt), and not through the lens of your gigantic ego.