The Aristos

1 Because of our powers of reasoning, imagining and supposing, we exist mentally in a world of opposites, converses, negatives. There may be some kind of absolute reality that is not like this. There may be other relative realities. But this tensional, or polar, reality is the one we humans inhabit.

2 Anything that exists or can be imagined to exist is a pole. All feelings, ideas, thoughts, are poles; and each pole has counterpoles.

3 There are two categories of counterpole. One is nothingness, the non-existence of the pole. The other is whatever denies, attacks, diminishes, stands contrary to or diverts from the pole.

4 The obvious counterpole of an idea is the contrary idea. The world is round; the world is not round. But whatever else stands between my mind and its continuous concentration on the idea (The world is round) is also a counterpole. Now the contrary idea (The world is not round) is at first sight the most dangerous enemy of the pole idea; but all those subsidiary counterpoles (other concerns, other events, other exigencies, other ideas) that distract the mind from the pole idea endanger it far more; in fact, to the extent that they do not signal it, but submerge it, they reduce it to nothingness. There is thus a paradoxical sense in which the contrary idea signals and supports the idea to which it is superficially most opposed.

5 Even when contrary propositions are meaningless or demonstrably false they contribute life and meaning to the propositions they oppose; just as the nonexistence, in human terms of existing, of ‘God’ gives life and meaning to all that exists.

6 Our first and most direct apprehension of this polarity is got from our experience of our own self – our body and then our mind.

THE COUNTERPOLES OF THE ‘I’

7 I am made constantly aware of the otherness of things. They are all in some sense my counterpoles. A Sartrean existentialist would say that they hedge me in, they tyrannize me, they encroach on my selfhood. But they define me, they tell me what I am, and if I am not told what I am, I do not know what I am. I am aware too that all other objects are in exactly the same situation as myself: minute pole in a vast ocean of counterpoles, I am infinitely isolated, but my situation is infinitely repeated.

8 All parts of my body are objects external to me: my hands, my tongue, my digestive mechanism. The words I speak are counterpoles. There is no mental activity I cannot stand back from and be towards as to a counterpole. So I am a tissue of counterpoles. My body and my thoughts and my words are like the garden and the rooms and the furniture of my house. Certainly they seem to me more mine than your garden or the room you read in at this moment; but a moment’s analysis tells me that they are not mine in any total or scientific sense. They are mine in the artificiality of the law, and in the illogicality (or biologicality) of emotion. My garden is this collection of grass, earth, plants, trees that I possess in law and can enjoy while I live; it is not mine. Nothing, not even what I call my self, is mine; individuality and counter-polarity separate me from all.

9 I see these strange tools, my hands, at the end of my arms; I see these strange tools, my arms, that hang from my shoulders; I see these strange tools, my shoulders, that curve from my neck; I see this strange tool, my neck, that carries my head; I see this strange tool, my head, that holds my brain; I see this strange tool, my brain, that sees itself and calls itself a tool and tries to find in itself a thing not a tool that it is a tool for.

10 Where then is the ultimate pole? Where is the T that permits me to make these descriptions? Which claims that everything, both in and outside me, is other? Plainly, it is no more than a recording of phenomena; a colourless mechanism distinguished from other such mechanisms only by its position in space and time. Ultimately T is simply the common condition of all human mentality.

11 The description we habitually make is this: ‘I am aware of this disturbance that has happened in my brain.’ But it is more accurate to say: ‘This disturbance disturbed and the disturbing took place in the particular field of experience that the reflector of the disturbance, the stater of this statement, exists in.’ I is thus a convenient geographical description, not an absolute entity.

THE TENSIONAL NATURE OF HUMAN REALITY

12 If the T pole is anything it is the sum of reflected (and recollected) disturbances in this field. If there had been no disturbances there would be no ‘mirror’; no T. In short, T is constituted by its counterpoles; without them it is nothing.

13 There is however a sense in which each counterpole must seem hostile to the ‘ghost’ called T that has been constituted by all other counterpoles. The directly contrary counterpole to I am is I am not. That is paradoxically not the most hostile since my death (as tombstones remind us) at least signals my existence. The way in which we ordinarily think of our own death is not morbid; on the contrary, one of the simplest ways of assuring ourselves that we live. But the counterpoles that are external to my body and my immediate surroundings and possessions are’ all in effect submergers of me. They distract my (and other people’s) concentration from myself. They diminish me. And thus they give rise to my personal sense of nemo.

14 What we consciously or subconsciously require of a counterpole is that it in some way signals and confirms our existence; because we own it in law, because it loves us or hates us or needs us or acknowledges us; because we can identify ourselves either with it or, by the process of countersupporting, against it. The more we are aware of the nothingness at the still centre of our being – that nothingness we mask by talking of T – the more we look for these ego-reflective (or nemo-destructive) qualities in the counterpoles with which we can choose to furnish our lives.

15 Between all these counterpoles, both choosable and inevitable, and the T pole there exists a relationship; but since the counterpoles are in themselves poles and have their own counterpoles (one of which is constituted by T) the situation of the T pole is analogous to a kind of complex tug-of-war. We must imagine countless teams all of whose ropes are knotted at a centre; of differing strength, some directly combining, others obliquely affecting, many diametrically opposed. This central knot is the T; and the diverse forces pulling at it make the state of tension.

TENSION

16 Tension is the effect on the individual of conflicting feelings, ideas, desires and events. Sometimes the tug-of-war will be one-sided, in the sense that the individual will know quite clearly which ‘side’ he wishes to win. In most political and social contexts this is so. A Jew-hater is not attracted by pro-semitism, a pacifist by armed intervention. There is still tension, since the individual knows that in society the opposing point of view is held. But in many other situations the conflict will be in the individual. He will be pulled first one way, then the other. This can form a rhythmic and comfortable pattern, as in normal sexual relationships; it can become a torture on the rack; and in extreme cases the knotted ropes, the individual mind, may break under the strain.

17 The effect of a tension may be good or bad: a game or an anxiety. Tension, like every other mechanism in the universal process, is indifferent to the organisms it affects. It may ravish them, or it may destroy them.

18 Each of us, and each society, and each world, is the centre of a web of such tensions; and what we call progress is simply the effect of its opposing forces. To be human, or to be a human institution, is like being obliged to be a man on a tightrope. He must balance; and he must move.

19 We shall never attain a state of perfect balance. For us, the only perfect balance can be the living balance. Even if perfect balance is momentarily achieved, time ensures it will not be sustained. It is time that makes this balancing real.

20 Evolution changes in order to remain the same; but we change in order to become different. Time passes, from our human point of view, in order that each moment shall be in hazard and needing balance.

21 Our pleasure and our pain, our happiness and our envy, tell us each hour whether we balance or we fall. We live in the best of all possible worlds for mankind because we have been so adapted and developed that this world cannot be anything else to us; we are best and happiest in a tensional, tightrope situation, but one in which we can gain increasing skill as we go higher. Height in this situation is principally definable by our ability to destroy ourselves. The higher we go, the steadier – and what is steadiness if not a form of equality? – we must become. Or we fall.

THE MECHANISM OF THE TENSION

22 The fundamental tension is between pleasure and pain; and the three chief fields in which pleasure-pain operates are in the subsidiary tensions formed by good-evil, beauty-ugliness and security-insecurity. The fundamental truth about all these tensions is that their ‘good’ poles are totally dependent for their ‘goodness’ – their value to us – on their ‘bad’ counterpoles. We all know this: that too much beauty can become ugliness, pain can become a profound pleasure… and so with all the rest.

23 Beauty-ugliness may serve as a model for the mechanism of the other tensions. Just as there are two modes of pleasure, intended and fortuitous, so are there two similar modes in our apprehension of beauty: objective and actual The objective beauty of an object or experience is immutable, in parenthesis from all the subjective reactions and feelings of the experiencer. The actual beauty is what I happen to feel on a given occasion; it is the effect of the object or experience on my being at that moment.

24 We are taught as children to think about great art (and indeed many other things, such as religion) in the objective way, as if every actual experience of a great painting should produce the same effect on us. We see the results of this in any famous art gallery during the holiday season: the gaping, wooden-faced crowds who stare at great art and cannot understand why they are not having great-art reactions, because they have been so conditioned that they cannot accept that in actuality a Coca-Cola advertisement may be more beautiful than the sublimest Michelangelo.

25 Objective beauty is, of course, a myth – a very convenient myth, without which education in art and the ‘science’ of artistic appreciation would be impossible, and also a very human myth, since to search for the objective beauty in an object is to attempt to see it with the finer feelings of one’s fellow-men. All great works of art are secular ikons; and seeing them objectively is a secular act of communion.

26 But the objective beauty has two great enemies: reality and familiarity. The total reality of an aesthetic experience is what we actually feel both in and out of the parenthesis. Familiarity breeds contempt, that is, boredom with the parenthesis. Seeing the objective beauty becomes a duty, and we all know that the concepts of duty and pleasure are rarely sympathetic; the second visit to a gallery is also a visit to the first visit. This is not to say that all repetitions of beautiful experiences diminish the original beauty. It is often not true of art, and is certainly not generally true of many other activities – such as lovemaking. Nonetheless, there is a deep and archetypal hatred of routine in man, caused by the demands of survival (survival is the correct performance of drills, whether they be the hunting-planting drills of primitive man or the wage-seeking labour drills of industrial man). Pleasure is associated strongly with the unexpected (the fortuitous mode) and the fresh, or previously unexperienced, beauty.

27 It is of course possible to experience this beauty, which I will call virgin, in familiar objects, just as a metaphorical virginity can be found in a lover long after the literal virginity has passed. Such virgin beauty is commonly felt by almost all children, by poets and artists, and sometimes as an effect of certain drugs, like alcohol and lysergic acid. But to the vast majority of adults it can be found only in the new experience.

28 It is true that we find substitutes for the loss of the virgin beauty of an object. This picture is beautiful because it is mine; because I own it, or remember it, or understand its secrets. The thing becomes my thing; not the thing in itself. Experience cedes to possession.

29 The whole trend of modern society is to force the objective beauty down our throats. It is this beauty that concerns critics; and we are an age of critics. It is this beauty that concerns commerce. Mass communications, vulgarizing techniques, the substitution of twentieth-century didactic culture for nineteenth-century didactic morality as a proof that the propagating organ ‘serves’ the public, the spread of museums and art galleries, the flood of books of information – all these things force us, fundamentally actual beings, to see the world in a parenthetically objective way.

30 The great contemporary attraction of the drugs and philosophies – such as Zen Buddhism – that facilitate the discovery of virgin beauty in familiar objects is explicable by our resentment of this pressure modern society puts on us. There are genuine and important uses for the objective beauty; but sometimes we want less of names, less of labels, less of analysis and historical placing – in a word, less ‘culture’. We want nothing to stand between the object or experience now and the mind and senses now. We want the thing in itself.

31 In wanting this, and in being forced to search for the previously unexperienced, we put ourselves in the same situation as Midas. Everything he touched turned to gold, and from then on became useless to him. We crave the virgin beauty, but as soon as we experience it, it turns to gold… or boredom. We have to move on. The satisfaction of the desire is the creation of a new desire.

32 But there is of course a further element in our pursuit of the virgin experience of beauty. Even the most unobservant must have noticed that the same inexorable law applies here as applies with hunger: the evil or apparently hostile state is necessary for our enjoyment of the good or ‘friendly’ one.

33 Hunger and appetite are exactly the same thing. Have you got an appetite? Yes, I am hungry. Are you hungry? Yes, I have an appetite.

34 The same is true of all the other great tensions. A pleasure is all the more pleasurable for coming after a period of pain. Security, for following insecurity. Good, for following evil. It is true that we may not actively seek the ‘bad’ counterpoles and our swing away from the ‘good’ ones may be characterized more by apathy than by actually inflicting pain on ourselves, or risking our lives meaninglessly, or engaging in crime. Nevertheless we cannot do without the alternation of these opposed states, and we will encourage the alternation to the extent that we feel deprived, by the defects of society and education, by the unnecessary inequality in our world, of the virgin experiences we need.

35 In our present unhappy stage of civilization – come so far, so little learned – it is natural that many should regard the essential thing to be the virgin experience, whether it occurs among the socially ‘good’ or ‘bad’ poles. They will find a justification for crime (a case brilliantly put by Jean Genet), for non-criminal evil (persistent adultery, ruthless commercial practice and so on) and for insecurity (the pursuit of dangerous interests and professions, such as mountaineering and car-racing).

36 Even those who try to find their pleasures in the ‘good’ poles will just as much need, even if they do not actively seek experience in, the ‘bad’ poles.

37 Now it may seem at first sight that this alternating mechanism reaches so deep into our innermost beings, and into the innermost being of our societies, that we can do nothing about it. But this is to say that reason and science can do nothing against the pleasure principle and our addiction to the virgin experience; that we can never control the violent effects that these tensions at present exert on each of us and the societies we live in. I reject totally this pessimistic and fatalistic view of human destiny, and I want to suggest the model and method we should examine for a solution.

THE MANIPULATION OF THE TENSIONS

38 The model is marriage; the method is transposition; and what we hope to achieve is not of course the abolition of all tension, but the avoidance of wasted energy, pointless battle and unnecessary suffering. It is necessary to drink water; but it should not be necessary to drink polluted water.

39 Joining is a first principle; the proton joins the electron, the atoms by joining grow in complicacy, make molecules by joining, amoeba joins amoeba, male joins female, mind mind, country country: existence is being joined. Being is joining, and the higher the being the more the joining.

40 Marriage is the best general analogy of existing. It is the most familiar polar situation, with the most familiar tension; and the very fact that reproduction requires a polar situation is an important biological explanation of why we think polarly.

41 As with all tensional states, marriage is harassed by a myth and a reality. The objective myth is that of the Perfect Marriage, a supposedly achievable state of absolute harmony between the partners. The reality is whatever is the case, every actual marriage.

42 Married couples normally try to give the public, their friends, and even their children, a Perfect Marriage version of their own marriage; if they do not, then they still express and judge the extent of their failure by the standards of the Perfect Marriage.

43 The gauges of the supposedly Perfect Marriage are passion and harmony. But passion and harmony are antipathetic. A marriage may begin in passion and end in harmony, but it cannot be passionate and harmonious at the same time.

44 Passion is a pole, an extreme joining; it can only be achieved as height is on a swing – by going from coital pole to sundered counterpole; from two to two ones. The price of passion is no passion.

45 During the White Terror, the police caught two suspects, a man and a woman, who were passionately in love. The chief of police invented a new torture. He simply had them bound as one, face to face. To begin with, the lovers consoled themselves that at least they were together, even though it was with the inseparability of Siamese twins. But slowly each became irksome to the other; they became filthy, they could not sleep; and then hateful; and finally so intolerably loathsome that when they were released they never spoke to each other again.

46 A few rare marriages may be without mutual hatred or quarrels from their very beginning. One could also write music in which every interval was of a perfect fourth. But it would not be perfect music. Most marriages recognize this paradox: that passion destroys passion, as the Midas touch destroys possession.

47 An intelligent married couple might therefore come to this conclusion: they wish to retain passion in their marriage, and so they should deliberately quarrel, and hate, in order to swing back together with more force. Women do indeed initiate marital quarrels more frequently than men; they know more about human nature, more about mystery, and more about keeping passion alive. There may be biological reasons for menstruation, but it is also the most effective recreator of passion; and the women who resist emancipation also know what they are about.

48 But there comes a time when passion costs too much in quarrels. To survive familiarity, dailiness, it needs more and more violent separations, and so either the two poles quarrel more and more violently inside marriage, or they look for new passion, a new pole, outside it.

49 Passion can be controlled in only one way; by sacrificing its pleasures.

50 But this sacrifice is made almost impossibly difficult, at least in capitalist Western society, by our attitude to growing old. With the decline of a belief in an afterlife and the corresponding growth of the demand for equality, the whole tendency of man is to shrink away from death and the age at which it arrives. In every aspect of our societies, from their art to their advertising, we see the cult and desirability of eternal youth maintained… and therefore of passion, which joined with our craving for the virgin experience, explains the enormous change that has taken place in our concepts and standards of marital fidelity.

51 Man is more guilty than woman here, since men have always required public and social – rather than emotional and domestic – reward in life. In spite of the male myth about female vanity, it is the men who are in the more greedy pursuit of this chimera of eternal youth. The Western male has, in our century, become increasingly Moslem in his attitude towards marriage and women. We do not yet practice legal polygamy, but the common contemporary desire of men in their forties and fifties to jettison their similarly-aged wives for an affaire or a new marriage with a girl young enough to be a daughter (or even a grand-daughter) is already a de facto polygamous institution among the rich and successful in the less convention-bound professions (especially those that permit mobility and thus escape the ethical pressures of the close community). This may be a normal, even finally a healthy, innovation in society. But it could be just only if middle-aged women were allowed to follow suit. In fact, they stay at home and suffer, left in a slavery more subtle but no less iron than the one they are generally supposed to have been freed from during these last fifty years.

52 This retrogressive step in the relationship between the sexes is certainly partly explicable as a last resentment of overthrown Adam against victorious Eve; and it may in itself seem to have little to do with my general theme. But it is in fact very symptomatic of our craving for a more sharply-opposed tonality of life – a greater tension. No one will deny that passion is necessary in its season, and we possess nothing until we possess it first with passion. But this passion, and the passionate stage of marriage, is animal; it is the harmonius marriage that is human. In passion it is said, we feel near the heart of things – and so we are: nearer things than humanity.

53 Plenty of books instruct sexual technique; but none teach the equally vital technique of transposing from the passionate relationship to the harmonious one.

TRANSPOSITION

54 The first step is to eliminate passion as a source of tension. The second is to accept the oneness of the marriage. In passion everything is between thee and me; in harmony it is between them and us. I-thou is passion, we-they is harmony. We have the word egocentric; it is time we invented noscentric.

55 Now of course no marriage can be wholly harmonious. But if it becomes noscentric it is immediately equipped to find different counterpoles, outside itself, which can in their turn help to determine the nature of, and establish and cement, the nos, the ‘we’ pole; just as the T pole is determined by its counterpoles. Certain counterpoles, such as the problems of aging, and the approach of death, will be common to all marriages.

56 But there is a second aid to the establishment of the harmonious marriage. We think ordinarily of the opposite of harmony as discord. But as I said earlier there is another and very fundamental counterpole of every existent object, and that is its non-existence-nothingness, the state of ‘God’. In a piece of music we think of the discords as the counterpoles of the harmonies; but there are also the pauses and silences.

And it is this state, not of discord but of ‘silent’ not-harmony, that we need to utilize to establish the harmonious marriage. In practical terms, this means the establishment of private interests not shared by the other partner, a disconnection in the relationship, an acceptance that togetherness becomes as intolerable as that of the pair in the White Terror torture if it is not based on periods of at least psychological separation. Now clearly the ability to form such outside interests, to maintain such a controlled separateness from which the basic harmony will spring, requires both education and economic freedom of a standard we have nowhere in our world today except among the fortunate few; and that is yet one more argument for a greater human equality.

57 All I say about marriage is stale news: every middle-aged and still happily married couple knows it. But my purpose is to point out that in our metaphorical marriage to pleasure, and in particular to the pleasures of being secure, doing good, and experiencing beauty, we develop the same kind of passionate relationship as we do in marriage. We feel passionately about them, but in order to continue to feel so, we have increasingly to resort to their counterpoles.

58 The equivalent in marriage is the malaise known as the seven-year-itch: boredom with fidelity. This metaphorical itch, this boredom with the stable and the socially recommended and the good, comes as a rule between the ages of thirty and forty – in the fourth decade of the marriage to existence. It is aggravated – and always will be – by the group in society who are at the age when the passionate experience is their right, their desire, and almost their duty: that is, the young. And if we idolize (as we do today) the young, then passionate atmospheres (and passionate politics, passionate art, and all the rest) must infest our societies.

INTERNATIONAL TENSION

59 All this conflict between harmony and passion becomes of greatest pertinence in the relationship between different countries and blocs of countries. The suffering we cause by private stupidity is at least confined to a small area; but the penalties now lurking in the underground bunkers and germ-warfare laboratories, lurking and waiting to pounce on any national or governmental selfishness and stupidity, are so gigantic that we cannot afford any personal isolationism in these matters.

60 Countries and blocs also live in relationships like marriage. To have the passion of love (to five in peace, which in the world as it is means in a state where the over-privileged are left in safe possession of their privileges) they have to have war. So ages of prosperity and security breed the counterpoles. An age of self is always mother to an age of war.

61 It is customary to talk of ‘international tension’ and ‘nuclear annihilation’ as if these things were terrible. But we love the terror. It is like salt to us. We live under the threat of an annihilatory war; and on it.

62 The two world wars were wars among societies dominated by the emotions of the adolescent. East and West, unhappily and passionately married in the house of the world, both derive vigour and energy from their mutual love-hatred. They erect and exercise and thrill each other. They stimulate each other in many ways besides the economic.

63 There are enough hostile factors (overpopulation, poverty, disease, ignorance) in the human situation to provide endless extramarital counterpoles. There is no inescapable need for man to be his own worst enemy. Many other things are queueing close to have that role.

THE ULTIMATE TENSION

64 The power of a tension is proportionate to its mystery. To be aware of and to understand a tension produces two results. Like lightning on a dark night it reveals what is, and it reveals the way ahead. It thus allows the transposition to a personally or socially less harmful tension to be made. It permits the tension to be controlled, rather than to control.

65 Knowledge of a tension therefore inaugurates two situations: a seeing through the old, and a craving for a new. Because we love and need mystery, we are often reluctant to analyze situations in which mystery seems to inhere. The chief such situation is in ourselves, in the tensions we exist in. We despise primitive cultures for the taboos with which they surround sacred groves and caves and the like; but we still encourage exactly similar taboos in the antique landscapes of the mind.

66 Yet even here we must distinguish between the selfish attachment to mystery that is really a lazy refusal to think or act and our essential need of a residual mystery in life as a whole. This mystery, between what we know and what we know we will never know, is the ultimate tension.

67 The more knowledge we have the more intense this mystery becomes. It may diminish from our point of view, but it condenses.

68 We tend to think that evolution must be a vast attack on mystery. We suppose our highest goal must be to know all. We consequently try to ignore, or destroy, or vitiate, what genuine mysteries life contains.

69 We are intended to solve much of the mystery; it is harmful to us. We have to invent protections against the sun, in many situations; but to wish to destroy the sun? The easier mysteries, how at a superficial level things work mechanically, how things are ‘caused’, have been largely solved. Many take these mysteries for the whole mystery. The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.

70 The task of education is to show the mysteries solved; but also to show where mystery has not been, and will not be, solved – and in the most familiar objects and events. There is mystery enough at noon; no need to multiply the midnight rites.

71 The counterpole of all that is existent and known or knowable, that is ‘God’, must be infinite mystery, since only so can a tension remain to keep mankind from collapsing into total knowledge, or a ‘perfect’ world that would be a perfect hell. From this knowledge-mystery tension there is no transposing; and it is the source of human being.

72 All predictions are wagers. All predictions about the future are about what is not scientifically certain, but only scientifically probable. This fundamental uncertainty is essential to life. Every look forward is a potential illusion. This satisfies our need for insecurity; since in an eternally insecure situation we must externally seek knowledge and security, and never completely find them.