BEING THERE FOR A REASON Wherever we go, whatever we do, we tend to have a reason. Just as I wouldn’t want to be found wondering down the street without any clothes on, neither would I particularly like the idea of being found somewhere without having a reason for being there. If you were to stop and interview people on a busy high street it is almost a dead certainty that everyone you spoke to would have a ‘reason for being there’. That ‘reason’ can take a number of forms. We could explain what we mean in terms of ‘having an agenda’. If you stop me on the street and ask me what I’m doing, I might answer that I am shopping for some new shoes or a pair of jeans. Or maybe I am going to get a key copied. Or maybe I am meeting a friend for coffee. Or going to a yoga session. Another way to look at it, therefore, would be to say that I have a specific thing in mind. I am not just wandering around aimlessly – I have a goal. I am not just ‘there’, I am ‘there for a purpose’. Yet another form that this purposefulness takes is that of social roles. So I have another kind of reason for being there – I can say that I am a policeman, or an electrician, or a sales assistant and that is my reason. Having a social role both protects me and justifies. If you come up and ask what I am doing here I have an instant answer. When I tell you that I am there to sort out the plumbing you are satisfied and move on to something else – I am not examined any closer. This is like wearing an ID badge – as long as I have a valid ID no one questions my right to be there. Finally, we can look at ‘having a reason’ in terms of following a known and familiar routine. We said that the good thing about social roles is that they protect us from being questioned too closely, and daily routines serve a similar function. When I engage myself in a routine I automatically slip into a mode of being in which it is not necessary to question myself. Being engaged in a familiar routine drives out the sort of uncomfortable uncertainty (or uneasy self-consciousness) which tends to bother us sometimes when we are not doing anything. As soon as I go through the motions of my routine I start to feel more at ease, more comfortable, more secure. All of a sudden the emphasis has switched from the “Why?” to the “How?” and the “How?” is a lot easier to deal with. For a difficult or complicated routine I might have to study for years and pass exams before I can master the “How?” This is hard work, but curiously enough it is still a lot easier than facing the “Why?” which no amount of training (or any amount of qualifications) can help me with. If I have the technical mastery, the “How?” holds no fear for me, but the “Why?” has to be faced alone. I am always naked and vulnerable when it comes to the big “Why?” no matter how impregnable and solid my so-called ‘reason for being there’ is. It is for this reason that we always reply to questioning in ‘functional’ terms, which is to say, by reference to some goal or some agenda or in terms of the social system I am part of. In doing this, we completely fail to see that we have involved ourselves in an ‘infinite regress’ which there is simply no way out of. We can uncover this infinite regress easily enough, all we need to do is continue questioning, and not be satisfied with the first level of meaning that we are offered. So, for example, when you stop me on the street and ask me what I am doing, I answer that I am heading off to the supermarket to obtain some groceries. But, you, not to be fobbed off with superficial explanations, press on. “Why do you want to obtain groceries?” you ask, curiously. I reply that I want to buy food so that I can take it home and eat it. “What is the purpose in eating food?” you ask innocently. Exasperated, starting to suspect that I am talking to an idiot, I point out that if I didn’t eat, I couldn’t continue to live. So now you ask, with unabated curiosity, what my reason is for wanting to live. At this point I would probably give up trying to take you seriously, and walk off in disgust, but the question is a fair one. It is of course possible that I might attempt to answer your question on theological grounds, and say that we are here because God wanted us to be here, and that it is His plan for us. But this does not avoid the regress, because the question you will now ask is “Why does God want us to be here?” The ‘theologically correct’ answer to this is to throw up one’s hands and say “Who can question God?” He is a law unto Himself, after all, and so who are we to impudently demand to know what He is up to?” Now, in one respect there might seem to be sense in this, but in a psychological sense we can see that, no matter what the truth of the matter might be, we have a vested interest in handing over responsibility. Maybe we can’t know ‘the mind of God’, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t suit us only too well that we can’t, and in that case our avowed respect for God’s ‘unquestionability’ is actually just a shoddy excuse for our true motivation in not questioning, which is that we would simply prefer not to think for ourselves. Or even think at all, when it comes right down to it. All the examples we gave of ‘being there for a reason’ can also be seen in the light of this ‘secret motivation’. If I account for myself in terms of my goal or in terms of my agenda, then at the same time as making something obvious (i.e. what I am about) I am obscuring by sleight of hand any doubt or uncertainty that I might have on this score. By pointing to the obvious or ‘the known’ (which is known only because we have all tacitly agreed upon it) I distract attention from the limitless ocean of the unknown which everything floats in. If I say to you that I am a tax accountant, then you can stop wondering what I am, but actually you know nothing because the label ‘income tax accountant’ only makes sense within the collective system of meaning that we have all agreed to abide by. In other words, a role or part within a game only has meaning within the game within which it has meaning. Outside of that game, the label (or role) is utterly meaningless – it tells us absolutely nothing. What is more, the game is only ‘make-believe’ – games are not reality, they can only become ‘real’ to us if we agree to pretend that they are real. A game only works as long we agree not to question anything too deeply. This in fact is how we deal with the ever-present ‘infinite regress’ which we talked about a minute ago – we deal with it by ignoring. We ignore the way in which the framework of meaning which we are relating everything to is actually arbitrary, i.e. its solidity is not based on anything other than our desire not to look any further. So, if I am a bouncer in a night-club and I am throwing you out, and you ask me why I am throwing you out, I throw up my hands and say “It’s the rules…” This is a classic example of ‘handing over responsibility’. It is a sneaky avoidance of the truth really, though, as everyone can see. It is still my responsibility really of course because it is my decision to abide by the rules. By throwing up my hands I am distracting attention away from the fact that I have chosen to have no choice in the matter, and if I have chosen to have no choice, then I do have choice after all. It’s just that I am hiding my choice. So the thing about ‘having a reason for being there’ is that we choose the reason ourselves, and then ignore the fact that we chose it. That is the trick whereby we ‘justify’ ourselves. The gain that we obtain by this trick is the gain of not having to see the relativity of all knowledge. In other words, we don’t have to see that what we know is a function of how we choose to think about things. When I ignore this relativity, then I can relax. I don’t have to see the big ? that hangs over everything. I have distracted myself from the uncomfortable eeriness of the “Why?” and can get on with dealing with the much less challenging “How?” I can turn off my awareness of the strangeness (or ‘unaccountable-ness’) of everything, and focus comfortably in the known and familiar and accountable world of my games. Routines are a perfect example of this sort of thing. When I am comfortably in a routine I don’t have to choose what to do, all I have to do is to ‘follow the rules of the routine’. Relativity here means ‘arbitrariness’, and the way a routine works is through the unacknowledged act of ‘ignoring the way in which it didn’t have to be so’. Actually, I could equally well have done it a different way, but I act as if there is no the one way to do it. I act as if there was no ‘choice’ involved at all. As we have said, there was a choice because I chose to have no choice, but I conveniently ignore my responsibility in this matter. If someone were to come along and point out that I didn’t have to do it that way, I wouldn’t like that at all. That would put the responsibility right back on me, I would have to start asking myself serious questions, I would have to face my own frightening ignorance. If my ‘reason for being there’ were to be rudely taken away from me, then I would feel quite naked. I would have no handy way of evading the issue. I would have no more excuses, no more easy answers. An easy answer is like a pillow that I can rest my weary head upon – the only trouble is that when I do this I inevitably fall fast asleep, and this was actually my secret motivation all along. I want to be asleep! Waking up is the last thing that I am interested in. This ‘drive to be asleep’ (or ‘drive to be unconscious’) is basically avoidance; it is basically a desire to hide ourselves away. But what could we be hiding from? Why are we really here? When it comes right down to it, we are ‘here without a reason’. “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here…” as the old army song goes. As the resurrected Osiris says in the Egyptian Book of the Dead: “I am that I am that I am that I am…” Being here without a reason, I feel like a snail out of its shell. I feel queer, unaccountable. Open to anything that might come along. If you were to come to me now and question me, I would have no credentials. I have nothing to hide behind. Here lies a clue to the great fear that has me in its grip. In the normal run of things, we are our agendas, we are our goals, we are our roles. It may also be said that we are our routines, which is to say, we are our ‘habits’. In short, we are our ‘excuse for being there’. And as both Krishnamurti and David Bohm have said, we are the arbitrary context of meaning within which we make sense of ourselves. Being shorn of my reassuring certainties seems to me to be the same thing as having my self wiped out. I am, therefore, threatened with the annihilation of my identity. To have my limitations are stripped away from me would be ultimately threatening for me because I am identified with those limitations. I don’t actually want to go beyond my limitations because that would mean going beyond the habitual pattern which is ‘myself’. When the solid walls that used to surround me start to crumble there is the sense of vertigo that comes from being suspended over infinite depths. I feel as if I am about to be lost in an awesome vastness in which there is no place to locate myself. Without the wall of my ignorance there to protect me a burning awareness starts to press itself upon me, an awareness that I am incapable of hiding from. As this unlimited awareness dawns, all crappy ideas of having to have this reason or that reason for being here become laughably redundant...
Posted on: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 08:07:02 +0000
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