Krasilov, 1997. Metaecology-16. Passers-by. Dulcinea. The Witness. Substitution. What's in a Name?

Morality (conclusion). Chapter 5. ECOSYSTEM. Tandem.

V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. M.: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 p. Part 16.

Passersby. Dulcinea. Witness. Substitution. What's in a name?

Logos. Galatia. Sword.

Passersby. In Polynesian and African languages, words are repeated twice, like 'lava-lava' or 'ngoro-ngoro.' Children's words like 'mama,' 'papa,' 'baba,' 'dyadya' (uncle), etc., common to all Indo-European languages, are similar repetitions. In emotional speech, we often repeat a word or phrase twice or thrice. Once, apparently, is not enough for the word to be properly experienced, to 'stick in the soul,' as they say. In poetic language, rhyme returns to the previous line, as if continuing its life. Children constantly ask to repeat a familiar fairy tale. Odysseus and the long-winded Phaeacians enjoy listening for the hundredth time to the amusing story of Ares and Aphrodite caught in the act. In antiquity, everyone who respected himself created his own version of the universal story. There were seven Greek (Apollodorus, Euripides, Cleophon, etc.), seven Roman (Gracchus, Seneca, etc.) 'Phīēstēs,' and approximately as many 'Atreus' with similar plots. The pseudo-ancient story of the pseudo-Trojan hero Troilus and his beloved Briseis (Cressida, Chryseis) was retold, among others, by Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare; the legend of Tristan and Isolde, after numerous medieval adaptations in all European languages, was revived by Schlegel, Walter Scott, Immermann, and Wagner. However, even in my school years, it was customary to reread books (watch movies) several times. Now this tradition is lost, and, strangely, the excess of information does not satisfy but only accelerates life, which quickly slides on one plane. In my school years, the story of the wealthy boyar Troyekurov and his poor neighbor Dubrovsky was presented as a realistic depiction of Russian village life in Pushkin's time. The rich neighbor, 'abusing the antiquity of his glorious lineage, had a multitude of followers and did whatever he pleased in the town. He treated his modest neighbor hostilely and ruined his meager estate: he killed small livestock, drove away bulls, trampled unripe grain. When he deprived him of all means, he decided to completely drive the poor man from his plot and, initiating some frivolous lawsuit about boundaries, demanded the entire land for himself.' Further events take a tragic turn, but one should not check the quote against Pushkin, because it actually gives a realistic depiction of life in a Thessalian village during the time of Apuleius, Pushkin's favorite. The great Manet also could not deny himself the pleasure of copying a painting from the Louvre collection. Such quotes bring to life ancient layers of culture, preventing them from being neglected, from being turned into dead mass. We owe our love for repetition to the fact that ancient epic has survived at all. The Gospel is repeated four times, and how many then wanted to retell the short biography of Christ again and again? In the Bible, the solar journey with immersion into the abyss and rebirth is presented as the story of Adam, Jacob, Joseph, Job, the prodigal son, and finally, Jesus. And we returned, and will return to these cycles endlessly. Jesus said: 'Be passersby' (from Thomas). Pontius Pilate, having retired, barely remembered the young Galilean whom he handed over to the soldiers for destruction, and could calmly claim that it was all fiction. An event becomes not so much what happened, but what has been repeatedly played out in the imagination, although perhaps it did not happen.

Dulcinea. They say that in the last moments before death, one's entire life passes. Does this mean that everything that constituted life can pass in such a short time? Does this mean that life is not measured by the number of years lived or the number of involuntary episodes? Do the three thousand women of the dying Don Juan pass before him, each separately, or do they merge into some crowd? Does Don Quixote see windmills, or are they still warrior giants? Whom does the blind Faust see in his last moments – Margaret or Helen? It might seem that Faust gains no benefit from the accompanying Mephistopheles, but this is a mistake. What would Faust's life be without Mephistopheles, who would treat him with such unwavering interest, who would mock, sympathize, and bear witness? His life would be lost, like a Greek tragedy without a chorus. If our life is a tragicomedy, as Plato believed, then at least give us a chorus. Childhood is good precisely because in a normal family, a child is always surrounded by a chorus of sympathetic witnesses. If he grew up and stayed in a small village where everyone knows him, then a certain semblance of a chorus accompanies the entire tragicomedy of his life. But life in a big city, one of millions, breeds a chronic inferiority complex, the tragedy of a little invisible person whose days scatter like sand between fingers. The honesty of a city dweller, the desire to become a department head, a movie star, Napoleon, Einstein, finally – is nothing more than a natural desire to acquire a chorus. A city dweller's love and marriage are an attempt to find a sympathetic witness to his life. If neither succeeds, only one constant witness remains, the one whose existence itself has no other evidence than its presence in the soul, which testifies to it. The need for a witness apparently explains the stability of such social institutions as marriage and family. They will survive, no matter what radical ideas Plato, Jesus, or Marx put forward. Although the chorus of witnesses seems preferable at first glance, there are works – and with the development of individuality, there are more and more of them – that are not intended for choral performance. Deeply intimate relationships are possible only with one witness, whose uniqueness is a reflection of one's own uniqueness. Thus, the monogamous family replaces the polygamous one. Thus, the one God supplants the host of gods living on Olympus or elsewhere, asserting his kingdom within us. Don Quixote could remember windmills if they seemed like giants to him. Blind Faust could see Margaret if she were also Helen. Real life – life on one plane, a story told once (and, frankly, idiotic, full of senseless noise and powerless rage) – avoids and dissolves like a track on water. The fullness of life is determined not by the number of achievements, but by the completeness of experiencing what has been accomplished. An event, sympathetically experienced by a witness, reflected many times by paired mirrors, occurring simultaneously on earth and on all celestial spheres, cannot pass without a trace. One ephemeral Dulcinea surpasses three thousand Spanish lovers. However, for this to be possible, one must create a witness for oneself, or at least rent one.

Witness. In a humorous story, an old woman who tore her dress is overcome by doubts: is it me? A dog is supposed to resolve this question – if it recognizes her, then it's her. The same problem often faces criminal investigators. How to prove that a person is the same if they have changed their name, appearance? And here they turn to dogs for help. Obviously, a dog's recognition is more reliable than a human's. The dog itself has no other confirmation of its own identity than recognition by another dog. For a person, there can be no greater tragedy than the loss of self-identity: with the disappearance of the inner witness, the entire life path seems to be erased. Even physical death is not so destructive, because some, perhaps the most important, part of personal life experience, the trace of self-awareness remains after it, ensuring what is called in symbolic language the immortality of the soul, which leaves the mortal body. With the exception of rare pathological cases, a person, despite changes in appearance, social status, and way of thinking, knows for themselves that they are themselves, at least from a certain age. Early childhood is usually outside of self-identification. As for the fact that the infant with a pacifier in the old photograph is me, one has to rely on the testimony of parents and other external witnesses. The inner witness appears at the age of five or six, when our ancestors approached sexual maturity – convincing evidence that self-identification arose in the later stages of evolutionary history. When a child begins to say "I" about themselves, the ability to reflect awakens in them, and at the same time, a metaphysical double begins to develop – a meta-ego (this term, according to the author, satisfies the need for a more precise concept than "second self" or "soul," which have many meanings; it also does not coincide with Freud's "superego," which essentially means the rational ethical principle). The individuality of development in this case repeats the historical process – the separation from nature, the development of reflective thinking – stretched over millennia. Self-identity is a product of this process, and its keeper is imagined as a special creature, outside of time and, therefore, detached from our external "self," which is so quickly covered by the patina of lived years. "By divine fate, a certain genius has accompanied me since early childhood," said Socrates. "It is a voice that warns me and does not allow me to act." "It's as if there are two people in me," admits a Lermontov character. "One acts, the other observes and evaluates." Such confessions are not evidence of exceptionalism. All people (as well as gods) have metaphysical doubles. Pathology is more likely expressed in the absence or underdevelopment of the double, when it has to be substituted by a priest or a psychiatrist.

Substitution. The individual development of the child's spiritual world, to the extent that it repeats historical development, can provide invaluable material for understanding the latter. Let us note again that the consciousness of a newborn is not a blank slate at all. It already contains templates of ideas, which, under external influences, will have to develop into images and concepts that fill the space of the inner world. If we call this world the soul, then, as Plato believed, we receive its beginnings even before birth. However, the soul of a newborn does not yet feel its separation from the surrounding world and is not capable of ensuring self-identity, a stable recognition of oneself. This is partly due to the irreversibility of consciousness. A small child does not understand that a doll made of plasticine is still the same plasticine. Their consciousness is not yet ready to mentally perform the reverse operation, to roll the doll back into a ball. At this stage, it seems, a duality as a condition for the existence of a productive personality system does not yet exist. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget showed that reversibility comes at the fifth or sixth year of life. This is an event of extraordinary importance, as with reversibility comes the potential for self-knowledge. It is at this stage that the meta-ego double arises, causing sadness in the inner world. What was unambiguous has become ambiguous. The young meta-ego feels an almost painful interest in games and fairy tales with transformations. If a wolf can turn into a grandmother, then a transition from one-dimensional thinking, inherent in animals, to multi-dimensional thinking, inherent in humans, has occurred. Reality, given to us through sensation, turns out to be absorbed by reality, given to us through imagination. In this new reality, the categorical nature of perception disappears under doubt. The inversion created by dual consciousness evokes joyful satisfaction (good enough), called a sense of humor. Now there is everything necessary for the formation of personality. Will it form – that is the question. Nature has been moving towards this for hundreds of millions of years. Like any property that appeared late in the evolutionary process, the reversibility of consciousness exhibits great individual variability. We are accustomed to the fact that people differ in the development of their sense of humor, and some seem to have none at all. The latter, as a rule, love certainty in everything, expect clear, unambiguous instructions, prefer authoritarian rule to democratic, and are incapable of learning foreign languages. At the same time, the absence of a sense of humor is considered more humiliating than a lack of musical ear, spatial imagination, or mathematical abilities. The issue, of course, is not so much in the inability to see the funny side of events, but in the inability to see the other side at all, which indicates an extremely infantile consciousness (in psychology, this phenomenon is known as "intolerance of ambiguity," associated with other personality traits and, in particular, with the ability to learn foreign languages; however, its significance as an indicator of evolutionary progress has not yet been revealed). The separation of personality from the surrounding world and the formation of an autonomous system of the inner world are laid down in the development of every person at the prerequisite level. But these prerequisites may not be realized if development is directed in a different direction at the right moment. Society, inclined to view a person as a means to achieve its goals, widely uses this opportunity. Instead of separation, the person is strongly encouraged to self-identify with the nation, state, or territory, belonging to which becomes not only a formal identification mark but also an inner feeling that replaces personal qualities. Similarly, the "second self," the central figure of the inner world, is substituted by an externally imposed figure of a leader, hero, or god, usurping this world, like a cuckoo's larva in a stranger's nest. For a child with an unformed metasystem, the desire to be someone is natural. As personality forms, the impossibility of identifying with someone becomes increasingly obvious. If an adult still sees a role model in someone, an ideal state of their own personality, then the personality has not been realized. At the same time, the meaning of ambition becomes clear as the desire to implant oneself as a "second self" into as many souls as possible. This is a way of metaphysical reproduction, comparable to brood parasitism (the cuckoo is a well-known example). If many people are willing to sacrifice their lives for their beloved leader, thereby testifying to the substitution of the most valuable part of themselves, then ambitious dreams, one might say, have come true. In the "people - leader" system, the latter is most often formed as a mirror double, from contrasting material (Hitler did not have an Aryan appearance, and Stalin spoke Russian with a strong accent). The leader becomes the center of spiritual life and absorbs the nation's energy, raising it to heavenly heights or lowering it to base manifestations of demonism. But the feedback loop also leaves its mark, and the nation, long after the mortal double's departure, retains the imprint of his petty, troubled soul. A democratic regime differs from a dictatorship only in that the majority has the constitutional right to impose its embodiment of the "second self" on the minority, delegating fundamental spiritual values to the authorities through free will (something of this sort was feared by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, advising not to confuse the homeland with the authorities). In democracies, a single standard of spiritual life arises on its own, which a dictatorship tries to establish by force. As long as the soul retains the need to substitute the personal double with a state-wide one, no constitution can ensure true freedom or democracy. Spiritual values such as patriotism, national consciousness, and faith in an ideal are not exceptions to the universal duality of human nature, which, with the elimination of duality, is reduced to the animal level. Thus, territorial behavior is characteristic of many animal species. Humans have learned to use the territorial instinct of a wild dog for their own purposes, turning it into a guard dog. Similarly, each of us, to one degree or another, possesses an innate sense of personal space (some do not allow themselves to be touched, others constantly pat on the shoulder; in general, the personal space of women and children of both sexes is more permeable, they are touched more often than adult men), which at the meta-ecological level extends to state borders and reacts painfully to their movement. In conditions of military confrontation, love for borders is probably necessary. However, no necessity can justify the transformation of territorial instinct, like any other coding feeling, into a dominant of the inner world, which thus undergoes depletion. We already know that the stability and productivity of any system, including a spiritual one, are directly related to the complexity of its structure (measured by diversity) and, conversely, to dominance. A monodominant system has low diversity and insignificant stability. It produces a large amount of dead mass. Such systems arise in crisis conditions. If we are talking about a spiritual system, then the introduction of a dominant and the inevitable simplification negatively affect its stability and productivity. The inner world is shaken by hysterical breakdowns, and spiritual energy seeks an outlet in inciting enmity and other forms of dead mass production. It seems surprising that the unification of people under the slogans of spiritual purification and moral revival can lead to self-immolation or gas attacks. However, the psychological processes that develop in such an association make such an outcome quite predictable. The idea of some special mission, persistently instilled in consciousness, subjugates the spiritual world, substituting the "second self" and, consequently, excluding the possibility of personality development. When the inner world is linear, the ambiguity of the environment is perceived as a threat, causing an aggressive reaction that is directed outward or inward.