Overcoming O

That Unifying Quality

Dewey bases his aesthetic philosophy on the concept of quale (or quality), reintroduced to modern philosophy by the founder of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). According to Peirce, a quale denotes the perceivable essence of a given phenomenon—what a particular person at a particular moment may consider its nature to be. A quale is not dependent on any a priori “absolute” traits of the object or of reality. In fact, it does not even have to be actually perceived. Qualities are “mere may-bes, not necessarily realized” (Peirce 1931, p. 150). Yet the instances in which these “mere may-bes” do become realized constitute the building blocks of our experience. In Peirce’s words:

There is a distinctive quale to every combination of sensations . . . —a distinctive quale to every work of art—a distinctive quale to this moment as it is to me—a distinctive quale to every day and every week—a peculiar quale to my whole personal consciousness [Peirce 1935, p. 150].

Qualities make it possible to designate unified phenomena within the ever changing stream of impressions called consciousness. They allow us, for example, to regard ourselves as coherent subjects despite the fact that we experience only a fragmented mixture of sensations, thoughts, and emotions; or to recognize our mood at various times as “sad” although sadness may take any number of forms.

The notion of quality is pivotal in Peirce’s brief remarks on aesthetics, which are later taken up and developed by Dewey into a comprehensive theory of meaning and ethics. According to Peirce, a phenomenon is experienced aesthetically if its parts are perceived to be “so related to one another as to impart a positive simple immediate quality to their totality” (Peirce 1934, p. 84). As I have noted, this immediate quality does not inhere within the phenomenon, but originates in the eye of the beholder. Things are never intrinsically or metaphysically aesthetic, but they may be rendered so if their quality is experienced with extraordinary clarity and intensity. Yet how can we measure the brightness in which objects and events glow in our mind? Are there criteria that may distinguish an ordinary quality from an extraordinary one? Eventually, even Peirce admits that he is “seriously inclined to doubt there being any distinction of pure esthetic betterness and worseness”; one may find only “innumerable varieties of esthetic quality” (Peirce 1934, p. 85).

This seeming flaw in Peirce’s arguments becomes the cornerstone of Dewey’s theory. According to Dewey, there is indeed no sharp distinction between the commonplace and the aesthetic. The word “aesthetic” refers to an orientation rather than to a fixed trait or state. It denotes a specific form of commitment toward engaging with the world. Thus, it is essentially an adverb rather than an adjective or a noun. Living aesthetically involves reading the world as if it were poetry, thereby being receptive to the limitless metaphors and references contained in every word or action. It requires the effort to encounter people, ideas, and events as if for the first time rather than recognizing and cataloguing them according to predefined categories. In this state of wholeheartedly taking in the world, the boundaries between the self and the environment become indistinct, to the point where the two “are so fully integrated that each disappears” (Dewey 1934, p. 259).

Yet despite these almost ecstatic overtones, Dewey stresses that aesthetic experience is far from being the result of a sudden divine grace. Rather, “adequate yielding of the self is possible only through a controlled activity that may well be intense” (Dewey 1934, p. 55). Attaining the capacity to perceive aesthetically is an arduous endeavor involving a continual struggle to cultivate one’s sensibility, taste, and knowledge. More important, it calls for conquering our fear of the unexpected. The Other, whether a word, an object, or a person, always has a life of its own. People have their private agendas, and even instruments seem at times to follow their own will. Our expectations are bound to be proven wrong. Yet as several Dewey scholars comment (e.g., Capps and Capps 2005; Colapietro 2002), this fallibility should not lead us to passive resignation. Rather, in Dewey’s view, it must push us forward to act in anticipation of being challenged and affected by others.

As Stroud (2008) observes, this outlook has significant ethical implications. Engaging with other people aesthetically involves attuning ourselves to the unique and unknown aspects of their individuality rather than casting them into the already written roles of our inner drama. Others should be kept in their otherness without becoming alien, and their words and actions should be viewed as unfamiliar aesthetic objects, worthy of contemplation and commitment.

Notes more Orphean than Heavenly

Reviewing the previous section, one may notice that both Bion and Dewey advocate a form of “deliberate forgetfulness.” One is required to forgo previous knowledge and expectations in order to achieve a state of complete receptivity to—and absorption in—the present moment. Upon achieving this state, words, actions, and finally people take on unexpected forms and meanings, thus becoming, in the words of the Russian literary theorist Victor Shklovsky (1917), “defamiliarized.” From this perspective, Dewey seems to offer an ethical-therapeutic worldview analogous to Bion’s yet requiring none of the latter’s Platonic speculations. Dewey’s theory is guided by the wish to be better attuned to one’s present experience in the world rather than to merge with a hidden ultimate reality that lies beyond it. One should indeed refrain from memory and desire, but for this reason: “Only when the past ceases to trouble and anticipations of the future are not perturbing is a being wholly united with his environment and therefore fully alive” (Dewey 1934, p. 16). Thus, Dewey’s theory provides analysts the opportunity to practice Bion’s technique while maintaining the freedom to reject the latter’s postulate of O.

Yet freedom rarely comes without a price. To find out what we are losing when we steer away from Bion’s metaphysics to build on Dewey’s logically sound foundations, it might be helpful to examine not only the content of the two writers’ arguments, but also their tone of voice as they present them.

On first impression, it appears as if Dewey swears allegiance to phenomenological neutrality. Reality has no predefined values and no “nature” to be conquered or savored. The world is nothing but the sum of the events that happen to take place in it:

Empirically, things are poignant, tragic, beautiful, humorous, settled, disturbed, comfortable, annoying, barren, harsh, consoling, splendid, fearful. . . . Any quality as such is final; it is at once initial and terminal; just what it is as it exists. It may be referred to other things, it may be treated as an effect or as a sign. But this involves an extraneous extension and use. It takes us beyond quality in its immediate qualitativeness [Dewey 1929, p. 96].

In this respect, aesthetic perception involves shedding our judgment in favor of viewing objects in their neutral “immediate qualitativeness.” Our observation may reveal order or disintegration, beauty or ugliness: “nature is construed in such a way that all these things, since they are actual, are naturally possible” (Dewey 1929, p. 20). Yet Dewey rarely addresses the disagreeable aspects of reality, and for the most part he refers to “that delightful perception which is esthetic experience” (1934, p. 19). Moreover, even while arguing that aesthetic attention involves the loss of distinction between self and object, Dewey never entertains the possibility that this state might harbor anxiety or confusion. Rather, in such cases “we are carried out beyond ourselves to find ourselves,” an experience that brings “a peculiarly satisfying sense of unity” (1934, p. 193).

Similarly, when Dewey addresses the topic of artistic creation (relevant here as a paradigm for understanding the formation of analytic interpretations), he initially stresses the importance of balance between critical thinking and bursts of inspiration. However, as the discussion progresses, neutral rationality clears the stage for an almost religious sense of epiphany: “when patience has done its perfect work, the man is taken possession of by the appropriate muse and speaks and sings as some god dictates” (Dewey 1934, p. 76). Thus, although Dewey often asserts that aesthetic experience reveals reality in an impartial manner, it is beauty and unity that finally prevail in each of his accounts.

This sweepingly optimistic view of aesthetic experience resurfaces in the writings of two of Bion’s most prominent interpreters, Donald Meltzer (1986) and Meg Harris Williams (2010). According to both, the world is inherently beautiful, and it is mostly psychopathology that conceals this fact: “Thwarted development, mental illness, dis- and un-integration, can all be seen in a new light: that of emotional failure to maintain this aesthetic contact” (Williams 2010, p. 11).

Aesthetic attention (including psychoanalysis as one of its expressions) is the means by which one’s ability to appreciate beauty may be restored. Thus Williams defines psychoanalysis as “this quest to reconnect with the ‘inward sense’ that makes our lives beautiful” (p. 11). Moreover, according to their interpretation, at the end of this quest one finds not only beauty but also truth, since the two are intertwined. It comes as little surprise, then, that both, like Dewey before them, quote Keats’s famous lines: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (1819; the lines are quoted in Dewey 1934, p. 34; Meltzer and Williams 1988, p. 143; Williams 2010, p. 119).

Meltzer and Williams (1988) attribute this view to Bion as well, stating that “throughout his work he had cleaved to the Keatsian formulation, ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’” (Meltzer and Williams 1988, p. 20). In doing so, they repeat an earlier claim by Martha Harris (1980)—Meltzer’s third wife and Williams’s mother— that Bion, “like Keats and many another poet . . . seems to regard truth as inevitably linked with beauty . . .” (p. 341).

Contrary to their reading, I claim that Bion’s worldview is in fact the opposite of the one presented by Keats and Dewey. According to Bion, the mode of attention in which words contain infinite possible meanings and patients are constantly encountered without their past steers dangerously close “to what occurs spontaneously in the severely regressed patient” (Bion 1970, p. 47). It is experienced “as a very serious attack on the ego” (p. 48) and yields turbulence and dread rather than an enhanced capacity to enjoy beauty. This is why “the analyst who tries this disciplinary activity will find it disturbing despite his own analysis” (p. 47). Moreover, even when the analyst finally achieves insight into the meaning of an analytic moment and formulates an interpretation, there is no sense of epiphany or artistic satisfaction. Rather, by the time the insight reaches the domain of language it is already irrelevant, “because the work for that has been done in the previous weeks, months, years” (Bion 1990, pp. 87–88). What remain are merely “the inevitability of the thought and the unimportance of the individual who harbours it” (Bion 1970, p. 105).

Thus, whereas Dewey’s eloquent style conveys his confidence in the human potential to enjoy the world’s splendor, Bion’s writing is doubtful and often anxious, as if haunted by a constant premonition. “I have owed and shall owe my continued existence,” he confesses, “to my capacity to fear ‘an impending disaster’” (1991, p. 175). Whereas Dewey “sings as some god dictates” (1934, p. 76), Bion is “singing of Chaos and Eternal night with notes . . . more Orphean than Heavenly,” as remarked by one of the fictional characters in his Memoir of the Future (1991, p. 254). It is possible to conclude, then, that although both men consider aesthetic/analytic attention to be the ideal mode of engaging with reality, their views as to what this reality may be seem to differ tremendously.

Conclusion: The Importance of Being Anxious

Dewey’s optimism originates in his assumption that the unknown is merely yet-unknown, a challenge to be met. For Bion, by contrast, “the unknown” is a euphemism for the unknowable— the impending calamity that can never be grasped. The concept of O serves as the embodiment of this calamity. To quote Suler (1993), O is “the archetypic condition of disintegration and catastrophe that underlies being” (p. 66). It is the darkness and formlessness that lurks beneath manifest reality, accounting for Bion’s contention that “anyone who is not afraid when he is engaged on psycho-analysis is either not doing his job or is unfitted for it” (1991, p. 517). O is the source of the distinctive nightmarish tonality that characterizes Bion’s later writings. This tonality reaches its clearest expression in the apocalyptic scenario of his final trilogy, A Memoir of the Future (1991), but its presence may already be discerned in earlier works, as in his grotesque depiction of fragmented gramophones haunting the patient’s psyche (Bion 1957, p. 268). Along with his innovative ideas, this tone is one of Bion’s most distinctive contributions to the psychoanalytic literature, as it embodies his existential and therapeutic outlook.

Thus, we realize that O is not merely a theoretical speculation. Rather, it is an expression of Bion’s conviction that our existence is based on fear. On his view, we will never be able to accommodate this fear, to face O, by denying its existence. The desire to “overcome O,” whether by science or by a philosophical manipulation like the one outlined at the beginning of this paper, is an illusion. Indeed, we may seize the opportunity Dewey offers us to ground Bion’s technique in the commonsensical wish to enhance our enjoyment of everyday experience. Such a procedure may even assist in disseminating Bion’s method to a wider audience. Yet by banishing O from the counseling room we are in effect detaching this method from the theoretical grounds that give it meaning. So if we choose to avail ourselves of Dewey’s approach, we must not be surprised to find ourselves hearing Bion’s distant voice rebuking us that we are not doing our job or, worse yet, are unfitted for it.