Force and Reduction: Destruction And Life

The true destruction of man's spirit, the true unthreading of his own relation to himself, lies in self-alienation. The alienation that fractures the essence of a man, the tool that masters wield in delight, the enabler of systematic harm, the harbinger of ruined lives. This alienation from the self is often silent and pathologized, for most alienated men there exists not an outward, visible plea for help; rather, what once used to be a connected body and spirit is now a walking corpse and a contorted, buried humanity, dooming most to a life of strife towards wholeness. Simone Weil herself paints the picture of force against the body clearly in The Iliad, or the Poem of Force:

Force is that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it. Exercised to the extreme, it makes the human being a thing quite literally, that is, a dead body. Someone was there and, the next moment, no one.

If force is that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it and both the body and the self can be reduced into things, then there must exist two kinds of force: force applied outward against the body and force applied inward against the spirit. In both cases, power presupposes the application of force. In the most brutish sense, a man with a gun that meets a stranger with just his wallet and fists at night holds latent power, the capability to will a new existence into this realm. If he so wished, he could exert force onto the stranger and reduce him into nothing more than an abstraction to loot from. Likewise, the wrathful parent holds the capability to love or beat his defenseless son, and thus the parent alone can choose to create a safe home or a living hell. A power imbalance is the requirement of force.

Outward force can wound, enslave, or kill; inward force can make one alive but absent, a corpse still breathing.

Outward force is not totalizing, outside of murder. Although outward force is often severe, and does sometimes lead to fractures in the spirit, there remains the ability to transcend the physical affliction, beautifully demonstrated by Epictetus in his Discourses.

There exists things within our control and things outside of our control, and to reject things as outside our control with indifference renders the spirit the ability to withstand exile, slavery, and even execution. Outward force, even if brutal and destructive, does not have to fracture the spirit.

It was fitting, then, that the gods have placed in our power [control] only the best faculty of all, the one that rules over all the others, that which enables us to make right use of our impressions; but everything else they haven't placed within our power…

'Tell me the secrets.'

I won't reveal them; for that lies within my power.

'Then I'll have you chained up'…

You can chain my leg, but not even Zeus can overcome my power of choice.

'I'll throw you into prison.'

You mean my poor body.

'I'll have you beheaded.'

Why, did I ever tell you that I'm the only man to have a neck that can't be severed?

Where Weil shows the body reduced to a thing, Epictetus demonstrates that such reduction need not touch the spirit. The true danger, then, is not force applied from the outside, but force that penetrates and corrodes from within. Yet if outward force can be endured, then the truest danger lies in that which erodes the very freedom to endure: inward force.

If Epictetus demonstrates that outward force can be neutralized in spirit through preserving one's inner freedom, even if destructive to the body or life itself, then inward force must be understood as the corruption of that very inner freedom.

Yet Epictetus' triumph is not the final word. His indifference protests against shackles, lashes, and even the guillotine. He was of extraordinary character, but he was not the everyday man: his spirit was iron, somehow forged in slavery. But what of those whose spirits are clay rather than iron, who cannot endure the hammering of force without fracture? In this case, the enemy is no longer the master's chains, but the self split against itself, the past perpetually replaying itself in the present. What happens when the enslaved becomes its own master, and the whip strikes not the back but the nervous system, reducing not flesh to thing but spirit into absence? This is the start of inward force.

It is important to recognize that inward force is much more difficult to identify and analyze than outward force, for it is a matter of the mind rather than the material. Like a man who was beat from seven years old to sixteen years old that cowers in encompassing fear when he disappoints his wife's parents, there exists a fracture between his self and his spirit. He has developed into a strong, loving man on the outside, yet he remains branded as a fearful child on the inside. This story of a mind living in the past, not the present, is well studied by psychologists studying the aftermath of trauma, particularly illuminated by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score:

Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions.

It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.

We have discovered that helping victims of trauma find the words to describe what has happened to them is profoundly meaningful, but usually it is not enough.

The act of telling the story doesn't necessarily alter the automatic physical and hormonal responses of bodies that remain hypervigilant, prepared to be assaulted or violated at any time.

For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present.

Likewise, in response to inward force, there exists a fundamental fracture between the spirit and the self:

Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort.

Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside.

They learn to hide from their selves.

Though there is the ability to avoid inward force, as shown by Epictetus, those who lack the miracle of chance may find themselves perpetually living in the past, despite their wishes, replaying traumatic responses and a total alienation from their self. On the outside is that strong, loving man, but on the inside is a child perpetually in fear of being beat by his parents meant to protect, yet he remains numb even to his own insides. Inward force severs agency into a lived truth: the internalized belief of reduction that prescribes destiny.

[ I am quite tired… maybe I will revisit this in the future and finish this.]