(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Vincent Deary: How We Are. How To Live Trilogy. Book 1
Allen Lane, 2014
Self-help books have a bad reputation. But the fact is that most really good philosophy books and non-fiction books have an element of self-help in that they support you in your understanding of the world – and thus also indirectly give you a better grasp of yourself and your own life. Knowledge and overview infect on one's person, no matter how far away from the traditional self-help literature these sizes, or the book's other project, had to be.
This was known, for example, by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose main goal was to break down the illusions that prevent people from living a good and full life. Yes, even Ludwig Wittgenstein had a therapeutic element at the bottom of his thinking: It was not about cultivating an academic jargon where knowledge could circulate further in institutes' corridors, but about coming up with cognitive models that could dissolve glamor.
Philosophical self-help. The last couple of years I have read some new self-help books of the more philosophical kind. Not the kind that comes with simple solutions, but the one that requires you to make an effort and think. And actually, some of these can help you along the way, if you go for it. Among the best I've read over the past year is Vincent Dearys How We Are. The book is the first of an announced trilogy, though How We Are. How to Live Trilogy Book 1 is good on my own anyway (and I'm true to say a little uncertain if the other two will come, since the author himself doubts here in the first volume).
Why does Deary's book work? Yes: First and foremost because Deary is personal – his book is for a dosing attempt to tell us how to live from a place where all answers are clear. No, How We Are is an expression of the author's efforts to explain life art to himself.
Deary should know what he is talking about, since he is a psychologist by profession. But, as most psychics know, you can be as professional as you just want in a field of care, but once there is someone who is the patient, the case looks different. One has to start again – doubt and ponder, and then internalize the knowledge from his newly acquired perspective. In many ways, it is precisely the elaboration of a soulmate role that is closer to the author himself – and thus becomes more acute – this book is. Understanding how to live life becomes different – more intimate – when a professional helper, who has spent his entire professional life understanding others, turns around and looks at himself.
On automatic. What does Deary have to tell us? He believes that our lives are structured by habits – primarily the automated habits; those we don't think of. Whatever we do, think and feel, there are these – "The automatic"- which is the very machinery of our lives. This automation is what enables us to live, but at the same time it is the one prevents renewal and change. We may have many dreams and desires, but it often takes a lot of time before we can break our automated habits, writes Deary: We usually fall back to what he calls "Saming"- that we continue to do as we have always done. We go, yes, precisely, on automatic. So how to find the way out of this circle?
Deary has a sense of metaphors and uses them to create clarifying cognitive images. Our habits are like paths, he writes, and it is these paths that make up our person. «In learning to drive, walk, see or talk, in our very being, we are a massive interpenetrating collection of paths and routines worn by repetition; we are each a landscape, shaped by recurring patterns of force and formed by desire. ”
Thought Pictures. Deary's great strength is his ability to use images to explain the situation – but also to sketch concrete ways out of it. In the book, he highlights a large number of films and books as scenography for the life problems we all encounter. In other words, he uses fiction as a tool for thinking more clearly, and as a backdrop and scene for the concepts he uses.
In an inventive reading of Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca – and Hitchcock's filming of it – he explains how the habits and storytelling are rooted in the environments in which we move. his forrige wife. The latter regularly haunts the newly arrived wife through the network of props and habits that still express her life. The shape and content of the house actually makes the ex-wife more present than the new wife. The same goes for us and our own past, Deary suggests: "We live in houses haunted by ourselves."
Basic fiction. Fortunately, there are other stories and other props to resort to in the identity formation, which Deary makes good use of. For the whole culture, with all its institutions, all its culture and thinking, are also habits that haunt us, but may not be as clearly present in our own houses as the spectral habits of your own (or your predecessors). That is when we have to invite them over the doorstep, heat them up, and use them as a counterpart or counter-scene, so that we can free ourselves from the ghosts that are holding us down. We must play a new role in mastering our new self and new habits.
But, as most psychic mothers know, you can be as professional as you just want in a field of care, but once there is someone who is the patient, the matter looks different.
In fact, there is no original, "real" identity either, so there is no fixed or literal origin for legal institutions or legislation, says Deary, who here switches to Slavoj Zizek. Foundational fiction underlies all culture and politics, so any identity must be played until it becomes truly through the new habits that materialize. Fake it till you make it.
Performative recognition. It is also in the self-narrative, Deary believes – in how we convey our story to others – that we can locate the scenes and props that can enable us to expand the dramaturgy of life. Sometimes there may be a "stay" between who we are and who we want to be in this narrative – and it is in these "delays" in our automation that something else can break out: This is where we can find another landscape to move in, yes, even then become another landscape, crossed by other paths.
Again in line with Zizek, there is talk of one performative recognition, says Deary: When we spot a representation of who we are vile be, which is close to what can happen – that is, the liberation from the self we want to work out of – we are already in the process of become this person. When we say, "It's me!", We connect to a new self-narrative, and begin to gather the threads for the realization of a new set of habits, a new set of paths, which can become our new self. Such stories, such images, we can encounter in literature and the film, among others: "The lightning stroke, the marriage of heaven and earth, the beginning of transformation," writes Deary (and quotes William Blake).
Inner and outer. The really interesting thing about How We Are is expressed here – after all, Deary's point is that what is yours is yours essence, is not something buried deep in your soul, but rather is found in everything from the interior design you surround yourself to the literature and movies you seek.
So the material for building an ego is not an original interior, but something that is external becomes an inner through our recognition of who we want to be. Thus, both things and stories can be models to create ourselves: find new habits and one exit from our old self. In other words, if we are to learn to live – learn to become ourselves – we must first learn to recognize the value of storytelling as a tool for transformation.
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