On the Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness

I read this as a free advance copy from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review; the opinions are entirely my own.

I loved this beautiful collection of aphorisms. Pantano does something genuinely interesting: he takes some of the major hits of the history of philosophy — largely nineteenth-century German philosophy — and combines them with the nascent ideas of consciousness coming out of cognitive science. His starting point is that consciousness isn’t a thing “out there” but an organizing principle for our experience, and that its trouble is the way it tries to carve something discrete — an “I” — out of the marvelous oneness of all existence. When we recognize ourselves as individuals, that’s exactly what we’re doing, and most modern societies valorize the individual experience, even the ones we’d usually call collectivist. The philosophers he draws on are largely pessimists — Emil Cioran and Arthur Schopenhauer — with a healthy dose of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, both of whom fought against the meaninglessness they saw spreading through European society, and Pantano’s own conclusion is an absurdist one: it’s about recognizing our powerlessness in a world we have no control over.

There’s no Serenity Prayer here, no asking for “the courage to change the things I can”; his perspective is, in the Nietzschean and Schopenhauerian vein, fatalistic.

It is the nature of consciousness to see how everything goes and to plead and cry for it to be different. But it won’t be different. It can’t be different.

That determinism makes sense in a Newtonian universe, where everything affects everything else and God is the watchmaker, but since the quantum revolution the introduction of chance has opened up a great deal of room for free will — and Pantano dodges these questions, I think rightly. The book is organized thematically, with chapters on creativity, anxiety, anger, despair, madness, nihilism, hope, freedom, futility, time, wisdom, and many more, each opening with a paragraph or two of imagery, something like:

He lays the human psyche bare on the table, dissecting it, so he can see it for what it really is in all its horror. Out oozes the slime of absurdity and the sludge of melancholy–with which he pains; with which he transmutes, through which things become beautiful.

Some readers will be uncomfortable with what Pantano has to say and will want to argue with him, but anyone who recognizes the deep, profound interconnectedness of all things — and takes it seriously — will find a lot here that makes sense. Rather than pay the idea lip service, he pushes it to its furthest implications, which lets him write paragraphs as beautiful as this:

Regret occurs when the paradox of self-awareness–the fact that we are aware of so much but given control of nothing–is never acknowledged as paradoxical. If we recognize the true scope of our unawareness and the limits of our control, it becomes obvious that we never have anything to regret.

We may want to fight for control — of our lives, our circumstances, our opportunities, our fates — but they control us far more than we could ever hope to control them, and rather than keep struggling against them I personally find it therapeutic to submit my soul to them. To paraphrase Laozi: when the wind blows, the grasses bend. The book is life-affirming, and Pantano concedes that we’re all ridden with malevolent characteristics — but these are a matter of perspective; yin and yang come together to make something whole, and if we block out the Shadow, in Jung’s terms, we produce a monster. He leaves us with a beautiful penultimate aphorism, which I wanted to set down here for posterity:

Perhaps the closest thing to a solution to the conundrum of self-awareness is not a solution at all. Rather, it is a relinquishment of expectation–of all certainty, control, and resolution–and a commitment to simply moving with, observing, and appreciating everything as it is, as deeply and often as possible, while trying our best to be okay. To cry. To love. To try. To fail. To be. To die.

Once it’s published, I hope it gets the attention it deserves.