Bert Pursoo, Cebu
This Post deals with Fear as postulated by Desh Subba, the Hong-Kong based Nepali thinker/philosopher. In a look at the theory of Fearism, B. Maria Kumar asks:
Why do we have to live; what is the purpose of our existence?
Do we live in order to?
1. attain the kingdom of God
2. seek pleasure and avoid pain
3. preempt suffering
4. realize ouer true potential by making choices freely
5. accept absurdities and rebel against odds and uncertainties so as to find meaning in life,
In 1. Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish theologian links our purpose as being to exist in the service of God - too obtuse for me.
In 2. Indian sage Charvaka mirrors the philosophy of Epicureanism, which is concerned with glorifying pleasure and abhorring pain.
In 3. The Buddha is concerned with finding a way to preempt suffering.
In 4. Sartre posits that life has purpose because it enables us to make free choices, which sounds a bit like Freewill.
In 5. however, Camus - a complex philosopher wonders if living isn’t about accepting absurdities so that we can find reasons to rebel against odds and uncertainties in our effort to find the meaning of life.
While all of the above appear plausible, Dr. Subba not only challenges but seems to reject them all. He insists that from his study of the human condition, life is conducted, directed and controlled by fear and by extension all our thoughts and actions are a function of fear.
Subba engages in deductive logic to support his argument tracing the volatile state of contemporary unstable human affairs back to the original cause. He does, however, suggest ways and means as to how the uncertainties and insecurities could be dealt with rationally and credibly towards the end of his book Fearmorphosis.
Subba looks at the philosophy of Kafka, who states that the human condition as we know it is absurd. Kafka jokes (I imagine) that humans were created in one of God’s bad days and hence, there is no way to make meaning of life. To bolster his case of absurdity Subba points to the situation of Camus’s Sisyphus, condemned to repeat the same absurd and meaningless task ad infinitum. And moreover, Subba challenges the notion that man is a thinking animal, a social being or a political specie. Does he pay homage to the term Homo sapiens? It doesn’t really appear so, having placed sapience in a tertiary position, with fear-stricken man a close secondary. He does, however, accept as first that man is a free animal at the instant of birth in conformity with Rousseau, who claims that humans, unlike other creatures, are born free agents but subsequently becomes a stranger to himself as the result of fear.
In his self-imposed state of apparent wisdom, Subba laments that we are all aliens to our own self and sympathizes with all humans because of the fact that everybody’s fate is similar to that of Sisyphus. Subba, by looking into Kafka’s Samsa concludes that the metamorphosis is the result of fear as we struggle to find and also to express our own identity in an ever-changing world. Now, while Kafka is obsessed with the concept of the absurdity of it all, Subba sees Sisyphus as a resultant product of the fear that he himself created while moving in his existential journey and from which he now cannot extricate himself.
Subba sees fear in everything, in various forms of constructs. Born free but metamorphosed into a fear-ridden being, Sisyphus consequently becomes victimized as a scapegoat, as a surveillance target and also as an exploited proletarian - simply because he cannot disobey the unjust dictates of his authoritarian gods. But it is only his self-imposed fear which forces him to blindly carry out these destructive commands.
Stanley Milgram, American psychologist, along with others like Britain’s Lord Acton, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, and South African leader Steven Biko came to the same conclusion that it is fear of losing power that drives people in authority; and the fear of survival that forces those at the receiving end to succumb to the dictates of the gods in much the same way that Sisyphus was induced to toe the line.
One has to admit that despite the logical direction, Subba’s dialectics do seem rather pessimistic. But Subba is far from an inveterate pessimist. His has a technique to counteract this apparent nihilism uplifting human thinking. He now seems to move away from his Sisyphusianism in exchange for one in which he has complete faith in the indomitable spirit and willpower of humanity. To solve the puzzling fear conundrum, he resorts to the Fearlessness paradigm as postulated by R. Michael Fisher, a Canadian philosopher and educator who conceived and formulated its essentials, including the premise that fear must be looked at from both sides, in much the same way we recognize that to understand good we need to understand bad also.
Since fear, according to the good doctor, propels the individual to perceive people, things and situations as absurd, restricted and hostile, Subba points out that a fearless spirit can certainly turn the tide. He exudes confidence that his fear-morphed Sisyphus will be able to navigate adeptly through the frightened global landscape if he is capable of reshaping himself as fearlessness-tempered. No doubt, it is within the control of Sisyphus himself to achieve freedom from fear and this, then, is the message that Subba delivers to the world in his book.
I do recognize that fear does play a significant role in one’s behaviour, thoughts and plans from all directions. What I have difficulty accepting is that it constitutes the sole reason for all our actions. According to Subba, the wife demonstrates and displays love and affection for her husband out of fear that failing to do is likely to cause her to lose him, making her actions one of mere survival. I have to look to a middle road, with fear on one side and genuine desire on the other side. I do agree, nonetheless, that we would never be able fully disregard Sisyphus and that feeling of being a scapegoat.
According to Subba’s philosophy of fearmorphosis, the love or satisfaction I derive from say working as an educator or playing professional tennis is based on the fear of not having that satisfaction, which he sees as something I have convinced myself is something I need to survive. I can rid myself of this fear if I reshape myself as a fearless tempered self which would allow me to adeptly navigate our frightened global landscape, but Subba does not go into details as to how we can achieve this and reach the end of the rainbow, at least as far as I am able to see.
12/06/2023
This article is shared by author after reading "Opinion: Brewing Freedom From Fear" by B. Maria Kumar. Article was published from Hyderabad, India in Telangana Daily on first of December, 2023. It was one of the best Fearmorphosis article. Author has posted it in his Facebook page The Philosophical Factory (Public Forum). With his permission, it is re-published here. -D. Subba
Comments
Yes Michael! I have used the phrase in the last paragraph of my article saying that the fear-morphed Sisyphus has to shape himself as fearlessness-tempered. I am going to mention more about it in my next article, maybe a few days later.
Thank you Michael, Subba and Bert for your incisive observations!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/401208328729247/?multi_permalinks=6...
I appreciate all the thinking going on here, and the care-ful thought of the issues of fearism cum fearmorphism (a la Subba), etc. The brief mention of my "Fearlessness paradigm" would need a lot more nuance and space to work through, and to compare more carefully to views of fearlessness and fearless by either Kumar or Subba. I would suggest on top, that to treat "fearlessness" (and/or fear) as rational objects to philosophize about, as I find all these authors tend to do, is inadequate to the task of ferreting out the layers of meaning and possibilities and research which is available on the topic. "Freedom from Fear" has to be analyzed critically by the fearists as wll as others in this dialogue, and I would say that there are huge problems and contradictions in how different people understand "freedom from fear" (and equally, more problematic is the way people understand fearlessness). Bert Pursoo's notion of "fearlessness-tempered" is intriguing and I'd like to hear more.
This article is Fearmorphosis 1
https://telanganatoday.com/opinion-brewing-freedom-from-fear