Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“NAVIGATING EVERYDAY LIFE” by Peter J. Adams (Lexington Books, Maryland, USA. No New Zealand retail price available.)

Peter J. Adams is professor of population health at the University of Auckland. He trained as a clinical psychologist and has previously written books on gambling, addiction, the use of domestic violence by men and the corrupting effect wrought when charities and government-approved organisations accept money from the gambling, alcohol and tobacco industries. In Navigating Everyday Life, he takes on the topic of how we conduct our everyday – and especially domestic – lives. The title may seem to signal a “self-help” book, but you will be aware that it is a different sort of beast when you spot its subtitle “Exploring the Tension Between Finitude and Transcendence”.

Navigating Everyday Life follows a particular thesis, which is illustrated throughout by events in the life of a fictitious family. I will deliberately postpone comments on this narrative device until late in this review.

As Adams posits in his preface and introduction, there are “fissures” in everyday reality as we experience it – those sudden moments where everything seems to fall away or be questioned, and we see our lives from a radically different perspective. We are lifted beyond the limitations of our physical bodies and our immediate physical circumstances. In part, we can gain a new perspective on ourselves by purely intellectual and aesthetic means - recording history, painting portraits or taking photographs, all of which “conquer time” and make us aware of a context much greater than our immediate circumstances. However, Adams is concerned with how these moments occur, what challenges they pose, and how they can be beneficial or harmful, in the context of everyday family life and not in the context of intellectual and aesthetic endeavour.

And to understand what he means, you have to read carefully his two opening chapters on the concepts of “finitude” and “transcendence”. “Finitude” as used in this book is “a catch-all concept that refers to both specific and general forms of awareness of the boundaries or limits that constrain our existence.” (p.2) This includes such boundaries and limits as embodiment – our physical and biological being and the fact of death – our immediate circumstances in the physical and social sense, our inheritance in terms of ideas and belief systems and the fact that we all have personalities that are relatively stable through life. Though Adams never uses the term, “finitude” could be closely related to the idea of determinism. “Transcendence”, however, is “stepping over the limits that confine us”. (p.19) Adams does consider more exalted uses of this term, but says he uses it even for everyday situations in which we are lifted out of ourselves by, for example, watching weather forecasts, telling stories, testing the limits of our bodies by running and vigorous physical exercise,  attempting to get beyond ourselves by meditation, religious practices or the use of drugs; and discovering empathy for others in caring and intimate relationships.

Developing these concepts in his third chapter, Adams  says “finitude is intimated and transcendence is imaginatively constructed”. (p.39) Furthermore,  “whereas finitude operates on the level of immediacy and particularity, transcendence operates at the level of concept and representation”. (p.52) Despite the “situationality” of the individual,  signals in our lives make us aware that time is passing. We have intimations of mortality, and by the power of metaphor and our belief systems we have images of transcendence. (At certain points in this stage of his thesis, Adams comes close to the untenable postmodernist idea that all reality is merely “constructed”.) Tensions arise (Chapter 4) from the energy caused in a “fissure”, when the two counterbalancing forces of finitude and transcendence meet. This could be quite fortuitous, like the spontaneous buzz we get from contemplating nature or from the exertion and elation of sport. Or it can be purposive (that is, planned and expected) as in arranging a dinner; or having sexual intercourse; or undertaking safari tourism, white-water rafting or meditation; or in appreciating art in all its forms. Social tensions can be bridged in a purposive way too. By consciously showing sympathy, empathy and care for others, and “being there", there is the sense of fully engaging

But how are we “called” into these moments of transcendence? (Chapter 5) The really transformative experiences are not usually rational or willed. Young men sometimes move beyond their mundane reality by hooning in cars while getting drunk or taking drugs. The activities are purposive (i.e. planned), but the impulse to undertake these activities is not. Deliberately creating life-threatening dangers like this is part of the impulse to transcend themselves, to prove they are either immortal (“I’ll never die”) or invulnerable (“I’ll never get caught or injured”). Similarly, the middle-aged woman who undergoes facelifts or botox injections is impelled, whether she is consciously aware of it or not, by a sense of aging and mortality. Adams describes one such woman as “tossed around by the interplay between the markers of aging and transcendent image of her modified younger body.” (p.89) And yet, of course, none of this really overcomes finitude. Aging and death are inevitable.

What can prevent us from really reaching a balance between “finitude” and “transcendence”, as Professor Adams uses those terms? (Chapter 6) What causes “the blocking of those existential aspects of life that run parallel to the content of everyday experience”. (p.98) We can become “lost in transcendence”, being so caught up in an imagined world that we lose contact with material reality. This is like the multi-millionaire rock star who is able to buy all his fantasies but is really satisfied by none and ends up self-destructive. (Cue images of rock star drug-use and suicides etc.). Or on a more humble level, it is like the daydreamer who is lost in unrealistic scenarios of the future or the possible, while neglecting his/her existing situation. Conversely, one can become “lost in finitude”, like the man overwhelmed by the banality of his work or the woman overwhlemed by having to run house and keep up with her husband’s ambition while stifling her own talents. In both cases there is little time or opportunity for them to gain a broader perspective on their lives. Finally, says Adam, one may be “doubly blocked”, as in situations of extreme suffering, chronic pain, a bullying work environment or having had an unsympathetic upbringing. Not only are these all largely situations beyond our control, but they so dominate our views and feelings that they block both the “transcendence” of imagining other things and the “finitude” of existing easily in our material situation. At this point Adams says that so far the book has dealt with “blocks, both voluntary and involuntary, to obtaining entry into these fissure-enabling zones of tension” but that  “what now demands attention is what happens when we step over the threshold and consider what is going on within these zones, particularly during those times when fissures are active.” (p.110)

In translation, how do we deal with those situations – sometimes crises – when we completely reassess our lives? Adams says (Chapter 7) he is cautious about discussing such matters because of “the highly ethereal and speculative nature of what such a discussion would entail” (p.113). To ground us about the nature of such crises, he gives the example of a husband who is lifted out of himself by meeting an attractive woman, constructing his own image of her and then beginning an affair with her - but paradoxically, this makes him realise more than ever the constraints of his position (deceit, guilt about his infidelity, the reality of his family etc.). A crisis between the conceived/imagined and the existing situation is not necessarily a liberating experience. And yet Adams also gives the example of a stressed student who meets a crisis with a spontaneous feeling of uplift.

What should be plain from all the book’s argument so far is that Adams is NOT saying that finitude is negative and transcendence is positive. To prove this point he discusses (Chapter 8) the darker side of transcendence. Stepping out of your everyday situation may be the product of long-held resentment about matters in the past. Somebody thinks obsessively about wrongs for which there is now no remedy, and imagines scenarios of revenge or compensation, all of which are indeed exercises of imagination but which contribute nothing fruitful or healthy to a life. The exercise of violence may be transcendent – getting revenge on the world by exercising physical power, imposing boundaries on others and stepping outside one’s usual role. Addictions to gambling or drugs or other things are also “transcendent” in the way Adams uses the term.

Proving that Navigating Everyday Life is not a “self-help” book, it is only in the last four chapters (Chapters 9-12) that Professor Adams turns to the matter of how we are to cope with these polarities in our lives. He argues that we have to reach equilibrium by extending forgiveness to others and to ourselves, and getting used to body change and disease. We are all embodied and “any significant changes to our body will have consequences for how the world is experienced” (p.164) Often changes, such as a sudden death in the family, can bring us up against these realities, but we also have to cope with our own mortality. Inevitably our minds will turn to “otherness” – that is, a state of being [or not-being] totally different from our state of living. For many the default setting is to focus on thoughts of heaven or some sort of afterlife, even if it is simply being absorbed into the energy of the universe. When dealing with matters of separation from others, or other people’s suicide, we have to understand that we constantly re-negotiate relationships within families. Long-nurtured resentments will poison our relationships with ALL the people we know. As for attempts to escape into “transcendence” by drugs, it merely leads to more confinement – more “finitude” – as our bodies become more dependent.

Changes for the better are not always brief or spontaneous. Adams conclude by discussing the benefits of consultation and talking matters out with others, “letting go’ in order to breaking the cycle of resentment which traps us in endless thoughts of an unalterable past and a non-realisable future  and generally restoring balance and real relationships with others.

I think I have conveyed truthfully the essence of what Professor Adams book is about, but (as I did when I reviewed Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now on this blog) I will now balance up the positives and negatives of Navigating Everyday Life, which will include some serious misgivings about it.

Once one gets used to some jargon – which Adams politely explains for us – the book reads well, is not obscurantist and gives some lively examples to illustrate Adams’ overall thesis. In other words, it can be read by the general public and not only by specialists in the fields of psychology and psychotherapy. Adams’ outlook is a humane one – he is primarily in the business of healing ruptures in human life, and not simply observing them. He makes a good case for the polarity of mundane, everyday, physical, lived experience; and the conceptual and imaginative power which can take us out of ourselves.

I hope that most of these positives are evident in the long summary I have given of this book.

Unfortunately I also have some objections.

First, there is the issue of that term “transcendence” itself. Professor Adams is the expert in how this term is used by psychologists, not me. Even so, as a non-expert, it seems to me that the term is debased when it comes to mean little more than to be “taken out of yourself”. (“Come on love, let’s go and see a movie. It’ll take you out of yourself” etc.) Adams uses it for anything that distracts your attention from your immediate circumstances – the powers of conceptualising or imagining, even at their most banal level. It is “transcendence” when I am thinking about how tasty will be that meal I’m going to have in three hours time etc. Adams acknowledges at various points that this term can be used, in quite a different sense from his own, for intense spiritual or aesthetic or religious experiences. But my own view is that the ego-effacing sense of connectedness with something much bigger than ourselves, be it the Universe or Nature or God, is so different from most of the experiences Adams dissects that it deserves a separate name. When, in the Ode to a Nightingale, Keats comes down from an intense sense of identification with the singing bird, it is simply a different order of experience from my looking forward to a good meal.

Second, there is the matter that I have deliberately postponed to a late stage in this review. To illustrate everyday human dilemmas,  Adams invents the Nelson family “living in a two-storey home situated close the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in a middle income suburb about a half-hour drive from a city.” (p.xvi) The father Jeremy, an architect in his mid-forties; his mother Beth who has moved in with his family; the wife Rachael who is at first resentful of this and who is in part driven by her sense of aging; the daughter Sophie, a 22-year-old student of business studies, frequently stressed and depressed; and the teenage son Hayden, caught up in sex, drugs and fast cars.

I understand that this book is not a novel and cannot be criticised as one would criticise a work of fiction. Professor Adams has created this family and their lives to illustrate and make clear to us non-specialist common readers the situations he is discussing. They are exemplary “cases”. Nevertheless, the Nelson family are with us in every chapter and we can’t help noticing their unreality. They have apparently been designed only to illustrate points and problems – grandmother’s fear of dying, rheumatoid arthritis and her gambling addiction; mother’s sense that she is losing sexual attractiveness and her resentment at her own mother for undervaluing her; over-controlling father’s attempts to escape his dull, constrained life by adultery; daughter’s stresses as a student and experience of discouragement, depression and diabetes; teenage son’s extreme disconnectedness from mundane reality and his attraction to hooning, drugs, violence and wild living. Into this, there is also thrown an attempted suicide.

Okay – all families have many problems, but these problems have been neatly devised to illustrate the author’s arguments. Worse, the conversations the Nelson family have are very stilted, self-expository and show a far greater sense of self-awareness and ability to articulate it than most people would have. They are far more adept at diagnosing themselves than non-specialists would be. ( For a particularly bad example, see grandmother Beth in Chapter 8 neatly analysing why she has become a compulsive gambler.) And – dare one say it – at a certain point we begin to question how credible their collective problems are. I am in no position to say how representative this family is of people whom Professor Adams has encountered in his practice as a clinical psychologist. But I can say that, given their materially comfortable middle-class position, one is sometimes tempted to use the insulting taunt “First World Problems”.

Finally, there is the very big problem of how Adams conveys the healing process. Wife gets over her resentment at husband’s infidelity and sensibly moves on after he moves out … yeah, but we don’t see enough of the rage beforehand and we are not allowed to see how she has worked through her hurt. Probably Adams has encountered examples of sudden, life-changing epiphanies, but the redemption of tearaway teenage Hayden comes only in such a moment of truth: “A vitality then erupted and spread across his consciousness. It was a feeling of connectedness, a sense of unity, with his parents, with people in general, and with the world around and it conveyed to him that he was not alone and that he could trust in the direction he was heading.” (p.216) How often do such things happen? I hope more often than I suspect they do.

I do not wish to denigrate Adams’ purpose in this book, but I do feel there are great flaws in the way he has conveyed it. Getting us to recognise the difference between our actual and our self-perceived selves is, however, always a worthwhile enterprise.