Downloadable PDF Erich Fromm on Narcissism
To understand narcissism as a heuristic one must see things through the limitation philosophy lens, where all human behavior is based in strategies that generate error(heuristics). This explains how all of our good acts done from good intentions often incur unforeseen cost, create misunderstandings with others, or go awry in some unintended way.
The maxim is:
We Reach for Paradigms but Only Ever Get Heuristics.
Where intentional human behavior is concerned, this is limitation, and the odious behavior of narcissists is just limited beings behaving as limited beings do.
The relaxed attitude of limitation philosophy teaches that imperfection is the inescapable reality of living in the world of things as a local, temporal and discrete being.
So, give yourself and everyone else a break. It will do your sanity a lot of good.
General Concepts of Limitation Philosophy
We Reach for Paradigms but Only Ever Get Heuristics
In almost all communications best practice is to use everyday words in their ordinary meaning. However, in Limitation Philosophy the words Paradigm and Heuristic acquire extraordinary meaning and require special definition. In the everyday use of these two terms there is a degree of interchangeability but the two are not considered synonymous.
The ordinary meaning of paradigm implies a set of rules for how a model of reality works. There is an axiomatic aspect to it and an absolutist one as well. Heuristic is similar but less absolute. Guidelines and rules of thumb are heuristic, in contrast with the more rigid, absolutist term, law, which is considered paradigmatic. Everyday use of these words often depends on their context and how they are used to determine their meaning in a sentence.
In Limitation Philosophy the word Paradigm is always absolute, invariable and without exception of any kind. Paradigm exists in the Personality and Being of the Deity and the universal process. Paradigms exist mostly in infinite and eternal reality.
Language paradigms can be expressed in concise paradigmatic sentences and discussed using language but everyday language often speaks using absolutist terms when speaking of situations where exceptions abound. This is exaggerated in some speakers but it creeps into all language usage. This unintentional form of absolutism is just part of the less than precise nature of language.
One aspect of the Language Heuristic is that, in ordinary talk one makes a statement and ignores exceptions to avoid confusion. Ordinary language is imprecise, precise language is impossible because all language is heuristic. The phrase, all language is heuristic, is a prime example of a paradigmatic statement conforming to Limitation Philosophies special definition of the word paradigm which includes language paradigms as a special category.
In Limitation Philosophy, Paradigm never generates error. This leads one to ask, what about language paradigms? How can they be framed in the Language Heuristic and not contain error? The short answer is that they do contain some error and break just as the syllogism does in formal logic due to the heuristic nature of language.
The Special Definition of Heuristic
We are limited beings. Our knowledge is partial, and because we are often frustrated in our desires and determinations we are prone to anger and other negative emotions. In addition to the limited nature of our being, our existence, that is, the world we live within is local and temporal. Heuristics are the rules and methods we employ to get by in the human situation. We wish for paradigms but settle for what the situation requires for us to get by. We reach for paradigms but only ever get heuristics, because we are local, temporal, limited beings.
Paradigms operate in the eternal and infinite universe of Limitless God. We are mistaken to look for something so pure in our local and temporal world. To us the ocean tides are paradigmatic. Even their variations in strength are predictable by careful calculation. However, there was a time when this earth of ours did not exist and though it may be a long time from now to us there will be a future era when it will have passed away. The ‘scientific laws’ we look to when the tides are calculated are not as invariable as they appear to us but do serve as accurate guides for our use. For us, apparently perfect guides, such as scientific laws and other heuristic models, enable us to navigate our local temporal lives as limited beings. By employing heuristic models, choices are often made without stopping to make conscious calculation.
The framework of life experience models are but one type of heuristic. Unlike the very limiting and excluding definition of Paradigm, Limitation Philosophies definition and use of the word heuristic is very broad and amorphous. Language is by nature heuristic, but the language heuristic is too far-reaching and varied to ever define or explain in anything approaching a complete sense. Other very large, worldwide, heuristics can be encapsulated in very plain language. In the next section I will do this with the Ordinary Religious Heuristic.
Cognitive biases are another aspect of heuristics. These are effective strategies for behavior that we deploy to succeed and get by in life that also have unfortunate downsides. Behavioral psychologists and Sociologists like to point out the humorous aspects of these downsides, sometimes using anecdotes from their own experience.*
Because we are limited beings, almost all of our choices are made employing one form of heuristic or another and whether we are operating by intuition or calculation few if any of our choices are without a downside. One valuable benefit of analyzing the heuristic aspect of a choice is discovery of the downside which is often ignored when the choice is made.
In Limitation Philosophy, Paradigm is pure, Heuristics in operation generate error. Once the choice is made and the behavior sequence unfolds, the operations, that is the chosen behavior itself will generate the errors. So, inherent in any Heuristic is the aspect of error generation.
Socrates had an apparently uncanny ability to find faults in his interlocutors answers to his questions. Once you accept that all language is heuristic this ability becomes easy to understand. So long as all Socrates did was ask questions the only assertive statements being made were those of the interlocutor. These positive affirming statements being made using the language heuristic contained within their truth some form of error. Socrates simply developed a keen eye for finding that error and pointing it out in the form of a question. By putting it in question form he made no positive affirming statement of his own and by doing this the interlocutor could never use Socrates’ own method against him. One wonders why anyone even talked to him.
Part of the language heuristic is that humans seem to be born with a godlike self-image that resists seeing their very human limitations. This godlike self-image perseveres because like every other heuristic, despite its inherent downsides, we cannot live without it. The unfortunate truth is that we need that godlike self-image to survive the dilemmas of limitation. People who hedge and qualify almost everything they say don’t seem to have anything up on the rest of us. Some of the riddles of our existence are not only insoluble, perhaps we are better off not trying to solve them. Not if that solution makes us hem and haw, qualifying every statement we make with ‘perhaps’ and pointing out exceptions to our statements that introduce confusion. Limitation Philosophy accepts the heuristic nature of our limited being.
Having brought up the riddle of our godlike self-image let’s look into the heuristic we use to ‘see God.’
*For an example of cognitive dissonance in an expert on cognitive dissonance see, Eliot Aronson’s canoe story, on page 25 of, Mistakes Were Made(but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Eliot Aronson.
The Ordinary Religious Heuristic
A very wide range of systems of religious belief share a set of common characteristics that shape their beliefs and practices. On the face of things Christianity and Pantheism are very distinct religious systems. Prayer, a practice common to most religions might be practiced in both but the manner and content of prayer in each will be very distinct. However each of them operate using The Ordinary Religious Heuristic and so do most other systems of theistic religious belief.
If you look at the beliefs of the major theistic religions there are three core elements present in some form. Their Deity, deities or whatever stands in as Deity is anthropomorphic. This Deity has authoritarian characteristics, the rules of behavior emanate from the Deity. And the relationship of the Deity to the believer, and perhaps everyone else is transactional. This structure is explicit in some religious systems and obscured in others (Pantheism and other unconventional religious systems put as much distance between themselves and more conventional systems as possible).
In Christianity there is God, the Father whose personality is exalted far above ordinary human personality but understood using ‘theory of mind’ (using ourselves and our own understanding of human behavior as a reference for understanding others). This idea of our use of ‘theory of mind’ to understand a Deity extends to the Pantheist. Nature or the Universe has a mind, albeit on a higher plane than ours, Nature feels and can become offended and it’s motives are calculated using ‘theory of mind’ methods. The Pantheist likely sees disasters resulting from climate change in terminology that echoes divine vengeance. In Pantheism the anthropomorphism is obscured but the constraints of narration make that impossible to fully accomplish. The ‘theism’ in Pantheism comes out in its narrations.
While massive differences define each major religion most if not all of them operate in human personality by the Ordinary Religious Heuristic, perhaps this is how they all get categorized as religions. Consider this conception using the lens of personality structure, that is mind, heart and will, alongside the three parts of the Ordinary Religious Heuristic. Our minds anthropomorphize, our hearts recognize common feeling and our wills use our own various intentions to gauge those of others, even when the other is a Deity. As humans we frame any form of intention in human terms. It’s how we understand stories. Because humans understand things from their own self-perspective the Ordinary Religious Heuristic operates in our personality like digestion does in our body. It’s normal human behavior.
As normal human behavior it can be considered within the system one and system two cognitive model which Daniel Kahneman makes plain in Thinking, Fast and Slow. The Ordinary Religious Heuristic forms the basis for intuition, system one, and provides a framework for the philosophical theorizing of Theology, system two. Religious faith shapes the believers intuition so that speech and action consistent with the faith happen without forethought and then defend system one religious behavior with the complex articulations of system two thinking which are understandable to fellow humans who are naturally in tune with the Ordinary Religious Heuristic.
The only religions exempt from the Ordinary Religious Heuristic are those with no deities to anthropomorphize, the non-theistic religions and the theological system made plain in The Logic of Limitless, because Limitation Philosophy’s premise is that the Deity is not humanlike with non-authoritarian and non-transactional following from the conclusions of the original premise. As the culmination of its theme The Logic of Limitless proves that, as a form of perception, the Ordinary Religious Heuristic hides reality, the ultimate reality of God and the nature of the universe of things.
It’s natural and in some ways impossible not to anthropomorphize. We do it all the time with our pets. I know how I think. I believe I know how you think, but do I really know how my cat thinks? We tend to frame any form of intention in human terms. The self-reference of our own human intention plays a large role in how we understand and follow stories, especially fictional stories. A Non-Anthropomorphic Deity cannot be given a dramatic role in a story. Such a Deity can be discussed by the characters, but the role of any non-human character in a story requires its intentions to be anthropomorphized.
The True Source of Social Darwinism
Critics of Social Darwinism cite Evolution and Natural Selection as the origin of Social Darwinist theorizing. They ignore the fact that genocides and every other moral outrage proposed or carried out by Social Darwinists were present in wars of religion long before the Social Darwinists came on the scene.
In Social Darwinism, Nature is made into an anthropomorphized deity with humanlike intention. In the Social Darwinist narrative, nature has decided that one group is fit to survive and another is not. Natures intention stands in for ‘God’s will’ in the Social Darwinist narrative which is analogous to the narrative of every holy war. Social Darwinists embrace an unconventional form of theistic religion operating within the ordinary religious heuristic. Evolution and Natural Selection are a form of religious belief important to their use of the holy war model.
Having abandoned the holy war model of ages past, Christian denominations can now point out to Social Darwinists the immorality of it as ideology and policy. Our world and the people in it today are very different from the world and people of the Crusades and the Wars of Religion. There is nothing hypocritical about modern Christians denouncing Social Darwinist faith and practice.
In Limitation Philosophy, the Deity does not have the humanlike intentions to “will” a holy war, and the manner in which the earth, life and human beings ‘come to be,’ by ‘process not intention’ does not license any subset of any species to destroy others because they are the favorites of some anthropomorphized pantheistic deity which animates that process. The humanlike intention to decree ‘survival of the fittest ‘ as a ‘law’ is not part of the Deity described in the cosmology of Limitation Philosophy. Social groups of limited beings concoct stuff like Social Darwinism by manipulating the Ordinary Religious Heuristic to justify doing in groups the kind of things their innate moral sense as individuals tells them is wrong. Far from being the expression of paradigmatic natural law, Social Darwinism generates so much moral error that most social groups see it as just plain wrong.
The way the earth, life and human beings come to be as part of the universal process is far too enmeshed with the rest of Limitation Philosophy’s cosmology to be explained in isolation. The best way to understand it is by a careful reading of The Logic of Limitless.
The cosmology of Limitation Philosophy is more distinct from than similar to General Darwinism. The risk of associating the cosmology of Limitation Philosophy with Darwinism is troubling to me. In our culture, the anthropomorphizing the terms evolution and natural selection is a deeply ingrained language habit and thinking in terms of paradigmatic laws like survival of the fittest is mostly what Darwinism is all about. Darwinism is often used to deny the existence of God while being spoken of in what my discerning eye sees as very theistic language. The cosmology is not Darwinism, and the way the language of Darwinism is spoken is the opposite of Limitation Philosophy.”
The Quote is from Eleazar’s Story Where the Text Moves on to
The Ordinary Religious Heuristic, which explores theistic faith as a heuristic
