1 Because of our powers of reasoning, imagining and supposing, we exist mentally in a world of opposites, converses, negatives. There may be some kind of absolute reality that is not like this. There may be other relative realities. But this tensional, or polar, reality is the one we humans inhabit.
2 Anything that exists or can be imagined to exist is a pole. All feelings, ideas, thoughts, are poles; and each pole has counterpoles.
3 There are two categories of counterpole. One is nothingness, the non-existence of the pole. The other is whatever denies, attacks, diminishes, stands contrary to or diverts from the pole.
4 The obvious counterpole of an idea is the contrary idea. The world is round; the world is not round. But whatever else stands between my mind and its continuous concentration on the idea (
5 Even when contrary propositions are meaningless or demonstrably false they contribute life and meaning to the propositions they oppose; just as the nonexistence, in human terms of existing, of ‘God’ gives life and meaning to all that exists.
6 Our first and most direct apprehension of this polarity is got from our experience of our own self – our body and then our mind.
THE COUNTERPOLES OF THE ‘I’
7 I am made constantly aware of the otherness of things. They are all in some sense my counterpoles. A Sartrean existentialist would say that they hedge me in, they tyrannize me, they encroach on my selfhood. But they define me, they tell me what I am, and if I am not told what I am, I do not know what I am. I am aware too that all other objects are in exactly the same situation as myself: minute pole in a vast ocean of counterpoles, I am infinitely isolated, but my situation is infinitely repeated.
8 All parts of my body are objects external to me: my hands, my tongue, my digestive mechanism. The words I speak are counterpoles. There is no mental activity I cannot stand back from and be towards as to a counterpole. So I am a tissue of counterpoles. My body and my thoughts and my words are like the garden and the rooms and the furniture of my house. Certainly they seem to me more mine than your garden or the room you read in at this moment; but a moment’s analysis tells me that they are not mine in any total or scientific sense. They are mine in the artificiality of the law, and in the illogicality (or biologicality) of emotion. My garden is this collection of grass, earth, plants, trees that I possess in law and can enjoy while I live; it is not mine. Nothing, not even what I call my self, is mine; individuality and counter-polarity separate me from all.
9 I see these strange tools, my hands, at the end of my arms; I see these strange tools, my arms, that hang from my shoulders; I see these strange tools, my shoulders, that curve from my neck; I see this strange tool, my neck, that carries my head; I see this strange tool, my head, that holds my brain; I see this strange tool, my brain, that sees itself and calls itself a tool and tries to find in itself a thing not a tool that it is a tool for.
10 Where then is the ultimate pole? Where is the T that permits me to make these descriptions? Which claims that everything, both in and outside me, is other? Plainly, it is no more than a recording of phenomena; a colourless mechanism distinguished from other such mechanisms only by its position in space and time. Ultimately T is simply the common condition of all human mentality.
11 The description we habitually make is this: ‘I am aware of this disturbance that has happened in my brain.’ But it is more accurate to say: ‘This disturbance disturbed and the disturbing took place in the particular field of experience that the reflector of the disturbance, the stater of this statement, exists in.’ I is thus a convenient geographical description, not an absolute entity.
THE TENSIONAL NATURE OF HUMAN REALITY
12 If the T pole is anything it is the sum of reflected (and recollected) disturbances in this field. If there had been no disturbances there would be no ‘mirror’; no T. In short, T is constituted by its counterpoles; without them it is nothing.
13 There is however a sense in which each counterpole must seem hostile to the ‘ghost’ called T that has been constituted by all other counterpoles. The directly contrary counterpole to I am is I am not. That is paradoxically not the most hostile since my death (as tombstones remind us) at least signals my existence. The way in which we ordinarily think of our own death is not morbid; on the contrary, one of the simplest ways of assuring ourselves that we live. But the counterpoles that are external to my body and my immediate surroundings and possessions are’ all in effect submergers of me. They distract my (and other people’s) concentration from myself. They diminish me. And thus they give rise to my personal sense of nemo.
14 What we consciously or subconsciously require of a counterpole is that it in some way signals and confirms our existence; because we own it in law, because it loves us or hates us or needs us or acknowledges us; because we can identify ourselves either with it or, by the process of countersupporting, against it. The more we are aware of the nothingness at the still centre of our being – that nothingness we mask by talking of T – the more we look for these ego-reflective (or nemo-destructive) qualities in the counterpoles with which we can choose to furnish our lives.
15 Between all these counterpoles, both choosable and inevitable, and the T pole there exists a relationship; but since the counterpoles are in themselves poles and have their own counterpoles (one of which is constituted by T) the situation of the T pole is analogous to a kind of complex tug-of-war. We must imagine countless teams all of whose ropes are knotted at a centre; of differing strength, some directly combining, others obliquely affecting, many diametrically opposed. This central knot is the T; and the diverse forces pulling at it make the state of tension.
TENSION
16 Tension is the effect on the individual of conflicting feelings, ideas, desires and events. Sometimes the tug-of-war will be one-sided, in the sense that the individual will know quite clearly which ‘side’ he wishes to win. In most political and social contexts this is so. A Jew-hater is not attracted by pro-semitism, a pacifist by armed intervention. There is still tension, since the individual knows that in society the opposing point of view is held. But in many other situations the conflict will be in the individual. He will be pulled first one way, then the other. This can form a rhythmic and comfortable pattern, as in normal sexual relationships; it can become a torture on the rack; and in extreme cases the knotted ropes, the individual mind, may break under the strain.
17 The effect of a tension may be good or bad: a game or an anxiety. Tension, like every other mechanism in the universal process, is indifferent to the organisms it affects. It may ravish them, or it may destroy them.
18 Each of us, and each society, and each world, is the centre of a web of such tensions; and what we call progress is simply the effect of its opposing forces. To be human, or to be a human institution, is like being obliged to be a man on a tightrope. He must balance; and he must move.
19 We shall never attain a state of perfect balance. For us, the only perfect balance can be the living balance. Even if perfect balance is momentarily achieved, time ensures it will not be sustained. It is time that makes this balancing real.
20 Evolution changes in order to remain the same; but we change in order to become different. Time passes, from our human point of view, in order that each moment shall be in hazard and needing balance.
