The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

Over the course of Chapters 4-6, Watts moves beyond his initial criticisms of modern culture and starts to unpack his views on conscious awareness, the present moment, and the art of living.

It is important to note that at all times, Watts is writing specifically for and about white, heterosexual, middle- and upper-class men. It is their desires, fears, and eventual enlightenment that form the basis for his analysis, examples, and prescriptions. Their status as the preeminent social group in 1950s America allows Watts to sidestep oppressive structural and systemic conveyors of anxiety, such as racism and sexism, and argue that the quest for safety and comfort is a false goal. In the case of this de-facto upper American caste, this formulation seems correct—white male anxieties may well be simply the result of materialism and the grasping for future goods. In ignoring the much more grounded and externally motivated insecurity of women, people of color, and other marginalized groups, Watts is tailoring his approach specifically to only those with structural support in place.

In “The Wisdom of the Body,” Watts diagnoses the “special disease of civilized man” (57). Watts is referring to the sense that the mind and the body are separate. Philosophically, this is known as mind-body dualism, a philosophical theory first proposed by French philosopher Rene Descartes in the 17th century. Descartes is now known as the father of Western modern philosophy. It is fitting, then, that Watts would take mind-body dualism, i.e., the schism between the brain and the rest of the body, as the disease unique to “civilized man,” because the philosophical foundations of the modern philosophy have grappled with this issue for centuries. Despite consistent philosophical criticism, the fact of mind-body dualism is a fixture of contemporary culture—something Watts finds deeply problematic. This is one area in which the Eastern philosophical/spiritual traditions that Watts relies upon are diametrically opposed to Western academic philosophy.

The upshot of this “special disease,” is the atrophy of bodily, instinctual wisdom. This atrophying has a compounding effect: The more our adaptations to our world have been outsourced to technology, the more our instincts fall into neglect. Watts writes:

The ‘instruments’ which achieve these feats are, indeed, organs and processes of the body—that is to say, of a mysterious pattern of movement which we do not really understand and cannot actually define. In general, however human beings have ceased to develop instruments of the body. More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious ‘know-how.’ This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose (57).

We may note how the fundamental metaphysical view of the modern world, mind-body dualism, is intricately connected to an epistemological view privileging the primacy of propositional knowledge. Forms of knowledge that cannot be stated in semantically coherent, propositional form (by the “brainy economy” [61]) are degraded and deemphasized. The wisdom of the body—in its procedural awareness of tasks and participatory understanding of physical forms—is neglected. In a sense, our bodies become foolish, clumsy instruments in the modern world. We can see how Watts’s themes and chapters compound on one another: Since the neglect of embodied wisdom makes us more instinctually unaware of our surroundings, then the necessity for a reinvigorated sense of awareness is more crucial than ever because this awareness is far less natural than it once was.

Watts also connects this disconnectedness from embodied knowledge to a rising insensitivity to natural, simple pleasures, connecting to the “I”/“me” dichotomy of previous chapter. Whereas the natural, true self would have an intimate familiarity with the simple pleasures of the body—the touch of a hand, the scent of an orange, etc.—the ego, caught up in its projects, fantasies, and memories, loses touch with this primary reality.

Not only does the “I” passively disconnect itself from primary, conscious experience of the present moment, it also actively obfuscates it with an over-reliance and dependence on the symbolic order. For the “I,” the symbols of things stand in the place of the real things. The fundamental, metaphysical relationship between the real and the imaginary is reversed. While criticizing the modern/Cartesian dualism of the mind and the body, Watts reinforces the ancient/Platonic dualism of the real (or intelligible) and the image-based (or material). In Plato’s famous allegory of the cave from The Republic, a group of prisoners chained to a cave floor assume that the shadows they see projected on a screen are depictions of the real things. For instance, they believe that a shadow-picture of horse is a real horse. For Watts, modern, unenlightened folks are like these cave prisoners, taking their concerns and projections as real life when these imagined goods are no more than attempts at escape.