Category: commentaries

Erasing the Race Toward Race

Erasing the Race toward Race (A cautious conception of a ‘superculture’)

            In what is arguably the most radical science fiction short story ever written, Theodore Sturgeon presents a super-race. Not alien, but rather a humanity evolved through culture. In ‘If all men were brothers…’, the author has his protagonist himself evolve, at a personal level, from a normative presence in a mediocre and decadent society to an acceptance of this higher form of being. At first, contact with these superior humans prompts a profound dysphoria, physical illness, and ethical revulsion. For here is a world in which love really is love, including that incestual, wherein beauty is superlative and omnipresent, and where joy is almost matter-of-fact. Sturgeon clearly presents his principal character in this way to act as a vehicle for what he imagines the reader’s own experience, and possibly also that reader’s reactions, to be. Indeed, a reevaluation of all values has taken place, and beyond this, such a process is understood as the only way in which humanity could, in fact, evolve.

            Fiction is not fact, but it is based upon factual experience we humans share. Part of this experience is reflected in discourse. The heroic confrontation between the person and the institution is an enduring performance, cliché at the worst, yet inspiring at its best, appearing in serious analyses such as Herbert Spencer’s The Man versus the State, or Pierre Clastres’ Society against the State, and in popular culture renditions such as Rush’s 2112 or the WW1 drama The Monocled Mutineer and scads of others. Yet today we seem to be shying away from this self-conception, perhaps preferring to invest ourselves into alternative collectives based upon those we deem like us. Anonymity breeds anomie, to be sure, and the response from we social animals are attempts to create community for ourselves. Such forays range widely, from the dispirited desperation of those who are taken in by cults, to the somewhat less dangerous but also more cynical sectarians, whose idea of community is decoying and networking under a moralizing curtain. But whether coven or covenant, I am being drawn up as a person who is only a person within the context of presumed like others.

            Mixed messages abound. At once we are told to ‘be ourselves’, to become what we are, and DIY of all kinds is a pricey industry, suggesting that ultimately, we can only rely upon ourselves, or more darkly, to ‘trust no one’. At the same time, we must identify with something larger than ourselves. King and country have faded in significance, though ethnic nationalisms countered by state apparatuses seem to be a renewed source of world conflict in our own day. Community is itself a challenging conception; what is its threshold? who has it and who does not and why? who is truly ‘like’ myself? And how would I recognize it if I were to choose, and upon which basis? My gender? My skin-tone? My socio-economic status? And so on. Generally, such life-chance variables are said to coalesce in community, of whatever sort, giving us a yet stronger impression that what we are as a human being must be based upon these widely shared similarities, rather than upon our much-vaunted and once sovereign selfhood.

            But how can both of these be true at once? I am an individual, and yet I am nothing outside of the group. My culture creates me and yet it also limits my personal growth. My society nurtures me and then I am imprisoned by it, in it. Many phenomena attest to this contradiction and how it is being experienced, especially by young people. The outlandish, even outrageous forms performed by some of our fellows, could be seen as attempts to valorize the self in the face of both cultural limitations and societal limits. The conflict between self and society is a recent one, beginning only formally in the 18th century. But it is also the most contemporary expression of a much more ancient dualism, that of the one and the many. This deeper division animated all of creation, for even the pantheons of large-scale faiths were not exempt from it. When monotheism began to supplant these older systems, the contrast between singularity and multiplicity did not vanish. If there was but one God, there were yet many manifestations thereof. If there was but one world, there were many regions, one species, many cultures, one consciousness, many minds, one state, many citizens. The fashion for ‘celebrating diversity’ is not as Whitmanesque as it is idealized to be, for in so doing, we rapidly lose track of what we share as human beings; our essence as living projects and the essentiality of the human condition.

            The presence of cultures, originally salutary to human evolution, is perhaps now getting in the way of further and future development. The loyalties to ‘race’ and ethnicity, to gender and genderedness, to identifying with structural variables as one would list résumé items, along with a more dated though just as sycophantic an adoration of 19th century institutions such as the State itself, precipitates both ongoing conflict but as well, and more profoundly, a sense that I am not myself without such uplinks, that I am nothing as the one, something as the many, that I am even immoral as the individual, but as a citizen and a group member, moral through and through. I fear not to judge others for there are many voices judging; there is no first stone in a landslide. I fear not hypocrisy, for how could such a thing afflict and infect everyone I know? I fear no evil, for in community only the good resides. Inevitably, a large part of group identification entails definition by negation. I may not know exactly what I am, but I do imagine I know what, and thence also who, I am not. This represents the point of no return for the self. At this vanishing point, the event that occurs upon such a horizon betrays my existence and in whole cloth. My humanity, so disturbing to me in its fragile mortality, is shuffled off, in favor of the living death of the self.

            The brute fact of a human like myself being stronger collectively, whether in politics or logistics, in practical intelligences or yet in the gene pool itself, belies the more serious factuality that in reality I am strongest at home in my ownmost existence. This singular selfhood is presented as the vehicle through which, and in which, I confront that same reality of my shared condition. I do share my essence with others, but not through any of the identities that I imagine have such suasion. They are, from the existential and phenomenological fulcrums of the human condition, mere window dressings, and to flaunt their flagrant flaneur as if it were my truest self is nothing other than an ethical fraud. Worse still, the joke is on me alone, for in finally being forced to face down mine ownmost death, I belatedly comprehend that I am nothing, and have been nothing more than a unit in a measured machination, capable of action but incapable of acts, pretending to agency under the guise of being an agency, and indeed one possessed by the sole goal of its own reproduction, without a thought to those persons who make it up.

            Each human culture today is this fraud. Is there an evolutionary process by which the best of each may be amalgamated into a single superculture, a way in which to express the one and the many as the same thing? This idea is not new, but the only serious attempt prompted an epic disaster. The Reich’s ideal was to remake culture through art, remake the person through the model of the artist. But the Nazis too narrowly defined both art and culture, and yet more so, what could constitute personhood. Next time round, if you will, such conceptions must be widened extensively, though no doubt not universally. There does exist anti-culture after all, ‘degenerate’ or no, in the same way in which one might speak of there existing an antipathy to being cultured, which is most commonplace, ironically given impetus by E. B. Tylor’s all-embracing coinage of anthropologically defined culture as society itself.

            The Reich’s modernist idol, Richard Wagner, expressed the desire for a new culture in immoderate tones, telling his virtuoso musicians; ‘you are perfect human beings; all you need to do is lose your Jewishness’. His own evolutionary goal was no less parochial, reanimating Nordic mythos and presenting it as somehow as a future rather than a long past apparition of dubious merit and import. But if we take any specific cultural identity to be a mere exemplification of that which thwarts further human evolution, we can avoid vindicating the artist for imagining that life should be as art already is while at once realizing the pith of the artist’s insight. Yes, we do need to lose our cultural loyalties, and desperately so. And if the cult of Kultur was not the answer we needed, then or now, the sense that becoming cultured in the wider sense – overcoming our provincial loyalties – and in that deeper – undertaking the confrontation with the tradition that each culture presents us with – is nevertheless the only manner through which cross-cultural conflict will cease. That politics manipulates our archaic loyalties is to be expected; but the real issue, jaded and jaundiced, is our petulant possession of both.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 57 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Possible Inauthenticities in the Transgendered Phenomenon

Possible Inauthenticities in the Transgendered Phenomenon

            In the cases I have come across through professional ethics consulting with families and youth, there are present three kinds of discrepancies from institutionally and commercially normative family forms; that is, those possessing two different but dominant gendered parents who have mutually come to terms with the birth gender of their children. They are:

            1. Single parent families: here, the child has adopted the gender of the absent or missing parent and if their sex at birth contradicts that of the one who has been so adopted, a transgendered child results.

            2. Conflict between parents who desire a different sexed child: here, the child internalizes this conflict and reproduces it in himself or herself, generating a transgendered selfhood in the effort to please both parents.

            3. Conflict within one or another parent whose own desires regarding their sexual identity do not match worldly outcomes regarding the child’s sex at birth: in such cases, the child becomes accustomed to performing as if they were the gender counter to their physiological sex, also constructing a transgendered identity for themselves.

            Often subconsciously, parents interact with their children as if the latter were simply smaller projections of themselves. If conflict is present beyond that inevitably associated with basic socialization processes – there is no culture that does not possess this more demographically based conflict; some cultures negotiate it with more compassion and gentleness than do others – also, in my sense, a pathological presence, the phenomenon of transgenderedness is understood by the child, once again, subconsciously, as the only possible response to the context around them. I must please both parents, I must take on the role of the absent parent, I must assuage my parent’s self-doubts.

            In each permutation, ethical interaction is scarce. In general, speaking as a philosopher, I would suggest that any time one’s actions are bereft of ethical reflection, inauthenticity, perhaps at best, is the result. My case observations have, in turn, suggested to me that parents overly and overtly concerned with normative gender boundaries can also produce transgenderism in their children, thereby generating a fourth category, slightly different from the three listed above. Here, by contrast, the conflict within the adult is transferred to the child who reacts not to assuage or please their parent but to instead defy them and thus also to deny the projection itself. These cases were also more challenging to resolve, as the adults involved were in patent denial that they were defending gender norms against their own self-doubts regarding them.

            The inauthenticity of transgenderism is a function of it being not only epiphenomenal to sources of conflict which orbit round self-conscious agrarian-based societal norms regarding gender roles and performances – that is, these conflicts are not personal but rather historical in scope – but as well, they represent avoidance of conflict in general; decoys constructed by the child who is either too young to understand the authentic conflict in the family, or later on, too anemic in character to confront such conflict which has by then become their own.

            As such, it is easier to understand why the gay subculture has been tepid in its support for transgenderism. They are utterly different phenomena in both source and result. For gay people, transgenderism might well seem to be reactionary, as it, in every case, seeks to shore up dominant gender models and roleplaying, and thus is nothing radical at all, let alone revolutionary. Thus, transgenderism has been misunderstood both by its critics as well as by its adherents. In sum, it is essentially a coping mechanism that is both inauthentic to modern selfhood – it seeks to cover over the conflict that is both necessary to distinguish the self from others as well as provide a bandage for the pathological conceptions of parents who have unethically allowed their desires to overtake their ideals – and an entanglement of one’s very being in the face of its essential mortality and condition of its happenstance birth.

            Though gender as a performance, however indirectly related to biological sex and to human sexuality in general, may be a ludic form which should not be evaluated as pathological in itself, that which is sourced in conflicts which are pathological should not be encouraged, but rather resolved at the point of departure. I suggest here that transgenderism is, in general, just such a negative form, and as such, must be gently retouched to the point that the victim in these cases, the child, is not further alienated by other social forces which are thence to be encountered at an interpersonal level.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 57 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades and has consulted for families and youth for three years.

The Demise of Civility

The Demise of Civility (and the error of culture)

            Etiquette manuals have been around for some time. Their heyday coincided with the rise of the Bourgeois class, from c. 1820-1930, prompted by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which in turn allowed nascent industry to develop, cities to grow, and those who used to be guildsmen, mercantilists and burghers to become a true class. Indeed, a class for itself, unlike the workers of the nineteenth century. And this was a novel class, one that had never existed as a demographic force before capital. Though their ideals descended from the aristocracy and their tacit essence, the conception of ‘blood’, drove their desire to become as were the nobles, their interaction with one another could not be relied upon to immediately ape their betters. Hence civility began to replace gentility. The major structural error of the Bourgeois was that they imagined what in fact was a caste could be, or in fact had been, through historical force, transmuted into a mere class. In fact, the nobility did not become the aristocracy in this manner, even though casually we might imagine these to be two terms for the same group of people. A caste presumes upon what Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (1970) have referred to as the ‘naturalization of the cultural arbitrary’. Ultimately it was this ‘ability’ which has escaped the Bourgeois class, and thus by our time they have foundered upon their own ideals.

            Not a great loss, one might think to say, but the lesson here is that a mode of production shift must be respected as the sea-change it truly is. No mere Bourgeois, however civil and high-minded both, would imagine that vengeance is theirs, for instance. No, this kind of radical act became the province of the State under a new rubric, indeed, the Bourgeois State, to stay strictly Marxian. Bourgeois ‘blood’ was not up to the noble task of dispensing of one’s inferiors; at most it could only aid in the dispensation of ‘justice’, also a novel concept, and also within the purview of the new State. That this justice is sensitive to context, taking biography and even personal suffering into account marks it as utterly different, and even completely at odds with, the noble sense of vengeance. This particular trail begins with the God who declared that vengeance was His and His alone, but no person of truly noble stature would have paid the least attention to such bravado. No, the superior human being was so in part because she had no truck with any divinity other than her own. The entire narrative of the God on earth would have been, at the very least, old hat to such a being, and certainly seen as well as ludicrous. No real God would stoop to owning a human interest, let alone actually dwell upon the human stage alongside ourselves.

            Between Christianity and its parables of communalism, its equality of being before creation and its sense that one should love one’s enemies, and the new order of means of production afforded by industrialization, the ancient noble caste was swept away. It was mere pretense that the new Bourgeois class should seek to ape this older form of being, but it was laughable that they should, in attempting to do so, mistake the premodern landed aristocracy for the ancient nobility. In this, all were already Christian, which I think is one point Wagner is making with the contrast between The Ring Cycle and Parsifal that apparently so annoyed Nietzsche. Upon closer look, the ‘twilight’ cuts both ways. First the Gods then the Idols, surely. Today, we can see little difference between the two once distinct categories. There is nothing contemporary about noble action; chivalry, honor, self-sacrifice, adventure, vengeance, dispassion. No, today we have but civility, policy, self-interest, venture, justice, and compassion, an odd mix in itself, certainly, and one that bears no resemblance to the noble caste ideals of antiquity. It is a great historical irony that within that antiquity there arose a counterpoint to these distinguished and rare traits of character, not unlike the advent of the rodents who rose to prominence as mammals when the reptilians were wiped out by a cosmic accident.

            Was it merely an historical accident that erased nobility from our world, or was it an inevitability? Either way, we must work with what we have left. Eschewing the Bourgeois obsession for aping the aristocracy – only through material consumption could they attain some semblance even of this already lower form of life – as well as the worker’s clamor for ‘equality’ – outside of the law and of material resource, this has no meaning at all – we might perceive instead that civility could indeed pass for chivalry, compassion for honor, and justice for vengeance, if we ourselves internalized the noble value of affrontedness. That is, if we took offense at those who are actually offensive in our society, we would begin to experience something of the noble caste of mind. Instead of kow-towing to the loudest and most obnoxious voice – by definition such a display carries with it the basest, most ignoble lot – we sequester it, ignore it, sanction it, even destroy it. Given that a large part of our modern notions of what might have been nobility is likely based on a romantic fiction, we might use this play to improvise our own new and newly discovered superiority. It must be kept in mind that this divined superior quality of being can only be based on a superior culture, one that does not align itself with any other variable. This was the Reich’s great error of self-conception. In turn, this error led to yet greater flaws in action, including genocide. A truly noble caste of culture takes the understanding that anyone anywhere may well contribute to it. We have the kernel of that sensibility even today when we hear someone speak of ‘not knowing where the next Einstein will come from, or who they will be’. The question is not, is such cultural genius available to human beings, but rather, will we be able, as a culture, to recognize it at all?

            At the start, civility – which even so is to nobility as civil religion is to religion proper, it must be admitted – must be somehow made mandatory. No Singapore sling, civility is rather a basic manner of social interaction that all must heed. Yes, the gentle tone can mask a darker violence, the ‘quiet one’ is ‘always’ the menace, so we have been told, since she sits observing all of the others and thence schemes her insinuative ingenue, but at the same time, it compels us to be attentive and not get carried off by the mob. The Pauline tone is at base, manipulative. Like the visionary, the missionary must realize that his mission is about the self, and that ‘truth is a pathless land’ after all. Civility has within it the roots of society itself, for though a house divided cannot stand, moreover, it cannot stand itself. Civility is the civitas of civic life, the singular connection between public and private, between personal and communal, between intimacy and sociality. And while chivalry was quite ad hoc, civility has this advantage; anyone can learn it and practice it in any context. We need no damsels in distress, no bloody jousts, no holy grail, no fallen Jerusalem to impel us to action. In the civil, we are not concerned with acts; we do not have that kind of vanity about us. In its stead, we have rather the sense that in a diverse and massive social organization within which everyone is accountable to, and reliant upon, everyone else, that there absolutely must be a universal solvent that acts upon all those who would ‘act out’ in that very vanity we have just indicted.

            Our version of the noble can only now be compassion, justice and civility. In these we shall find our nominal superiority, but only in these. Though a pale shade of the original, perhaps we can understand these new nobilities as leverage for a newly refined culture, which takes into itself, and for the first time, all possibilities that enrich the cultural self-understanding. The categories of self-knowledge, the chasms between discourses both within the West and across the world, cannot by themselves generate a noble culture. Anthropology has been not so much the handmaiden of imperialism but rather the bridesmaid of a decoy democracy which in turn states blithely that anything ‘cultural’ has cultural merit, and by definition. This is manifestly not the case, and indeed was the argument, in part, that the same Reich used against its cultured critics. It used to not be a puzzle to import the best and brightest, but what was ignored were all those who could have been, or already were also the best and brightest, since these categories were themselves hung up on Bourgeois conceptions of what would be most favorable to the desire for aristocracy alone, not nobility. Abandoning this sensibility will go some way in rejuvenating authentic culture and thus as well genuine cultural suasion. In 1927, Edward Sapir, the apical anthropologist Boas’ best and brightest, wrote about the difference between ‘genuine and spurious culture’, naming Nietzsche as one of his avatars. Culture, he states, does not ‘happen’ to one, whilst we sit easy in our chairs. It is not after all a ready-made, but rather such customs get in the way of creative, authentic culture. They are the smaller stuff of ethnography, for instance, and as such their limits must be assuredly understood. A culture gets in its own way, as Nietzsche suggested before him, and has an uncanny way of doing only that; ‘A culture is something that is a way to produce one or two great persons, yes, and then is a way round them’.

            In order that we do not let our mere culture get in the way of Culture proper, we must invite the otherness of others – though not necessarily these others themselves, mind you – into it. We must not imagine that we ‘possess’ enough culture to ‘get by’. There is, in fact, no getting by any longer in this our shared, and vulnerable, world. Civility is the first step towards genuine culture. It is also the easiest, shame on us. Then justice, then compassion following hard along. In rational organizations, the highest form of being is rendered last, for better or worse. Compassion, when enacted without pity or grace by the nobility, now becomes our desire to be superior; compassion is the higher being, the ‘bridge to the Overman’, perhaps, but at the very least, the pathless landscape of fenceless neighbors. Truth and the Good did not apply to nobility, and beauty was known in the flesh, and not as an ideal. Nobility had a savage honor about it that we cannot afford to revisit, given our technological proclivities, but it also had a superior sense; that it, because of its humanity, would not, even could not, be brooked in its aspirations. It is this ‘self-confidence’ that we are so sadly lacking today, for we rather imagine that we cannot attain this or that state, and that the world is itself failing. No, it is we who are failing the world, and through this anti-virtue, we commit our most uncivil selves to a premature demise.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Trouble with Tribal

The Trouble with Tribal (Regression in self-identity)

            Any time we imagine that our selfhood is in majority defined by what we are rather than who we are, we risk the loss of that very selfhood. We have already spoken of one level of this self-misrecognition, that of the life-chance variable. These factors, such as gender, age, level of education, socio-economic status and such-like, certainly influence, sometimes to a great degree when combined with one another, an individual’s ability to access resources, gain employment, marry up or down, as well as one’s longevity. Just so, they are factors that impinge upon our personhood, they do not define it. We are, at our best and most developed in terms of worldview, singular souls who must come to terms with our own finitude. At once, this condition allows us to share intimately the pith of what it means to both be and to become human, and this is of the species-essence, while confronting the equally profound, though this time existential, situatedness of being a thrown project into the world and ‘running along’ towards mine ownmost death. Avoiding either of these means evading them both, and the most common, and also base, manner of doing so, is hanging one’s existential hat up upon the tribal peg.

            More ancient than modern life-chance variables, and therefore sometimes more potent to the unconscious mind, are traditional factors such as language group, ethnicity, region of birth, sex rather than gender, caste rather than class. These variables, some almost primordial for human beings, influence us at a deep level, often escaping conscious reflection. Far easier it is to identify through analysis the roadblocks present in our lives due to contemporary features of organizational and family life, aspects of our social role panoply that would include wealth and social status, ability to ‘pass’ as a member of a certain class or professional group, and so on. These are factors which could be said to be ‘in hand’; they are present or absent along the lines of how we can use them in the day to day. I lost a major status when I retired from the academy, as well as major wealth. These were easy to understand and were even partly measurable. But the deeper and thus more disconcerting loss was of my personal identity, for I had made the ethical error of making too close an alignment between my profession and my person. Though this is a commonplace mistake – I am what I do for a living – it results in existential avoidance that, if there is a life-change at hand, one must then confront rather nakedly and without guidance.

            I witnessed, before I retired, a number of older colleagues who exhibited what could only be referred to as an abject terror at the prospect. They really were what their work life had made them into. There could be no future vision from such a vantage point. This was one minor factor influencing my own decision-making at the time; I didn’t want to end up like them! And even though it took a few years, I have remade my professional identity. That was, it turned out, the easier part, which underscores the point we are making here. More challenging was extricating my personal selfhood from that professional. The ego was a major instigator of the desire to hang on to the latter. From having a built-in audience transfixed by one’s every word – on a good day – to possessing the ability to possess through relatively unlimited consumption, to being called ‘professor’ or ‘doctor’ innumerable times a day, all of this contributed mightily to the sense that this must be who I am, as it felt so good. This ‘goodness’ was in fact a mark against my character; the one who is moved by praise and power alone. Before entering into an Augustinian retrospective, I have maintained some of this sensibility, though with more circumspection and even modesty than previously, in my current professional role. There is yet no money in it, but the promises of El Dorado are enough, at my age, to pique my declining pecuniary interest.

            ‘Exogamic’ internecine role-conflict – that between authentic levels of self-understanding; the idea that I am one thing or rather another – deeply contributes to the anomic false consciousness. I realized that I was suffering from this while I was a professor, and indeed, upon leaving that vocation behind for good, entered a kind of ‘recovery’ phase, which for me lasted some years. I was a member of the academic tribe, kindred with that medical, legal, and even other less voluminous professions such as architectural. As with any tribe, to mix imageries, one circled the wagons when there was an external threat – from either proprietary students and resentful administrators, for the most part, and once in a while, from suspicious politicians – and when there was not, one instead practiced a kind of status one-upmanship which of late, so I am told, has migrated from comparing one’s c.v.’s to comparing, in Pythonesque fashion, just how miserable one is being of, or descending from, such an such an identity. You don’t say?

            Identifying with historical variables as if they were personal does generate a kind of miserable self-penury. The distance it creates between authentic Dasein and the manner in which one views the world alone is almost fatal to both compassion and a sincerely expressed desire alike. One wills one’s own negation. One says to oneself, ‘Surely it is better to tell the other who is like me that she is my very kindred, my flesh and blood; that we are both, or even all, bred in the very marrow of our kind; language, ethnicity, sex. Only through these deep connections can we make a truer community.’ This outlook presents to modernity the ultimate regression; that we are somehow better off as neolithic gatherings of fictive consanguineals. Not only is this contrary to the evolution of consciousness in general, it is an Edenic fantasy borne on some sort of Nosferatu nostalgia, with the fear of the other as its cardinal theme.

            Now none of this is to say that the confrontation with otherness writ small and into the human heart is not a severe challenge to selfhood. Anyone who has lived will attest to the ethical fact that to come to know another as she is to herself is a rare accomplishment, and one deserving of both the utmost care and compliment alike. But to shrink into the shadows of primitive frameworks with the express purpose of avoiding that confrontation and the ever-present conflict which comes along with it, is to deny one’s very humanity. Worse still, it is to deny the same of that very other, for, in identifying too closely with faux essentials such as ethnic group, language, or sex, is to make one’s fellow human being into a shell of herself. I observed, in a number of field studies of professional organizations, that the great bulk of human interaction in modern institutions was geared into shared experiences of this or that work-life. In leisure activities, familial experiences were added in, but always at the same shallow level. In one sense, this is necessary to keep sociality itself afloat, but in another, that same sociality is the vehicle for inauthenticity, for human unfreedom. All of this is very old hat, of course, which simply tells me that we haven’t been listening for well over a century if not more. Speaking of Augustine, the inventor of narrative subjectivity as well as of the apical confessional and perhaps also the autobiography, are we not also avoiding the tribulation, the trial, of having to actually be a person, and that further cast into our mortality?

            Instead of the authentic, if extreme, overture of Hamlet, who is apparently willing to at least act out his own demise – with the ex post facto caveat that we might be more careful what we wish for – we have taken the ‘to be or not to be’ and placed it into the melodrama of identity politics. Here, the personal is only the political if the former is vanquished. The sole manner of being is to not be a selfhood, to abandon the personal source of experiences which create and develop the self. To become rather a member of some kind of latter-day tribe is the goal. Its desires are kindred to those of all other attempts to avoid the anguish of human finitude, which, ironically, is one of the essential and real experiences that all of us share as a conscious species. The search for extraterrestrials, in its most desperate and unscientific guise, the quest for immortality through prosthetic or ‘artificial’ intelligence, the sub-culture of social regression hoisted into the limelight by neoconservatives, and the tribalism notable perhaps more on the ‘progressive’ side of fashionable politics, both of which are anti-culture, all share this avoidance behavior with those who dread the confrontation with existential anxiety and ethical anguish. Not that either of these need be Pauline or Augustinian respectively, but how they are presented to us in the present rather than historically, is not ultimately altered by our running headlong away from them.

            If we are to have a human future, if we are not to carry on in mass denial of world-altering forces at work around us and through us – tribalism, climate change, warfare, greed – then the first step must be to recover a perspective that respects our own human selfhood. In doing so, we place ourselves back into the world upon which we had been thrown at birth, and we rejoin the movement which traces the existential arc from birth to death, from one happenstance to another. And we do this together, not as a contrivance but as an authenticity; I am at once myself and of a species of consciousness, unique in the universe just as my selfhood is unique within that selfsame species. I am nothing other than this, other than the vehicle for the other to gain her own humanity and lose her like provincial status and outlook. This personal, though not private, risk is the mirror by which we undertake the risk of the future itself.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Ethics of Self-Censorship

The Ethics of Self-Censorship (the person and the work)

            I am more than fortunate to be a citizen of a nation which continues to value, at least legally, a general freedom of voice and speech. Politics are one thing of course, and they come and go, but as long as the essence of free and open discourse remains a key to our understanding of democracy, one can weather the squalls along the way. Certainly, there is a current sense that such freedoms are being eroded by extremities of that self-same speech and writing that most of us cherish and look to for both inspiration and perspective. The best response to such attacks is to speak and write in return, humbling the censor with eloquent truths, or at the very least, ideals. The greatest virtue of freedom of thought and expression is that it reminds the parochial mind that there is an entire world of diverse differences of which all must take account. In expressing these differences, we realize the Gestalt of the human species at large, including becoming more understanding of its species-essence.

            Yet self-censorship is, perhaps oddly, near the heart of this human dialogue. In day-to-day life, each of us, if we care about the social whole and about individual others, curtails our most frank sensibilities, generally regarding relatively trivial things. The old saw about the ‘white lie’, the patent non-response to such questions as ‘does this dress make me look fat?’ and such-like, are likely obvious to almost everyone. Such minor dishonesties, we agree, make the social wheel go round, and no one needs to know what we actually think about every little thing that could pass in front of us by the end of each day. This form of self-censorship is part of the package by and through which we maintain our sociality, even to the point of supporting our community or yet our culture. We cast a look of reproof at those who don’t play along with this mildly duplicitous game – children are not necessarily expected to be reliable players, but they learn, over time, how to master it, just as did we ourselves – as it stands to reason that they are not keeping up their end of the socially agreed upon bargain. In this, our sanction is in keeping with a number of other kinds of ‘betrayals’, if you will, that fuel various conflicts which buttress media copy in our time.

            More intense versions of sociality, as in crises where we imagine relationships or work life is at stake, require of us either distinct diplomacy or a yet transcendental tact. Here, where we are perhaps far more tempted to speak exactly as our conscience, or our ego, directs us, we rather reign in at least some of this personal truth given obligations or future rewards. ‘Do I preserve my marriage?’ is never of course a momentary kind of question, but we also know just how far to one side or the other a thoughtless comment here and there can travel. Intimate relations gone awry, the proverbial lovers’ tiff, the back and forth of friendship, even the contractually manufactured trust given to those who are hired to do this or that task in lieu of our own incompetent selves, also require self-censorship. To ‘not bite’ on potential baited editorials sometimes freely had from contractors presents to us a choice. In struggling intimacies, that same choice writ much more expensively, occurs and may indeed recur. Each of us is charged with well-known scripts that are themselves contrivances in principle, but in practice may become the pith of romance, even love.

            But none of this is usually in the discussion regarding freedom of expression, though it should be present at least as a backdrop. It tells us that we are, for the larger part, quite skilled at being our own censors, and thus would appear to render any institutional or yet State action superfluous. We can, in a word, police ourselves. Those who can’t, out themselves all too readily and are thus subject to a variety of sanctions, that is, if the rest of us stand firm in our avowal of keeping things moving along. Yes, the direction of this movement, who is steering, and what goals lay ahead or afar, all this can be debated, but the basic sense that our sociality should not be destroyed of a piece must also be ever-present, even foremost, in our minds. To that regard, the cut and thrust of conflicting interpretations and ideas can thence take place without placing stakes upon that dialogical table that would break us, bankrupting the individual and the collective the both. It does seem of late, however, that the bulwarks which shore up this delicate balance between freedom and sociality are being challenged more than usual, or at least, more than in recent mortal memory. Is this truly the case, or are we experiencing the push and pull of larger, historical changes to society and thus are made witness to more extreme voices reacting to such changes?

            First of all, the traditional difference between author and work may be cited. Nietzsche, perhaps coyly, perhaps irresponsibly but yet also honestly, reminded us that ‘I am one thing, my books are another’. Barring bare-faced autobiography, it is certainly correct to state that the person and the work are two different things. Even in composing memoir material, we are as persons who live, reflecting upon a life already lived, one that we are not quite living in the present, and thus there is an important difference to be observed. I waited a full twenty years plus before writing of my experiences in the deepest south, the Mississippi Delta, simply because those three years were an intensely focused, almost ethnographic journey, so overfull with richness and impoverishment that ‘processing’ all of it took a great deal of time, even though for portions of the interim was spent doing so tacitly, perhaps even sub-consciously. When the account was complete, I saw a quite different person populating the pages. Indeed, my wife found my previous self to be unrecognizable, as she did not know me at the time. I seldom flip back into my own books, but the rare moment I do, I am always struck by the voice of these earlier works, which sound so unlike my own today. To a degree, a different person wrote these books, someone with the same name as myself, but someone living another life, with differing experiences foremost in their mind, and distinct imagery inhabiting the landscape afore their mind’s eye.

            Even so, in none of these now fifty-seven works, will you find self-censorship. But you will find a series of different selves, or selfhoods. On the one side, this is one of the great privileges of writing, especially if one writes fiction. An unpopular tone may be placed in a character’s voice, blasphemy or even hate speech could spout from a villain, narcissism from the naïve hero, or a magnanimity foreign to the author’s person might save the day. There are no limits to literary ventriloquism. Philp Roth was a writer who played and ployed with this unlimited Mardi Gras of hall-of-mirrors theater. Readers may have felt they knew what the author was thinking, or at least intending, but post-Barthes this is naïve at best. Authorial intent is essentially irrelevant to readerly interpretation, and so it should be. Who cares what the author thinks about his works? In publication, the author becomes merely another reader. Yes, she may clarify in interview, for example, but this is still her reading. Books, and other kinds of media more recently, take on a life of their own and their potential meanings reside beyond any one person’s control or expectation.

            Yes, but what of this openness, this freedom, laying beyond institutional or discursive control? This is a more difficult question, one that cares nothing for authorial intent in the first place. In the history of hermeneutics, it was Schleiermacher who generalized exegetical interpretation, circumscribed as it had been to the reading of sacred texts alone, to all books. Dilthey went one better, challenging of us to interpret the world, both social reality and also the world of forms. The world is not a text, per se, let alone one autographed by a divine hand, as it was imagined to be during the Medieval period, but the process of interpretation is much the same. A book is a slice of reality, allegorical perhaps, or biographical. The world is the source of human experience in general, Dilthey reminded us, and thus it is its own repository of potential freedoms and limits alike. Fiction removes many of these limits, accentuating the worldly freedoms human beings find fascinating. Non-fiction allows us to get a handle on both freedom and limit in a realistic manner. Knowing the world means also to know how each of us might read accounts thereof. What are we looking for in a ‘good read’? What kind of voice, or positioning of such a voice, appeals to us, and how does that shed light on how we ourselves narrate the world? But from an institutional point of view, an organization bent on reproducing itself and its attendant powers, or yet developing them, perhaps at our expense, such diverse readings may become a threat.

            There may well be a sense, amongst those whose tendency is to conserve things as they are or as they imagined them to be, that fiction and non-fiction, even fantasy and reality, have become so blurred as to be indistinguishable. It is amusing to read about Moll Flander’s misadventures, another thing to actually be related to someone like her in the real world. And yet the one strongly implies the other. The ‘hook’ of most fiction is that it reminds us of our own lives, perhaps wincingly in some cases, perhaps with a sage nod of the head in others. Even so, this is where self-censorship reappears; we do not deny the unpolished aspects of ourselves and others, but we manage them, work around them, in daily life. Fiction has no need of this, nor even non-fiction, with its anthropological apologies in tow. If some of us begin to see in others the unbounded timbre of literary character or yet caricature in social reality, we may take some umbrage. This is, I think, part of the story surrounding the resistance to the LGBTQ2+ presence on the social stage. It is outrageous to wield epithets such as ‘misfit’ or ‘mutant’ against our fellow human beings, but less so to question why and how some of us have decided to apparently make art into life. The most pressing query must be: am I, in my altered state, still willing to abide by the basic rules of sociality by which all indeed must abide?

            Here, ‘I’ is used not so much as a place-holder or yet filler, but rather to make more intimate a general question we tend to only direct away from ourselves. In doing so, we place ourselves at risk of becoming too complacent with traditions or what is deemed customary, when these, in every healthy society, should be regularly questioned much in the same manner as we question government spending or policy initiatives. We need not become as the philosopher, to whom nothing is sacred and for whom the question no one asks is the immediately and automatically the most important. No, he’s just doing his job, one by which the body politic and body culture can recognize as a somewhat hyperbolic role model. I am not being slyly disingenuous here. My fiction is mostly agenda narrative, so it cannot, and should not, ever be considered even to be an attempt at art. But just so, how agenda driven are those who have seemingly so radically departed from this or that social norm, and how missionary are they? We may well question this given our own sordid histories replete with both activist agenda and immodest mission. If those who do not seem to practice daily self-censorship are to be seen as living literature, they may yet open our perspective to other possibilities of being human. But if they are merely flaneurs, flaunting a fashionable formula in opposition to basic, if perhaps tired, social relations, we might do well to question them in the same way we discuss a book meant to rattle our shared velvet cage. In doing so, surely we will uncover something interesting about our own allegiances to that framework, even if we also discover that ‘living art’ is a vain attempt to excise oneself from the shared responsibility of keeping sociality the very space from which human freedom is born.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Human Nature and Human Person

Human Nature and Human Person (A comment on essence and existence)

            The 1901 Gifford Lectures are arguably the most famous in their august history. In print the next year, William James’ ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’ went through dozens of imprints in the next decade, cementing his reputation as the foremost American thinker of his time. I taught this text many times over my own professorial career, and for me, it was one of those books where the sub-title was in fact more profound than the title, for James subtitled his work ‘a study in human nature’. Immediately one is arrested by the scope, the depth, that such a phrase implies. The only hedge is that it is one of a possible number of such analyses, ‘a’ study rather than ‘the’ study. Otherwise, the author of such a book has committed himself to the topic of topics, and for many of us, I think we might shy away from such a responsibility. My own large-scale works have never directly approached such a theme of ‘nature’ and those of the future likely never will. At most, I have suggested that our experience of art ‘glimpses the shared soul’ to slightly paraphrase the publisher’s subtitle for my major work in aesthetics. But James was working in a period where leitmotif statements were not only discursively sanctioned, the readership available seemed to expect such grand gambits of their philosophers. It took two world wars and a genocide to perhaps dissuade the European tradition from overdoing it, and postwar one notes a general stepping back from essential narrative, something that the novelist had moved away from after only the first war. So, while the title of the book remains both intriguing and moving, we tend to at first overlook the real meat of the work, its actual purpose, as revealed in the subtitle.

            And that core thing is, in short, that no matter the diversity of religious experience had by humans in their equal diversity, such experiences, even if we do not refer to them as ‘religious’, are part of the essence of what it means to be human. Even if religion is itself one massive projection of the human ego, as James states in this work, it is a necessary aspect of the wider and originally thrown project which each of is. For James, ‘projection’ was not a psychoanalytic term, but rather an expression of the very character of humanity; a representation, in a word, of our shared human nature. Much of his 1902 work is spent cataloguing the very varieties he advertises in his title, simply to demonstrate that in their existence and exigency, nothing is taken away from their pattern. A vision, no matter its specific contents, remains a vision. A conversion, no matter to which credo, is still a conversion. In the one, the visionary is taken outside of the everyday world and given a glimpse of another. In the second, the convert leaves behind the old world and is inducted into the new. The higher otherworld is, if not perfect, far better than the worldly realm, just as is the new world better than the one previous. In this, the visionary and the convert share both the experience of, and also the ability to, transcend their mundane circumstances, and this is part of the essence of the religious experience, as well as the leverage it uses to convince us of its profundity.

James argues that it is only through the possibility of what we can refer to as ‘irruptive’ events or phenomena, that regular life is livable at all. Such experiences may even be partially calculated, as in creative works of art, but their model is the religious undertaking, often seemingly spontaneous, as if the otherworld were a structural neighbor figure, dipping into our mundanity to aid us in crisis, in an unexpected and radical fashion. It is indeed, James suggests, that human life as lived is livable only due to the idea that there exists another life at hand. In some systems, there is no evaluation in store in order that one may pass on to this other, better life, whereas in others, not all will have the opportunity to do so. Even so, these purely cultural distinctions hail from the realm of existence alone; the presence of the otherworldly, the ‘reality of the unseen’, as James puts it, is of the essence. At this deeper and thus ‘more’ real level, several patterns emerge: one, that an otherworld exists and thus this our world is not all there is to being – this is reflected in the discourse of the child of religion, that of science, through its quantum-predicted multiverse – two, that we can pass through or on to this other realm; hence the idea of spirit or soul which, if not immortal, is at least understood as indefinite – this too is expressed by the sense that the cosmos is not infinite but indefinite in both time as a cycle and space as an expansion – three, that even within the mundane sphere we can catch glimpses of the otherworld; implying that its forces or denizens have a human interest or at the very least, interact with the purely human world – this too may be found in science by way of evolution; ‘we are star stuff, contemplating the stars’.

This trinity of essential character underpins the vast variety of religious experiences that human beings have encountered over the course of both historical time and that primordial. Even if, as James the psychologist is wont to point out, all of this rests strictly in the human imagination, it has become essential by transcending what has remained existential. In this, James appears to counter the modern sensibility that consciousness is historical through and through, and that Dasein is itself a being of history and language, though it too has ‘essentialist’ characteristics shared by every human being; anxiety, resoluteness, being-ahead, and care or Sorgeheit, for instance. But this contrast is an appearance only, at least at the level of discourse. For this aspect of human nature has itself developed evolutionarily; it is this chief manner by which we find a reason to live, and thus reproduce ourselves as a species. In Marxian terms, the religious experience is part of our species-essence, and it is an open question as to whether he and Engels considered the religious experience to be merely a part of religion proper, the notorious ‘opiate of the masses’, or whether it was excerpted from this indictment as an aspect of the authentically human character. In terms Heideggerian, James’ patterns would be expressions of the structure of Dasein’s beingness. Such monumental ‘projections’ certainly reflect our existential anxiety – perhaps overdone in Heidegger, though surely not as Schutz flatly suggested of his analysis: ‘phony’ – but as well and at once, our care or concernful being. They aid us in our resoluteness and keep our focus upon the future, assisting our ‘being-aheadedness’. Religious experience, if not itself an aspect of Dasein’s elemental character, could certainly be understood as the outward statement thereof.

 Both cosmology, our understanding of the universe as it is, and cosmogony, how that same universe came to be over time, its origins, are, as the ultimate discourses of the sciences, descended from religious conceptions. In primordial temporality, such ideas were not necessarily understood as religious per se, for only with the advent of agrarianism did major world systems associated with pantheism, ritual, place, priest and pilgrimage are observed historically. Nevertheless, in all known pre-agrarian beliefs, we can easily identify the three crucial elements of otherworld, of spirit, and of vision. They appear to be human universals, and even though human nature is not any one thing, it is mutable and itself takes on a variety of experiences deemed essential, for James, the ongoing presence of these projected tropes points to there being something within which what it means to be human indefinitely rests. In this, and somewhat surreptitiously, James in fact has altered the very definition of human nature through his study.

Our nature is evolved in the structural sense, developed in that personal. To each her own truest nature, as regards the latter, but in each the basic thrownness which includes the happenstance of birth and the inevitability of death. Life is itself an outcome of cosmogony, but one’s person is an accidental correlate of that life. Therefore, origin narratives take account of Being, of there being something rather than nothing, but cosmological systems respond only to beings, of there being me rather than someone else, or humanity rather than some other ‘intelligent species’. Human nature is thence in turn a response to evolution, human person a response to thrownness. On the one hand, time, on the other, history. Cosmic processes are themselves evidence of a kind of otherworld, anonymous in its forces, dispassionate in its absence of intent, ateleological in its lack of any ultimate purpose. But I as a human person am the very opposite of each of these: I am a being which can be known and can know others, I intend almost everything I do, and I have, over the life course, created a purpose to explicate to myself at least my own presence, my accidental existence. Just so, it is of the essence for each human person to accomplish this trinity in light of the essential one of otherworld, spirit and vision. Discourse and knowledge provide the world other to custom and tradition, intent vouchsafes the sense that I have an ongoingness, a psyche or ‘soul’ by which I navigate the day-to-day work of existing, and finally, an overall or general purpose for an individual human life is the vision necessary to string the whole thing together of a piece.

James sets up this kind of interpretation for our present day by responding to the critiques of selfhood and Being characteristic of the nineteenth century. Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, in spite of their radical dismantling of Enlightenment precepts, all reserved their own sense of human nature, as well as the essence of historical or existential Being. James appears to combine all of these insights or even overtake them in an unexpectedly specific manner, by making singular the pattern by which our ‘nature’ is expressed in the world of forms. If history is class conflict, if life is eternal recurrence, if psyche is Eros-Thanatos, then human nature is religious experience lensed by the human person. This essential experience, born of a universal human condition of happenstance and inevitability, is nonetheless borne on the existential vehicle which is my own personal life as lived. And in that life, though meaning is inherited, meaningfulness is made. The ‘religious’ experience, in its widest and deepest sense, that which includes science and art, gift and even love, is a fullest expression of both our nature and our person. This is why it can be referred to as essential and existential at once. It lives but it also needs to live. It is the one joy amongst all sorrows, it is the meaning shadowing all meaninglessness, it is the cosmos within the chaos, the clarity breathing beneath absurdity. It need not be ‘oceanic’, as Freud skeptically disdained, but it is nevertheless the ocean, in all its mystery and power. In recognizing this, James has given us the ability to shrug off specific beliefs precisely in order to hold on to belief itself. And this too can be a talisman for us; that we can endure specific moments and crises in our lives in order to simply continue to live.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, religion, health, aesthetics and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Bring Me the ‘Head’ of Sergio Garcia

Bring me the ‘Head’ of Sergio Garcia (anomie and anonymity)

            Samuel Peckinpah’s 1974 low-budget pulp film ‘Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia’ has recently become somewhat of a cult classic. Pop culture references abound, perhaps inevitably, but truest to pedigree was the 1991 aborted attempt by the band Iron Prostate to record a song entitled ‘Bring me the head of Jerry Garcia’. Given the much more famous band the named person led, perhaps such an act would have been met with gratitude. Of course, we are not demanding the actual head of the professional golfer, but rather what is inside it. Why so?  Simply because he is an excellent example of someone who is a well enough known figure to have engendered a persona for himself. He, as with any athlete or entertainer, is someone who is both immediately recognizable and yet completely anonymous. More than this, he has publicly, earlier in his career, given fans and followers, detractors and disdainers alike, much fodder to believe that Garcia himself believes in another world which both influences this one, and yet is utterly impassive in its influence; in short, a manner in which to assuage or avoid anomie.

            Anomie is, in a word, subjective alienation. Garcia’s plaintiff, voiced especially after close shaves in major golf championships, that the ‘golf gods’ were out to get him and such-like, suggested that he was feeling anomic about his vocation, picked on, singled out. How many of us have had the same feeling, less publicly perhaps, but even so? Our very anonymity promotes it. ‘Who cares about us?’ We might well ask, on our way to work Monday mornings, along with ‘Another week killed’, on each corresponding Friday evening, but temporary relief aside, what is the meaning of it all? Emile Durkheim coined the term in his 1897 analysis of suicide, rather appropriately, and stated that according to known data at the time ‘anomic suicide’ was the most common form in European society. This contrasted with other forms, such as ‘altruistic’, where one sacrifices oneself for the group, or ‘egoistic’, where one is certain the a quick ‘goodbye cruel world’ is the best response to unfulfilled desires. Given that only about twelve percent of suicides leave notes, it is possible that this category may be under-reported, but however that may be, Durkheim found that his analysis had also generated an empty-set category, which I have elsewhere named ‘fatalistic’ to balance out his conceptions of the other three. A fatalistic suicide would be the kind to be found in an Ibsen play, for instance, or Romeo and Juliet, but in real life, they are exceedingly rare. The very opposite of the anomic, the fatalistic would occur if there were too many structures and strictures in place, prohibiting agency.

            But anomie, by contrast, implies the lack of community and thus responsibility or obligation in one’s life. It is alienation sourced in the absence of salient structures, but not in Marx’s directly structural sense where the person, especially the worker, is subjected to forces that are much more abstract, such as competition with other workers or the commodified reduction of the human being into his ‘labor power’. The anomic person loses her personhood through a lack of the looking-glass selfhood which tells her who she is to others and for others. It is a kind of externally enforced solipsism, and many young people today suffer from anomie, which is yet the leading cause of suicide for this demographic in our own time. The lack of connection, the absence of affection, the abyss of meaningfulness, all combine to threaten our sense of purpose in life. But when one does have that sense, and everything else is also in place, one can still be thwarted. And this is where the ‘gods’, golf fans or no, come in.

            Vindicated and no doubt also relieved, Garcia belatedly won the Masters in 2017. Ever since, he’s cut a different figure than in his youth. He rolls with it, even when the rock itself isn’t rolling. In a word, he has become a mature being, understanding that life is sometimes simply about ‘that’s life’, a song sung by Sinatra on behalf of everyone else who lives or who has ever lived. There has been no more talk of the ‘golf gods’, for example. All this is inherently public, and no one should claim to actually know who the professional athlete is. But personae also change over time, just as do social fact data like the suicide rate. In traditional social organizations, there was only one kind of suicide, that undertaken by the person on behalf of the collective, the one ceding ultimate moral precedence to the many who, collectively, were thought of as one thing in any case. But in modernity, the situation became more complex, and Durkheim was the first to investigate it. The first social science study to make use of statistics, Durkheim’s method-breaking analytics ultimately put forth a much more important idea than his list of categories of suicide; that of the ‘social fact’. Four years earlier, he had stated deadpan that there was ‘no other moral order than that of society’. Therefore, ‘moral’ facts, as they had been called by J.S. Mill and others, were innately social in nature, echoing Marx and Engel’s 1846 epigram, ‘consciousness itself is a social product’. But The German Ideology did not actually appear in print until 1932, so Durkheim had independently come to this similar conclusion through an inductive study, unlike Marx.

            Induction, Sherlock Holmes’ actual method pace Conan-Doyle’s terminological error, proceeds from observations netted into facts of experience. ‘I can’t make bricks without clay’ Holmes testily editorializes to Watson. Quite so, Garcia’s experience in major championships provided a bounty of clay for him to reason, perhaps gratuitously but even so, that there was another force at work, denying him his due results. For those of you who have no interest in golf per se, a bumper sticker I once saw puts it best: ‘As if life weren’t hard enough, I play golf.’ Yet I don’t think we can judge whatever was in the golfer’s mind too severely, because as stated, we have to ask ourselves how many times we might have come to a similar conclusion through this guise of induction; ‘I should have had it, made it, got it, owned it, (or him or her et al), so why didn’t I?’ The social facts that may have leaned up against our individual desires are sometimes obscure, potentially requiring, on the one hand, a full-blown scientific analysis of the kind in which Durkheim excelled. On the other, we are also sometime loathe to admit that we, as individuals, most often do not have ‘what it takes’ to beat the world at its own game. And by the world, we mean of course the very social reality in which we are enveloped from birth until death.

            It is an aspect of adolescent angst to begin to discover this swathe of social facts, mostly ranged against us given the presence of so many others in this our shared world. Before this, parents and others try to give children almost anything they might self-interestedly desire and demand. But this kind of thing can’t go on forever. Indeed, the egotist as adult who keeps faith only in his desire is at risk for suicide, because the world cannot – or in this person’s mind, will not – provide as parents once may have done. So, we hear of ‘common sense’ parenting techniques that suggest weaning one’s child away from directly met demands at the earliest age possible. Yet this is not at all a sense derived from custom and innate sensibility, but rather from none other than induction, a process of logic and reflective reasoning. Adults know from experience that most of life in mass society will be anonymous, fraught with the ever-present problem of anomie. Children must be gradually, and gently, introduced to such a world, one to be their own just as it is already ours. It is not simply a matter of a parent not wishing their child to ‘make the same mistakes’, but rather a more abstract understanding that, while it cannot pinpoint exact contexts or moments in a life that will end in frustration and even loss, nevertheless knows that such moments will occur, other things being equal. One’s singular will, no matter how assertive and confident, cannot match itself each time to that of the world’s.

            For the one who yet imagines themselves larger than life, suicide is one outcome. But homicide may well be another, such acts perpetrated by those who imagine that their will really is, after all, stronger than the world’s and that they will prove this to be so by murdering the very others who have the unmitigated gall to stand in their way, for whatever reason. This yet darker path has no apparent limits, given historical precedents such as the Holocaust and other genocides. Seen in this wider light, the suicide is by far the more ethical person; as an egotist, he wants to die, as an altruist, she dies for those who remain, but as an ‘anomist’, this person truly sees no way out and in this, he is in ethical error. Still, such a mistaken act is far better than murder, and in this induction has also played a role. In its heartfelt attempt to overcome anonymity, observation and experience combine to tell the anomic person not so much of his impending fate, but rather the way life could, even should, be lived by human beings. It is, therefore, not that the alienated individual in our time feels nothing, but rather that she understands precisely what she lacks yet does not see a way in getting it. The fates, as it were, are ranged against her. One of the lesser attributes of calling out the golf gods is, of course, that golf is a trivial pursuit in and of itself, while social anomie is a very serious condition. Garcia has no doubt realized this over time, no differently than the rest of us are compelled to do. Entertainment ‘culture’ provides for us formulaic salves, whereupon we, equally formulaically, react with a ‘you think you’ve got problems!’ after viewing this or that melodrama, fact or fancy. Just so, the artificial relief of contemporary anomie is a major function of entertainment, sport or otherwise. Part voyeurism, part ressentiment-inducing, but majority anomie-reducing, popular culture sashays ever onward simply because the relations of production in our version of social organization do not themselves change.

            But what is the upshot of all of this? One, we have the means within our own heads to utilize a logical process through which we gain a better self-understanding of both alienation and anonymity at the level of the person. Two, Anomie is not something that is inevitable, as Durkheim himself noted. Three, anonymity has its up side, for who of us, aside from the true narcissist, would want to be known by all? Given the fashionable anxiety about the erosion of privacy in modern life, anonymity may well become a kind of precious value in the day to day. Four, we know by now that ‘fate’, though still not of our individual making all of the time, is nonetheless historically conjured, and does not appear in an irruptive manner. There are no golf gods after all. Just bad shots and sometimes some bad luck as well. Given all of this, taking our own shots when best we can will go some way in inducing within our experiences the sensibility that not only can we pick our battles, we don’t need to care all that much what others think or do not think of us, as long as we support their right to try and live a human life. Our relative anonymity vouchsafes the first, our inductive sense testifies to the second. If there is anything somewhat fishy about Durkheim’s analytic, it may be that anomie is itself a kind of nostalgic category, perhaps assuming that the collective life, or even having generous and compassionate community around one at all times, is the better way to live. If so, the authentically modern person must embrace, along with her newfound sense of radical freedom, the understanding that she is by her superior character able to in fact be alone in life, and that this is, for such a person, the new godhead after all.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

My Conversations with the New Right

My Conversations with the New Right (an attempt at a dialogue)

            Over the previous seven years I have had numerous encounters, conversations, and some ongoing dialogue with ostensibly conservative leaders and pundits, including those from organizations such as James Dobson Ministries, Moms for Liberty, MamaGrizzly and various journalists and educators. I am going to refer to them as the ‘New Right’, tripling down on some intended and unintended meanings; the sense that these persons and those they claim to represent feel that they in the right morally in terms of what they value, that they are on the right along the usual political spectrum, and that they are newly correct, not morally this time but rather empirically, about their political and cultural sensibilities. The New Right can be said to be comprised of neo-conservative NPOs and NGOs and their attempts to woo whatever politician is willing to risk their career upon them. Yet every person I have spoken with is at a distance from politics proper, and on my side, I have suggested to each that they maintain that distance, simply because politicians seek only support and have no need to truly believe anything they supposedly stand for. The politician should be distinguished from the politics of values, since he himself values only one thing; personal power and the wielding thereof.

            What was most interesting about this attempt to love one’s apparent enemies, was that each person – I am going to vouchsafe the anonymity and integrity of these discussions by referencing only organizations and not specific voices – came across as someone who wished to be thought of as one thinks of oneself; in a word, ‘average’ or ‘normal’ people, who are simply concerned about this or that within the wider social scene. The problem for the New Right is not that they cannot state their case, but when asked exactly why they are so concerned about specific topics, their line falters. Indeed, I was the one who often provided responses for them, for which they were quite grateful. But the overarching issue for any subculture on the decline is the same as that of any failing national population demographic, such as that in Russia most extremely, and that is biopower. Foucault’s concept may be applied to any receding shoreline upon which are revealed the once undinal wrecks of what used to be valued. Treasure no longer legal tender, but also in which such coins as may be found are so worn as to be no longer able to hold their value. In short, the values of the bygone subculture are, for the most part, unrecognizable to the rest of us, long used to the currency of contemporary life.

            Any dialogue takes place within the hermeneutic arc. If the language of archaic values is disused, then a translation may be salient. Certain distinctions are of great import, like that between distribution and censorship. Organizations dedicated to redistributing certain kinds of materials do not advocate outright bans. The popular but mistaken sense that book banning is the same thing as redistribution is a case in point. There is a great difference between stating that certain media, including books, should not be available to certain age groups through school libraries, and stating that such materials should be banned entirely, not even to appear in public libraries. The former is what the American NPO’s concerned with such materials state, the latter, sadly, can be found for instance, in southern Manitoba, and represents a far more dangerous threat to culture and literacy than anything I have observed south of the border. It is quite reasonable to remove certain graphic sexual materials from elementary school libraries, especially since they remain available everywhere else, and, as the representatives of these specific organizations added, children and parents can decide together when and how to access them. This position by itself seems unproblematic. We have to hold our breaths as to whether or not it is the thin edge of the wedge, as exemplified by De Santis’ bill against sexual education in the schools, at first put forward for only young children, but recently extended to cover all grades. Even so, banning books per se has never been the goal of these NPOs.

            Though we cannot assume that media censorship is not an ideal of the New Right, thus far there is no real evidence for it. Politicians cannot be trusted, certainly, and the Florid Floridian spoken by De Santis is perhaps but a gentle version of the development of the T4 program of the Reich, wherein at first, those responsible were very concerned that it would be morally unacceptable to most people, even though they themselves believed in it. Politicians test their waters gingerly, as did De Santis, and when there is little or no recorded pushback, then they take the next step, and perhaps the next after that. Minors are picked on by politicians simply because they cannot vote, and pandering to parents – and by extension, parent’s rights groups – is always a good bet, since these same parents are already weary of their adolescents’ breeching behaviors. Ganging up on youth is a favorite pastime of the schools, of parents, and of politicians hoping to capitalize on the fact that most adults have no control over much of their lives, especially in their workplaces. Giving them more control over their kids is a political no-brainer, as it acts as a temporary salve against adult anomie and plays to the existential resentment all adults feel towards young people.

            I was critical of this aspect of the political dynamic in my conversations, and most of my interlocutors agreed that children should not be political footballs. At the same time, the parents of the New Right voiced a panoply of concerns about how their children were being educated. I asked after the evidence that such education, wherever and however it might be taking place, was truly alienating families beyond the usual inter-generational conflict which is a hallmark of Western demographics. In the main, they could not distinguish any additional forces sourced in institutions that added weight to the already tense interactions between adults and youths. But they did mention a reasonable point; that young people would assert their own way in any case, and didn’t need ‘extra’ bidding from media and schools to do so. The content of this ‘extra’ was not necessarily in question, just the general suasion thereof. And this too I can see, given the hyper-reliance on digital media used by young persons in our day. As the CEO of a digital media corporation which seeks to provide healthier options in gaming and wellness apps for all persons, but especially those younger, I am in fullest agreement with those who state that much media in this realm as well as in the older venues of film and TV has no merit and promotes a kind of anti-culture.

            And this brings us to the other major bugaboo with which the New Right seems so uncomfortable: alternate gendering. I put it to each person that the sheer numbers of people opting out of the normative binary dynamic was so low as to be insignificant. Admitting this by itself, they replied that this was precisely why these alternate groups appear to proselytize so strongly, coopting schools and even the State to ‘convert’ their children. Certainly, it doesn’t help matters for the alternate side of things to have queer pride parades chanting that ‘we’re coming for your kids’. This in itself seems a rather transparent advertisement for the very event imagined by anxious conservative parents, and perhaps others as well. But the use of ‘your’ betrays the attempted radicality of the non-binary movements. In fact, children do not belong to anyone. On the right, parents are encouraged to own their children as if they were chattel, but their opponents make the same ethical error, whether or not they are actually trying to convert youth to become as they imagine themselves to already be.

            Biopower is in action on both sides of this values front. The New Right’s demographics are flagging as are their pastimes, including what the social scientist identifies as ‘religious behavior’, such as attending church. Less than half of the American population now attends regularly, and this for the first time in history. But there are, in reality, so few persons of alternate gender and sexual preference that this motley community also needs more acolytes. In the meanwhile, the rest of us sail on unmolested, as it were. My interlocutors and I also agreed on a related point; that media, kindred with politicians, simply takes advantage of all of this value conflict to sell copy. The loudest and most obnoxious partisans are featured, giving the impression that the New Right, for one, is filled with hatemongering morons – which, in my experience, it is not – and their opponents are simply weirdos or at best, candidates for the Pythonesque Silly Party. But one has to ask, why are adults who enjoy costumes and theatrical performances of gender-bending apparition so keen on sharing this with young children? Who invented drag story hour anyway? And how did it become so widespread? Perhaps, after all, too curious minds don’t want to know.

These and dozens of like questions filled the conversations I have had with the New Right. Part of the motivation for them seemed simply ‘common sense’. Though this is not a conception that the philosopher employs – William James famously exhorts us to question it at every turn in his popular 1906 lecture series ‘Pragmatism’ – at once I was struck with the sense that the New Right was, after a fashion, engaging in reflective questioning of a number of phenomena that much of society seems to take for granted or at least, shrugs off. In this, I encouraged my interlocutors to continue to question fashionable flaneurs while at the same time cautioning them against appearing to front fascism or berate others, especially their own children, with barbarism. In this, there was also room for dialogue. It is important to note that in my experience, conservatives were always willing to listen to argument, even if it pressed them, while their opponents have never once given me the time of day. This is disconcerting in two ways; one, that the New Right will open themselves up, to a point, with someone like myself, someone who looks like them and has the credentials that traditional values respects, but perhaps would look awry if I were not who I was but made the same arguments, and two, that alternative values proponents take one look at myself and reject anything I might have to say to them, closing off dialogue before it even begins. The latter is by far the worse error, and in that, it does not bode well for those who seek liberation from archaic values and subcultures.

Freedom is only available for human beings through culture, ideally, its highest and most noble forms; art, science, religion, philosophy. While the New Right retains a narrow slice of each and all of these, its opponents appear to reject the lot, and to their gravest peril. That such peril is paraded as if it were the condition of any freedom-loving person is nothing more than an outright fraud, and takes its unenviable place to the left of the fascist who proclaims, though with far more culture behind him, the exact same thing.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Pride Goeth After the Fall?

Pride Goeth After the Fall? (On mistaking the ‘what’ for the ‘who’)

            In Western cosmogony, Adam and Eve discover what they are, and this leads to their expulsion from the timeless scene of paradise. Whatness is not something compatible outside of the historical, and history itself begins with the outcome of the expulsion. Within this newly human history, what one is becomes paramount, at least until our own times. It may be a member of a marginal semi-nomadic ethnicity, such as the ‘pariah community’, to use Weber’s description, like the ancient Hebrews. Or it might be more basically, male or female, man or woman, as the two naïfs in the Garden abruptly uncovered. Yet more primordially, either child or adult, as the original division of labor was that of age, not gender. Whatever one was, given the complete absence of the concept of the individual – something much of the world yet today fails to recognize – it was this what that defined one’s very being. What one was, was the same as who one was.

            Because there was no ‘who’, there was no danger of self-misrecognition. Indeed, one could suggest that Satan’s guise in Eden, that of the serpent, was an attempt on the part of the already fallen archangel to gain a new identity. Not for the purpose of subterfuge, but rather for self-understanding. In this sense, there is a double expulsion at work in Genesis. The ‘Fall of Man’ is actually an echo, or better, a resonance, of the prior fall from the firmament of God’s darker brother, so to speak. Satan has lost his identity, his whatness, and is now in search of himself. Along the way, he encounters two beings, his niece and nephew perhaps, who know not what they are. In a singular act of compassion, he helps them reveal this to themselves. Since Satan himself didn’t expect to be flung from the Garden either, we cannot presume that his act was in essence a plot against Being. It did turn out, however, that it was the first proto-historical act.

            If there was a brief moment of pride in the recognition of what the apical humans were, followed by shame, it was of course a false pride, a kind of bravado in the face of a novel and unexpected fate. Satan no doubt felt nothing of the sort. For him, pride was more simply an after-effect of certain actions in the world, now suddenly set in temporal motion. Over this new kind of time, pride then became a commodity of sorts, something to be bargained for the spiritual fellowship selling one’s soul would provide both parties. Apparently, it’s lonely at the bottom as well. In the meanwhile, pride itself took on its unashamed sensibility only after the fall, not before it. And it is this pride, equally misrecognized as magnanimity, that continues its shady career to this day.

            We find it in all places, exuded by all comers. But its essential character is that the person displaying it has mistaken the ‘what’ for the ‘who’. Unlike in antiquity and long before, this actually matters today because we do have a clear conception of the individual, even though this idea is not yet three centuries old. Today, authenticity means being a ‘who’, not a what. Certainly, the confluence of what social scientists call structural variables, some of these also referred to as life-chance variables, goes some way in forming not just what we are, but as well our personal identities, an aspect of the ‘who-ness’ of Dasein. But they are like primer, an undercoat of social circumscriptions and fraternal framings that allow us to be recognized within the odd confines of a mass and anonymous social organization. The very use of nametags at conferences or other like events is an attempt to personalize the impersonal, to allow strangers to behave more like kindred, though still in a very formal and, as is said, ‘professional’ manner. Such a thing would not have been necessary in smaller scale societies, and certainly never within this or that community, where all were necessarily kin.

            To hang one’s personal hat up on whatness is to have internalized the very anonymity from which one desperately seeks egress. To state that ‘I am’ this or that in an ever-lengthening list of impersonal pronouns and descriptors – a cisgendered white male, for instance, to cut things short for myself – is to obviate the historical essence of who I am as a person and as a being-in-the-world. It is both an ethical and a phenomenological error, and one that has profound implications for one’s own humanity. One possible reason for the burgeoning fashion to ignore one’s personhood is simply the idea that commodification has belatedly caught up with the self. Individuals are messy, even chaotic. Their singular alchemy is momentary, like the absent presence of the philosopher’s stone itself. I am, at the end of the day, only myself after all. To at once take pride in this fleeting flotsam seems both vain and in vain. Far easier would it not be to join with other ‘whats’ and thence and therefore be proud of this false identity. And yet this is the entire point: it is a lie in the face of one’s existential project to identify only and fully with the whatness of being. Only the non-historical deity, left behind after the fall – His attempt to reunite with His own children was also a failure and ended in His death – can claim to be both a what and a who in pure syncretism.

            One the one hand then, a commodification of the self, and on the other, a bravado in the face of a gnawing anonymity that questions one’s ability to actually know who I am. So, for all of those who take such pride in ‘being’ this or that without either accepting, or through avoiding, their singular humanity, Satan, who could not help but blink at our ready-mades, must as well have given up hope. Only the individual, in fullest knowledge of who he is, can gift her soul to another. And this is the further downfall of using social variables to define oneself; we cannot even begin to love one another as cardboard cut-outs taken from a sociology textbook. And if the lesson of the Garden was love at all costs, then our self-commodification desires a different kind of value; one in which I am costed out along structural debits and credits. What is the most valuable persona today, we then might ask, and thus what is the least?

            Pending context, the biracial lesbian professional female might be a fair guess at the top marque of the new humanity. She, or perhaps they, are child free, wealthy, well-educated, and yet as well somehow knowing of suffering, of bigotry, of shame. Their garden is full of haute herbs and perhaps haughty herbals as well. Certainly, in culture producing institutions such a persona would carry some cachet, the university, the publishing and entertainment media, fashion, even some political arenas. None of this is sour grapes, for after all, ‘my kind’ of persona held the top spot for overlong it appears. The first shall certainly be last. Even so, any kind of ranking of types of anonymous souls misses both the existential and ethical points. Unless we are also to believe that the very concept of the individual itself is but a DWEM conspiracy! Hadn’t thought of that. Once again, Satan blinks, his eyes widening. What next, he might well wonder. How serpentine can these humans get? Evolve a sense that selfhood should not at all be predefined by caste, labor category, family pedigree, bloodline, biological sex and the rest of it, well, that sounds like a radical freedom to me. Indeed, the Enlightenment conception of the sovereign self could well be understood as the belated outcome of exposing the what just before the fall. At long last, the what has become a who, only in a short historical period, to fall backwards into the what again! Perhaps this trend is actually more like the end of modernity itself, not at all moving into the postmodern, but rather regressing into the premodern. All of this must give any being who imagined that he could play the indefinite role of trickster-cum-devil conniptions. ‘They don’t need me’, Satan was overheard murmuring to himself, ‘Just as they don’t need a me.’

            Poor devil, we may empathize. Just proves you don’t have to be red, replete with tail and hooves, to be demonized. Just ask me. And while a popular pundit like Jordan Peterson seems not to recognize the basic historical fact that language use changes over time, and indeed does so through its usage, he does maintain an essential caveat, if I understand his work correctly: that by abandoning singularity we lose the essential link to our thrownness. As a phenomenologist, I take this most seriously, even if I am translating somewhat. And if I am critical of defining oneself in terms of social variables which are shared by millions or billions, it is because it truly is a regression to do so. It has nothing to do with awkwardness, the blinking of the eye in the face of the ‘theyness’ of these persons who abide yet in one body, or the seemingly more and more picayune distinctions made by insiders amongst versions of queerness, no, but rather to do with the question of fallen humanity. We know, at least mythopoetically, how it fell. But today, the question is rather, where did it fall? Just where is that other to self, who, in her ownmost project, will also face a most personal death as will I myself? Where is the fallen whatness that has of late been resurrected to tend its collective farm in lieu of its lost private garden? Where is the otherness that can only present itself as radical to me as a singular self, a sole soul who confronts me as she is?

            For now, at least, it appears that she is She alone, along with whatever else She imagines She is, or they are, or this could be. And if I am the only one who mourns this loss, then at once I can put it down to simply being part of my job to mourn it, as well as wonder what was missing in all of the would-have-been whos which have not waited to be elbowed out of paradise, preferring to instead, arm in arm and with a great pride and a bravado since shared, charms itself as if it were courage, stride out the front gates of their own accidental accord.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Encountering Finitude

Encountering Finitude (Coming face to face with one’s personal death)

            Three weeks ago, I almost died. After five days of inability to eat I went to the hospital at the bidding of my close friend, a nationally recognized lung cancer specialist in the USA. It turned out I had the uncommon and unfriendly ‘Necrotizing Pancreatitis’, and at that point I had but two days to live. That I am writing this now is testament to a combination of luck and solid medical care. But each day remains a subtle Damoclean existence. There is no cure and only management by diet provides some vague guarantor against relapse. That this was the seventh time I had confronted my own personal demise may seem astonishing, but this most recent experience was quite different. Each of the previous times was had in a moment, the subito of evil which Kierkegaard discusses, equally abruptly, in his book on anxiety. Mostly automobile related, one does not have time to reflect upon what is happening. The most interesting was me being taken out to sea on an ebbing tide while exploring coral reefs in Hawaii. Growing up on the ocean, I had enough nautical sense to simply begin to hold on to the corals when the swell slacked, and then I pushed along when it flowed towards the shore. It took about twenty minutes or so but I regained land to see my much-relieved girlfriend taking a picture of me straggling up on the beach.

            But in all such cases there is either a place, a time, or an event that can in the future be utterly avoided. It may be reckless driving, a specific intersection or stretch of road, or an activity, like ocean snorkelling on an outgoing tide. But with a health condition, that place is you, inside you, and there is no escape from it. One can learn to ‘manage’ it, but this is at best a practice, like yoga or meditation, and not a return to health from being otherwise. Chronic conditions present to the self a new kind of selfhood. ‘This is what I am now’, one must say to oneself, and further, more profoundly, ‘This is what I will be and will continue to be.’ In the hyletic realm, the space of the world and of the social world, health is paramount. One cannot be anything else without one’s health in hand. Even so, in the interior life, that of a consciousness which includes both conscience and self-consciousness, alterations in the vehicle of being do not fundamentally change Dasein’s elemental orientation. If anything, they heighten its proclivities, make one feel that time is short and that life is, after all, solely for the living.

            Yet it is a curious mix: one desires to accomplish this or that, but one is also wary of making plans. There is an instant contradiction between the Pauline feeling of anxious pilgrimage, where the next step may well be one’s last, and the futurity which is one of Dasein’s essential conditions of and for itself. Mediating these conflicting sensibilities is one’s presence in the present. This more pragmatic issue says to us, ‘Until and unless you hear otherwise, carry on more or less as before’. At the end of each day, this is the only thing one can reasonably do, for it is a betrayal of the will to life itself to simply stand and wait for death, while it is a mistaken interpretation of anxiety as fear to be driven to work overtime simply to accomplish some personal goal. Just as chronic illness presents itself as a fait accompli, so one must respond with one’s remaining health and reason by attempting to live, not as if one had remained unchanged, but within the full authenticity of Dasein’s unaltered existential lot. This includes resoluteness, anxiety, being-ahead, and the call to conscience, amongst a few others. And if resolute being seeks to take the fore, like the Jungian warrior who vows to protect one at all costs, one must step back a little at this juncture and remind oneself that life is not what illness says it is; in a word, render unto crisis what is critical alone.

            What then does it mean to experience finitude rather than become aware of one’s own finiteness? The latter is measurable, and for human life finds its expression in actuarial tables, suicide rates, life expectancies and mortality rates at birth, usually ‘per 100,000’ or some other such denominator. Humans too have a ‘half-life’, on average, given the presence or absence of what social scientists refer to as ‘life-chance’ variables. These include genetic markers, made manifest in family histories such as my father having the same condition, though misdiagnosed, and my maternal grandmother having the same again, diagnosed correctly. But most life-chance variables are what are commonly called ‘environmental’. Taken in its loosest sense, an environmental variable list would include level of education, family composition and birth order, poverty rate, intensity of community, rural or urban, and so on. Finiteness can never be utterly specified for an individual life, but it can be framed in a manner completely distinct from finitude. Finiteness has both an objective probability to it, as well as a fraudulent personal equivalent, as when we say to ourselves, ‘well, we all have to go sometime’. Heidegger is particularly critical of this use of ‘all’. Who is ‘all’?

            Any time we generalize death we are participating in what he calls Uneigenlichkeit, inauthenticity. We do so in order to avoid the intimate confrontation with ‘the death which is mine ownmost’. In fact, we die only our personal deaths, and indeed cannot experience death itself at all. That is, an objective death is beyond our being, and it can only indirectly be understood through the deaths of others coming before our own. Transposing finiteness as if it were an expression of human finitude is one of modernity’s’ great self-frauds. Heidegger makes intimate the confrontation between Dasein’s being-in-the-world as a thrown project and the completion of being in death. Surely, I desire to remain in this sense incomplete for as long as reasonably possible. And just as we cannot experience our own deaths – dying, yes, but this too is a life process and represents also a phase of life, not of death – we can also never understand completed being. Only the Being of the world and of the wider cosmos is of this marque.

            Coming face to face with one’s own finitude is a moment wherein the call to conscience can no longer be ignored. For me, I had to come to terms with the looming potential of no longer being, not only not alive, but being at all. My chief concern was for my wife; that she could, would, and should live on and attain a new life without me in it. But I also had to confront the part of conscience which leveled an indictment upon my character. This part literally told me that I deserved to die. This may seem outlandish, but each of us accumulates a litany of litigious libel over the life course. All of the mistakes I have made, all the others I have hurt, all the chances passed by or wasted, all of the time spent doing nothing of merit. For me, it felt like a lengthy list, and if each of us is our own St. Peter – who, we are told, himself knew very well what remorse and regret meant – then we appear before the mysterious limen before being able to pass over its threshold. In such a moment, evaluation comes to the fore and one hopes for a deeper self-understanding through its unfailing interrogation. That objectively one neither deserves nor does not deserve to die is bracketed, not as unmeaning or yet a fraud, as the cowardly use of ‘all’ connotes, but rather as a reminder that the world is itself value-neutral, and that ‘deserves got nothing to do with it’.

            Finitude is our authentic existential condition. It is both shared by all and intimately experienced by the self. Because we are historical beings, beings of language and ‘social animals’, my ownmost expression of the zoon politikon reaches back into the world, not for justification any more than for judgment, but rather in the hopes that the perspective of the world, which we are said to love as we love life, will allow us to come to terms with our own mortality. Ideas of legacy through work, of continuance through children, even of memory through the ongoingness of others whom we had known, all come from this worldly perspective. Together they make up our idea of a human future, whether or not I am to be part of it anymore. Joined to this, for many yet, is a second perspective which can legitimately be called otherworldly. This otherness to the world speaks also of a future, but a non-historical one, wherein some version of myself persists and thus exists apart from the purely human ambit. Can it be any more called speculative than its worldly counterpart? Perhaps the less so given the travails of said social world, the evils of its politics and the wider Damocles of its dark technologies and elite desires alike. However this may be, it is clear that on two fronts do we set our faces and step forward toward the unknowable Otherness which is completed being.

             It is a sign of ongoing health that we do so. The human imagination, the harbinger of all futures, is coupled with its curiosity, the presage of the present. Not that which Heidegger also includes within his analysis of entanglement, the curiosity that ‘tarries along’ and distracts, but rather that by which we involve ourselves in the world as a child of its own Being. In spite of any fear, or in my case, bad conscience, we remain curious, even about death. Our imagination seeks to frame it, not to make it less potent, but rather to come to know it in some manner, since it already and always seems to know us so well. One is given to say that death has the drop on us, which is a residue, if you will, of the Promethean gift to humanity of hiding from us the precise moment of each of our personal ends. Without this absence of perfect knowing, nothing would be possible; no human project would be begun let alone completed. In this sense, the Promethean trickster in all cultural traditions was a paragon of pragmatism. The apical metaphor is clear: I live on in the face of not living on, and I will continue to do so until or unless I hear otherwise.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.