October 2023 – GV Loewen

A Brief History of Real Time

A Brief History of Real Time (very brief, very real)

Hawking’s well known A Brief History of Time provides for us a cosmology, through really, more a biography, than a history, of the career of the scientific understanding of temporality, time in the abstract and as an abstraction. It is astonishing that the human mind, historical through and through and with no conception of being without time in both senses – not having it as well as being outside of it – could conceptualize cosmic time in such an intimate fashion. Even so, it is of limited usefulness to mortal consciousness to be able to contemplate the infinite in any form or by any formula. Heidegger, in his much earlier History of the Concept of Time, the prolegomena to his masterwork, Being and Time, provides a more down to earth set of proposals. That which is closest to us, the history within which we are compelled by the happenstance of birth to live and in-dwell, is generally that which is least well known to us, in part, due to the drama of the cosmic, which science sets out to script in a comprehendible manner. The perhaps bastard child of religion, science seeks to take hold in the same territory as did its somewhat absent parent explain. This is its truer limit: that modernity accepts the fruits of science, its applied innovations, and rejects its methods, as Sagan aptly stated. In doing so, we find ourselves inhabiting a kind of divided time; one half shot through with superstition, the other shot up with technology.

The evidence of this temporal schism is all around us. The creationist drives his SUV, the cybernetician attends church, the pilgrim hops on a commercial jet, the hermit is a virtual globetrotter, the atheist worships nature, the most avid of empirical religions. It is a challenge, in our day, to know what time actually is, hence the projection of cosmological narrative in an effort to overtake mere history, human and thus passing. While Hawking’s book was a best-seller – and who among us is a physicist, after all? – Heidegger’s book remained unpublished for many years after it being written in 1925. It is fair to say that no one reads philosophy either – who among us is a philosopher, after all – but there is more to it. In the effort to assuage our anxious doubt about the exact time in which we live, we have reconstructed temporality as a mere fact of nature; something to be observed and explained, rather than witnessed and understood.

On the one hand, it is a case of ‘plus ca change’, as is said. Science is indeed new wine but its bottles are ancient. The life-blood of the redeemer is no longer poured from them, but something of the sort remains as an aftertaste, just as God Himself maintains an afterlife as we speak. Real time, that which humans in-dwell, begins only with history itself. Before this, time had no serious meaning. In the original human groups, the only division of labor was that of age and thus experience. The legend of the Fall contains the recognizance that man and woman are different, and we are ashamed of this fact, not because of the difference, but rather due to its self-discovery. For in social contract cultures, sex and gender were oddly irrelevant to social reproduction. The realization that the beginning of surplus altered the very fabric of what it meant to be a social animal is certainly a source of shame, and we bear that stigma to this day, and the more so. Men and women were distanciated from one another from this point onward, further dividing the human sense of time. As production gradually outgrew reproduction, these divisions only multiplied, if not exactly in the same sense as the edict given voice by the eviction.

For we were not so much expelled from a place but rather from a time which was non-time, ahistorical and not even prehistory, for the latter term implies that history has already begun and thus we are able to recognize what came beforehand. This kind of timeless time is yet better thought of as non-historical, and thus also as non-human. The social contract is the real world expression of Eden, and so it was seen by the Enlightenment thinkers, though for moral reasons and not those temporal. In any case, temporality today consists of a dual flight from the shame of being so divided. On the one hand, we delude ourselves that we still have some connection with our origins in the primordial primavera of the garden, by prevaricating the mythos associated with non-history. In doing so, we ignore the that there exists an essential and qualitative break between our beings and the Being made choate in primordial non-time, preferring instead to imagine that Edenic life was simply present on the horizon of a remote antiquity, which is nevertheless somehow measurable. Biblical chronology is only the most literal example of this delusion. On the other hand, we demand of ourselves a Neuzeit, to borrow from Koselleck, which promotes a much too recent chasm, that associated with the revolutions of the eighteenth century.

This divided temporal selfhood is experienced as subjection to the either/or of the vapid ‘culture’ wars, and the misuse, or rather, abuse, of terms such as ‘ideology, ‘value’, and ‘truth’. That one is ‘traditional’, that another is ‘contemporary’, that one is reactionary and another progressive, that one is conservative or liberal, fascist or anti-fascist, when in reality all exist in the insularity of their own self-imposed fascist reactions to all things which might offer an ounce of perspective. Yet if the divided temporality were not present as a phenomenological structure, as a foundation for schismosis of institutional and political life the both, such symptoms as ‘value’ conflict would be at most agues rather than the plagues they have become. In the effort to avoid living in our own time as it is, both the grand and the grandiose shift their process of self-validation onto the culture of our long-dead cousins or, those others who have not yet lived at all.

Heidegger stressed the need to live in real time. The transition from Mythos to Logos, the most important process in the history of consciousness, could only be made itself real by experiencing life as an ongoingness, in its fullest presence, and called to conscience by that which is nearest to me. If mine ownmost death occupies such a salient rhetorical place in Heidegger, such is it that mine ownmost life, in the meanwhile, receives its most encouraging support from every less studied page of the great thinker’s works. Truly more of an ethics than an ontology, Being and Time recognizes the ‘andness’ of these two conceptions as essential humanity. Our very beings are historical, nothing more but also nothing less. Therefore, it is the Logos which is the fitting metaphysics for any historical being, and not the Mythos. That we remain so entertained by the latter is also a symptom of what he refers to as ‘entanglement’. Instead, I have reiterated that the new mythology is demythology, nothing more, but also nothing less. The Neuzeit actually begins some 2500+ years ago, and even if it has not quite yet come to its fullest expression, the process of demythology is as a force of nature, equally cosmic, but thus far wholly human and hence providing us with the only certain relevancy in our otherwise divided times.

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

The Dreams of the Perpetrators

The Dreams of the Perpetrators (A deathless Arcadia in Ego)

“We do not know the dreams of the enthusiasts, the victors…” Koselleck intones in his Holocaust study ‘Terror and Dream’. And we are immediately reminded of the deepest of connections; that all humans, no matter their worldly merits or deficits, sleep and dream, as Whitman declaimed. The content of such dreams must differ, pending the dreamer, we might assuage ourselves. But it is not so much the character which is at stake but rather the conditions in which I might find myself, now sleeping peacefully, now fitfully, now lethargic and thence insomniacal. “…they dreamed as well, but hardly anyone knows how the content of their dreams related to the visions of those that were crushed by the temporary victors.” Koselleck finishes. If the murderer sleeps and dreams as well as does his victim, what then characterizes the difference which we feel must be present?

In the dreamscape, I am not free to master the otherhood of the self. How often have I seen the looks of reproach, even revulsion, on the faces of the young women I encounter in this dream or that. As often those willing, lustful, playful. Why does the lover turn to the one who hates? Mostly, we do not ask such questions, preferring to dwell on the ‘how’ of it all, which in such cases might be able to be explicated by an advanced neuroscience. And what drives the compunction of my dreaming self, along with its compulsions, so that dreaming content is so often conflicted, even if the act of dreaming and its attendant Traumdeutung occur precisely so I can ‘process’ the real-time conflicts of the day to day? I once hauled a girl in full Blytonesque school kit into a specific room to beat her. I equally foreswore having sex with a young woman who, after we kissed somewhat diffidently, told me she ‘could not do this’. I ‘decided’ to assault another in an office but her look of absolute disgust stopped me cold. I was myself accosted by many, but since I am male, I took it in my supposedly so-masculine stride and allowed ‘nature’ to take its burlesque course. All these were but dreams, at once the playing out of suppressed desires, so we are told, but at the same time, themselves hermeneutic commentaries on those same desires. And why are there scenes which we know so well that are never replicated in the dreamscape? I have never been a death camp guard, that I recall. I have never been the pope. I have only once or twice been emplaced as another gender. I seem to be stuck on myself, in myself.

It is commonplace to acknowledge a kind of gatekeeping mechanism between one’s desires and one’s sociality. This ‘superego’ style of boundary maintenance keeps the extremities of the ‘id’ from becoming too real in the world of both the ego and its fellows. Koselleck notes that “It is a characteristic common to all camp dreams that the actual terror could no longer be dreamed. Phantasy of horror was here surpassed by actuality.” When indeed the extremes of human intent turn to action in the world, as they do all too often, it appears, we no longer have the ability to separate the unreal from reality. The very unreality of human horror is suggestive that those who perpetrate it have themselves lost the means of dreaming it. What can no longer be processed by the unconscious aspect of my mind breaks forth into the open space of other minds. Is it a mere case of bad manners, wherein we can no longer keep our hands to ourselves, as it were? A case of being a child in an adult’s body, having a childish mind but the capabilities and resources of a mature being? Certainly, cognitively disabled persons who are violent manifest this kind of admixture, attacking their caregivers with willing wantonness and yet somehow also knowing that they are, for whatever rationale, exempt from any serious consequence, unlike the rest of us. There are, however, darker disabilities than those which prevent maturational growth. Such a list would include the lack of compassion, absence of empathy, ignorance of otherness, and the like, which we observe as being regularly present in much politics of our time. There seem to be few enough public figures who do not express such disabilities, at least in their rhetoric. Anyone who stakes their own claim to existence through annulling the other’s equal claim seems the willing vehicle for a desire so vain as to be bereft of self-recognition. There is a certain solipsism in political life which strides bodily over the claims of others to exist at all.

Are these then some of the monstrous forms that the ‘dream of reason’ has produced for us moderns? Have we been regressed to the inferior forms of pre-modernity, recreating a world in which the other is automatically an enemy, and at best, a passingly dormant threat? Is youth the assassin of adulthood, or is it the other way round? In my vain desire to be ever youthful, my dreams speak to me not so much of desire alone, but of slaying the process of aging before it can itself do me in. I no longer want to possess the young female; I want to be her. To live again from the point of optimal departure, to have not a care for health and fitness, to be the envy of all who are called to witness my outward beauty, to have the market pander to my every whim. Surely there is a link between the industry-contrived charisma of a Taylor Swift and the very much self-constructed charisma of an Adolf Hitler. Practicing endlessly in front of the mirror, the latter, cast into an autonomic obloquy by his social anxiety, could not rely on himself to stand and deliver in any spontaneous manner. This contraption, so calculated yet never cool with itself, unlike Swift’s, is mimicked in the death camps. The rationalized precision of mass murder makes the desireful sprees of splayed-open recent nightmares look amateurish. The terrorist of today can only ever dream of being the Fourth Reich. As well the politician?

Yet the chief character of human reason is that it does not dream. Reason is the tool of the waking mind alone, conscious of itself without becoming self-conscious. This may be a key: that we are capable of compassion only in forgetting the self. When we proffer our desires unto others with the expectancy they will comply, we are lost. The parent who demands obedient children is the living archetype of this fascist fantasy. The lawmaker who expresses only his own druthers is their child, along with the barking coach, the banal teacher, the masturbating school administrator, the self-serving civil servant, the insolent official. Even the best of reason, held within its mortal coil, does not necessarily escape its own monsters. Aristotle’s exclusion of the female, his xenophobic hatred of barbarians, Russell’s disdain of women, Foucault’s reckless abandon. And then what of my own dreams? We know that violent sexual imagery, a leitmotif of Wagnerian proportions in the libidinal world, is so commonplace within the dreamscape as to not excite comment. Yes, analytically, perhaps. The psychoanalyst’s guild, a new priesthood born at the height of modernity but actually practicing a postmodern art, one which we have of late suppressed, perhaps inevitably but certainly ironically, allots our confessional and thence allows our confession. If unreason is demonic, then reason has become the new religion, its ‘spirit’, if you will, the ghost in our shared mechanization; what we might have called ‘conscience’ if it weren’t for our collective disenchantment.

Mostly, we are jaded with ourselves. How can it be that my mere dreams are more exciting, and assuredly also more immoral, than my waking life? Would I trade the one for the other? It has been done before: “The compulsion to de-realize oneself in order to become paralyzed at the final stage of existence led also to an inversion of temporal experience. Past, present, and future cased to be a framework for orienting behavior.” Koselleck is aware that both memory and anticipation, dual phenomenological forces that act as a bulwark against absolute desire, have no place in the camp, just as dreams are themselves taken outside of human and historical time, instituting their own vapid irreality in its stead. Oddly, there are living spaces which seek to mimic such primordial experiences, including the casino and the church service, the vacation and the spectacle. It is as if we remain possessed, not by the collective unconscious and its memory of the visionary, the creation of all things and their destruction as well, but rather the pressing absence of vision in our current and very much conscious condition. Is it also then the case, that along with compassion, we must bid final farewell to futurity itself?

In dreaming desire, there are no real consequences. In order to make such fantasies real, we must disarm and thence dismiss no less than history along with biography. The perpetrators dream awake. This is how they can commit the impassioned acts of horror upon the others who now appear to them as mere projections, in their way or submissive, it matters not. It is not a case of decorum managing desire, or even compassion trumping the passions. It is rather that the vision of primordial Man has been reconstructed, and at cost, in the picayune and rationalized manner which modernity requires of it. No less costly than the first murder, the most recent one is yet less authentic since it is so seldom necessary. I am no longer an endangered species. In my fullest presence, I have become the one who endangers, and mine ownmost death can only be owned in life by the killing of others. This is the unreasoned monstrosity of a faux-phenomenological phantasy: that there are no unwilling victims, that I no longer dream alone.

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

Reason Radical, Rationality Revolutionary

Reason Radical, Rationality Revolutionary (Is thinking, after all, abnormative?)

When are we called upon to think? Or casual idioms are suggestive: ‘thinking things through’ is about following a thread to its end, but one that is centered around things; both the things of this world, which would include objects and objectives, as well as relations between and amongst persons. Such ‘worldly’ things demand an utmost pragmatism; the ability to consider only our conduct in that same world. Or take ‘think about it’, a hortatory device in turn demanding of us to pause for a moment and consider potential alternatives. While generally handy, there is still the presence of the ‘it’, once again, the thing, about which we are supposed to direct our fullest attentiveness. ‘Think before you speak’, an admonition usually levelled at children in all their as-yet not fully present sociality, as well attracts the mind to the dynamic between thought and world; one should marshal the former in complete service to the latter, but the latter as it is at present or as it has been known to be thus far. It is this world-as-it-is that presents to us a contrasting, even conflicting duet; on the one side, custom and tradition, on the other, what needs be done in the mutable day to day.

Though the weight of what has been done directs our present-day action, tradition is not history. Very often, the two are in confrontation with one another. History is change, after all, tradition stasis, so the tired phrase ‘the dead weight of history’ is actually a misnomer; it is more truly referring to custom, that which we idealize as unchanging. If the definition of gender, say, is a current and apparently newsworthy example of how change conflicts with custom, history with morality, it is simply one of a myriad of possible exemplars of this type. Tradition proffers to us the act, history counters with action. At once we are compelled to work in the world, all the while knowing that the vast majority of it is not of our making. The world is not the result of our work alone. Further, the world itself ‘works’, gets along, moves in an expected manner, in part through forces which seem bereft of humanity. The world, in short, worlds itself, as Heidegger as famously noted. In this worlding of itself, the once-shared and acted-in world takes on its own mantle, one of anonymous rather than eponymous movement.

In between human institutions, which have their own air of aloofness about them, atmospheres slightly alienating within which we are nonetheless compelled to breathe, and a world which is, in both its nature and cosmic source, alien to us, we humans are called to live. History is our willing ally, so we are not alone in our projects, but history can only present its presence to us through living action, and these actions, taking place in the spaces of institutions such as family or school, the workplace or the State, in their turn can only be effective in their dialogue with history and thus in their confrontation with the tradition, through human reason. One says ‘human’ here because, traditionally, there was also a reason divine, and today, a natural ‘reason’ which the cosmos orders unto itself, as well as the basis upon which this order rests and evolves. Even so, reason divine or cosmic are more metaphors than anything else, and though reason may well be possessed by other, as yet unknown beings, for now it is the singular province of humanity alone.

And so oft singularly ignored. Why, when we know that our very nature is change, that history begins with the advent of humanity, do we more shun this unique character in our daily lives and in our relationship to the customary than wield it? Perhaps we imagine that the leg-work has already been done, at least when it comes to those issues less profound. But this is a conflation between that which requires only recreation and that which demands creation. Alongside this, a confusion between pragmatism and practicality is present. The former, as stated, centers our attention upon the results of our conduct in the world, rather than the sources of our ability to think and act. It does not disdain metaphysics, but it brackets it, places it in a mental docket, something to be reflected upon in the slower hours, when one has accomplished the needs of the day. The latter does not recognize either the metaphysical or the pragmatic; it is solely concerned with the easiest thing, never the best thing. In this, practicality inevitably slides toward what has already been done, what has been done before, and thenceforth issues a further error; that what has been done is also the best way, even the only way to in fact carry onwards.

Even our managerial phrase, ‘best practices’, reflects this series of errors. Knowing only the presence of what has been done, we seek to emulate what gives the appearance of working, indeed, of ‘managing’ the world as it comes to us. Certainly, there are situations in which nothing else can immediately be done. Time is always a factor, which is appropriate in the sense that time and history are neither the same nor are they generally friendly to one another. Time suggests presence alone, a lack of change, which is why we find the seeming redundancy ‘historical time’ in textbooks and like studies. Contexts that are defined precisely by deadlines commit us to a certain style of work in the world, even though this same world has nothing about it that is suggestive of an ending. It is this which troubles both the person interested in metaphysics as well as the practitioner, for whom whose practice is all in all. This lack of ending brooks alongside that of an absence of goal or even objective, so for our human projects, we must construct an end. We ask, ‘what are we doing this for?’, and this has a pragmatic ring to it. But we seldom ask ‘why are we doing this at all?’, a question that calls into play our very existence in relation to both tradition and history alike. It is the child who, using the first language, actually intends the second. ‘This for’ is uplifted into ‘this at all’ only to be placed back into itself by the adult, who interprets this nascent call to conscience as a mere mechanical error. Our answers to our youth orbit the practicality of worldly activity; all action tends to its center of gravity. ‘This is why’, we also mistakenly respond, for we are not, in fact, providing an answer to their ‘why’ but only a goal-orientation. In the same way, our ‘reason’ for acting the way in which we do, is not a product of human reason in general but rather a reaction to a worldly demand, as often as not unreasoned and certainly sometimes even unreasonable.

Through this other series of conflations and casual speech, it is likely that we ourselves begin to distrust reason even as a conception. ‘Reason’ makes demands upon me that I might not be able to meet.’ Reason’ is what the boss gives me, why I’m even working at all. ‘Reason’ is a political paradiddle more promise than premise. ‘Reason’ forces me to ‘be reasonable’, ignore my feelings, put my own experience aside and consider others. I’m only human, we might respond with some bitterness. Just so, it is authentic reason which is, in part, guiding our affective reactions to these genuinely unreasonable articles of daily life. They are so because, for the most part, they themselves are unreasoned reactions to whatever is occurring in the moment, in people’s lives, within the social context at hand. Biography, at once an individuated history – we are as a microcosm, rewriting our own existence moving forward – as well as an anti-history – in this rewriting we confront history as it has been written – exerts an inordinate effect upon our reason, casting it down, as it were, and committing it to actions it would, by itself, never sanction. It is not truly a case of a contrast or yet conflict between ‘emotion’ and ‘reason’, but rather a self-misrecognition that these casually oppositional aspects of the human character exist only because our consciousness, in its very character, presents their union. We are beings with reasoned emotions, with emotive reason, and through this confluence, a third form emerges; that of rationality.

Rationality is the agentive aspect of thought itself. If reason is radical, thinking is revolutionary insofar as action in the world changes that very world, and in a novel fashion. The profoundly radical exists, and can exist, only in our imaginations. Once we set to work in the world, we find that such a conception rapidly adjusts itself to the demands of the day. There is no shame in this as long as no sycophantic posture is inclined toward the tradition or the customary. The world worlds itself, once again, and we are thus placed in a dialogue with it, as well as with others-to-self. Nevertheless, what change we biographically promote carries its own weight into that collective, that which is exerted by a ‘spirit of the age’, the very one in which I myself exist, a child of my own time and no other. The aggregate of human action in the world is what we call history. Its source, at its best, is rationality; reason enacted, thought made work, presence becoming present. That this process is abnormative only exemplifies that at once history is a task as well as a gift; it is never automatic that we know how to think about this or, indeed, that knowing ‘what’ to do is, simply due to its mimesis of what has been done, is more easily accessed. Even so, thinking is human through and through. We cannot avoid it; we cannot lose it. If it seems that we are often in denial of this essential basis upon which our history and our persons rest, it is because there is a weakness in our ethical characters, and not in those existential.

Rationality too is not bereft of emotion. It eases the discomfort of authentic action in the world. It makes our agency, in its most intimate motives, understandable to others, who may thence even share it. And though the customary carries undue weight, history undoes its burden, even casts it bodily aside. And history is only possible because of the action of reasoned emotion in the world. We never act ‘against the world’, but rather through our care, even love, of that world. Sometimes we may find ourselves mistaken; the world worlds itself after all. These are the moments when others can be unmistakably correct, and the sobriety of reason as well as the relief of emotion will help us recognize this. Ultimately, this contrasting dynamic, held within the chalice of reason becoming rationality, will allow us to equally become other than we have been, for we cannot expect the world to change if we are not first willing to change ourselves.

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.