Author: Greg Loewen

Heart in Darkness

Heart in Darkness

Musician, Critic, Satirist, Role-Model: Ozzy Osbourne, 1949-2025

                                    They live their lives in fear and insecurity

                                    And all you do is pay for their prosperity

                                    The ministry of fear, that won’t let you live

                                    The ministry of grace, the doesn’t forgive

                                    Do what you will to try and make me conform

                                    I’ll make you wish, that you had never been born.

            Our latter day, and very much theatrical, prince of darkness is no more. Legendary pop musician Ozzy Osbourne has left a certain and indelible legacy upon both contemporary music and its performance, but as well upon hundreds of millions of fans spanning multiple generations. I am one such fan, and not even one of the oldest. Not by far, given that Black Sabbath’s self-titled offering appeared when I was but three years old. But my important encounter with Osbourne began some dozen years later, in 1981, with the release of his second solo album, Diary of a Madman.

            With the young virtuoso guitarist, Randy Rhoads, Ozzy’s solo career had taken off the year before, after the band he co-founded jettisoned him for his ongoing aberrant conduct. Rhoads himself met an unlikely and untimely death soon thereafter, cementing many popular myths about the long shadows of the English occultist and travel writer Aleister Crowley, one of Ozzy’s many real-world inspirations, which also included Richard Latimer, the Canadian man who murdered his 14 year old daughter who herself lived in misery due to a incurable illness. One leitmotif of Osbourne’s song-writing is that he never shied away from exploring the most difficult of human situations. He penned epistles concerning self-abuse and self-loathing, addiction, suicide, the mockeries of faux religion, and most of all, was a great and persistent critic of a self-righteousness that masked itself as righteous, one of the most prevalent themes of our contemporary public life.

            And yet this, by far the most profound aspect of a person one could only refer to as a true character, is almost entirely absent in the tributes which have poured in from around the globe and from every quarter therein. For Ozzy was, first and foremost, a political figure. A true populist, unlike such-named career politicians, he wrote many such political tracks for his parent band spanning the 1970s. This sensibility, that of a working class rust-belt Briton whose life was hand-to-mouth before the advent of Sabbath, never left his heart no matter how much glitz, wealth, and sheer lunacy he became surrounded by. And though famous musical peers agree that Ozzy was one of the most authentic persons one could ever meet, nevertheless there did exist a persona to the man, even if only as thespian. The real Ozzy did not practice the occult method of ‘consecrated hosting’, for instance, as imaged on the front and back covers of the 1981 release, though with his death, some might pine for him to have in fact done so! On stage, he was a force, but was also unafraid to engage in farce. Somewhat off stage, as revealed in The Osbournes, he was a gentle and affectionate parent; a much better role model for all those considering child-raising than any member of the many parents groups who sought to vilify him. He is also recalled as a most witty fellow, whose Pythonesque sense of the absurd he himself very much owned. Beyond this, to all those who did not know him, he was an inspiration for each of us to both become, and remain, our own persons.

            For this is the message in his music. Within the political critique and social commentary, and as well animating the more intimate scenes his songs sketched out, the conception of a self-reliant, thinking individual, unswayed by either ideology or religion, or yet one’s own baser desires, is the persona of authenticity that Ozzy attempted to express and indeed live throughout his career. And this in an age of illusions and delusions both, the work necessary to simply be one’s own person can often be daunting. For this is his inspiration: no matter what the world deals to you, always maintain your ipsissimous hand. At the time I purchased and first heard Ozzy’s music, in 1981, I had just lost the first love of my life as well as my family, and these dual losses were not unrelated. The person Ozzy represented to me, myself being one epitome of his target audience – the disaffected male teenager who was in danger of being swallowed up by his Wertherian sorrows in the very depths of Cold War terror – was crucial to my youthful survival. Although I never of course knew the man personally, yet I owe Ozzy very much a personal debt, and I imagine I am hardly the only one who does so.

            Anyone who sneers at Osbourne’s presence, manifest and manifold, is someone who is himself afraid of a human life. For this is the ethic: never give over the source of your human freedom; that one must become who one is. That no other quite made headlines like Ozzy should be taken as a simple exemplar of a prophet whose individuated mayhem mirrored, in earthy strokes, the Kerygmatic ability to make meaningful a happenstance existence. Ozzy was no existentialist by profession, but he could never be said to have not lived his life to the utmost. May then each of us find in his legacy the seeds of such self and freedom both.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 65 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He is co-founder and CRO of Insightful Ethics Communications, a health and wellness digital media corporation.

Grooming the Loyal Bride

Explaining the Presence of On-Line Harm Groups

            The recent phenomenon of adolescents urging their virtual peers to commit acts of self-harm and the harming of others constitutes the very crest of a wave of digital youth violence. Predators come from abusive homes, while their prey come from homes in which they feel isolated and alienated, lacking attention and affection. The majority of the former are male, of the latter, female. They are to be wed within our novel virtual church, with it fullest faux humanity in its digital pews. On-Line ‘communities’ are such in name only; they are quite loosely connected, and often involved in internecine competition and rivalry wherein members seek to enhance their status by the sheer numbers of victims they can claim. They cajole their prey into self-scarification, the results of which are mindful of nothing other than the ‘kill logos’ drawn on fighter planes during the world wars. The more enemy aircraft one had shot down, the greater one’s status as a pilot. Similarly, armor aces and their crews would often record numbers of enemy ‘kills’ on the chasses of their respective tanks. The torsos and limbs of young women are the chasses and fuselages of the predators who populate groups such as ‘764’ and ‘O9A’. There have been a number of suicides associated with these interactions, for the ultimate ask is to have one’s acolyte sacrifice their life, while of course recording it, for the vicarious pleasure of the predator. Exhorting the death of the other is the transcendental demand which validates one’s own continuing existence. It is the evidence necessary to convince a mortal that he is, in his own eyes, divine.

            While disturbing in its practice, there is in fact nothing new in its principles. Seen anthropologically, self-sacrifice as a gift to a master, to an embodied deity, or to a political ruler, is an essential, if extreme, aspect of political organization in general. Those who are marginal to the contemporary polis, through the effect of abuse, mental illness, anomie or yet ressentiment, seek to contrive their own society, wherein they are themselves the masters and leaders. They work fervently to discover those from whom they may extract favors; sexual, emotional, psychological, and even mortal. Young women who lack the acknowledgement of others, and who report the affection and adoration they receive during the ‘grooming’ process undertaken by on-line predators makes them feel valued and thus gives them a novel sense of self-worth, are ultimately betrayed by their suitors. Yet it appears to take a great deal of suffering, manipulation, abuse and even torture, to overcome the set-up of adoration and fondness engendered by the predator. Some victims are able to shake themselves out of this tantalus, while others are not, perhaps going to the grave believing that their sacrifice was but the sternest test of authentic love.

            It is vexing, to say the least, that the most noble principles which humanity has created for itself – 1. Self-sacrifice on behalf of a community in altruistic suicide; the chief vehicle of warfare amongst social contract cultures based upon mechanical solidarity; 2. Self-sacrifice to rescue and preserve the life of another individual: the duty of parent to child, for instance, or of the adult to the youth in general; 3. Self-sacrifice as the ultimate act of the lovers’ bond; a favorite in literature and opera, with Tristan und Isolde being perhaps its most far-reaching expression – can be debased and given an infernal twist. The ease of which cultural tropes can be represented within the shadows of social life speaks to their ubiquitous presence in our mental template. Of course, we do not here speak of ‘human nature’, for the essence of being human is to adapt to ever be a generalist; there is no singular human nature. But what is being connected in the fetid fake-lore and desperate disingenuities of on-line harm groups is the essential necessity for a human being to feel wanted, loved, and thus to become part of something larger than oneself.

            This is the synchronicity of all such forms of deviant assemblies. Street gangs serve as surrogate families, just as do political groups such as those Neo-Nazi, White Supremacist, and the like. Religious cults serve the same needs, as do the more normative churches, gaming communities, and hobbyists. There is a spectrum, likely almost measurable, whereupon two variables chart their respective courses; rate of alienation over against rate of disaffectivity or ressentiment. The cult registers high on both counts, as do on-line harm groups and the like. The virtual thread of Jaguar owners or like hobbyists register correspondingly low on both counts, and one can easily fill in exemplifications of any ratio in between these extremes. The point is, however, that the seeking of community, of whatever sort, is an absolute prerequisite, not for personal improvement of yet the good life, but for personhood and human life itself.

            Given this, anthropological history runs into psychopathology. The works of Bataille, within the discourse of the former, and those of Minkowski, in the latter, contain more than enough analysis and explanation to counter any lightheaded accounts of what precisely is ‘going on’ with the seeming advent of on-line harm and hate groups, often connected as they are. In a word, anomie cannot be used as a failsafe against the accursed share; autism will be the result in each attempted case. The hobbyist manifests a generally benign and controlled form of autism. His is a semi-disconnected world within which only others of his marque and specialty reside. The key difference between the philatelist and the child predator is that the former regularly steps out of his bell-jar and rejoins the remainder of his fellowpersons as a self amongst selves. The latter only does so when compelled, sometimes through violence, and in turn learns that violence can be a most effective source of suasion. For sociopathy only hails from three origins:

            1. A mental pathology that has created for the patient a separate world; those suffering from schizo-affective disorders or even schizophrenia – it should be noted that autism is itself originally a mere manifest of the schizophrenic condition – are thus highly suggestible to a knowing grooming but at once susceptible to developing for themselves a predatory prowl, seeking to bring others into their projection, which is for them already a form of self-torture.

            2. A severely alienated self-consciousness that does not develop an internal rationale but rather accepts an external analytic which is betrayed by its paranoia and talent for making conspiratorial connections which do not exist in fact. One of the basic problems of historical consciousness, in which we are made aware that the past can always and again be rewritten by the present, allows a certain latitude for the conspiracist to reinterpret world events. This kind of personality also manifests as both predator and prey.

            3. A sense of mastery and of destiny which can be summed as the messianic complex. Success in politics or in business can germinate a self conception that gives this person a self-promoted aura which in turn explains their dramatic rise to status and power. Lord Acton, in a letter, penned what has become a cliché, if yet a wise one, when he spoke of ‘absolute power corrupting absolutely’. Many of the oligarchs, plutocrats, and other political leaders of our time provide nothing other than role models for the on-line predator, as their mission is no different; the adoration of, and power over, others.

            If we combine the subjective alienation of the anomic, the ressentiment felt by the marginalized, and the saturation of our popular sensibilities by the shiny success of the latter-day gods on earth, it is in fact not astonishing in the least to witness the phenomenon of guided self-harm. Though it could be said to lie at the polar opposite of health and wellness on-line guides, such as those of Calm and HeadSpace, the dynamics utilized by on-line harm and hate are not at all so dissimilar to preclude analysis. My own health and wellness company makes virtual self-help and self-improvement guides, and the graduated steps the client follows mimic the processes of any cult initiation, religious conversion, or sexual self-harm grooming, if assuredly none of these contents. The consistency and indeed essence of moving a human being from one frame of mind to another is psychologically old hat, and indeed, it is to ethnography that we must turn in order to understand its deepest language. For the Ursprache of consciousness-altering methods is also the well-spring of both our reason and our imagination. These two most human essences can be turned to the noble or the base, and thus the on-line harm promoter asks of us a challenging question: who of us is capable of distinguishing the dreams of reason from its equally attendant nightmares?

            Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of 63 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 Margins of Conscious Life

Introduction: The Margins of Conscious Life

            As beings of finitude, humanity is, in its species-essence, a consciousness with margins. Not all can be, or ever be, centered, at the center, front and center, but rather events, things, others, and at once myself in my own manifold yet longitudinal being, come before me and then pass out of focus. What is arrests my attention, commands it, but does not possess it for overlong. I too am a moving target, for others and even for the world in its own anonymous concern. I am a being completed only in mine ownmost death, and whence I am appresented with its more radical otherness I find that it is, in itself, something value-neutral. I am apprehended by it, furtive being who I am, whether or not I have been in life a fugitive or figurehead, sought escape or merely egress, have myself grasped life, seized the day, nay the hour, or have placed myself into a personal corner, from which I then observe the living others and exempt myself from their daily doings. This heavy sleep about which I cannot come to an even terms is yet no horror, once again, in itself. And just as the margins of existence are still part of the human situation, contributing to our shared historical conditions in a manner oft more significant than one might imagine, death too retains its stake in the very life that has given it ironic birth.

            But in our time, we have made even death into a living trial; it was not enough to endure dying, to undertake our leave and contemplate our coming absence. Like the darker-souled companion to Masefield’s lady, the ‘presence’ which relieves us of all burdens instead of simply what is burdensome, as she does for the narrator, we, like him, embark on a quest both needless and indeed, heedless. The first because she has already absolved us of care, the second because life and those who live lay now to what we have taken to be marginal; only the lady and her compassionate care occupies our every thought. In turning away from life in order to seek that which relieves life of its very humanity is to neglect the very lesson of concern. Shall he ever find her again? No, for that lesson is taught only once in every life: that the love of another too rests in a passing hearth and the more so, that this is no fickleness. Instead, he shall discover only her shadow, the non-presence that turns a who into a which and thence turns the living into the dead.

            It is this second appearance which Beckmann documents. Today, death is a clinician, uncaring of human feeling since itself devoid of it, with the ‘taste of morticians’, as the old song has it, and within the atmosphere of a vulgar Valkyrie. It flies not, but scurries rather underfoot, and undertakes in turn its banal concern in an orderly fashion; that one is numbered in a manner of a factory factorial is very much emblematic of the horror this new death occasions. Once again, dying was not enough for us, we might gainsay, nor even dying alone. As had birth become a clinical experience, so too now death. Beckmann, who could not himself have observed any of the early evils of the coming Holocaust sampled by the T4 extermination program, has nevertheless captured in exact shock a scene which in reality must have occurred some thousands of times. But his ‘Death’, like Masefield’s ‘Vision’, is more about an ethical error than any historical event. The poet’s narrator seems not resigned in continuing his search, in seeking again what he has taken to be the sole space of succor in life, but rather both determined and oddly oblivious. The painter’s victim wears a look of abject terror, not that he is about to die, but rather in what manner. Death today is not even murder, but a moment in a clinical round, saddled up not with sorrow but instead with a salacious sadism. The horror in Beckmann is shared by the viewer, but only the reader is horrified at the decision of Masefield’s character, doubling over the effectiveness of the contrasting imagery. At length, we realize that in Beckmann we have no such contrast; all is centered round the banality which makes the new death utterly evil in both intent and action.

            It is this banality which begins to overtake other aspects of life in modernity. It is well known to have found a willing place in bureaucracy, and is part of the ‘rationalization’ of what ideally are merely rational organizations. It is part of the now proverbial Entzauberung that has itself overtaken the world. Much of our daily rounds have become banal, in the main because we do not know, or care to know, the others with whom we interact. Attempts to ‘humanize’ the cashier’s’ lineup or the gas pump are themselves heavily scripted. All of this is so well known, is an absolutely, if not so resolutely, accepted part of living in ‘modern times’, that our very understanding thereof has itself become banal. Perhaps this is a yet more horrifying irony than is presented by either the poet or the painter, for the rest of us, who are not artists and yet as well are sentenced to never knowing the arts of life, live in what for art is itself a margin. Mundane life is hardly conscious of itself. I go about my business and thus busy myself doing so. I have assignments without assignations, I carry a cross across an intersection, discard it only to pick up another; for today’s person in daily life, one cross is like another and in every aspect. There are no intimate burdens on the order of those existential, but rather only those which are taken too personally. This too is a convenience, for in doing so, I absolve others of their human care. At first, I feel this lack as a singular person but then only later do I realize its general absence; in my ardor to be cared for I have excerpted myself from the care of others. It is here, but only here, that extermination can then begin.

            In order to reveal the processes and dynamics whereby humaneness is cast adrift if not wholly aside, this collection engages with the margins of living consciousness. Its ‘fields’ contain studies of the banality of sexuality, of literacy, of parenting among others, all spaces of human intimacy and art that should partake only in the noble. Is it only the case that a clinical death has overtaken them, or is there a more nuanced interpretation available? The following also is home to a number of analytic papers whose purpose is to provide a series of ‘frames’ which are not merely epistemic or yet epistemological in scope. Sometimes the language is itself clinical, with a view to getting some distance from not only the object but as well, objecting to the very much partial language which has surrounded it, for to banality we tend to attach a great ululation, also scripted, in order to shield ourselves from the realization that we have forgotten our human concernfulness. Yet these analyses are, I suggest, most effective when they are not themselves bereft of passion, for even if the compassion of the poet’s visitational figure remains the ideal, for humans ensconced within only the expected day-to-day, the procedural proceedings of processed procession, the irruptive semblance of even basic passion may be the most likely path to its higher sibling.

            The author is himself both a ‘field’, as an object for the reader, and a ‘frame’, as the director providing a momentary authorial ‘intent’ to same. Given this dual role, an interview is included within part two that is meant to point forward, moving away from impassioned critique and toward compassionate companionship, describing in no great detail the outcome of over two decades of work in the field and a quarter century of such in the library. Their combination has disclosed a small portion of the human experience which, though it too is inclusive of all which seeks to nullify concern and thus make existence into a play of shadows, a ploying cloying umbrous clot that forever sticks in the throat of the poet and to the tip of the painter’s brush, yet has the will and love to overcome its contemporary self. If these studies to follow have in any manner aided in this better self-understanding, their author is forever grateful.

                                                – G.V. Loewe, Winnipeg, Canada. December 31, 2024.

Others, The Other, Otherness

Others, The Other, Otherness (Forms of what is not myself)

            The Cartesian sense of what a selfhood is remains our modern baseline of how we experience consciousness. It does beg the question, ‘what is thinking?’, addressed much more recently by Heidegger, for instance, but at the same time, it proposes that in whatever form does thought produce and reproduce itself, this event phenomenologically precedes being. It is one of the first instanciations of the idea that existence comes before essence and indeed, is in itself a necessary precedent. Over the ensuing decades, we find that culture (Vico), history (Hume), and eventually, evolution (Darwin) and even the unconscious (Freud) find their way into this precedent-setting existential amalgam which is humanity as we know it. Yet, what does not deviate within this rather self-interested pedigree is how the other is defined. Almost as an afterthought – and in this Buber’s criticism of Heidegger actually extends much further back in the history of ideas; Heidegger, perhaps unfairly, is seen as representing only a specifically dangerous form of auto-ontology – the other-to-self is simply seen as that and not much more. We must wait until the early years of the twentieth century to begin to understand the nuances of the other as a conception which not only markedly departs from that of the self but in fact stands alone without it.

            The first systematic attempt to reexamine ‘the other’ comes, ironically in some ways, in Cooley’s 1902 Social Organization. Here, it is at first and once again the self which occupies much attention, but with a difference. His conception of the ‘looking-glass self’, through which the self defines itself as not how I imagine myself nor how others actually imagine me but rather how I imagine others think of me, opens the door to an entirely new way of perceiving the other. Here, the other has become an active agent in my mind. I have no access to her actual thoughts – generally a blessing, one imagines – nor does my own self-image identify with them in any exact manner. Instead, I imagine myself through the lens of the equally imagined other, and the only consolation to this double jeopardy, Cooley tells us, is that everyone else is doing the same thing. Yet this imagined otherhood is not made up of any singular person. G. H. Mead, a colleague of both Schutz on the one side, and the behaviorist John Watson – his Theory of Modern Advertising, 1925, marks the birth of just that; the shill we know today wherein it is the self which is sold on the basis of what others think of us; mark that! – on the other, supplements Cooley’s new definition by understanding the other to be an abstraction of everyone who is not me. He calls this amorphous presence the generalized other.

            This conception is not only the source for an imagined social selfhood, Mead argues, but is also the station of socialization in general. This conception embodies, in an indistinct yet homogenous mass, everything we understand to be part of being a self within the folds of the particular society in which we live. The generalized other is the on-the-ground version of both a superego – it is the space of moral suasion, the press of the manual on how to live in this culture – and indeed, also the libidinal limits of the desiring self – it contains the objects of my desire but as well ‘contains’ them in a second sense, that of self-other limitation; she is not me and thus must be treated accordingly. Mead’s novel widening of the aperture of the other away from simply another individual who is too like myself to provide either a morality or, for that matter, a sexuality, combines with his sense that the looking-glass self is yet too partial to navel-gazing to account for the presence of society as a whole, even if it does do an excellent and indeed, even self-sartorial, job of analyzing how I myself engage in self-perception. The generalized other is today the accepted understanding of ‘others’, plural and undifferentiated, coming, akin to the cogito, before the ‘sum’ of consciousness as given to us.

            But there are two further distinctions to be found in twentieth century discourse which have contributed to our fuller understanding of what is not myself. First, The Other, in capitals, is taken to refer to what has supplanted, in an invidious manner, the older and pre-modern conception of Godhead. And this characterization could be taken as well advised, for it is both unpleasant and unfair to imagine that what is uncanny for its own sake should somehow ‘replace’ either divinity or yet infinity. Stepping back for a moment, let us recall that it is along phenomenological lines that ‘The Other’ establishes its ‘presence’ as non-presence. Originally hailing from the otherworld, this presence is both sudden and irruptive to our own and the social world in which our mundane lives are played out. It appears to us as part of the irreality of another kind of being, and it is in Husserl that we discover the most dedicated analysis of this form of being, which can take on the aspect of non-being or even that of Parousia. Certainly, I judge myself in this second worlding, which a moment before was unknown to me. Yet our modern millennial is self-contained, and appropriately given the rest of our general focus; thus its uncanniness rests within itself and does not refer to any evaluation at all, let alone one that is both fatal because final. Instead, what is perceived as radically other to myself occurs as momentary rather than momentous, as hallucinatory rather than as visionary, and as being sourced most likely in the altered perception of my own state of mind. For modernity, Godhead is, quite literally, in one’s head.

            Since this is an oddly unfulfilling terminus to the career of this second concept, that of The Other, we have populated source-points of this once radical other in extraterrestrial visits (that is, not visitations), or, less logistically demanding on the part of these others as well as being predicted by and predicated from the quantum theory, the presence of interdimensional limens, only seemingly irruptive because they are relatively rare and rattle our reality-cage with a glimpse of what lies just adjacent to it. Quantum cosmology presents an anonymous version of Heidegger’s sense of ‘what is closest to us’. It is impersonal and wholly non-human, and takes on the mantle of a remanential resident only due to our unthinking expectations of what the day-to-day world should be like. Even so, in taking another step back from the astonishment an alternative universe might present to both the senses and to our own biographies given the corresponding fetish associated with the Doppelganger – who is, in this case, more truly a Hinterganger if anything at all – we realize that both extraterrestiality and interdimensionality are neither uncanny nor irruptive, and in fact are mere quantitative extensions of the reality which we already know as generally ‘real’. This too, is somehow disappointing, for it robs the radicality of The Other as previously conceived. To be fair, there must also be some kind of relief present as well, for no alien or double appears in judgment of ourselves.

            The third and final guise of the other in modernity is defined as the at first unknown version of the generalized other, and this is, simply, otherness. This concept is originally associated with the phenomenology of the social world, as per Schutz, and is best understood as characterizing a number of zones to be found in his contoured cartography of how the self perceives that same world. What is ‘at hand’ to me as a Dasein is, in Schutz, a presence which denotes something available to me but not necessarily known by me in any detail. If we imagine ourselves looking out from the apex of a perceptual height, as we gaze outward and downward, we trail away from the intimate and then the familiar, off toward the cognizant and thence the unfamiliar but not yet truly strange. Yet further, and approaching the very horizon of my vision, lies the hinterland of my knowledge; things, people, and ideas that I know exist, but of which I have no further interest or knowledge. Beyond this is utter ignorance, mirroring our species’ lack of general knowing about certain reaches of the cosmos. At the same time, I am aware that this space, however alien, remains in the category of the ‘possibly-to-be-known’, either to me or to my fellow-persons. If there actually is anything yet more distant, something which would forever be beyond human comprehension itself, I tend to dismiss it, not only along the lines of a cumulative science – in this epistemological stance, all that is at present unknown is simply something which is yet to be known – as well as along the more personal lines of a ‘need to know’ basis. In this dual take, we redefine the infinite as merely the indefinite.

            This, in a word, is the function of the concept of otherness, with perhaps the additional remark that through this quantification of ‘the other’ as an idea, we as well redefine human finitude as merely finiteness, with all that this reduction implies. Oddly, we have come almost full circle: the Cartesian cogito exists only as long as does an agentive consciousness. This consciousness is, in its self-posited existence, conscious only of its own measure as a finite form of being-aware. What is gained by our contemporary tripartite understanding of the other as ‘others’, ‘The Other’, and ‘otherness’, is that we are no longer by default either neurotic or xenophobic about the novel which may obtrude upon our lives. There is a temper of mundanity attached to each of these three conceptions in turn, and, indeed, one by which I can myself participate in their othering capabilities. But what is lost to me, and to my culture more generally, is both the experience of the meaningful uncanny and the ability to create meaning in the face of not only human finitude as an essential element of the species-historical project but as well in the face of mine ownmost death, the completion of my Dasein’s thrown project. In order to reorient myself to this recent condition, I must take what is at first merely unknown to me and somehow reinsert the experience of facing down its momentarily irreal presence as if it were in its essence unknowable.

            To do this, to traverse an empirical threshold while maintaining the wonder of transgressing an uncanny limen is no mean trick. To see the other in her radically alien quality and yet immediately lend to her the humane and ethically necessary succor of being recognized as a being like myself, is also a canny challenge. But in either case, whether that cosmic or intimate, what passes for the other today, in its also necessary secular pragmatism, invokes a daring deontology which may yet be premature.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Parental Wrongs

Parental Wrongs (statistical reality and immoral panic)

            Let it be said straight away that the family household is in fact the most dangerous place for any child. Given that upwards of 95% of all abuse, and in all four major types – that emotional, physical, psychological, and sexual – occur in the home and are perpetrated by those the child knows or knows well, almost all them family members, no other social context even comes close. I have had numerous therapeutic professionals remind me of this statistic, and to this they add that almost all of the remaining five percent occurs in educational settings such as schools, churches or training facilities of various kinds; places wherein coaches, tutors, mentors, teachers and the like are, by definition, gathered. These numbers put the utter lie to any suggestions that children are most at risk either by themselves, on the street, on the internet, or in the company of strangers. Does this mean that we should let any possible vigilance over these other spaces completely lapse? No, but what it does mean is that such same vigilance needs be applied to the family first, and then the formal educational scenes second, if a very distant second. The question which remains is precisely why the family home is the most dangerous place, given that every ideal thereof speaks the opposite.

            It is reasonable to suggest that no modern institution has, and from its very inception, been subject to such scrutiny and critique as has the bourgeois family. Towering discursive figures such as Engels, Freud, Erikson, Foucault and others have aimed their ample artillery at it. None, however, have simply used arguments from authority, such as it may be, in their vivisections. Seen variously as a cauldron of sexual tension aping the apes, a compact of production-consumption aping the aristocracy, or simply an umbrella sanction to intimately control women as servants and children as chattel, our version of the family is certainly the site of a great many wrongs, almost all of them committed by parents. It is also the case that parenting does not come into one’s life replete with detailed manuals; it is very much an improvised operation, and there are a great diversity of ‘types’ of children to be had. If one overlays this basic incompetency, which is at first no one’s fault, with the objective stressors of parent as worker, parent as consumer, and even parent as police officer, it is no surprise that the interior of the family home quickly becomes a landscape littered with acts of petty terrorism, with parents just as rapidly becoming equally petty fascists. Indeed, apparently if one seeks to parent at all, one automatically tends in these darker directions.

            The seeming price of civility in children is incivility in adults, the ransom of child obedience, disobedient parents. The eschewing of violence as a citizen requires the use of it against our own offspring. These are hard sayings, reminiscent of the ‘tough love’ advocates who hail from evangelical margins of all sorts. In fact, ‘tough love’ is a contradiction in terms, a euphemism for sadism and a vehicle for Schadenfreude. ‘Troubled teens’, another kindred euphemism, are so troubled, if at all, because of how they have been parented. One would like to say, in these cases, ‘poor’ parenting but once again, the character of the modern family is such that one cannot truly make such an assessment, utter such a judgment, promote this kind of ethical evaluation. Parenting is, in a word, what it is, given the other variables in play. If this is tantamount to saying that children can be raised in no other way than that shot through with violence and abuse of various kinds, consider both the facts and the stakes.

            The facts tell us of the sheer numbers of abuse cases, yet under-reported given the absolute stress on family loyalty and the equally naked threat of yet further violence, as well as the understaffed and underfunded resources available for children, especially youth, to which they can appeal. Many young people with whom I have spoken have reiterated the very much stock line that, ‘yes, I was abused in some manner, but the option was the child welfare system, so I stayed at home until I could move out’. The false choice between stakes in one hell and the next is not one any grown adult would likely kindly settle for, though in capital, many grudgingly do. Parents extort their teens with the ironic threat of child services protection, and they blackmail their young adults – a great many of whom, due to economic and demographic patterns, find themselves at home far past the optimum period – through the use of the steep housing and unreliable employment markets. Most parents are, by these acts, criminals, abetting yet further criminal behavior, including well-documented, if seemingly much less common, instances of physical violence against legal adults in their homes. Indeed, it is relatively easy to practice such hoodlum hoaxes against older children simply due to the primary socialization these young people have experienced as actual children. The unmitigated gall of the most zealous child abusers, in suggesting that children are not ‘real’ adults until age 21 or the like, and thus should be subject to ritual violence in the home, in direct contravention of any legal code, is a clarion clue to how bold the ‘parental rights’ propaganda has in our time become.

            In fact, from the very beginning, one does not have the right to even become a parent. Parenting is nothing other than a privilege, and one which not all can either afford, are suited for, have the opportunity to accomplish, or are legally sanctioned to attain. There are no parental ‘rights’, as such, only responsibilities. And the vast majority of these have been gifted to parents by the penurious State, which is increasingly unwilling to perform its previous responsibilities, once accomplished when it itself understood that the new conception of the nuclear family would not be able to educate its children in the manner any State required. The wrongs of the State are vast and evil, yes, but inside each middle-class suburban dwelling, the state in miniature is acted out. It is made into a simulacrum of evil, with every public source reminding children of how ‘safe’ it is to be at home, how ‘good’ it is, and how right it is. Honor thy mother and thy father. It is the State that spouts this antique nonsense, and mostly because of budget line. Focus on the family. I have seen numerous bumper stickers telling us instead to ‘focus on your own damn family’, but to no avail. The charlatan NPOs which have arisen since the birth of the bourgeois family – from the 1830s child-saving movement through to our own five-ring circus of ‘family-values’ organizations – have performed a veritable Olympiad of Oleander, hammering home the idea that a single leaf of disobedience to one’s rightful parents is not only a betrayal of their ‘love’, but as well a ‘sin’, whatever that may mean.

            Yet if the bourgeois parent is himself a contradiction in terms due to the family becoming, in modernity and through our mode of production, simply the two-horned locus of reproduction – it is both the origin of production and the destination of consumption; workers must come from somewhere, all those many commodities have to go some place – what of the bourgeois child? Even in the very best of homes, where only the wider symbolic violence is refracted by compassionate parenting – ‘I am here for you always as a resource, I will never harm you, but the world is challenging and you must learn to navigate it, ultimately on your own’ – our shared reality, in which only those with access to resources do survive, impinges in a final manner the way in which one can imagine parenting. For being a child today is mostly to be the passive object of target-marketing of all kinds and from all comers. The child is a bulls-eye; the weapon, advertising. At an increasingly young age, the child becomes a willing target, consuming non-stop, from the virtual unreality to the equally unreal social world constructed around her. This pseudo-world is filled with both fantasy and decoy: the first to conceal from herself the suffering she yet feels, the second to conceal it from others. In inevitable mimesis, the family itself becomes a fantasy of itself; has there ever been an entertainment fiction that centers around the fact of child abuse as a norm; in a word, as a normatively sanctioned reality for the vast majority of children today?

            The family as well conceals its own activities through the use of false taboo. Physical punishment is, for instance, frowned upon, officially, and is sanctioned against by all professional and scientific associations and their journals. And so it is practiced in an unspoken manner. Most parents commit such abuses, but more than this, are then committed to never talking about doing so, even with like-minded others. We read of parents in chat threads and forums who are ‘so relieved to finally find’ an ironically ‘safe’ virtual space where other child abusers viz. parents and their vicarious voyeurs congregate. The detail in which they describe their dark doings is sickening but also most revealing. The ‘open secret’ of child abuse in the family could be such a scandal that impressive resources go into, not putting an end to it, not and never that, but rather in decoying all possible scrutiny away from the family home. Some of this goes into the schools and their annexes, which, to be fair, account for almost five percent of actual abuse, as stated. But by far the most misdirection is aimed at what is essentially a fantasy; the stranger in the panel van and his hyper-modern compatriot, the internet extortionist. But low-tech or high-tech it matters not. The race is very much on to find any kind of Other, however imaginary, who can steal away the villain’s role, for children themselves are stolen at birth.

            The source of this despicable condition lies in the sheer lack of dedicated personnel the modern family allows for itself. Non-Western extended families can also be abusive, of course, but the general stress of parenting is shared by the many, instead of by the merely two or yet one. The much-hallowed Victorian ideal of universal schooling sharing the load, replete with much violence of its own, has been the option for Western cultures. It is terribly ironic that the schools are targeted by the pro-family movements, given that humane parenting simply cannot be accomplished by two persons who are at once expected and indeed compelled to be workers first. In my work with families, I always reassured parents that they had, however cliché, the most difficult job in the world. This is not an essay in parent-hating. Even so, the reality demands that we completely redesign what the family is today, rather than shoring it up with propaganda and abetting its evil behavior. Society is violent precisely because we raise our children with violence. The future is uncertain, even for some, threatening, simply because we do not provide a certain and unthreatening space for our children to become themselves, thus preparing them to shoulder the task which is that human future, as well as being able to receive its beautiful gift.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 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 for three years worked as an ethics consultant for families and teens.

Holy Spirit, Wholly Spirit?

Holy Spirit, Wholly Spirit? (Wraith no more)

            Embodiment is a phenomenological term referring to a form of sensate. We said to be consciousness ‘embodied’. Yet in this, there is no immediate additional sense that this kind of being is temporary or may be contrasted with any other, previous or yet to come. I embody myself, in another, related sense, as well as embodying a certain set of cultural norms and suasions, individuated impulses and impetuses, and the ‘spirit of the age’, more or less. It is first to Durkheim that we might appeal for an explication of what is served by the idea that I am ‘made up’ of two things, the two-in-one, with a third having fallen out of discursive fashion, becoming recently and at best become an addendum to the body-mind amalgam. Even here, however, the problem of the concept of mind, let alone that of ‘other minds’ – one of the basic puzzles of phenomenology proper – resonates with the older concept, that of spirit. Surely if I embody my consciousness, I may also be said to not be possessed of a bias that centers the spirit somehow ‘inside’ the mind alone. Yet if not, the whole idea becomes rapidly outlandish; where then sits the spirit, if it exists at all?

            In social organizations exhibiting mechanical solidarity, the spirit is embodied by the group. One is thus never ‘alone’ in any contemporary sense; one has not only one’s kindred and community within one, one also likely has some other kind of force semi-present – not residing continuously but there when called upon; the clan membership of an animal spirit, one’s non-human but just as intimate kin – which indeed, when the need arises or the occasion befits, embodies itself in a variety of ways. The metaphysics of transformation is the home to such beings, who are not only shape-shifters in the phantasmagorical sense – this modernist formula ignores the fact that for authentic transformer beings, their recurring but differentiated presence occurs by crossing over ontological barriers and not merely by changing their appearance – but as well, embodiments of a specific sensibility and idea. And while the people may regard these visitations as somehow sacred and their denizens holy, the spirit materializing before them is not entirely made up of the spiritual. For within the transformer resides the hallmark of humanity: we became aware, within the primordial dawn of our species tenure, that only through adaptation and generalization would we at all survive.

            It is this leitmotif, this element of character, that pushes human consciousness away from the sense that the cosmos is simply an anonymous space within which happenstance humanity has taken fragile hold. In this sense, we might hazard it a projection alone, if a necessary one, but equally so, we are also driven back from the opposing sensitivity which demands that we kneel before nature as a wholly alien power with no human interest. It remains fascinating that the career of the concept of spirit not only traverses mode of production boundaries but as well, is itself a model of adaptation and generalism. For Durkheim, spirit is itself embodied in the notion of the sacred, his benchmark concept for speaking about symbolic forms which have a seemingly uncanny ability to preserve their identity across otherwise utterly different societal modes. One might also suggest that the presence of such an idea in vastly different cultures and apparently universally so, has given rise to a great deal of historical conflict. It is not so much that the other does not believe in the gods at all but rather that his gods are different than mine. This was never considered a puzzle on the ground, because of all of the other empirical differences amongst human cultures, but it was, with narrower eyes, perceived as a threat simply due to the knowledge that my own gods hung in the balance of their believers; and just here, numbers then mattered. We are well aware that specific embodiments of the spiritual come and go, so it is well not to get too hung up on any particular one. In response to this, the concept of spirit itself underwent a redesign: first communal and shared by animals and sometimes by other natural forces as well – recall Jung’s list of archetypes includes narrative leitmotifs such as ‘the flood’ – but in the light of the passing of entire civilizations, it becomes something which can be embodied but is in essence ethereal.

            This newer sense of how the spirit functions allows it a much greater liberation not only of movement but also of presence. It can appeal to this one or that, pending one’s credo and moral druthers, accepting and indeed embodying the customary before demonstrating an overturning of it – Jesus was Jewish but set the tone for a wider covenant and thus elect – or it can revive a faded or fading sensibility by appearing as a remanant – a reminder of the past and not simply a haunting, for instance – or yet again by eschewing material form in a wholly irruptive event, leaving the witnesses or perhaps even the visionary in wonderment but also with a renewed sense of perspective. In this, it matters not just what kind of vision is appresented and thence phenomenologically apprehended by our own embodiments, only that the experience is perceived as extramundane. Even the source is, finally, unimportant, not only due to the Thomas principle but equally to the simple fact that visions are, by themselves, incommunicable. To assuage this problem, the concept of spirit gradually becomes hyper-individuated. Protestantism likely has its own roots along the road to Damascus, where a specific individual, Saul, is accosted by a specific version of the holy spirit. It interrogative, ‘why do you persecute me?’ is sounded in highly personalized terms. Saul himself cannot ignore it, since it is literally pointing a finger. It is of interest that as Paul, his mission takes up that personalized sensibility, which is really more of a sensitivity made sensible only through epistle and sermon, for no one else was truly present for Saul’s decisive transformation.

            This too is of interest: human beings as well now have the transformational ability whilst yet alive; the difference is that I must be transformed, and for that there must be present an external impetus, which within social contract style cultures is unnecessary. There, transformer beings exhibited rather inherited traits which were shared by members of the same clan. In agrarianism, one can accrue to oneself such abilities, which is both astonishing and yet perhaps expected in the sense that it mirrors the change in the concept of spirit already underway. This idea of gaining something, however wondrous or even unexpected for the specific character involved, is almost certainly related to the continuously developed presence of material surplus in the new mode of production. Even in sophisticated transformational cosmologies, the kind we see in well-developed subsistence societies such as those along the Northwest Coast of North America, surplus and gift, however ostentatiously ritualized such as through the potlatch system, is, by the end of winter, almost completely used up. Only in the agrarian mode do we see large-scale surpluses which must not only be catalogued – the very first contents of writing known – but also possessed, and possessed by someone or some group. It is not a great leap for the human imagination to take upon itself the idea that the spirit is itself something which one not only can embody, but also develop, just as one develops the land or yet the imperial territory and its resources, and that what aids in such a growth can hail from diverse sources, just as material resources are diverse. Now, all this is not to say that changes in material subsistence directly drive all other forms of change. No, there is a rapidly-adopted symbiosis between symbolic forms and material manifestations, and this too is fitting, perhaps even inevitable, because the entire idea of embodiment does itself center around a syncretism of a symbolic form – the ethereal Being – being ‘materialized’ in that normative and to a great extent, even worldly.

            So, gained possession and development, though in mighty contrast to mere inheritance and stasis, reflect, and perhaps as well refract, the material conditions of life at hand. The spirit also transforms the closeness of ‘what is nearest to us’ by moving our perception away from the distanciated ‘at-handedness’ of having to interact with the world or with nature as imposing something upon it, making it work for us in return, to that of the ‘in-handedness’ of something which, like my own spiritual being, can be disclosed to me. There is thus a profound phenomenological shift expressed between the metaphysics of transformation – wherein it is my kinship within a communal spirit that allows me to experience the spiritual and envision the apical being which animates the mechanical whole; there is no Gestalt in transformational metaphysics – and that of transcendence: here, the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts but is so by virtue of the spirit being precisely disembodied in its very essence, rather than existing by represencing itself on down the cultural line as limen. We should never put on airs about one world system being somehow ‘superior’ to another in any of these senses, rather only that we can now recognize the pedigree of the concept in question.

            The culture hero, in his cross-cultural diversity, too must exhibit only the traits which are befitting to the cultural imagination itself at hand. Raven has transformational powers but is not himself the transformer being, who is rather Kanekelak or the like. Paul has been transformed but thence does seek transfiguration. Beethoven transforms the world through his art but has neither the power of self-transformation nor is he transfigured, unless dully and figuratively by the discourse of art history. The three forms of metaphysics known to the human imagination are themselves embodied, respectively, by such brief but contrasting catalogues of figures. One can iterate such a trinitial list, but no specific figure, whether mythical or historical or both, may be said to be itself an archetype, only, once again, an embodiment of a conceptual event. I can experience the figure ‘herself’ but only as an expression of the spirit. And this concept is both and at once the spiritual being as itself a representation of something ultimate and even infinite, while also becoming spirit as an abstraction of our existential consciousness, faced as it is with the problem of mortality cast as finitudinal being. For our embodiment, while divorced from the spirit ‘holy’ whilst in itself, is experienced as oddly something which is itself not wholly bodily borne.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

How the Petty Secures the Profound

How the Petty Secures the Profound (opposites contract)

            Certainly, there are few differences more notable than that between the sublime and the ridiculous, but as we move closer together in our comparative concepts, the apparent distinctions tend to be overblown. Bliss is sublime, love merely profound, and no one would call every and all the individual ‘slings and arrows of officials’ ridiculous, though all are petty. The ends of the human emotional and experiential spectrum are also most brief. We hear and read, in song and in text, about the proverbial ‘moment of bliss’, as well as a sudden feeling that life itself may be lensed as one big joke, played upon us, of course; perhaps the outcome of a God’s ridicule. Just as, however, a routine become otiose, and in its own way extremely so with seemingly endless repetition, even the sublime may be misunderstood, misrecognized and indeed, even become unrecognizable without the ongoing background noise of the quotidian. We require a regular basis upon which to compare our experiences, shared or no, and the day-to-day quality of waking consciousness is almost overfull with the expected and the rote, much of it in itself without a lot of other merit. The petty does after all secure the profound, and in a contractuality of opposites, but in exactly what manner?

            First, through majority. The petty acts of the powerful and powerless alike contain another kind of combined force. Just as, in military matters, we understand that at a certain threshold, quantity becomes its own unique quality – both Russia and the United States have used this tactic; strength in sheer numbers metastasizes itself – so the pettiness of everyday life becomes an entire social world. Not only do we expect others to run along certain rails, narrow-gauge to be sure but also travelling more or less straight down the line, we have the same expectation of ourselves. Putting ourselves ‘out’ carries more of a meaningfulness than a meaning. This ‘outness’ is very much the stepping away from normative rules and policy regulations, and in so doing, we are required to make an unusual effort. It is not only noted by others when we do contrive to countermand the orders of the day, but also by our own sense of what should have been done. Thus the ‘must’ of any action does, in general, come against the ‘shalt’ of any act, for it is the latter that carry the weight of ongoing human life on their experiential shoulders; shoulders which only gain in strength the more often the ‘same’ experience is rendered in the world. The vast majority of time is spent engaging with and in petty acts, and these are committed as well by the vast majority of people. We may bemoan their overbearing, and indeed, sometimes as well overweening, presence, but nevertheless they contain the necessary, if not sufficient, measure for the profound to take its relatively rare place.

            Second, through ritual. The orison of the day is always directed below. My thoughts may be noble, my vision afar, but I am well aware that everything in this life is but, and thus requires of me, a single step at a time, perhaps even conjuring a cliché-ridden image if such action is paused and viewed overlong. Even in spaces labeled sacred, ritual functions in this same way: it is the bringing together of community so that it can place itself in the way of the profound, not itself create it. To judge mundane life as ritualistic is correct but unfair. It’s very mundanity takes the world into a closer proximity to my being, for through ritual I myself am also placed within the folds of an existential envelope that then becomes the vehicle for the Kerygma of both history and contemporary life to be posted to me. In this, I am adjacent to experience in the hermeneutic sense, the novel and the unexpected, just as I am alongside, tarrying perhaps, as a Dasein filled with curiosity at best, the meaning of said world in its worlding. Ritualism may be scorned as both a dimwitted excuse for meaning as well as the resonance only of a tired tradition, but in fact it serves, by its very repetition, the same deity as does bliss. Its work is by far greater and its demands upon us mighty when compared to what is sublime, blissful, or even profound. Without an endless parade of prosaic parodies and petty paradiddles the both, what with suddenness and uncanniness overfills our senses with a glimpse of the shared soul, the otherworld, or the collective consciousness, could not occur at all.

            Thirdly, through sharedness. Just as does the petty occupy the efforts of the majority of people and fill up the majority of time, so too these acts create a world which is shareable without much corresponding effort. The work has already been done, one might say, and while we tend not to enjoy any fruits of this combined labor, we also tend to define what is pleasurable far too narrowly. Is it not a pleasure, in the sense of being relieved of a task or duty, to go through one’s day without any hitches of any kind? Is it not as well pleasureful to return home to find it intact and exactly the way in which I left it, pending the scope of its untidiness or lack of staples? And surely it must also be something to be enjoyed to engage in the usual pleasantries in the shower alone or at the workplace with colleagues each day; the morning breakfasts, the scuttlebutt of work-breaks, the promise of affection without affectation but as well, without the sense that my mate and I should reconquer paradise on a nightly basis.  Speaking of the ridiculous, our mostly vain attempts to conjoin the sublime, to literally sublimate ourselves, are also pleasurable in their amusement simply because we know they are bound to fail. In failure too there is relief, for to succeed each time we set ourselves to love, to work, or to yet to play, would nullify any of the humanity held within such categories of shared experience. Their most authentic value rather lies in their being shared, as vehicles for, and expression of, Mitsein.

            Fourthly, through their self-disdain. Our very derision of the petty becomes it; the shoe fits, as it were, and it is of the utmost that the quotidian in life wear that same footwear as do we ourselves when tasked with simply walking forward, oriented to the futurity of our being’s being-aheadedness. The horizon of the future proper ever recedes from us, but this too is both necessary and a good in itself, for the new can only be new once, and we must understand that balance between the living-on of the historical horizon and the motion of that other one, existential this time, and indeed travelling in the very opposite direction as the former. Mine ownmost death, as the singular function and sole iteration of this existential horizon, already owned by me through the fact of my birth and the reality of individuated life, provides the profound ingredient by which all those petty are assembled. It is the keystone of the historical arch, steadying the gateway through which I alone must walk. It is, once again, the aloneness of existential acts which adds to their profundity, and just as dreams may not be shared, so too I must face completing only my own being, and no others. I disdain death only in youth, as a necessary aspect of being young and feeling the immortality of a life which is just now becoming mine own. In and for youth, only love is real, and this befits a specific and passing phase of human life. But in this same phase I thus learn to disdain everything else, for the time being, and it is this lesson that carries me forward into a maturity in which I know how to tell the difference between the petty and the profound, even if the adoration attached to a singular gravitas has itself left me.

            Between and among these four elemental aspects of the value of pettiness – majority, ritual sharedness, and the disdainful – we find present almost all of our unthought goings-on, our relations with others as ‘the others’, our internalization of the norms of the generalized other, and the expectations of the looking-glass self. There is a mute beauty to their amalgam, a minor alchemy in their admixture. For we are not led to rare metals let alone the philosopher’s gem, but rather gain a hearth and home, sustenance and subsistence through them. The sorcerer must have a cauldron, the priest an altar, the thinker a study, the alchemist a laboratory, just as today’s heroes have their dwellings; the athlete his training facility, the entertainer her stage, and so on. The only reason we so unreasonably judge the mundane is so we can remain open to the irruptive; the more petty shall be the routine the more gravity shall have the extramundane. We are not jealous of the petty, and seek indeed to share it as one strives to share misery. We envy not the otiose and so we are more than willing to let the majority of our time overtake it. And we scoff at the meandering mumble of ritual, knowing as we do that its only function is to merely prepare the at first grudging ground. Securing the profound in human life cannot be over-planned, nor is it the stuff of magic, and just as the petty seems to reign uncontested in the social world, just so, it can never fully rein in the worlding of the world itself. For it is within this other movement, alien and anonymous, that the profound is brought home to us.

            Yet what is momentous must too be realized historically just as it must be recognized socially. It cannot retain its uncanniness and its visionary quality overlong. On our parts, we try not to utterly absorb it into the flux of mundane time, and in this we are mostly successful. Memory does not itself baulk at the uncanny, for there is no immediate danger in mere recollection. We must react, and even act, to place ourselves within the post-traumatic reliving of a profundity, and, other things being equal, what is profound to humanity is only half-buried in shadow. What I find, in taking the lighted space of Overbeing which also occurs to me from time to time, into that twilight, is that what is momentarily hidden too comes alive with its own luminosity. The darkling angels which convene at our bedside in times of crisis are not there to offer reprimand nay yet gloat; their act is to guide us through the landscape which their colleagues, as is known, fear to tread.

            Illness and loss, the parting of lovers and the parturition of children, the shipwrecks of projects taken and the abortions of those only planned, provide profound counterbalance to all of my successes, and their graven gravity is an anchor to all the levity of my fantastic dreams. For a human life cannot be lived solely in the brightest climes; this as well is the lot of well-spent youth alone. Most of human life is petty in both its design and its outcome, and this is why the vast majority of history remains unknown to us. And yet what delight we take in the rediscovery of even the most homely vessel of the ancient imagination; the clay pot or jar, the stone tablet, the primordial obsidian tool, for their craft and their work made our species what it is today, light and shadow the both. And through their utterly mundane presence do we realize the unutterable profundity of our species-essence in and as existence itself.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Venus Envy

Venus Envy (esthetic and aesthetic)

            It is almost always the goddess of love, not the god. Indeed, we are told that the truer god of love is that Christian, which lends itself to the problem Plato examines in the Phaedrus, wherein love is cited as a form of madness. If this is so, if the compelling vision of the beloved is taken as herself merely a sign of the presence of love both transcendental and ‘proper’, to stay civil, then to Plato we can simply add Nietzsche’s insight about us ‘being more in love with love itself than the beloved’. Between these two takes is played out the entire problematic of what love is and how it is perceived. It is striking that love is represented by the female form in the vast majority of cultural cases, suggesting at once, and especially in the Christian era, that while the hearth of sexuality is female while the Kerygma of love is feminine, and even the ‘eternal feminine’, of Goethe, which ‘lures us to perfection’. What then is this perfect love? Is it the mimesis of Jesus as a resonant presence in the world or yet an overcoming of his absence? Or is it a sense that when in love we rather transcend ourselves?

            What I will suggest here is that love carries within it two unquiet aspects: one, the esthetic of Eros and the aesthetic of what can be called ‘autothanos’. Erotic love is possessed of a well-known power. It is the outward expression of the desire for union, on the one hand, as well as the desire to lose oneself in the other. Most of us have experienced this form of love at least once, and if fortunate, multiple times, over the life course. Yet Eros, while affirming intimacy and unification, does deny the world, which is its chief weakness. Autothanatic love occurs when the loss of self in the other is no longer the key to the relationship in question. While the erotic replays this merger, here just at this present moment but thence needing and thus heeding iteration, the autothanatic is an actual state of being. It may be cautiously compared with Stendhal’s idea of the ‘second crystallization’ in love relationships. But the loss of self which is conjured by intensely erotic stimuli and the memory of union does not affect the personhood of the partners at hand, instead augmenting it. It is this augmentation that, if relations become more holistic over time spent together, carries me across myself and back into the world. I no longer have a heightened sense-perception of worldly experience, of the ‘colors brighter tastes better’ sort, but instead a superior worldview.

            This is expressed symbolically by the superiority of the gods themselves in Classical contexts, and the superiority of one’s ethical action in the world in Buddhism and Christianity, for instance. If my mate and I have overtaken ourselves – recall Rilke’s lines about how lovers are close to the ability of being able to see beyond death if they could also see beyond the presence of the beloved – and are also no longer moved only by the presence of the beloved other, we are then on the path to superior being as a way of being in the world. As an historical presence, this sensibility is made manifest in Jesus’ efforts to love all equally. It does not matter if this love is rejected by this or that person, as it inevitably will be, only that our own sense of what love actually is, as both a singular reality and an ethical ideal, welcomes the world into its embrace rather than denying its relevance, as does erotic love.

            Hence the nature of Eros is that it in-dwells the esthetic alone. At first sight, it is envy: ‘How beautiful she is, I wish she were mine!’ This is the ‘Venus envy’ of the would-be lover. It would suffer no harm upon the newly-lighted object, but at the same time, would never sacrifice itself to obtain her. Indeed, its purpose is to prove its worth to the other, and thus acts almost against the ideal of union. It stakes a claim to be its own being and in that, throws across the ultimate compliment, hoping for the same in return: ‘I would love you; I, another being like yourself yet almost wholly different.’ In one sense, this is why what used to be referred to as courtship ritual takes on the appearance of birds parading their plumage in the hopes of catching someone’s eye. Gender is here mostly immaterial, just as it becomes in love proper and thence absent all the more so in that autothanatic. And yet we cannot entirely dismiss the cultural suasion of the esthetic, as we are socialized to prefer a ‘type’ of other as a potential beloved, whether or not the details of this ideal mate attain such perfection in her physical or mental form. Given that the vast majority of relationships and marriages occur within social class boundaries, between persons of more or less the same educational backgrounds – these variables by far outstrip those ethnic and religious based – an ample part of esthetically driven love has nothing to do with ‘looks’. The key is rather a general recognizability. Even in ‘slumming’, we zero in on someone who fits an archetype: the adventurer in the male and the nurturer in the female, for example, as expressed in human form by the rebel who is running and who harbors a secret hurt that indeed the nurturing female, of whatever class but the higher the better, can both rein in and heal. In the meanwhile, the female’s family is scandalized, bringing the adventure home to roost, and the male’s family is heart-warmed, bringing in turn the nurturing into an otherwise utterly foreign territory.

            But the numbers do not lie. Such cross-class relationships tend not to stand the test of time, and never attain an autothanatic state, for their participants’ entire reason of being with an alien beloved is based upon playing out the theater of hero and heroine; in a word, the self has been lost before love itself could absent it. And so, while it may appear ironic and even misogynistic that Venus envy should be the surer path to authenticity in love, as well as its correspondent Freudian term, this sense of covetousness we must feel in order to make what otherwise could be anyone, a random individual human in whom I have no personal interest, into the object of love is quite necessary. Perhaps even most well-aligned life-chance variable intimacies never attain the second level, but nevertheless, they serve as rehearsals which eventually allow us to take that more profound leap. In doing so, we, in a dialectical movement, exert an Aufheben upon both the thesis of myself and the antithesis of herself. This uplifted union, which has at once, through this movement, bracketed the esthetic ambit of Eros and its proper love into a specific compartment of long-term relations as well as confining its esthetics to outward expressions of sexuality or sensuality – apparel, tone of voice, sentimentality, private fable and its attendant vocabulary, cosmetics and even health and fitness, all reside on this list of esthetic items – has now risen to the occasion which autothanos provides for it.

            In so doing, I am no longer conscious of being self-consciously allured by erotic union. At first, this realization may hit me as does a resigned rationalization, just as when one ages and one is no longer capable of daily or yet hourly sexual act. I must overcome the feeling of loss this relative absence of Eros inevitably occasions, and I find that the best manner of accomplishing this ethical demand is by widening the aperture of who can be loved in the first place. The esthetic is all about the ‘whatness’ of the object of love. In erotic intimacy I seek to lose my identity, merge it with the other, even for a short time. In fact, the both of us might feel slighted and thus distanced from one another if we did not take this merger in bits and bites. But the aesthetic vision of love overtakes all of this: it is no longer envious, perceives the other as a ‘who’ and not a ‘what’ in its move from object to subject, and does not so fervently attest to the narrow ideal of simply loving the one, especially at the expense of the world. This peculiar aesthetic motivates the autothanatic; it does not seek the conjury of magic which romance alone incurs between partners, but rather the transformation of alchemy, mirroring in its novel amalgam the ethical dialectic which as well must occur in order to for two persons to reimagine themselves as those who should share a life together.

            This willing loss of being-one, which we are calling here autothanatic, is the ethical aspect of Mitsein. ‘Being-with’ is well known to have as its phenomenological property the idea that the world becomes part of Dasein’s closest-to-hand; not the world entire, but something of that world – the beloved other – who has, in an irruptive event, made my Dasein into a less self-interested being. The beloved other is the world’s expression of the call to conscience, and indeed, her fuller presence to me enjoins a demand that nothing else in that same world can equal. Even so, the acknowledgement of and adoration offered to this other as the beloved, does not by itself impel us to gain the aesthetic ground of objective love. It provides the personal template, even at base, the attraction, as in esthetic beauty, for my Dasein to be willing to see in the wider world this ‘same’ beauty. I see it at first as the same, but ideally come to understand that personal beauty is only the ‘lure to perfection’ which the eternally feminine pronounces in both male and female alike. One might venture to say that there is also a ‘love at first sight’ directed to the world, but we only know how to fall into this event through the memory of doing so for another person like myself. As with that adolescent moment, I am at first envious as well of the world. Yet the world’s beauty is so diverse and vast as to put the lie to my resentment thereof, in a movement given simple but apt imagery by Nietzsche, when he speaks of the tide’s treasures washing up on a beach afore my witness. The tide takes away these precious items but then immediately replaces them with a new set. We find, if we live long enough outside of ourselves and through the love of the world our own personal beloved has herself represented unto us, that life itself is that tidal wash, allowing us a glimpse of just as many treasures of the world.

            Autothanatic love participates in this movement, for we too can be one of those precious things to others, and not just to another. It is this wider, less self-interested level of love that proclaims that we too are kindred with the aesthetic object, a perceptual event which transcends its art history context, its art market value, and its art methods formalism. For while the beloved other provides the model for the wider love, our most authentic and objective model of loving the world rests not in the beloved, but rather in art. It is art which has no need of the personal; it has never loved the one. Its entire instanciation lies in its ability to be understood by all, in whatever depth of profundity, just as one seashell on the beach before me may appear more intricate in its beauty than another. There are as many paths to perfection as there are loves in the world, but that said, there is only one perfection itself. Art allows even the personally unloved to gain that same vantage and advantage which Eros begins. In this, the call to conscience which is the love of the world offers its truer gift.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Normalism: Our New Testament

Normalism: Our New Testament (the sacred search for belonging)

            The concentration upon form over content lends itself to an expression of self-distanciation. Formalism in the discourses speaks first about the language of symbolic forms, which takes precedence over, or ahead of, possible truth claims made by these disciplines. In mathematics there is, for example, no sense that the language of math represents truths of nature; only the symbols are ‘real’. Formalism in the arts has a varied career, but the sense that the mechanics of how art is done is more important than its specific content or even historical context is highlighted. ‘Normalism’ is thus the preference to see oneself as a type of person rather than a uniquely individuated personhood. It is a self bereft of selfhood, and ultimately, Das Man rather than Dasein. And yet the quest for alternate communities, with their own norms being constructed after the fact of both the search and the distanciatedness it must bring to the incomplete selfhood, does not escape either the anxiety or the aspiration associated with all human needs regarding belonging, or feeling that one is part of something greater than oneself. Let’s explore how this latest set of attempts at founding a ‘new normal’ has fared in both the light of those previous, and the more perennial sense that humanity proper is never not without sociality.

            Commonly inherited boundaries that have demarcated group affiliations include social class background, sex at birth, ‘race’, and geographic region as well as religious tradition or credo. To these one enjoined level of education, profession, and a variety of voluntaristic or benevolent associations, charities, foundations, or political parties. The European triumvirate of ‘class, status, party’, to which Weber and others gave so much analytic attention, has of course now fallen away, beginning so quite precipitously in the post-war period. In our own time, sex has given way to gender, class to labor group or even industry sector, and party to a myriad of political ‘identities’ which agree only in that the personal expression of self as a category should also define that person’s political suasion. There are five or six biologically defined sexes for human beings, but the number of potential genders is indefinite. There are a scant few classes in capital, but career possibilities are numerous, if still shuttered by one’s birth status and access to the resources of personal augmentation, such as level of education and indeed, source of accreditation. This last has become, if possible, even more desperately associated with social class; all we must do is recall the recent spate of college entrance scandals. It is anathema to be a child of either wealth or celebrity and yet have to acknowledge that one is a dimwit, as evaluated by the steep hierarchy of university rankings.

            Yet the ‘outs’ for children of meager intellectual or other personal means have always been afoot. Prior to the second war, the military was itself considered to be a solid career for the child whose ambitions or abilities were mediocre. Immigration was also a reasonable path. Second sons, disinherited through traditional European property laws, could ‘seek their fortune’ in the new nation-builds of the empires at large. Immigration could be combined with military service, or better, that diplomatic, which required at least a modicum of wit as well as tact. Going into imperial state service siphoned off a great deal of ‘extra’ children, as well as those deemed unfit to inherit the family business, be it the new money of industry or the old wealth of property. Woe to the family who could not place any of their children to an advantageous position. My hometown saw an extended case of such a desperate domesticity in the Dunsmuirs. Once the most powerful magnate on Vancouver Island, none of John Dunsmuir’s nine children was apparently adept at anything much – it is plausible the ninth of these was sired by a mistress, given this youngest daughter’s strikingly good looks, in absolute contrast to those of the previous six, attesting to the efforts involved in finding a worthy successor, but no matter – and thus in a scant two generations, by 1967, the entire family had died out.

            The limits traditionally placed on sexuality have blown up, rather in our collective faces, starting perhaps around 1963, with the general introduction of simply taken birth control. We are told, with a rather pedantically pedagogic stance, that there have ‘always been queer and gay people, its just that…’ and so on. Indeed, this may well be the case, but what there has never been is a society or yet a culture that recognized ‘them’ as distinctly gendered categories somehow equivalent to those dominant in the male and the female.. Verdi provides an exemplar of how the going rate of a reproductively oriented society was able to digest alternate sexualities without promoting alternate gender categories, as a number of his operas center around major historical figures known to be gay or queer, and who had to avoid exposing themselves too publicly for fear of losing their status and their power. Today, we might be ‘suspicious’ that old Joe Green was also one of them, but again, no matter, since he celebrated these lives in the context of high art, never making the error, both categorical and ethical, that their nobility in any way stemmed from their sexuality etc.. This is the fundamental problem with contemporary identity politics: that it proclaims one’s human value to be ordered by one’s life-chance variables, the list of which having been adumbrated in questionably relevant ways.

            Now, it may be said that discursively, since the Enlightenment concept of the sovereign self has become somewhat jaded, and just so, mostly with itself, that the humane thing to do is to open the door to other versions of selfhood in its stead. The law, for instance, has not yet followed along with this politics, but could be said to be observing from alongside. This ‘sovereignty’ was meant as an intellectual and a political statement: that I as an individual am not beholden to either the state or the church. This was the eighteenth century’s great political and intellectual cause. It was of course Marx who, while acknowledging the moribund character of the church and the abettor lack of character, shall we put it, of the state, nevertheless cautioned mightily against this sovereignty by reminding everyone that ‘yes, but you are beholden to your class’. To this Nietzsche added ‘and to your culture’ or lack thereof, and lastly Freud as well, soon thereafter, ‘yes, and to your unconscious’. With some dismay, I would imagine, the post-Enlightenment self had rapidly become too enlightened with itself! This was perhaps not quite what Delphi had imagined implying. Knowing thyself in modernity requires of us a somewhat more sophisticated analytic, and it is this truth which, though epistemic to be sure, has also been interpreted as being personal.

            For the Greeks, knowing thy rank, a kind of status in society but also with regard to the fates as well as in relation to the gods and their druthers, is what is meant by the ‘self’. During the transition from mythos to logos, selfhood remained an amalgam of archetype and what was imagined to be base essence, such as manhood or womanhood, adulthood or childhood, slave or citizen and so on. This was uplinked into a more ethereal tradition of mythic tropes, so that the Greek could refer to the one who went against social norms and customs – the one who was ‘abnormative’ in our language today – simply as a ‘moron’. But the one who went against the fates was a hypermoron, no less! We have, needless to say, forgotten only this second, more superlative term, simply because we no longer believe in either fates or furies. And yet, willy-nilly, the two have returned in the form of ‘feelings’ or even moods, to haunt both the annoyed ethicist as well as all those charged with defending ‘morality’. We are also told, of late, that to be queer or gay or what-have-you is akin to a form of fatedness; for it defines not only one’s personhood but also colors every interaction these so-fated persons have with the rest of us as well as with our once-shared institutional cultures. As falls fate, so falls fury, since both our reaction to the novel presence – supposedly in numbers, according to the pseudo-revolutionaries, and supposedly in threatening numbers according to the neo-traditionalists; both claims are, to my mind, utterly unconvincing if not outright vapid – and then their reaction to our reaction regularly ramps up into the furious.

            Such is contemporary life, and indeed, life with our phenomenological contemporaries, that we are forced to reckon with this ongoing reckoning, hence the copious amounts of popular analyses which pervade mainstream media as well as bastions of neo-conservatism. These latter-day evangels have made the defense of what has of late been called, rather disdainfully by those fashionably enlightened, ‘binarism’, into their own cause célebre, which is as disenchanting as the supposed source of this call to respectable arms. In contrast to any of this, one must ask oneself, ‘have I ever needed to include what is vulgar about my humanity and my character in the cast of internal heroes upon whom I call to make myself more noble?’. If we dare not answer in the negative, what we are claiming is that sexuality is the equal of the call to conscience, that gender politics is the equal of one’s being-aheadedness, that anxiousness is the same as Anxiety, and that one’s personal desires are no different than one’s personal character. As Hillerman’s Higgins would say to Selleck, ‘Oh my God, Magnum!’.

            The next step would be to investigate, scientifically and analytically, the root historical and cultural causes of this shift in self-perception. It is not enough to be disaffected with the ‘sovereign self’ and thence call off the whole project of modernity simply because it has not yet fulfilled its universal promise. A premise is just that, and only by the singularly impoverished logic of identity politics does the premise somehow equal the promise. Indeed, given what it took to get to the premise alone, we as a species owe everything we are and have to pushing this sensibility toward its existential futurity. Do we cast aside the three millennia of overcoming superstition, ethnocentrism, and misanthropy in order merely to reproduce some personalist version of all three of them? Today we are urged to celebrate nothing more than the human bereft of humanity, and beings with no conception of Being. In turn, supposedly avoiding this fetid fate, we are then urged to destroy it in the name of antique humanity; the persona bereft of personhood, the ‘thyself’ as a what and never a who. There is an alternative: the historical and existential being in the world; my ownmost selfhood which is completed in a fitting act of fate and faith alike.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Author: Persona Gratis

The Author: Persona Gratis (on the hyperbole of authority)

            One would not imagine that any author, let alone one prolific and broadly based, would disclaim credit for his works, but I want to examine how the notion of ‘The Author’ has not only come about, but as well, how it has accrued to itself what I think is a too-bountiful accreditation and thus an over-generous genuflection. It is well known that publishers play on the names of best-selling authors, who, since the mid-nineteenth century, may not have written all of the titles upon which their name appears. Readers are attracted to a famous name, and anything published thereunder will sell, and far more so than that of an unknown figure. The name of an author is a autograph persona which is both free to the press – they get undue mileage from it if the author has himself sold well in the past – and presents a free pass even to the more discerning reader who has previously enjoyed books by this ‘same’ person. These two forms of gratis make the author’s name most welcome, for it eases the process at both ends of the productive-consumptive cycle for such products. The name of the author thus takes over the function of fetish for this kind of commodity, freeing the author herself to write, perhaps under another name, something else not as beholden to market interest. This third form of gratis is not as gratuitous as the first two, but it still acts as an hyperbole, extending the reach of the writer as an actual person, simply because this same person as author no longer struggles to make ends meet through her actual work.

            It is always of interest when a singular concept iterates itself. The ‘author’ may be dead, in Barthes’ terms, in part due to the death of the idea of the work as Werke, and in part due to the death of God, the ultimate author, but this passing in fact has freed up the ‘writer’ – in terms yet wider than Derrida’s – to become an authority without relying upon authorship per se. One of Barthes’ motives arrives via a basic hermeneutics. Dorothy Smith, in her gracious dialogue with me many years ago, told me this: “When you publish a book, it is like writing a message and putting it in a bottle. You cast that bottle over the side and you have no idea where it will end up, or when. If it finds a beach at all you still can’t guarantee anyone will find it!” Certainly this is a wisdom, and indeed, the implication that one’s work will find itself rather shipwrecked on a reef or on the rocks remains a likely outcome, especially for philosophical books. This apt image speaks at first to the sense that the author loses control over ‘his’ work as soon as it is released, and for celebrity authors, perhaps sooner than this, when their avid editor and then marketer gets a hold of it. But historically speaking, if the book is read at all, the author in fact dies due to the function of the reader.

            The reader brings her own life experience to the text, and interprets it thereby and therefrom. I have had a number of such experiences, mostly with fiction, since the interpretative latitude that fiction allows for is far wider than that of non-fiction. The interpretation of discourse is, however, a more profound movement in authorship, if not necessarily authority. Kant reading Hume is called to mind; certainly one of the most serious moments in modern readership and interpretation. Heidegger reading Husserl is another, the former taking apart his mentor’s work and moving from it. Far less profound, but somehow of perduring import nonetheless, are other like moments, such as Riefenstahl reading Mein Kampf andthen criticizing its author to his face about it. As with most such encounters with those he admired,Hitler laughed it off with the no doubt self-conscious equivalent of an ‘aw shucks, girl’. One is tempted to insert a Leonard McCoy line, such has ‘I’m an artist, Leni, not a politician’, but so it goes. As modern hermeneutics explains to us, the text is eventually the world itself, and so Hitler’s later brushing off with a grin and a chuckle his top fighter pilot’s sage advice regarding how to destroy the RAF ended up carrying a far more fateful weight to it.

            The exegetical function of the reader broadens as readership did itself widen. However authoritarian and social class reproductive was the new bourgeois education from the 1820s onward, what it did produce was several generations of readers both apt and rapt, especially women, who ripped through a copious library of volumes, of pulp as well as of more precious paper. It is not a coincidence that the same decades saw figures like Schleiermacher and Schlegel break open the narrow scriptural definitions of hermeneutics and declare that its methods applied to all kinds of text. By the 1870s the ‘world as text’ sensibility, first associated with Dilthey, himself a profound student of textual revolution the early ‘post-Enlightenment’ period of the 1820s and 1830s – recall his first major work, the biography of Schleiermacher, widely hailed as a masterpiece and establishing Dilthey’s reputation as a major scholar even though its second volume was never completed – had captured the intellectual imagination as well as popular authorship, coming to its first nadir with Conrad and Wells. With some irony, given how hermeneutics freed itself from its lengthy roots in religious scholarship, the world as a text was in itself not a new idea. The medieval outlook had it that the ‘prose of the world’, to use Foucault’s expression, was literally written into the cosmos at large by the divine hand itself. The world was an autograph edition, not of itself, but indeed of the creation.

            All authors, therefore, had their apical ancestor in God. The logoi of human writers was a species of the Logos, the text made in His own image kindred with the being itself. But not only authorship was at stake here. Authority was itself linked up to that divine, and so the author was able to accrue to himself a kind of meta-narrative: in the main, that authorial intent was understood to be the key to any rightful interpretation, and though Schleiermacher extended the scope of hermeneutics he did not deviate from this ancient sensibility. To read scripture, and later nature, was to understand the mind of God as an intentional structure. No one claimed that they could know the divine mind as a whole, of course, only what God deigned communicate to humanity. Still today, there are those who imagine that what the author thinks of their work is the standard by which all other interpretations must be judged. This is an error at a number of levels, not the least held within Smith’s image above. In fact, we know today the author to be simply another reader of the text, since the text has taken on a life of its own after publication, or, even after being written in the first place. For myself, I do not return to my philosophical works. They would require me to patiently study them again, for one, and the earlier ones are often too prosaic to provide any pleasure in their decipherment. I have enjoyed re-reading many of my fictional works, mostly to share them with others aloud, but even here, I find myself either not recalling how I wrote this or that part, or, more radically, that I myself even wrote them at all! This is more than the wiseacre writers guide’s ‘healthy distance’. I have changed in the interim, which is my much-wanted ‘intents’ must be taken with a grain of hermeneutic salt. I have changed, and my interpretation of ‘my’ work has thus also changed. Sometimes we hear a question, if the author is famous, along the lines of ‘would you have written this or that today, or in hindsight, what are your thoughts about…’. To attempt a response other than ‘that was who I was then’ or such-like, is to gainsay the life process and as well, perhaps avoid acknowledging the ultimate outcome of that selfsame process.

            We as well sometimes hear of authors who tell us that they have ‘forgiven their younger selves’, but this is at best unnecessary and at worst a piece of personal sophistry. At the same time, authorial authority demands that I ‘stand by my works’, even though ideally any such work should be able to stand by itself. One can immediately understand how the historically inclined aura of the author casts a broad pall over both free interpretation as well as individuality, all the while allowing such persona to become both grander than they are as persons while at the same time losing their own textual freedom. From Barthes to Foucault and beyond ‘the author’ is a bad idea from the start. Derrida’s sense of it being ‘replaced’ or trans-substantiated into ‘the writer’ also did not hold up. For the writer too has both a pedigree and an aura – even the foppish but yet fashionable line, uttered in a Bohemian accent, that ‘I am a writer’, carries with it an indelibly clannish crest, declaiming a kind of cultural, but not at all necessarily cultured, elitism – and the former cannot provide nobility any more than can the latter become a halo. Perhaps the most an author should ever do, in responding to the effect of what he has written, is express an unfeigned caution about augmenting any interpretation through the use of authorial sources: ‘Yes, at one point I did write this book, and here’s what I like about it and here’s what I don’t’. One can consider this the author’s version of Richler’s deadpan, ‘I write books; some people like ‘em, some people don’t’. In this gruff but apt epigram lies the basic operation of both the writing process and the reception of the text itself, especially for fiction. Its very simplicity affords the listener all due freedom to work her own line. It is this hermeneutic space which in turn provides the very life of the work in question.

            To counter the gratis of persona the concept of the author holds out to us, we must realize over against it the freedom to become the kind of reader the text does itself require: One, in its most understandable and necessary, a basic literacy, including that of one’s culture history, which I then bring to any text; Two, within the discourses, a growing and cumulative base of knowledge, know-how, and even experience that a more demanding text asks of its potential readership. Without any reliance on the author to ‘explain’ his works and, at the last, shedding the perfect safety also of the expert or specialist in this or that literary or philosophical genre, also often hyperbolic in both its presentation and its own vicarious persona – ‘did you know that Derrida was also a Joyce scholar?’ – the reader comes face to face with both her own limitations, but also her creditable self-improvements. The one is as valuable as the other, for in their face must I continue to become more literate and wise. The deeper meaning of the world as text is thus brought forth, through interpretation, as its ownmost and superlative historical gift: I am one person but to me is bequeathed the species entire.

            G.V. Loewen is the ‘author’ of over 60 books and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.