Category: editorials

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.

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.

Refusing and Misusing Philosophy

Refusing and Misusing Philosophy (Sophia Resented but Re-presented)

            There are a number of ways in which the history of consciousness is demeaned or misplaced. Some of these occur within the bonds of discursive thought itself, thereby taking their slatternly place within that same history, and less important, but still revealing of a wider antipathy and most often a willing ignorance of thinking, occurring outside of discourse entirely; in popular media or in casual conversation. Philosophy, the ‘love of wisdom’’, though ancient relative to known history, is yet very recent when compared with the tenure of an evolving human consciousness itself. It is quite likely that due to its own presentation of self – it must be studied formally by literate persons – and its own career – it has been both the privilege and purview of cultured elites more or less from the beginning – philosophy can be much more readily dismissed, not only by those deemed outside of its discursive circle, but the more so, those outside of discourse as a whole.

            And this denotation comes from both the philosopher and from the non-philosopher alike. We are apt to hear, from sports broadcasts to face-to-face shills, that the ‘philosophy of this coach’, or ‘our philosophy in making pizza is’, somehow how superior to all others. Today, however, there is far fewer excuses to be made, and correspondingly, far less rationales available for such, for philosophy to be treated as if it were a permanent resident of cloud cuckoo land, with its acolytes floating somewhere above the world and its more guttural realities. All the more so because the greatest of thinkers lived in that same world, the world of humans and our shared history, and the world which is both the origin and destination of Dasein as a ‘being-in-the-world’. There is no record of any figure in the canonical history of Western thought who turned away from that world, eschewing it in search of something other, better, higher, or deeper. Indeed, the insights of these persons, at once human like ourselves and as well, persons who pushed themselves to discover their fullest humanity and for some, even humaneness, came from their engagement with said world, and not at all from disengaging from it. It is of more than mere picaresque interest to read what can be known of the philosopher’s lives, from their encounters with other important figures, to their interactions with the polis and with rulers, both positive – Aristotle tutoring Alexander – and negative – Socrates being executed by the State – or yet their daily rounds – Kant providing Königsberg with a consistent timepiece on his way to the tavern. In our own times, these vignettes are generally more gentle, but not always. One need only compare Bourdieu or Derrida’s curricular work for the French department of education and Scruton’s writing of libretti and novels with Foucault’s reckless sexual misadventures and his ultimate AIDS diagnosis and Ricoeur’s wartime incarceration in a labour camp, to be reminded that the world contains every possibility, even for the thinker.

            The first thing to recall to oneself, if one is feeling some resentment against thinking in general and philosophy in particular, is that these figures were and are human like ourselves. They live in the same world, are challenged by the same travails, endure many of the same hardships and feel the same fleeting joys. There is indeed no possibility of becoming a thinker at all if one abandons one’s own humanity. The chief difference between the thinker and the one who elects to avoid most of the confrontation between the present and the past and that between self and other, is that the former makes what is already his own, his ownmost. The apical leader of the guild, Socrates, in his defense against his coming execution, famously uttered that same guild’s motto: ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. This examination can, it is true, take a number of forms, but all such roads lead to an awareness which is simply unavailable in day-to-day life. Without suggesting a morality of mundanity, one can at least say that this is how it must be. The social world runs on its rails, and needs to run on them if society is itself not to falter. This is also not to say that any reflection which becomes necessary from time to time when such rails no longer function as they once did should be the sole responsibility of a few august figures, to be consulted as did the ancients their oracles and haruspices. For the philosopher is no mystagogue; she is, more accessibly and much less mysteriously, a resource person. In this way, she is no different from the plumber; a professional who has learned a body of professionalized know-how. What the philosopher adds to this contractual availability is that her skill set is not oriented to a specific task-at-hand; philosophy is not about ‘fixing’ things.

            Rather, the thinker performs a number of functions which are generally outside the daily expectations we have of ourselves and others:

            1. The thinker opens up the questions of the day: the general rubric here is that if everyone appears to agree on something, whatever its cultural content or political fashion, the thinker deliberately steps away from this sensus communis and says ‘are you sure about this?’. Such agreements are all too easy to find in our contemporary world, for by way of them persons and well as governments can carry the day their way. Hence the role of the philosopher in this first sense is that of questioner, doubter, critic and analyst.

            2. The thinker is as well tasked with querying our shared history. For general agreement upon this and that does not only occur with reference to the living present and the worldviews which remain extant for those who live in that present. It is for the historian to interrogate the contents of history, but the philosopher must ask, more penetratingly perhaps, what is history itself? Add to this the question concerning which history is the preferred one and why so, and what are the implications of viewing history in the rather Whiggish manner of vanilla verisimilitude. Instead of this, the thinker understands the presence of the past in our lives to be the thesis in an ongoing dialectic. It is what has been and what has been done, over against the new and the very concept of the future. So, secondly, the thinker’s vocation demands that she live that dialectic in search of a novel synthesis.

            3. The philosopher also clarifies what people already know and seeks to communicate this ideally limpid vision to the world. Gadamer specifically notes this third aspect of what philosophy is supposed to be doing, in view of the many sources of obscurity and obscurantism which reign mostly unchallenged; the State, media, schools, families, the church, and even what used to be referred to simply as gossip; misinformation and yet disinformation, much of it in our own time purveyed through digital media. In order to confront such deliberate obfuscation, the main challenge for the thinker is to not present more of the same! It is often a fair cop to suggest that the philosopher gets carried away by his own insights, to the detriment of being able to be both clear and indeed insightful, in a manner almost all could comprehend.

            4. Given that obscurity and the deliberate narrowing of discourse also happens within the history of thought, a fourth task for the philosopher is to be constantly vigilant against the tendency of intellectuals to flaunt their apparently superior historical abilities. What she finds, in doing so, is that those who have closed off access to the history of consciousness have done so by themselves ignoring or refusing that very history. ‘Academic’ examples unfortunately abound, from the mathematically inclined thinkers and logicians declaring that ‘anything before Frege’ is irrelevant, to the ‘third-wave’ feminists who declare the same thing for male authorship as a whole, to the Marxists for whom Hobbes is the true beginning of thought, or yet the ‘modernist’ who dismisses anything written before Hume and Vico. If thinking was strictly an ivory tower pursuit, a disconnected discourse would be its result, with its practitioners overly and overtly specialized to the extent of becoming ignorant of thought both human and historical alike.

            This is indeed what we see, in the majority, in the university today, where the students of even their own disciplines are often unaware of that specific discourse’s history. Psychology is particularly at fault here, but the other social sciences are close behind in their own self-willing ignorance. The humanities fare somewhat better simply due to their being understood as in themselves historical disciplines, and thus more closely related to philosophy. When Ricoeur states that ‘the history of philosophy is itself a philosophical endeavor’, this is a testament to, and an acknowledgment of, for one, Dilthey’s enduring contribution to thinking; that we must include ourselves in our studies, that the human being is not merely the vehicle for an otherwise transcendent consciousness but in fact is its home and hearth: we are philosophy embodied. The only thing that separates the human species from its animal cousins is our distinct duo of reason and imagination, the two essential aspects of thought. It matters not a whit how this uniqueness came about, only how it has enabled us to become what we are and how we utilize this astonishing ability in our own time, with a view to a collective future. In light of this, one might be tempted to add a fifth point to the philosophical star: could it also be said that the thinker’s duty is encapsulated in his reminder that each and all of us must orient ourselves only towards what may come in our shared futurity?

            It may at first seem a contradiction to be so concerned about history, and about coming to know the history of thought, and yet at once state that our entire goal must be about the future. But in fact, the whole function of having a past is to allow us the perspective necessary to walk forward; the past does not welcome us back within it, for this defeats its elemental purpose as resource and as the beginning of wisdom. Philosophy is not about the past, even if, necessarily and by definition, the vast bulk of its wisdom hails from another time to our own. The philosopher reaches into the history of consciousness with her mind, on our behalf, and thereby brings back to us its enduring self-understanding. By acting at once as an historian, a critic, a voice of clarity and elocution, and as a discursive dialogician, the thinker serves his culture in the most adept manner imaginable. No other figure in the human career has had such demands, but no other has brought to them such abilities. In the end, however, philosophy is not about philosophers, and it is Merleau-Ponty who has stated its case perhaps most pointedly: “Philosophy is not a body of knowledge; it is the vigilance that does not let us forget the source of all knowledge.”

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books. He is a social philosopher and ethicist in the traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Fiddler on the Hot Tin Roof

Fiddler on the Hot Tin Roof (The Media Minstrels)

            The fact that persons of Jewish descent dominate the culture-producing industries, both high and low, is the result of historical happenstance alone. Any other inference is not merely Anti-Semitic, it is suggestive of the very ressentiment that is once again building its political franchise. This ‘undergrowth’, as the narrator to the mostly excellent documentary The Architecture of Doom refers to it in its closing moments, is no longer simply underfoot, to the side, or creeping along unseen beneath a cultured canopy. That Jesus was himself Jewish, or at the least, was perceived as such whatever his paternal pedigree, should not have provided the Anti-Semite with an apical ancestor. But Jewish colleagues have told me that they still overhear, or are even told to their faces, that ‘The Jews killed Jesus’ and so on. Doubtless a personal retribution on the part of a few well-placed priests, the crucifixion hangs itself up on another kind of cross; one that is political through and through. The sandal has been on the other foot ever since. For ideally, being well-placed in a culture means having culture in the first place.

            Due to European property laws, as Marx and Engels pointed out in On the Jewish Question, the diaspora was funneled into service sector trades, including all those associated with accoutrement and requiring consistent and trans-national trade networks, such as jewelry, precious metals, and financing. It should be recalled that the first significant loan in history occurred when the Black Prince borrowed heavily in order to back a war, with the agreement that this debt would be repaid with interest. Needless to say, it was not. What were a group of Italian Jews with not even a militia in their employ going to do about it? By the nineteenth century, people of Jewish descent had become the leading indicators of a globalizing culture that would move from Mendelssohn to Mahler and from Marx to Freud. But at the very moment that ‘the Jews’ seemed to populate the corridors of culture, since, once again, they were barred from politics – mimicking the earlier division of labor between landed luxury and mere luxury items – there arose against this presence, both artistic and intellectual which appeared from above, a vicious counterpoint from below.

            In the Reich’s propaganda, the culture critic is singled out. This was easiest road, the lane of least resistance, for the critic produces in the criticized nothing other than a resentment. Shaw expressed it most famously, and most concisely, showing the critic to be nothing more than a eunuch beside the lovers’ bed. Akin to those who teach, those who can’t do, criticize. Indeed, I have encountered such criticism, resentful in itself, and have found myself saying, ‘write your own book, my friend,’ knowing full well that they were incapable of even that. The priests in the temple, driven from it by some neo-Hebrew and seemingly self-appointed messiah, are the truer apex of this jilted genealogy. Certainly, they got their revenge, but just as certainly, the history of Anti-Semitism, in its Euro-American context at least, begins there. And thus, and thence it is the culture critic who is the one who ‘passes his arrogant judgments’, and represents a wider ethnic group or ‘race’ who is devoid of ‘the very organ of culture’. Yet this could be said, and was said, of anyone who was a critic, Jew or non-Jew alike. The Reich focused nothing more, and nothing other, than an already present resentment, lensing it into an authentic ressentiment. Ironically, it was the artist who was first to heed this new politics, the intrusion of which into his absolutely apolitical, or even anti-political, realm, supposedly transcendent of anything petty at all, was uncommonly resented and rejected heretofore.

            The artist and the intellectual, the scientist and the lawyer, and above all others, so to speak, the physician, flocked to the NSDAP. Doctors as a profession boasted the highest party-member rates, partly due to the new regime’s promotion of eugenics, but also due to the clear-cutting of all Jewish medical professionals. The fact that many prominent members of the culture-producing sectors were of Jewish descent was simply an outcome of their heritage being prevented from pursuing other vocations was somehow lost. Of course, if any specific social group is targeted as being fit only for this or that, they will, over time, excel at it. They will, over time, develop networks internal which favor their in-group participation in a more longitudinal manner. The Nazis were adept at rewriting Germanic history into myth, but Hitler himself had more personal reasons for doing the same with his own biography. Perhaps it was so, that when he took in a performance of Rienzi in 1904, this was the ‘beginning of it all’, but surely it was three years later, with the rejection letter from the Vienna School of Art that set his resentment in motion. How many other art schools were there in Europe at the time? If one was 21st on the list of the very best, where only the top 20 are invited, one would think one would with some clearance actually get into a number of others. This fact too, was lost.

            Even so, it is not entirely fair to say that once those of Jewish descent were purged from cultural production only the mediocre remained. Otto Dix, an anti-Nazi expressionist, is a shining counter-example, one of the great artists of the interwar period and as ‘Aryan’ as they came. And even Hitler himself was a competent limner and a well-studied architect. But his real genius lay in graphic design. To this day, no symbology widens the eyes as does the suite of media bearing the half-twisted swastika; banners, flags, uniforms, standards, letterhead and many others. A whole-souled acolyte of Wagner, whose own anti-Semitism is well-known if potentially equivocal – in its singling out of Jewishness as an instance of the wider problem of ethnicity as a regression, for instance – Hitler became his own impresario. For the German of culture, it was clear that while those who were Jewish had indeed contributed mightily to European dominance, it was equally transparent that Gentiles could carry the torch without their help. Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner, Goethe, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger; well, yes, we’ve got some game after all.

            And thus today? The same fomenting fulminations are afoot as were present in the 1920s, this time in the United States and not so much in Germany. The same resentment building itself into a movement of political ressentiment, the same mistrust of government and its minions, the same disdain and mockery of those who create in the arts, the same ignorance of literature and of philosophy – ‘only God knows the truth of things’, that is, their God – and this reiterative refrain begins in the 1980s. Yet we must ask, and at this very moment, is not the same blithe and sometimes even blatant sense of the blasé evident in how those of Jewish descent who do dominate the modern mass media in all of its lower cultural forms, as well as the now much-less targeted high culture, as well a reprise of the same attitude and self-perception present in the bygone Berlin and Vienna sets? Seinfeld defending Israel at Duke? Convocation from an elite culture-producing space, its design and entire look mindful of nothing other than a smallish party rally, with not the king but rather the court jester presiding, cuts a rather febrile figure to my mind. A mimicry and a mockery at once, such events result in some Lovecraftian hybrid, a ‘thing that should not be’.

            Beyond the specific spaces, behind the publisher’s closed doors, within the select circles of Kultur if not the heated tin roof of society itself, the coming victims of Holocaust II await their less chosen fates. And yet this is the happenstance of history repeating itself, without grace and outside of a wider Zeitgeist. People of Jewish descent know, more than any of the rest of us, that there is no Zionist conspiracy. It would then seem prudent if they did not continue to give the impression that there were.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, religion, aesthetics, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Donate your Brain to Pseudo-Science!

Donate Your Brain to Pseudo-Science! (a tax-free way to lose your mind)

            It is always less taxing not to think. The unthinking person can still take action in the world. The mundane sphere presents few opportunities for thought in any case, so one need not generally bother with it at all. We only need learn to use our technology, in the same manner as we have already, most of us, learned to apply norms and act according to the mores of the day. We do not, in either case, need to know the ins and outs, in any great or grave detail, of either Techne or Hexis. For the one, this is the job of the natural sciences, for the other, those social. The German translator of J.S. Mill’s System of Logic bequeathed to the discourse the lasting if unquiet distinction between ‘Natur’ and ‘Geist’ in providing the prefixes for Mill’s original sense of ‘natural’ and ‘moral’. Mills used the term ‘moral’ in his ‘moral sciences’ in the same way as Durkheim would later state that there was no other ‘moral order than society’. The Naturwissenshaften are seemingly straightforward, the Geisteswissenschaften seemingly less so.The first center around objects and phenomena that can be measured, even if in high energy physics such numbers can conflict and that there is an ‘observer effect’ at work. There is no object or posited force in the cosmos that escapes its own order, and this order is non-moral as well as non-moralizing.

            It is strikingly different with the social sciences or human sciences. Not only is the object the same as the subject – we are studying ourselves, which only could not give someone like Durkheim pause because of his very French nonchalance regarding other like conditions; ‘religion is society worshipping itself’, he famously declared in 1912, and so why not have a science dedicated to studying society itself? – that object is both moral and indeed moralizing, and all the more so today it appears. Mill recognized this with a typical rationality, including understanding that because the moral sciences centered around humanity, they must not only include women by definition but also that women should be doing the research as well as men. Harriet Martineau, the first person to write a social science methods book and also the first female fieldworker, was an associate of Mill’s, amongst a number of other high profile early woman scientists. And though the inventor of positivism, Auguste Comte, coined the term sociology, Martineau was the first actual sociologist. One might suggest at this juncture that anti-moralizing is still moralizing, but there it is. For built right into the very idea of self-study is the destabilizing presence of the ‘spirit’ or Geist.

            The career of the human sciences was, over the past two centuries or so, often held up by the sense that it could not in fact be scientific at all, a view some hold even today. One could be forgiven for simply replying, ‘well if it didn’t trouble Weber, it shouldn’t trouble us’, but there is more to it than such a nod to authoritative analytics. And the critique of the human sciences was not a one-way street, with just natural scientists disdaining their ‘softer’ cousins. From within the ranks of the moral analysts a bevy of hortatory criticism emanated, with the likes of Ian Jarvie, Edmund Leach, Malinowski and Kroeber as well the founder of behaviorism, John Watson and most famously his student, B.F. Skinner, weighing in on how ‘backward’ were their respective fields, ‘mystical’, and even counting ‘magical thinking’ as a kind of object. Pitirim Sorokin, in his Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences (1956) – of which I own a signed and dedicated first edition, no less, speaking of fetishizing the object – dismantles the hocus-pocus of both the critiqued and the critics alike. Closer to our own day, the Weber scholar and philosopher of science Stanislaw Andreski, in his Social Science as Sorcery, (1972), makes no hoary bones about declaring much of the Geisteswissenschaften to be generally fit only for a museum, and some of their contents even to be non-existent.

            Even so, it can be also be said that this back and forth is part of a healthy scientific discourse, a necessary dynamic so that the wheat and chaff of investigation and interpretation can be separated and contrasted with one another. And the sciences ‘proper’ too were not without their like critics, most notably, Thomas Kuhn and later on, Bruno Latour, whose argument, if ever actually understood by the anti-science crowd, would with great irony be quite devastating. So, while there has clearly been an ever-present element of both sciences natural and social which is given to epistemological slippage, the critical discussion coming from within these discourses has generally been enough to identify the problematic feature. But not always.

            Eugenics remains the most egregious example of a study that everyone across the board for some sixty years thought was science. It was not limited regionally, like Lysenkoism, it was not practiced only by applied specialists, such as anthropometry, and it was not associated with any specific politics of the day, which ultimately was its most insidious and dangerous ruse. We have to remind ourselves that the Reich was merely an extension, in its policies and practices, of what everyone thought at the time and long leading up to that time. This aside from Anti-Semitism itself, which was ubiquitous. Eugenics was the source of this sensitivity made sensibility, bigotry turned into science and thus made ‘objective’ by it. There is a eugenics institute to this day, though privately funded only, and sociobiologists, who skirt the very boundary of a form of self-hatred as human beings, still top the best-seller lists from time to time. The idea that superiority, especially that in ‘intelligence’, can be accounted for by ethnicity, gender, or other structural variables dies hard due to the very sense that we are yet in ignorance of the ultimate workings of human consciousness.

            All of this takes us directly back to the original puzzle which confronted Mill: how does one design a logic in which subject and object are essentially the same thing? What kind of epistemology is viable for such a condition? Science is not only a demythology but also very much a deontology, which suggests that any essence of thinghood as the natural sciences explain it has nothing of Being in it at all, and thus can be ‘reduced’ to its relevant quanta. We have encountered little enough in our nascent study of the cosmos to suggest otherwise. But from the first, the social scientist comes up against nothing less than a fully-fledged ontology, living and breathing, professing its soul to itself and anyone else who might be willing to, perhaps naively, listen. How does one study something ‘like that’ at all? Attacked from all sides, with philosophers joining scientists in deriding the student of humanity – the first engaged in protecting its interpretative territory, the second its good name – it would seem that the very idea of the social sciences itself was a non-starter. But due to the exiguity of the object, as well as the simple fascination of any thinking being reflecting upon itself as well as the problem, not of ‘other minds’ or the Other per se, but rather in getting along with the other, the human sciences have, in fits and starts, nevertheless flourished. Economics, that hard-hearted ‘dismal science’ which is not about nature at all, remains high in the human saddle, and its micro counterpart, psychology, is the analytic space from which all of the ‘bleeding-heart’, if mostly equally dismal, public policies emanate. Geography reminds us that we still live in and on a world, and anthropology and sociology have gifted that same world to all of the newly fashionable ‘studies’ that, for the Thomas Huxleys of the day, strain the definitions of both science and discourse alike.

            The conflict about what is and what is not pseudo-science is thus never a town and gown affair. The physicist nods his head to the chemist but that’s all he does, the biologist shakes his head at the psychologist, the economist sniffs at the sociologist, the anthropologist wrings her hands at cultural studies and yet nursing, and the philosopher turns away from all of it in a piece. That anti-scientism targets its apparent opposite tells us of a home truth as well; that some scientists take their work for a kind of modernist and rationalist religion. And yet the political situation does not admit any easy egress, for if the scientist explicates her vocation along lines Weberian let alone from the perspective of a Latour, then all might as well be lost, for once the regressive anti-science person gets a hold of the presence of both historical and epistemological relativism within science itself, its very existence can be called into question. To be absolutely objective insofar as one can, science truly is ‘a candle in the dark’, as Sagan described it. It is only a tool, subject to human error, but it remains the best we have. The anti-scientist does not only disbelieve in this sensibility, he also feels that science is itself a fraud; that there is, in a word, no difference between science and pseudo-science.

            This fundamental opposition to all of the sciences, be they of nature or of humanity, cannot be eroded by rational argument. Even the most direct evidence to the senses is dismissed – witness the malingering doubt regarding climate change – simply because the source is itself invalidated: ‘Science says what? Well, that’s obviously wrong, immoral, ungodly, secularist, sacrilegious.’ I do not think that most scientists understand the scope and depth of the opposition ranged against their trade and its discourses. Trained to accept both authoritative argument and sensate evidence, learned in mathematics and the details of technologies, the scientist imagines that she is only an adept within a universal suffrage of thinking. But in fact, most people have no idea how science works or even why it exists. This is another reason why febrile persons from within the academic discourses have of late suggested that there can be ‘indigenous science’ or epistemology, or that different cultures have ‘different’ sciences. No and no. This is the truer pseudo-science. Science itself is a formal discourse which studies in a systematic manner the patterns and structures of nature and culture. It is neither Hexis nor Praxis. The Greeks invented it, and no one else even came close. For all other cultures, for whatever local or historical reason, remained ensconced in their tradition; their cosmogonies may be beautiful but they are nevertheless mythical. And even if our shared Jamesian consciousness is separated from the infinite ‘by only the filmiest of screens’, it will fall to science alone to discover and explain just how this is so. That is, if it still exists.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, religion, social theory, aesthetics and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary ‘moral sciences’ for over two decades.

Valkyrie Eleison

Valkyrie Eleison (The Ultimate Narcissism)

But slight are they, unworthy a word;

still whole are my limbs and trustily knit.

If but half so well as my arm

shield and spear had availed me,

ne’er from foe had I fled;

  • Wagner, The Valkyries, Act one, Scene one

            Of late, with visions of the human apocalypse a major theme in entertainment fiction, the mystery of our collective end made commodity and just in time, the wealthy among us seek to transcend their destinies by constructing heavily fortified villas in remote places, staffed by select groups of trusted friends and what-have-you, to be driven around – touring the wasteland which they believe to be our future – in equally adept vehicles, armored, with six wheels and powered by, well, whatever rapidly dwindling fuel supplies remain. Corporations which actually build these latter-day Babelian monsters report more business than they can handle, not that they are sorrowful in the least. For the bottom line of the dread-mongers trade is the ecstasy of an ejaculation of blood.

            It is a central tenet of Calvinism to imagine that if one is materially successful in this world, that it should be taken as sign of one’s elect status in the then novel Protestant soteriological doctrine. Salvation was always a mystery to this point. One did not know, and could not know, who was to be saved and who was to be damned. Now that the wealthy can save themselves, so they think, their investment in a bedamned future severs any Gordian knot traditionally associated with the divine mystery. And this not only in Christian belief but also in numerous Pre-Christian cultures, including those Nordic. The Valkyries, the choosers of the slain in battle and thus also, by definition, choosing those who will live to fight another day, are famously celebrated in the Wagnerian epic Ring Cycle. One of the most gripping scenes in film history has their ‘Ride’, from Act III of Die Walküre, providing the soundtrack for a vicious helicopter gunship attack in Apocalypse Now! (1979). But none of this has any relevance beyond the framework of the conflict between the happenstance of death in human life and the human aspiration to live on in its face.

            Whirligig Valkyries or no, death, sudden and irretrievable, is the daily potential lot of anyone who lives. What the wealthy have decided, in their flight before this essential condition, is that they will build for themselves an impenetrable shield against not death per se, since even after the end of the world they too will still die, likely alone and starving in their obscure castles, but rather against chance itself. So it is not the idea that one has attempted to cheat death that is so despicable about their actions, but rather that they believe themselves to be worthy of life alone, outside of death; that they are superior to the rest of us simply because of the ‘signage’ of their logistical capacities, their entrepreneurial genius, their work ethic, their dumb luck, their inheritances, their elite marriage circles or any combination aforementioned. Instead of channeling their wealth and skills back into the world which gave them their fluky birth, in order to help save the species from itself, they, with a calculation both patent and precise, turn their backs on we lower forms of life. In interview, their contractors – who of course do not name their clients, some of whom are celebrities after all – say that these people seek escape not even from disaster of whatever type, but from other human beings. This is what they actually state as the reason for hiring such shadow-builders. The wealthy elites are quite aware of our resentment towards them, quite understanding of the dynamics of capital, and quite shy about fully trusting governments and their policing forces to ensure the longitudinal protection of their wealth. They not only build redoubts, they assuage their own recurring doubts by also contracting private militia, ex-military retirees turned post-imperial soldiers of fortune. Call their cliques night watchmen on amphetamines, perhaps. Will these trusty, if well-paid, dogs also benefit from being housed inside the structures they must risk their lives, supposedly, to protect?

            The entire enterprise would be laughable if it were not the case that these elites see the world-joke being placed squarely upon us. Their utter lack of conscience, social or ethical or yet historical, places they themselves in the role of the court jester; observant, unwilling to commit, saying the things no others can say, for which of the rest of us would not choose as they have done, if we could only do so? But in fact, there are those whose concern is with the authentic human future, whose care is for the species-essence and for their human fellow. The idea of the apocalypse makes for thrilling fiction, apparently, but only the most cynical sociopath wills its reality. Even a Putin does not will it, and seeks to avoid it by bluff and bluster as well as by old-fashioned hammer-and-tongs combat over which the truer Valkyries still range. The sociopaths, including both the mock-Christian evangelist who sloughs off the responsibility for the ‘end times’ on an unwilling deity, as well as the neurotic and self-absorbed celebrity or entrepreneur, who feels strongly that the rest of us can really well go to hell, are fortunately few in number and tend not to seek political office. Even so, their presence constitutes an undergrowth of amorality that any sane society would shun. We have, in our ardor for fantasy both epic, as in that religious, and vulgar, as in that capitalist, indeed created this elite ourselves, and thus must bear the burden of its deepening legacy.

            For those elites who do not seek egress from the responsibility they share with all those who live today, we might ask that they engage in their own capitalist combat and take out the companies whose leadership promotes self-seeking evil; whose directors hide themselves away from the too-public eye; whose founders imagine themselves immortal at our expense. Can one think that a Warren Buffet or a Bill Gates has a Wolf’s Lair awaiting their last call? A William Shatner, a Patrick Stewart? Perhaps we do not know, in any real sense, the famous and the celebrated. But what we do know is that increasing numbers of lesser lights are becoming more and more obsessed, not about the survival of the species, but rather about merely their own, paltry shadow-sylphs, half-souled dwarves whose only comfort is to live again within the penumbra of personhood, dwelling in a world made the darker by their narcissistic madness.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, health, religion, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Two Types of Freedom

Two Types of Freedom: Academic and Civil

            Often confused, mainly due to the coincidence of youth matriculating from an unfree state to the relative freedom of new adulthood, academic freedom and civil liberty appear to blend into one another because the young person, in their daily rounds and as a newly freed and fully human being under the law, now steps onto campus and now steps off. This motion, normative, expected, and quotidian, gives the impression of being seamless and consistent. But all experienced adults understand that social context, when consorting with human freedom in general, is of the utmost. Every organization has its intake and internal rules. If one does not wish to conform to them, one should not join in the first place. Yet it is understandable as well, with some little perspective of years, that anyone who has been essentially unfree for the first seventeen years of their life would mistake a sudden and seemingly complete opening up of the space of general freedom in their nascent social being as the all in all. Following directly from this, the ability to speak one’s mind, no matter the issue or context at hand also appears to be a new reality and that by definition.

            The actual reality is, however, that the institutional unfreedom of childhood and youth is simply loosened, not loosed. Freedom can only be had within society, as Berger notes, even though for human beings, this also means that the social order has itself, and within it, also by a more adept self-definition, the seeds of its own revolution. In short, all enduring social change comes from within. The young person, who is abruptly an outsider on two fronts – one, and gladly so, forever graduated from the unfreedom of chattel-like status in and around eighteen years of age; and two, suddenly and not by choice, someone who is looking at the adult world from the outside in, and this for a few more years perhaps – has difficulty grasping that the simplest entrance into this second world, and the one that each of us spends the rest of his life inside, is to learn the new rules of conduct and how they both open themselves onto basic freedoms whilst limiting others. The political fashions of the day serve mostly as an exercise in self-expression which is at best annoying and irrelevant and at worst a satire or parody of authentic freedom. These early experiments in a generalized freedom inevitably come up against certain limits imposed by the adult organizations, such as universities and governments, corporations and benevolent societies. Their push and pull constitutes a rite of passage for youth-into-adulthood and should not be given much credit otherwise.

            But let us, before continuing, first define the two major types of freedom which are at stake and which, because of their close contiguity in the societal life course as well as the coursing of social life, become easily conflated at first glance.

            1. Academic Freedom: this is a technical and professional denotation only relevant to conduct on campus and in the scholarly discourses as published and expressed in other vocational or guild-like settings, such as conferences or virtual pedagogic spaces etc. It adheres only when a student or a faculty member seeks to make a discursive statement about whatever it is in which they have an intellectual interest. A ‘discourse’ is simply the conversation, historical and theoretical, that surrounds a topic, a subject or object, a question, or an idea. Anthropology has a specific discourse, feminism another, economics a third, and so on. That they run into one another, sometimes in a salutary and sometimes in a conflicting manner, is nothing to shy away from, but is rather that which gives continued life to the conversation of humankind and its sense of what our collective brain-trust is capable. Thus, the ‘conflict of interpretations’ to borrow from Ricoeur, is the life-blood of thought itself. Academic freedom means that within each discourse, a student or professional is free to state their case as best they can, mustering this or that line of argument and evidence as the case may allow, and this is all that it means.

            2. Civil Freedom: this is a much more general phrase connoting the interplay between the law, mores, custom, tradition, and the individual agency which we, in North America, so dearly prize. It frames the ‘open space of the public’, wherein the Agora-like conversation of the day, of the hour, of the moment, as well as that perennial, may take place unadulterated by the ulterior motives of specific institutions. It may seem that it is in this space where everyone becomes her own Socratic presence, but it is well to remember that just because any single institution or organization cannot, or should not be allowed to, adjudicate the content and rhetoric of this shared space, this in turn means that the entire set of oft-competing institutional suasions is very much present. It is by the check and balance of social institutions and their confrontation with personal sensibilities and individuated agency that civil freedom exists. In a word, our general social freedom is framed by the actual work of all of the aspects of society to which we belong; it is not, repeat, not the same thing as an idealized human freedom. Its very name should caution us to this regard: it is a freedom which is civil and must remain so.

            Understood as discrete, it should simply be a matter of committing to memory and thence to practice, for young people, the difference between the two. More than this, one can now recognize that neither academic nor civil freedom approaches the abstraction of freedom ‘itself’ or in general. The former is solely about discourse and ideas, the latter about playing a cultural game which has within it the always-already of social change within its loosened harness. To overstate one’s case within the Offentlichkeit is to betray its collective trust. To claim that one is solely within the truth of things in a world of competing truth-claims, is to sabotage its historical force. This is what university students, for one instance, are currently engaged in, no matter what ‘side’ they have chosen to demonstrate for or against. What is lost in these mise-en-scene is the very freedom they imagine they are expressing.

            This is so not due to topic or ‘issue’ – in the same way, academic freedom may be gutted by a zealotry which is in itself value-neutral; it can adhere to any discursive topic and at any time, pending wider influences – but rather to the manner of enacting one’s claims about such. There are, proverbially, multiple sides to every ‘story’, and even within our own biographies, we can never be utterly certain of our own intents, and with failing memories over time, even our own actions once committed. The worlding of the world is also not entirely known to us in the moment. It often takes a while for things to ‘play out’, to see the effects of our actions in the present. For the young person, all action seems to account for itself in the now, but anyone with a little life experience knows that this is hardly ever the case. This ‘now’ is an artefact of a consumer anti-culture which seeks to compel us to satisfy immediate need and greed, and is thus an interloper with regard to the political conversation which must be present to animate any culture, no matter how sophisticated or simple it may be. But for the newly adult person, schooled only in the now of consumption, trained only to react to a stimulus, market or otherwise, and to never either prevent or at the least consider, freedom takes on the mantle only of a commodity, however ‘priceless’ it is said to be. Generationally, it is certainly necessary that young people test the limits of their respective social bonds, for this is an important way in which we older adults may gain a larger perspective and thus join our younger peers in initiating this or that change. At the same time, what is authentic to generational interplay must at some point upshift itself into a true ‘confrontation with the tradition’, something each of us, no matter how aged and experienced, remain a part of until we finally part ways with human life itself.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, social theory, religion, aesthetics and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Newly Invisible Man

The Newly Invisible Man (a personalist statement, 3)

            ‘We don’t need to listen to white men’. So declaimed a ‘Feminist’ leader from Quebec in reaction to another Feminist author’s caution that such persons were suffering and indeed might, because of their collective resentment at recently becoming invisible, in turn make all others suffer. Putin is a white man after all, as is Trump. The Taliban are at least male, and so we are perhaps to believe that they are ‘acting white’ in their evil behavior. While it is the case that there are a number of genres of Feminist sensibilities, in all cases wherein thinking drops off and gives way to bigotry, what in fact we have encountered is a form of fascism. To borrow the economist Tom Hazlett’s jarring, if apt, neologism, what we have run into in these cases in not Feminism, but rather Feminazism.

            Feminazism and its axis of ignorance, mainly to be found on university campuses and centered in departments of English and also Gender Studies, but as well in NGOs and some NPOs abroad, is not Feminism at all, but rather, and more simply, a form of unthought that has taken on the guise of a discourse and thus the masque of a faux praxis. It is the estranged sibling of the Reich, and in its social vision, the ideal state is merely an obverse mimicry of its namesake, and not at all an inversion let alone a parallax. And though it has yet to be formally elected, it is nonetheless real enough. I can testify to its reality because I live in a Feminazi State. In it, I am invisible, and unlike the villain in the famous Wells novel, who was feared because he now had the power to do anything he wanted – perhaps much like white men actually seemed to have during my favorite author’s lifetime – the reality is that if you actually are invisible, you can’t in fact do anything at all.

            To my knowledge, I am the most prolific scholarly writer of Generation X. No one else within that demographic has the breadth and depth of study I have brought to my work, and no one else also writes revolutionary epic fiction let alone in addition writes for digital media. And for that matter, who else has shared intimacies with both Dorothy Smith, one of the great feminist social scientists of our day, as well as Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty? My almost 60 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, social theory, health and religion amongst other areas can certainly speak for themselves, that is, if they too were not cloaked by a miasmatic vapor of vapid chiasm. In these terms I have but one living peer, the conservative thinker and baby boomer Roger Scruton, someone Feminazis certainly hate. He and I have few points of agreement in our thought, but I too am a Wagner fan and I do admire a writer who can not only do philosophy – even if without Freud – but as well novels and to top it off, also pen libretti of all things. So how is it that an apparently generational talent such as myself is unemployable? Could that have occurred in any other time but our own? Perhaps it is the vocation, as luminaries such as Georg Simmel came to have a full-time job only late in life, and Gregory Bateson never did. A philosopher is never quite of his own time alone, as David Hume, another self-employed fellow, and Friedrich Nietzsche, another early retirement, can readily attest. But invisibility truly implies a lack of presence in all spaces, and that not merely as a thinker but indeed as a person.

            No media will publish my essays or opinion pieces. No political party responds to my offers of policy help. No employer of any stripe hires me. No NPO desires me to volunteer on their behalf. No ‘respected press’ will publish my novels. No school responds to my invitations to take advantage of my presence as a veteran educator and pedagogic theorist with a nominal but international reputation, in their ‘catchment areas’; not for teaching the human sciences or the history of thought or creative writing or even helping college-bound students polish their own writing so that they do not fail out of the ‘big high school’ after a fleeting fashion; no none of that, thank you. The only journalist who will even speak with me, the insightfully dogged Barbara Kay, patiently awaits a story. But in fact I have none. My story is the story of European culture writ small, or better, made small by a pressing ignorance and bigotry that seems to have engulfed our entire society overnight. From whence did such a cataclysm come?

            The brilliant political sociologist, Barrington Moore Jr., another white guy, summed our stupor succinctly: ‘No Bourgeois, no democracy’. The middle classes in liberal democracies have shrunk significantly over the past four decades. The vast majority of these once thriving denizens of modernity have fallen into classes below. This movement can only foster in them a deep resentment which, added to the historical weight of those left out, upshifts itself into a true ressentiment. It is this ‘malicious existential envy’, as Max Scheler, another white guy, analyzed it, which lies at the heart of fascism’s sense that cultural elites are to blame for social inequities and inequalities the both. It is the driving force behind the so-called ‘populist’ politics; really, a form of neo-fascism and an expression of the sheer frustration of becoming invisible en masse. Opportunistic politicians are a dime a dozen in this vein, and most have utterly no social class relationship to the franchise they so shamelessly court. They themselves are elites who have been mocked by their peers, as Trump had been for decades, and thus also seek a kind of revenge – this time, a more personal one – against all those whose arrogance has prompted a turning away from our shared cultural heritage. And so what a cataclysm indeed! Uncultured unthinking masses moving to unseat social elites who post-war have themselves shrugged off the very culture and thought which both created the modern world and at once preserved the entire history of human consciousness. Such false elites deserve their fate, surely, but what rather of the real deal?

            It is one thing to live in a time of the world regression. Economics, demographics, politics and other broad and anonymous social forces ebb and flow. But to also live in a time of cultural regress, wherein ethnic, gender and other parochial loyalties trump any perennial suggestion that thinking is what makes us human in the first place is another matter. And that these are in fact the same times, our collective present, makes invisible any and all who seek reflective reason. No one who desires to be visible can in turn make another invisible, as all fashionable ‘identity’ movements do. No one who wishes to count for something can in turn make another uncounted or indeed uncountable. It is not merely that our social world would not exist without the history of thought, without art, without science, all thus far emanating from white males almost exclusively – including such like Kant, Kierkegaard, Tchaikovsky, Foucault et al; are the gay fellows of this DWEMic emic also to be discounted? – but our very humanity itself. And what did all these white guys do in order to attain their fullest humanity on our behalves? The very opposite of heeding their narrow birthright. They climbed the highest known cultural peaks in their own day with the sole purpose of leaping off them. Only by doing this do we transcend our all-too-visible bigotries; only through this leap of faithless faith do we become as Gods on earth.

            G.V. Loewen is, for better or for worse, as he has been described in this well-meaning caveat.

La Crème de la Crematoria

La Crème de la Crematoria (The Shoah must not go on)

            “Follies seem these thoughts to others, and to philosophy, in truth, they are so.” Said Rienzi; “but all my life long, omen and type and shadow have linked themselves to action and event: and the atmosphere of other men hath not been mine. Life itself is a riddle, why should riddles amaze us?” (Bulwer Lytton, 1840:364).

            In the darker humors of a post-Pythonesque imagination, Malibu Barbie is supplanted by Klaus. One can envisage a MAD-TV sketch, with a Margot Robbie lookalike donning Hugo Boss’s menacing red and black, belting out ‘Under the Double Eagle’ with Ken as they pop-top tour the streets of Lyons. Now Robbie is herself no Nazi, of course, but a good actor should be able to play almost any role. And Mattel’s ubiquitous doll is, after all, ‘very Aryan’, to borrow from Chaplin. She’s a tall lanky blue-eyed blond who epitomizes the ideal whiteness of commercially defined glamor. That the somewhat sartorial film ambushes various clichés which abound in the toy itself is a rather different attempt at a demythology than say, Bruno Ganz’s stellar portrayal of the great dictator in ‘Downfall’. There, we must agree with Ganz’s own assessment, which shocked and dismayed his Jewish friends and colleagues, which can be summed as: ‘I feel I now more truly understand Hitler; I know why he did the things he did, and indeed, my overwhelming reaction to him is one of pity, sympathy and a sense of the tragic.’. But ‘Barbie’ rests its case on popular fiction, and that directed to children to boot. ‘Downfall’ is a dramatization of historical events, as related intimately by Hitler’s personal secretary. It is a memoir writ large, and thus accesses an aspect of the authentically historical. ‘Barbie’ is also a memoir of sorts, but one recessing anything historical into the timeless space of childhood play.

            If only Hitler’s own imagination had remained in that same space. If only he had viewed Rienzi at the tender age of fifteen, and shrugged it off as a reasonable allegory of the political confrontation between the people and the elites, discarding any sense that Wagner – or Lytton for that matter – were somehow in the know about what actually occurred during the republican period of the Roman Empire. Instead, he himself relates that ‘this is where it all began’. Much later, he declares, with his usual rhetorical unction, that, ‘our state is that which rests upon the people’s deep sense of the irrational, and thus it is art which must lead society, and to which we must bend our collective will.’ I am both translating and paraphrasing here, but you get the idea. What he meant was, of course, not the ‘irrational’, but rather the non-rational, as in those feelings and beliefs associated with a religion. He was aware that people were moved more by their hearts than their minds, and as well, that those same non-rational hearts suffered in a way that the rational mind cannot. The Reich arose from such misery, and then trebled its misery by projecting it around the globe, where it resonates to this day.

            In its propaganda, in its diaries, and in its policies, one encounters the leitmotif of ressentiment above all others. This is the same emotion – malicious existential envy – that is the source of the neo-conservative movement and its evangelical vanguard. This is the emotion which Trump has tapped into and channeled, though he as an individual likely feels little of it. Yes, he has been consistently mocked, by none other than Jewish entertainers for the most part, such as David Letterman. Hitler felt himself to be cheated out of a position at the Vienna school of art by the majority Jewish entrance committee, and the fact that the painter Oskar Kokoschka was the 20th and final successful applicant of 1908 and Hitler came in 21st could not have helped. Kokoschka much later suggested in interview that if their positions had been reversed, ‘he would have gone on to become a mediocre painter and I a benign dictator.’ Perhaps not quite benign, as he once created a life-size BDSM doll of Alma Mahler after she had dumped him. But my point is simply this: ressentiment is widespread in any society that markets heavily unattainable ideals, and then also appears to limit certain people’s access to the very resources that would foster gaining such ideals. The phenomenologist Max Scheler is owed the greatest debt in analyzing this dangerous condition, first understood more fully by Nietzsche. The neo-conservatives are those who, in general, have been marginalized by modernity and by modernism, and have, since about 1980, reacted to this growing erosion of their beliefs and individual rights by adopting a chopped-down version of personhood set into a mockery of Christian ethics. In this simplistic sensibility, they have attained a strength of numbers which is politically formidable. If all of the nuances of both Burkean conservatism and authentic Christianity had been maintained, such numbers and their apparent agreement would not have been possible.

            What this means for the rest of us is that we must make a choice between a regression into the same kind of social motion that animated the NSDAP and got them elected, and the usual gang of idiots, to make a second nod to MAD, who populate the corridors of power in so-called liberal democracies. These latter may be incompetent and irresponsible but they are not generally dangerous, so the choice seems clear enough. All the while, those who are most at risk, arguably people of Jewish descent and Black Americans, must together continue their uneasy partnership purveying low-culture (over the) counter-propaganda. If there is even a hint that the entertainment industry has an ethnic-enclave gatekeeping mechanism about it, then it is surely one of utter desperation, even outright fear. The Goyim must be kept distracted, made to laugh, to swoon, to sentimentalize their otherwise barbaric and cruel passions, and in spite of a Black leader’s epithet regarding New York and the case of Bernhard Goetz, amongst many other tensions, these two social groups, through sports and fiction, feel compelled to continue to concoct what is essentially a minstrel’s dire duet.

            It is not a stretch to imagine another Shoah. Hamas and Hezbollah have neither the firepower nor the allies to construct it, but the American neo-conservatives very much do. And for the same reasons that Hitler was enormously popular, seen as a savior, not unlike the recently fetishized Trump, all those who suffer from the ignominy of ressentiment are capable of any act. Scheler makes it clear by distinguishing resentment, which gives way to simple envy, from its more extreme sibling. Resentment tells me I should be like her, have what she has, youth, beauty, admiration, wealth, or what-have-you. But ressentiment tells me that I should be her, which implies that she herself should be dead and I have replaced her with myself. In all those breasts which have been sidelined by science, by art, by education, and by the economy, malicious existential envy rages, and rages on. And it is the arrogance of cultural – though not necessarily actually cultured – elites which performs the final straw on such a social stage. A common plaintiff of Goebbels’s films is that ‘the Jews’ have ‘passed their arrogant judgments’ upon art and life alike. Art history itself is not at issue. Even the long-suffering Red Army shrugged it off, sending some 200 Hitler Youth fighters back home to their surviving parents and their leader, a professor of art history, back to his academic position, after their ludicrous attempt at defending the Olympic stadium in Berlin. But the neo-conservatives, unlike the Nazis, have interest in neither art nor culture. Imagine then, in a yet darker humor, a sheer simple madness this time and not the great Al Jaffee’s crew, a Reich in which there is no art, no culture, and no thought. For after all, no less than Heidegger himself, arguably the world’s greatest living thinker, was invited to become state philosopher, a posting he toyed with for several months before wisely turning it down. Richard Strauss, one of the world’s two greatest living composers, became the Reich’s arts director. For all of their ressentiment, the Nazis still knew who was good.

            Not so this reprise movement. There is not the faintest sign or signage that culture of any sort is present in its minions. Michelangelo’s ‘David’ is naked, my blushes. Judy Blume talks teen sex, how disgusting. And uh, no Margaret, I’m actually dead, remember? Quit your bitching and leave me in peace. Give me the Nazis any day of the year, one is tempted to say. They not only celebrated the naked form – well, if you looked like Margot Robbie at least – they avidly listened to Bruckner. They disdained swing music, as do I. Of course, their ‘taste’ in such things was incorrectly sourced in the idea of authorship. The big bands were often helmed by Jewish musicians, and after all, Mahler himself was born a Jew. Speaking of Gustav this time and not his wife, Mahler gave the Nazis conniptions, with many listening to him discreetly, since they loved his art but publicly had to hate his person. And while I wouldn’t have turned the Tchaikovsky Museum into a motorcycle repair shop, as the SS did whilst temporarily in the neighborhood, I do think Bruckner is the superior composer, as did they. It is sage to recall Putin’s recent comment about there being ‘no gays in Russia’. Maybe not now, but then there was Peter Ilyich. To extend our satire, the SS may have been taken aback to know that Tchaikovsky might well have admired men on motorbikes.

            All of this would be anathema to the neo-cons, and thus none, including any sense of humor, would be present in the Fourth Reich. Let’s not fool ourselves into hoping that such desires shall pass, and without a fight. Ressentiment is present in all of us. Our hearts feel its minor fuel each time we are denied something we had been promised, that we knew we had earned, that we are owed by another, by a social institution, by government, or perhaps even by life itself. And though it may be true that ‘deserves got nothing to do with it’, our basic will to that very life can conflate chance and destiny, belief and opinion, even fact and fiction. When it does, go look in the mirror and tell yourself that you would never, ever, be a death camp guard.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 58 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.