essays – GV Loewen

Salem and Jerusalem

Salem and Jerusalem (Seek and Ye Shall Find)

The sense of pursuing something at all costs is reflective of the will to life. In principle, we are beings who are limited by our form of Being. Even if we have attempted to divide the One and the many, placing the former either in a superior space which is yet life, though beyond itself, or by imagining that we are more deeply and fully part of that same Being, and thus this experience of life is but partial and transitory, we are still confronted by the challenge of living that life as a being incomplete. This is such a daunting prospect for the individual and for the community alike, that the intrusion of the One is historically seen as a regular feature of human existence. Now, whether or not this is truly an ‘intrusion’, irruptive and thus posing as irreal in space and time, or it is merely a construction, can only be judged from without. Modernity does not in general cleave to the conception of the One, for it has firmly parked this sensibility in non-human forms, trading the infinite for the indefinite. So, when we review specific historical events or even moods, we today gaze with both disdain and astonishment, that our ancestors could be so moved to have done what they did at the time in question.

Our two metaphors, one of the witch-hunt and one of the crusade, closely related as they are but trending off in opposite directions – the former toward the person and thence the personal, the latter outward to the world and thence the cultural – will serve us both historically and analytically. Salem is synonymous with paranoia, local politics, Puritanism, misogyny but above all else, the abreaction against the abnormative. In Foucauldian mode, Salem is an exercise in small scale biopower. For pioneer settlers, faced as they were with an unending wilderness populated by superior numbers of indigenous peoples, unmarried childless women were an unaffordable luxury. Whatever the hysteria of charges against these women might have been in the minds of both their peers and their leaders, the basic transgression was of the most basic reproductive rule, made extreme by the circumstances. Salem is with us today in the anti-abortion movement, mainly helmed by women, and in the anti-gay movement. Anyone who opts out of the reproductive cycle cannot entirely be trusted not to do the same with that of production-consumption. Indeed, one might well suggest that child-free couples and gay persons are only tolerated because their lack of childcare duties allows them to be more productive in their workplaces, and this in turn affords them more economic power in the marketplace. If we take this tack, it is merely a question of balancing role-players: how many ‘breeders’ does one need and how many hyper-consumers, how many workaholics and how many stay-at-home caretakers? In this mode of analysis, biopower is diffused along the lines of social role expectation.

But Salem is also an outlook. It casts a profound aspersion upon those who seek to live their lack of oneness outside of the basic social norms. Just so, if the One is lost to that same contemporary life, it can only be approximated in a society that heeds fairly strictly the norms of its organicity. Society can only be made into community in this manner. The former is too abstract a oneness; I cannot experience it directly. But the latter gives me something I can actually feel in my day-to-day rounds. I am part of something larger than myself; a community not of like minds but of like actions and inactions, and through these I express my own willing charity and even good-naturedness interacting with these small scale others. This is the ‘othership’, which partakes only in the Cartesian sense of ‘here is another like myself; they are not me but I could be them’. Here, I am one of them and hence approximate the One with them, but only with them. But to those who depart from this most basic form of otherness, while at the same time potentially adding to the difficulty of both social reproduction and economic growth, I am disagreeable. In salemic times, I am hard-pressed to extend my best self and my otherwise good-naturedness in all directions at once.

This is also key: that there are now a multitude of different callers upon my good will, not just those with alternative sexualities or reproductive sensibilities, but those hailing from a myriad of diverse cultures, who are at once rivals and allies. Globalism is not the same as cosmopolitanism. Acceptance does not equal tolerance, and neither take the place of understanding. Salem itself was so small a group that there could be no deviation, even numerically, between what society was and what was community. Here, acceptance, tolerance and understanding must be the same thing, for the Puritans found themselves living in an organic culture set down into mechanical conditions. In Durkheimian mode, the colonies were a contradiction in organizational terms. When one’s culture and one’s conditions are askew, internal scrutiny becomes the most intense. Everyone must do their part. Beyond this, the original charges against the sectarians, the very reason they fled Europe, included dealings in the occult; they were themselves, by doctrinaire old-world standards, devil-worshippers. To then have even a hint of such within their own exiled and pariah communities would have been too much to bear. At the same time, marriages of convenience always break asunder after the most critical moment has passed. Those brought together by mutual loss and mourning struggle to find their way as a new unit once the much-vaunted ‘new life’ is attained. Wartime allies, such as the Western powers and the Soviet Union in 1945, retreat into their respective geopolitical corners. And communities who have been forced out of one place undergo internecine purges once a safe refuge is discovered. Salem was this purge, this divorce, this political realignment. It was largely symbolic in that it scapegoated a few; anything more widespread would have wiped out the entire affair.

Salem as metaphor is about internal purity, but Jerusalem is about purifying the wider world based upon the already attained purity of the internal Oneness. Jerusalem, as the goal of an externalizing crusade, represents a regaining and thence grounding, just as Salem might be seen as a finding and thence a re-grounding in a mimesis of the autochthonous. Salem is the cosmogony reiterated, Jerusalem the cosmology created, but they are two side of the same historical coin. It is not simply about xenophobia let alone ideology. The fear of otherness is a fear that the self is not able to maintain itself. My homophobia speaks to my own sexual doubts. I may not even be attracted to other men but I will always find some women unattractive. My ethnocentrism expresses a similar skepticism: there are many things within my own culture of birth that I abhor. One sure-fire way of overcoming these doubts is to project them onto others; not so differently do I ‘transfer’ my neurotic symptoms onto significant others, endangering the intimacy of the othership which I hold so dear. A culture that cannot afford to fight amongst itself is best prepared to wage war on another. The historic crusades were an example of this ‘coming together in the face of a common enemy without’. Unlike the Columbian Conquest, which was a competition amongst developing nations who needed the leverage new markets and new resources would bring them, the Crusades engendered a singular goal: the retrieval of the origin of life itself.

If Salem had recreated life, that of the culture and that of the faith, Jerusalem remained the font of both. Only one crusade was actually militarily successful, but this is immaterial to the force of the symbolic content present in the idea of Oneness and how to merge once again with it. In our outsized cosmology, to witness the birth of the current installment of the universe is seemingly a benign crusade. The otherness in the way is itself a mere happenstance; it could have been any different culture, or even a very similar one – indeed, in fact it was, given religion, lifeway, subsistence pattern and economy, gender relations and many more characteristics – which presently occupies the promised landscape; it is simply the idea that I am not within that space, that of creation, that of all the force which opposes death. If Salem means to confront the mortality of the community emanating from within its own bounds, its own force occurs outside of the space of origins. The farther one travelled away from this center, the more at risk one was to encounter the dissenter, for who out here could have heard of the center of life, dwelling at such a distance from it? Salem is also thus a genuflective expression of Jerusalem, an orison directed back toward the center from the uttermost margins, which the new American colonies would certainly have qualified as. Yet Europe, by the High Medieval period, could well have seen itself as a margin, flung out in a patchwork of Christian diasporas, only tenuously tethered to the Levant, facing out upon, at that time, an unknown ocean of counter-being. It is not a coincidence that Europe turned back before turning forward, into its own imagined womb before out into the unimaginable world.

It is transparently clear that both Salem and Jerusalem are with us yet. In all internal examinations, from the petty McCarthyisms of a political purge to the more profound disinfectants of normative salute, the martinette strutting in the first stage, but the marionette the very goal of the second, the salemic jingo speaks its spiel. If in times of relative lack of success in enforcing the oneness upon its own society, then at the cultural level, there will be a call to exogamous arms. The sense that there lies in wait a common enemy, ready to destroy us if we do not ‘come together as one’, surely exerts a powerful suasion. But this aspect of the dual metaphors is old hat. If we are to more fully comprehend the oft-oscillating historical dynamic involving Salem and Jerusalem we would do better to consider their relationship to the will to life as a whole. For one could live on in an altered culture; humanity is in fact not that diverse. No, the truer sticking point is not cultural difference, but that I myself am not the one who can know oneness, who can relive the creation, who is divorced from Being. That some other culture attained the purity of the central mimesis, regained the exacting proximity to the authentic center, the Mecca, the Mt. Fuji, the Ararat, the Mount Meru and so on. To be apart from that ultimate and death-defying success is to be committed to a truncated life. To be only adopted, or yet co-opted, into the other’s existential apex is to lose my ontological status as a being of Being. This is the deeper reason why some refer to those who flout the norms as being ‘existential threats’, whether directed at those of the interior or of the exterior.

Without the center I am absented from the One. I can no longer experience the uniquely plural personhood of beings because I do not have any sure basis of comparison; Being is absent. This modern condition would be tolerable if no other human being yet sought Being through either a Salem or a Jerusalem, but alas we have as a species not matured to the point wherein the center can be redefined as within each human life; where the Being of beings resides only in that same existential arc that defines our collective finitude.

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

Now you say it, now you don’t

Now you say it, now you don’t (recanting recantation)

What is the character of the take-back? What could have so changed for me that I am myself transformed in return? That what I stated to be the case, either for myself, for another, or for the world, was either in error, ignorant or deliberate, moral or empirical, or could never have been in the first place nearest the truth? In recanting, I must pivot, change my mind or heart, or so be changed by ensuing events, including the contents of my own experiences as a person. Of course, changing one’s tune may be enforced unethically and externally, for instance by an authoritarian parent, but these kinds of recantations are themselves false. A forced choice is in fact no choice at all. Rather, I must be convinced that altering tack is not only in my best interest but as well comes to me, and at the least, as if I had made the choice to backtrack of my own free will.

Three modes of recantation stand out; those of remorse, regret and reserve. They have slightly different ethical inclinations, and thus as motives, carry a somewhat diverse suasion about them. Remorse may certainly be faked, but the conception itself generally has to do with a sense that I have indeed erred and that the error was one of character and not simply act. Regret, by contrast, has in it a sense that I could well feel it even if its source is me being caught out; that I regret not getting away with my error, most especially, in it not becoming a new truth and thus able to stand alone in a more longitudinal fashion. Reserve is the most objective source of recantation. It suggests that something in the world has changed, unexpectedly, or in some other way as unlikely or improbable, and my statement of the facts meant to hold into the near future is thus rendered obsolete. Reserve is built into predictions or even predications from the start, and one might even note this or that possibility as a caveat. The least sophisticated form of reserve is the ‘margin of error’ employed by predictive statistics, nodding both to the vicissitudes of sample size and the foregoing ‘history’ of the kind of test involved. Here, a take-back is also equally simple: once in a while the most probable outcome does not occur.

Importing this sensibility into the ethical life reduces human existence to a mere game of chance. At its most base level, probability does have an agency all its own. Even so, calculating ‘the odds’ and applying them to situations where I either seek to ‘get away’ with something or other, or further, tell myself that it is unlikely I am misrecognizing my own motives by way of a reassurance that I am working for the good, is itself a form of bad faith. This is one reason why reserve is so attractive. Within its probabilistic preserve, I am neither morally nor ethically culpable. Unless the odds themselves have been misrepresented – and in this, one would already have inserted a different kind of source for potential recantation – the numbers stand alone, telling their own tale; there is no ‘school’ to be minded in such cases, and I cannot speak either inside or outside thereof. Yet in its very attraction, reserve seems to promise a way around having to face up to either authentic remorse or being compelled to exhibit regret, no matter the outcome. This is surely why those who are neither predicting the weather, election results, nor yet stock values, are temped to imagine that acts of character are no different than risk assessments.

Reserve is, however, a possible candidate for ethical action if it is employed before any decision or statement is actually made. Though somewhat archaic, we regularly see in literature descriptions of characters who ‘act with reserve’, or who present themselves as ‘reserved’. These are understood by the reader to be observers of the human character, including their own. They neither tilt at windmills nor jump in the fire. They are associated with level-headedness, but of a moral kind and not the ‘cool under fire’ type who may well be a hothead in terms of what decisions he has previously made to place him those kinds of situations. The reserved person is also one whom others seek out for advice or even judgment. Such characters are often more conservative than their peers, but not always. To say to oneself or to another than one harbors ‘reservations’ about this or that decision is to always be ahead of the moment. One cannot be reserved either about action or within its heady movement. Just so, the person ‘with reserve’ is seen as much more likely to have come to the correct conclusion before such action duly commences. It is only when such a character begins to become too enamored of her own observations and predictions that her countenance is altered from one of quiet confidence to a more unbridled arrogance, and this is where both remorse and regret awake to the doings of the day.

A winning record does not by itself produce this change. One can be proved right without anyone else being aware. Entire novels have centered around this type of character, often a child, whose witness to adult doings is unmarred by the accumulated politics of experience. Such a character suffers if she discloses the truth too often, or in too sensitive a condition, but nonetheless she endures as a figure of the truth. The child in literature is oft used as a guileless messiah; she is relatively newly born to a has-been world, suggesting the ‘twice-born’ status of an elect, and she thus as well has no specific loyalty to how that world is itself run, or has been run, in the past. Hence, she is unreserved in her ability to stand back and behold within reserve. She has no agency other than her bare witness, and whatever suffering she endures at the hands of adults, the narrative can either itself take an heroic stand against it, having the youthful character never blink, never break, or in a more tragic tone, gradually but relentlessly convert the child into a wholly agentive, but otherwise utterly flawed, adult.

And herein do we ourselves witness the appearance of both remorse and regret. In the main, the hero feels the former, the anti-hero the latter. Remorse centers around our conception of the betrayal of conscience, and this may include our own as an approximation of that of the other, or, if the other in question does not in fact feel herself to have been betrayed, nevertheless I may have betrayed myself; my own standards of ethical conduct have been transgressed; I have ‘fallen below’ my better selfhood. Conscience, whatever its ultimate source, is both the origin and the destination of remorse. One might go so far to suggest that remorse is best characterized as a wholly internal conversation with oneself, as opposed to regret, which at some point must be recognized by others. The courtroom expression ‘the showing of remorse’ in order to facilitate a lighter sentence or a more compassionate judgment, lends itself to the fakery of charm. Authentic remorse only discloses itself, and that as an elemental ethical aspect of Dasein’s ownmost being; it is never simply displayed. In this, remorse cannot be ‘shown’, only expressed indirectly, either by one’s subsequent actions or yet inactions. Remorsefulness as an emotional state may precede such a disclosure and thence carry through to the point wherein the other has finally pardoned my error rather than merely corrected it – here we speak of forgiveness in the West or forbearance in the East, though the latter term seems to have a wider temporal usage; one can be forbearing in the same way as one can be reserved, for example, while the sense of ‘being forgiving’ or having a ‘forgiving’ personality is more awkward, even a misunderstanding of the concept – or it may become a more permanent fixture, pending on the scope and scale of my error. In mighty contrast to merely regretting an otherwise passing faux pas – here, we are often told by a friend or lover that ‘no one else noticed it, no worries’, or such-like – remorseful being is an ethical inclination of Dasein’s ownmost call to conscience, and indeed, characterizes this call in all of its arcs, returning to itself the very source of its phenomenological disposition as a being who acts as opposed to one who can only enact, such as a God or hero.

While remorse utters a disquisitive discourse in which I am in turn called to confront my own actions, once taken or, for the character whose combination of both reserve and unflinching self-examination is superior, even before any action commences, regret is a concept that is defined only and always after the fact. Regret, thus rather speaks inquisitively; it is always on the make to find out as precisely as possible the chances against it; that is, how likely it is to be compelled to feel itself. Remorse does not seek to avoid its own presence, while regret’s entire predisposition is to the contrary. I do not wish to regret my actions, decisions, words or deeds, nor do I wish to regret my interactions with others, especially those whom I love. But in all this, I am self-interested and to a tee. For regret is the care of the self spoken into being by way of bad faith. Remorse is a part of my very being, an authentic ‘existentiell’ of Dasein’s concernfulness and indeed, a catalyst thereto. It is part of the character of the ‘I can do it again’ as a manner of both basic learning and ethical improvement. Regret, though at first shunning the converse phenomenological realization that ‘I cannot swim in the same river twice’, has to work to overcome itself in order to at least feel a sense of relief, let alone joy, that this is in fact the essential case for human beings. To say one thing in its favor, regret has the ability to reorient my sensibilities to that relief: ‘I do not wish to return after all, I am glad it’s over, I live for today and thence for the future, and I will not live in the past.’ Indeed, regret may be so placed; it is a resident of what has come before, and I do not wish to revisit it. Remorse, in its turn, while not compelling me to return to the source of my regret, does ever move me to consider reserve to be the superior witness as itself an aspect of being-ahead.

Regret at length utters a recantation of itself, generally without changing our ethical character. Remorse recants any such take back, and instead settles in, in order to reshape, however slightly, the interior of our conscience. It seeks to avoid the use of recanting for not only appearance’s sake – this is another reason why it can only disclose and never display – but also as a fail-safe against human ethical error more generally. For remorseful being to work as does anxiety itself, I must orient myself not only to the futural, but as well to understand that any relevant human future can only come about if by definition it speaks no language of the past. Regret seeks the past as succor for its misery, and even remorse must eventually let go its hold over our being-concerned. Even reserve must count as one of its reservations its own self-witness, so that it does not become a simple barrier to change. At the same time, we are, as beings of finiteness and finitude alike, ethically called upon to ‘live without reserve’. How we navigate the situated conditions wherein the dynamic made of contemplation and of action wills its outcome will in turn define both ourselves and our consciences.

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

Token and Taboo

Token and Taboo (an unspoken snafu)

In Bourgeois institutions, such as the Von Humboldtian university, the Jewish colleague was at once a token and a taboo. It was considered bad form to mention his ethnic background, but as well, it was in bad taste to mistreat him. He was both the ultimate outsider – insofar as ‘the Jews’ were the ‘pariah’ community; it should be noted here that Weber’s phrase does not connote any kind of stigmata but refers to the ancient Hebrews lack of a homeland – and, due to the Jewish precept of representing the Logos, and for some time even after the new covenant is proclaimed, the ultimate insider when it came to the text. ‘The people of the book’ is a stereotype, but rather more of a complimentary one than ‘the Jew’ both ‘eternal’ and ‘wandering’. This incipient tokenism in the Protestant space was, for some today, I imagine, the beginning of the end or, as Berdyaev might have it, both at once. Catholics had, of course, their own colleges, and it is important to note here that Jews were even less welcome in these institutions, modeled as they were after the original, medieval university and not that modern.

The sense that an educational system must reflect the values of this or that subculture, whether originally ethnic-based or linguistic, religious or more recently, social class or simply of just plain material wealth, is a symptom of the absence of the concept of a wider human community. The Quakers founded their own colleges, and some few yet exist. From the late 19^th century onward, schooling based upon specialized pedagogies also arose, beginning with John Dewey’s lab school in the 1890s and carrying forward with sites such as Black Mountain College, Summerhill, and the Montessori system. These alternative campuses presented themselves as attempts in creating an authentic learning community, and yet one within a wider society that hardly knew they even existed. The archetype is, of course, the ‘cult’ or sect; a small group of acolytes led by the master in the East or even a messiah figure in the West. Nietzsche’s comment about those who seek followers, ‘get noughts (zeros but also nothings) behind you’, is well taken, but at the same time, those with a vision, for better or worse, must indeed find those numbers if a solitary flash is to build into a social movement. The link between religion and education – in antiquity, much the same thing until the Eleatic and Miletian schools began to think something of worldly matters – is yet deeply held; the major competition to State education is still that parochial.

Yet the continued existence of credo-based learning in separate sites, exclusive in terms of ideology and value-orientation, is not truly a testament to the endurance of such values, but rather a tacit admission of their failure and subsequent defeat. For, if I were confident in my Christianity, for instance, and followed the lead of Jesus in both eschewing the directly political-secular sphere – ‘render unto Caesar’ etc. – and yet working throughout the polis to model and demonstrate my ethics, why would I not desire to be within the very heart of where young people who are not converts and not believers dwell? If my values are so strong, are so noble, why would they not only withstand their foes but indeed, win them over? That parochial schools exist in modernity is a sign of self-mockery; a self-inflicted wound to be emblazoned upon the corpus of a dejected curricula laid upon the corpse now consisting of only disjecta membra. The truer Christian or Muslim does not turn away from the world; these are both Western worldviews and cosmogonies which do not seek Nirvana nor to transcend the earthly. Rather, they are soteriological through and through: the earth and its peoples must be saved, not left below in as yet an unenlightened state.

Given this, teaching these children in spaces set apart from the world is tantamount to having given up the entire basis for the belief in the first place. It is especially concerning for the early Protestant sectarians such as the Anabaptists, for whom faith must be voluntary. The existence of such spaces, such as the child’s Sunday school, wherein very young persons are taught the basics of this or that belief, carry a patent and potent irony about them to this regard. Such presentation of the Logos is not in fact voluntary, and is practiced in almost an involuntary manner, as adults do not pause to think about what they are actually committing, and committing to. Such processes make faith the token, and taboo the anti-institutional critique in which Jesus and others engaged. Better by far to abandon these ‘Eastern’ spaces – the monasteries of Tibet and the Himalayas were also schools, and their very placement at higher altitudes was a nod to the physical sense that one was beginning to loosen one’s ties to the world and those who lived in it, far below – and fully immerse oneself in the hurly-burly of wider cultural life, as did Jesus himself. Never one to shy away from confrontation, at first appearing contrary to his uttered ethic exhorting both forgiveness and self-sacrifice – and in this did Jesus demonstrate that practicing both by definition meant placing oneself in the midst of resistance – the Christian god on earth would presumably disapprove of our attempts to shelter both ourselves, but especially our children, away from the society as a whole. It is, even in the Pauline texts, unchristian to make Christianity an exclusive space, geared to specific followers and training only those who happen to be born, very much involuntarily, into said communities.

In our time, over most of the globe, religion is itself a token. Why then also make it a token of itself, a shadow, even a remanant? If it is taboo to discuss religions matters, matters of the heart or soul, within secular spaces, surely even the looming presence of aging churches amidst all of the glass, concrete and steel of the modern metropolis, is also an unspoken self-indictment. They are anachronistic, both architecturally and atmospherically. The history of the urban landscape is such that it was inevitable these structures gain their ‘left-over’ look, for their organizational backdrop allowed them to survive demolition, even if no parishioners remained. It is also a taboo to suggest their final removal, perhaps even to think it! Such is seen as an unhallowed hallmark of the fuller presence of the anti-Christ among us. The famed hip-hop epigram, ‘bail out the banks, loan art to the churches’ might be more radically over-written, ‘socialize the banks, demolish the churches’, but so it goes. At the same time, there must also be those entrepreneurs who bemoan the waste of valuable real estate in city core business districts which are taken up by these wastrel relics. It is of some interest to acknowledge that even cemeteries have been moved or simply built over, especially the historical or ‘pioneer’ graveyard, where only the stone monuments have been preserved. It is an odd experience to investigate their newer sites knowing that no human remains lie underneath. What then is the point of the memorials?

The preservation of both empty churches and hollow gravestones tells us that it is neither religion nor ancestor that is directly being recalled to culture memory, but rather the problem of mortality and the only response humanity has thus far invented, that is, faith itself, that retains its perennial quality. Modernity does not free itself from finitude, and indeed exacerbates its condition by sloughing off the conceptual gravitas of both death as an abstraction and the means by which one has been called to overcome it. It is almost as if by surpassing the salvation doctrine of the new covenant we have somehow also gotten beyond the very reason for its existence! That mortality is a clinical phenomenon alone makes soteriology something only theologically interesting. The modern priesthood, the guild of psychologists, presides over an altar dedicated to the origins, not of life, but rather of the individual person. Its great achievement is its ability to separate personhood from persona, and help anyone do the same for themselves. In this, it is absolutely and directly a descendent of Christian ethics, wherein Jesus appears as the first person. Its utter reliance on the individual, however, at the same time subjects it to an unethical reduction; the ego only relates to faith as if the latter were a mere symbolic apparatus of the super-ego. God dwells in morality – this is the ‘old God’, long dead; why should psychology co-opt it and place it at the head of the institutional and ideological table? – and the devil rusticates in unbridled sexuality, or the libidinal Id. Here, classical analysis betrays its reliance on Greek-Judaic myth, in the very face of its drive to become a science.

Is the presence of mythos in logos then also a token? Is it taboo to point out such a presence? Just as morality dumbs down ethics, in the process making the world look far simpler than it actually is, myth hijacks thought, time sabotages history, the designer trumps the artist. These are the more worrisome ‘satanic reverses’. For Freud, the ‘totemic’ represented not just the crests of clans and their specific druthers but as well a kind of hierarchy wherein the symbolic forms of cultural life competed against one another; the vulvar shapes lower down the phallic pole, the male membership higher up. Certainly, he was not speaking of actual totems, whereupon we rather see the animal spirits and archetypes in mutual support, the bear or killer whale at the bottom in part due to their sheer ability to hold the rest of their allies skyward, the creatures of the air perched atop the pole exactly as they do in reality, and those with especial duties, such as the ‘three watchmen’, as well at the very top; in all of this, function and form are one. These last figures represent both the vigilance necessary for the village to safeguard itself from both storm and enemy alike, but as well, the unuttered but not at all taboo confidence in the people’s alliance with, and even love for, the beings of the forest and mountain, for there is never a fourth watchmen figure facing rearward, away from the ocean.

We have long lost that confidence, thinking that our superior comprehension of nature entails our complete abandonment of what that same nature has bequeathed to us via its patent evolution. Reason stands aloof to imagination, and yet both are necessary to be fully human. The rational admits nothing of the non-rational into its intensely bureaucratized corridors of borrowed power. Our success at personhood, even if we continue to deny even this to ourselves through identity politics and the adoration of celebrity persona, is at times overshadowed by the ultimate need for a shared existence which carries us beyond death whilst we are still dying. It is authentic courage to face death as mine ownmost completion of being, an overcoming of the final taboo and a dismissal of all euphemism, but it is an equally sincere cowardice to make human community, however passing, into a token of itself, in order to vault that most incomplete being into the sham of personalized myth.

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

Our Memory of the Future

Our Memory of the Future (Prescience, Predilection, Prediction)

At first glance, the future and the past appear to be nothing other than opposites. The past has occurred, the future has not. The past is a matter of record, even if such documentation remains private. The future is, by definition, as yet unwritten. So how, if this is indubitably the case, can we suggest that in spite of this, we are in possession of a kind of ‘memory’ of the future, a foreknowledge of what is still to come? For phenomenology, memory takes up the converse position to anticipation. But just here, we note that the latter can be very much based upon the former. Erfahrung anticipates Erlebnis, and indeed, the adventure of life experience at the personal level takes on the mantle of a discursive venture, the more sedimented it becomes within our consciousness. This mutual imbrication of memory and anticipation also suggests that the past and the future may not be quite as oppositional as they seem. There are at least three angles by which we may investigate further.

1. Prescience: Though I have heard others tell of ‘predictive dreams’, wherein the dream sequence turns out to be repeated in waking life a short time afterward, I have never myself experienced ‘prescience’. Often, the narrative is one of trauma, even life and death, such as when the dreamer has inadvertently run over a child who has rushed unexpectedly into the path of their vehicle. In waking life, the same sequence of events occurs but this time, due to this foreknowledge and the recognition that one is ‘living the dream’, as it were, the child’s life is spared. I have heard numerous examples of this phenomena, which could well be put down to a backreading effect that trauma can have upon us; we seek to provide a rationale for challenging action in the world, positive or negative. Prescience of this flavor might be a ‘psychosomatic’ cousin of the better known (pseudo)experience of déja vu. At the same time, the unexpected and dramatic are not at all always the themes of dream-into-reality. I have also heard many accounts of a simple, even repetitive mundanity which is first dreamed and thence lived out. One example that is oft mentioned is that of one’s morning routine, where one thinks that one has already awakened, gotten out of bed, and run through one’s daily ablutions even to the point of getting into one’s vehicle and starting it up, only to actually then awake and, likely with a sigh, run through the entire series once again, this time perhaps harboring some small skepticism about the question of reality itself. Prescience is also claimed by quasi-religious specialists – much more so in antiquity or in traditional societies than today and in our own – as part of their specific skill set; the ability to access an intertemporal plenum where the normative flow of linear time is not relevant. Even here, however, I will suggest that precisely because human life is mostly routine and thus predictable, the dreamer and the shaman alike are merely playing upon, and perhaps also playing out, our general sense that tomorrow will be much the same as today. This is the ‘odds on’ approach that functions as a leitmotif in all three of our apertures, and only becomes outré or even eldritch when misplaced; either by calculation, as by the shaman, or by sheer repetitive happenstance, as with the dreamer.

2. Predilection: Here, one is assumed to have a better grasp of what might yet happen not because of the ability to access alternate forms or aspects of consciousness or time, but rather more mundanely, has instead honed a worldly skill that opens the door to making subjective predictions. Predilection could be very much defined by the personalization of probability theory, our third character below. Yet there remains a link with prescience even so, making predilection our second term in a loosely logical formula. This is the case because religion has itself been personalized, beginning in the pre-modern and accelerating during the modern periods. We have seen that prescience is highly personal; intimate, in the case of the shaman, who can only transfer his powers to an apprentice – the motif of existential transport, unforced in the instance of soul transmigration, and violently criminal, even evil, in the instance of ‘consecrated hosting’ and such-like sorcery – and beyond even this, intimate to the point of being unshareable, in the case of the prescient dreamer. Predilection is not as exclusive, nor does it need resort to occult means and methods to be communicated. Yet it also, on the far side, never ascends to a discourse, as does the statistic. This is so due to its still somewhat personal character. One might say, simply as a nod to the face-to-face, that predilection is the personable version of prescience, just as prediction is that entirely impersonal. These learned skill sets which occur only in our shared world are also much more recognizable than those deliberately occluded – the shaman’s trickery – or yet occlusive by nature – the world of dreams. The fact that predilection is an extension of action in the present is also of note: this second term allows us to recall the past and our work now ‘in’ that past to ourselves, with a view to repeating it in a present which through that very action moves itself into the future. Here, we gain the perspective that simple doing propels the present into the immediate future, without the need to command that future to appear as either preparatory apparition or maleficent vision.

3. Prediction: Probability and statistics are part of a fully modern discourse, taking their formal place within applied mathematics. Discourse is, as we know, something that one studies, equally formally, and within the pedagogic framework of various institutional settings. The ability to ‘crunch the numbers’ might seem to an outsider to have retained a bit of the occult atmosphere around it, for not everyone has a gift in this arena, but the results of this skill set are both public and as well, function cross-culturally, neither of which can be claimed by either of our first two terms. The shaman’s magic is notoriously local in effect; one has to be a believer in it oneself if it is to have any result at all, thus extending our notion of the placebo, in this instance back into time. The person with a knack for this or that may find that his skill is irrelevant given shifting historical context. But a statistic is simply what it is; the only common confusion that perdures – much to the delight of those who operate casinos – is that between point and series probability. In a closed system, the relation between one event and the next is fully dependent upon the range of possible events so enclosed; this generates the series. But no matter what the make-up of the set or even ‘universe’ occurring is at hand, one cannot transfer such odds point to point; a blue marble pulled out of a sack this time does not by itself connote a red one the next. So, when a gambler believes that it is high time ‘his’ number comes up, he is deluding himself. The set of possible numbers at stake, completely public and thus above-board, assuming the wheel is not itself rigged, nor the dice weighted, contains no series probability, only that point. A red 34 this time does not imply a black 31 the next. And even though craps operates upon a real-world curve, super-positioned upon a finite and discrete statistical model derived from the binomial theorem, this does not help us predict point to point rolls, for here, series probability only comes into play over the course of many assays. Prediction is thus itself subject to occultation by the unwary and the wishful-thinking, but in itself it has none of these features. This overlay of ‘mystical’ desire only underscores how enduring is the human sense that we should be able to control, even a little, events which have yet to occur. It is no coincidence that one of the themes of time-travel in entertainment fiction centers around taking advantage of foreknowledge in order to get rich, or to maintain the transtemporal lifestyle with some perhaps higher purpose in mind, from episodes of The Twilight Zone to Stephen King novels. In fact, prediction is as routine as it is mundane. And if our ‘need to know’ basis cannot be entirely assuaged even by the most accurate of risk analysts – weekly weather patterns and daily stock performances, morning commute times and the divorce and suicide rates alike – we can take some comfort in knowing that the near future is highly unlikely to be radically different from either the recent past or thus the present as well.

Each of our three apertures, however contrived, are attestations to humanity’s basic will to life; what our species and likely its forebears have as part of its existential character, and what has replaced, for us, the survival instinct of animals. We are aware, somewhat indirectly, that the world continues as a futural space of beings, even if we ourselves will at some point be absented from that worlding. The confusion between point and series probability likely has its truer, and far more profound, home in a similar confusion regarding our own lives and those of our children. Vicarious parenting is certainly seen as negative, but what parent could say that they would not want at least a little of themselves ‘in’ their kids? And yet society at large is not a closed system – all efforts to make it so, through ethnic enclave or even parochial schooling are, to my mind, their own kind of regressive evil – and history, as the known narrative of human consciousness as a whole, is as open as our imagination and experience combined can be. Given this, our children lead their own lives, point by point, without the parent being able to predict with any accuracy this next life. That the apple may not fall far from the tree ignores the fact that such a fruit bears within it another tree, unlike that of its predecessor. It also, as with most chestnuts of this sort, conflates two utterly different forms of life; a human being is not a tree, a child not a fruit.

That we should neither retreat into a false seriality nor a simpleton’s utterance should be obvious, but the problem of knowing exactly what to do in the present, so that the future will be at least tolerable for those children’s different lives, remains of the utmost. And seen this way, none of the three categorical terms that we have briefly discussed above can help us in any ultimate manner. In their stead, what we do have at our disposal is a phenomenological memory of the future, constructed at once by the experiential dynamic of Erfahrung – this tells us that ‘we can do it again’, in Schutz’s sense, and includes both the expectations of practice and discourse – and Erlebnis – this in turn exhorts us to live in order to add to our experience through the truly novel and thus unexpected. Erfahrung is the hearthstone of human knowledge, while Erlebnis is its birthstone. In their syncretism do we find the living present, and in this shall we gain the touchstone of the future itself.

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

The ‘Ambitextrous’

The ‘Ambitextrous’ (Overtone and Undertone)

Multiple meanings in literature, marketing, politics and even within the interactions of the day to day and the face to face are nothing new. They allow for the creative person to explore the human imagination, the wordsmith to get a kick, or the passive aggressive personality to take a shot. Playing deliberately from both hands, however, the ambidextrous text presents to us a more calculated version of the double intent. The more so, such ambitexterity seeks not to be revealed, and this is its chief departure from the coincidence, pun or clever play on words. Here, the merely clever slides into the sly, the amicable wink into that of the leer. It is particularly evident in marketing and politics that the ambitextrous is being employed, but beyond any specific usage thereof, there underlies the very ability for it to be used in the social structure as a whole. While the essential polysemy of language in general presents an overtone – something that desires to be known and thus attempts to take the fore – ambitexterity occurs as a converse to this, as in fact an undertone.

One of many possible examples of the former in popular culture, amicable, clever but in an inoffensive manner, a wink only rather than a wink followed hard on by a nod, occurs in album titles. One need only recall to mind The Who’s 1971 Who’s Next, wherein we ourselves acknowledge the sense of it being the band’s next release, perhaps the implication that they as a band were in line for something or other – given all of the famous deaths and breakups of the period, for instance – as well as the visual jape of the band members themselves urinating on a concrete pillar and having done their business, asking the simple question of the consumer. A decade later saw the release of Rush’ live album Exit…Stage Left, where no less than three possible senses may be taken; the band leaving the stage, the stage itself has been left by the band, and the stage as a space is what is left over after the band’s exeunt. Hundreds of other examples might be cited, but the point is self-evident: such overtones of polysemy are meant to be understood and quite consciously so.

It is otherwise with the ambitextrous. Though its use might be regarded as value-neutral, its underhandedness in both its method and its goal sabotages any possible ethic that could have seen to be arising therefrom. Given that I had the idea of the concept through writing what I hoped was no flippant flop – an oversize narrative with which I took great literary pains to avoid being a novel; the end result was more of a failed novel rather than something radically new – I also realized that a calculated effort to move the reader into another space of meaning through the unmarked vehicle of a canonical prose form was nothing more than a deception, however sophisticated or no. This instance can serve as a cautionary device for those future readers of St. Kirsten - sub-titled ‘the last novel’; and here there was authentic polysemy; at the time it was to be the final novel I myself would write, or if not, it was that previous, the ‘last’ one, the one beforehand, and thirdly, it was meant to be the final novel ever written by anyone; a concerted conceit but also a well-advised critique of the novelist in general; in a word, after this point there could no longer be a novel written at all – due out sometime in 2025. In principle, the creative effort must remain as the most focused, but also the smallest, version of the ambitextrous.

For its truer homeland is that of propaganda, and in all of its forms. As Zizek has suggested, ‘only when one comes to believe in the truth-value of propaganda can it itself taken for the truth’. The latter is not as important as the former; one has to value the very idea of being misled. Why would anyone so value such a force? Does it seek to ever provide a suitable and tolerable veil for an oft-intolerable reality? Not quite, as this is rather the function of the social form itself, and we have understood this general principle at least since Durkheim. He suggests that ‘the air is no less heavy for the fact that we do not feel its weight’. Point taken: socialization is the most successful form of ‘propaganda’, if we are uncharitable. But if we are more objective, we understand that in order for any society to function at all, its cultural apparatus must be accepted in the majority by the majority. Its symbolic forms betray their function when investigated by either the native speaker or an outsider – even if the tools to ply such a trade must be learned formally and institutionally and are not, and never, a part of any culture’s primary socialization – and thus there is no enduring mystery about their presence. Much of historical analysis rests on these same pinions, and it is thus but a short step from dissecting a society of the past to one extant in our own time.

The ambitexterity of ‘society’ as an abstraction rests in its ability to maintain a loyal fellowship, not a sycophantic follow-ship. Society and its polis are thus not ‘political’ in the specific sense of them being geared into the desire for power. Society has a power over us because we grant that authority to it through upholding cultural norms and participating in their corresponding forms of life. Culture trumps society just as history trumps morality. We are vehicles, in daily life, of both the passive symbols of our shared culture as well as active expressions thereof. This is why adolescence itself has at least two functions; it hones the adult’s skill in ‘maintaining the right’ in the face of youthful challenge, but at the same time, youth allows adulthood to make necessary adjustments to the social order, and in a most ad hoc manner. In this way, culture cleaves to itself the fluidity it needs to survive historical changes. It needs rebellion as much as it needs revolution, and it is up to the adult to winnow the one from the other other since the very incompleteness of socialization to be found in the adolescent disallows such persons themselves to make that same distinction.

So far, we have seen the ambitextrous as a false mimesis of polysemy, as a calculated creative effort, and as an effect of how society itself functions through its symbolic forms. None of this is particularly underhanded, but in each of the foregoing examples, the undertonal quality is, nevertheless, present. Now we are better prepared to examine the purely propagandistic effect of the ambitextrous; this is not only its authentic practice but as well its highest self-regard. If successful in hoodwinking us into imagining that our way of life, our manner of unthought, our sense of right and our suite of prejudices are not simply the best way but in fact the only way for human beings to live, then it has served its highest master. Propaganda is least effective to any of these regards when it is served directly from the State. We are generally aware that this or that politician seeks to gain power and thence maintain it. Secondarily, the status of being someone who actually makes decisions is also in play. The vast majority of us have no such power, no such authority, and this is the majority explanation of why we tend to treat our children, and especially, our adolescents, so badly. Contrary to a fashionable script, this includes almost all white heterodox males as well; no power, no authority. The stage is thus set for the ambitextrous to take firm hold.

Its leading edge is advertising. No matter the product being shilled, it is the landscape into which this item is set that holds the truer sale. We see non-whites, recently in a super-abundance which reflects nothing of their demographic ratio at large, but what are they doing? They are adding a pigment to an otherwise utterly Bourgeois setting. We see non-whites driving cars that in reality they cannot afford, living in gracious executive homes that are purchased by an insignificant number of their peers, spouting off in a tongue foreign to their ears, and driving their faux children to distraction by their ambitious social-climbing, made to look second nature in ads whilst in reality being a desperation of anxiousness. Just so, in order to remind us that this social order being portrayed is after all white at heart, we are yet called to witness white people doing all of the same things but mustered up with a sense of panache that non-whites are yet to master. With a salacious Schadenfreude, parents curb teenage desires in killjoy compartments, while very much in the background a reliable automobile is so noted. Reliability is itself being sold, in this sense, since teens are notoriously unreliable and in every way, and it is thus an adult’s responsibility to introduce them to a general responsibility, which apparently includes never even kissing one another before one marries. Being married is thus likened to driving a reliable car; the commodity fetish in this case is not about the product at all, but rather about a sensibility.

The ambitextrous sells what is taken for common sense, all the while actually being a sensitivity over against both change and to the human imagination. It is a fear of desire, an anxiousness over personhood. It compels obedience not to the State nor even to society, both of which have their own, self-authenticating mechanisms of symbolic persuasion, as we have seen, but rather to our own worst selves; the self that masks selfishness with both a self-absorbed consumption and an aping role-play of the martinette, the one who mimics an authority he does not actually possess. That children are the chief victims of this masquerade troubles us not at all, for our own memories of childhood which have survived at all and which are not diluted by the sentimental – the major function of the ambitextrous in advertising is to present family life as the very home and hearth of human happiness, another unutterable lie given the abuse statistics, for one – remind we ourselves of being chattel. The fascism we endured was only overcome by us converting to the fascist figurehead. We now not only live the lie of ambitexterity, we are that lie.

In this, the ambitextrous has successfully merged propaganda with socialization. In all of the efforts of the Tyro of the State, nothing political has ever come close to the rate of success to be found in contemporary advertising. And though we can find other spaces in which the ambitextrous is present – the schools are the most obvious example – in none do we find the sheer shameless showcase of purveying sentiment in the name of mere commodity. The latter is only a bauble, a representation of a hobby or the stuff of the dilettante. It is an ongoing astonishment, for the thinking person, to weekly witness the witless wonder of a way of life based upon so contented a self-delusion.

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.

Tales of Goffman

Tales of Goffman (my nominal contributions to microsociology)

It was my surpassing good fortune to be trained in the human sciences by a student of both Erving Goffman and Talcott Parsons, one Elvi Whittaker, who herself went on to become a well-known feminist thinker who wrote in epistemology and institutional ethnography, among other areas. Goffman and Parsons remain two of the most important post-war social scientists, but though my theoretical work bears the imprint of both, my fieldwork is almost wholly Goffmanesque in style and in content. The first social scientist to be featured on the cover of Time magazine, Goffman was as impressively insightful about the human condition as he was notoriously retiring. He was impossibly shy about being photographed, for instance, and the one well-known shot of him, sitting somewhat bemusedly at his desk on campus, betrays a sense of both diffidence but also hurt feelings. Goffman’s ground-breaking studies in dramaturgy, stigma, the presentation of self, and the sensibilities governing our conceptions of public and private, among much else, provided our own time with invaluable introspection into the very soul of enacted modernity.

Goffman placed himself in the social contexts wherein how society defined its margins could come to light. His work in mental asylums, during the final phase of their systemic existence, generated the skeleton key to many puzzles within symbolic interactionism. The conflict among ideals in practice is arguably the most important. Persons must sacrifice one ideal in order to uphold another; no social context can contain all of society’s ideals. This single yet singular realization opens up our entire worldview. Goffman illustrated the hypocrisies of holding to ideals in spite of the glaring absence of practicing what we preached, but this was only the first step. His patently American pragmatism held sway over all of his diverse studies, coupled with a rather Durkheimian sense of form and function. Choosing amongst conflicting ideals presents the fully socialized member of this or that culture with one of life’s most difficult challenges. Second to this, the performance of a public selfhood, at times overextending one’s own sense of who one is, and at other times in full retreat from it, was the other major challenge to the modern person. This intimate disclosure of Dasein to itself through observing our behaviors along the boundaries of what keeps society itself cohesive, is at times disturbing, while also regularly amusing. Society is both a comedy and tragedy of errata, played out on a shifting stage, ‘each another’s audience’, if you will, and more than this, a display of who can best police themselves.

In my two decades of fieldwork, I rather unknowingly replicated not only Goffman’s methods, but also his focus on marginal arenas of day to day life. After an epistemologically oriented dissertation, I found myself in cultural regions wherein the entirety of the social fabric was in a strong sense itself a margin. In the rural American Southeast and Midwest I studied Civil War reenactors and UFO cult members, as well as the BDSM sexual theater. Back in Canada I studied artists and then medical practitioners who had presented their careers as iconoclastic to various applied science and clinical discourses. Throughout this time I had been compiling hundreds of interviews and vignettes of those who believed they had encountered, or had more intimate relationships, with the paranormal. Most recently, I authored a study of youth who make or had made illicit pornography. Each of these eight qualitative works were the first of their kind, but their combined force was not so novel. The resonance of Goffman was present throughout both their respective dynamics and the analyses which followed.

Why do people sometime flock to the very margins of their society? How does participating or yet believing in a set of contrasting ideals, often set up in knowing opposition to the ‘mainstream’, help make their lives more fulfilling? Time and again the responses ran along these lines: ‘What society does to me and expects of me is not the same thing as who I am. The what that society needs is not the who which I need.’ If this sounds like a position realizing Enlightenment sovereignty of selfhood, an authenticity of Dasein, such a sense is premature. Perhaps it is along the way to authenticity, but Goffman would be the first to note that all of these people, denizens of whatever sectarian segment, have merely traded one what for another what; they have cast aside, temporarily in most cases, their everyday selfhood for an alternative self-image as defined by like-minded others. And just as the wider society must contain all persons, however conflicting they may be in their private druthers, subcultures and sects, cults and associations, replicate both the means and methods of the very society that has given them a somewhat morganatic birth. Goffman was very clear in revealing that social margins are the very mirrors of the center of culture; they may diffract and refract it, but their generally only slightly skewed vision has no other basis.

This umbrella insight is of the greatest import for us today, cast as we are into an accelerating political culture that appears to seek out conflict rather than dissuade it. For we live in a time when the margins of the polis and its spectrum of ideals have once again come to the fore. What I myself found in the fields, as diverse as they were in their respective subcultural contents, was that in-group members felt they had a firmer grip on ‘the truth’ of things, and were so empowered only due to their full participation in their otherwise quite marginal interests. From the physicians who studied Wilhelm Reich and his ‘cosmic orgone’ apparatuses – some even had built replicas thereof – to the erotistes whose chief goal in recreative life was to make sure others felt as much ecstatic pain as possible, to the ghost-hunters who were actually looking for their own deceased relatives and instead finding everyone else’s, there was ever a palpable urgency that this deeper truth be revealed and to all.

This sensibility – that what society offers us as Erfahrung is both incomplete and even a sham when compared with the Erlebnis of personal venture and adventure the both – is also quite revealing. It suggests strongly that many persons feel that what they have been taught, either formally through institutional enrollment, or informally from family and friends or others, somehow exists to cover over a more germinal knowing. There is an official view of things, born of necessity and tradition, and one that is sourced in wisdom alone. But wisdom, in Goffman’s view, is but a hallmark of the hall of perspectivist mirrors which society can alone provide. However ironic this may be, it is this which is in fact the ‘deeper’ truth. There is no Gödelian third position, outside of the Saussurean strings and streams of signifiers, and from which one can justifiably say that I have eaten the apple of transcendental knowing, and by this I am become Eden’s Gnostic.

For some theoretically inclined social scientists and others, this remains Goffman’s most important contribution to modern discourse. There is a whimsical set of ‘sports’ collectors cards featuring well-known social theorists – I am not among them, needless to say – and the buy-line on the back of Goffman’s states that ‘he accidently invented postmodernism’. Between his version of dramaturgical analysis – Jung’s is the only other postwar effort that could be said to match it – his Pharmakon of conflicting ideals differing and deferring amongst one another, and his sense that ‘Gödel is Right!’, to borrow from Henze’s violin concerto tribute to the mathematician, it is not an unreasonable statement for all that. I prefer to leave the term ‘postmodern’ to the school of architects who in fact invented it, but either way, Goffman’s very public parallax of sociological insights remains second to none during the postwar period. It is astonishing today, when popular culture, not to mention that academic, almost appears afraid of any kind of critical analysis, that Goffman should have been so celebrated during his own time. As they saw Bertrand Russell, the baby boom youth also viewed Goffman as one of the enlightened elders and as such, an ally of revolution. A generational compatriot of Goffman, Henze’s own slogan, that ‘Man’s greatest work of art: world revolution’, does not, however, echo in the former’s own works. Social science is, after all, not art, nor is it a politics, as it has of late been compelled to lower itself into becoming.

When one compares the greatest of artist’s personal mottos, they define not only the person but the entire cultural demographic of which they are the highest representatives. The Romantic period saw Beethoven’s ‘From Adversity to the Stars’, the fin de siècle witnessed Mahler’s ‘To live, I shall die’, and of course, the postwar angst of revealed horror and authoritarian echo gave birth to Henze’s appropriate valediction. Goffman uttered no such concise and summative statement. Not an artist let alone a composer on the side of authenticity, and not a politician batting for the shallower side, Goffman discovered that a person’s most visionary dreams were the result of a complex web of social interactions, into which we are thrown from birth and within which we each must thence find our birthright. In this deeper sense, I found nothing whatsoever in my field studies which departed from Goffman’s major ideas. What I did find was that the proliferation of alternative culture-crafts was a response to the increasingly alienating quality of what was judged to be the mainstream of social life. That this ‘mainstream’ was not to be regarded as the mainspring of a human life was the motto of each community of esthetes I encountered and for a time, tried to understand.

But there is neither solace nor salvation in Goffman’s work. Without either chaliced chagrin or Cheshire smirk, his enduring corpus of the very best human science has to offer its own subjects and objects at once, allows us to take a close look at ourselves and our actions, our beliefs and acts, perhaps in an unprecedented manner. And if there is sometimes a lack of individual and ethical humanity in those works, there is never an absence in humaneness in their analyses. There is no point to the existence of the sciences as a whole if it is not to better both our self-understanding as well as our knowledge of the universe abroad. The two, vastly separated in age and scale, are nevertheless intimately linked in a mutual imbrication and implication. For the cosmogony of the one is the beginning of the cosmology of the other.

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

Flatteries not Included

Flatteries not Included (The Problem of False Other-directedness)

One aspect of David Riesman’s famous analysis of post-war society that is often overlooked is the sense that the ‘other’, in his ethical rubric, presents an inauthentic otherness. In following our literal neighbors, in ‘keeping up with the Jones’’, we are not only aping an ideal form by means of idealized formulae, we are striving to homogenize society; to make everyone into the same thing. Riesman’s other-directedness, which he rightly casts as both unethical and cowardly without quite explaining why this is more profoundly the case deontologically, is thus not about otherness at all, only ‘the others’ in the sense of a diaspora of Das Man. Insofar as one is left with making what appears only as a decision of individual character – a way in which to distinguish ourselves from a merely individuated life, another aspect of modernity of which Riesman is correctly critical – we leave in possession of an incomplete analytic, suggesting in turn that such a decision cannot itself be fully either made or kept.

Riesman’s ‘other’ is simply another version of myself. I look at him with envy or disdain, resentment and, in a crisis, even ressentiment. Yet he is nonetheless an intimate stranger; familiar in every way that society seems to count. He has either what I have or what I would like to have. I regard him thence with covetousness, which goes beyond the antique sensibility that his trophy wife is more attractive that mine. Or, conversely, I play the other’s role for him, with similar sentiments abounding. None of this is otherness per se, only what is ‘next’ in line. And the more so, it is also not the Other, the radically irreal Otherness of the uncanny. Are there then three kinds of others with which I must live? The next person, like me in all outward respects and most inward ones as well – we often underestimate the mental sameness occurring in mass society as it is somehow disturbing to imagine myself as much less unique than I would desire – is another; a representative of the herd, to be harsh, an expression of the generalized other, to be discursive, a mimesis of class filiation and that in both senses, to be critical, or yet a ‘fellowman’, to borrow from Schutz. All of these themselves demean the humanity of this next person, and yet all of them are correct in their own way about what he is in society.

Most mature adults will recognize the great difficulty in procuring friendship as one ages. We are wary of letting just anyone in on who we are, preferring to display only the what for public consumption. This, in spite of the corresponding fact that friends hailing from other phases of contemporary lifespan have changed beyond recognition, especially those much-vaunted childhood friends. Yet we tend not to seek replacements for friendships come adrift or gone awry, suggesting that our perspective is one that suggests ‘well, any further friendships will ultimately go the same way, and if not, we will all die out of them in any case’. Romantic relationships are subject to the same stern logic, but survive its lens more easily given the erotic desires present for some decades after youth. Either way, however, authentic otherness is the last thing persons seek when surrounding themselves with serial circles of acquaintance, very often the most any of us is willing to commit to during working adulthood. Indeed, the frisson of fascination exerted by fictional limns of the Other as an irruptive force exert more pull than does otherness as a cultural fact. Once again, the otherworld requires no real commitment from us, given its own cameo ethereality. If the potential friend might be relatively blameless in the face of our diffidence, the ghost has only itself to blame for same.

The reliance on sameness to distinguish otherness presents, even so, a more complex problem for ethics and for sociality alike. Though it is reasonable to a point to prefer those who are deemed ‘like us’, to fall in love with ‘kindred spirits’, at least of the earthly kind, or to idolize historical figures who appear to embody our own ideals, whatever they may be, what is less reasoned is the sensibility which overdevelops out of such liaisons. We learn, from a young age, those whom to shun, and these cleavages fall mostly along class and status lines. In-marriage rates exhibit a shocking social class homogeneity, and even those ‘progressive couples’ who do not share a skin colour or even a religion, if any, find that they share almost everything else, especially when measured against the most important variables for match-making or even simply hooking up. For women, anything else is slumming, and for men, just another notch on one’s belt, so to speak. Authentic otherness is inadmissible in marriage; there is too much at stake for elemental disagreements to carry the day. But even for acquaintances who may not share anywhere near as much as do spouses, there one quickly co-constructs a list of topics that will have to remain taboo. Within families it is proverbial that one does not discuss either religion or politics, and perhaps more recently, sexuality as well. Each contemporary person travels in a set of mostly disconnected circles, a more-gentle rendering of living secret lives, if one is deemed sane, or of having multiple personalities, if one is not.

These social circles are themselves bound by either similar tasks, viewpoints, status backgrounds, or yet beliefs, such as a church membership, and persons who appear in one circle are more likely never to frequent another. Simmel’s ‘web of group affiliations’ still provides one of the most insightful analyses of this aspect of modern society. Circles may be casual or formal, or may move from one to the other pending occasion. They may accept new members, if those more veteran tire of one another’s direct company, or they may hive off into yet smaller groups, driven by a competition for in-group status. In none of this, however, do we discover the differences associated with authentic otherness. To do so, one must be willing to essentially throw over one’s own druthers and connections, and so once cherished and newly perished. Two of my oldest friends, hailing from vastly different cultural backgrounds, nevertheless married decades ago and are yet together. The parents of the woman refused to speak to her for nine years after she had taken up with him. Only when the couple produced their own children did the newly-minted grandparents seek them out. This kind of dynamic will no doubt be familiar to many, even if very few persons take the risk of striving to know the authentic other.

Yet one can say this and still be well within the normative definitions of otherness. The one who is truly different to me is oddly familiar in that she is eminently recognizable as a societal sore thumb. At the same time, the dominant genders and their relations present an ongoing normative context shot through with apparent conflict and difference. Men and women continue to be raised quite differently in our society and indeed, in all cultures succeeding those of the social contract. The chief reason why the total divorce rate has hovered around fifty percent for many decades is not so much economic – women appearing en masse in a non-crisis mode workforce starting in the 1970s is often cited as the most important variable here; let us suggest that this is merely a vehicle for divorce and not a motive for it – is that men and women find one another to be stunningly unrecognizable, and this as a human being, not simply as another person. Every dominant gender marriage is thus an odd exercise in internecine yet still cross- cultural ethnography. Participant observation rules the day, and one of the major reasons why youthful intimacies are so erotically inclined, aside from the general sexual repression of our puritanical educational institutions, is that sex is by far the easiest thing for two people to share with one another. It generates both authentic and inauthentic intimacy; it tends to play us beautifully false to one another.

When the overt passions fade, young people change up and the dance continues elsewhere. If there is also a sense that ‘the grass is always greener’ there is also a growing sense that one needs to ‘settle down’ at some point or other, and so a balance is eventually struck. Subjectively, same-sex relationships are more convenient for such persons, as they do not participate in the wider cross-cultural gender conflict. Of course, objectively they remain more difficult, since the rest of us still cast aspersion towards them, and that precisely because they are seen as avoiding a perduring conflict but one that is nevertheless necessary for the reproduction of society as a whole. It is a simple case of appearing to not be ‘doing one’s part’, ‘sharing the load’, ‘taking a hit for the team’, and so on. Any alternative gender may be hung up on such crosses, and this same diaphanous resentment is at work in other, if related, arenas having to do with the interface of sexuality and gender and the character of the polis, such as women who do not support reproductive rights and who thus vote ‘pro-life’: ‘I raised my own children, why can’t she?’. The underlying pattern to such sensitivities acts like a leitmotif; in this case, it is the perception that someone is cheating.

It does take a tremendous effort to construct a long-term intimate companionship with an authentic other, and the dominant genders have been experimenting with this task for millennia. Those who have forsaken this norm, however jaded and jaundiced it may be as a principle and certainly not and never being something ‘natural’, are in their turn consigned to a number of margins, not least that of apparent cowardice. It may well be a wondrous thing for men and women to love one another, but how, exactly, does one go about doing such a thing? To face this question squarely is not to just be a ‘square’. There is enough queerness in heterodoxy to make most of us blink at anything yet further down that proverbial side-street. What we find in adult relationships of all kinds is a practice which both acts at a safe distance, all the while safeguarding the perimeter with which the relationship has itself surrounded. Marriage and like companionships represent the epitome of this construction, which is why, even for younger persons, it requires a fair bit of work to undo. Though statistically consistent even if in and out of pop culture fashion, ‘swinging’, mutual and consenting, provides a failsafe for formal intimacy whereby one preserves the once-again edible cake. Alternative genders may themselves be acted out in such spaces, but we lack the data to state that those who play-act the margins are more compassionate towards their reality.

In all of this, we flatter ourselves. But the world-as-it-is does not include such pat and happy ends. Our tendency to pursue the faux otherness of distant cultural items such as cuisine and popular art forms, as well as genuflect toward political positions of ‘multi-culturalism’ and ‘inclusivity’, betray our deeper motives. We seek only the kind of difference that cements our sameness, that cannot sabotage our sense of what we are and which allows us to decoy ourselves away from the question of who we might become. That we ultimately become other to all that we have been presents Dasein with its ownmost completedness. In contemplating this, however, we are brought bodily into the question of the Other as Anxiety and as the Nothing which comes to me; that it shall come to all others itself means nothing, and this is where normative understandings of otherness let us down the most palpably. Perhaps we can rather suggest that the flight from authentic otherness in life is a proprioceptive resonance of the denial of death; it is the faux equivalent of imagining a form of consciousness immortal; it is the method by which we learn to die by ourselves. In this, we cannot entirely dismiss its patent cowardice as outside of all ethics, even if we might ideally state that resoluteness in life is the better practice of that to be tested in the face of the absence of that self-same life.

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

Does Gratitude lead to Complacency?

Does Gratitude lead to Complacency? (The shared character of past and future)

To be given respite in the face of a crisis is our greatest hope. Once given, once taken, how does this effect our character? Just now, and just then, I was compelled to be resolute, facing down the end and facing up to my personal challenge; the end of complacency, of whatever sort. Resolute being, one of the elemental ‘existentials’ of Dasein, places my being before itself, and thus as well wills my personhood to walk away from itself, itself as it is today. Cultures of all credo and stripe face this same task, and by it, all of them are challenged both bodily and mightily. It is perhaps not implausible to imagine that the courage which is demanded of a single human being in the face of the as yet unknown future might somehow be scaled to suit the needs of that same person’s society. The question of individual character might become a way in which to interrogate cultural merit, a kind of ‘superorganic’ structure which germinates in the basic subsistence of any social organization. The primordial society had no sense of history, and yet, painstakingly and imperceptibly, walked into a future, even though the concept of which could not itself take hold in this original imagination. Any time we today shun this movement, we are regressing into this first being; the proto-human who, in spite of himself, evolved a penetrating and visionary consciousness.

Resoluteness is Greek, while gratitude is Hebrew. This is one mythopoetic manner of understanding the mystagogical function of the two contrasting ethical stances. That the former is superior to the latter in theory alone does not immediately help us, for it was born in the desultory of dismal dismay; the future is nothing but the end, its all downhill from here. For the Hebrews, the stance is itself weaker, but the motive superior: the future is ours to walk toward and though its all uphill from here, nevertheless, the vantage will be worth it. With the demise of Christian metaphysics in German idealism, the willing being had but resoluteness to call upon in order to become that futural figure. Can one be grateful for the loss of gratitude? As it is so often used as a mere platitude, being grateful lacks the essential kick which propels Dasein to complete the arc of its thrown project. At the same time, resoluteness alone often dismisses what has in fact already been accomplished, and to our credit. Today, we must then ask, what is resolute gratitude? What is the means by which Dasein discloses to itself not only its futurity as a being-ahead-of-itself, but as well, its own beingness-as-it-has-been, which would include its accomplishments?

Due to a serious health condition, I lived under the impression of the loss of futural being for about 18 months. I was recently given a clean bill of health, a second chance at life, if you will, and found it just as difficult to accept the latter as I did the former. I had become resolute, and had found gratitude, but only concerning the past. I was resolute before the sense that the past was now all I had or could have had, and grateful for this past. But taken in this way, the conceptions become salves and vanish from the vocabulary of vocation, the erudition of ethics. Here lies one of the clues to resolute gratitude: that both must orient themselves toward only the future of Dasein. One may refer to what one has completed only in the sense of Schutz’s ‘I can do it again’, as a writer might say to herself, ‘I have written so many books, why should I not write another?’, and so on. In support of this self-reference which is not back-referencing, I must as well only refer to my prior experience in the manner Schutz has also detailed, when he quotes ‘I cannot swim in the same river twice’. Experience would indeed lose its value, both as the basis for human knowledge but as well, for any ethics, if it itself could only be repeated. This is why, in the primordial human trope, experience is limited to the daily round and to a small suite of crises in which all who live must be challenged by the call to that same life. Childbirth as the future, dying which is the past, hunting and gathering and storytelling and child-raising, as the present presents itself. Is it only the scale and detail of these essential rites of passage which has been altered over the eons?

I want to suggest that for our own time, what has in fact been altered in a qualitative manner are the implications of mine ownmost death. During the interminable tenure of the social contract, there were no persons, and only parts of the mechanical whole dropped away. The ethnographic witness of mourning rituals in subsistence societies, however marked by astonishment and shot through with romance, nevertheless tells us that there is no one, only the many. One loved one’s group, unto death, and in that death the love of the group holds utter sway over the shared emotions. Here, experience of the human condition is the same thing for all. For us, so far removed from both the complete intimacy of the cohort – Freud’s ‘horde’ has been, in English, trailed away from itself with the over-emphasis on sheer size rather than cohesiveness, which is the other aspect the term suggests; his sense that it was paternalistic is almost assuredly an ironic projection, imported from his own analysis of the modern State – and the daily necessity for its nurturing and nourishment, cannot but see in experience only difference, not sameness. Just so, philosophers too have made it an ambition to convince us that experience must be ever new; Erlebnis and not mere Erfahrung. The lack of the novel in our lives is assuaged by the invention of theatrical experience, such as that to be found in sports and entertainment fiction. But there is nothing truly new in a game which has itself been played thousands of times, or in a script designed to appeal to a known market. In spite of this, we can be so captivated by the ongoing action that we forget the other chief aspect of authentic experience: its presence enacts not action but rather an act.

In this, individuated experience, becoming an ‘in hand’ through its generalized call to conscience, reenacts the moments of ‘collective effervescence’, to use Durkheim’s phrase, to be found in contexts of crisis which the primordial human community endured or celebrated. That we cannot feel the presence of ‘others’ is precisely due to their being others to ourselves. This was not the case originally, and no ethic of the future would ever imply that it should so be again. We experience life only as our life, and this, in turn, invokes in us both resoluteness and gratitude. On the one hand, I am alienated by my solo adventures; ultimately, no one can fully share them, and this comes home to me most intensely when I am tasked with completing my own Dasein, when I am faced with finitude. But on the other hand, I am liberated by the very same sensibility; no one else has experienced life quite the same way as have I! This is a marvel, a wonder, and perhaps still for some, a miracle. Narrative thus becomes a means of communicating an unshared vision, rather than one of iterating a vision already known to all. Not only did this shift in human consciousness open up language to both religion and to science, it transformed cosmology itself, freeing it from being the vehicle only for cosmogony. Until the ethic of the individual emerges, gently beginning in the West with the Pre-Socratics and much more radically given a futural model in the life of Jesus, our story of the universe was the story of its creation alone.

Today, origin myths are mostly of interest to folklorists and writers of fantasy quest narratives. This ‘lorecraft’ constructs in turn a ‘worldcraft’, in a manner not so different from what must have occurred during the social contract itself. Cosmogony thus remains as a part of the theater by which the lack of novelty in modern life is partly compensated, thus as well retaining an integral aspect of its cultural value; the latter day spectacle of the pulp fiction epic is our version of each evening’s fireside tale, told and retold in increments, night after starry night. But cosmology proper, liberated from the umbilical uroboros, is now able to investigate for itself the reality of the universe as it can be known without recompense and as only and ever presenting to our astonished senses the radically new. Cosmology is, in a word, the centerpiece of authentic human experience, for no other realm of our yet shared understanding is as alien and wondrous. It can be so simply due to is non-human character, and in this, it tells us its own story, bereft and unrelated to our human concerns. No cosmogony has this function, and indeed, just the opposite; origin myths relate human experience to the universe, not the other way round. This is also why almost all contemporary adventure epics chart a course backward rather than into the unknown. They are attempts to recover the recipe for respite alone, and mistake their ancient form – the extended, originally oral, narrative – for their present function – to impel the present to overcome itself.

In this, we can be, both as a culture and as persons, too grateful for the past. The resale market for cosmogonical stories remains a leading ledger of this error. We are ourselves led away from the world-as-it-is, for that is after all the function of entertainment cast only as itself. The melodramas of fiction and sports, whether live-action or ‘virtual’, present to us a world askew, a world righted, a world askew then righted, or more disturbingly, a ‘right world’; a world which is seen as being itself in the right. Seldom are we met with the future of our own world, with all of its rightness and wrongness fully in our face. ‘Is this not after all the real world?’, we may ask ourselves. ‘If so, I cannot be entertained by it; I must be resolute only, and take my gratitude from that which allows me to dispense with my obligation to the future of that world.’ In short, the future is seen only as a task, rather than as well a gift. History is also both of these, but with the past, we overemphasize the giftedness therein and turn away from its challenge. Our stance towards the future is the very opposite; we overdo the task in front of us and forget what a great gift, indeed, the greatest of gifts, it is to have a future at all.

And just as a person can fall ill and be forced to contemplate the lack of that future and the end of one’s life, the completion of one’s Dasein, so a culture entire can sicken itself to the point of disbelief in the future, of itself and in principle. Our half-planned technical apocalypse is a dangerous gesture to this regard. The future causes in us a basic resentment toward life if we take it only as a task. Our very will to life, so essential and indeed, seen as an essence in its supplanting of the animal’s survival instinct, is muted by this overstatement of the unknown as only a threat. Along with this, the dredging of the salvaged selvedge of historical druthers distracts us from becoming conscious that what we have been, as a species, presents just as much of a challenge to us – for it tells us who we are and why, and speaks these wisdoms to us without either rancor but also outside of all salvation – as it does a gift. The authentic disposition of Dasein’s response to the call to conscience as concernful being is that the past and future must be understood as equal parts curse and blessing. We cannot, as the cosmogonical viewpoint had it, simply choose the one and not the other, just as we cannot, as Nietzsche reminds us, choose joy without sorrow. We cannot choose the past without the future since it is we who walk forward resolutely from the one toward the other. Just so, this movement cannot be accomplished without gratitude, for futurity is something elemental to our being, and not merely an unknown factor to be discerned with time, an alien language to be deciphered with study. The future is, in its authenticity, of the same ethical presence as is the past, and thus requires of us the self-same sensibility; that of resolute gratitude and grateful resoluteness. Only by way of this will experience confer upon us its overcoming of complacency, and the universe will continue to be open to our wonder.

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

Before Good and Evil

Before Good and Evil (a non-moral reality)

A generally overlooked aspect of Engels’ social evolutionary schema that closes the circle around its dynamic if not its scale, is the absence of a God concept in what he refers to as ‘primitive communism’. Marx later writes, ‘for the communist man, the idea of God cannot occur’. That is to say, even the very idea of a God becomes impossible in the communist mode of production. For Engels, the cultures of the social contract were to be the model of the relations of production in what remains today an hypothetical communist society. In his schematic, the quirk occurs late in the day, almost as if it were a plot device, necessary because, after unrolling a tight tapestry of human history and prehistory alike – and for the first time, making a connection between them without regressing into either metaphysics or flirting with outright bigotry – the reader finds the climax requires the usual suspension of belief. While this is fine for commercial fiction, it is not so fine for philosophy. That the means of production do not change from the Bourgeois mode of production to that of communism more than implies that capitalism is communism bereft of pre-capitalist symbolic formations.

This is not, on the face of it, an insoluble problem in practice, only for the model. It is somewhat difficult to believe that neither Marx nor Engels were aware of this tipsiness in an otherwise reasonable ‘model of’, but this is precisely the point here: if Engels strove to create a ‘model of’, Marx desired rather a ‘model for’. Given the challenge of transforming the same model from one to the other, it is perhaps unsurprising that the logic of the dialectic abruptly drops off just when one would expect to see its culmination. A literary scholar once suggested to me that a failed novel is the worst thing, but a failed philosophy is but a work in progress. While such a sentiment is itself reasonable, the key is to continue that work. Let’s reexamine the connections between the origin and the destination in Engels, in order to clarify both the motive and thence the rationale for constructing it the way in which he did.

‘Primitive communism’ is the less romantic version of Rousseau’s social contract. It becomes even less sentimental in Durkheim’s ‘mechanical solidarity’, and downright Third Reichish in Malinowski’s diaries, not intended for publication, wherein the ‘savages should all be obliterated’. Yes, living-in with a bunch of superstitious morons would likely get old, as the famous ethnographer discovered for himself, but then again, this was precisely the point of Marx and Engels when they dedicated their corpus to a demythology of modern man. In the nineteenth century, when social evolutionary schemas were all the rage, Darwin’s revelations only fostered a deepening of the sense that what one saw regarding ‘progress’ was not merely cultural, but had to do with the ‘species essence’, as Marx has it. This post-Enlightenment problem was not quite overcome even in the work of some of the greatest of its revolutionary thinkers, including Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. For each, there is a point wherein metaphysics, the idea of Man, capital ‘M’, creeps back in. From a purely authorial point of view, this is a subjective reaction to becoming over-enamored with one’s own ideas. This is the more easily solved aspect of the problem. Less simple is the aspect which lies at the discursive level: from Aristotle to Foucault, metaphysics, in its broadest sense and most distanciated case, re-presences itself. At the far end, ethics does not manage to sever its umbilical cord to metaphysics, and at the near end, the archaeological structures of discourse, their ‘evenements’ and their orthographies, trend trundling into the same. It appears that it is not an easy thing, at all, to overcome the idea of the ideas.

Yet for the vast bulk of our species’ tenure on this planet, and presumably, for all of the millions of years before this, wherein our hominid ancestors rusticated, metaphysics didn’t, equally at all, exist. This is the perduring strength of Engels’ understanding: the original human condition provides all of the symbolic clues necessary to convert capitalism into communism. A cosmology without gods, a cosmogony of transformation, and an apolitical polis; what more could one ask for? This was humanity not beyond good and evil, but rather before.

Gauguin and D.H. Lawrence were liberated by this discovery, but Malinowski was apparently appalled by it. Even so, one would have to more minutely distinguish the types of societies each of these European interlopers lived in, in order to more fully appreciate the implications of Engels’ own work. Melanesia is not Eden, though Polynesia appeared to be a closer approximation thereof. And Mestizo Meso-America, however sunny and sexy when compared with a paranoid and ultimately also delusional Interwar Europe, could only be compared with subsistence social organizations, at a stretch, in the remotest village conditions. Rousseauist romance aside for a moment, Engels was himself the polar opposite of any sentimentalist, having disowned his father, a great capitalist and solemn Protestant Bourgeois, and thence studying the working conditions in the heart of industrial England, producing the first ever full-fledged ethnography in 1845. No romance here, one would suspect, but even there, even then, Engels did find his life love, rescuing a 12-year-old girl from the mills and later marrying her when she ‘came of age’, to use a period expression. In a word, Engels cut a rather more heroic figure than the dreamy Rousseau, embittered Lawrence and escapist Gauguin. For the feminist, Engels was able to do so because he had also shed the misogynist contraptions of his forebears and peers alike. Marx was unable to claim the same for himself, we would suggest.

However this may be, what is certain is that Rousseau’s image of the ‘noble savage’ itself cut two ways. Was it then the savagery or the nobility that evolutionary discourse would favor? In Nietzsche, they appear to almost become the same thing, and thence in Freud as well; hence the ongoing problem of repression. Darwin, on his part, seemed aloof to the distinction, which may well be par for the course for the harder sciences; ‘it is what it is’, could be an empiricist motto. But all of this discursive hand-wringing in the face of human history comes just before 1859 and thenceforth in the implicatory interregnum between Darwin’s ‘Origin’ and his 1871 ‘Descent’. Afterwards, handwringing gives way to head-shrinking.

Metaphysics, as a projection of human aspiration, served equally well as a set of ideals as it did ideal conditions; it proposed, in its diverse contents cross-culturally, that while humanity actually lived like this in the present, in the future it could live like that. At first, even death was but a metaphor. One needed to shed the human being which I am in order to ascend to the new culture. There is thus an exiguous, but still continuous, connection between the exhortations found in Gilgamesh to those of The Will to Power. In a word, my life as it is and how it has been, is but a shadow of either what is to come, or what it should be. The discursive rendering of the saint, metaphysics as morality quickly came to define not only the standard of ideal conduct in the world – and this as a role model, a ‘model for’; which in turn suggests that the dialectic should have been able, if left to its own internal logical device, overcome any flaw in Engels’ schema, since in metaphysics we do have a general example of what once was merely a ‘model of’ transmuting itself into a ‘model for’ – but as well the rubric by which one, indeed, anyone, could attain such an ideal. These are the timeless codes, from Hammurabi to the Decalogue, which connote a space transcendent to history, a space which is not a place and which can be simply called ‘Time’. In this, metaphysics reinvents the absence of history which was, forever and ever, the condition of our species and its direct predecessors.

The timeless time of the social contract was attractive to Engels both as a model of a society which endured in spite of itself and its own serious limitations, as well as politically; as a model for the re-creation of a similar set of relations of production which would, in their own way, withstand the test of historical time. Communism is thus granted the status of an Eden-in-practice. Like any utopian scheme, Engels’ dialectical materialism presents its terminus as at the least indefinite, and in this, aspires to bring the metaphysical metaphor to ground. That we have not yet been able to slough off the ‘old gods’ of pre-capitalist symbolic forms, does not slay the utopian loyalist but rather summons her to further heroics, discursive or otherwise. In our own day, climate clamor, identity ideology, gender genuflection, and hysteria in the face of the facts of human history fashionably dominate popular discourse regarding the future, however indefinite it may be or yet become. Not that Engels’ was himself either an ill-considered thinker or a person who dwelt in the clouds, quite the opposite. But any time one ‘gets an idea in one’s head’, as it were, the deeper meaning of such a phrase comes to the fore in light of the represencing of metaphysical aspirations, this time at a very subjective level. It allows us to mistake the personal for the political, the ideological for the theoretical, even the factual for the fanciful. It blinds us to both the vicissitudes of historical time – our conception thereof does not admit to there ever being a ‘forever’, either in the distant past or the projected future – as well as the evidence, fragmentary and yet possessed of its own miracle: that even in the fossil record of quasi-timeless geological time, there is still change, albeit glacial. The toolkit of Homo Erectus showed almost no alteration over a span of up to two million years, but, in the end, it was transformed, as more sophisticated proto-humans arose. This cannot possibly be called a memory, but only a fact. In this, we learn that experience has a too-intimate effect upon us; through it alone we are become bigots, the deniers of worlds.

What Engels did realize, before the logical slippage, was that too great a cleaving to models of meant a more challenging effort regarding models for. There is no sign, in running through his evolutionary model, that anything unexpected was to occur. Marx noted, perhaps more to himself than to anyone else, that capital presented the most liberating possibility of any human condition theretofore, simply because there was not only the vast potential of its industrial-technical means of production, but there was also, and for the first time, social mobility built into the system itself. Romantic pseudo-history has culture heroes flung to the top of antique societies, but these figures are exceedingly rare. Whether or not Capital can overcome the metaphysics it has inherited from the social organizations occurring in history between the bookended communisms remains to be seen. Social mobility itself cuts both ways. That one can improve one’s subjective lot also means that one can sabotage it. And when an entire culture history ‘breaks bad’, it is the great plot device of an ideology to glorify the implausible in order to suppress the impossible.

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