essays – GV Loewen

How the Petty Secures the Profound

How the Petty Secures the Profound (opposites contract)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Venus Envy

Venus Envy (esthetic and aesthetic)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Author: Persona Gratis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sin Agog

Sin Agog (the radical propriety of conversion)

It is a not uncommon feature of our finitude to accrue to oneself a sense of both regret and redemption. This is, for us, primarily a Christian frame of reference, for there is but fate inexorable and penance pedantic in the Greek moral mythos, and even in that Egyptian, from which the Christian sensibility is ultimately derived, one finds that living-on produces only the ledger by which Horus judges whether or not the soul has lived up to its predetermined value, or perhaps has even exceeded it. Thus, there is no redemptive force in pre-Christian moral cosmology. But we can ask, why redemption at all? What have I done, or not done, in this life such that I would require some soteriological entry into the next? Of course, if there is no ‘next’ phase of existence, redemption becomes purely a private matter, and it would be to my own person as an expression of the call to conscience afore which I would stand and be tested. For us today, this test is no longer a moral one, but one of public ethics to which the private self must for the time being bend its will and desire.

We have, however, a mythopoetic landscape first to tread, and like all mythic narrative, hyperbole and metaphor rule the day. Confessionals, pioneered by Saul into Paul in terms of posterity – Peter immediately felt remorse in realizing he had, in the most Greek sense, fulfilled Jesus’ simple declaration regarding denying Him thrice , but this was a private comprehension and never meant to be taken even as a Christian viewpoint; it was not prophecy in the Judaic sense nor prescient in that pre-agrarian, nor was it to be made into a foundation for a conversion event – and given an entire discourse, that of subjectivity, by Augustine. Before one is born again, one’s subjectivity is one of subjection; we have yet to object to ourselves as being mere objects in another’s eyes. The twice-born are not elites, merely those who have been enlightened; they are the to-be-saved, and form a pool of willing souls who have undergone the sternest of earthly examinations. Self-examination is also not Christian, but the entire rationale for submitting oneself to this perhaps daily evaluation shifts from the now transient Greek ground, moving from mythic and poetic thought to that historical and linguistic, scientific and aesthetic, to one of a kind of dress-rehearsal for judgment day, once again Egyptian in pedigree. One ideally would not appear before God wearing the dross of any worldly subjection, including the objection others make at our very existence.

In order to prepare oneself for potential salvation then, one needs to undergo conversion. In the Gospels, we have but a kind of charismatic convincing or yet baptism. One, there is yet no church to which to convert, nor even a systematic set of beliefs to adopt. Two, there are no figures who preach conversion as a liminality, or as an event in its own right. One is immediately transformed in Jesus’ presence, whether the interlocutor is beset with sin or blight, disease or infamy. This is Socratic dialogue taken in its most guttural, but also radically flattened-out, manner. There is no philosophical argument to be made or accepted, no dialectic, and no evaluating audience. The thesis is how I have lived, the antithesis how I must live from now on, and there is no further Aufheben yielding a synthesis,. The entire thesis must in fact be discarded in conversion; it is the patently non-dialectical process. Jesus presents his case not as a position within discourse, but one that hails from a source beyond all human thought. Yes, he certainly humanizes the glad tidings of redemption through faith, but their contents and their force emanate entirely from a non-human sphere. Like any visionary, Jesus is met with incredulity at times, and his message finds its most receptive ears amongst the marginal, the last who shall be first in the new leaven of things. But with Paul, who has, in spite of himself, pronounced his own conversion event and thence makes it into that apical ancestor of all further such experiences – if we are to take up the faith and become ‘twice-born’ we must picture ourselves on the road to Damascus, as the very first person to be converted – not only does his name change – this hallmark is found even in social contract societies within the rites of puberty and of death and has nothing to do with religion at all – he gains repute through taking up the message of the Gospels, with a variety of political adumbrations, no doubt, but yet with a sense of keen sincerity and concern for a wider humanity, the kernel of which is first seen with Alexander and his sense of cosmopolitanism.

This idea of ‘humanity’, so dear to us today as an ideal in spite of our reckless shunning of it in practice, is also something that can be queried. For if the road to salvation demands conversion, we must first reflect upon how our previous life, also human, does not and has not measured up to the new ethical standards of late presented to us. Youth can be baptized, but they cannot, in truth, become ‘converts’, for conversion, by its very character, must have material through which a point-by-point comparison may be made between the first born life and that twice born. This requires time served; indeed, one might suggest that conversion only is authentically itself completed by living the new life for some few years so that the comparative analysis itself may be completed. There is thus a conversion ‘event’, but this is not at all equal to conversion as an experience. The road to Damascus introduces the conversion experience, but only the Pauline epistles complete it. In them, we find references to not only how the author blanches at his previous life and the sometimes nasty actions which populate it, we also see that he widens his self-scrutiny to the cultures around him, be they Greek, Hebrew, or Roman. An ethnic chameleon himself, Paul is roused to rhetorical force in the face not so much of active resistance but rather of a placid disinterest. He is aware, as is any good orator, that resistance means that the other has begun to consider one’s arguments, whereas the apathetic or yet the diffident are much more at risk for missing their Kerygmatic content. Paul imparts the crucial idea that the new church shall not discriminate against any human being; all can convert to Christianity and indeed, all should do so post-haste.

But the other chief sensibility that the epistles own and thus introduce to Western discourse is that of the existential anxiety. This was non-existent for the Greeks, whose fates were predetermined and whose notion of Hades included only a one-way ticket. Anxiety is today understood as an elemental aspect of the Being of Dasein, but the Pauline version specifically addresses me to attend to how I have lived and the reasons for my life. Instead of desirefully feeling agog within our sinful subsistence, we must shed the very desire for that kind of life; we must, in our newly examined life, feel agog at the nature of sin itself, and thus question why on earth I have participated in it. This intensely interested concernfulness, the very source-point of Heideggerean ‘guilt’ – a term which he takes great, but to me, unconvincing, pains to make value-neutral – is shifted, in the process of the conversion event, from reveling in sin to examining it. And it is precisely this shift which, though a politics in Paul, becomes a full-fledged discourse with Augustine.

Yet we are not quite as fully absent from mythical narrative, even here. For Augustine consistently overdoes it, making his first born life out to be a veritable salmagundi of secularist sin. I once overheard one student who was appalled that he was having sex with a twelve-year old girl, but of course during this time period such an age was very much an adult; Mary was the same age when carrying Jesus. It is of interest that Augustine’s own audience would have found fault with different aspects of his self-examination than we today, but this makes for an enduring testament, allowing for errors of interpretation along the way. At the end of the day, however, we have no idea what Augustine did or did not get up to in his younger years, and this function of memoir in general – we must take the author’s statements at face value or, at the very least, as well-intentioned euphemisms to be used as both metaphorical models at first of – the pre-conversion life – and thence for – the newly ‘good’ life of the twice-born – is another invention of his. The essential tension which resides in subjective narrative is that it is always an amalgam of memory and imagination, of reality and fantasy, and the admixture very much depends on what kind of message one desires to communicate. The confession as part of conversion begins with Augustine and has had a great many mimics since. But as with any literary or even aesthetic form more generally, it can truly only be ‘done’ once. Given this, what are we to make of its historical appearance?

It most forceful sensibility is one of a radical propriety. I must come to own my prior life, warts and all, and to thence possess its experience as an absolute benchmark against which my new behavior and outlook can be measured. In conserving the notion of sin, mainly past but still possible for me, I can evaluate each present action through the comparison with the perduring shadow sin casts over human outcomes. Just because I have undergone a rite of passage, that I am a convert, does not mean that I am exempt from sin, only that I have a powerful manner of adjudicating it in my life and perhaps in those of others as well, which I could not have had before the conversion event. Just so, I must also learn to own this new ability; I must exercise just as radical a propriety over self-examination in the light of redemption as I do over the haunted landscape of my sinful past life. That life is over, but sin itself remains, since it is after all its own force, and does not accrue especially to me nor does it regard me as its only vehicle. And just as I was merely another once-born sinner, so too I now realize that in the light of a redemptive soteriology, I learn to take the human being in me as an end in itself; neither a means for other’s ends in subjection, nor as a way to judge others as fitting mine own through objectification. Thus the concept which is given the truest shift is neither that of sin nor even of action, but rather of interest; it is the orientation of my being agog that is transmuted from reveling to evaluating.

In sum, conversion is both an event and an experience. It is a point and a series. It contains the limen of the born-again but in so doing, does not purge the actual presence of sin, but instead reorients my interest toward it. I no longer desire it as an ‘in itself’, even if I may yet sin as my twice-born selfhood, but I rather desire to examine it and evaluate it as an action in the world. In conversion I move away from the shadowy essence of sin in order to actively grapple with its existence, in my life and in that of others. In the model of which the confessional representation of conversion begins, I am all agog within sin and because of it, but in the model for with which this same narrative structure concludes, my intense interest is in sin as a space that I may live without, and that in both senses of the term. Conversion excerpts us from the sinful life but does not exempt us from examining the character of sin which remains as part of my general humanity. If we take this language in its historical and thus wider sense, our conversion ethics of today allows us to critically examine our entire way of life and how it pronounces, in part, a misery upon others. ‘Sin’ in modernity orbits round injustice and inequality and is thus no longer radically subjective in its record. Even so, we must attempt to own it as if it were my personal error; the kind of mistake reserved for those whose conscience remains once-born.

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

Self and World

Self and World (a phenomenological excursus)

When I regain the day, upon awakening, the mode of reality into which I am extended shifts. I had been asleep, traveling within the world of dreams, for the most part autonomic in orientation; the involuntary communication of states of bodily function. We do not know precisely the ratio amongst dreams of anxiety, of neurosis, and those simple ‘public service’ announcements that prevent me from minor midnight mishap, but what is clear is that in each genre of dream, hyperbole, metaphor, and desire are employed to get the message across. The ‘reality’ of dreams is not entirely unreal, since it borrows heavily from my waking experiences with real others alive to our shared world, but due to their unshared and unshareable character, dreams lack the sociality of the social which our daily interactions with those same others possess. Though I may sometimes discover a limited volition within the dream-sequence, I am never ‘in control’ of the space of action itself. In this, dreams also mimic the wide-awake reality; the world at large is as well mostly beyond my individual control. Yet neither are dreams irreal, the mode of reality befitting the vision. Instead, it is their surreality that, upon awakening, either shocks or amuses us. The most important factor for any model of reality is that the distinctions between its modes must be quite significant. For realities, by their nature and definition, cannot share their selfsame presence.

In experiencing a vision, for instance, I depart from the mutually shared social reality of my contemporaries. This irreality is sudden, prompting Kierkegaard to note that it is often received by us as a form of evil. Yet the unplanned and unexpected irruption of the Nothing or perhaps only the non-rational is, as a phenomenological event, no different in its structure than that of the phantasm, wherein we consciously plan for ‘projects of action’. My responses to it are inverted, as I can only react consciously to the irreal, rather than plan for it and thus expect it, but the elements of the ‘interaction’ do not differ from any other self-world experience that may come my way. In waking, social reality too I find that I am oft only reacting to others’ actions rather than initiating my own before being overtaken by events local or general. The chief difference demarcating the irreal from the real is that the former attempts a waking dream. The vision is the middle ground between dreaming and waking, between fantasy and reality. As Rod Serling might have it, ‘it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge’. This is perhaps too strong a characterization of the vision proper, but apt enough for a theatrical version thereof. Yet within this eloquent line does lie the sense that radically other forms of knowing present to us a challenging choice: do we take them into ourselves and thus become somewhat different than our human fellows, or do we leap into their fire and thus potentially lose our humanity entire?

If an excursus into the ‘twilight zone’ of irreality is not always to our advantage, we do maintain an anchor out to the windward cast of the realismus, where, appropriately, the sensus communis of normative social life rules the day. We have no such access when dreaming, and must first awaken to once again partake in the world as we know it to have been, and as we assume it shall continue to be. The world as a worlding being provides this safer succor to our mortal self. It does not need us, and thus is able to nurture our finite beings with the goal understood to be itself a confrontation with both tradition, on the one hand, and finitudinal futurity, on the other. Neither dreams nor visions have either of these goals, nor are such recognizable when we are ourselves within their odd, even oddball, embrace. The waking dream of the vision might appear to be shared and thence shareable, but in fact the visionary finds that he must retreat from the irreal source of wisdom in order to share it with others. This is why the descent from the mountaintop is a near universal feature of the cosmogony of morality, for instance. From Moses to Zarathustra, the visionary, as a vehicle for the new sociality and as a midwife for the world to come, cannot remain in the space of the vision itself. Dreams, by contrast, present no radically liminal landscape, for each night everyone enters into her own version thereof, and upon awakening, returns to the collective consciousness of both symbolic forms and behavioral norms.

This is the ‘lifeworld’ of Schutz. It implies, without specific judgment, that neither do visions nor dreams possess that which animates conscious being; life itself. As Lennon sang, ‘it is not living’, referring to dreams in what was arguably the most important song of the 1960s, simply taken as creating a break from the going-rate. Given that ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (1966) was used as the sonic backdrop to a crucial moment in the series Madmen, marking the advent of the new social reality of the then youthful baby-boom, we are thrown into both a cultural maelstrom as well as a pop-culture event. Born in that same year, I had no conscious experience thereof, even though I was alive therein. And this distinction too is of import, because lived experience must first be in possession of a modicum of rational consciousness, the very thing generally absent in both dreams and visions. The lifeworld enumerates the structures of shared consciousness, including the conscience, self-consciousness, and self-understanding. The lifeworld thus has its ‘personal’ side, if you will, wherein I, as a reflective agent in the world, come face to face with my ownmost being as a social character. The Husserlian might protest that the lifeworld is a model only for the phenomenological psychology of hyletic reality alone, but though this is a reasonable criticism which brings our attention toward not abusing the language of phenomenology, it is not as germane when we as well become aware that eidetic structures must, if they are to themselves animate the ‘collective consciousness’ without recourse to mythos, remain as part of the scientifically irreal. In ‘On Multiple Realities’ (1953), Schutz implies that scientific reality is in fact the practical means by which cross-cultural communication can occur in reality at all. Phenomenology, when examining the structures of consciousness rather than those of the lifeworld, is the irreal version of science.

Within the lifeworld, I am presented with two agentive options: the social reality of my peers and contemporaries, and the social world of humanity as a whole. I take the former as a given, and also take that others will do the same, on our mutual behalf. I do not question the ‘whys’ of the day-to-day, but rather duly perform them, without much conscious effort, and the affront I take when others do not live up to the standards of the day reminds me that this form of agency, acting in the social reality, is both a performance and does require some effort after all. Most of the tension in today’s political life emanates from the emerging sense that a growing number of these others are unwilling or unable to ‘do their part’ in upholding the performance-based version of the social world. If they refuse to do so, or recuse themselves from this shared effort in some other manner, they move from simply being an ‘other-like-myself’ to a more authentic otherness, and thus may constitute a threat to the reality of the lifeworld itself. Through this possibility, I discover that in fact social reality is not a given, since it requires daily upkeep. Part of that work is expressed in me being able to take this reality as a given, which mirrors the selfhood about which I too am required to make certain assumptions. None of this, however, touches the question of ‘existence’, which is contiguous with other kinds of ‘why’ questions that the normative person leaves for the philosopher. Within the phenomenology that seeks to understand the structures of consciousness itself, a kind of ‘Kantian’ sensibility is present. But in social reality, we are not Kantians but rather Jamesians; wholly pragmatic in outlook and aware of the general rubric that only the outcome matters.

It is not quite the same stance that I bring to the social world, which, in contrast with social reality, includes the past, as well as something of the sense of a general future, within its phenomenological ambit. History is our chief source of what has been in relation to the career of our species. Archaeology and paleoanthropology extend the technical and temporal reach of history, but they neither alter its mandate nor its scope. Here, instead of simply living out the day in a calculated indifference to its ‘how’ – why these norms instead of others, for instance – I can delve into their history, their own careers, and the politics presented in other times and places that eventually combined to bring us to where we are right now. The social world does not attempt to examine itself as an ontological form, but it also does not simply shrug off any epistemic analysis. The discourses of the sciences too are available in the social world, whereas once again in social reality they are sloughed off as areas for the specialist alone. It is clear, then, that on any given day, I can cross from social reality into the social world more widely, precisely in order to explain, at least to myself, why and how the former functions the way it does. Indeed, if I am a cultural newcomer, I must make this crossing not only on a daily basis, but many times per day. Schutz’s ‘The Stranger’, (1944), remains the most exacting, and even poignant, account of this challenging dynamic. Here, I am presented with the ultimate problem of distinguishing what constitutes social reality for my new hosts, and am flummoxed by the realization that social ‘reality’ is itself plural in nature via human culture itself. This is why it is scientific reality which is the only generalizable form. Dreams, phantasms, visions, and most vexingly, even wide-awake social reality are not portable in any ultimate sense. All the more so the altered realities of the addict or the mentally ill cannot provide the species with any kind of useable works in view of the future. For it is specifically Dasein’s future-orientedness that both allows me to shore up the waking reality with which I am most familiar, as well as take occasional forays into the more aware and reflective space of the social world.

But in order to do so, I must myself maintain the rational consciousness which not only befits social reality but as well reproduces it. This dynamic, between reproduction and reflection, between action and contemplation, and between the historical act and the aesthetic work, compels me to attend to its inherent tension: without respect of its origins, social reality’s primary goal is to simply get through each day, just as my own goal is the same. This goal can conflict with any sense that I should more deeply understand why I have this goal in the first place. To what end, I might ask, is the effort expended in and for mundane life? What is the ‘me’ that is offered such solace in the routine, the otiose, and the repetitive? And why do I often prefer this version of myself over against the human being possessed of, and indeed, created by, the confluence of reason and imagination and given an existential hold upon temporality through both memory and anticipation? At first, this appears a pressing issue: social reality neither requires nor encourages reflective or critical thought. The social world contains the discourses of both, but it is still up to me to both access them and thence put them to living use. If I take a second glance at my predicament, I realize that it is not quite as tense and dire as it seems. In fact, even in daily life, there are times when I have to reflect upon my actions. Very often it is through the presence of others which cautions me to take a step away from action, and thereby enter into a more contemplative stance. When this does occur, I find myself able to question more generally the reality of my hearth. I need not become a philosopher to do the work necessary to engender self-examination with a view to attaining a mature self-understanding. I need not even alter social reality to engage in this species-essence project. I only need to alter my own sensibility which I usually bring to it.

And this is precisely where the perspective of all the generally available realities come into play. I may be inspired by a vision, enlightened by a dream, shuttered by a passing addiction, relieved of a mental illness, become learned and rational through the sciences, or take on the guise of the future within the phantasm. Social reality does itself engage, willingly or no, with these other six forms, all of which may be found within the combination of the social world and that which abruptly breaks in upon it, emanating from some lesser known function of consciousness itself. When I do gain the perspective of multiple realities, I find that both my self and my being within the world’s worlding of itself become more adeptly apt and more deeply alive. For the selfhood of the world rests in its ability to go its own way, apart from my intents or desires. Just so, any authentic worldliness that I accrue to myself, living within the landscape of both a shared and waking social reverie, must do the same.

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

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.