essays – Page 2 – GV Loewen

Refusing and Misusing Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tales of Goffman

Tales of Goffman (my nominal contributions to microsociology)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flatteries not Included

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does Gratitude lead to Complacency?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before Good and Evil

Before Good and Evil (a non-moral reality)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘Zeitmotif’ and the New Art

The ‘Zeitmotif’ and the New Art (Metaphorical Realism)

In his 1851 essay on music drama, Wagner outlines the structure of the leitmotif, a recurring theme which can be used to convey a wider sense of emotion concerning a character, an abstract force, a place, or even an intent. Used in this way, an audience is reminded of the presence of the essence of the character, force, or place etc., just as all of his principal characters themselves represent more abstract qualities in the human and historical imagination. Characters, by definition, cannot be archetypes, but they can cleave to them. And this is what we are presented with through the use of the leitmotif: it is the connecting link between person and persona, character and type, experience and essence. Insofar as the entirety of the romantic aesthetic was transformed by Wagner’s idea, the leitmotif as a concept in a sense contains itself.

I would like to suggest a corresponding conception for history, rather than art. Rather than Zeitgeist, the ‘spirit of the age’ or of the times, which is either too narrow temporally if in fact realistic, or unrealistic if overextended in time, and increasingly so the more time it is claimed to be able to represent. Its thus far place-filler converse, ‘leitgeist’, suggests a kind of transhistorical presence, a ‘recurring spirit’ which, akin to that of religious ethics or soteriological doctrines, also by definition cannot adhere to any specific time period. So then, the fourth possible term available would be ‘Zeitmotif’: a temporally contained motive which also implies historical motivation. In modern art too, the leitmotif is present, and in all arenas of popular art Wagner remains the benchmark. Video game soundtracks are an ubiquitous example of the use of leitmotifs. Every important character has their own theme, for instance, as well as do certain kinds of events or yet scenes. Brands have theme-songs or specific melodies attached to them, and even cartoonish characters in children’s video games have simple ditties which, due to their repetitive and even omnipresent replay, have become instantly recognizable, even outside of their digital and interactive contexts.

By contrast, the Zeitmotif does not so much recur as characterize. Indeed, if we were to subjunct modern art to modernity more generally, we could call the leitmotif itself a Zeitmotif, for it is something which in itself is characteristic of the art of a particular age. For pre-modern or traditional relations of production or cosmologies, the leitgeist would certainly qualify as a Zeitmotif, for it too is characteristic of an important aspect of a world-system, yet as well constrained by a specific historical time period. It is not at all a contradiction to state that historical conceptions, even self-conceptions, can include the transhistorical. The reality of the former does not even imply, objectively speaking, the wider reality of the latter. Thus the ‘presence of God’, so presumed as universal in premodern contexts, has for us fallen away, both from ourselves and perhaps more radically, from itself as well. The Fall of Man becomes the less-dressed rehearsal for that of the divine.

The history of art presupposes that each innovation seeks for itself pride of place amongst the competition to represent not only its individuated subject matter, but the very age in which it finds itself present. This intent could well be called a leitgeist, but the content of each of these successive styles or genres is clearly much more limited. We can argue that the origin of modernity in art appears with Goya, and especially his willingness to, quite without romance though indeed with the highest human drama, depict violence and horror. This period in art only begins to reach its far horizon with the advent of digital imagery. It ascends to its symbolic nadir perhaps with Picasso – Guernica comes to mind – where a Catalonian catatonia is catastrophically catalogued. A Zeitmotif ignores the ‘school’ of artists, their nationality, and their respective lifespans as long as none of these fall outside the wider period identified by a Zeitgeist. In this, the two concepts are themselves linked, just as the archetypical suasion of a leitmotif casts its arm loosely round the figure of a leitgeist. The Zeitmotif in the new art acts as an aesthetic centrifuge.

In the older sensibility, a corresponding Zeitmotif could not be subjectively identified. This is so due to its content, which spoke of transcendence and not history, the otherworld rather than the this-world. The Madonna figure is certainly, from an art historian’s perspective, a leitmotif in the sense of it being a recurring expression, and, from the view of the history of ideas, a Zeitmotif, since it is a ‘sign of the times’, as it were. But in itself, and from the context of this genre’s ‘production and consumption’ – more empathically, ‘creation and assumption’ – it is simply a snapshot of an ongoing presence, a leitgeist, rendered and portrayed yes, but neither invented by, nor tethered to, in any way the artist or the viewer. Only in modernity is the Zeitmotif both acknowledged as a ‘thing’ which exists and which has various content, but as well understood as it being itself a form of formal analysis. The lack of the subjective analytic in premodernity does no disservice to its art, of course, but it does place it somewhat outside our general ken. We are conscious of its presence as representative of a worldview, but not as the presence of a God.

To reiterate most plainly: today, any leitgeist is but a Zeitmotif, any Zeitmotif a temporally truncated non-recurring leitmotif, as well as an emblem of a Zeitgeist. How then do these additional terms help us explicate apparently qualitatively different periods in both art, belief, cultural practice, and even realismus?

Our ability to recognize contrast between and amongst successive, or even simultaneous, genres in the arts provides a first clue. Brahms and Bruckner shared a number of important things; they were both major composers of their time, they had their respective followings, neither married, and both fell in love with women who were utterly unavailable to them. They met the once; enjoying together with gusto the one thing perhaps to their minds that they truly shared; a love for south German cuisine and beer. Brahms’ avatar was Beethoven, Bruckner’s, Wagner. Brahms had himself already endured the fashionable conflict between his followers and Wagner’s, the latter supplanted by Bruckner’s after Wagner’s death in 1883. Even so, viewed over the longer term, there is no authentic conflict here. Both composers’ apical ancestor was Beethoven, and the romanticism of the 19^th century did not truly vanish until the advent of Schoenberg, a few years after both men’s own respective passing. The case is instructive on more than one count. First, we must learn to distinguish mere fashion from history proper as the identification of a Zeitmotif can only occur within the ambit of the latter. Next, we can also begin to apprehend the phenomenological property of ‘taste’; its ‘regimes’, to borrow from Bourdieu, too formal to themselves provide egress from their also fashionable frames. For institutionalization does not an epistemology grant. Finally, but not exhaustively, a Zeitmotif collects to itself that which can often appear to be in opposition. More profoundly aesthetically, but no different structurally, is late 19^th Vienna when juxtaposed with more recent feuds between popular music groups, such as The Beatles with The Rolling Stones, that same band with The Who, or Metallica with Guns ‘N Roses. A Zeitmotif thus does not make distinct an aesthetic judgment, but is rather a simple phenomenological rubric.

Further, the presence of a Zeitmotif is not limited to a specific form of content. In our example, we would have to as well identify an entire ‘Wagnerian’ persona, versus that ‘Brahmsian’. This analytic points neither to acolyte much less to martinette, but instead attempts to disclose, in the existential sense of the term, the Dasein of the form in question; its beingness in the world. Nietzsche was, for a short time, a Wagnerian, but we would never think of the philosopher today as wearing that heart on his sleeve. And speaking of Dasein, Heidegger was a member of the NSDAP for about two years, before belatedly realizing the fuller import of that movement’s own leitmotifs. Today, only the embittered critic trades in Nazified insults when it comes to the lineage of great thinkers. By contrast, a Zeitmotif has staying power; but always within its own amalgamated arc! And yet further, and more evidence of the parochial quality of the presence of a Zeitmotif in situ, as it were, one would strain to find either a Wagnerian, Brucknerian, or a Brahmsian today, and while each composer still has his respective fans, mostly it is the case that if one loves one, one loves all three and others besides. So, what can construct a Zeitmotif also, over time, serves to ‘deconstruct’ it – in the looser sense, surely, but indeed including the characteristics ‘differing’ (we recognize the distinct styles of yet musically kindred composers) and ‘deferring’ (we abjure judgment, recusing ourselves from stating with any final emphasis which composer is ‘superior’) – without our analytic losing its hold over the historically inclined framework, once in place.

While a leitmotif recurs not merely to reiterate its charge’s presence but as well to remind the listener or what-have-you that indeed this presence has in fact reappeared, a Zeitmotif is much more static, relying upon its somewhat standoffish but always-fullest presence to stifle any lapse in our collective memory. In this, it maintains an advantage over the older leitgeist, which, in its very abstraction, must avail itself of its uncanny properties. Like any vision, it then risks the perennial problem of having utter authority over the visionary but that over no other. In direct contrast – and perhaps also as an historicist ‘replacement’ of the leitgeist? – the Zeitmotif’s presence rests in the mere presentification of itself; it is simply there, and thus its version of risk is that we, equally simply, neglect to note its ongoing presence, since it can rapidly recede into mundanity, as with everything else.

Perhaps it is reasonable to conclude that it is this very otiose quality which animates the Zeitmotif, and is in turn reanimated by it. Even at the level of fashion, our spirits are at least titillated by their being the appearance of conflict. In narrative of course, it is proverbial that ‘if one does not have conflict, one does not have a story’; that is, at all. We may venture to say the same of life, in spite of our almost innate sense that we must avoid conflict as best we can. Simmel’s discussion of the irreal, though not quite uncanny, quality of there being a life which can only be lived by experiencing a number of different lives and thus inhabiting, or yet indwelling, a number of different phases of life, resonates here; for the concept of the Zeitmotif comes home to us most intimately when we understand ourselves through its ledgered yet lustrous lens.

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

Artificial Stupidity

Artificial Stupidity (Forget about AI; this is the real danger)

Perhaps one of the oddest contradictions of human history is the dual character of that very history. This is so due to the fact that the major source of cultural incompetence is that same heritage through which we have become competent. The past of our world culture, all that we have known as a species and all we have experienced as individuals, is contained in this history. Some of it has been lost forever due to the vicissitudes of a history ongoing and ever-changing, and some further still a secret, yet to be rediscovered. Weekly, we read of startling archaeological finds, many due to the improved technology of location and geophysics. Entire large cities which have escaped our ken for perhaps millennia, emerge with all of their romance intact but with only a partial ability to communicate their knowledge to us. Shipwrecks laden with untold riches, tombs divulging their latent treasures, and all of it speaking the uncanny Ursprach of the dead up against whom we have abruptly brushed. The past does not share a precise language with the present. It tells us of its own experiences only indirectly. We understand what we can, acknowledging that there will always be something or other lost in proverbial translation.

Because we cannot choose what has been preserved and what has been lost, we must take these finds as they are and thus hopefully as well for what they are: the slippage between the cultural competencies of the past and the needs of the present waxes and wanes pending temporal provenience and just how much sheer ‘stuff’ has survived. Mitigating the rapidly receding horizon whereupon remote antiquity calls across an ever-increasing chasm of incomprehension is the historical fact that the farther back one travels in the human career, the simpler things get. Cultural complexity, in its vast majority, is a product of our own era, a well-documented affair which, though subject to ideological suasion and attendant ‘rewriting’, is nevertheless almost fully present to us. From the Internet Archive to the Library of Congress and every modernist reliquary in between, the records remain. Do we have as fair a sample of the earliest of writings? Records of warehouse holdings, which spoke of the agrarian advent, a novel way of life, mingle with narratives of once only oral myths and epics, which spoke of that previous. The symbolic order of subsistence societies, nomadic, horticultural at most, tiny in their population load, relatively intimate with the doings of relevant animals and an always enveloping wider nature, are the murky and indirect sources of what are yet world institutions. And it is one of the most extraordinary facts of history that most of the beliefs of the present have their roots in a stage of cultural development following hard upon the social contract.

Religions with gods, the evaluated afterlife, gendered divisions of labor, domestication of animals, semi-sedentary communities, none of these was the least bit present in humanity’s earliest attempts at culture. Indeed, it is only very recently that we have begun to question them, ten to twenty millennia after their original appearance. The chief factor which disallows their critical interrogation is not that they are stupid in themselves. For a great length of time they served their diverse purposes, dexterous and generalizable, adept at adapting to other societal changes; the most profound of which coming with the advent of agriculture. The symbolic literacy of antiquity contained the competence proper to those periods. For us, the question must be, is much of that same order able to function in our own society? It is rather the shame we feel, as a culture and perhaps also unconsciously, that we, who would like to identify with our ancestors through our respect for their many achievements – the shibboleth at hand is of course the one about the shoulders of giants, though in fact culture has always been a collective enterprise and the singular revolutionary figure is merely a moment of cultural crystallization; a statement that the culture in question is almost done with itself and needs to move on – feel that we have been failed by our predecessors. In turn, we have failed them, perhaps through our lack of respect and our ignorance about their ways. Even so, this dual sense of being let down is not so much historical as it is personal, and its present-day source lies in the family dynamic and its cross-generational conflict.

The past is the parent of the present. The present presents to the past its future selfhood through the child. At first content to learn by rote the manners and mannerisms of memorial consciousness, the onset of adolescence prepares the child to become a being of the future. One must literally begin to look ahead of oneself and one’s current state and status. That I cannot know the future through my own experience, that no ‘culture’ solely of the future can yet exist, inspires me to take up the ongoing historical task of creating such a thing. The future is the dialectical apex of a triangle whose bases are the past as thesis and the present as antithesis. Futurity, an elemental aspect of Dasein as a being which is always ahead of itself, expresses the Aufheben of time as experienced through culture. History is cultural time.

If we are sometimes dismayed that time does not wait for us, we are comforted overmuch by the converse condition; history waits on us for too long. This is the case due to the perduring presence of antique symbolic items which, in their own time of efflorescence, expressed the order of those days. More than just awaiting us, however, in addition, symbolic history waits upon us, is our servant, and in its savant presence we are carried away by what is in reality a narrow wisdom. With the loss of the visionary by way of the exposition of the real through science, the apparatus which presumed upon the utter and final presence of the vision as the only means by which humanity could not only predict the future but as well actually attain it, the entire architecture of agrarian symbology collapses. Modernity states emphatically that there is no otherworld.

Momentary in the social contract, souls unevaluated and presently returning to animate the newly born, the otherworld then was intimately a part of the this-world. Transformer beings crossed such a threshold, something only mysterious to those who lacked that specific ability. In a word, the limen to the otherworld held no mystery in itself. Here, in the primordial mindset of our human ancestors – how far back we have no way of knowing – the uncanny was merely an augmentation of reality, and not one other to it. In this, we can begin to comprehend that even with the earliest appearance of sedentism and agriculture, this perhaps original human cosmology had run its course. It was not long before it became quite formalized; the evaluations of the living were projected upon the dead. The otherworld was divorced from what was considered to be real in itself, and placed at a distance therefrom. Hierarchies in the social order, jarringly novel and also often harsh, enabled a process of judgment that no longer contained within it the will of the community as a culture entire. The ‘sentencing circles’ of the social contract became themselves null and void. Instead of the scapegoat, the law; instead of the wilderness, the prison. City replaced village, herding and thence harvesting replaced hunting, processing replaced gathering. None of this is an effort at nostalgia, quite the opposite, but can we bring the same objectivity to bear upon the ongoing presence of agrarian worldviews in our own times, while acknowledging the total loss of that which preceded them?

If mathematics is the unknowing language of nature, self-consciously, if haltingly, understood by human beings, there is no ‘mind of God’. If the cosmos is a repetitive affair, indefinite in size and yet finite in its own history, as well unknowing, there is no ‘purpose’ to existence. It is arguably the most radical cultural item of modernity that we have granted ourselves the ability to make our own meaningfulness, bereft of either judge or judgment. For some, the otherworld as a personal hallucination conjures a remanant, a vestige of the experience of the hunter and the gatherer, alone in a forest now otherwise metaphysically forbidding, as well as physically fading fast. Though the collective unconscious may well have preserved culture memory from these earliest periods of human consciousness, even here, in dream and waking dream alike, in the reveries of the writer and the revelations of the thinker, we remain children of our own time and no other; beings of our own world and none other. Yet given that this world, in its rather self-conscious appraisal as both the ‘this-world’ and the only world, is shot through with reminders that our present-day cultural self-understanding includes everything from the past which both burdens our endeavors while at the same time urging them onward, it is arguably the greatest challenge of our age to sort through all that may still serve us as a function without form. For the latter is gone. That agrarian framework which itself was built upon the formalization of yet earlier cosmological rubrics was lost in the shift to capital and its industrial-technical means of production. The Zeitgeist of the society it birthed, ‘bourgeois’ and individuated, places me in an ‘iron cage’ not so much of economics, but rather of symbolics and of the symbolic life. Insanity and ‘magical thinking’ are the only spaces of the visionary, but such a culture as has sequestered the human imagination to an ideal arithmetic fosters its own idiot-savant quality. And we are as impressed with it as we in turn imagine our ancestors were of their own.

The incompetencies of the past were often of a logistical and technical matter. That our predecessors could not observe what we now take for granted, the cosmos included, does not necessarily mean that they envisioned less than we. But we are not going to find more than the decayed and perhaps also decadent pith of those visions in the myths and mantras of ages lost. Our entire conception of essence may itself be the vestigial bigotry of bygone ballads. But if that is so, as Nietzsche for one suggested, then existence too can be called into question as symbolic of its own absence of a future conscientiousness. The romantics sought to replace it by living, the existentialists, ironically, by being. But present existence, historical in its very character, holds within it both an unquiet mélange of melodies, the sirens of stupidity, as well as a space within which is held all that can ignore and thus avoid the quite artificial rocks to which we are yet being drawn.

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

On Truth and Lie in a Virtual Sense

On Truth and Lie in a Virtual Sense (it’s not 1872 anymore)

In what is arguably the most important short essay of the 19^th century, the youthful Nietzsche belatedly answers the querulous query, ‘what is truth?’ made notorious, if still resolutely apt, by Pilate. For some millennia, it was recognized that though reality could possess lies – especially the social reality constructed solely by human beings – truth, by contrast, could not. But in ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, (1872), Nietzsche casts aside that distinction. Truth is simply its own form of lie, currency which has long lost its imprint of precise value and stands on the memory of it being metal alone. Truth is both metaphoric and metonymic, an exalted form of euphemism that covers over the reality of it itself having been constructed and imagined by that same human consciousness which, oddly, even perversely for Nietzsche, finds succor in the misplaced ‘will to truth’. This jarring statement, finding its legendary lines in “…how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life.” We can call this ‘nihilism’ if we want; nevertheless, in the cosmic order of things seen from the vantage point of Victorian period, it is more true than any human truth.

Nietzsche, however, does not dwell for overlong in the cosmic. His question is, and ere after, not so much ‘what is truth?’, but rather, ‘what is human?’ If “…to be truthful is to employ the usual metaphors.”, then in a moral sense, truthfulness means merely “…the duty to lie according to a fixed convention.” We do hear, from time to time, the phrase ‘conventional truths’, which are taken to point to a kind of statement existing exiguously between truisms and ‘trivial truths’, the former chestnuts of uncertain origin but precise provenience, and the latter simple statements of self-definition; certain only because they can only reference themselves. But Nietzsche tells us that all truths are such only by convention, thus erasing these other, perhaps cowardly, distinctions. The most famous passage of the paper occurs just above these reminders, and after reproducing it here, I want to provide some discursive context, both before and after, in order to aid understanding of just how it was possible that Nietzsche, at age 28 – the same age at which Hume wrote his magnum opus A Treatise on Human Nature – was able to come up with such a succinctly damning statement of one of humanity’s most cherished possessions. “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force…”

The previous year, Darwin’s The Ascent of Man appeared, making clear the evolutionary connection between the great apes and human beings, something which was only implied in his revolutionary 1859 work. We shared the primate branch with other creatures; apes and humans had a common ancestor. Recasting the ‘great chain of being’ was not what was more seriously unsettling about Darwin’s work, but rather that humans were to be included in it, as another animal, but one simply more evolved. Nietzsche himself found this fact regrettable in the extreme, but also found within it the source of the death of godhead, something some commentators imagine him celebrating. The son of a Protestant minister, Nietzsche was, instead, moved to devote much of the rest of his working life coming up with both a new ethics to replace the one sourced in the divine assignation of conscience within human consciousness, but as well, a now ‘post-metaphysical’ cosmology centered around not the will to truth, but rather the will to power, ‘and nothing besides’.

But in fact, the seeds for the exposition of the illusory qualities of human truths were sown far before Darwin’s somewhat indirect framework had taken hold over the philosophical imagination. ‘Perspectivism’, usually attributed to Nietzsche as well as fashionably misattributed to post-colonial discourses, actually first occurs with any force in Vico’s The New Science, (1725), wherein he speaks of cultures and peoples having different truths, in which they wholeheartedly believe as if they were the sole human knowing of the things themselves. ‘New’, of course, refers to the human sciences, the Geisteswissenschaften, as a complement for, and contrast to, the sciences of nature. The German translator of J.S. Mill’s System of Logic, (1843) came up with the term as well as its contrasting one, which ever since has given students thereof problems. Naturwissenshaften is straightforward enough, but ‘Geistes’! These ‘sciences of the spirit’, were in the main, unimpressive to Nietzsche, with the exception that they exposed the relativistic quality of truth on the ground. Anyone who has travelled outside of their own locale knows that the sole remaining truth about truth is that it’s status can adhere to anything we humans need it to.

Closer to Nietzsche’s own time, aside from Mill’s important work – it should be noted that Mill was a vigorous supporter of the nascent feminist social science, and was personal friends with a number of its progenitrixes – Marx and Engels had penned The German Ideology – 1846, but not published until 1932 – in which the phrase ‘consciousness too is a social product’ presages in a much more concise manner Nietzsche’s argument. From Vico and Hume to Mill and Marx, the sense that truth was more than merely ‘elusive’ – a sensibility hailing from the natural sciences – had been germinating in serious discourse. The irony here is, perhaps, that the entire heart of Enlightenment discourse, officially dedicated to the truth of things bereft of moral overlays, ended up losing truth itself by jettisoning its moral sources and backdrop. And it was Nietzsche who first noticed this irony.

His essay too went unpublished for some time, but eventually this acknowledgement that evolution, on the natural science side, and cultural perspectivism, on that social, gave way to an entire discursive framework within which truth found its place beside all other human faculties; institutions, subsistence practices, cosmologies, magic, kinship, the rites of passage and so on. By 1923, W. I. Thomas’ famous ‘principle’ could be uttered almost in passing: “If people believe something to be real, it is real in its consequences.” This is the working version of Nietzsche’s essay in a single sentence. By the mid-1930s Robert Merton could sum up the source of all inquiry into truths within the reality the Geisteswissenschaften studied in a single, precise question of his own: ‘Who benefits?’. In a word, a truth, of whatever form or function, existed due to someone or other gaining something from its remaining extant. Truths which do not function in this manner are soon overtaken by others, but the character of human truth is not altered by their simple replacement, any more than it is by their reproduction, the latter of which Nietzsche himself had concentrated most of his analysis upon.

Today, we face another challenge to the traditional model of what a truth is or can be. If we now understand truth to be extramoral, or ‘non-moral’, what then of truths which are wholly virtual? When I first placed a virtual reality helmet upon my surefire rational head, I was astonished not only at the simulacra available, but the more so, by my ‘natural’ reactions thereto. I hesitated and even leapt back from a virtual ‘cliff’; I automatically bent forward to pet a virtual dog which, just to keep things ‘real’, had the ability to pick up a bone with its rather alien snout. I knew the experience was not real in the usual sense, and yet I still had the experience. Virtual reality is thus more like a vision, but one which can be shared through technology. The visionary has now an audience greater than himself, even if the content of the visions are just as hallucinatory as those of ages antique filled with the equally aged who could at least be truthful to themselves. Virtual reality is the scion of the sciences of the ‘spirit’, and its panoramas, its melodramas, its illusions are exactly what would animate Nietzsche’s own sensibility if he would have dreamed up the idea. By contrast, the sciences of nature too have their own child, ‘augmented reality’, which is a misnomer, because what it shows to our senses through a technological prosthetic are things which are actually already there in the world. There is no ‘virtuality’ about this augmentation; yet it is not reality per se that is being augmented, but rather our sensate. We are enabled to see the guts of things, for instance, in a manner reminiscent of Husserl’s gradually building ‘glancing ray’ which, bereft of the hyletic sphere, gets at the essence of things. We can see around corners, inside compartments, splice wires and inspect semi-conductors and this is how a precise and cool empiricism would likely interpret transcendental phenomenology’s ‘noesis’. It is a literalist litany of ‘to the things themselves’.

And when we are dealing with mere things, truth and reality coincide most closely. Things alone, however, cannot hold our human interest. We know we are the far more curious phenomenon, and perhaps the greater proportion of that more fascinating character comes from our ability to find truth in the illusory, to make beliefs real through acting upon them, and yet also to be able to analyze and critique these attempts, seeing them as well for what they are. A consciousness that understands the very truth of truth is the result, and to my mind this is laudable achievement. For Nietzsche, the tacit question which resonates from his seminal essay might run along the lines of ‘why then have truth at all?’. He answers it, in so many words: “So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring. [ ] The intellect has now thrown the token of bondage from itself.” If the cosmic truth of human existence is sobering – and perhaps a new reality of a constructed intelligence will, in fact, carry humanity’s intellect ‘beyond human life’ and thus into a more ‘truthful’ future – the worldly truths we humans have taken for a wider reality have done far more than act as agents of self-deception. Our ability to conceive of something we call the ‘truth’ is far more profound than even our corresponding ability to believe in it and thenceforth act upon it. We need the concept of truth in the same way that Nietzsche much later notes that ‘we are more in love with love itself’ than we are of the beloved. We love the truth, but truths are of passing adoration. Truth then, might be one of those Durkheimian concepts which, akin to the sacred, are able to overleap discursive shifts in metaphysics and even societal shifts in modes of production. Nietzsche is correct about Truth and truths alike, and yet is it not more than true that in spite of this redolent gem of self-understanding, what more fully animates the human endeavor – patient and cumulative experiment in its natural science aspect, impassioned and visionary dream on that of ‘spirit’ – is that reality, after all, has itself always been virtual?

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

Coincidence and Signage

Coincidence and Signage (The ‘prose of the world’ revisited)

Wherever I go, I observe signs. Many are simply functional; some explaining traffic flow, keeping everyone safely moving in the appropriate directions. Other like signage would include the shingles of business and government, church and non-profit. These are basic locational signs, some with directions, which are then duplicated at the sites themselves. Without directional signage, daily life would become a hierarchical jumble of conflicting ‘local knowledge’; those having lived in a neighborhood or city having a distinct advantage over newcomers. Even so, such signage is yet handy for the experienced city-dweller, and all the more so, for those who venture forth from urban areas into those rural. Function is seldom turned to form at this level of the sign, and only when the state is anxious to make this or that political declaration, itself a sign of a different dimension, does directional signage become a vehicle for ideology.

The other major type of signage available to us in our contemporary scene is that of marketing. It too is primarily functional, but not entirely. While one could perhaps make a gentle argument that directional and locational signage betrays our penchant for social order in its most general, even vaguest, sense, advertising carries a double intent somewhat more bodily. While first oriented to only selling a product or a service, the presence of advertising is after all also a function of a specific economic sensibility, that of capital, wherein entrepreneurs compete for market and franchise through advertising. Here, the undertone of ideology is slightly more manifest than in mere locational and directional signage, for the very rubric of capital is contained within the ad, whereas all known cultures have some semblance of basic order about them, and one that is generally seen as value neutral. Running a red light might well get the communist killed as effectively as it would the capitalist. This said, advertising is not as neutral, and when I recently saw an ad on a nearby campus exhorting students to join the Marxist society I was bemused by its patent irony. It is clear that if one desires to share anything at all, advertising is the most effective way to do it, lending credence to the everyday sense we have that the ubiquity of sheer shill is nothing more than what can be taken from it at face value.

But the combination of signage and outcome lends to us another level of sensate; we are used to every sign being utterly honest about its information and direction. When our digital maps are slow to update, we can get frustrated, as this or that business or other site has, in the interim, moved or simply vanished. If I am on such and such street then I expect to find this or that address along it. I am aware, of course, that larger-scale businesses and other like concerns have more than one location, and so I must sift accordingly, but this is a very different challenge than not being able to find a site at all. I read a piece of signage, and through my success in following its directions, I transform that signage into a sign; that is, its information imparted becomes a force in my life, and one that has led to success. We are quite used to this tacit process of transformation and think nothing of it in the day-to-day. But its presence in our consciousness has a profound impact on how we understand and give meaning to the world more widely, as well as to the myriad of chance interactions we encounter in our smaller lives. This is so because we have already mastered, within our normative and standard rubric of routine, the ability to read the world as if it were a text.

Foucault, as a prologue to his famed book. The Order of Things, (1966), speaks of the medieval period being dominated by a worldview that based itself upon the ‘prose of the world’. Herein, signs were everywhere, just as is in our time, signage. Signs of what, exactly? Simply put, signs that the world was an autograph creation of God. God’s work spoke for itself, in a further sense, but if one desired to accrue meaningfulness to this odd dynamic of the otherworld and the this-world, one had to learn to ‘read off’ that signature which marked a great variety of phenomena. Our interpretation of the divine hand as quill thus re-marked, more than it did simply remark upon, that same world, creating an exegetically inclined prose. The natural world had become its own scripture. Foucault’s own point is that this worldview was about to give way to the incipient version of our own, wherein sign devolves to mere signage, and the world worlds its own way, apart from either human or divine design. Here, I want to suggest that the presence of the prose of the world has not in fact been utterly overtaken by modernity, but has rather been transmuted into what, even as a baser metal than the ideals of the alchemical mindset, is still functioning as sign and indeed, even signatory.

A modernist glance might note that God too had to advertise His works, and so marketing has in fact a longer history than it might seem, but this would ignore the contrast between a source who very much had the time to wait for His market to show authentic interest in the message being marketed, as well as the theological fact that whether or not one was ‘sold’ by its soteriological suasion, the events of the apocalypse and judgment would occur in any case. This is manifestly not the condition for contemporary marketers, hence their sometimes desperate haste and powerful panache present in their attempts to convince us that their own version of salvation is worth our while, and for that matter, our money. But advertising firms owe the majority of their success not to their inventive signage but rather to the more profound and historical fact that we are used to reading signage as if it were a sign. Advertising would have no power over us without this ability, and this interpretative skill, itself sourced in the primordial need for human beings to make their mortal lives meaningful and thus tolerable in some manner, was brought to its most sophisticated head during the medieval period.

Anything could be a sign. What today we mainly put down to chance, happenstance, and more strongly, coincidence or yet the déja vu of the psychologists, was for our ancestors something to be noted. Like the Logos itself, not all of which could be directly understood by humanity, the prose of the world was both present and complete. Our human faculties, on the one hand, could access some of its truths, but our human failings, on the other, prohibited an holistic comprehension of the mind of God. Indeed, we only see the charlatan in the place of the mystagogue in today’s world, wherein those who claim to know the mind of God and thus its divine will as well, are generally seen for what they are. We have no record of such figures existing in previous eras, and this makes sense insofar as they had the open book of God’s creation and will before them, and all had the same access thereto. It was the lot of the gnostic to at first make a claim about knowing the truth of things in essence and thenceforth attempt to vouchsafe such a venture through the interpretation of the world as a complement to scripture. There was certainly seen to be a symbiosis between the two, but the addition of the world as a source of God’s truth and will greatly amplified the presence of a form of cultural literacy during the related historical periods, dominated as they were by the second wave of agrarianism, that of the feudal order in the West.

It is this very literacy that advertising now uses, rather unbeknownst to itself. Mammon has perhaps replaced Yahweh, especially amongst the latter’s original acolytes, we might gently suggest, but Yahweh seldom advertised in any indirect way. No, He made demands, followed or not, but one’s that all could understand if not exactly relate to. The world cast as a prose document has its source in the God who didn’t beat around the burning bush, so to speak. Yahweh’s competitors were often obfuscatory; meaning was obscure and thus meaningfulness a chore. It is this simplicity of demand that modern marketers borrow from the Judaic dynamic, as well as the sense that they would become as Yahweh was; a mascot for a better life.

For advertising in capital ultimately sells us its own form of earthly salvation. ‘Better living’ is its mantra, status only its mantle. What we demand from our own mode of production is worldly success, just as did the Calvinists who, not at all by coincidence, imagined that such itself would be none other than a sign of the divine salvation to come. They were to be saved, just as were the chosen people before them. It is confusing at the level of symbolics, to say the least, that the very people who so disdained the Jews sought to so emulate their situation. No doubt the worldly competition within the mercantile affairs of incipient capital was projected upon the deeper canvas of a competition for a reserved place in paradise. It was no more ludicrous for the originally marginal community of sectarians to claim that worldly wealth was a sign of God’s favor and grace than it was for a marginal ethnicity to claim for itself salvation by equally earthly kinship. But all such claims must be taken in the context of both the anxiousness that accompanies our daily rounds and the existential anxiety that is the hallmark of the human condition more generally. If such rationalizations appear as nonsensical today, it is due to our own displacing of such an anxiety into our demand for a better life in the here and now.

Does then advertising have the grace to make that desire into reality? Perhaps not by itself, but what it does do is reduce the level of happenstance in our mundane lives so that we might be able to more appreciate the possible irruptive presence of authentic signs into that same life. Coincidence is, at base, constructed from the sameness that marks mundanity just as did God’s autograph mark the medieval world. Reason in that latter and now mostly absent world was of a superior form of consciousness, but today it comes across as the mere rationalization of an inferior form. With abundant irony, it is marketing which today mimics the call to conscience which once animated an entire culture’s aspirations. Can we then use this seemingly omnipotent source of signage in capital to both engender a better material condition for all, but as well, and more deeply, engage in a latter-day eschatological ecumenism, one in which there is represenced the sense that each of us, as a human being, are subject to the same ultimate forces and are the object of the same essential conditions?

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

With a Fitting Confidence?

Introduction: With a Fitting Confidence?

The unexamined self is not worth being. But in saying this, are we not also aggrandizing that very selfhood, comparing it to life in general, also to be examined? How much of a life is, in other words, worthy of examination in the same way we might attempt to explicate life in general? This other level is surely more a question for the sciences, especially those of nature. For though living is of the human, life itself is not. Life is shared by vast minions of species, all of whom live within its natural embrace. But living-on in the manner we humans accomplish it is something quite different from any other known form of life. This is so because we have to live life as a self.

What does it mean to be a self, and a self which lives? At first, we would seek to alter the ‘which’ into a ‘who’, giving us the sense not only of agency but also of individuality and even perhaps that of purpose. Who is the self who lives? But a distinction must be immediately made; that between self and selfhood. For if we share life with other creatures grand and miniscule, we also share the conception of self with all other persons, and extending in two directions; those predecessors to me who are now passed and constitute the once-living component of the past, as well as those successors, those to come who will also live as human selves. At least unless or until we develop into a new species which has no need for either self or selfhood, this is what human life is as existence and not merely life. Existence is ipsissimous, life, only autochthonous. The one belongs to itself and is also ‘owned’, while the other simply arises from itself and thenceforth is only as it could ever be.

Yet given that my predecessors are passed and my successors yet to come, I must inevitably but also compassionately turn to my contemporaries to gain an understanding of not only what it means to live a human life, but also the purpose of being a human self; the meaningfulness of selfhood. After all, I live with them if not as them. And they live with me though not as myself. We share both life and self but never living nor selfhood. We imagine that it is through love alone that our nascent but wondrous contiguity of beings become as Being. Yet even here, being in love prompting a more existential rendering as being-in-love, or the being-which I am in love, distracts us from its more ontological marker, being-as-love, or being as is the love we imagine transfigures the mere quantities of a human life and thereby gives it its unique quality.

We are challenged in our own time by such quantities, perhaps as never before. It often appears we are content to rest within the selvedges of self, perhaps salvaging a modicum of objective grace but losing anything to do with the challenge which mortal being confers upon us. The window-dressing of the self can never lead to selfhood, just as identifying with a group or a structural variable such as race or class can never lead to the person who I am. It is an ethical error to imagine that the personal is only the political; such an idea rests upon the conflation of self and selfhood. A ‘self’, by itself, that which is shared through a ‘Das-Manic’ dynamic, if you will, gives us the impression that it is wholly defined by its life-chances and through the gaze of the generalized other. It is intent on avoiding intention. It is an agent of the agency at large and thus has none of its ownmost. We have rather a bifurcation of self in lieu of selfhood, and the question for each of us thus is, how do I navigate what are entanglements for the Dasein which is both mine own but also mine ownmost selfhood?

This book is, in the face of this question, itself divided into two parts. The ‘examined political self’ contains essays and queries about the relationship, strained as it so often is, between who I am in the world and how that same world frames my being within its objective ambit. Here, the ‘who’ tends to retreat in front of forces which seem to it larger than life. Yet because they are historical and political, they have long since been divorced from the life of nature, so much so that we cannot even identity precisely when this parting of ways occurred. Culture is, for us, larger than nature, and has been so at least since the domestication of fire. Just so, it is also larger than any single selfhood, since it is made up of the total quantity of selves, living and dead, that there may ever have been, though the vast majority of these remain unknown to us in any personal sense. This too is a factor, and, I believe, a perduring one; we cannot know the dead as they knew themselves. They once were as I am now, and for now, and I am to be as they now are. I am now a selfhood to myself and perhaps to a few intimate others, and as well, seen as a self politically and in the world, but my destiny is to repeat the dissolution of the former and the ascendency of the latter. In death, mine ownmost life as a selfhood abruptly vanishes, and the memory of me as a mere self in the world takes on the mantle of life which is no longer living.

This process is an element of the facticity of Dasein, yet we overdo it whilst still alive by engaging in the entangled pretense, as well as the simply tangled pretension, of seeing ourselves as augmented selfhoods, extended by the same basic, if brute, ‘practitioning’ of the habitus of ‘identities’. This volume argues stringently against this fashionable practice, which is at once a flaneur and a regression. We play at being anachronists, imagining that the Enlightenment never occurred, and that we can, or even should, be better off living as if it actually did not. In part two, the ‘examined social selfhood’, the second set of essays speaks more directly to the ‘who’ of whom I am. If the first part’s tone is itself pitched politically and critically, the second’s cleaves to us at a most personal level, intruding upon our intimate spaces and clearing not so much a ‘lighted space’ but the more so; a spatiality alit with self-understanding, for that is the ultimate aim of this brief collection. Selbstverstandnis is the outcome of an hermeneutic interrogation, both of the self, its more public thesis, as well as the selfhood, its more private antithesis. The synthetic sensibility that arises from all authentic attempts at self-understanding is a Phronesis of the political and the personal. Neither, as stated above, can wholly be identified with the other, and beyond either we are called to action by both the collective conscience and our own Anxiety-impressed ethical compasses to respond to their conflicting presence.

In doing so, this Phronetic sense gradually becomes itself ascendant, expressing the Aufheben of being-there as lensed through Polis and Psyche the both. In doing so, perhaps we can engender for ourselves a fitting confidence in our responses, if not directly to any ‘great questioner’ who may yet exist, then at least to the great questions posed by human existence itself; those surrounding notions of its purpose or its lack thereof, that regarding its ultimate destiny as both a species and as individuals, the character of its species-essence and, more incisively, mine ownmost ethical character; who am I and how can I know this? And it is not so much self-knowledge that is at stake, because of course that selfsame being undergoes much change over its brief tenure as a selfhood, but rather what develops is an ongoing process of self-understanding; here, the method is, as it were, more important than the truth. For the truth of our being-present is never yet the presence of Being, never larger than the life which is granted to the who that I am. Let us hope that our present penchant for conflating self and selfhood, the political and the personal, and even nature and culture, are but passing testaments to an age wherein the truth of selfhood may seem to some to be an overburden of that very Being to which we owe both our human conscience and our historical calling.

– GVL, Winnipeg, May 2024.