essays – Page 2 – GV Loewen

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.

Do this Thing for Me

Do this Thing for Me (the idea of the last request)

When I almost died last summer, my thoughts were entirely for my spouse. In a deliberate manner, my final request to her was that she carry on, take up her promotion in a new city, and move there with or without me. She assented to this demand, for that is what it was in the end, and only later, given my survival, did I realize that this had constituted my last request. I had no thought for myself or my own ‘fate’, and had been compelled to come to terms with my existence as lived. Never necessarily a pretty sight, nevertheless, one feels in turn a demand that the arc of life imposes upon each of us; life has itself of us a last request.

Famous or no, the idea of ‘last words’ is an intriguing one, implying a number of related assumptions. Mostly this is taken to mean that after death, one can no longer issue ‘earthly’ requests or demands, commands or beggary; all are now abruptly moot. But it might also imply that there is no afterlife at all, and one’s final requests are indeed final for one’s consciousness entire, and not merely its passing embodiment. But if indeed an afterlife is held to be at least a possibility, the phrase itself might also suggest that once present ‘in’ this other realm of being, no further requests can be made of anyone or anything. And cross-cultural ideas of paradise, first arising in the archaic agrarian period and coming to a discursive end with the Enlightenment and the beginning of our own time, do tend to vouchsafe this third interpretation; that once in heaven there are allowed no further demands simply because none are necessary.

Our shared world is of course very different from such a communitarian ideal. In the here and now, the ‘by and by’ of higher worlds and altered forms of being occurs rarely. In wage-labor societies, retirement, if possible at all, can be seen as a dress-rehearsal for a further life in paradise. Recused from work, all such demands issued by or upon me have now also been removed. Most direct obligations are, for those advanced in age, absent. Children are long grown and out of the premises, one’s own predecessors are already dead, and grandchildren, if present, provide no serious burden, at least in the folklore of the family, as ultimately, they are not my kids, not my problem. One’s failing health does present new challenges, issue new demands upon us, pending our druthers regarding quality of life and longevity, but this is seen as part of the ultimate democracy of species-essence, a signage of the fuller presence of finitude and a sign of oncoming finiteness. For Dasein, nearing its second solstice, mine ownmost death may be of growing concern, and even though yet abstract, yet I find that this unknown moment with its unknowable outcome can speak to me ‘ahead of time’, as it were, and thus as well ahead of its time.

I was not at all ready to die at age 58, with my wife just turned 40. To be a widow at that age seemed ludicrous, absurd, and even tragic, not that I was ever the hero I so planned to be. But such an experience, my first brush with death since I was 32 – then still too young to understand it as an ‘event’, or believe in its irruptive non-presence – gave me a fresh perspective on what it meant to live on in the day to day. At first, this kind of reaction can be summarily rejected as trite, yet upon a more patient examination, I found myself comparing the days I live now with those deemed as final. The contrast is stark, those few days staring at me with vacant sockets into which no corrective tool will fit. Indeed, the empty skull of inward cast, casts rather a wrench into one’s future plans, as it were. These days, now back to their indefinite and even repetitive status, pull one back from the precipice only to land one in a uniform meadow of mostly grass. The villains of the day, weeds them all, or the heroines, beautiful flowers ever in Spring, are both unlikely and indeed, might the both even be welcome for their very rarity. The key to the day-to-day is, however, its absence of any ultimate demand, any last requests.

There are other rehearsals, other practices, a goodnight kiss as surrogate mortuary ritual, a ‘now I lay me down to sleep’ a child’s shield against death’s subito, possible, if highly unlikely, even for the young. The habits are worn, with intent, not to pretend that life is itself, and as already stated, immortal and in touch with infinite doings all on its own, but rather as part of the ongoing if mostly tacit acknowledgement that we are present only insofar as we are unaware of our coming absence, to borrow from Gadamer. This odd awareness-of-being-unaware could be seen as the basic motive of life itself, akin to an instinct perhaps, or at least, a necessary evolutionary development that cloaks, with a Promethean proprioception and profundity, a consciousness intelligent enough to become all too aware of its finite character. It is well known that in one’s final days, all plans must be abandoned, given over to one’s successors, however indirectly, and thus the very idea of a singular future begins to slip away. It is an error of culture to conflate this personal future, which must end at some point, with the wider conception of the future, which is part of the being-aheadedness of Dasein and as such is an existential fact.

And yet, in flirting with disaster at many a turn, from warfare to climate to plague to dictatorship, our global society seems to desire more realism in its theatre than the drama of human history can allow; that is, if history is itself to continue. The feigning of death might be referred to as a kind of ‘hyperdrama’, at once hyperbole in its mockery of finitude, hypostasy in its attempt to short-circuit finiteness. It certainly retains the human drama while at the same time aspiring toward the dramatis deus of the epic or the mythical. This rhetorical presence of the larger-than-life brought into the ever-worldly sphere of human doings does us, however, a disservice. For human life cannot be larger than itself. This is another perspective which is presented by the ‘near death’ experience: that we should live on, if we will in fact do so, with less of a demand upon the very day given to us; serially, consecutively, but not automatically, not perpetually. This experienced ethic can also be applied to a number of other ‘sacred’ aspects of social life where we tend to hyperbolize our demands in the day to day, giving others a sense that we are always already euthanizing ourselves as leverage to simply attain our desires.

This is the entanglement of manipulation; how much can I get away with because I am either ill, close to death or dying, or worse, returned from a premature burial by chance and timely health care? It is worse that curiosity or tarrying along, for its malingering quality entangles others in a skein of fraudulent theatre. By this I simply mean that the drama of existence is never actually lived larger than its quotidian demands. There are no last requests in the mundane sphere, in which the vast bulk of life is lived and within which we ourselves humanly dwell. And thus, there are no final expectations of the other to be possessed. I give the other her chance but she must take it up; it is only a gift and nothing more. But in the last request, made upon a closing-off of Dasein’s daily rounds, the sense of expectation becomes more like an anticipation; that one can be confident that the other will acceded to my demand, whatever it might be. The leverage of dying is applied to living in a moment of dramatic presence which touches upon the mythic. Just as sleep is the brother of death, so too my last request is the sibling of my now absent presence. The corpse displays by a lurid twilight the corpus of its past life, acting now only as a memento mori to the final demand which its just then living breath issued forth.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 60 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Let us not Praise Famous Men

Let us not Praise Famous Men (a celibate celebrity?)

The composer William Schuman, before his death, was asked in interview whether or not he would have preferred to be more famous than he was, given his munificent talent and accomplishments, known more fully only within cultured circles. His response remains instructive: ‘Given the many factors and their quality that go into the construction of fame in our time, I would not have preferred that.’ He later suggests that these factors distract from one’s work, appeal to the baser emotions, and exist as well as temptations to the artist to lend to his intent an outside influence which takes away from the work itself. This rejection of fame can be seen as a secularized version of that Augustinian, the first detailed statement we possess about both temptation and the perils of persona over against personhood. Sirach’s ecclesiastical text, from which the phrase, itself famous, originally comes, speaks to us through much of the Gospels, providing not merely a sense that some of Hebrew ethics are ported quite bodily into the nascent Christian outlook but as well, that, barring any overzealous sense of messianic property, prodigality, and perhaps yet propriety, from the period between c. 170 BCE and c. 80 CE, a quarter of a millennium which seems so telescoped from our vantage point as to be a single moment as well as a singular one, the popularity and use of Sirach was such that Jesus’ sensibilities could only be translated by way of these older and more established rhetorical remarks.

However this may be, it is clear that the many moments, especially in Matthew, wherein Jesus is quoted as expressing almost exact advice and counsel as does Sirach, tells us of a consistency in the Hebrew outlook under Roman rule. It is the view of a people conquered and striving to make the best community possible in harsh times. Agee and Walker’s Roosevelt-era document bearing the same title tells indeed the same story; of the courage and even nobility of the most marginal persons in Depression America, working to make as generous a community as possible under severe hardship. In a word, such persons are to be celebrated not because of their fame, which none in life possess, but rather are to be recalled and exalted because of their lot and their response to it; Sirach can be thus seen as the original hagiographic accounting. It is an unfortunate coincidence that the Hitler Youth leader and sometimes poet had a similar name as the Hebrew ecclesiast, but for Balder von Schirach, fame was something with which one got drunk. He reminds us, also in interview, that ‘Hitler’s genius made him a man without measure’, but does add that this can cut both ways, as it were. Fame accrued during a life of missionizing – on the side of the marginal themselves, Jesus, on the side of the margin itself, Hitler – makes it more difficult to distinguish its ‘use and abuse’, if you will. For the ability to convince others of one’s mission is of the utmost to its continuation.

Jesus was executed on a personal vendetta, Schirach served a full twenty-year sentence handed down at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, of which he maintained until his death he had no knowledge. One wonders at the fate of the famous, but not at the destiny of fame itself. Our entire relationship to the former is disingenuous in the extreme. We vault this or that person into a persona and hope to see them topple from their aerie perch. Celebrity in our society is a function of ressentiment alone. We love the idea of fame whilst hating those who have it. As long as they do remain persona, we provide for them our modernist worship; adulation, fandom, wealth and other privileges of both exclusivity and even outright exclusion. But when their actual humanity shows them to be as we are, then the pressing question collapses the card-castle; why them and not us? ‘How is it that I am not rich and famous’?, is an extrapolation of the less outlandish but still resentment-fueled ‘what does she see in him?’ type of query. In it, there is a promotion not so much of self-doubt, that which our very existence can authentically challenge us and indeed needs do so, but rather a self-denigration, which can only add to our resentment. What transmutes mere resentment into malicious existential envy is just this conundrum; what is it about me that is of less merit than her?

It thus very much matters how a culture defines merit. For the ancient Hebrews, insofar as we can judge through their writings, the meritorious is a combination of pious and ritualistic adherence to taboos and mores, and a willingness to speak of ideals otherwise in their face. For the Reich, ritual too is certainly present, but in this ‘new religion’ that Hitler, at a dinner with English aristocracy of all things, announced he would create, and more or less to himself seated at a long table overburdened with silver and glass, it is rather the expression of cultural will itself that is the most noble thing. It remains a stunning logistical and economic accomplishment that, in spite of the overwhelming demands made of Germany under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, in a scant few years the nation transmuted itself from the very margins to the very center. The Reich is, historically speaking, writ large the personal transfiguration of the converted Jew. This ‘new religion’, godless and yet just as mythical as any antique belief, in its extermination of European ‘Jewry’, found for itself the ultimate conversion experience. And its model had been present specifically in German Romanticism; the overcoming of the person, the death of the self by its self-transcendence through art.

The Reich’s non-rational ideal was to create a society based solely upon art. Those whose livelihood was gained by attaching themselves, like parasites, to either art itself or the life of the artist – presumably, artists of Jewish descent were deliberate frauds, mocking the superior works with their doggerel dogma, hence the preponderance of their works displayed as ‘Entarteite Kunst’; though it is important to recall that a number of ‘Aryan’ artists’ works, notably those of Otto Dix for instance, were also included in these ‘showings’ – were to be removed, not only from the discourse but also from society as a whole. Such is fame, one might say at this juncture, for its fickle flame is fanned now here now there, by this one and then by that, one work adored and the next disdained – Richard Strauss, himself the Reich’s Arts Director for some years before he resigned due to his support for Jewish artists, knew these ups and downs of celebrity very well – that Schuman must be understood as being quite correct in his estimation thereof. And just as no God survives an absence of belief in Him, so no celebrity is left standing who, through her own shared humanity, exhibits in any way the mortal coils of an equally human life.

The radical conception of a God on earth is the origin of celebrity. Jesus himself shunned it, which was presumably part of the whole point of working as the neighbor figure alone, even within the confines of ‘embodiment’, but since then we have bodily embraced it. Mass media is ever on the look-out for the next messiah, whether it be in politics, popular music, sport, or self-help, amongst others. Those whose mission stands the test, not of time, but rather of taste, endure as part of a pop-culture pantheon, to be repeated, with self-serving irony, in the afterlife. We regularly hear musicians and critics extoll ‘heaven’s band’, which by now would have to be the ultimate super-group. The unutterable nonsense of celebrity must needs extend itself into what has been ‘shown to us as a mystery’ only; even the apparent dotards of antiquity understood that much. That we continue to praise the persona framed round an otherwise human life and ignore the person within such frames only speaks to the loss of Godhead historically, and the corresponding loss of community socially. Coupled with the desperation exhibited in cursing an immortal conception with a merely human life, fame does a double disservice to both forms of being; it at once commits God to an ill-fitting grave while destining Humanity to resent its own existence.

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

Beothuk Dodo

Beothuk Dodo (an excursus in extermination)

Too big to fly, Dodo ugly, so dodo must die

Dog go, with fear on its side

Can’t change, can’t change the tide

Dog baiter, agitator

Asking questions, says he wants to know why

Ain’t no reason that money can’t buy

Mink, he pretty, so mink he must die…

Genesis, 1981

It is well known that the Reich made the obvious connection between exterminating vermin such as insects and rats to doing the same with those they considered to be person-pests; ‘life unworthy of life’, as was said. The penchant for eugenics was married to the desperate desire for ‘racial purity’. The Jew, in spite of his eternally wandering status and his pariah personality, had somehow maintained his own racial homogeneity, refusing to entirely assimilate wherever he next washed up. The subito siren of the death of the other, beseeching us in both ways at once – if I must die let it be quick; nay, I shall rather slay you in the heat of your own desire – is remade in the grander scale of opera or yet epic. A Wagnerian death, fit only for the antique gods, when transposed to humanity, required millions to be murdered, and systematically so, for that is the most rapid way of capturing the drama of the moment. The Holocaust was more than an anthropological machine for ‘beautifying the world through violence’, it was also an architectonic aesthetic statement; that those closer to the old Gods in form and feel would take over the once-Valkyric duty to choose the slain before these lower forms reached up from the depths of ugliness and dragged the rest of us down with them.

How many human deaths could equal that of one God’s? That is the question the Holocaust and like events pose to us. The old god of morals, long dead, was Himself an immoralist in the sense that He aided the ancient Hebrews in their quest for a homeland. Begrudgingly, given their lack of loyalty and inconsistent worship, Yahweh must have been thinking that, ‘Well, they do suck but all these other groups wouldn’t be any better. Besides, the children of Akhenaton invented me, so I suppose I owe them one’, and so on. This ‘religion of the father’, as Freud famously put it in his final volume, Moses and Monotheism, only gives way to that of the son through patent parricide. Now, how then to keep the potency of that ultimate death alive given that history rewrites and memory forgets? The death of the father = the life of the son; Jesus was thus not forsaken on the cross but rather because of the incarnation, the one to whom He called was Himself lost. The death of the under-race = the life of the over-race, and thence toward the so-called ‘super-race’ yet to come. In the ‘Dyskabolos’ speech, Hitler cautioned his art history buff audience that ‘we can only be said to have reached our goal when we have attained the form expressed by the Greek sculptors or even have gone beyond it’.

This ‘form’ could not have been an idealized, stylized reference simply to an Olympic athlete, though we to this day, with continued Nazi verve, celebrate the ‘festival of both youth and beauty’ – the subtitle of Riefenstahl’s documentary film of the 1936 games – but for Sontag for instance, referenced the ‘fascist aesthetic’ which was wholly esthetic in its surface appearance. Riefenstahl herself calls out this analysis in the film The Power of the Image, and somewhat amusingly to boot. But the very use of the term ‘form’ is suggestive; it in turns calls to mind the Platonic ideals, the eternal form and not its passing content. Youth, for a few years and those extended by Olympian practice and exercise, maintain something close to the ideal bodily expression of the form. So, it is not so much that a race as a whole must reproduce itself unsullied by inferior elements, but rather more specifically the youth of that race. It is not a coincidence, nor is it merely an effort in pedagogy, that the Reich spent much effort upon cultivating its youth in both culture and sport. By 1940 or so, even complete nudity was made into part of the propaganda imagery, not so much due to the sense that mores had relaxed since Orff’s highly erotic Carmina Burana was first performed in 1937, becoming a Nazi favorite soon thereafter, but rather because the first generation of racially pure youth had now come of age, ready to strut their perfect stuff in a call to more than military arms.

At the climax to the Olympic torch relay, also a Nazi invention, one needs recall, the BBC commentator remarks on how ‘perfect’ and ‘pure’ does the physique of the German runner look, and thus extolls it to the world. Just as was the Holocaust the result of applied aesthetics, so the Olympics are the obverse side of that self-same coin. Anyone who watches them is a crypto-Nazi at best. Far better to give into the baser desire to see youthful bodies as simply objects of lust and nothing more transhistorical; that is how low we can go without imagining extermination camps. For the beauty of youth, stained by the Internet, suppressed by the neo-conservative, was actually the one truer thing exalted by the Reich. It expresses an essential will to life, just as does mass murder – we imagine that life is precious not in its quality but rather in its quantity; if you must live, then I shall surely die, there’s simply not enough of it to go around – and the killing of the other in order to preserve my own ongoing existence remains a human ultimatum to its more ‘affective unhistorical subconsciousness’, if you will. We are possessed by a feeling, not merely of superiority, but of a kind of passing grace; I am alive and at the peak of my living performance. The Olympian expresses this will to life over against the unhealthy and infirm, the injured and ill, but also, more profoundly, against all those ugly and deformed. What used to be referred to as the ‘special Olympics’ is belatedly inserted not so much out of any doubt about what is beauty and thus truth, but rather for perspective, and rather out of the sense that Nazism can after all be democratized and alles can be included in the race for the perfect race.

But few desire to watch the ugly try to be beautiful. They exist in their own media ghetto, its walls unforgiving and stretching as far past the eye of the now as does the death of God stretch back in historical time. In His stead, we are rightly outraged in the face of the ubiquitous abuse against athletes because coaches and trainers are themselves outside their sacred circle, violating it with their perverse lust, petty authority and picayune control. The gymnast is a living sculpture, her mobile museum the stadium. It was not merely a function of lack of more qualified personnel that the Olympic stadium in Berlin was defended by two-hundred Hitler Youth led by an art history professor. The Soviets quickly dismantled this effort with few casualties on either side, sending the kids home and the professor back to his campus office, perhaps missing the whole point of it. No, these defenders were the most qualified to serve and protect this meta-sacred space. Donning the uniform of Valkyric intent, obeying the higher orders of aesthetic authority, the young men and women imagined that theirs was the transcendental task of elevating life unto death. However many barbarians died was not and never at issue. The question was not even of what constituted the ‘good death’ – that is something for the therapist to ponder in the face of a smaller life perhaps replete with some regrets and disconnects – but rather what is the highest death? What is the life that is worthy of being chosen by the sisters of Brunnhilde? That is the death worth dying, and only that. And the highest of deaths must be ledgered by the lowest, those occasioned by the camps.

So, the function of the death camp system was at least two-fold; in its baser of operations, it was a eugenics facility, but in its noble cast, imagined by its architects and likely specifically by Haydrich himself, given his own sense of art and accomplishment, it was a bellwether for the evaluation of the meaning of the higher death. If I am the final person standing, if I have vanquished all others, pretenders and even vermin that they were, then the Valkyric youth, the ideal woman who is both a goddess and a warrior, beautiful and lithesome, whose athleticism is no longer a theatrical display as in the Olympics but is absolutely real in its ‘event’, shall surely light on I and I alone. It is no coincidence that the Olympics were born out of the skills associated with ancient warfare, the javelin, the pole-vault, the broad jump, steeplechase, and Pankration. The Valkyrie is the one with all those skills; she is the truer heptathlete. In my desire to die by her own hand, I shall exterminate the many distractions that might yet blind her to the presence of the higher form. So much is this a vaunted goal, that in our imagined post-Nazi days we seek to buy our way into her purview, abusing our actual youth but mass-manufacturing the pretense thereof for adults; sixty is the new thirty. Yet because thirty is also the new thirteen the sixty must maintain its deeper mark, masking the stinging stingy stigmata of agedness with the wistful wiseacre of fantastic ages. But the capitalist, like the communist before him, misses the point. Extermination is about ultimate life, not death. It is the only passion by which a mortal being can distinguish himself in the eyes of the dispassionate Gods.

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

Authorship and Authority

Authorship and Authority (Consider the Source)

‘Arguments from authority are worthless’, declares Carl Sagan, as he famously defined science near the end of the epic Cosmos (1981). This is surely an element of any research field, where there is not only always the next experiment and the next, but as well, the sense that our knowledge, however cumulative, is always both partial in the sense of being incomplete, as well as in that second, deeper sense of being biased. We are not only children of our own times and no other, we are also subject, as mortal beings, to the degradation of memory and the flight of fantasy. Beyond all of this local flavor, reality is, its ‘realismus’, itself subject to change given cosmic evolution. What once were constants have been shown to be relative and discursively, we cannot be certain that it is our own history that is at least a partial source of the enduring mysteries we encounter when we do inquire into the universe at large. The most obvious such link is that diverse antique civilizations and their moralities appeared to endure, almost timelessly, and thus in their worldviews, corresponding to their perduring quality as understood from the point of view of each short generation of mortal denizens, their ideas about the cosmos were also timeless. In a word, the politics of humanity spills historically into the human understanding of nature.

Sagan was himself an authority in both astronomy and physics, and he was a decent interpreter of history and culture as well. In spite of his credo, he too was a moralist, and in spite of the framework of his chief vocation which he correctly outlined in what remains the most watched documentary series of all time, he too mustered arguments ‘from authority’ from time to time, no less than in defining the merits of science as the ‘best tool’ humanity possessed. It is of more than passing interest that Max Weber, arguably the greatest authority and expert on society of all time cautioned us against relying upon expertise for any serious decision in or about that same society. What are we then to make of major figures who seem to bely, or even outright deny, their authority in matters we have already ceded to them? This is more than a question of modesty in the face of the vastness of cosmos and the daunting diversity of even our own species, parochial as it must be against the wider backdrop of indefinite infinity. To my mind, it seems more about the sense that when one does in fact dig into the human conversation, things quickly become more complex then one might have bargained for.

Which in turn begets the question of authorship as source. It is not so much that certain persons are not entitled to their opinions unbridled and unlimited, and thoughts remain yet free in at least the sense of being able to have one or the other pending one’s imagination and education. Rather, it is the recent ability for anyone to create his own venue, especially one digital, to broadcast such opinions far and wide and begin to construct his own authority out of that which is in fact mere authorship. Examples are, regrettably, far too abundant to enumerate, from misogynist bigots who happen to have Super Bowl rings, to anti-communist journalists who imagine they are experts in dialectical materialism, to Jewish comedians who are suddenly political scientists and experts in the history of the Levant. But by far the most dangerous authors who imagine they also have authority in some more profound sense are the many politicians who, because they wield power but that without non-legal authority, deliberately and diligently confuse serious discourse for mere politics. Here, names would be superfluous, because almost all politicians, whose very reason of being is to pander to any and all those who might vote for them – or, in anti-democratic conditions, support them either through their silence or their willingness to engage in precipitous conflicts upon their leader’s behalf – engage in the calculated conflation of authority and authorship. A fashionable favorite is that ‘parents know what is best for their children’, and apparently, everyone else’s as well. Teachers and mass media, the usual rivals to parental authority, have come more and more under fire, consistent with the parent-pandering craze – though with nothing else regarding the actual confluence of youth, anxiety, and hopelessness – and the ease of which targets can align against two fronts with which we are either generally suspicious – media sells things to us and little more – or have some resentment against – we all recall our poor teachers and perhaps too much so.

But teaching is, for one, a vocation, a trade, and a profession requiring training and expertise as well as the wisdom of experience, cliché as that sounds. Stating that ‘education should be returned to parents’ is much the same as saying that ‘gas-fitting should be returned to the parents’, or that ‘hydroelectric dam-building should be returned to the parents’, and so on. So far, I have yet to hear that my own vocation, philosophy, should be ‘once again’ a parental purview, but then such parents, who would certainly be incapable of even the slightest musings in that direction, would also likely baulk at the very idea. Not quite sincerely, however, as parenting, seen as a Gestalt of mentorship, guidance, resource allocation and even love, for goodness sakes, would certainly include much moralizing if never any real thinking of any note. Yet in spite of all of this faddish and hypocritical nonsense about ‘parent’s rights’, the wider question of expertise and authority remains. And when major authorities suggest that arguments from authority are either worthless – as they are in the experimental sciences – or to be taken with a grain of salt – as those emanating from the behavioral sciences – then, with some irony, we feel we must take such statements seriously.

I have chosen the two most important cautions that have appeared in discourse during the course of the twentieth century. Yet more well-known ones, such as Einstein’s ‘God does not play dice with the universe’ – Hawking reminded us decades later that he himself took ‘God’ to mean the same thing he understood Einstein to mean by it; the whole of cosmic forces as known to us and not as some inveterately anti-gambling moralizer – are statements of scientific position in the wider history of ideas. For Einstein, arguing against some of the more outlandish implications of the quantum theory at the time, this was simply his non-scientific way of refuting another such position, or at least, exhorting caution about it. But Hawking himself went further than this when he warned of extraterrestrial contact and the annihilation of the human species; this was an opinion uttered by a physicist who was anthropomorphizing alien morality; and as such one with absolutely no basis nor scientific evidence behind it. Hawking had made the mistake of playing on his bona fide authority in other areas; he was, in a word, borrowing status from himself.

When any discursive figure does this, no matter their contributions to other fields, they immediately fall from authority into mere authorship. Unfortunately, many of the rest of us do not at once make that vital distinction, or do not care to. Perhaps one is a Hawking ‘fan’, seeing the scientist in the same way as one holds any other kind of celebrity to heart. In this, we are being as dishonest as is the figure in question being disingenuous. How then to resist both the unguarded abrogance of the expert who is too-enamored of his own authority to remember its limits, often severe, as well as our own penchant for adulation which is born of, and borne on, the sense that this or that figure really is smart and thus anything he says must have some merit to it? One can begin to reverse this troubling trend by looking at oneself and those around us.

My father was a structural engineer and ended his career as the chief building inspector for the City of Victoria. He was a master carpenter and a decent renderer of still life and nautical scenes in oils and watercolors as well as an expert model-builder. He played golf and hockey until his mid-70s, winning his club championship at age 73 with a handicap of 10. He knew little of culture and nothing of thought, he had been propagandized during the war and as a veteran he remained so until his death. His surpassing weakness was that he rarely spoke of things he actually knew a great deal about, and yet would borrow from this tacit status – of which almost none were aware in any case – to issue declarations of the most ignorant sort upon almost any other subject. These were not stated as opinions but rather as if they had some factual basis, or, at the very least, the weight of ‘wisdom’ behind them. He was, as a parent, typically sound for the younger set, typically incompetent for those older. For his generational demographic, he was amazingly progressive and enlightened, as was my mother. As I have before japed, both my parents were philistines but they were not barbarians. My father was no discursive figure and never would be, but he nonetheless represents the commonplace error of mistaking one’s personal experience for actual knowledge. This almost-universal human error is grievous enough in itself – most of us find, as we live on, that our experience is itself often found wanting after all – but that this selfsame error is deliberately targeted by politicians as the best way to manipulate franchise is nothing less than a patent evil.

My father’s only son is a philosopher. But he is not a cognitive philosopher, or ‘philosopher of mind’, as this once wholly archaic designation has recently made a comeback, he is not an analytic philosopher of language, an epistemologist, an ancient scholar or a medievalist, he his not a philosopher of science nor a Marxist, nor is he by any stretch a logician. And so I do not, even within the genres of my own painstakingly studied vocation, assert any serious claims adhering to any of these departments and have never done so. The stuff I do know something about – phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethics, aesthetics, critical theory, education and existentialism, religion – casts a broad enough net for any thinker to never want in topic or subject. Far beyond this, I do not spout off about gas-fitting, hydroelectricity, or even parenting for that matter – I have consulted as an ethicist for many families over the years and always explain to them that I am expert in human relations in the abstract and not a ‘parenting’ expert, whatever that last might mean – in order to maintain my serious game and nascent name within the wider conversation which is our shared species legacy. And though it may be the case that those lives deemed outside of circles meritorious are all the more likely, through ressentiment, to try to gain access to them through a combination of outright fraud and feigned ignorance as to their truer motives, it falls to the rest of us to exercise a more existential and ethical version of the caveat emptor in their face. Otherwise, we risk becoming as the politician alone, who, as a darling dapper doyenne of the system within which he must work, is compelled to become a huckster, a shyster, a conniver, a narcissist. Each of us has each of these and others within our breast, so this is not a matter of directing our disdain afar. Rather, it is more simply a matter of learning how to recognize the authorship-limitations of what we know today as who we are right now, and thence perhaps coming to a better understanding of the authority-limits of what we can know as a human being and thence as a species entire.

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

The Hermeneutic Self

The Hermeneutic Self (Interpreting a life)

We are aware of the skill said of some, that they ‘read others’ well. But how do we read ourselves? We are also aware that our self-conceptions rest mightily upon not how others actually see us – this would be too harsh a portrait in most cases – nor how we see ourselves – too bright-eyed, most likely – but rather on how we imagine others see us. This projected otherness, the looking-glass self of Cooley, functions as a kind of Goldilocks zone for our personhood, somewhere in between the too-soft of solo self-perception and the too-hard of the authentic other. We are also told, on top of all of this, that we are generally ‘too hard’ on ourselves, no doubt to give us the sense that our imagined other, that constructed mirror, is more realistic than it might be if we had always patted ourselves on the ethical back. The echoist cares too much what others think or might think, the narcissist too little either way, and thus we are compelled all the more to seek some middle-ground which thence turns into a kind of groundedness for Dasein as a public self. Nevertheless, this attenuated and extrapolated selfhood still requires ongoing interpretation, not only to adjust its own expectations, reading its life-chances in the wider world, but also to process what are now becoming but biographical memories.

The manner in which we do this mimics a more general hermeneutics, the method and theory of interpretation, dialogue, and understanding. Verstehen into Deutung, one could remark, is the dynamic of our dialogue with the self. Understanding into meaning, with the third term being either comprehension, if one is of a more empiricist-rationalist bent, or meaningfulness, if one is taken by the more existential sensibility in life. For the hermeneutic thinker, however, the apical term in this personalist auto-dialectic is rather Selbstverstandnis, or with its double intent, ‘self-understanding’; understanding one’s selfhood but also being utterly conscious that one is also doing that work oneself; that is, it is an exercise in the self understanding itself. The combined effect of ‘standing under’ oneself occurs when we defer to experiences already committed to both an authorship and a memorial authority. On the one hand, we have done this or that in the past and it has ‘worked’ for us. On the other, we are said to, or say to ourselves, that we thus ‘own’ it; it is ours and we not only take responsibility for it in the casual and popular sense of ownership, but also, perhaps more obliquely but also more profoundly, we see it as part of our self-definition, a way to own not only our actions and thus take care, ideally, about their implications in the world and for others, but also the chief manner of identifying them with our own agency.

This volitional vector gains its verve not merely from whatever personal panache we bring to it as a kind of patent or insignia, but also simply from how consistent it appears to the others. This is, generally, also the most consistent feedback loop from the social world back to ourselves; we are regularly adjusting our self-presentation not only in accord with others’ rights and feelings as defined by both State and the state of mind of individual persons around me, but all the more so, in order to ensure that we ourselves do not fall out of the cultural frames as given and taken by the idealized other in its most ‘generalized’ and Meadian sense. I hijack George Herbert Mead’s surname not only because this conceptualization of the self’s agency is mainly his, but also to link it homonymally with the simple median; the moment in the graphic distribution of all actions wherein the most expected ‘cause-effect’ in the social world comes to be. Certainly, just as we are rarely our ideal self, our actions in the world can thus only approach what might be their idealized form. Even so, each of us confronts that same disjuncture, and the farther we are off the mark the more we generally feel it. Only those with a diagnosed mental illness or the unguarded criminal appear not to register the affront the remainder of us ourselves register with them, given their behavior. In both cases, however, the discourse suggests that indeed such an objection is taken in, it is just that both sub-sets of our fellow-persons are attempting to gauge, from moment to moment, just how much it is they can ‘get away’ with, not unlike the poorly socialized younger child. This pseudo-autism, if you will, is prevalent far outside the raft of so-labeled cases, and is better seen as a consistent function of neurosis. This takes its effect far beyond Bleuler’s original definition, which, as a hallmark early symptom of schizophrenia, did not carry any especial weight in either social or popular understanding.

The blind side of this lack of confrontation with one’s own actions is of course that interpretation both holds little sway over our personal sensibilities but as well, marking this hic draconis against others unwary, any diagnosis would suggest a deliberate avoidance of becoming a selfhood in the first place. It is well known how the schizophrenic, or even those with lesser challenges such as authentically independent autism, suffer from a lack of ability to develop the self in relation to others. Indeed, ‘self’ has no real meaning outside of this relationship, an element of the social bond more generally. Which in turn suggests that the rest of us also incur an ongoing challenge in understanding just what it is this or that subset of fellow-persons needs from us, or what it is they cannot, or are unwilling, to give in return. The lesson for one’s own self here is, I think, that we must be aware, astutely and even acutely, of the regular disconnects between our expectations of others and what they are actually able to give us of themselves. It is also germane at this moment to give impetus to the idea that those with ‘two-spirits’ or ‘multiple persons’ in the fashionable sense are simply trying out various versions of the self’s division of social labor; one part of me adjusts to the world-as-it-is and another, perhaps seen as more authentic, does not. The ‘theyness’ of this yet other subset of human contemporaries in Schutz’s sense, views themselves as a more-than-one due to the lack of cohesion they observe between social ideals and realities, a tremendously troubling problem each of us must confront, perhaps on a daily basis.

It is likely that this phenomenological explication of theyness is what is actually occurring, but just so, each of us bears this same intersection of selfhood, either aligned in a crucial crucis of motive and action which in turn is authored by the singular self of those who decide that their authorship denotes as well an authority upon social relations, or those whose division of agentive labor connotes a sense that the world authors them overmuch. In older terms, this would have been interpreted along the lines of ‘strength of ego’ versus ‘presence of superego’ or the like, but today we might suggest rather that the two-spirited selfhood is attempting to split the difference amongst competing ideals and social contexts, and is thus perhaps taking the sense of role conflict too literally, or perhaps actually experiences this conflict too sharply to thence too-closely adjoin these competing roles or role–sets. The expectations which others have on ourselves must then be adjudicated, reorganized and redistributed in a manner suggestive of those who subcontract their efforts or, in managerial language, ‘delegate’ tasks and are therefore able to reallocate their attendant resources, even if all of this action is internally defined and only externally observed as skirting the theatrically ‘schizoid’.

Even so, none of this exempts any specific person from the purely human questions of ‘what I am’ or ‘who am I’ as the process of self-interpretation must needs continue, perhaps with a heightened sense of urgency in all those who work to divide and thus conquer, as it were. For most of us, the history of hermeneutics works itself out much as it had done in History ‘proper’, from the generalization of textual exegesis in Schleiermacher to the world as text in Dilthey, through the ontology of Selbstverstandnis in Heidegger to the effective historical consciousness of the selfhood approaching its own ‘fusion of horizons’ in Gadamer. For others, this more patent lineage is adjusted or yet skewed, though in wholly patterned ways: the sacredness of selfhood is conserved and made into a reliquary only for the individuated modernist soul, preserved from role-conflict and competing expectations by being held aloof from textual generalization as well as from the world. For the ‘theyness’ of being, it is Heidegger’s instanciation of hermeneutic ethics that is taken most to heart, excerpted from its own wider pedigree both past and future and caressed as would be the chalice of amethyst Richard Strauss has his singer extoll in one of his most famous songs, ‘Take my Thanks!’. For the multiplied persona, the divided selfhood is, quite literally, thanking itself for preserving what it of its utmost; their ownmost Being-aside-the-world. In our most personal moments, we too understand, belatedly, what it means to be ‘two-spirited’; the effect of retreating into our own singular self, even if just for a moment, placid and at peace with existence, bereft of world and of history but for the most noble of self-understandings: that in running along toward death I am also living mine ownmost life.

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