The Future is Plastic

The Future is Plastic (Sculpting Fluid Change)

            With the major oil-producing nations shying away from a variety of bans on plastic use and waste, given that the petrochemical industry is facing a shortage of expanding commodity markets and such countries as India, Iran, and Russia reserve their ‘right to develop’; with microplastics in water supplies, gigantic festoons of plastic littering the remote oceans, plastic detritus on the beaches – to the point that certain crustaceans are now using plastic bottle caps and the like as makeshift ‘shells’; inventive creatures they must be – and with plastic recycling losing its trendiness, the bit character in The Graduate (1967) may have said more than he meant, in counseling the young Dustin Hoffman about the most promising careers: “The future (really) is plastic!”. This film, meant as comedy but in fact a tragedy – the culminating scenes have Hoffman playing Harold Lloyd in an updated chase sequence borrowed wholly from Girl Shy (1924), but the happy ending of Lloyd’s daredevil antics is not repeated in the more recent effort – reminds one of nothing other than the contrast between plastic items themselves, brightly colored, whimsical, toy-like, and their lingering effect upon the environment. Indeed, ‘malingering’ might be the more apt term, given their notoriously long half-lives.

            But the conception of plastic predates the actual material invention, seen yet in interwar period ‘Bakelite’ and other like artifacts as varied as vintage poker chips, early electric shavers, toothbrushes, and shoe-horns, to name a few. Plastik in German is ‘sculpture’, as in the art form. And the ability to mold this new liquid polymer-like substance into any possible shape desired could only accrue to itself the same name, Anglicized but carrying the same methodic meaning. Sculpted plastic did itself appear in the galleries soon after the war, taking its place among the modernist movement, yet also pushing it along toward pop art. Plastic as a substance is seemingly as value-neutral as it is a conception. The latter connotes change, not permanence, so there is an irony of contrast between the idea and the product, given once again the fact that plastic is so difficult to break down and few organisms in nature have, so to speak, the guts to do so. Certainly, we humans appear to lack them, as it is far more convenient to make like the crab and turn away from the world, sheltering under our very much artificial shells.

            Even so, the film’s enduring epigram also must be taken much more literally than a general suggestion to get a job in a specific and growing industry. The future is, by definition, plastic; fluid, as yet unformed, to be molded, the very outcome of present-day change which in turn is the future’s ownmost harbinger. The littoral litter of actual plastic objects and their shards and fragments does nothing to alter this profoundly existential condition. Yes, unless the world does itself become uninhabitable due to it’s becoming inundated with things made of plastic. It is not a momentary irony after all, this contrast between the conception and the object, the idea and the product, the meaningful word and passing thing. But we must ask, is the nascent drive to cleanse the earth of these cast-off remnants transmuting into gaily Lovecraftian remanants – one can imagine that Cthulhu itself, rising from the ocean depths, is after all made up of a million tons of plastic waste held together with giant fish nets – simply a matter of rehabilitating the health of the ecosystem or does it carry some other, more essential sentiment, within it?

            The idea of the future is, oddly, itself a recent invention. For the Greeks, the future was to be as tragic as the fates of the young would-be lovers in the Hoffman film, escaped from their normative prisons, yes, but then realizing, in the final frames, that they had now come face to face with an utterly unknown – and for them, seated side by side at the very back of a bus, just as unknowable – time to come. There is no being-ahead in the Greek mythos, of course, but during the transition toward logos, the mythic temporality was shed before ever was the mythic sensibility. The past was venerated, the present deplored, the future dreaded. Speaking of rehabilitation, the first light that shone from a future point appears in the resurrection of the Christian mythos; it speaks of a future that is better than what has been. This is an impressive volte face given the druthers of classical thought, and represents, through the midwifery of the Hebrews, a re-uptake of Egyptian thought concerning both personal destiny and the structure of the afterlife more generally. Perhaps paradoxically, the idea of a future being as well as world is actually an older sensibility than is the idea of decay and the overall running down of things. The future as a conception comes from the past as an actuality. What is more truly resurrected is thus not a particular culture hero but rather an entire outlook, a worldview that seeks to overcome both the torpor of the present and the ultimate breakdown of the future.

            This novel vantage presents to itself an equally unexplored panorama. That the Greeks maintained vestiges of their older temporality, a cycle in which the usual linear histories are inverted – the past was somehow ahead of them and thus could be known; this is dramatized in some of the most famous literary sequences that have survived from this period, such as those that speak of ‘predestination’ in Oedipus Rex or Antigone, while the future was ‘behind’ them and was thus unknown to the present – tells us of their abject fear of the future as a looming historical space. The ‘horror vacui’ of their Geometric period in sculpture was, for the Greeks, seemingly imported into a wider worldview. Blank space, either on the surfaces of clay vessels or in the temporal imagination, could neither be condoned nor countenanced. There is a residue of this even in our present-day imagination, since the future ‘itself’ has not changed and can itself never be present for us. Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) is a well-known popular attempt to essentially bring the future into the present, filling up the otherwise void spaces with its abrupt presence. The author speaks of urban renewal projects, where in a short space of time the entire landscape has been transformed. This is the general character of city life, in one sense, and it is no coincidence that temples remain the most enduring structures in these otherwise fluid and very much plastic spaces. Temples stand not because of their vintage if oft warmed-over architectural styles, but rather due to the worldview they represent and the morality they express, both of which are not only archaic to capital and to modernity more widely, but as well, contradict them.

            Their contrary character mimics the temporal inversion of the Greek mindset regarding history; what it was and what it meant. An urban core church tells us that the future is the past, that what is to come is actually behind us, its origins are very much its destinations and we complete our mortal being in the death of the present alone. Mythos, in its timeless and principled mannerisms, can duly afford both this contradiction – in itself there is no temporal conflict as history cannot exist in myth – and its benediction; it is rather through the logos that the future regains its promise and the present thus becomes promissory. To see the temple as a mere relic is to enforce the linearity of the very Word which the new belief and its attendant world-system have bequeathed to us. But it is a literal enforcement even so, for at once it can take refuge in the umbrella ethic, imported from the East, that earthly life was to be transcended, and thus even the places of worship upon the earth would be annulled in their meaningfulness and annihilated in their objectificity, as well as being able to hang the Logos up above its own worldly speech; to not do this second part meant to hang oneself, tethered to a world both forsaken and thus doomed: ‘my words fly up but my thoughts remain below’, as Shakespeare has it. Here, thought, a form of the Logos, is meant to itself retrieve the Being of mythos. No wonder then are we reserved in the face of any future.

            Though history can be concretized as ‘the past’, either as an official account to be found in government records like Hansard, courtroom transcripts, policy manuals, papal tracts or missals, and many other like documents, it remains fluid due to countering events such as new archaeological discoveries or historical interpretations, as well as the vicissitudes of mortal memory and even the popular culture misrepresentations of both historical cultures and otherwise well-documented events. The future is, by definition, plastic, but by redefinition, so is the past. The present lies in an Husserlian flux, even fluxion, so that its fluidity is as undeniable as is its sheer immanence. Its ‘pure presence’, however eidetic and hence rather unavailable in its tendency to be unavailing of itself, could be seen as another way in which to ‘avoid a void’, as it were. If there was a well-ensconced horror of the vacuum in spatial representation, as the logos gained preeminence, this sentiment found itself transposed to the very cosmos; ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. Today, cosmology fills in the greatest vacuum yet discovered by science, that of open intergalactic space, with ‘dark matter’ and even darker energy that shines not observably but in fact historically, refracting the ’ether’ of the Victorians. These and like efforts speak to us not of a simple accumulation of knowledge but the more so of a mimesis: that while nature might abhor nothingness, history deplores it, humanity avoids it, including my personal death, and temporality absolves itself from it. Thus to be plastic is to adopt an adeptly adaptive response to self-negation.

            The unshaped space is at best, a place-to-be. Unlived time is imminent alone, without presence. Idioms such as the ‘virgin landscape’, ‘virgin seas’, ‘untapped energy’, even inertia itself, all testify to the sense that what is the new is as well exciting, even if it might also be feared. To be the first to discover or explore something is to become a vehicle for the future. This is a metaphor of mythos, but one absorbed by the history of logos; in our very individuality we grant the safest of harbors to the idea of both uniqueness and thence the ability to be the first one to have done this or that, this specific way and no other. Simply because it is I, as an I, no one else could fill that void. Yet the goal is ever the same: to happen across a blankness and conjure forth a tapestry, to take the mute and give it voice, to transform the nothing into a something. This act is fluidity, it enacts change. Through this ability, we are able to see the future even if we have yet to fully experience it. The trick remains, however, to see in a future something which is itself different from what has previously filled such diverse voids; gaps in knowledge being perhaps the most important. Lloyd’s futurity is preferable to Hoffman’s, but between them we are called to witness the dual poles of human possibility; that I can busily color in the bald heralds of death without considering their augury and their ability to import the future into my very presence or, I can, with resolute being, step into each of them and move through them, only filling them up in passing, and thereby gaining the wisdom of that which moves all mortal life.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and 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.

Self and Afterlife

Self and Afterlife (an exercise in existential extension)

            While not all conceptions of the afterlife have as their outcome a continued existence of the same selfhood, nor do all boast that a new form of existence will be conferred upon it if it is conceived of as the same, all have as their essence the idea of the extension of life in some form. The afterlife is therefore an exercise in existential extension. When my book On the Afterlife (2012) was published, I realized that though I had provided a chronological and cross-cultural analysis of the structure of the afterlife itself, I had paid scant attention to the vehicle which was supposed to undergo these surrounding alterations in ontological space. I deferred to my title quite literally and thus overlooked the entire reason why such a concept should have taken its enduring place in the human imagination. With some sense of this, let me now make a brief attempt to further the relevant investigation.

            In the cosmology of the social contract, insofar as it can be known today, the soul’s immortality was cyclical, mirroring the concept of both time and seasonal nature. An indefinite number of corporeal lives had been lived, with the same stretched out ‘ahead’ of one, constituting the future. Intensely logical and even rational, the sense that since life itself exhibited no change over mortal memory and far beyond, pending upon how primordial this first concept of the afterlife was – we can only remind ourselves that the toolkit of Homo Erectus remained unchanged for approximately two million years – just so, the life of the soul should be an exercise in the eternal return of the same, in Eliade’s sense of course and not so much in Nietzsche’s. It was of especial moment when an elder passed just before an infant was born, as this was taken as a sign that the same soul had willed itself to return almost immediately. There was thus also inferred that the pool of souls was quite limited, because the population load in material life never seemed to grow beyond a certain amount; one that could, if not be known exactly, predicted most proximately. A moment of witty scripting in the indigenous Haida film Edge of the Knife (2018), has a youth asking after who were the past lives of so-and-so, and an adult relative replying with, ‘oh, you don’t want to know’.

            No doubt, one might suggest. And for perhaps ourselves as well, presuming that the ontological structure of life and death has not been further transformed by the appearance of history proper. This original idea, that of unevaluated return, must have animated the imagination of the vast majority of our species existence heretofore. But with changes to the population structure, the appearance of surplus, and thence the growth of communities, social hierarchies, and their alteration of subsistence strategies, the realm of ideals as well shifted. In the East, some twelve thousand years ago, the early emergence of agricultural sedentism propelled an alteration in the afterlife’s conception. The soul still returned, but this time, in its sojourn in the afterlife, it was evaluated. This is the basis for both reincarnation and the caste system. One’s ‘karma’ may not be sufficient to rise in the stratigraphy of life as a whole, nor yet in the social hierarchy of cultural life. The jape about one ‘coming back as a dog or a rat’ must have been well taken. But by the time sedentary settlements and agrarian subsistence patterns had fully emerged in the Near East some ten thousand years ago, the conception of the afterlife underwent further and even more major changes. No longer did the soul return at all and, after being evaluated, spent the remainder of its own indefinite existence either in the underworld or in a better, lighter space. The first agrarian conception, that of evaluated return, is most famously associated with Hinduism, while the second, that of evaluated continuation, with ancient Egypt.

            It was this second idea which, historically, became predominant, with the spread of Near Eastern irrigation civilizations and their associated and serial empires, and thus inspired a raft of variations on its basic theme. Who was to do the evaluation, the character of the rewards and punishments accruing to its outcome, the framing of the contrasting spaces adjoined in the afterlife, heaven versus hell, for instance, and so on, were all subject to a great deal of improvisation and alteration, given that all of these ideas were first to be found within still oral cultures. Only with the advent of written script, some seven to eight thousand years ago, did these notions begin to take on a more definite and detailed form and formulation. By the time we enter our own historical period, with the appearance of the three great second-age agrarian world systems, the conception of evaluated continuation becomes quite well known. The radical shift occurs in how one is evaluated, and not that one is or one is not, nor that one’s soul does not return in any case, with the appearance of forbearance as an ethical precept in the East and its Western equivalent, forgiveness. These kinds of ideas are, in a sense, reverberations of the primordial sentiment that whatever one was or did in this or that specific life, that one should begin again with a clean slate. The difference is that one does not return to an embodied state to start anew, the soul rather being ‘cleansed of its sins’ and entering a new form of extended existence elsewhere.

            The career of this most fascinating concept does not, however, end there. Even in modernity, our finite and godless cultural sensibility has taken the afterlife to yet another self-conception, that of unevaluated continuation. Not only does this fill in the final cell in the four-square model proposed and detailed in my 2012, it suggests that we are still willing to stake our claims to consciousness itself, at least in part, upon the idea that it somehow continues bereft of body and freed from the mind’s sole manufacture. Or perhaps this is after all the difference between brain and mind, and thus for this same reason they cannot be precisely ‘mapped’ onto one another. There is now no judgment of any kind, which also implies that the structure of the spaces of the afterlife has also been changed, collapsed into a single undifferentiated plenum where the ‘sky’s the limit’, as it were. The final line of script in what for many remains the best of science fiction fantasy entertainment speaks to this only half-rational and utterly unempirical sensibility, thereby contradicting, at least somewhat, the modernist ethics of the Star Trek franchise. That it is set in the context of the weekly upper decks poker game serves the contrasting reality that only within known existence can one attain one’s ideals, and that ‘fate is just the weight of circumstances’.

            Yet that weight itself must have been known as soon as our most antique ancestors, presumably perhaps even the Australopithecines and yet before, were able to consciously cognize the difference between the quick and the dead, and thence reflect upon its existential implications. In that we are not ontologically superior to those our first incarnations tells us of perhaps both elements summing each of our conceptions of the afterlife; that the this-life must end and yet life itself continues. If we are romantics at heart, we might somehow will ourselves to an active role in the next-life, and the next, or, if we are, as I imagine the species to ultimately be, not content with merely human form, we might by contrast will ourselves to become in fact something more than we have ever thought to be. It is by way of this more that humanity has evolved and progressed alike to both possessing a sense of the indefinite, the futural, as well as the infinite, the cosmic. Only by holding onto past conceptions of the afterlife do we continue to flirt with the apocalypse, for the unexpected fifth wheel in our house of existential extension is the one in which we are reduced to the star-stuff from which we originally came.

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

Experiencing Illness

Experiencing Illness (Its Uncanny Liminality)

            Perhaps the most pressing impingement on the will to life as lived is the experience of illness. Health, as Hans-Georg Gadamer aptly put it, is an enigma. We are unsure of exactly what it is without due recourse to understanding its absence. As if it were a singularly focused sense of the social, wherein we only feel the weight of society as a set of rubrics, roles and rules when we resist its presence or openly rebel against it, similarly, illness speaks to us in irruptive tones, interrupting the generally unthought experience of health. Illness, no matter how slight, is always something of a shock. ‘I felt fine, just a moment ago’, we might tell ourselves. ‘What could possibly have gone wrong in that time?’ of course, we are told that many illnesses have incubation periods, genetic markers might manifest themselves over a brief and sudden period, or injury might have resulted from being at the wrong place at the wrong time, or through a freak accident, or yet a calculated risk gone awry. Our health, the most precious thing we can be said to ‘possess’ – the love of another is a gift and not a possession, for instance – is, in one sense, constantly at risk of being lost.

            And it is not that illness is ever-present for most of us. If so, we would have no true experience of what it means to be healthy at all. Sickness and health would be subjectively interchangeable. No, it is rather the sometimes-stark contrast between them that allows us the perspective to compare and contrast such seemingly opposing states. Illness confronts us in the manner of all things irruptive. The visionary was confronted by his vision, the saint by her mission, the pilgrim by the end-times, and the artist by their muse. In all such cases, there is a ‘reality to the unseen’, which William James specifically states is a hallmark of religious experience, also irruptive when radically present, though much less so when presented through institutional lenses. This generally invisible yet real plenum, the space from which uncanny things emanate is by its character unidirectional. We, for instance, at least in our mortal and fragile form, cannot transgress its boundaries, oblique and occluded as they are when made contiguous with the everyday world. To do so would be risking all, as if we had deliberately made ourselves sick, or if we had attempted suicide.

            The irreal sphere speaks to us, but it hears us not. We too might close our ears to its glossolalia, turn our eyes from its hieroglyphics. But what we cannot do is control it from without. This at least, from the tradition that claims such a realm even exists at all. It is medicine that makes the first attempt to open up the irreal in the name of rationality and through the use of empiricising methods. The mystery of ill-health itself was to be solved, even if specific conditions remained unresolved. What medicine does is to reframe illness as a departure from a set of experienced conditions that betray their ‘normal’ state through their functional status. That the doctor often begins his hermeneutic by asking ‘How do you feel? Where is the pain? What kind of pain is it? How strong?’ and so on, betrays both its kindred nature with the investigation of any mystery, including the criminal type at perhaps one end of the spectrum – after all, the criminal role is merely a socially defined career that itself is ‘ill’ and Abnormative – and cosmology at the other; what is the nature of the universe, how did it come to be? The diagnostic criteria are themselves arranged on a spectrum of their own, gradually departing from the cut and dried as we experience the shift from physical ailments to those deemed ‘mental’. If we can say that the mechanics of proprioceptive function seem to take on their own uncanny presence – functioning in health ‘normally’ and yet also somehow miraculously – they thus exude a certain tacit charisma, as if they are the resonance of Being in creation. On the other hand, mental illness is both the truer mystery due to its ability to fraudulently present itself as if it were a kind of charismatic presence, but also and at once due to the fact that while charm can be faked, as anyone who has been on a first date can attest, authentic charisma cannot. The emotionally compromised can maintain their charm, at least for certain hours of the day, but physical illness is simply, and at best, unpleasant.

            For modern physical medicine, the discursive dues have been paid. Even if the root cause remains unknown, this idiopathy is never an epistemological problem. One always can identify the effects and perhaps also treat them. ‘Managing one’s illness’, from addiction to diabetes to pancreatic breakdown and a host of others, has become a commonplace phrase in daily life. It may be diet, it may be drugs, exercise or even meditation, but such management clearly takes the place of any outright cure. It is of interest, from the perspective of witnessing the shift from illness being sourced wholly within the irreal no matter its material effects to it being itself fully material and empirical, that illness management can claim to have the only remaining pedigree that harks back to traditional diagnostics. That is, the shaman, in countering the sorcerer, tells the victim that she must ‘live with the curse’ as there is no cure for it. But there are countermeasures, which must taken even daily, that ameliorate the curse’s effects or indeed force it into dormancy, as if in remission. For in traditional cosmology, there is no such thing as an accident; nothing occurs by chance alone.

            Nothing truly is altered by the upshifting of both magic and sorcery – the one patrolling the sunny side of the existential street, the other skulking along the shady side – into the sole purview of a god. If such a deity is given to evaluation, it issues forth its own curses and blessings, and only time will tell which is which in the end. The sourcing of the irruptive in the irreal, giving it is uncanny force and perhaps also a kind of soteriological suasion, is unchanged. It is only with the advent of medicine that illness is both brought down to earth but at once denuded of its earthy roots. Even so, such knowledge is clearly also a work in progress; everything about the subjective volatility of mental illness underscores the incomplete character of medical discourse. More than this, its own history, especially that of psychopathology itself, lends credence to the belief that applied science may have its limitations, if not in principle its limits, when confronted with a state which rests part of its status in premodern metaphysics. Like ultimate questions which only religion presumes to answer – indeed, it must do so if it is to be worth our consideration at all – mental illness proffers to the doctor a kind of abject faith, if only in itself.

            Though the medical specialist is also human and thus also can suffer ill-health, medical discourse is an objectivating space deliberately set over against the irreal, just as is modern evolutionary cosmology a bastion against creation ex nihilo. Not that the discourses of anti-transcendental metaphysics can answer to ultimate cosmogonical questions. In this, the absence of understanding precisely what health is, in its essence, is made choate only by being able to tell what it is not. Sanity thus is best framed as a practiced knowing of social customs and the presentation of self in daily living-on. Any other definition risks sliding sideways from this normative practice and becomes immediately subjective or, at the very least, introduces a ‘subjectionable’ element by having to undertake the interrogative journey of ascertaining how the patient ‘feels’ about her emotions and thoughts. The person who suffers from illness of any kind is subjected to it simply by retaining their status as a subject. I feel my illness in a manner no one else can, and so it goes for everyone else. Even the dislocation between pain receptors and pain processors in the brain is not enough to resolve this subjection of the subject to illness. Yes, some persons appear more ‘stoic’ than others, another factor amongst a myriad that the doctor must try to take into account. Some patients ‘present’ well, other badly. Some presentations little resemble clinical data, while in other cases, the data speak to relatively good health though the patient still feels badly. In a word, illness is the most salient way by which we identify health.

            One early deontological departure from the traditional sensibility that illness and therefore also mortality are functions of either evil acts or primeval fates comes to us from the Greek physician Alkmaion, who stated that humans are in fact mortal because ‘they have not learned to connect the beginning and the end’ in the way that the rest of nature has been evolved to do. I am not a perennial being, and even though my being is completed in mine ownmost death, this completion differs utterly from that which is completed by beginning once again, over and over. Insofar as the experience of illness is like a rehearsal for dying, its theatrical power emanating from a representation of both the uncanny and the charismatic in the guise of a journey from the healthy place of magic to the unhealthy space of sorcery, it alerts us to the fragility of our shared human lot. But illness is no mere metaphor, a point to which Sontag as emphatically has alerted us. However irreal it may feel, its reality rests in the material change in function and variance that often can even be measured, sometimes indirectly but always with a sense that illness’ sources, however obscure some of them may yet be to medicine, cannot be taken literally as either curse or cure.

            Thus, the experience of illness is as much something that distracts us from pursuing the most objective course while at once offering a very personal glimpse into the very ontology of health, its history and its discursive career. For mental illness, this glance may become a manner of life, though never a way of living. For in being forced into the darker reaches of mortal being, we should not think to rest there let alone remain. Illness is the lesser sibling of anxiety, which rests within us as part of our Dasein. Even so, illness as experienced allows us to more gently understand that dying has its own ethic, and that the disconnect between our origins and our ends is not so fatal to absolve us of willing a return to an enigmatic health. Only through accomplishing this return do we then also glimpse the wider miracle of nature’s self-connected being, that which our consciousness cannot so far grasp in any other manner.

            G. V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Sentiment and Sentimentality

Sentiment and Sentimentality

            If we want to abandon our daydreams, we must look at the other thing these ornaments are hiding and put ourselves in a state of methodical doubt in regard to them. (Merleau-Ponty, 1955:225, italics the text’s).

            The third of William James’ legendary set of Gifford Lectures is entitled ‘The Reality of the Unseen’. In it, he reminds us that reality is matched in human consciousness by ‘unreality’, or at the very least, a set of realities is balanced by a similar set of unrealities. Such a term, ‘unreal’, during the fin de siécle period meant less the uncanny or surreal and more simply the sense that it lacked agreement and rationality. The first due to its generally unobservable character, the second due to its resistance to being subject to reason. Yet James did not find the idea of unreality to be in itself unreasonable or even unempirical. Regions of the brain, separated only by ‘the filmiest of screens’, were either occlusive in their contiguities or were yet unexplored in their potential. Mapping the brain, as Broca had accomplished in James’ own time, was not the same thing as understanding exactly how these different regions managed their internal affairs. Consciousness itself was thus constructed by apparatuses and architectures unseen yet real.

            The reaction to Enlightenment transparency, the ideas of the individual, of free will, of sovereignty of thought, and their belated early Victorian offspring, progress, democracy, positivism, feminism, shared one powerful leitmotif. Evolution moved through unseen means. Phenotypes could be observed – even in our own time, when the genome is itself observable, the dynamic between genes and environment as well as mutation, genetic drift and so on, are not to be directly ‘seen’ – as the outcomes of a process the reality of which eluded Darwin though not, of course, Mendel. Consciousness, now radically remade as a ‘social product’ in Marx and Engels 1846 work – not published until 1932, mind you – also contained, or was yet contained by, an unseen reality. When Janet first proposed the idea of the unconscious he did so quite unconsciously, if you will, with none of the glaring threat and radically primordial overtones of Freud’s later reworking. Perhaps it is better to describe Janet’s efforts as ‘unself-conscious’, given the latter’s deeply self-reflective and philosophical construct. For our present purposes, however, we want to merely note that whether it is evolution, consciousness, empiricity as phenomenologically inclined, or structuralism in linguistics and later the social sciences, it is the ‘reality of the unseen’ that dominates post-enlightenment discourses.

            Now is this the same unseen as James had in mind? Not at all, or at least, not entirely. If the Enlightenment, in its brash rationalism and its common-sense empiricism, had made the old idea of unreality flee into the cultic or rustic mindsets alone, it ran the tables for only a scant three generations before it itself began to be displaced. Like any revolution, the old regime – in this case, of thought in general and not specifically politics, though these seismic shifts are related – while defeated and in flight, doubles back upon the victors. It does so not by a pure counteroffensive, but by altering its self-conception. The old must displace itself from its own customary sentiments in order to reappear, through the back door, as it were, in a new set of guises but with the same basic principle in hand. What the unseen was to the religious worldview, James’ ultimate topic, became the unseen within that scientific. Science, that paragon of Enlightenment practice, its ‘application’ of both reason and observation as redefined and reminted by the eighteenth century becomes, by the end of the nineteenth, a fertile field of occlusive discourses. From organismic evolution to psychology to phenomenology to structuralism, the conception of the unseen, of ‘unreality’, ensconces itself perhaps even more deeply than it had ever found itself to be in religion alone. For after all,  however mysterious was the invisible hand of the divine, all would ultimately be revealed to human consciousness. There would be, in truth, no truth untold.

            Can one say the same for the unseen that animates many of our most profound conceptions of modernity? Certainly, the race has been on, following the second world war, to both provide a ‘grand unified theory’ in cosmology but also a unity of scientific understanding – sometimes referred to as ‘levels theory’ – regarding all human and non-human existence. Pike’s 1957 opus attests to the reach of such a sentiment; that science can only overtake its predecessors by explaining as much as did these older forms of thought. In a word, science must both become the new religion and the end of religion. And it would do so by finally uncovering the conception of the unseen within its own novel discourses.

            Yet this sentiment is a self-conception. If religion had its primal mover in unreality, its symptom in the uncanny but with the foreknowledge that the hand of God was ultimately a canny one – ‘everything happens for a reason’ becomes the mantra of the believer; the phrase is itself at best trivially true but the acolyte transforms such ‘reason’ into a connected plan – then science has the same in the surreality of cosmological evolution. It is, to our sensibility, just as unbelievable that the entire known universe should be as a point of light, that for eons nothing but cosmic background radiation should exist, that no other explanation need be given for existence entire, as it was to believe that a superior being with unexplained provenience and the more so, origin, should have simply created existence out of inexistence. At some level of reflection one is bound to ask, ‘what’s the difference?’.

            And yet there is a difference, stark, stolid, and still as stunning as it must have been in 1859 or would have been in 1846; and that is, science presents a cosmos that is non-teleological; it has no final purpose. This differs in as radical a manner as possible from the previous metaphysics, wherein a final goal was assumed. And while Hegel attempted to preserve the telos of history, of spirit, in his phenomenology – such a dynamic was also unseen in its primacy, one can note – by the 1840s this had been rejected by the entire swath of younger thinkers, from Mill to Marx to Martineau to Darwin himself. In art, the difference between Beethoven and Wagner might be cast along similar lines, the difference between Goethe and Dickens perhaps as well. But most importantly, it was the concept of evolution – in spite of its own ultimately unexplained origins; what sets the serial universe in motion? – that departed from the sentiment that existence entire should have a purpose beyond itself.

            In this, we are confronted by the whole question of the difference between sentiment and sentimentality. The one is customary, assumed, unseen. It is part of the social stock of knowledge at hand and is a lynchpin of contents for any phenomenology of culture or even of consciousness ‘itself’. But the second is contrived, fashionable, observable and indeed, desires itself to be observed at all times and in all places by as many as possible. Sentimentality is as much a flaneur as is sentiment retiring. The one lives to see and be seen, the other would die before giving up its unseen reality to either science or religion. With the overturning of telos as reason, sentimentality overtakes sentiment as the compelling force animating human consciousness in its self-refracting lens.

            Travelling alongside the conception of nothingness, a concept aberrant like no other to Western consciousness, ‘atelos’ provides a perverse reassurance that our worst selves need not concern themselves with the final ends given impetus by our egregious acts. The world could end, yes, but by our own hand. We own the end, we ourselves are the end entire. Perverse, yes, but such a term hardly begins to describe such a sentimentality as this. While it is mostly the case that mere sentiment cannot provide for either human freedom or authentic being, let alone thought – the ‘sacrifice of the intellect’, another one of James’ famous phrases, is demanded by any set of traditions, customs, doctrines or doxa, not only those religious in character – it is rarely the case that traditions alone provoke the apocalypse. In our fear that revealed religion might self-construct self-destruction for all, believers and non-believers alike, have we not stepped too far away from the equally customary sensibility that a culture must simply be reproduced at all costs? We have, in our Enlightenment liberation, excised divinity and its teleological children from our sentiments only to be faced with a gnawing sense that without ultimate purpose, meaning too disappears.

            Does this then also suggest that meaningfulness is no longer extant at all, or is it only hidden from us, a final effect of the transfigured conception of the unseen in our new reality? Merleau-Ponty asks us to consider this ‘other thing’, this otherness that now can only be other to us by maintaining itself ‘underneath the ornament’ of none other than sentimentality. I want to suggest that meaning does not necessarily have to be hitched up to purpose, and that just because we now live within a non-teleological modernity and live through and by an ateological consciousness, this does not demand either the reality of the unseen or the sacrifice of the intellect. Indeed, reality is all the more meaningful if it has a depth which is at first occluded, and the intellect is all the more real if its meanings emanate from both a fully conscious sensibility and an equally real unconscious sensitivity. If anything, the liberation of human freedom of the will frees up not so much humanity as a whole – perhaps each one of us tends in her own direction on this point; we each of us are thrown upon the pathless landscape of the purposeless truth and this is the meaning of ultimate freedom – but rather the ability for meaning to come to its own fulfillment freed up from final purposes and ends alike.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over fifty books on ethics, education, social theory, aesthetic and health, and more recently, fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.