Tag: history

How the Petty Secures the Profound

How the Petty Secures the Profound (opposites contract)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self and World

Self and World (a phenomenological excursus)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Decoy of Self-Improvement

The Decoy of Self-Improvement (a conflict of metaphysical expectations)

            I am a thrown project, arcing over what is at hand, stumbling through what is closest to me. I find I am a being in the world, a being which is completed only in mine ownmost death. I inherit nothing of my own, at first, and this cultural persona yet resonates with archetypes universal as well as the apical ancestry of the specific culture history into which I have come. As a boy, I had a certain set of role models after which I could shape myself: the adventurer, the warrior, the navigator, the architect, the bard and so on. The list of gendered archetypes for men is no longer than that for womankind, but it is much more projective, opening onto the world and indeed, taking the world for its own. And while it is an open question whether or not the hero’s life is still superior to that of the person’s, we are today confined by the dynamic extant between personhood and persona, an unquiet keep into which no hero can tread.

            To insert the heroic into modernity we have invented the popular discourse of self-improvement. I am not a hero, for I live in the world of humanity alone, but I may believe that I yet can act heroically, mimicking not the character of an archetype but simply some of its behavior. Each of our culture heroes, after the agrarian revolution, are figures like ourselves, augmented human beings, demi-gods due to a mixed birth, miscegenative misfits who are thus mis-aligned in both the social world and that dreamscape of the pantheon. The agrarian culture heroine is marked by her divorce from animality. In pre-agrarian societies, these beings are defined by their ability to change their incarnative presence, animal spirits who can take the shape of a human being and back and forth, as well as take on many other forms, relevant or appropriate to their task at hand. In my home, it is Raven who is the leading figure in what for us is now a most alien sensibility. Raven discovered the first people in a giant clamshell washed up on a remote beach, the metaphorical image connoting some kind of deep culture memory of the Bering Strait crossings, some 20-40K years ago. We are told that Raven was as astonished as were the people themselves, and this too is of profound import: across the pre-agrarian consciousness, humans and animals share not only a common nature, they share a common humanity as part of that nature.

            This is the metaphysics of transformation rather than that of transfiguration, which appears much later in human history. And at this later time there is as well a split, a schism, between the great irrigation civilizations of the East and those of the Middle East and West. In the former, transcendental metaphysics came into its own, with the goal of leaving this life for something that carried one’s being far beyond it. In the West, the this-world was understood as a proving ground for the otherworld, and, in passing over the evaluative limen which demarcated the two, one was transfigured. The concepts are distinct: in transformational metaphysics, it is a two-way street. One can change into something else for a time, and then change back, as the need arose. It is highly likely this idea came from the seasonal rounds subsistence societies were compelled to rigidly follow. Even the village sites changed, and in Raven’s geographic region the winter habitation sites were considered permanent, those for the summer, nomadic and temporary, shifting to follow fish, game, and plant food. The community took on a mobile form and format in the warmer months, and settled down into a rich symbolic harvest of narrative, theater, song and dance, during those colder. It was in winter that the animal spirits and others more radically Other, such as the world-transformer Kanekelak, or the Thunderbird, appeared and thence convened with Raven’s children and all of their relations. In these cultures, the mask represented this convention of Being, allowing the transformation of the hunter and the gatherer into something archetypical.

            In the metaphysics of transfiguration, there is no going back. It is strictly a one-way street, and in the West, it was the Egyptians who invented this sensibility. There were no seasonal rounds in massive irrigation societies, from the Yellow River in China, to the Indus-Harappan in India, to Sumer and Mesopotamia, through Babylon and to the Nile. Sedentism proper had taken over, writing was invented as well as slavery, large-scale warfare, and the priesthood, this last nothing more than a ‘calumniation’, according to Nietzsche. The Epic of Gilgamesh agrees with him and indeed broadens the critique, for its major ethical theme exhorts the hero to turn his back on the accumulated wealth of the new epoch and return to the garden; the world’s undomesticated larder which by itself never quite generated enough surplus for the social stratigraphy we accept as ‘natural’ to have taken hold. It is today ours to live with as best we can, but the perduring voice of the first mythic narratives still gives us pause: what if we could engender the perfect society, the best way of human life?

            If the culture hero as a figure is the frame within which I seek to improve myself, then the return to paradise is the goal. The sensibility is still agrarian, however, for I wish to become something other to myself at present and then never go back to it. It may well be that the conflict between pre-agrarian goals attained by agrarian means is what, at base, sabotages my efforts to make today’s society into an earthly Nirvana, wherein all are treated justly and all have what they need to live at a certain qualitative standard. We have yet to discover an authentically modern self-understanding, bereft of either aspects of the social contract – the idea of paradise itself – or those of the archaic civilizations – that I can transfigure myself and thus become more than I have been. There may be, in spite of these vast gulfs of both history and memory alike, still some points of contact. Raven is a pragmatist at heart. His transformational abilities are to be employed ad hoc, and never to simply gain status. It is of especial relevance that the huge surpluses that were in fact generated by the coastal chiefdoms were here redistributed through status-enhancing displays. The Potlatch, one of Bataille’s examples of the corresponding outlet for this set of cultures’ ‘accursed share’, saw both gift-giving and destruction of valuable objects, the ritual sacrifice of slaves, and alliance-marriage of young women. It must have been a lurid, outlandish spectacle, with its combination of grotesquerie and wanton vandalism, its deep cultural theater and the very presence of the transformer beings themselves, perhaps at a bit of a distance, their forms blending with the shadows of the giant conifers and the overshadows of the more distant mountains.

            For ritual too would become more staid with the advent of agriculture. Even its most grim displays – like the cutting out of a the heart of a slave or war prisoner at the top of the cultic Meso-American pyramid; in one stroke the formidable obsidian blade would slice through the ribcage, for the heart must still be beating as it was held up to the God in question – was a moment of climax. Propitiation had been altered from a simple orison to the cougar when one killed a deer or a women’s chorus on the beach willing the safe return of the whale-hunters and their canoes, to a highly rehearsed and therefore rote repetition of liturgical prayer, in the recesses of temples meant to ape mystery without their spaces actually being mysterious, such as the cave in which one of the first people witnessed the transformers’ secret song and dance. With sedentary society, highly stratified and specialized, generating uncounted surpluses of both foodstuffs and the mouths it had to feed, cosmogony gradually loosened its hold upon cosmology, and humanity itself, by shifting its sense of the temporal into an historical cycle rather than one timeless and eternally recurring, began to insert itself into the workings of the universe.

            But nowhere in human history and prehistory alike do we find the idea of self-improvement. It is a distinctly modern sensibility, even if it attempts an amalgam of more ancient sources. I am not a hero, yet I can act heroically; I have never experienced paradise, and yet I can create my own; I seek no Olympic summit but rather only to move institutional mountains. The symbolic decoy of this novel approximation of Dasein’s own authentic arc lies in its departure from our existential lot. I cannot be an allegory of myself, I cannot live as does the archetype, for indeed the latter does not ‘live’ in any real sense at all. Even here, however, such odd delusions are not fatal, for the entire worldview with which they had been associated is long past. No, the truer decoy, beyond any symbolic distraction, rests in the sensibility that only the individual person has the mandate to improve himself, and more than this, only himself. Yet further, that the individual person is the only space in which there could be improvement, implying that society as a whole is thereby bettered only because solitary persons have elected, of their own free will and perhaps goodness of heart, to better themselves. This radically inductive approach to cultural evolution is both utterly new – pace the social planners and utopianists from More to Skinner and everyone in between – as well as being oddly blind to its disconnect from the world. Its ethic – that I as a role model foster more compassionate attitudes and actions amongst other with whom I interact – is equivocal. Its light comes in the form of the neighbor, which is the most radically disjunctive of archetypes since he is fully human and yet has abandoned his humanity in a transformational manner. The neighbor excerpts herself from the bonds and bounds of all social roles, but yet returns to the world after her heroic act is completed. The world, in the interim, has not itself been altered.

            Let me suggest then that self-improvement outside of either symbolic distraction or the delusion of induction can be understood as the irruption of the neighbor, this libertine of compassion. Such action turned to act is, phenomenologically speaking, an expression of Dasein’s call to conscience; it is bereft of the self-conscious, as in its personal Potlatch it throws to the winds all possible worry and transforms concern to care, but more importantly, it is also devoid of self-consciousness, in that the sense that I must render care to myself first and foremost is also discarded. The neighbor is a presence outside of the present, it is an action becoming act, a being-within-the-worlding, and a figure without archetype. Its humanity is perhaps primordial, and only its ethic, historical. It decoys nothing, and yet it improves something, and this other-than-the-self which, in its transformation, also enacts something outside of itself and without self-reference. It allows me to become part of that which is closest to me, and, for a moment, the world is no longer simply at hand, but rather has arced itself up to meet my thrownness and take me into its essential embrace.

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

Refusing and Misusing Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does Gratitude lead to Complacency?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before Good and Evil

Before Good and Evil (a non-moral reality)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘Zeitmotif’ and the New Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Our ability to recognize contrast between and amongst successive, or even simultaneous, genres in the arts provides a first clue. Brahms and Bruckner shared a number of important things; they were both major composers of their time, they had their respective followings, neither married, and both fell in love with women who were utterly unavailable to them. They met the once; enjoying together with gusto the one thing perhaps to their minds that they truly shared; a love for south German cuisine and beer. Brahms’ avatar was Beethoven, Bruckner’s, Wagner. Brahms had himself already endured the fashionable conflict between his followers and Wagner’s, the latter supplanted by Bruckner’s after Wagner’s death in 1883. Even so, viewed over the longer term, there is no authentic conflict here. Both composers’ apical ancestor was Beethoven, and the romanticism of the 19th 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 19th 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.

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.

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.

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.