meaning – GV Loewen

Understanding and Comprehension

Verstehen und VerstÄndnis (Understanding and Comprehension)

In my life I am confronted with both history and world. Neither of my own making, nevertheless they dominate my existence, and could be said to both originate and predestine it. History includes the tradition, all that which is customary in the sense of Hexis, which I must learn in order to function as a viable being in the social world-as-it-is. But history also includes all that has come to be known as ‘cultural capital’; the very ‘stuff’ of the human career, from ancient archaeology through to contemporary popular culture. It is an open question how much of this capital must be possessed in order to maintain social viability. To each is granted his specialties, perhaps, and in a complex organic social organization wherein each of us plays multiple social roles and thus wears many hats, the daily discourse of informal interaction is muted to the point where Verstehen, or ‘interpretive understanding’ is rarely called upon. This bracketing of interpretation is significant due not only to it being so by design, but also, and as a result of this, that each of us is left to assume that the other knows what she is about, as well as knowing what we ourselves meant by this or that interaction. In a word, we favor Deutung over Verstehen in everyday life.

Since our very sanity is at stake, both in terms of our self-perception and that of the others, Deutung, or ‘interpreted meaning’ must indeed carry the day to day upon its presumptive shoulders. Most of us presume one another to already and always understand what is called for, and thus what is also called forth, in a great variety of social contexts. But since all of these are learned, and mostly in our childhood and youth, we cannot be certain that either we ourselves or any other person has fully comprehended every possible social context and thus knows how to act to a tee in each. The ‘social’ person used to be casually equated with the most ‘sociable’ person. The very conception of what can constitute a ‘social’ gathering might be interpreted by class and status, ethnicity or language, work relationship or family pedigree. Though all are social in the anthropological sense, the vast majority of us are not students of society in any formal way. It is perhaps ironic that though we do learn to tread on much or even most of the stages upon which civil behavior is to be enacted, very few of us choose to dive more deeply into just how all of this ‘sociality’ actually works.

And there is, on the face of it, no good reason to do so. If all of us know the score in terms of how to act, what to say, and of course, the opposite as well – the shalt not is duly implied by the shalt – then what would be the point of expending the effort in order to take everything apart just to see how it functioned? Would there not be a risk, in reassembly, that I would then get it wrong? Taking society apart to examine its mechanics and its organics both would seem a risky, even radical act. And since there is no clear consensus on society itself being ‘broken’ – though many claim to know just where and how this or that part of it is broken and should be replaced by some other part, equally proclaimed as being ‘obvious’ – the idea of taking it all down and reconstructing from point zero seems to have little merit. Even the most astute and vigorous social scientist does not attempt such a cosmogonical feat, contenting herself with an examination only, noting the parts and how they interact, just as the ethnographer of modern culture might stalk the streets and observe actual human interactions. An examination of society generates the means by which Deutung can be performed. It does not require any consistent interpretation but rather looks more like a connect-the-dots diagram. The pieces lack order until the connections are made, surely, but just as certainly, all the pieces are present and can be ordered. And it is the resulting order that generates both customary performance but also much of the history of the world itself.

Between Max Weber and Georg Simmel, ‘Verstehen-Sociology’ gained much traction in the first third of the twentieth century, making a deep impression upon other seminal sociological thinkers such as Alfred Schutz and Robert Merton. It faded post-war given the ascendence of functionalism, which is instructive for our topic as interpretation was just that tool of questioning that mere examination need not access. Taking it all apart and rebuilding it required interpretation, poring over it and noting its connections, as functionalism mostly did, required only already interpreted meaning. Not that this is an either/or situation. Indeed, one might argue that one would have to come to an understanding of the parts themselves before generating an overall comprehension of the whole. While interpretational understanding could do the first, it seemed only functionalism could do the second. Even so, in between these two stood social phenomenology. This third stance suggested that it was the very interactions of living persons that constructed and reconstructed the cultural parts of the social whole in an ongoing and even daily basis. In short, society itself was a performance, or better, a performative understanding of itself.

The roots of this more active interpretation are diverse. Durkheim’s famous epigrammatic definition of organized religious belief is a case in point: ‘Religion is society worshipping itself’. No more concise editorial can be imagined. But within this pithy fruit is the very essence of performative social action. Borrowing from the older idea that in order for a deity to exist at all it must be actively worshipped, the very structure of society itself has to be borne up by our participation in its manifestations. I am a social actor, yes, but I am also a social founder through my action in the world. Similarly, and perhaps just as profoundly, history too is enacted insofar as we are historical beings. This is not to say that what is known as ‘the past’ must be reenacted – though Mesoamerican cultures have this as a benchmark understanding of human history; the most famous of these consistent performances is the re-enactment of the Columbian Conquest – but at the very least, history ‘continues’ only due to our actions in the present and our resolute being oriented towards the future.

What is interesting for both the student and the social actor is the fact that performance requires interpretation. The customary scripts may be given and learned by rote, but there is always slippage between an ideal and a reality. The spectrum of improvisation is vast, ranging from stifling a belch during a dinner conversation to reworking a political speech given the pace of world events. Society in its mode of being-social is very serious theater indeed, and part of the fulfilling quality of actual theatrical performance, stagecraft and script, paid actors and paying audience, is that all involved recognize themselves outside of the drama and cast upon the wider social stage. We are, in our own way, not so different from the conquered cultures of Central America, though our settings are perhaps more abstract and work not so directly with historical narratives but rather with an indirect allegory. This too is by design; like the examination of the mechanisms of society without taking the whole thing apart, allegory allows each of us to take the broader view without fully imbricating, and perhaps thus also immolating, ourselves within or upon society’s reason-of-being. For if it is only the ‘moron’ who resists social custom and flouts both mores and moralities alike, most of us would rather preserve our semblance of sanity as part of our own social performance, so that we never risk the ire of others who can justifiably say to us, ‘Well, I’m doing my part to keep all this nonsense together, why aren’t you?’.

Hence the suspicion and even aspersion cast up against all those who question things ‘too much’. The professional philosopher, who is only doing his job, is perhaps the only socially sanctioned role wherein the practitioner can legitimately say as part of his vocation that nothing is sacred. Outside of this, we are all expected to give at least nominal service to specific renditions of what the majority feels society to be, and to be about. The ‘what’ of society is the first, the ‘why’ the second. Even the thinker, in order to be judged as human at all, must bracket her radical investigations, insights, and indictments some of the time. Society is at once a performance and a comprehension. In true Durkheimian fashion, it performs itself in order to comprehend itself. But because such real drama requires ongoing improvisation and interpretation, society is also made up not so much of cut and dried mechanisms as quick-witted examinations and re-enactments. Society gives the appearance of a machine only insofar as we social actors have honed our individual and thence collective skills upon its various stages. A well-polished theatrical performance never leaves the fiction of its allegory, but a well-staged social performance upshifts itself into a stable social reality.

The question for each of us then is, do I continue to improve my acting skills within the historical context of the culture into which I was born, in order to preserve the manner in which that culture enacts itself in the wider world, or do I pretend only and ever to be an understudy, letting others do the work which is in fact the duty of all? Or, do I walk off the stage entirely, into a hitherto obscured human drama called ‘conscience’ by the world and ‘the future’ by history? In fact, it is our shared birthright, as both gift and task, to accomplish both of these essential acts. For society as mechanism is only the resulting case, and society as performance the manner in which the present presents its case. In order for any modern culture to reproduce itself, it must eschew pure reproduction in favor of a self-understanding, a Selbstverstandnis or holistic comprehension-of-itself that is developed in history but seeks the future of and in all things. Interpretive understanding is both a tool and yet a way of life for human beings. But comprehension is the mode of being of the social whole, which means no one person can provide it, even for himself. That we are social beings tells upon us in two elemental ways: we are called to conscience by the ongoingness of the world, and we are called toward the future by the ongoing presence of history, which distinguishes the social world from the world at large. That I am myself never socially larger than that historical life is for me the Kerygma of existence.

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

The Concept of ‘Value-Neutrality’

The Concept of ‘Value-Neutrality’ (the mundane version of beyond good and evil)

The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, so disturbing to human complacency yet so inescapable, is nothing but a recognition of these oppositions, and of the consequent necessity to accept that every important individual action, indeed life as a whole, if it is not to slip by like a merely natural process but to be lived consciously, is a series of ultimate decisions, by means of which the soul, as in Plato, chooses its own destiny, in the sense of the meaning of what it does and is. (Weber, 1978:84 [1913]).

The contemporary exhortation to ‘own’ one’s own actions cleaves to this same sensibility; that in choosing this or that, I am not only expressing the combined state of both my consciousness and my conscience, but am also developing each of them in this direction or that. ‘Breaking bad’ or ‘good’, I may, in the end, become a very different person than I had been, or that I ever imagined myself to be. And what all of this ‘means’ is thence also decided in a sense for me, even though I was always myself at its ongoing helm.

This individuated ethic of responsibility and self-consciousness is placed, however, in a much wider discussion of the place of value judgments in the social sciences, which is Weber’s topic in his 1913 article. As such, it seems quite out of place, since the ‘moral sciences’ are so not so much because they present a morality of any kind but rather because their chief task is to examine human decisions in the sphere of social interaction and history; in a word, the space wherein ‘morality’ however conflicted and thus denuded of any connotation of the transcendental, plays itself out.

Weber is reacting to the odd conflict between romanticist notions of ‘extra-moral’ acts, those seen to be removed in some way from the spectrum of good and evil, and what at the time were the ultra-modern conceptions of deep structures which, almost by definition, were ‘pre-moral’ in nature. The first is definitively engaged by Nietzsche’s famed conception of acts of love, which ‘always take place beyond good and evil’. The second include the two most important discursive concepts of the 19^th century, evolution and the unconscious. It is well known that Nietzsche regretted Darwin, while at the same time presaging Freud in many of the latter’s most innovative conceptions, a fact spoken to by Freud himself, in a letter to Bickel of June 28, 1931. Nietzsche immediately understood the true radicality of organismic evolution, and while popular commentaries mocked the idea that we should be ‘related’ to apes and the church lamented the loss of creation and design – in fact, evolution does not murder a potential metaphysical God, for it does not account for any definite ‘beginning’ to the cosmic drama – Nietzsche recognized that it was the fact of evolution’s non-teleological basis that constituted its most threatening issue. In a word, evolution has no ultimate purpose. From the perspective of organismic development, consciousness is itself nothing more than a happenstance Gestalt.

In the very same year as Darwin’s ‘The Descent of Man’ (1871), appeared, Nietzsche penned his most important early essay, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense’, which remains one of the great short pieces of modernity. In it, he brings to full light the intractable ateleology of life itself. His trenchant statements surrounding the sentiment of life having utterly no purpose gained for him a mistaken reputation for nihilism. But Nietzsche, unlike Darwin and much less begrudgingly than Freud – ‘Oceanic feelings? Oh please. Well, maybe in art we can find a temporary salve…’ – spent the rest of his working life, and perhaps even beyond it in his own challenged imagination, trying to create a new morality, a new manner by which humanity, now godless and finite, could embrace with the same spiritual vigour and sense of purpose as it did the ‘old god of morals’ Himself.

Zarathustra is, of course, Nietzsche’s major answer to the forsaken gospels. It is one of the German language’s greatest literary works, and remains a difficult read today, given its alchemy of romanticist and post-modern metaphors. At once it reaches back beyond the new agrarian trinity of world systems, but only to heave with some Über-manic forcefulness this classical sensibility far into an extra-human future. It is the new mythology; at once a demythology of the history of mythic thought and as well a prophecy regarding what cultural evolution would have to accomplish in order to ‘create’ the new Man. Needless to say, the Reich picked up the rhetoric without the ethic, and the result was neither evolutionary nor revolutionary.

Is it any wonder then that Weber should be struck with this apparent contradiction? A keen student of Nietzsche himself, unworried that the iconoclastic thinker would pre-empt his own ideas, Weber pursued the problem from a different angle. If the cosmos, and thus all life which emanated from it had no final purpose, no ultimate meaning in itself, this suggested that such abstract conceptions which fulfilled a structural function in human consciousness, including both evolution and the unconscious, could only be value-neutral in themselves. The usual move, a century before, was to elevate the human being into the sole creator of meaningfulness, and this even within the individual life. This is romanticism in a nutshell, and this view still has some smaller merit, given that each of us faces this self-same challenge and yet is alone in the task of fulfilling it. But Weber was much more concerned with the meaning of culture and consciousness alike. The singular person could be left to her own devices, for anyone with half an imagination should be able to become one’s own Schiller or Goethe.

It was a different question for culture. This question became so pressing that it was the Reich, once again, which took it upon itself to answer it once and for all. The ‘final solution’ to the problem of Kultur took on a grotesque form; in its irrational idyll of idealism, a form just as horrific as the death camps were in the material realm. With one exception; the oddly petit-bourgeois taste of the Nazi elites. For Weber, it was the piano itself that was the quintessential bourgeois instrument, and though it had generated many great composer and virtuosos, its inherent limits – mitigated and vastly extended of course by modern synthetic keyboards – created a framework within which art was supposed to not only take place, but thence also to be confined. The ear could not hear that 89^th key. It was as if murdering 88 persons for their ‘degenerate’ status could be justified because the next one just might be the bridge to the Overman. This lurid outlook has its roots in the idea of the elect, the separation of the wheat from the chaff, and the caution regarding throwing pearls before swine. At the same time, we are told not to mock those with ‘little faith’.

Weber was unimpressed with these sorts of exegetical contradictions. He was fully aware of the modern condition, at the very beginning of our own historical period. The very next year after his article appeared in fact saw the end of Bourgeois culture, its dreams of progress and its fantasy of the white man’s burden. And so, at the end of his working career, it is Nietzsche who returns to haunt the newly uncertain future of humanity as a whole. Life in the abstract, Weber suggests, is certainly value-neutral, and so our intent to study it in all of its manifold experience, must also begin with this understanding. But lives as lived by persons are the very crucible of value; we do make our own meaningfulness, even if more obviously, we make what are in fact cultural meanings, not of our own invention but rather bequeathed to us by history, our own.

The advent of subjective meaningfulness in the ethical tradition may be found in the Pauline texts, but there it is encountered out of a rejection of the world, resentment towards its abstract, mythic values and their ability to rationalize unjust valuation in the living world – which is exactly what the Reich repeated in its regression to these values – and thus it is truncated, never truly explored. In Freud, rational subjectivity is sabotaged by an omnipresent depth of psyche, which performs itself in a language that attests to its own value-neutrality. In a casual sense, the unconscious doesn’t ‘care’ about our actions in the world. As an aside, this is also a potential caution that can be issued to the fashionable field of psychedelic therapy, wherein substances are used to temporarily mute the default network which functions akin to the Freudian ego. Is the mind authenticating itself by removing the source of repression or has it merely found a less expensive and more immediate way of experiencing its idiomatic id?

However that may be, it is at least clear that when we attempt to incite or imagine value in the spaces of ateleological thought, the results are grim indeed. Beautification of the world through violence is just one such outcome. Resurrecting ancient social norms as if they could replace the lost morality is another. Fine if the ancient Hebrew whipped his eight-year-old child two millennia ago, we can’t do anything about that; not fine if the evangelist does the same to his fifteen-year-old today. And just there, we can take the same action as we took against the Reich, and for precisely the same reason. What Weber’s analysis shows us is that, at the very least in complementary adjunct to Nietzsche’s extramoral hyper-romanticism, it is rather the mundane sphere with its amoral social locations which are likely more important to critically examine. The personal soul cannot in fact ‘choose its destiny’ amid such meaningless and purposeless options. I would further add that mundanity must be so adjusted well before the quest for the Overman can begin, for no such bridge can be built if the near side of our ethical chasm does not even exist.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 55 books in ethics, aesthetics, education, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Sentiment and Sentimentality

Sentiment and Sentimentality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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