metaphysics – GV Loewen

Holy Spirit, Wholly Spirit?

Holy Spirit, Wholly Spirit? (Wraith no more)

Embodiment is a phenomenological term referring to a form of sensate. We said to be consciousness ‘embodied’. Yet in this, there is no immediate additional sense that this kind of being is temporary or may be contrasted with any other, previous or yet to come. I embody myself, in another, related sense, as well as embodying a certain set of cultural norms and suasions, individuated impulses and impetuses, and the ‘spirit of the age’, more or less. It is first to Durkheim that we might appeal for an explication of what is served by the idea that I am ‘made up’ of two things, the two-in-one, with a third having fallen out of discursive fashion, becoming recently and at best become an addendum to the body-mind amalgam. Even here, however, the problem of the concept of mind, let alone that of ‘other minds’ – one of the basic puzzles of phenomenology proper – resonates with the older concept, that of spirit. Surely if I embody my consciousness, I may also be said to not be possessed of a bias that centers the spirit somehow ‘inside’ the mind alone. Yet if not, the whole idea becomes rapidly outlandish; where then sits the spirit, if it exists at all?

In social organizations exhibiting mechanical solidarity, the spirit is embodied by the group. One is thus never ‘alone’ in any contemporary sense; one has not only one’s kindred and community within one, one also likely has some other kind of force semi-present – not residing continuously but there when called upon; the clan membership of an animal spirit, one’s non-human but just as intimate kin – which indeed, when the need arises or the occasion befits, embodies itself in a variety of ways. The metaphysics of transformation is the home to such beings, who are not only shape-shifters in the phantasmagorical sense – this modernist formula ignores the fact that for authentic transformer beings, their recurring but differentiated presence occurs by crossing over ontological barriers and not merely by changing their appearance – but as well, embodiments of a specific sensibility and idea. And while the people may regard these visitations as somehow sacred and their denizens holy, the spirit materializing before them is not entirely made up of the spiritual. For within the transformer resides the hallmark of humanity: we became aware, within the primordial dawn of our species tenure, that only through adaptation and generalization would we at all survive.

It is this leitmotif, this element of character, that pushes human consciousness away from the sense that the cosmos is simply an anonymous space within which happenstance humanity has taken fragile hold. In this sense, we might hazard it a projection alone, if a necessary one, but equally so, we are also driven back from the opposing sensitivity which demands that we kneel before nature as a wholly alien power with no human interest. It remains fascinating that the career of the concept of spirit not only traverses mode of production boundaries but as well, is itself a model of adaptation and generalism. For Durkheim, spirit is itself embodied in the notion of the sacred, his benchmark concept for speaking about symbolic forms which have a seemingly uncanny ability to preserve their identity across otherwise utterly different societal modes. One might also suggest that the presence of such an idea in vastly different cultures and apparently universally so, has given rise to a great deal of historical conflict. It is not so much that the other does not believe in the gods at all but rather that his gods are different than mine. This was never considered a puzzle on the ground, because of all of the other empirical differences amongst human cultures, but it was, with narrower eyes, perceived as a threat simply due to the knowledge that my own gods hung in the balance of their believers; and just here, numbers then mattered. We are well aware that specific embodiments of the spiritual come and go, so it is well not to get too hung up on any particular one. In response to this, the concept of spirit itself underwent a redesign: first communal and shared by animals and sometimes by other natural forces as well – recall Jung’s list of archetypes includes narrative leitmotifs such as ‘the flood’ – but in the light of the passing of entire civilizations, it becomes something which can be embodied but is in essence ethereal.

This newer sense of how the spirit functions allows it a much greater liberation not only of movement but also of presence. It can appeal to this one or that, pending one’s credo and moral druthers, accepting and indeed embodying the customary before demonstrating an overturning of it – Jesus was Jewish but set the tone for a wider covenant and thus elect – or it can revive a faded or fading sensibility by appearing as a remanant – a reminder of the past and not simply a haunting, for instance – or yet again by eschewing material form in a wholly irruptive event, leaving the witnesses or perhaps even the visionary in wonderment but also with a renewed sense of perspective. In this, it matters not just what kind of vision is appresented and thence phenomenologically apprehended by our own embodiments, only that the experience is perceived as extramundane. Even the source is, finally, unimportant, not only due to the Thomas principle but equally to the simple fact that visions are, by themselves, incommunicable. To assuage this problem, the concept of spirit gradually becomes hyper-individuated. Protestantism likely has its own roots along the road to Damascus, where a specific individual, Saul, is accosted by a specific version of the holy spirit. It interrogative, ‘why do you persecute me?’ is sounded in highly personalized terms. Saul himself cannot ignore it, since it is literally pointing a finger. It is of interest that as Paul, his mission takes up that personalized sensibility, which is really more of a sensitivity made sensible only through epistle and sermon, for no one else was truly present for Saul’s decisive transformation.

This too is of interest: human beings as well now have the transformational ability whilst yet alive; the difference is that I must be transformed, and for that there must be present an external impetus, which within social contract style cultures is unnecessary. There, transformer beings exhibited rather inherited traits which were shared by members of the same clan. In agrarianism, one can accrue to oneself such abilities, which is both astonishing and yet perhaps expected in the sense that it mirrors the change in the concept of spirit already underway. This idea of gaining something, however wondrous or even unexpected for the specific character involved, is almost certainly related to the continuously developed presence of material surplus in the new mode of production. Even in sophisticated transformational cosmologies, the kind we see in well-developed subsistence societies such as those along the Northwest Coast of North America, surplus and gift, however ostentatiously ritualized such as through the potlatch system, is, by the end of winter, almost completely used up. Only in the agrarian mode do we see large-scale surpluses which must not only be catalogued – the very first contents of writing known – but also possessed, and possessed by someone or some group. It is not a great leap for the human imagination to take upon itself the idea that the spirit is itself something which one not only can embody, but also develop, just as one develops the land or yet the imperial territory and its resources, and that what aids in such a growth can hail from diverse sources, just as material resources are diverse. Now, all this is not to say that changes in material subsistence directly drive all other forms of change. No, there is a rapidly-adopted symbiosis between symbolic forms and material manifestations, and this too is fitting, perhaps even inevitable, because the entire idea of embodiment does itself center around a syncretism of a symbolic form – the ethereal Being – being ‘materialized’ in that normative and to a great extent, even worldly.

So, gained possession and development, though in mighty contrast to mere inheritance and stasis, reflect, and perhaps as well refract, the material conditions of life at hand. The spirit also transforms the closeness of ‘what is nearest to us’ by moving our perception away from the distanciated ‘at-handedness’ of having to interact with the world or with nature as imposing something upon it, making it work for us in return, to that of the ‘in-handedness’ of something which, like my own spiritual being, can be disclosed to me. There is thus a profound phenomenological shift expressed between the metaphysics of transformation – wherein it is my kinship within a communal spirit that allows me to experience the spiritual and envision the apical being which animates the mechanical whole; there is no Gestalt in transformational metaphysics – and that of transcendence: here, the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts but is so by virtue of the spirit being precisely disembodied in its very essence, rather than existing by represencing itself on down the cultural line as limen. We should never put on airs about one world system being somehow ‘superior’ to another in any of these senses, rather only that we can now recognize the pedigree of the concept in question.

The culture hero, in his cross-cultural diversity, too must exhibit only the traits which are befitting to the cultural imagination itself at hand. Raven has transformational powers but is not himself the transformer being, who is rather Kanekelak or the like. Paul has been transformed but thence does seek transfiguration. Beethoven transforms the world through his art but has neither the power of self-transformation nor is he transfigured, unless dully and figuratively by the discourse of art history. The three forms of metaphysics known to the human imagination are themselves embodied, respectively, by such brief but contrasting catalogues of figures. One can iterate such a trinitial list, but no specific figure, whether mythical or historical or both, may be said to be itself an archetype, only, once again, an embodiment of a conceptual event. I can experience the figure ‘herself’ but only as an expression of the spirit. And this concept is both and at once the spiritual being as itself a representation of something ultimate and even infinite, while also becoming spirit as an abstraction of our existential consciousness, faced as it is with the problem of mortality cast as finitudinal being. For our embodiment, while divorced from the spirit ‘holy’ whilst in itself, is experienced as oddly something which is itself not wholly bodily borne.

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.

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.

An Ethical God does not Exist (but a metaphysical one might)

An Ethical God does not Exist (but a metaphysical one might)

It is customary to juxtapose the moral and the metaphysical, as opposed to the ethical and the existential, but here I am going to rewind to Aristotle’s distinction, novel in his own time; that of the ethical and the metaphysical. His attempt to separate them is one of the history of thought’s famous failures, kindred with Husserl’s half-hearted manufacturing of otherness or even the Cartesian pseudo-problem of the doubting of other minds. But such a failure is not a necessary outcome if we recast another proverbial reflective question; that of the existence or non-existence of God or the Gods.

In general, this is seen as an 18^th century question, and one that was resolved in the negative well before that century drew to a Napoleonic close. But I think within the framing of that question there has been a conflation of Aristotle’s contrasting conceptions, or, in his day, one a customary conception, metaphysics, the other a mere conceptualization, ethics. For the latter idea truly was brand new, and its Western advent, some three centuries after that in the East with the appearance of Buddhism, was at first rejected as a kind of too-private perception, akin to the ‘idiot’; or purely private ‘citizen’. Just as the one who flouted custom was the ‘moron’, surely the one who turned aside from morality and into his own self-aggrandized sense of justice had more in common with idiocy than anything else. Indeed, this was perhaps the most challenging issue Aristotle faced, when trying to cut ethics loose from an overarching morality ensconced in metaphysical perambulations and emblazoned across mythic banners. But he was in august, if yet contemporary, company. Antigone is faced with an originally moral dilemma, the loyalty between family versus the State, which she attempts to solve in an ethical manner. Does the playwright intend for us to consider her ultimate and abysmal failure a model that says to everyone, ‘all like attempts must fail’? Or is there something else to be gleaned from the action?

If the ethical job of the artist is to bring out the chiaroscuro of the human heart by rendering it askew from the mundane life, that of the thinker is to question it quite directly. The parallax employed by the artist would be seen as disingenuous if utilized by the philosopher. And so we are left with an ongoing puzzle, even today, and one that is underscored by the continued insistence upon revisiting the question of Godhead, something that was supposedly put to rest during, and because of, the Enlightenment. Here, the artist can no longer help us, simply since the society into which that question was originally placed no longer exists. Indeed, the question of the existence of God was foreshadowed in Hellenic times, as the Greeks shifted their discursive loyalties away from mythos and toward logos. This shift was, in fact, something far more radical than even the much vaunted ‘death of God’, as it not only foregrounded its occurrence but presented it as a future inevitability. For once people stopped believing in the article of mythic imagination and turned both their worldly and self perceptions toward the project of human reason, consciousness itself was irrevocably altered.

One might suggest that divinity was unseated by this much earlier shift, though it maintained a precarious existence until perhaps the 17^th century say, with the firmer advent of scientific explanation and the ongoing and intensifying encounter the European mind was having with other cultures as well as with itself. But though this makes eminent sense historically, I would like to nominally add the idea that it was the further shift from metaphysics to ethics that hastened the demise of divinity; in the East, Buddhism rejected not only the Karmic system as it had been and thus its associated earthly castes, but also the very idea that the cosmos was originally and itself alien to human consciousness. Instead, the ethic of forbearance – to be morphed into forgiveness in the West – suggested rather that one’s actions in the world made an instant difference to human life while it was being lived. It was this sensibility that generated the idea of the neighbor, an ethical force outside of both historical custom and social role.

If Aristotle could not identify the logical device by which to fully separate ethics from metaphysics, here was now an historical one acting in the world. With Christianity, this historical force began to gain a further revolutionary impetus; that all human beings were to be treated as ends in themselves. No longer could the person who acted outside of the normative be considered a mere idiot or moron. Here instead was an alternative that was not only free from the customary but also was presenting a new politics of action – ‘go and do likewise’ – that made no metaphysical claims about itself. Turn this novel lens upon the question of God’s existence and things begin to look a little different than what has itself become customary to the history of modern thought. Instead of the death of the ‘old god of morals’, we can say resolutely that an ethical god cannot, and has never, existed. The former due to the assumption of ethical competence in the evangelical statement that ‘God is in control of everything’ – by definition, such a God cannot be ethical given the state of the world, no matter if one places all of the blame upon human folly; an ethical God would act instantly as the archetype of the neighbor ‘action-figure’ – and the latter more simply because ethics did itself not exist in the human imagination before Buddhism.

But in saying all of that, one cannot then also have it that a God does not, in principle, exist, or yet exist, or did once exist. This is so because we can easily imagine another kind of divinity who, though possessed with a human interest and thus also being possessed by an historical self-apperception, acts only as a metaphysical entity; as a creator and an orderer, for instance. In all honesty, even the atheist would be forced to admit that she could not answer such a question either way, and so the real response to the question of God’s existence is a twofold one; the usual ‘No’, if God is presumed to be an ethical figure, but also an ‘I don’t know’, in response to the idea of God in general. It is the same conflation that harried Aristotle which also muddies our current understanding of what may still be a relevant question for our own times. A metaphysical God is in fact quite thinkable, even by contemporary standards, and thus the evangelical sensibility comes back into more serious play, for on this side of the ‘cultural’ conflict, statements exhorting the unqualified existence of God can yet be heard, loud and clear. As with the rest of us, the faithful have also conflated these two kinds of Godhead with one another, and are thus as desperate to insist upon God’s existence as the ‘secular’ person is to deny it.

For the thinker, all of this calumniation, to borrow Nietzsche’s term, suggests that we have not, or are unwilling to, make that self-same separation in and for our human action in the world. That is, we are hampered in our ethical action because we still desire a metaphysical reward for so acting. But I think the message of new ethics is quite clear: the neighbor figure acts without custom and outside of history, and does so not even for the sake of virtue but rather because this figure knows that within such action, the entirety of our human existence is both encapsulated and exonerated. In placing oneself in contrast to social role and cultural norm, we are expressing our most authentic selfhood, one freed from both the moral and the metaphysical not by adding a discursive ethics to the roll call of philosophical departments, but rather by performing that ethic in the world and in real time. In doing so we not only change the world but also the very character of time itself. Both are made more fully real, engendering a kind of timeless reality that is the human equivalent of cosmic time, which appears to us as infinite and undifferentiated. It is this ethical reality which turns action into act, being into community, passion into compassion, and abstract time into presence. Thus if one wants to see a certain transformation of human ‘nature’ in our shared world about which we cannot say in certain terms that a creator and cosmic God exists or doesn’t, simply heed the original ethical mandate and go and do likewise.

G.V. Loewen is the author of fifty-five books in ethics, education, religion, social theory aesthetics and health, as well as more recently, 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.

The Dialectic of Elemental Forces in Mahler

The Dialectic of Elemental Forces in Mahler

No more wooing, voice you’re outgrowing that don’t let your cry

be a wooing cry even though it could be as pure as a bird’s

that the season lifts up as she herself rises nearly forgetting

that it’s just a fretful creature and not some single heart

to be tossed towards happiness deep into intimate skies.

Like him you want to call forth a still invisible mate

a silent listener in whom a reply slowly awakens

warming itself by hearing yours to become

your own bold feeling’s blazing partner.

– Rilke, from Seventh Elegy

It is at once remarkable but also commonplace to understand great historical movements as being borne on the shoulders of specific individuals who themselves seem to be placed beyond history. This is misleading on the level of historical consciousness, wherein we come to understand our own times through the ‘confrontation with the tradition’ and the ‘fusion of horizons’, often aesthetic in character. At the same time, with the most superior visions of humankind, one finds culminations expressed by singular persons who have themselves been embraced by the entire history of their chosen art. In music, we have four such figures from whom everything else in their respective centuries followed; in the seventeenth century, Monteverdi, in the eighteenth, Bach. For the nineteenth century, it was Beethoven who gave birth to the ideas the rest of the music of that century took up, and in the following century, it was Gustav Mahler. That both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw competing and somehow ‘dualistic’ interpretations of these origins – Brahms versus Wagner and then Schoenberg versus Stravinsky – only suggests that there were at least two essential elements already present in the original. In Beethoven, the ‘classicism’ and the ‘romanticism’, in Mahler, the tonal and the ‘atonal’. But in fact these elements are mere glosses, refracting much more profound essences present in the art at hand. For music in our modern era has been about the disquiet distances with which contemporary humanity is both burdened and challenged.

What do I mean by this ‘distance’? We have a longing, expressed in the gap between self and other, individual and society, mind and body, spirit and nature and so on, which is unique to our modernity. Less profound, but still profoundly disturbing, are the distances that separate the genders, citizen and State, nation and nation, rich and poor. All of these distances combined are said to produce in us a kind of subjective alienation, that which Durkheim referred to as ‘anomie’. At the heart of this unease, communicating itself to us as an inability to bridge this or that gap and the corresponding assignment of blame for such ongoing failures, is the very sense that I should be myself and no other. This selfhood, this ‘fretful creature’ is indeed no ‘single heart’. And we are not so much thrown up as of our own volition, but rather, as Heidegger proverbially and repetitively states, thrown into the arc of worldhood. We are thrown beings, and our being-thrownness declares to us both our birth and death. We glimpse this existential caveat through the sense that much of ‘life’ is beyond our daily control. Certainly the machinations of nations, the coruscations of corporations, even the emotions of one’s beloved, lie elsewhere than within my grasp. We are responsible for these ‘events’ and acts only insofar as we act in concert with them, abet them, or ignore them. Yet ultimately, even with the deepest compassion and most critical voice, they escape our possession. This is the distance of distanciated being, which is necessary to the modern person given his existence as an individuality.

We would likely not trade in that kind of self-consciousness for other versions of being human, embodiments we associate with previous ages or cultures past. On the one hand, this may serve as a salve, a tool by which one might reconcile one’s sense of thus being ‘stuck with’ oneself as one is. Even so, the shared consciousness of mechanical solidarity escapes us, the idea of becoming an automaton rightfully revolts us, and the sensibility that, though a self, our whole reason of being is to exist for the other, is a difficult ethic. Indeed, we might well suggest that a neighbor figure who was always in the mode of ‘being neighborly’ could no longer distinguish herself from the socius of normative daily life. In a word, the radical act of the neighbor would be no longer available to us if the neighbor itself became a social role. So distanciated being is the lot of we moderns, if for no other reason than there are no other models that appeal to us.

Given this, the dual complexes of elements that we harbor within our individuated breasts must somehow be reconciled. The individual may engage in all sorts of activities that promote ‘wholeness’, including forms that often hail from a metaphysics different from our own, such as meditation. Within Western consciousness, however, it has been the role of art to transcend opposites and oppositions alike. And when this transcendence appears to not merely overlook the structure of existence, its birth and its death, its light and its dark, but to actually combine the two essences into a new element, we are in the presence of the greatest art of all. This is the case in the music of Mahler.

Bernstein’s epic and deeply felt commentary on Mahler 9 is well known and well taken. He stresses the dualistic nature of both the man and his art. Yet what is left out is equally important, if not more so, and indeed supports not only the argument that Mahler was working with and working through the most basic elements and forces of life and Being, but in fact overcoming them, transfiguring them into a novel expression of human consciousness. Just so, the ability to do precisely this is the essence of the distinction we make between consciousness in general and that of which we, as human beings, are in possession. Mahler 9 has been iterated as being ‘about’ death and the ultimate inability of humanity to overcome its own innate mortality. Yes and no. As a set piece, the ninth is in itself a compendia of the past and future, of soaring transcendental, if also heartbreaking, tonality and searing unearthly dissonance and partial atonality; life and death in their mortal embrace. But as part of a life’s work, Mahler 9 is simply the sibling work to his previous symphony – though the cycle ‘The Song of the Earth’ was written in between them, almost as a chaperone of sorts, a liminality; a threshold into which one can step from both sides, as it were – and just as Mahler 8 expressed the inexpressible joy and verdure of the fullest life possible to human consciousness, so Mahler 9 provides us with the sorrow of that same life, equally overfull and too powerful for the quotidian senses of rational being. In Mahler’s own terms, it was never death per se but rather more specifically, the death of love, that imbricated the ninth. The death of love, inversing and balancing the Wagnerian paean which exhorts the love of death, is in fact the more difficult challenge for we humans. For all must die, and in that sense death is most impersonal and anonymous. But to face death in a more intimate and very much personal manner one has to lose love and when one does not desire to do so.

The expression of transcendental love in Mahler 8 is simply balanced by that same expression of its absence in the ninth. There, we die whilst yet still alive, and yet life without joy has both no merit but also is no longer life. At this point another important ‘dualistic’ contrast should be noted: the eighth is arguably the greatest work of art ever created but it is tremendously difficult for the ensemble and conductor, whereas the listener is transported into 90 plus minutes of infinite bliss; contrast this with the ninth, which is easier on the musician – though by no means easy! – and correspondingly infinitely more difficult for the listener. If an ensemble can make it through Mahler 8 they can make it through anything. If the listener can survive Mahler 9 they can survive any other work. Perhaps there are technically more demanding works for both musicians and audience – Schoenberg’s Opus 31 comes readily to mind – but there are no more demanding works existentially than Mahler’s two final completed symphonies. Our very being is at stake, and we must rise to the occasion on both counts.

With that in mind, it is also well to recall that Mahler himself, though he was, as Bernstein points out for instance, well aware of his imminent demise, did not throw himself over the cliff in any premature manner. He kept conducting, writing, mending fences with his estranged wife, teaching and promoting musical talent, and touring right up until close to the end. Mahler, in his ability to live the life he was granted, remains a role model for us no matter our relative talent. His own humanity, though somehow able to access the pinnacle of human achievement and recreate it time after time, remained both his own and thus also our own. Mortality can advance itself on the one hand as a personal threat, and this is the atmosphere of the ninth, wherein we feel every base emotion and existential fundament; the glaring, striding, unimpeachable power of the first movement, the risus sardonicus of the intervening scherzos, the shimmering otherworldliness of the final farewell, all of this in a dialectic which seems nothing human uplifts the light and dark into a chiaroscuro and in doing so, overcomes the very chiasmus that gave birth to humanity’s oppositional ‘nature’. But in the eighth, mortality is advanced as a creative force, that all life might well ‘become immortal’ through dying many times, as Nietzsche intoned. Mahler was a profound reader of Nietzsche, though of course they regrettably never met, in contrast to the fact that Mahler and Freud knew one another. Mahler 8 expresses first the previous understanding of existence, the Imago Dei of revealed religion at its most noble. In the second part, we have moved from God to Goethe, from the old metaphysics to that of our own age, and as murky as some of this millennial author’s metaphors can be, they nevertheless are themselves transfixed and transformed into an art that can be understood by all.

The ‘marriage of light and dark’ is a hallmark of modernity. Yes, the twentieth century, so absolutely foreseen and understood by Mahler the aesthetic prophet, was indeed the century of death. Mahler 9 expresses this horrifying vision to us, but not as an acceptance thereof. It is a warning, an enlightenment or ‘Aufklarung’, an alarm bell, a Tocsin. It does not warn us of the imminence of death, for we already understand this condition as our own. It rather provides a caveat that tells us ‘do not make death into an immanence’. That is, do not allow death to ascend any higher than does life, do not let it attain an immanent domain into which we as a species-being would be swallowed. And though we have been on that brink more than a few times in past one hundred years or so, we have retained the sensibility that life should be ‘about’ joy, love, and even transcendence of itself, as contradictory as that may sound. If death is then somehow more ‘real’ to us, it bespeaks first of the distance between our realities and our ideals. The rationalization that one ends a life to save another is also real, if ethically strained. What is at stake is a conflict which remains at the horizontal level of the elements Mahler uplifted and combined. Differing opinions, beliefs, genders, cultural communities, competing nations, the perennial war of classes, all of these and others gainsay their very vocation through the medicated brevity they provide to their actors; ‘actors of their own ideals’, to once again reference Nietzsche.

Mahler’s art speaks differently to these regards. Though the dialectic of elemental forces culminates in his final works, it was always present, something that commentators have sometimes forgotten. The contrast between distraction and focus, folk art and transcendental art in Mahler 1. The overcoming of death through love in the second and the dialogue between nature and culture in the third, Mahler’s ‘most personal of works’, as he himself put it, and the one in which Nietzsche’s work is most directly used. The dangerous decoy of feeling and atmosphere in the fourth, where we are placed on a too sunny shoreline, our backs turned to the conflict of interpretations by which human life lives its days, and the first signs of the ultimate dialectic between death, including the death of love, and life triumphant in the fifth. In the sixth, the death of the hero, the soteriological compassion and passion combined of the hero’s beloved companion, the menace of a too gendered socialization – in the third movement of Mahler 6, his own children, an older boy and a younger girl, play with one another and yet also play with the elemental forces of life and death corresponding to their essential Goethean ‘natures’ – and finally, just before we are taken into the depths of the very cosmos Mahler has opened up for us, the interplay and contrast between animal nature and the civil humanity of the salon culture in the seventh. Bird calls punctuating a forest trek, and yet chamber music to soothe an after dinner digestion, nothing escaped Mahler’s musical lens. That we are in his debt regarding our very understanding of the modern condition which is our shared predicament is an ongoing understatement.

Even so, the towering figures of art, to a person, would not have suggested that their accomplishments represent the end of anything. Mortality as a creative force, life as the interregnum wherein creative work may be sought, and all of this as an unending principle of existence, this is the message of dialectically transcendental art. Mahler expresses this aspect of universal consciousness to us, through his singular works which retain their absolute relevance more than a century later. Who will be the next singular figure, the one from whom our own century’s music shall proceed apace? Perhaps it will be a woman this time, which is one important part of this intriguing question. But whomever it will be, the same forces will be at work in her efforts, and the same dialectic of transcendence will need to be accomplished. For us lesser beings, we too must come to grips with the polar forces animating our existence as both individuals and as a culture history writ into the wider, if still woefully provincial, consciousness of our time. If we take just one step in each of our lives to broaden that view, we will have advanced the maturity of our shared species and will have made ourselves more worthy of the gift that the art of ages has bestowed upon us.

Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of over forty books in ethics, aesthetics, education, health and social theory, and more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor f the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Past Lives I have Loved and Lost, part 1: on mixing one’s metaphysics

If you have ever felt like you are living more than one life at the same time there are reasons for this. The usual suspects include social role conflict, serial relationships both at home and at work, and the transitions between life phases. But there is a deeper structure to our diverse sensibilities, and this has to do with the structure of consciousness, no less. Structures, plural, should we say, as there have been three types of metaphysics known to human existence. Their appearance is associated with the kind of social organization and subsistence pattern followed by respective human groups.

Transformational metaphysics hails from the period of ‘social contract’ societies; small groups, intensive hunting and gathering, pastoralism, and horticulture. Here, humans and animals interact intimately in a spiritual realm. One’s ‘animal spirit’ is a commonplace idea. Forces of nature and other kinds of objects also embody spirits. The level of abstraction and metaphor is low. Such relations are to be taken more or less literally. Upon death, one’s soul cycles back into the group at hand with little delay. Time is static and thinking practical.

Transcendental metaphysics is the hallmark of large-scale intensive agrarian societies. It is familiar in the doctrines of the religions that survive from that historical period. The gods are either personifications or abstractions, their communications with us are metaphoric and upon death, the soul is evaluated, either returning to embody some unlike form or never coming back, destined to dwell in some other realm. Time is cyclical and thought mythical.

Anti-transcendental metaphysics is the dominant mode of consciousness at present, and its recent advent is associated with industrial states and the rise of science. It is literalist, ‘realist’, and rationalist in its outlook. There are no gods or other realms of being, and no soul. Upon death, it is one’s material form that returns to the cosmos but it does so most modestly. Time is linear and thought ‘logocentric’, or linguistic.

All of this is old hat, but if you reflect on your own personal beliefs, which ones hail from which of the three forms of metaphysics? Often enough, each of us harbors an unquiet mix of unkempt beliefs and passions. One of many examples would include the sectarian person who is a creationist but drives a vehicle based on the same science that states evolution as a fact. We don’t generally even attempt a cohesive and coherent world view at the level of the individual, and we probably shouldn’t. More on this later on.

But at the cultural level it is a different story. Witness, for lack of a better term, the ‘naked kidnapping’ case from Alberta, where four sectarians abducted their neighbours, hoping to save them from the apocalypse. What next, you say? The two teenage daughters were arrested but not charged, which was reasonable. Indeed, if a church were to send naked teenage girls to our homes to ‘save us’ I wonder if many men would not in fact go rather quietly. But the prelude to paradise, perchance? That aside, such an event was inevitably interpreted by the psychopathology of the day as an aberration, and that the family suffered a rare form of shared delusion, in other words, something diagnosable.

No, no, and no. What occurred cannot be so simply dismissed at such a personalist level. This, and other less piquant episodes, are rather the symptoms of a conflict of metaphysical narratives. Transcendental metaphysics initiates the idea of history, yes, but also the end of history, the end of time. This event, the most important in this version of human consciousness, translates what already occurs to the dead into the world of the living. We are to be judged as we stand before a god; and naked, by the way. What occurs ‘after’ this is neither history nor time, but some other form of Being to be announced in its detail to those worthy of redemption. The naked family’s intents, by their own normative rubrics, were of the very best standard. They do not suffer from a mental illness, shared delusion, or criminal passion.

What they are, are anachronists, real ones, unlike the thespians who dabble in Renaissance fairs and the like, and cannot by definition be considered to be like most of the rest of us in any important way. They have, in fact, managed to construct a more coherent set of beliefs and intents – though they drove their unwilling victims off in a BMW SUV no less – than the average ‘normal’ person. But for this feat of self-coherence they pushed themselves so far off the spectrum of the everyday they cannot but be shunned and now, medicalized as well. Fine, we might say to ourselves, the rest of us have to live in the real world so also should they.

This reaction too is incorrect. Like a Pauline figure, the anachronist asks us ‘what is our world, after all’? What is the ‘everyday’ made of, and why? Why do we expect that the future is not only open-ended but also indefinite? How can human judgement be objective when the world is so diverse? How can one know what the right thing is? In a word, such a person questions both our metaphysics and our ethics and is, ironically, kindred to the thinker and culture critic. Now the philosopher does not abduct people, let alone doing so in the buff. Nevertheless, the questions themselves remain and they cannot be dismissed by mere psychologism, even if such persons appear to be so.

In anti-transcendental metaphysics right and wrong, good and evil, are irrelevant. Correct and incorrect, and perhaps even good and bad, yes. The first is based upon the mathematical sciences and the second on an humanistic ethics. These are the foremost tools of human reason available to us as moderns and they are impressive. Even so, the questions they allow us to ask of ourselves are quite different than those someone hailing from another metaphysics would ask, and indeed, would have us ask. Just so, we cannot know with certainty the outcomes of our ethical actions, nor is infinite certitude available to our evolutionary cosmology. We live in a godless, finite world of often cynical politics and self-absorbed hedonism; a world not entirely unlike that which Paul imagined himself confronting.

Which brings out both the sense and sensibility of the sectarian line: If the world seems threatening, then why live as we do? Why not change the world, why not save ourselves? This question has its origins in eschatological thought, that which promotes a self-understanding in the light of divine reason and the end of history. A ‘Kairos’, or arbitrary and yet decisive starting point, a moment where the world ends and a new world commences, is at the heart of the environmentalist, peace, women’s and subaltern movements. These quintessentially recent social critiques seek to both save us and begin a different kind of world. They are also immensely practical, for the end of life on earth seems to be a most impractical development. So how ‘modern’ are they, after all? The same question may be asked of ourselves as human beings.

In fact, these recent ideas are as mixed a bag as almost everything else human history brings to the table each morning. Their presence and their diversity argue forcefully that we should not attempt to be overly and overtly consistent within any one of the three metaphysical forms. The hard-nosed rationalist misses the mark existentially, the sectarian finds pragmatism incomprehensible, and the practical-minded communitarian forgets the larger picture and thus as well cannot accede to the cosmic question. If it is true that human consciousness has undergone three sea-changes over a period of some half a million years or so – its very origin, its shift into agrarian thought, and its recent upshift into that technical and scientific – it may be equally true that we as living human beings carry bits and pieces of all three around within our just as living and present consciousness.

So I am going to gently suggest that we remember to ask the questions a being from some other guise of ‘human nature’ would ask. Just so, those few who remain amongst us but appear as anachronistic must be introduced to the questions we moderns have invented and must, with increasing and dramatic urgency, respond to. This last is the metaphysical underpinning to any psychotherapy the two daughters from Alberta will no doubt now undergo; likely years of it, given that they stated they thought the RCMP officers were demons attempting to drag them to hell. No doubt as well, Freud and his followers have been called the devil often enough. However that may be, and whatever the outcome of such ‘rehabilitation’, unless we take seriously the critique of consciousness that emanates from the entire history of that self-same consciousness we may well be doomed in a much more literal manner than any sectarian had ever the literary flair to imagine.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over thirty books on ethics, religion, aesthetics,

and social theory, as well as metaphysical epic fiction.