Mitsein – GV Loewen

How the Petty Secures the Profound

How the Petty Secures the Profound (opposites contract)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Venus Envy

Venus Envy (esthetic and aesthetic)

It is almost always the goddess of love, not the god. Indeed, we are told that the truer god of love is that Christian, which lends itself to the problem Plato examines in the Phaedrus, wherein love is cited as a form of madness. If this is so, if the compelling vision of the beloved is taken as herself merely a sign of the presence of love both transcendental and ‘proper’, to stay civil, then to Plato we can simply add Nietzsche’s insight about us ‘being more in love with love itself than the beloved’. Between these two takes is played out the entire problematic of what love is and how it is perceived. It is striking that love is represented by the female form in the vast majority of cultural cases, suggesting at once, and especially in the Christian era, that while the hearth of sexuality is female while the Kerygma of love is feminine, and even the ‘eternal feminine’, of Goethe, which ‘lures us to perfection’. What then is this perfect love? Is it the mimesis of Jesus as a resonant presence in the world or yet an overcoming of his absence? Or is it a sense that when in love we rather transcend ourselves?

What I will suggest here is that love carries within it two unquiet aspects: one, the esthetic of Eros and the aesthetic of what can be called ‘autothanos’. Erotic love is possessed of a well-known power. It is the outward expression of the desire for union, on the one hand, as well as the desire to lose oneself in the other. Most of us have experienced this form of love at least once, and if fortunate, multiple times, over the life course. Yet Eros, while affirming intimacy and unification, does deny the world, which is its chief weakness. Autothanatic love occurs when the loss of self in the other is no longer the key to the relationship in question. While the erotic replays this merger, here just at this present moment but thence needing and thus heeding iteration, the autothanatic is an actual state of being. It may be cautiously compared with Stendhal’s idea of the ‘second crystallization’ in love relationships. But the loss of self which is conjured by intensely erotic stimuli and the memory of union does not affect the personhood of the partners at hand, instead augmenting it. It is this augmentation that, if relations become more holistic over time spent together, carries me across myself and back into the world. I no longer have a heightened sense-perception of worldly experience, of the ‘colors brighter tastes better’ sort, but instead a superior worldview.

This is expressed symbolically by the superiority of the gods themselves in Classical contexts, and the superiority of one’s ethical action in the world in Buddhism and Christianity, for instance. If my mate and I have overtaken ourselves – recall Rilke’s lines about how lovers are close to the ability of being able to see beyond death if they could also see beyond the presence of the beloved – and are also no longer moved only by the presence of the beloved other, we are then on the path to superior being as a way of being in the world. As an historical presence, this sensibility is made manifest in Jesus’ efforts to love all equally. It does not matter if this love is rejected by this or that person, as it inevitably will be, only that our own sense of what love actually is, as both a singular reality and an ethical ideal, welcomes the world into its embrace rather than denying its relevance, as does erotic love.

Hence the nature of Eros is that it in-dwells the esthetic alone. At first sight, it is envy: ‘How beautiful she is, I wish she were mine!’ This is the ‘Venus envy’ of the would-be lover. It would suffer no harm upon the newly-lighted object, but at the same time, would never sacrifice itself to obtain her. Indeed, its purpose is to prove its worth to the other, and thus acts almost against the ideal of union. It stakes a claim to be its own being and in that, throws across the ultimate compliment, hoping for the same in return: ‘I would love you; I, another being like yourself yet almost wholly different.’ In one sense, this is why what used to be referred to as courtship ritual takes on the appearance of birds parading their plumage in the hopes of catching someone’s eye. Gender is here mostly immaterial, just as it becomes in love proper and thence absent all the more so in that autothanatic. And yet we cannot entirely dismiss the cultural suasion of the esthetic, as we are socialized to prefer a ‘type’ of other as a potential beloved, whether or not the details of this ideal mate attain such perfection in her physical or mental form. Given that the vast majority of relationships and marriages occur within social class boundaries, between persons of more or less the same educational backgrounds – these variables by far outstrip those ethnic and religious based – an ample part of esthetically driven love has nothing to do with ‘looks’. The key is rather a general recognizability. Even in ‘slumming’, we zero in on someone who fits an archetype: the adventurer in the male and the nurturer in the female, for example, as expressed in human form by the rebel who is running and who harbors a secret hurt that indeed the nurturing female, of whatever class but the higher the better, can both rein in and heal. In the meanwhile, the female’s family is scandalized, bringing the adventure home to roost, and the male’s family is heart-warmed, bringing in turn the nurturing into an otherwise utterly foreign territory.

But the numbers do not lie. Such cross-class relationships tend not to stand the test of time, and never attain an autothanatic state, for their participants’ entire reason of being with an alien beloved is based upon playing out the theater of hero and heroine; in a word, the self has been lost before love itself could absent it. And so, while it may appear ironic and even misogynistic that Venus envy should be the surer path to authenticity in love, as well as its correspondent Freudian term, this sense of covetousness we must feel in order to make what otherwise could be anyone, a random individual human in whom I have no personal interest, into the object of love is quite necessary. Perhaps even most well-aligned life-chance variable intimacies never attain the second level, but nevertheless, they serve as rehearsals which eventually allow us to take that more profound leap. In doing so, we, in a dialectical movement, exert an Aufheben upon both the thesis of myself and the antithesis of herself. This uplifted union, which has at once, through this movement, bracketed the esthetic ambit of Eros and its proper love into a specific compartment of long-term relations as well as confining its esthetics to outward expressions of sexuality or sensuality – apparel, tone of voice, sentimentality, private fable and its attendant vocabulary, cosmetics and even health and fitness, all reside on this list of esthetic items – has now risen to the occasion which autothanos provides for it.

In so doing, I am no longer conscious of being self-consciously allured by erotic union. At first, this realization may hit me as does a resigned rationalization, just as when one ages and one is no longer capable of daily or yet hourly sexual act. I must overcome the feeling of loss this relative absence of Eros inevitably occasions, and I find that the best manner of accomplishing this ethical demand is by widening the aperture of who can be loved in the first place. The esthetic is all about the ‘whatness’ of the object of love. In erotic intimacy I seek to lose my identity, merge it with the other, even for a short time. In fact, the both of us might feel slighted and thus distanced from one another if we did not take this merger in bits and bites. But the aesthetic vision of love overtakes all of this: it is no longer envious, perceives the other as a ‘who’ and not a ‘what’ in its move from object to subject, and does not so fervently attest to the narrow ideal of simply loving the one, especially at the expense of the world. This peculiar aesthetic motivates the autothanatic; it does not seek the conjury of magic which romance alone incurs between partners, but rather the transformation of alchemy, mirroring in its novel amalgam the ethical dialectic which as well must occur in order to for two persons to reimagine themselves as those who should share a life together.

This willing loss of being-one, which we are calling here autothanatic, is the ethical aspect of Mitsein. ‘Being-with’ is well known to have as its phenomenological property the idea that the world becomes part of Dasein’s closest-to-hand; not the world entire, but something of that world – the beloved other – who has, in an irruptive event, made my Dasein into a less self-interested being. The beloved other is the world’s expression of the call to conscience, and indeed, her fuller presence to me enjoins a demand that nothing else in that same world can equal. Even so, the acknowledgement of and adoration offered to this other as the beloved, does not by itself impel us to gain the aesthetic ground of objective love. It provides the personal template, even at base, the attraction, as in esthetic beauty, for my Dasein to be willing to see in the wider world this ‘same’ beauty. I see it at first as the same, but ideally come to understand that personal beauty is only the ‘lure to perfection’ which the eternally feminine pronounces in both male and female alike. One might venture to say that there is also a ‘love at first sight’ directed to the world, but we only know how to fall into this event through the memory of doing so for another person like myself. As with that adolescent moment, I am at first envious as well of the world. Yet the world’s beauty is so diverse and vast as to put the lie to my resentment thereof, in a movement given simple but apt imagery by Nietzsche, when he speaks of the tide’s treasures washing up on a beach afore my witness. The tide takes away these precious items but then immediately replaces them with a new set. We find, if we live long enough outside of ourselves and through the love of the world our own personal beloved has herself represented unto us, that life itself is that tidal wash, allowing us a glimpse of just as many treasures of the world.

Autothanatic love participates in this movement, for we too can be one of those precious things to others, and not just to another. It is this wider, less self-interested level of love that proclaims that we too are kindred with the aesthetic object, a perceptual event which transcends its art history context, its art market value, and its art methods formalism. For while the beloved other provides the model for the wider love, our most authentic and objective model of loving the world rests not in the beloved, but rather in art. It is art which has no need of the personal; it has never loved the one. Its entire instanciation lies in its ability to be understood by all, in whatever depth of profundity, just as one seashell on the beach before me may appear more intricate in its beauty than another. There are as many paths to perfection as there are loves in the world, but that said, there is only one perfection itself. Art allows even the personally unloved to gain that same vantage and advantage which Eros begins. In this, the call to conscience which is the love of the world offers its truer gift.

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