resolute being – GV Loewen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Memoriam: Ian Bairnson

How can you be so sure?

How do you know what the earth will endure?

How can you be so sure… that the wonders you’ve made

In your life will be seen, by the millions who follow

To gaze at the site of your dream?

– Alan Parsons/Eric Woolfson (1978).

Of such things none can be so confident, let alone certain. If anything, given the vicissitudes of history, rather the opposite is the case. The question of legacy animates most older persons, especially if one is diagnosed with a terminal illness and has committed, in health and as future-looking, an enduring gift to our collective cultural bastion, the only bulwark we possess over against our individually fleeting immortality. Ian Bairnson was one such bearer of cultural gifts. Arguably the most under-rated guitarist in popular music, he died after a five-year struggle with dementia, at age 69 just a few weeks ago. A list of his musical peers would have to include the likes of David Gilmour, Alex Lifeson, and Neal Schon. These names are much more recognizable due to their being band leaders or founders. But as guitarists, all are, in my opinion, severely under-rated as well. Bairnson had no flash about him. The precisely dedicated passions in his work instead bore all the hallmarks of perfection, and when I think of his playing, this is the very word that comes to mind, first and last.

Think of the arcing solo in ‘What Goes Up…’ (1978) from which the above epigraph is taken. The seamless transition between moods, almost as if there in fact were two distinct players. This gift is revisited in the compare and contrast solo in ‘Somebody Out There’ (1984), where not merely the tone changes drastically, but also the very personality of the sound. The poignantly classical elegance throughout the ironic elegy of ‘Ammonia Avenue’ (1983). The elemental herald of the signature track ‘Sirius/Eye in the Sky’ (1982). Then there’s the soaring, wincingly beautiful bridge solo of ‘Closer to Heaven’ (1987), the impassioned fire of the flamenco-inspired guitar work in the instrumental ‘Paseo De Gracia’ (1987), the extended soloing throughout the epic suite ‘Turn of a Friendly Card’ (1980), the guttural defiance of the solo in ‘Turn it Up’ (1993), a song about resistance, even revolution. One feels more confident about staffing the barricades with Bairnson at one’s side. One feels quite clear in conscience about entering the gates of paradise with Bairnson ennobling a life with no mean soundtrack. One feels the ambiguity of one’s own selfhood, or the mystery of what has in fact ‘been lost’ to time, even though it too ‘must be found’. We do find it; in Bairnson’s music, for one.

Though it is the case that the very best of studio musicians must master not only the diverse instrumentation of one’s featured instrument, but also a wide range of styles from classical to popular and everything in between, Bairnson must be thought of as someone who went well beyond this impressive technical competence, even mastery. In the ever-burgeoning guild of guitarists worldwide, Bairnson must be seen as someone who transported the standard of studio work not only into the theatre of live performance, where so many things can go awry and there are no retakes, but also of transcending the studio quality of such work. There is nothing calculated about Bairnson’s guitar, even though once heard in situ, no other solo, no other riff, no other comp, no other chord progression could be imagined that would suit the overall music as well. Sometimes a song requires simplicity without being simplistic, sometimes sophistication without sophistry, care bereft of pedantry, or transcendence without the pompous. Bairnson was a musician who could gift any and all of these and in force, as Alan Parsons, himself one of the most respected names in the recording industry, and arguably the most knowledgeable about its history and techniques, demanded a stunning array of emotions and characters even on a single album. And though the guitarists who have been lucky enough to follow in Bairnson’s footsteps with the band into the 21^st century have walked in his shoes without ever coming close to filling them, it is perhaps testament to Bairnson’s enduring legacy that Parsons has continued to shift among very competent guitar players over the more recent years.

I will remember Ian Bairnson (1953-2023), as an inspiring call to aesthetic conscience, a musician who came from the margins and arrived in a sense unknowing of the center whilst occupying it for a full quarter century. If dementia is itself a loosening of our ideally shared perception of the social world, if it is to be thought of as a loss of something which the rest of us must indeed find and continue to care for, the one who suffers from it remains a talisman for all of us who live on and bear the mark of the future upon us, uncertain because unknown. But it is not so much the works of the past that themselves cannot be lost to us, but rather the very essence of our resolute being that faces down that selfsame future and walks with intrepid grace towards it. These too are the calling cards of an Ian Bairnson guitar; each solo is possessed with a graceful resoluteness that is kindred with the deeper call to conscience with which a human life presents its vehicle. As such, his music attains the more profound aesthetic of being a serious commentary on the shared existence that alone, each of us is called upon to both endure and enact.

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