selfhood – GV Loewen

The Hermeneutic Self

The Hermeneutic Self (Interpreting a life)

We are aware of the skill said of some, that they ‘read others’ well. But how do we read ourselves? We are also aware that our self-conceptions rest mightily upon not how others actually see us – this would be too harsh a portrait in most cases – nor how we see ourselves – too bright-eyed, most likely – but rather on how we imagine others see us. This projected otherness, the looking-glass self of Cooley, functions as a kind of Goldilocks zone for our personhood, somewhere in between the too-soft of solo self-perception and the too-hard of the authentic other. We are also told, on top of all of this, that we are generally ‘too hard’ on ourselves, no doubt to give us the sense that our imagined other, that constructed mirror, is more realistic than it might be if we had always patted ourselves on the ethical back. The echoist cares too much what others think or might think, the narcissist too little either way, and thus we are compelled all the more to seek some middle-ground which thence turns into a kind of groundedness for Dasein as a public self. Nevertheless, this attenuated and extrapolated selfhood still requires ongoing interpretation, not only to adjust its own expectations, reading its life-chances in the wider world, but also to process what are now becoming but biographical memories.

The manner in which we do this mimics a more general hermeneutics, the method and theory of interpretation, dialogue, and understanding. Verstehen into Deutung, one could remark, is the dynamic of our dialogue with the self. Understanding into meaning, with the third term being either comprehension, if one is of a more empiricist-rationalist bent, or meaningfulness, if one is taken by the more existential sensibility in life. For the hermeneutic thinker, however, the apical term in this personalist auto-dialectic is rather Selbstverstandnis, or with its double intent, ‘self-understanding’; understanding one’s selfhood but also being utterly conscious that one is also doing that work oneself; that is, it is an exercise in the self understanding itself. The combined effect of ‘standing under’ oneself occurs when we defer to experiences already committed to both an authorship and a memorial authority. On the one hand, we have done this or that in the past and it has ‘worked’ for us. On the other, we are said to, or say to ourselves, that we thus ‘own’ it; it is ours and we not only take responsibility for it in the casual and popular sense of ownership, but also, perhaps more obliquely but also more profoundly, we see it as part of our self-definition, a way to own not only our actions and thus take care, ideally, about their implications in the world and for others, but also the chief manner of identifying them with our own agency.

This volitional vector gains its verve not merely from whatever personal panache we bring to it as a kind of patent or insignia, but also simply from how consistent it appears to the others. This is, generally, also the most consistent feedback loop from the social world back to ourselves; we are regularly adjusting our self-presentation not only in accord with others’ rights and feelings as defined by both State and the state of mind of individual persons around me, but all the more so, in order to ensure that we ourselves do not fall out of the cultural frames as given and taken by the idealized other in its most ‘generalized’ and Meadian sense. I hijack George Herbert Mead’s surname not only because this conceptualization of the self’s agency is mainly his, but also to link it homonymally with the simple median; the moment in the graphic distribution of all actions wherein the most expected ‘cause-effect’ in the social world comes to be. Certainly, just as we are rarely our ideal self, our actions in the world can thus only approach what might be their idealized form. Even so, each of us confronts that same disjuncture, and the farther we are off the mark the more we generally feel it. Only those with a diagnosed mental illness or the unguarded criminal appear not to register the affront the remainder of us ourselves register with them, given their behavior. In both cases, however, the discourse suggests that indeed such an objection is taken in, it is just that both sub-sets of our fellow-persons are attempting to gauge, from moment to moment, just how much it is they can ‘get away’ with, not unlike the poorly socialized younger child. This pseudo-autism, if you will, is prevalent far outside the raft of so-labeled cases, and is better seen as a consistent function of neurosis. This takes its effect far beyond Bleuler’s original definition, which, as a hallmark early symptom of schizophrenia, did not carry any especial weight in either social or popular understanding.

The blind side of this lack of confrontation with one’s own actions is of course that interpretation both holds little sway over our personal sensibilities but as well, marking this hic draconis against others unwary, any diagnosis would suggest a deliberate avoidance of becoming a selfhood in the first place. It is well known how the schizophrenic, or even those with lesser challenges such as authentically independent autism, suffer from a lack of ability to develop the self in relation to others. Indeed, ‘self’ has no real meaning outside of this relationship, an element of the social bond more generally. Which in turn suggests that the rest of us also incur an ongoing challenge in understanding just what it is this or that subset of fellow-persons needs from us, or what it is they cannot, or are unwilling, to give in return. The lesson for one’s own self here is, I think, that we must be aware, astutely and even acutely, of the regular disconnects between our expectations of others and what they are actually able to give us of themselves. It is also germane at this moment to give impetus to the idea that those with ‘two-spirits’ or ‘multiple persons’ in the fashionable sense are simply trying out various versions of the self’s division of social labor; one part of me adjusts to the world-as-it-is and another, perhaps seen as more authentic, does not. The ‘theyness’ of this yet other subset of human contemporaries in Schutz’s sense, views themselves as a more-than-one due to the lack of cohesion they observe between social ideals and realities, a tremendously troubling problem each of us must confront, perhaps on a daily basis.

It is likely that this phenomenological explication of theyness is what is actually occurring, but just so, each of us bears this same intersection of selfhood, either aligned in a crucial crucis of motive and action which in turn is authored by the singular self of those who decide that their authorship denotes as well an authority upon social relations, or those whose division of agentive labor connotes a sense that the world authors them overmuch. In older terms, this would have been interpreted along the lines of ‘strength of ego’ versus ‘presence of superego’ or the like, but today we might suggest rather that the two-spirited selfhood is attempting to split the difference amongst competing ideals and social contexts, and is thus perhaps taking the sense of role conflict too literally, or perhaps actually experiences this conflict too sharply to thence too-closely adjoin these competing roles or role–sets. The expectations which others have on ourselves must then be adjudicated, reorganized and redistributed in a manner suggestive of those who subcontract their efforts or, in managerial language, ‘delegate’ tasks and are therefore able to reallocate their attendant resources, even if all of this action is internally defined and only externally observed as skirting the theatrically ‘schizoid’.

Even so, none of this exempts any specific person from the purely human questions of ‘what I am’ or ‘who am I’ as the process of self-interpretation must needs continue, perhaps with a heightened sense of urgency in all those who work to divide and thus conquer, as it were. For most of us, the history of hermeneutics works itself out much as it had done in History ‘proper’, from the generalization of textual exegesis in Schleiermacher to the world as text in Dilthey, through the ontology of Selbstverstandnis in Heidegger to the effective historical consciousness of the selfhood approaching its own ‘fusion of horizons’ in Gadamer. For others, this more patent lineage is adjusted or yet skewed, though in wholly patterned ways: the sacredness of selfhood is conserved and made into a reliquary only for the individuated modernist soul, preserved from role-conflict and competing expectations by being held aloof from textual generalization as well as from the world. For the ‘theyness’ of being, it is Heidegger’s instanciation of hermeneutic ethics that is taken most to heart, excerpted from its own wider pedigree both past and future and caressed as would be the chalice of amethyst Richard Strauss has his singer extoll in one of his most famous songs, ‘Take my Thanks!’. For the multiplied persona, the divided selfhood is, quite literally, thanking itself for preserving what it of its utmost; their ownmost Being-aside-the-world. In our most personal moments, we too understand, belatedly, what it means to be ‘two-spirited’; the effect of retreating into our own singular self, even if just for a moment, placid and at peace with existence, bereft of world and of history but for the most noble of self-understandings: that in running along toward death I am also living mine ownmost life.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, aesthetics, education, religion, social theory and health ,as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Friction of Faction

The Friction of Faction (and the fiction of fraction)

It must be a burden to be the same, to bear the mark of sameness rather than that of difference. That I am as another, and thus the expectations that this other has of me are merely that which I have of her and nothing else, must appear uninteresting at the least, if not an outright waste. For who am I that I must be thou? Am I only thus, is that what I am fit for, fit to be? And who are you to make such a demand upon me? At once, who am I to declare myself as the goal of your action, or of your very being? Sameness is our human condition, but it is one which is filled with shame and resentment. And so, we seek the difference within the sameness, the diversity in the homogeneity. And we do so with a desperation which has of late become a fetish. What once was the default – this small group is ‘the people’, is what is human, and everyone else is something else – in our time becomes a contraption. If the default was a fault of misrecognition and parochialism, a severe and ultimate understatement of the species-reality, then is it surely not the error of modern global society that we tend to overstate our case?

Or is it the same question merely scaled? For in declaring difference to be the de facto condition, over against sameness, are we not reiterating, though with by far a more cosmopolitan sensibility, the original fiction of faction? Distinguishing ourselves based on inherited traits, phenotypic and not accrued, and then even, perversely, remarking upon their degradation – this repeats, though in an obverse manner, the antique atmosphere which surrounded the stigmata, the ‘mark’ which denoted a slavish caste and thus nature; one has cancer, one is a cancer survivor and so on – appears not only shallow but as well too easy a thing. It avoids the question, as we have stated elsewhere, of the ‘who’; who am I? Such avoidance behavior seems the norm in our day, and we must then ask, why am I as a person something to so stringently avoid? Is it because I fear being reduced to sameness? And if so, what would this imply? Would I thence vanish without a trace of my being anything at all, simply because of my own humanity?

In a society which is structurally unequal, and wherein opportunity odds are unevenly distributed, many, if not most, might appear to have small means afforded to them to distinguish themselves. We each of us might have a small circle, and are ‘known’ to be this or that within it, but are unknown beyond it. Schutz has famously outlined the topography of the social selfhood. My knowledge, of myself, of others, of society and of history etc. can be mapped, with sufficient accuracy but also intended metaphor, as with all cartographic representations. From the highest peak of intimacy – never quite closing in upon itself since there are things, perhaps unconsciously understood, once again, by way of distended and sometimes absurdly drawn-out metaphor, of which we are otherwise unaware – to what Schutz referred to as the ‘hinterland’ of awareness, and beyond which lies only the unknown for now, or, perhaps yet the absolutely unknowable, my Dasein is surrounded on all sides by relative degrees of knowledge and ignorance. The two are by no means mutually exclusive and, as people change throughout the life course, I can also say with an odd confidence that all the confidences in the world do not permit me to state with utter certainty either self-knowing or comprehension of the other, no matter how intimate. ‘I thought I knew you’ is thus a cliché plaintiff, whether appearing in a lover’s tiff or deathbed confessional, between trusted work colleagues or less trusted political bedfellows. In a word, knowledge of the other is not so different than is self-knowledge.

This is so because at base, we remain after all the same thing, to ourselves and to others, and it is the headlong flight from this species essence that entangles Dasein in and as a skein of social roleplays and normative presumptives. The fraction of what we do know, about ourselves, others, or again the world at large, must be ledgered against what we merely tell ourselves we know. This fraction contains its own fictions. The ‘personal fable’ is, anthropologically speaking, perhaps the most common. It can be considered a cultural item only in social organizations known to practice it in their sameness, and through some thematic variations, to indeed assert this sameness as a general intent. I am not the ‘son of eagle’ in order to make fraternal a cultural whole, but rather as a fabulous construction, though one vouchsafed by a Cree shaman, which reasserts my individuation. But if I were an indigenous person, this mark would be an effort toward the homogenous. Yet in confirming my identity in his cosmology, this shaman was not thus conferring upon me an indigenous status. For him, it merely affirmed, with some astonishment on his part, as I recall, the wider reach of forces that are generally beyond the human ken. This is a relic of the universe enchanted, and has no place in modernity. He knew this, I knew this, and yet.

Even so, the rush to difference is itself majority fictional. The camaraderies of the faction, the dividing up of what is in camera already a clique – why would one care to ‘identify’ someone else at all; are we now all our own detectives? Is the prevalence of detective fiction in our entertainment giving us a sense that we must not only own our own actions but as well with some visage ashamed own up to them? – are artificial in the face of living and dying the both. And the conflict that seems also so desired and desirable and which can only be attained by overdoing factionalism, of making fractious the fractions of our fellow humans who would surely, in an ideal world, be more like us than anything else – the other headlong flight in evidence, that away from traditional social roles in non-Western cultures, is testament to this – is mainly a fictional conflict. In fiction, if there is no conflict there is no story. What then, we might imagine, would be the story of humankind without that same conflict? What would people truly live for? Is this why the yet-radical ethics of the Koinonium is still so rarely in evidence?

But history is not fantasy, even if it too contains its fraction of fiction. Reality, social through and through when it comes to human perception, is also not a fiction. That it sometimes rests upon fictive kinships is no argument against its reality function. The sleight of hand of fiction is that though it is not real, it comes across as if it were. There is no real danger here as long as we keep our heads; this there is a story and this here is history, this over here is theater and this right here is dramaturgically inclined social relations, this out there is fantasy and this in here is who I am, who I really am. And even if I cannot know myself in the entirety of my being – I change over time, memory falters, pride is present, the pitch and lens of the generalized other shifts gradually across generations – nevertheless at any one time I retain the Gestaltkreis of a whole self, the personhood who I am, mine ownmost being. Is this being so paltry that I daily seek to forget it, avoid its presence, fictionalize it and divide it into fractions of itself, join it to external faction, seek the ‘friction of the day’? No, rather it is our inability to accept ourselves for who we are as human beings that promotes the fiction that we can be something else. Yet each of our replacements contains much more phantasmagoria than was originally self-present. We have in fact inverted the cartographia mundi of the self, and now dwell in the very deepest of trenches, unseen as a being, unseeing as a person. Perhaps the quite intended paradox of desiring identity difference is such that we can no longer be identified at all.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, social theory, religion, aesthetics and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Holus Bogus

Holus Bogus (The ‘all’ is a fraud)

The call to the whole is the anathema of the call to conscience. Associated with Das Man in Heidegger, at the very best it collectivizes care, allowing each Dasein the same shadow of a more general entanglement. For to be distracted by this or that, or by this person or that person in the anonymous ‘open space of the public’ is something which is alongside Dasein’s own being-present. But what if one cannot find egress, at all, from an omnipresent non-being which takes for itself the worlding of the world? It is the this situation which deprives us of our situatedness, mine ownmost life, if you will. Just as does the fact alone deprave facticity, belief unmake the one who wills, and hexis make a mockery of praxis, so too does the all overtake Dasein’s ownmost; what is closest to us takes on the guise of only what is nearest. My thrownness could thence be anywhere, for all has been made the same thing by the all. I am no longer myself, but nor am I an other who, as her own Dasein, entails meaningfulness face to face with mine own. Heidegger never fails to use this phrase, ‘face to face’, common enough but now placed in a serious, though not fatal, confrontation with both itself and with the other. But if all are the same thing, no such perspective can be had. And yet I too can speak for you, for I and thou now also have been collapsed in a false dialectic. This is the ontology of the evil of evil.

Ricoeur famously enjoins us to understand the evil of evil as ‘fraudulency in the work of totalization’. His examples are the church and the state, as these are institutions the humankind which present themselves as the all in all, and demand not merely our obedience but also our worship. It would seem as well the singular selfhood, developed in direct contraposition to both, and at the very moment the state had overtaken the church in the historical position of and as ‘the all’, is as well at risk for a similar fraudulency. Simmel notes more than once that while we do change over the life course, and even our memory cannot vouchsafe the singular consistency of any one life, let alone on behalf of others, nevertheless we do continue to exist as a being who has made its own history over against History proper, and carved out some minute niche of ‘personal’ culture over against the tradition. More profoundly, each of us is tasked with confronting that same tradition, in an hermeneutic dialectic which does not fall for the fraud of the all. We are at once the apex of several existential dialectics: 1. Self and other uplifted into mine ownmost being; 2. Memory and anticipation uplifted into the living present; 3. History and Zeitgeist synthesized by presence ‘itself’; 4. Habit and improvisation made into innovation; 5. The waking self and the unconscious coming together as a contemporaneous consciousness; 6. Anxiety and the call to conscience metastasizing themselves into Sorgeheit; 7. Reason and imagination combining in a unique intelligence, human consciousness itself, and so on. Let us take each of these, briefly, in turn.

1. I am not the all in all, neither by myself nor, and of especial caution in our time, with others seen as ‘the’ others. On the one hand, I must negotiate the generalized other, both as its willing vehicle – ‘voluntarily’ in Weber’s sense of social cohesion – but as well as an individuated agent sometimes opposed to it, through the development of an ethics based upon personal experience but also an understanding of the looking glass self; how I imagine others perceive me. In order to accomplish each of these reflexive tasks, I must eschew thinking of myself as only what I have previously believed to be mine ownmost, or my closest-to-hand.

2. Memory knows the past more precisely than can anticipation know the future, but it may not always be as forthright. For the future is unknown in an open manner, and memory can be standoffish pending my acts or their absence. ‘Memory yields to pride’, Nietzsche cautions, but surely not in all cases. Sometimes the two are co-present, as when we are proud of something we have done or something we have avoided doing. Elsewise we may be unsure of the outcome of an act, as its playing out remains ongoing, so neither pride nor memory can grasp complete hold over what is nonetheless, past, and thus past redux. Anticipation is limited, though not shuttered, by prior events; we do not tend to ‘unexpect the expected’, as anyone undertaking critique must do. The living present is just that; a kind of amalgam of partial memory – both biased and incomplete – and only an incipient openness lensed through the anticipatory stance, or instanciation.

3. Beyond ourselves, but nevertheless both perceived and indeed endured, are the ‘times’ themselves. At once the moment ‘in’ history as well as the cultural atmosphere which can both enlighten and shroud such a moment, we are inside the manifolds of what has been bequeathed to us as a culture, while at the same time once again coming face to face with the ‘spirit of the age’. How aged, how spirited, cannot be decided on my own, without the syntagmatic temporality that belies the Now and yet also generates it more or less continuously, as Husserl speaks of in his densely parsed analysis of ‘internal time consciousness’.

4. Akin to Zeitgeist itself, habitus rests beyond our individual vision and indeed our control. It is not constructed of a hundred personal habits, but rather imposes itself upon us as a kind of habituation. Even so, force of habit, so-called, cannot make its way against all comers. The unexpected, or at least, less predicted, does happen from time to time. In this, we are reminded of our fuller humanity as generalists and improvisers. The great skill of adaptation sees us through time and again. Of course, there is always the next experiment, both in discourse and in life. As improvisers we are closer to Dasein’s authentic being-in, but as mere habituants, we have fallen within a specifically fraudulent entanglement.

5. Contemporaneity means more than mere coincidence. We are yet unsure of the chronology of specific sequences of Traumdeutung. Most will agree that dreaming, when recalled at all, is often simply a caution about physiological functions which have, over the course of sleep, become imminent and thus must wake us in order to be solved in conscious action. Similarly, though more of a resolution, anxiousness or other forms of concern – though yet not, whilst remaining unconscious, concernful being – requires of us a just as conscious, though much less automatic or habitual, action, in order to come to some sort of self-understanding, either about what it is we are actually concerned about, or more deeply, and thus more analytically, some aspect of our character that is awry. But the timing of these processes, from the metaphoric dream-state to the pragmatic waking act, varies greatly. The so-called ‘recurring’ dream suggests a pressing engagement with one’s past, for instance, and perhaps precisely due to the fact that we are replaying personal interactions which befit only the past, and never the present let alone the future. The unconscious is characteristically and regularly offended by such prolapsed inaction on our parts. To be truly contemporary, the self must unite the awkwardly communicated and even absurdly theatricalized insights of the unconscious with a reflective and reasoned Selbstverstandnis.

6. Concernful being, once present, in its turn is the summit of care and anxiety, taking the most fruitful elements of both in their specific instances and even instants – this ‘instant instance’ is for the phenomenologist a sign of instanciation – that have as their hallmark an insistence about them, impresses us with how much concern they can generate on our part in response to them. These are no mere phobias, nor will they be too liable to repression, becoming neurotic, unless we summarily ignore all instances of the call to conscience, which very few of us truly do. Dasein’s ethical compass does not misdirect, but it does require us to read it off, much as does a dream remembered. The advantage of anxiety over dreams is that it can take hold of us fully, without undue interpretation or dramaturgical analysis, and while we are awake. Of course, to be awake and ‘awakened’ are sometimes two different things and not only this, as well often opposed to one another, for the normative living-on within that which is closest to us and that which is alongside of us often gets in the way of reflective, fully conscious, understanding. Selfhood in its authentic moment is thus also charged with calling a halt to the quotidian, as an immediate and compassionate response to the call of conscience itself.

7. Finally, we have elsewhere already said much about the unique, if unquiet, confluence of human reason and human imagination. Akin to memory and anticipation, reason is reflective upon experience, and thus mostly concerns what is referred to as the past, or more simply, as ‘past’, and done with. But only in the unreasoned sense is this past complete. We reopen it, in almost cliché fashion, and it becomes part of the living present, even spilling itself onto the opening space of the futural, enacting part of what we can understand Husserl examining as the present process of the future in its making, or its ‘futurity’. Selfhood, ‘sovereign’ in its ideal sense, apart from any ‘evil of evil’, reaches reasoned reflection while trailing imaginative alternatives and ‘projects of action’ which, in their turn push that same self to further experience and thence reflection both. Here, more than at any of the other dialectical apexes, I am closest to the species-being or ‘species essence’.

But even at this point, I am not the all, not ‘whole’, and not merely another within the whole. These seven dialectics, and there are presumably a few others to be noted, prevent any sense that I can be fully aware of each of their dynamics and for all occasions and experiences that I will have over the life course. Simmel’s late holism of a human life is to be regarded more as a rubric – however I shall change, I am yet, in the presence of the present-being, still myself, still my self – and not as an existential synthesis. If we are able and willing to unmask the fraudulent totality in institutions, however historical and vast, then we should also take the same phenomenological lens to our own beings. The self-examined life is as it stands very much worthy of life; it is we who must attain the same marque as is already and always imbedded in the human project itself.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, religion, aesthetics, education, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Wokeness Monster

The Wokeness Monster (Lives in a lake near you).

If you go down to the woods today, you’ll be in for a big surprise: there’s nothing there. The remaining trees arc majestically in the breeze, their canopy verdant with both life and limb, the deer skittish at our presence, the bear blithe, the wolf skeptical, the cougar only half-interested, being a cat after all. But in a nearby lake, something untoward doth lurk. Only ever peripherally glimpsed, its form a mere parallax to reality, yet fully imagined as real, this monster dwells in a vanity of self-deprecation as much as in the absence of a mature being resolute.

Wait a minute! Hold it right there. Did you just say, ‘the remaining trees’? What kind of woker-than-woke statement is that? Are you some kind of tree-hugging wolf-kissing Subaru-driving hippyesque liberal? I’m quitting here then. No, I really am; I’m walking, just watch me! Mom’s meter-less taxi awaits my pilot. Oh, okay then, continue.

Though it is the case that the sardonic co-opting of the ungrammatical term ‘Woke’ – originally referring to a kind of enlightened state of political being kindred with the other awakenings haling from American religious history – by its critics represents something mean-spirited and lazy, I am going to suggest that in fact it is those who are so labeled who have done much more lasting damage to not merely the idiom but far worse, to the idea of enlightenment itself. For the followers of this fashionable flaneur are the Wokeness monster.

The lynchpin of this sensibility is that one’s social location creates one’s perception. The genesis of this idea may be found in Vico’s ‘New Science’, of 1725, and it was given its most modern formulation in Marx and Engels’ ‘The German Ideology’, of 1846, in which the now legendary statement ‘consciousness is itself a social product’ may be seen as key. It is important to recall that this book was not published until 1932, as its authors could not find a publisher who would take it on. Daily, I feel their pain. And for me, aside from my books’ contents, the fact that I am manifestly not ‘Woke’ scares the fastidiously fashionable presses away. No, according to this locational position, I am nothing other than a middle-aged professional white straight Euro-male, and thus have absolutely nothing of merit to say to anyone. In short, I am not a person.

It is this depersonalization that an over-reliance on social location brings to the human being which sabotages both ethics abroad and conscience at home. The idea that selfhood should only be composed of the happenstance confluence of social variables is indeed a patent evil in the face of existential integrity. For the self is what is gained when such chance factors are overcome, and not at all the outcome of their continued presence. We, as human beings, are more than the sum of our parts. Our consciousness has evolved to be that Gestalt, a melody, and not a mere series of notes. Similarly, our culture too has evolved to be a harmony, and not a random collection of sounds and of late, mere noises.

To adhere to the sense that all you are and all you ever can be is dictated in some deterministic fashion by external structures and normative strictures is not only to do fatal disservice to one’s own humanity, worse, it is to frame the other as dehumanized. And this in spite of the apparent grave concern such framers have for ‘the other’ and even ‘otherness’! Yet this is precisely what the followers of ‘Woke’ take pride in doing; self-sabotage and the sabotage of the Self. The former might be forgivable if one is an addict, has a serious mental illness, or was abused as a child, and then only for oneself. The latter has no pinion, no remediating quality, no possible heuristic, damaged and aborted as these other concernful cases are. It has only the juvenile legerdemain of the one who lingers enthralled to what by the original definition of Woke is the very opposite of enlightenment and awareness. I would go so far to say that given this; such a sensibility is more of a malingering than anything else. It represents in many cases perhaps a knowing avoidance of personhood.

Why would one desire to remain a mere thing in the world of things? To deny the very essence of what one is as a member of the human species? I will suggest here that it is simply due to the reality of a world which now asks of each of us to become more than what we have ever been before; more mature, more responsible, more quick-witted, more conscientious, more aware, and that for many, and that for especially the young, this demand of the world as it is, is so scary as to be unimaginable. And thus, to be Woke in today’s sense is to be fearful of one’s own authentic being and far more fatal, to give over the fate of the future to each and every limit that has made the human past such a present burden.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 58 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Trouble with Tribal

The Trouble with Tribal (Regression in self-identity)

Any time we imagine that our selfhood is in majority defined by what we are rather than who we are, we risk the loss of that very selfhood. We have already spoken of one level of this self-misrecognition, that of the life-chance variable. These factors, such as gender, age, level of education, socio-economic status and such-like, certainly influence, sometimes to a great degree when combined with one another, an individual’s ability to access resources, gain employment, marry up or down, as well as one’s longevity. Just so, they are factors that impinge upon our personhood, they do not define it. We are, at our best and most developed in terms of worldview, singular souls who must come to terms with our own finitude. At once, this condition allows us to share intimately the pith of what it means to both be and to become human, and this is of the species-essence, while confronting the equally profound, though this time existential, situatedness of being a thrown project into the world and ‘running along’ towards mine ownmost death. Avoiding either of these means evading them both, and the most common, and also base, manner of doing so, is hanging one’s existential hat up upon the tribal peg.

More ancient than modern life-chance variables, and therefore sometimes more potent to the unconscious mind, are traditional factors such as language group, ethnicity, region of birth, sex rather than gender, caste rather than class. These variables, some almost primordial for human beings, influence us at a deep level, often escaping conscious reflection. Far easier it is to identify through analysis the roadblocks present in our lives due to contemporary features of organizational and family life, aspects of our social role panoply that would include wealth and social status, ability to ‘pass’ as a member of a certain class or professional group, and so on. These are factors which could be said to be ‘in hand’; they are present or absent along the lines of how we can use them in the day to day. I lost a major status when I retired from the academy, as well as major wealth. These were easy to understand and were even partly measurable. But the deeper and thus more disconcerting loss was of my personal identity, for I had made the ethical error of making too close an alignment between my profession and my person. Though this is a commonplace mistake – I am what I do for a living – it results in existential avoidance that, if there is a life-change at hand, one must then confront rather nakedly and without guidance.

I witnessed, before I retired, a number of older colleagues who exhibited what could only be referred to as an abject terror at the prospect. They really were what their work life had made them into. There could be no future vision from such a vantage point. This was one minor factor influencing my own decision-making at the time; I didn’t want to end up like them! And even though it took a few years, I have remade my professional identity. That was, it turned out, the easier part, which underscores the point we are making here. More challenging was extricating my personal selfhood from that professional. The ego was a major instigator of the desire to hang on to the latter. From having a built-in audience transfixed by one’s every word – on a good day – to possessing the ability to possess through relatively unlimited consumption, to being called ‘professor’ or ‘doctor’ innumerable times a day, all of this contributed mightily to the sense that this must be who I am, as it felt so good. This ‘goodness’ was in fact a mark against my character; the one who is moved by praise and power alone. Before entering into an Augustinian retrospective, I have maintained some of this sensibility, though with more circumspection and even modesty than previously, in my current professional role. There is yet no money in it, but the promises of El Dorado are enough, at my age, to pique my declining pecuniary interest.

‘Exogamic’ internecine role-conflict – that between authentic levels of self-understanding; the idea that I am one thing or rather another – deeply contributes to the anomic false consciousness. I realized that I was suffering from this while I was a professor, and indeed, upon leaving that vocation behind for good, entered a kind of ‘recovery’ phase, which for me lasted some years. I was a member of the academic tribe, kindred with that medical, legal, and even other less voluminous professions such as architectural. As with any tribe, to mix imageries, one circled the wagons when there was an external threat – from either proprietary students and resentful administrators, for the most part, and once in a while, from suspicious politicians – and when there was not, one instead practiced a kind of status one-upmanship which of late, so I am told, has migrated from comparing one’s c.v.’s to comparing, in Pythonesque fashion, just how miserable one is being of, or descending from, such an such an identity. You don’t say?

Identifying with historical variables as if they were personal does generate a kind of miserable self-penury. The distance it creates between authentic Dasein and the manner in which one views the world alone is almost fatal to both compassion and a sincerely expressed desire alike. One wills one’s own negation. One says to oneself, ‘Surely it is better to tell the other who is like me that she is my very kindred, my flesh and blood; that we are both, or even all, bred in the very marrow of our kind; language, ethnicity, sex. Only through these deep connections can we make a truer community.’ This outlook presents to modernity the ultimate regression; that we are somehow better off as neolithic gatherings of fictive consanguineals. Not only is this contrary to the evolution of consciousness in general, it is an Edenic fantasy borne on some sort of Nosferatu nostalgia, with the fear of the other as its cardinal theme.

Now none of this is to say that the confrontation with otherness writ small and into the human heart is not a severe challenge to selfhood. Anyone who has lived will attest to the ethical fact that to come to know another as she is to herself is a rare accomplishment, and one deserving of both the utmost care and compliment alike. But to shrink into the shadows of primitive frameworks with the express purpose of avoiding that confrontation and the ever-present conflict which comes along with it, is to deny one’s very humanity. Worse still, it is to deny the same of that very other, for, in identifying too closely with faux essentials such as ethnic group, language, or sex, is to make one’s fellow human being into a shell of herself. I observed, in a number of field studies of professional organizations, that the great bulk of human interaction in modern institutions was geared into shared experiences of this or that work-life. In leisure activities, familial experiences were added in, but always at the same shallow level. In one sense, this is necessary to keep sociality itself afloat, but in another, that same sociality is the vehicle for inauthenticity, for human unfreedom. All of this is very old hat, of course, which simply tells me that we haven’t been listening for well over a century if not more. Speaking of Augustine, the inventor of narrative subjectivity as well as of the apical confessional and perhaps also the autobiography, are we not also avoiding the tribulation, the trial, of having to actually be a person, and that further cast into our mortality?

Instead of the authentic, if extreme, overture of Hamlet, who is apparently willing to at least act out his own demise – with the ex post facto caveat that we might be more careful what we wish for – we have taken the ‘to be or not to be’ and placed it into the melodrama of identity politics. Here, the personal is only the political if the former is vanquished. The sole manner of being is to not be a selfhood, to abandon the personal source of experiences which create and develop the self. To become rather a member of some kind of latter-day tribe is the goal. Its desires are kindred to those of all other attempts to avoid the anguish of human finitude, which, ironically, is one of the essential and real experiences that all of us share as a conscious species. The search for extraterrestrials, in its most desperate and unscientific guise, the quest for immortality through prosthetic or ‘artificial’ intelligence, the sub-culture of social regression hoisted into the limelight by neoconservatives, and the tribalism notable perhaps more on the ‘progressive’ side of fashionable politics, both of which are anti-culture, all share this avoidance behavior with those who dread the confrontation with existential anxiety and ethical anguish. Not that either of these need be Pauline or Augustinian respectively, but how they are presented to us in the present rather than historically, is not ultimately altered by our running headlong away from them.

If we are to have a human future, if we are not to carry on in mass denial of world-altering forces at work around us and through us – tribalism, climate change, warfare, greed – then the first step must be to recover a perspective that respects our own human selfhood. In doing so, we place ourselves back into the world upon which we had been thrown at birth, and we rejoin the movement which traces the existential arc from birth to death, from one happenstance to another. And we do this together, not as a contrivance but as an authenticity; I am at once myself and of a species of consciousness, unique in the universe just as my selfhood is unique within that selfsame species. I am nothing other than this, other than the vehicle for the other to gain her own humanity and lose her like provincial status and outlook. This personal, though not private, risk is the mirror by which we undertake the risk of the future itself.

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

Past Lives I have Loved and Lost, part two: the possibility of a transcendental memory.

Back in 1996, Carl Sagan made brief reference to then more rarely encountered cases of ‘past life memory’. Over the past quarter-century more than 2500 such cases have appeared as documented, first, in para-psychology journals and more recently in mainstream ones. Finally, commercial press has taken note of them and counselling psychologists have advised parents of children apparently exhibiting such behaviors to more or less ignore them, as they always seem to pass away with age. Sagan suggested at the time that such cases ‘might be worth a closer look’, though he doubted both their ultimate veracity and verifiability.

Given the epistemic structure of consciousness that Sagan shared with many persons who live in our own historical epoch, it would be difficult to accept at face value the idea that such a serial experience as multiple existences could be historically accurate or biographically real. But such an idea is of course an ancient one, and one not at all foreign to many of the world’s belief systems. Indeed, as we are with many things, it is we, as scientific-minded moderns, who are in the minority to this regard. From reincarnative world systems to social contract cosmologies, the idea of multiple lives is common-place and unworthy of much comment. The vast majority of human experience as an evolutionary consciousness has simply accepted the sense that one lives, dies, and returns to live again as a matter of course.

It is equally transparent that today we tend to view these beliefs as rationalizations against a fundamental mortality and finiteness that we observe in the world-as-it-is. Yet we are being asked, in reference to these other vantage points, if there is yet not a difference between finiteness and finitude, a difference between the structure of perception and the nature of consciousness. Parts of modern philosophy suggest that there is a difference, without reference to the idea of past lives or any other such possibility. The death which is mine own, which cannot be shared, and towards which I run headlong, is a horizon that is neither public nor finite in any objective sense. It cannot be identified simply because the precise timing of our personal deaths cannot be known in advance. In this, our death is a radically ‘subjective’ event. It cannot be said to be an ‘experience’ in any mundane sense of the term. Indeed, it is also commonplace for the philosopher to state that ‘I cannot experience my own death, only that of others’. Furthermore, no matter how many passings to which I have myself been witness, this does not alleviate from me the burden of having to face down my own death, nor does it exempt me from the problem of the Other itself. No matter how many others die, not only must I still myself die but there remains yet more others to remind me that the otherness of the Other itself lives on.

Perhaps this is one of the experiential sources of the idea of past lives. A person dies, perhaps even a loved on, an intimate, but most of the time, these persons are recalled to memory by the living-on of other persons. It is not that the dead are summarily ‘replaced’. Freud, in a poignant letter to Binswanger from 1929, points out that in fact we never make substitutions of this sort, and in not doing so, this is in fact the manner in which we remember the beloved dead. More common than even this is the facticity of resemblance. We often tell ourselves that we know many people, but fewer characters, as individual persons who are different from one another nevertheless exhibit many of the same traits, especially if they hail from a similar cultural background. Although the old ‘culture and personality’ school of mid-20th century anthropological psychology has fallen out of favour, there remains something of this in our casual bigotries towards ‘the others’. As telling as this is, it is also sage to note that we stereotype ourselves for the sake of convenience as well, not wishing to disassemble our own society for fear of worse to come.

And I think that this is the more essential reason that lurks behind our general unwillingness to examine the phenomena of childhood past life memory. To begin to take apart the sense of selfhood that animates our current life journey – I am one thing, in one time and place, in the world as it is known at present etc. – is tantamount to placing the entire notion of existence at a parallax. It raises the kinds of questions that might betray us to bitterness, resentment, and perhaps even ressentiment: Why these few persons and not others? Do only a select and insignificant number of persons get to ‘live again’? If I have one at all, is it possible that my soul is new and not old? What does that mean, if anything? How could old souls reanimate? Is it a random process of regeneration? Is it a fifth elemental force of organismic evolution, so far overlooked? Why do such ‘memories’, if that is what they are, fade or are superseded over time? If such souls are old, would not their accumulated wisdom wish to express itself? Or is anything we do in this life patently predicted by what we actually have already done, outside of our current ken, in past lives that all of us have once lived?

This last question is the one that is truly offensive to any modern person who shares as sacred the idea that we are free beings, and that our will alone is what should determine our destinies. So not only is the nature of existence called into question by these growing numbers of cases but more radically, so is our conception of human freedom, itself a very recent invention and, judging by world politics, also a very fragile one.

Although ‘old souls’ and ‘past lives’ appear to us as at best romantic reveries – and I use both as plot devices in my Kristen-Seraphim saga – there is yet no plausible current-life experiential explanation for the memory content exhibited by these children. It is also difficult to imagine a scientific manner of further investigating them other than what has already been done to confirm the accuracy of the memories in question. Could we imagine travelling back in time and confronting the previous ‘host’ in order to interrogate about a future life of which they would presumably have no knowledge? The entire data set confounds not only experiential life but also rational discourse as we have developed it over the past four centuries. From the point of view of the work I do, such cases serve to underscore the human ability to step back from our lives as lived and examine their serial selfhood as it is in a singular life. For we already know we do not remain the ‘same’ people throughout the life course. This would be an unmitigated disaster, and the prolonging of adolescence into one’s thirties in some regions today is testament to this. Beyond this, we are placed squarely in the imagination which, being also uniquely human, commits us to the wonder of all things both present and perhaps also not quite past.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over thirty five books in ethics, aesthetics, religion and education and more recently a ten volume adventure saga. He was professor of the human sciences for over twenty years.