vocation – GV Loewen

On Self-Loathing

On Self-Loathing (Despicable Me)

My parents were from a generation wherein it was the norm to project vicariously upon their children. In my case, each wanted their only son to pursue the vocation they themselves missed out upon, also a commonplace filial trope. For my mother, music was the dream. Her own parents, hailing from the late 19^th century, forbid it and, at seventeen, steered her into secretary school. She did emerge much later to sing in a university chorus and study music, as well as teach ESL, but she had been destined for far more. Likewise, my father, who dreamed of becoming an architect. The only thing he shared with Hitler, mind you, he left home at the same age of seventeen and joined the RCN, fighting in the Battle of the Atlantic. But though I showed early promise in both music and architecture, and maintain to this day a love for the one and a fond interest in the latter, my own path took me far from anything either of my parents could ever have imagined. At first, with my mother passed, my father questioned academics, and then for the next two decades fostered an utter disdain for it, and secondarily, if not only by implication, myself within it. It was only in 2009, four years before he himself passed, that he began to see some merit in myself as a thinker, after reading my 2009b Becoming a Modest Society. That was my seventh book and I can now hardly recall its themes. But on his deathbed, he was engrossed in my 2013b, We Other Nazis, leaving it incomplete. I was and remain grateful for his change of heart, even though, perhaps ironically, perhaps equally fittingly, I have of late adopted his own attitude toward the academy and those within its faux ivory tusks.

Is this a way to repay him for his belated loyalty? Most of us, as children, wish to please our parents, make them proud of us, even to point of sycophancy. And though outright mimicry is only for the young child, it is nevertheless a sign of an enduring sensitivity to the idea that one’s parents must be on one’s side no matter what, and perhaps also vice-versa. But then there is a reactive aspect found in adolescence which is the more profound. Necessary for becoming who we are – that is, not one’s parents after all – youth is a time of tension and experimentation. Passion rules the day, and, if one is lucky enough, the night as well. Yet this incipient individuation is also a delay mechanism. A delay which can solidify itself into a decoy. For adulthood, the developmental precursor to mature being meant in the hermeneutic sense of the phrase, is the proving ground for my newly minted selfhood. Casually, we may to ourselves, ‘do I really have what it takes to do what I want to do with my life?’. This question, however informal, is both pregnant with maturity and perspective but also unanswerable as stated and also due to the timing of when it is asked. Only by living on, certainly for a number of decades, can any response be forthcoming. There are many late bloomers even at the highest of cultural levels. Tom Thomson in painting, Anton Bruckner in music, and even less conspicuous age relative, myself at around the same age as a writer. My first book was published only when I was 37 years old, back in 2003. Fifty-nine books later I still do not have a sure answer to that question of worthiness. But to the related query of worth, at least, I do.

Or I like to think so. For to be a philosopher in a time of polar unthought, as cold and as oppositional as the Weberian term implies, is at best a lonely job. There will be few readers, almost no recognition. And as we humans are sourced very much in the looking glass self as well as guided, even goaded on by the need for community, the lack thereof promotes a gnawing doubt, one that can easily slide into the despondent pool of self-loathing. True to say that the pilgrim walks on by himself and in our godless and finite world, also for himself. Indeed, the very idea of the pilgrimage has been altered at both beginning and end, since we fall into it without the sense of calling, divine or otherwise, and we also recognize that there is no terminus, no Santiago de Compostela but rather, for some, the effort of becoming part of the sainted compost of the history of ideas. Composing this, then composting it in yet another essay collection, might give some bland zest to the sense that it is force of habit alone which generates reflection and perhaps yet self-reflection. No matter, we tell ourselves, for ‘those who have ears shall hear’.

This Nietzschean poise, which worked well for his books but not at all as well for he himself, is something of a theatre. A cultured autism, a high-minded affect, a transcendental but still shamanic trickery, the critical essayist, falling as he does within the panorama of philosophical work but taking on a dangerous dilettantism even so, is ever at risk that his reasoned loathing of the social world should turn upon himself, no matter what one’s parents might have thought either way. The critic is himself problematic, the wavering target of Shaw’s sneering snarkery, for instance, for the mere critic is a mere eunuch of course. And even if, contra a related epigram, teaching is also ‘doing’ of a sort, in Shaw’s own time his was a much more apt remark than one hopes it is in ours. Even so, when I made the shift from teaching to writing, which I never thought I would, I began to see something through his narrow glance: I have been fortunate that I have also been able to do, and not merely critique.

Such doings, however. I try to love my work, though I never go back and read my scholarly titles and only read my fiction with others; victims, perchance. But I do understand if someone were to attempt to read either, they might well imagine on the one hand, that the philosopher is unable to communicate his genius widely enough, and the fiction writer is at best, a sociopath. Does my fiction impinge upon my non-fiction? Is my fiction too realistic to bear because of the opposite influence? Or are both merely the by-product of what could have been? For truth be told, I have wasted so much time chasing girls and flirting with addiction that my output would likely be twice that extant today. And surely, one tells oneself, the author with 120 titles could not be so summarily ignored. I am but the author of my own premature literary grave, its stone bearing the longest epitaph in human history.

This evaluative sensibility is ancient, though hardly primordial, for human consciousness. In the West, it is Horus who first judges the relative weight of one’s acts versus that of the gifts of one’s soul. The much later Christian incarnation of this same idea has our ethical worth measured by how close we approach the moral ideals of the world system itself. It is interesting to note that though Christianity’s revolutionary ethics on the ground promote the gradual development of the individual as her own person along with the subjectivity that defines the personal, its evaluatory mode suggests the very opposite: that the highest human attainment is the same for all. By contrast, the Egyptian original was individuated in its afterlife, even though the concept of the person, and the ‘much-vaunted’ modernist subjectivity, to nod to Nietzsche once again, was absent in that society. But though we owe much to both belief systems, and from afar, they could be seen as glosses upon one another and not only in historical sequence, Christianity is itself unfairly blamed for the disdain not only of the body, but also for the mind and spirit alike. Our own latter-day evangelists are in the main, anti-intellectual at best, as well as shunning the fuller intimacies of the body, electric or even Electraic, if you will. Their spirits too await their collective freedom, perhaps to be had at the expense of the rest of us in some Armageddon made real. This is clearly not our species destiny in any noble sense, and we might well rise to fight against its inertia. And this, by the way, is a major theme of my fictional work, just in case the casual reader mistakes it for something else.

But however over-ripe is the evangelical obsession with Pauline anxiety, we ourselves are to blame for having adopted too readily the wider Western neurosis of self-loathing. Pre-dating Christianity by far, the Greeks were convinced that their own age was lesser, part of a devolution of culture, and not its Victorian opposite. Hope was, for them, a resident evil, the only thing that did not escape Pandora’s Box. Yes, one can get one’s hopes up and be disappointed. A hundred casual lines, oft repeated in popular song, attest to this lingering fear of hapless harm; ‘hopes are dashed’, ‘hope goes up in smoke’, and the like. And for the Egyptians, insofar as we can know of their perduringly murky doings – were they really reanimating ex-human drones inside their giant pyramidal Tesla batteries? – it seems one rather blindly walked forward onto the scales of Horus with only then finding out if one’s acts were of equal measure to one’s gifts.

I feel their pain. The Egyptian in me worries I have not measured up to my potential. But what is my potential? What is anyone’s? The Greek in me mourns the loss of youth, the ‘good old days’ leitmotif that was never true and that of course animates the false faith of the evangelical as well as that of the more benign nostalgia buffs of all stripes and hues. And the Christian in me steps forward with some trepidation, doubting the future itself and for itself, which in turn acts as a mechanism of self-sabotage both for the person and for the culture as a whole. But as a person, no matter how despairingly weighty this combination of dead historical hands might be, I have in modernity a different kind of agency. What should bear down upon me is not so much an archaic world system, but the lack of insight and experience which, over the life course thus far, has led me to make some impoverished choices. At the same time, this very knowing allows me to do differently. Let me then quote from volume one of Queen of Hearts, andhere’s to it:

The Unpolished edge of futurity will draw our collective blood.

If it must be spilled then let the one who holds the sword be a visionary,

and not a reactionary.

Let her raven eyes be the windows of our collective soul.

Let her joyous judgment be the compassion of our call to conscience.

Let her unknowing be but innocence and never ignorance.

Let her knowing become the working wisdom of light before heat.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 60 books in ethics, education, religion, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Writing as a Vocation

Writing as a Vocation (a personalist accounting II)

I never imagined I would become a writer. Even after my twentieth book was published, I thought of myself as an educator, a professor, and a pedagogue, but not a writer. I was simply a thinker who happened to enjoy writing. After I had finished with my administrative role and found that the vast majority of time had been taken up with its duties, divers and sundry as they were, the sheer amount of freed-up time lent itself to that very imagination. A well-known Canadian novelist was my first victim. His delicate indelicacy, ‘its quite a bit better than I thought it was going to be’, encouraged me to take at least the idea of writing more seriously. Almost forty books later, I have thought of myself as both a thinker and a writer now for some years. But what does it actually mean to be a writer? What does it mean to write?

Writing as a means of communication:

Writing is the greatest legacy of the first agrarian period. Other aspects of culture and civilization bequeathed to us from that antique epoch include mass warfare, caste slavery, and steep social hierarchies, as well as abstracted religious systems and gender inequality, all quite dubious historical gifts. Even monumental architecture might be seen as something of an unnecessary luxury. But the ability to record one’s thoughts, or simply describe the facts at hand, has made humanity a much more conscious, as well as self-conscious, species than it ever would have become without it. The first two ‘genres’ of written text exemplify the contrast between the senses and the imagination. The former is expressed as records of warehouse holdings, in the earliest of cuneiform, the latter, in the great mythic narratives, such as Gilgamesh, which orally is far older than even its first recorded rendition. Myth and fact divided the mind of antiquity and they are with us still, though both in somewhat muted form. The mythic has been personalized in a sense beyond belief, which in fact must be shared as part of culture to be truly authentic to itself. Fact has become a signpost for the absence of imagination, which is both ironic and ultimately impoverished. Throughout their conjoined career, myth and fact, fantasy and reality, continue to attract us in spite of their now stilted quality.

They are able to do so because they continue to communicate things which are of the essence to our kind. On the one hand, writing allows one person to share their vision with another, no matter how outlandish are its contents or premises. With it written down, any reader can judge for themselves whether or not to take it with a pinch of salt or a drop of strychnine. We are able to read of distant places, exotic sources, crazed witness and unexpected encounter. We no longer need to presume it is some version of ‘Livingstone’ whom we meet in the heart of darkness or elsewhere, nor do we presume upon ourselves that we are always and utterly sane if only we manage to shun the irreal or the irruptive. On the other hand, the entire cosmic order is made more accessible to each of us through writing. These need not be the facts of a Gradgrind or for that matter, a Tyler, and the fact that one is, fortunately, a fictional educator and the other, perhaps regrettably, was not, impinges not a jot upon the reader’s sensibilities. Our question immediately becomes, ‘is this fact of merit, does it possess any value other than its descriptive presence?’. The judgment we carry into fiction is not entirely distinct from that which we carry unto fact.

And it is writing that gives us this more sophisticated grace. We can discriminate between reality and fantasy after all, if only more of us would do so in our own time. Writing is both the stringent gatekeeper of any who would sully fact with fiction, but as well, and sometimes in direct contrast to this function, writing is also the means by which fact merges into fiction, and something of the fictional, in its ludic veridicity, appeals to us as if it were the thing itself. Writing represences the world as it is, and it makes present to us other possible worlds. In doing so, we find ourselves in the possession of a naked sword, visionary and keen, which, in a singular cut, can tear away the veils we tend to place over both our social normativity and our global inequity the both. At every level, from the most personal to the utterly dispassionate, writing reveals our truths to ourselves. Been molested? Write about it; let everyone know. Free others to communicate and come together to halt injustice. Fallen in love? Tell us all about it, for we too have such yearnings. Allow us to dream together in a waking state, overly conscious of our singularity, overtly impassioned by our desire for community. An undiscovered world awaits all readers of both astronomy and history, fantasy and science fiction. In a sense, writing does not discriminate such fields so distinctly as does discourse, and this is one of the chief differences between writing in that Derridean sense and the ‘tracing’ of nature through language in that Saussurean.

Either way, writing as a means of communication remains its primary role in culture, whether or not the intention of the author recurs in their works, and without respect to the reader’s own intentions, whether it is to be simply entertained, informed, or enlightened. To each her own epiphany, one might respond to the text in hand, and from each their own experience. For writing has one further sidereal quality; that it becomes part of the reader’s world and his experiences thereof and therein, forgetting its ‘original’ source-point and reaching over any differences in biography and even history that once lay between writer and reader. In this, writing cannot in itself ever be parochial. For we living beings, this status provides for us an egress from our own rather sheltered perspectives and oft-shuttered imaginations.

Writing as a personal experience:

Non-fiction writing is an exercise in waking from what Schutz has framed as the ‘wide-awake consciousness’. This may at first seem redundant: how does one awake from the already waking life? Social reality provides for us a seldom penetrable insulation of norms, rituals, symbolic forms, and abstract beliefs within which no thought is necessary. As long as I run on my cultural and historical rails I need not blink at the world. But upon writing about this oft otherwise mute witness, I am compelled to reflect upon my sense of that same world, and what had been predictable and routine becomes much more experiential and even beckons an incipient adventure. Writing about the world as it is, insofar as each one of us can grasp it, is to awake from the day-to-day of the waking life. It is to simply become conscious, rather than to ‘raise consciousness’, for consciousness is always already with us and we are consciousness embodied. This awakening is also not a specific moral direct, such as ‘becoming woke’ or even ‘waking up’. It is a phenomenological disposition that pauses when it encounters the ‘of course’ statements associated with any automatic, or even automated, defense of society in the majority view. This is the hallmark of non-fiction: that it at once describes how things actually are and asks the reader to reflect upon, and question after, such truths. Non-fiction explicates to us that things are not quite as they seem to be, without suggesting how such things might be or might have been in the same way that fiction does.

By contrast, fiction is thus less limited by the world. It may present different worlds, more or less plausible, and thence judged in terms of how recognizable to the unthought norms of the day they may be. If non-fiction writing awakens us to the subtext of life and living-on, writing fiction is to experience a waking dream. When we read the fiction of others, we note that our own perceptions are enlarged, but not in reference to the world per se, but rather to our own respective psyches. That the collective unconscious of humanity may also prove to be within our reach, at least once in a while, is testament to the function of the mythic as it plays within a reality itself bereft of myth. The latitude of interpretation associated with reading fiction is also wider than that of non-fiction, as readers may feel more free to bring their own experience into the text. Similarly, writing fiction sources itself in the author’s own experience, and those experiences which have been related to him by others he has known, sometimes intimately, sometimes vicariously. A commonplace projective trope thus begins with such rhetorical questions, ‘what if I had known her better?’, or, ‘what if we had never met?” and the like. In fiction, we are able to step outside of the facts at hand and imagine something else, indeed, almost anything else. This is why the creative character of fiction cannot be entirely divorced from the ‘discoverable’ sensibility associated with facts. If it is, then the world would lose its historical essence and humanity would be forever stunted in its species-maturity.

My own experience with writing has fully participated in both major realms. For myself, scholarly non-fiction is shot through with the dialectic, as is appropriate for a hermeneutic phenomenologist. My more general non-fiction works are attempts to communicate difficult analyses to literate lay-people no matter their own backgrounds. It is the latter which is much more challenging for the writer to accomplish with any aplomb, and my originally mediocre assays have, over the years, given way to more modest, and thus more effective, offerings. At the same time, I take some satisfaction in making nominal contributions to aesthetics, ethics, education, and psychology, all emanating from my philosophical base. It would be past vain to enumerate such titles, but two examples, from both ends of the writerly spectrum, so far stand out: Aesthetic Subjectivity: glimpsing the shared soul (2011), is my major statement about art and its attendant discourses. The title is mine, the subtitle, the publisher’s, denoting a sudden and apt insight on their part. This book received a number of interdisciplinary reviews and was an unqualified success. But scholarly books are, by definition, elusive, and this work is now sadly out of print. In contrast, The Penumbra of Personhood: ‘anti-humanism’ reconsidered (2020),was a nightmare to write and no doubt the worse to read. I vowed to never write another large-scale scholarly work and to this day I have not, though I am planning one for 2024 in spite of this cherished interregnum. ‘Penumbra’ nearly finished me as a non-fiction writer, and was a reminder of how the vocation of writing can take over one’s life, sacrificing it in the service of the almighty text.

As a belated writer of fiction, I have experienced similar distensions of ability and result. I am, first of all, sometimes taken aback by my waking dreams and how certain aspects of my unconscious life have found their way on to the page for all to peruse. Do I really have a penchant for grotesque violence? Have I never moved beyond adolescence in my desires? Though many would agree, life lived as an adult can be frustrating and sometimes even the coach of despair, but even so, at the end of any reads, I would hope no one would wish a life like any of my characters have been given and thus have had to live out. And just as art and life remain distinct, where there is no art one can yet suggest there is also a distinctive absence of life. So my fiction has within it a semblance of both at once. Since for the most part I write agenda fiction, by definition it cannot be art, no matter what kind of literary sophistication it may be said to have, and I make no claims to this regard. I write verse, not poetry, and I write books, not novels. I have never considered myself to be, or to yet become, either a poet or a novelist, but I have penned seventeen novels nonetheless, along with a novella, two short story collections, and an arc of folktales. This last, Raven Today, has been called my most ‘beautiful’ work by readers apparently in the know, and perhaps amusingly, is the only work of fiction I have produced which contains no bad language.

As with the non-fiction, I may be forgiven in citing just two books here. About the Others was my first adult mainstream title, and this failed art novel was meant as a tribute to my favorite author, H.G. Wells, who himself had quite a number of them. It has some autobiographical elements, and as such is the only work of fiction I have written that relies on what is this commonplace source material. But if my first mainline attempt was much-flawed, if still a tolerable page-turner, my second was, in my own view, perfect. That The Understudies remains unpublished reminds the author that his view of perfection may not at all be understood by others. This too is the common lot for writers of all sorts, and one must inhale that displeasing atmosphere as best one can, expelling it in new directions and perhaps relieving oneself of this or that delusion in the process. Writing fiction is about the literary sleight of hand, so to move from a pleasant illusion to a sometimes unsavory disillusion reworks the story from the outside in. And of course there is a world of difference between writing and publishing, especially in the fiction industry where, because of at least the potential for profit – unlike, and especially, scholarly works – editors and presses become agitated if ‘fit’ for catalogue is at all transgressed.

Writing fiction is not a thankless vocation. Its task is to step into worlds hitherto unknown and uncharted, but its gift is that you are the one who becomes the first to know, the first to map, and these new worlds come to love you as much as you have given them the reciprocal gift of life.

Writing as a Discursive Activity:

All writers contribute to discourse, the conversation of the history of consciousness. If ‘dialogue is what we are’, as Gadamer has declared, discourse is that dialogue written down, a record of thought itself, and not merely thoughts, which any person may have, and in the most fleeting of fashions. Discourses come in many forms, and one need not be dismayed if philosophy is not on one’s writerly menu. Few read it, for one, and fewer understand it. And though it is not economics, the ‘dismal science’, philosophical discourse is often discouraging, as it leaves nothing sacred and unmasks even the sweetest of sentiment for what it may be or contain within. It is, in a word, not for the faint of heart, and if one has any hint of the Pollyanna, it will leave that fake Sophia naked and utterly at risk for her estranged sister’s truth.

Given this, it is no holiday to write either. Perhaps it is this slough-filled pilgrimage which is the truer source of the action in my fictional works! I do find myself alternating between non-fiction and fiction, sometimes writing both at once, as I am currently doing. But discourse is immune to authorial sentiment. And if the author is himself dead, as Barthes famously reminded us, perhaps the writer lives yet. I have stated that we today dwell in the period of the afterlife of God, so it is not a stretch to imagine as well an afterlife of the author as a kind of remanential writer. This figure is itself discursive, and is made up, if you will, of all those who continue to author works in spite of that particular literary function being surpassed or superceded. That there is no autograph which can contain the text, that there can be no signature which vouchsafes it, is, even so, not to say that the reader can do more than rewrite the read in the light of her own experience and sensibilities. Penetrating non-fiction, as well as reflective fiction, in fact disallows complacency of any kind on the part of the reader, and tells us instead that discourse is alive and well, fully matriculated from its birth, divine or no, and fully accepting, and acting upon, its birthright.

Hence writing is to experience the presence of discourse in one’s life. It is creative, in its guise as fictional, constructive as factual, but either way, it remains a wholly discursive act. That I became a writer tells me in turn that the vocation of writing adopted me as its own child, as it has done for countless others and, one would hope, will continue to do as long as there exists a human consciousness worthy of its precious record.

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