Induction (4/3/14)

 

We often find that when we engage with others, we are typically obliged to engage with them solely on their own, usually unsifted terms—i.e., within the possibly cramped orbit of what may turn out, upon close inspection, to be a myopic but incongruously cocksure conceptions of themselves—and of the whole of reality! If the range and the depth of our own thought, imagination, and expressive power are hemmed in by an unwitting, faithful allegiance to the limiting horizons of the minds, sympathies, and imaginations of the generality, we ultimately have but ourselves to blame for becoming ‘bogged down’ in a steamy swamp of spiritual-mental mediocrity and mendacity.

For those of us who instinctively rebel against being thus corralled into cognitive collusion with the languid, the lumpy, the listless, and the laggard—those of us, that is to say, who have no hankering to become obliging day-care workers in the nescient nursery-school of innocuous nincompootpourri—these klutzily blunting and maiming locutions, differentiations, and explanations must be gathered up in our biggest red wheelbarrow and carried to the nearest incinerator. So much depends on this! Then, and only then, do we begin to place ourselves in the clean and lonely position to re-enact Adam’s ancient office of (re-) naming the animals.

This means that we must not only thoroughly mistrust, but we are also obliged to thoroughly overhaul and regenerate, the ‘commonsense’ understanding of reality and of ourselves—the (mis-) understanding that is lovingly-brutally bludgeoned into our impressionable young minds and souls from the moment of our birth into this amnesiac, blathering, and deracinated culture. We must renegotiate all those eviscerating adaptations, concessions, and dubious terms of agreement that we unwittingly signed and consented to—largely because there was no one around to caution us against what we were getting ourselves into as we were being corkscrewed into the managed pandemonium of manic, modern, mundane madness.

Self and Psyche, Jung and Ramana Maharshi (3/18/13)

The thoughts that occupy our minds may profitably be conceived as symptomatic of the mental context or perspective in which we are, for the moment (or, as the case may be, for decades), situated. Our thoughts are the fauna and flora native to that psychic ‘habitat.ʼ To pursue and to work up these thoughts is, at the same time, to further substantiate the enfolding context or perspective—thus making the perspective look and feel all the more solidly and compellingly established. Often, we unwittingly attribute causal status to these thoughts, although when regarded from the standpoint of their generative context or matrix, they are better regarded as symptoms or effects, just as whales, sharks, plankton, and starfish are ‘consequences’ of the life-generating sea, and not its cause.

Our efforts to ‘objectify’ and to extricate ourselves from these enfolding mental contexts or inherited perspectives will be thwarted if our attention remains engrossed in their enchanting or vexing fauna and flora. It behooves us to be mistrustful of the metaphysical pretensions of all bounded mental contexts, along with all the indigenous creatures spawned within their Garden-gates or horizons. Only thus—with such salutary and sobering mistrust as our loyal ally—are we able to wake up from the dream of the ʽmany worldsʼ and learn, at last, to imaginatively play, where before we moiled and toiled on various maintenance crews.

From this perspective we are granted a somewhat fuller view of the crucial differences between Jungian psychology and Ramana Maharshiʼs spiritual standpoint. Jung speaks on numerous occasions of the reality of the psyche. I think it is fair to say that what Jung is calling psyche Ramana Maharshi would call mind plus the vāsanās (the innate or residual tendencies of the mind). And more importantly, Ramana Maharshi does not dignify the mind or the vāsanās with ‘realityʼ status. Only the Self is held to be real and abolute. Everything else—including the psyche—being derivative, is less than real, since nothing but the formless Self is self-subsistent, and this self-subsistence is what constitutes reality in RMʼs book. At first, this may seem like a logical quibble or set piece, like Anselmʼs ʽproofʼ of God, but thereʼs more to it than this.

Before the reader is tempted to make a fateful choice between Jungʼs psychology and RMʼs spiritual teachings concerning the all-embracing Self, let us dive a little bit deeper into this subtle business—a region of deeply intriguing questions where mere words and general concepts are more apt to get in the way than to be of assistance to the diver. In order to begin properly, we would do well to place both Jung and RM within the contexts they were responding to in their seemingly different teachings.

As we know, Jung was up against the thick, proud wall of 19th century European materialism at its zenith, while RM was operating snugly within the well-established Indian spiritual tradition. He was, as Jung famously referred to him, ‘the whitest spot in a white space.ʼ In order for Jung to gain cultural relevance (in order to fulfill his fate?), he had to come to terms with the materialist context in which he was immersed. The generally embraced metaphysical presuppositions of materialism implicitly denied full reality status to immeasurable and intangible spiritual/psychic phenomena. Within the jealously guarded fortress walls of the empirical-scientific worldview, there were no entry visas for anything that was not demonstrably reducible to matter or energy in quantifiable terms. It was agreed that terms like ‘mind,ʼ ‘soul,ʼ ‘God,ʼ and ‘ideasʼ referred to intangibles that nonetheless meant something, however vague and confused, to human beings (even to clear-thinking, no-nonsense persons like inorganic chemists and physicists). Accordingly, these weightless, immeasurable, and immaterial factors could not simply be ignored or categorically dismissed as utter poppycock or ‘silly nothings,ʼ although more than a few ‘Positivist’ zealots advocated such a wholesale rejection of all non-quantitative ‘phantasms.ʼ Nonetheless, even among those who granted a kind of provisional reality status to these insubstantial elements (of intellectual-imaginative-moral-spiritual experience), there was a generally shared belief that eventually all of these features of consciousness would be adequately accounted for in material terms—e.g., electrochemical processes; stimulus response of the human organism within its environment; neural pathways; behavioral habits rooted in the brain; and so forth.

When Jung argued for the reality of the psyche he was not embarking on a philosophical-metaphysical quest or campaign. He was not attempting to credit intangible psychic contents with quite the same ontological or metaphysical status that material objects and processes had been endowed with by the ruling scientific establishment. Perhaps his move—his intellectual stratagem—was a bit tricky or super-subtle, but instead of trying to induct intangible, invisible psychic contents into the exclusive club of materialist metaphysics, he simply dismissed dogmatic metaphysics altogether as a standpoint having anything of real or authoritative value to say about the psyche as such. And he accomplished this bold, brazen maneuver by simply turning the whole question on its head. By inverting the order of priority—by making the psyche the primary datum of experience—Jung, in a single move, made metaphysics a dependent subset of the psyche, which for him became the precondition, the sine qua non, of all experience. Some critics of Jung have called this move ‘psychologism’—the undermining of all possibility of philosophical truths by exposing their roots in that protean, irrational datum: the unconscious psyche.

In this way, Jung—who was not a professional or trained philosopher (although he had read Kant on his own, and was deeply impressed)—had delivered as deadly a blow to Western metaphysics as Heidegger had done (from the phenomenological direction). Instead of painstakingly unraveling it, after the manner of Heidegger and his deconstructionist followers, he simply cut the Gordian knot in one fell swoop. To repeat: he argued, in effect, that because all metaphysical positions, claims, and assertions are generated by the psyche (just as dreams, myths, and symbols are), they can never be more comprehensive, more authentic, or more grounding than the matrix out of which they emerge spontaneously and autonomously. Basing his findings upon years of experience with the phenomena of the unconscious psyche (gathered from his patients, from himself, and from the myths, religious symbols, and other recurring motifs in human cultural history), Jung concluded that the psyche is ultimately opaque, mysterious, and irreducible to any of the categories and forms of thought that we have at our conscious disposal. But, he claimed, despite its ultimately unfathomable mysteriousness—despite its transcendence of all our rational categories and methods—it appears (again, phenomenologically, and therefore, in Jung’s perhaps idiosyncratic view of phenomenology, empirically) to operate in accordance with certain ‘heuristic principles’ or observable patterns. Like the interplay of yin and yang—or between various elements in chemical processes—the psyche, of which our consciously differentiated ego-standpoint is but an outgrowth, is not a merely chaotic mystery, but a mystery that holds out the promise of wise understanding and a fuller participation in life. And since the psyche is itself the matrix of consciousness, it provides us with the means with which to make some kind of meaningful sense of it: dreams, myths, ‘archetypal’ images, ‘Gods,’ etc.

So, now we can see that while Jung posits the reality of the psyche (as an immediately experienceable datum that is directly presented to us in the form of autonomously produced images and fantasy material, which constitute its natural language), this ‘reality’ has a very different status than we encounter in rational philosophy and traditional metaphysics. It is the ground or basis of all possible experience (a claim RM will make about the Self), but it resists all comprehension by necessarily limited human rationality. From one angle, this disqualifies the psyche from being a suitable object for traditional philosophical treatment or analysis—since, as we have noted, it transcends the very terms and axiomatic principles upon which rational philosophy is founded.[1] And while the unconscious psyche is ultimately opaque and stumpingly enigmatic, it nevertheless appears to generate forms that invite (or elicit) meaningful interpretations from us. As Jung saw it, this need for meaning (and for the mental orientation it can provide) appears to be innate in human beings. Our languages, myths, rituals, religions, philosophies—and more recently, our rather threadbare ideologies—have served, with mixed success, to organize meanings and values into systems that mediate for us, collectively. They serve as cultural interfaces between human consciousness and the enigmas of the collective unconscious.

When viewed against the backdrop of his cultural-ideological milieu (namely, the scientific-materialistic-rationalistic modern Western worldview) Jung introduced both creative ideas and corrosive criticisms that left many of the ground-floor presuppositions of that worldview utterly untenable.[2] By opening up the psyche as phenomenologically explorable territory—territory that is situated well beneath the cultural forms and artifacts acquired and assimilated by means of the best formal educations available to us—Jung not only greatly expanded the scope of the discernible and the intelligible. He also introduced more exacting standards of subtlety in treating these little-explored factors and phenomena—standards of subtlety that make former (reductive) methods seem ham-fisted and narrow by comparison.

In our efforts to better understand the points of difference between Jung and RM, then, we must first take note of these differences between Jung’s subtle, inner-directed, culturally assimilative depth psychology and the generally outer-directed, (largely) psychologically unreflective material science that still commands the most respect where questions about the nature of things are at issue, at least here in the West. So, how did the reality of the psyche—or its validity as a ‘scientificʼ hypothesis—become established? Due to a combination of cultural, educational, and other collective factors, the realm of the psyche (or soul) had been pretty much relegated to a marginal zone inhabited by impractical or ‘madʼ poets, the ‘innocent’ faithful, dubious charlatans, theosophists, and lunatics. It was only when members of the ‘normalʼ and ‘respectableʼ bourgeoisie began to suffer from troubling and embarrassing neurotic symptoms that serious attention started to be directed towards the mysterious source of these bizarre maladies of the mind.

Freud is generally credited with having discovered the subconscious—but the groundwork for his valuable theoretical and practical contributions to the new ‘scienceʼ of depth psychology had been prepared by dozens of pioneering minds before him. Jung, having worked closely with Freud as a young psychiatrist, inherited the best that his simultaneously celebrated and reviled mentor could offer him—and then carried the flickering candle deeper into the transpersonal realm of the archetypal unconscious. His theoretical writings on the structure and dynamics of the psyche—founded upon extensive clinical work with patients from around the world, and supported by his own life-altering, protracted encounter with the unconscious during the years before and during the First World War—stand proudly beside the most eminent and revered works of psychic cartography within the possession of Western humanity. Written in a prose style that reflects the scientific temper of the times in which they appeared (but which always points beyond the limits of that worldview), these works possess a lucidity and power that speak to the innermost depths of the attuned modern reader. Suffice it to say that Jung’s writings—along with those of the other genuine depth psychologists—have succeeded in communicating the strange but partially intelligible inner processes of the psyche. Today, for anyone who has been initiated into a dialectical relationship with the unconscious psyche, there is a new dimension of experience that is every bit as vast, complex, and mysterious as the outer universe is—but immediately accessible, unlike the outer universe. Speaking about the outer realm, the British evolutionary biologist, J.B.S. Haldane said: ‘The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.ʼ This observation certainly applies to the psyche, as well—that ever-present but perplexing source from which our angelic and demonic impulses, our transcendent and bestial yearnings, and our fate-shaping dreams and imaginings mysteriously arise.

[1] I suppose I don’t need to point out the fact that ‘irrational philosophy’ is simply an oxymoron.

[2] Physicists and biologists living today will no doubt insist that no one who fails to grasp the fundamental ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics, of molecular and evolutionary biology, can claim to be fully or adequately educated. With much the same brazen temerity, I would argue that any contemporary thinker who has not thoroughly assimilated Jung’s fundamental insights and perspectives is living at least a hundred years ‘behind the times.ʼ

Words as Seeds and Conjurors (5/11/15)

Lest we go too far in our reduction of words and concepts to empty, dried-out husks and sloughed-off skins of the once vital vegetables and animals of living thought and perception, we would do well to remember the creative power of speech. We needn’t take this idea to the super-human level of the ‘divine Logos’ (“In the beginning was the Word”). We might simply muse upon the magical power that poetry and prose exerts over some of us. We need merely recall the transporting effect that passages from Shakespeare, the Bible, the Koran, or Plato have upon our minds, hearts, and imaginations—and all through the conjuring power of words! To be sure, there must first be suitable ground within our souls in which to plant and germinate these seeds. Our psyches must, therefore, be capable of meeting words halfway—of unlocking the ideational and imaginative power packed into their ‘chromosomal’ material. Words, like temples and palaces, octogenarians and very old trees, have long and often interesting histories—and therefore, stories to tell if we are but sufficiently patient and attentive.

And there is a socio-political function of words and verbal commands: it is precisely because—or to the extent that—we obey words and verbal directives—because we place our trust (and sometimes our very fate) in their power to mean what they say—that words indisputably wield real power over tangible reality, over happiness or regret, life and death. There is no getting around this. Words and perceptible, material phenomena (and consequences) are intimately intertwined with each other—so far as humans are concerned. Thus, to fail to acquire competent use of speech is to fail to develop fully into a human being. It is obvious that one who never acquires a language is effectively cut off from those distinctive powers and abilities that are characteristically human. What is less obvious is that one whose command of language is poor or grossly deficient is to that extent hampered and crippled as a cultural entity. Thus, the dilution, homogenization, and radical simplification of ordinary language use inevitably contribute to the barbarization, stultification, and mental homogenization of human consciousness. And who does not see compelling evidence of this distressing trend?

Language and Disposable Light (1/19/13)

My limited meditation work has produced some noteworthy insights into the nature of thinking, regarded here as a psychological function. I am becoming more acutely conscious, for instance, of conceptual thinking as a particular kind of cognitive function—one that I can turn on and turn off. My awareness of the volitional power I have over this instrument or function has been enhanced, of course, by my ‘stepping back’ and observing subtle changes and shifts in psychic activity, as they spontaneously occur.

From one angle I am able to regard the words and concepts (that I employ when I am thinking) as nomina—labels or signifiers that stand for various non-verbal phenomena (internal and external). These psychic contents (objects of sensory perception, affects, bodily sensations, intuitions, memories, etc.) are more basic and more essential than the nomina (the actual words and concepts) that automatically clothe and convey them. In this process of formulating my pre-verbal and pre-conceptual perceptions and inner contents in words and concepts, I am drawing, of course, from the resources of my native language, which is collective, and not personally designed or created by me. To be sure, these resources are rich and ample. If fully exploited and developed by the energetic, judicious employer of the English language, along with the conceptual inheritance readily available for our acquisition, these resources afford even the subtlest and most inventive thinker more than (s)he could ever need in the way of ‘clothing’ (or mental vestments and vessels).[1]

This shared or collective character of the words and concepts (that we imbibe cum lacte as essential elements of our linguistic-cultural inheritance) is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the fact that English speakers are in general agreement concerning the meanings (rough or precise, as the case may be) of these words and concepts makes it possible for all ‘newcomers’ to understand others and to be understood, as soon as they have acquired rudimentary command of the language. On the other hand, since the general level of accuracy, depth, and resonant quality of these terms and concepts is largely—nay, decisively—determined by the cognitive, imaginative, and moral norms of the society as a whole, if these norms are relatively low and crude, these deficiencies will inevitably be reflected in the verbal and conceptual materials in currency at any given time.

There are many today who complain of a widespread corruption and debasement of language and the concepts we presently depend upon for thinking. Such critics contend that our words and concepts are being cheapened by the leveling agencies within the crude, mass culture that is inwardly driven by the will to make things as comfortable, convenient, and pleasant as possible for the greatest number of (rather poorly educated, semi-literate) people. This is certainly not the first time in human history that hedonism, ease, personal safety, and material well-being have been unashamedly held up as norms or goals for a society. But surely something will suffer neglect within a culture that prizes comfort, sensual pleasures, cheap conveniences, mass entertainment, and technological gadgetry over the very different sorts of values and pursuits to which other cultures and eras have consecrated their best energies and deployed their best talents.

If we want to get a rough idea of just how far today’s verbal and conceptual standards have fallen from those of earlier times, we only need to pick up a popular novel from the late 18^th or the 19^th century—one, say, by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens—and compare the prose to that of a popular novel today, one by John Grisham or Stephen King. Shakespeare, Plato, and the Bible—which were staples for pretty much all educated persons until quite recently—are practically unintelligible to college students today. The unfamiliar syntax, the luxuriant vocabulary, the allusive and multi-layered meanings packed into metaphors and parables that were readily grasped by our cognitively more sophisticated (because more thoroughly literate) forebears are simply beyond the patience and the easy reach of today’s graduate of ‘Tier-One’ universities. Their ‘sophistication,’ such as it is, lies elsewhere.

If the general standards of literacy (along with the degree of precision, depth, and complexity of verbal/conceptual expression maintained by the educated segment of society) have sunk to an all-time low in our own era, it is worth noting that even under the most favorable cultural and educational conditions, there is always someone whining and wailing about the slackness and carelessness of ordinary language as a medium for the best thoughts and sentiments. We know how Socrates made a virtual career out of testing, challenging, and (when allowed to) amending the Athenian know-it-alls’ (mis-) use of such important terms as ‘truth,’ ‘justice,’ ‘goodness,’ ‘beauty,’ and ‘knowledge.’ And Socrates’ lonely campaign to bring greater exactitude, clarity, and richness to philosophical and moral discourse was conducted during one of the high water marks in Western cultural history—another being the Renaissance. At the time that Shakespeare was writing and producing the plays that many of us have so much trouble reading and understanding—while even ‘groundlings’ or uneducated riff-raff enthusiastically filled the Globe Theater after the more hoity-toity audience members were seated—Francis Bacon wrote the following passage:

The Idols of the Market-place are the most troublesome (impediments to the mind) of all; these are idols that have crept into the understanding through the alliance of words and names. For while men believe their reason governs words, in fact, words turn back and reflect their power upon the understanding, and so render philosophy and science sophistical and inactive. For words are usually applied according to common comprehension (italics mine), and divide things along lines most suited to common understanding. When someone of sharper understanding or more diligence in observation wishes to shift those lines, so as to move them closer to Nature, words shout him down. (Novum Organon, sect. 59)

Unsurprisingly, the kinds of knowledge deemed important by the majority of educated persons within a society, or culture, will reflect the principal aims and interests of that society as a whole. The trajectory-setting, educated elite of past societies have been chiefly concerned with—sometimes even pathologically obsessed with—very different aims, values, and ‘ways of life.’ For the Spartans, the early Romans, and the Prussians, military valor and honor were of paramount importance. For the ancient Jews, Medieval Christians, and many modern-day Muslims, religious piety and ‘righteousness before God’ constitute the chief aim of life. For the Renaissance Florentines and Venetians, Victorian Englishmen and most North Americans today, the accumulation of wealth and personal power appear to be of supreme importance.

Unremarkably, the ‘intellectual capital’ of an era tends to be concentrated among those generally respected thinkers who embody and help to advance the prevalent, generally embraced values of the time. In other words, if the intellect may be likened to a searchlight, the lion’s share of a society’s disposable light will be turned in the direction of dominant collective interests and desires. A genuinely balanced deployment of a society’s disposable light would presumably provide the best safeguard against a perilously one-sided state of affairs that thwarts and fails to nourish the attainment of human wholeness among its choicest specimens. But if it is in fact true that the light generally follows rather than leads the collective will (as that will is expressed in its principal preoccupations and aims), then we are faced with something of a conundrum.

Before the modern era, before the extension and expansion of political and legal rights to formerly ‘powerless’ or disenfranchised persons, and before the explosion of human population as consequence of medical and technological developments—societies, entire cultures, were shaped, governed, and perpetuated by a relatively tiny elite of educated persons. Because of this generally aristocratic—and often autocratic—arrangement, serious changes in a few minds at the top could occasionally lead to a major redirection of social or collective energies. Because political and cultural power—all the power—was concentrated in a few hands, a few persons could make a colossal difference, for good or ill, in a way that seems almost inconceivable today. The simple reason for this is that the stable base—the sheer inertia of the multitudes—makes such sudden and radical change well-nigh impracticable. Despite the free access to all sorts of news and information, it is more difficult than ever to bring about significant cultural enrichment on a large scale. This is a complex issue and there are many avenues of approach to it, but perhaps a good place to begin is from the angle of quantitative differences between modern and pre-modern societies. In their different ways, René Guenon and John Lukacs—two rather distinct thinkers—argue that quantity, in the modern era, has thoroughly diluted—if it has not altogether eclipsed—quality.

[1] But, alas, ‘clothes do not always proclaim, or make, the man’—at least not in this case (and not even in France, where those of the best deconstructionist rank and postmodern station are of a most select and generous, chief in that).

On Dialectic and Rhetoric (10/18/15)

I realize how important it is to overcome the mind’s natural tendency to be charmed into obedience or assent by eloquence, by flattery directed towards our wishes and prejudices, and by rhetoric. Rigorous dialectic has something very un-charming and dis-illusioning about it. It cuts through the beautiful flesh of eloquence in order to reveal the musculature and skeletal structure (or lack thereof) hiding below the fetching, distracting, and often misleading surface. As such, dialectical thinking is perhaps intrinsically ruthless, painful, and disturbing. And yet it is essential to the quest for the truth precisely because its task is to flay the thick layers of skin and flab that normally conceal more than they reveal of the truth that lies at a deeper, subtler level of experience. With such gruesome images in mind, it should come as no surprise that Socrates was feared and detested by those in his midst who deeply resented having their piss-poor innards and frothy pretentions unveiled and publicly displayed by that peerless old vivisectionist of souls. Only the toughest and most sincere lovers of truth would have welcomed—or willingly withstood—such a torturous unmasking. Apollodorus—who is presented in the Symposium as semi-misanthropic despiser of himself and of everyone else but Socrates—may have been just such a toughened and dis-illusioned candidate for philosophical self-enquiry, if not an altogether flattering portrait of one.

We might wonder: Was not Plato, in attempting to beautify philosophy, behaving as an even more audacious ironist than Socrates? Does he not, in fact, ‘meta-ironically’ employ Socrates’ irony as a lightning rod to absorb and deflect far more serious charges from himself? Wasn’t Nietzsche justifiably suspicious—if not flatly dismissive—of Plato’s equation of ‘truth, beauty, and goodness’?

****

If, from the standpoint of ordinary human expectations, preferences, and desires, the unvarnished truth concerning the fundamental questions of human life is ugly, then doesn’t it follow that beauty and truth can only coincide or converge for the philosopher who has dialectically ascended the ladder of understanding to a vantage point high above the normal (‘interested’ or desire-infused) human perspective? Such a person would necessarily have transcended those run-of-the-mill expectations, preferences, and desires before truth could be purged of the ugliness it necessarily possesses for the resistant non-philosopher. Is it possible that seductive beauty and off-putting ugliness cancel each other out in the neutral but vital contentment of the philosopher whose perspective has transcended this familiar pair of opposites?

If we allow ‘eros’ to stand (or substitute) for philosophy—or even philosophical insight—we see (at 201e in the Symposium) that Diotima clears up the ‘dichotomy’ in Socrates’ mind by asking him, “Do you believe that whatever is not beautiful must necessarily be ugly?” Eros, like philosophy, turns out to be something neither good nor bad, beautiful nor ugly, but something ‘in between.’

*****

The final chapter of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching:

 

True words are not beautiful;

Beautiful words are not true.

A good man does not argue;

He who argues is not a good man.

A wise man has no extensive knowledge;

He who has extensive knowledge is not a wise man.

The Sage does not accumulate for himself.

The more he uses for others, the more he has for himself.

The more he gives to others, the more he possesses of his own.

The way of Heaven is to benefit others and not to injure.

The way of the Sage is to act but not to compete.

Lao Tzu’s words (which, after all these centuries, still startle) echo the observation concerning Plato’s ‘beautification’ of philosophy—and Nietzsche’s astute rejection of Plato’s equation of truth-beauty-goodness. Plato could purge his Republic of the poets, but it took all the disappointments of a long, uncannily circumspect and irreproachably honest life to silence the beautifying poet in himself, as we see in the later dialogues, which are models of logical-lexical rigor. (And, despite himself, Nietzsche doesn’t seem to have had any more luck along these same lines than Plato did…although if he had lived longer, who knows? Perhaps he, too, would have eventually seen through and tamed the Circe of intoxicating eloquence.)

Perhaps beauty—like pleasure—pertains to the inherently preferential individual ego, but—like ugliness and displeasure—are matters of indifference and irrelevance to the truly liberated spirit. In becoming liberated from the ‘ego and its own,’ doesn’t the spirit transcend all those preferences, desires, fears, and concept-convictions that define, bind, and drive individual ego-consciousness?

A Man-ner of Fish (12/15)

For me, earnest thinking may be likened to conjuring spirits or fishing for leviathans from the deep. When commencing to think or write, only rarely do I already have a ‘fish’ on the line, unless it’s a shiny minnow meant to attract the attention of more massive or intriguing marine creatures. Here I have pointed to the difference between imaginative/intuitive thinking and discursive/analytical thinking. To be sure, both have their dignified place in the vast and intricate economy of multi-tiered cerebrations—but I have long felt a deeper affinity for the former speculative-imaginative sort.

Unlike that ‘fisher of men’ from the last aeon, I am a ‘man-ner of fish.’ ‘Fish,’ in this instance, stands (or swims?) for those silver-finned, darting and diving, seminal ideas which inwardly yearn to become part of man’s ‘gray matter.’ Thus, I (and my ‘ancient mariner’ kin) venture out upon moonlit seas, beneath which our tutelary spirits glide and drift and surge—devouring and being devoured—all of us alike in that respect. These are the fish that dream of ‘becoming man’—and it is the vocation and privilege of fisher-men to lure these voluntary sacrifices to shore for others to carve up and portion out as they deem fit. Thus, in the truest sense, it is our peculiar destiny to remain ‘middle-men’ or ‘go-betweens’—bawds, if you like—and I don’t mind admitting that there is something more than a little ‘fishy’ about such work…and such workers. And yet, as fishy as it smells to those who have never been pulled out to sea by a fierce undertow, this lonesome-malodorous vocation may very well prove more honest and above board than all dry and fragrant forms of work.

Veritas and Verdun (2/11)

Although it certainly can feel liberating, inaccurate knowledge is actually quite limiting. For many of us, it is owing to our mild delusions and our false beliefs that life seems so congenial and welcoming to us. Would it be preposterous to claim that roughly ninety-eight point six percent of our beliefs are either shallow generalizations and consoling inanities—or that they so grossly simplify and soften reality as to bear little resemblance to the complex, multileveled truth of things? The 1.4 % that is not froth and poppycock is usually pummeled into us by crushing disappointments, grave personal illnesses, profound (but fleeting) moments of honest reflection, and other generally disquieting experiences that we would assiduously avoid if we could. If we did not have this thick, insulating layer of consoling untruths armoring us against the merciless X-rays of truth, it is quite likely that many of us would quickly perish of despair and demoralization.

And yet it is the flint-hearted, small-minded fool who rails and wags his chiding finger at his fellow humans for behaving, in certain respects, like deluded and spineless children. In the back of our minds many of us are more than faintly suspicious that life, at bottom, is probably a cheat, and yet a goodly number of us still keep pressing ahead against the biting wind, bearing our fardels, making big and little sacrifices for others that may or may not be appreciated with gratitude—or even noticed. Do we not routinely lie to ourselves and to others in well-intentioned defiance of the probable truth? Should we not be commended—instead of condemned—for our charitable, half-feigned blindness?

On the whole, humans appear to be a little bit like infantrymen at the notorious battle of Verdun, running en masse into blinding clouds of mustard gas and into the pelting rain of the Gatling guns, knowing full well that the war and the politicians behind it serve virtually none of the aims they profess to serve. As they run, merged in their hearts and minds by the steely bonds of desperate sympathy—not only with one another, but also with the mirroring enemy across the way, wantonly shooting at them—they realize that Verdun is simply a more concentrated, muddier-bloodier version of life itself, with a rat-and-corpse-filled trench dug here and there to provide a momentary stay against the inevitable rendezvous with the patiently awaiting truth.

Perhaps then, it is the misanthrope who is in fact the blindest caitiff of them all. He is blind because he fails to see that his fellow humans are actually, if only half-consciously, transforming their ‘existential’ anxiety into energetic, if slightly frenzied, participation in the rigged game of civilized life—of live human theater—the collectively created and fretfully maintained alternative to that sinkhole of savagery and barbarism from out of which this fascinating species has managed somehow, over many millennia, to lift itself—and back into which we catastrophically slid a number of times in the last century. And the misanthrope is a coward if only because he uses his hatred of man to justify his contemptuous non-participation on the great stage.

But—to if we are truly to be fair—even the misanthrope deserves a measure of our sympathy and our indulgent ear. His hatred for man most probably began as an honorable hatred of the lies and falsehoods that he and his fellows were obliged to imbibe in order to keep the ‘game’ afloat. The innocent mistake he made was equating the lies with the carriers of the lies—the stories with the storytellers. Having seen through the game, all he could see was the players’ flight from actual life, or stern reality (as Nietzsche saw romanticism, Christianism, Platonism, pessimism, socialism, and just about every other ‘-ism’). His misanthropy was rooted in a failure to fully appreciate the necessary, buffering role played by language and culture. In one respect, culture is the sane and prudent adoption of a measured stance towards irrational reality as a means of more safely and adroitly navigating through the uncertain seas of life. As civilized, culture-dependent natural creatures, we stand (or wobble!) at a ‘fictional remove’ from the brute facts of life (thanks, primarily, to language and concepts, the building blocks of that sheltered, second realm of culture that we inhabit). This is our ‘cave’ (in the Platonic sense), of course. But, of course, when we are in a cave it is difficult to recognize it as such.

In most cases, a misanthrope is born from a traumatic and usually prolonged encounter with the overwhelming, undiluted existential truth of things, lurking like lethal nuclear fallout just beyond our protective cultural walls. The unfortunate misanthrope either forgot or stubbornly and proudly refused to wear his protective goggles and lead-lined cloak while out on the range where the gamma rays play. His overexposure to radiation has left him weakened and not a little bit confused. Beneath his troublesome antipathy for his fellow mortals—an antipathy born, in part, from their not having been subjected to the same traumatic exposure he has only barely survived—he secretly fears that he may be a radioactive danger or contaminant to them. So, part of his motivation—an incongruous one, because it clashes with his consciously embraced misanthropy—for remaining aloof and marginalized from his own kind springs from a desire not to infect or disturb the peace of others with the larger dose of corrosive truth that is now an integral part of his very make-up. He always feels a bit ugly and dangerous to others—down deep—and so he keeps his distance. He can love, he finds, but only from afar, it would seem.

Language and the Feminine (8/11)

Some time ago I came to believe that when human beings speak and write about ‘moral’ actions and phenomena, their words are more commonly employed to distort and cover up the truth than to convey or represent it faithfully. In most instances, these distortions and falsifications are not deliberately or even consciously perpetrated. What I want to propose is that our (usually) unconscious lying and oversimplifications have roots that reach deeper down into our psyches than is generally recognized. What I want to suggest is that the lies, distortions, and gross simplifications (which amount to the same thing as a kind of blurring or reduction of evidence), are inherited with the language itself, and not concocted afterwards. Ordinary language, at least when it comes to talking about our own and other persons’ moral behavior and motivations, is—to put it gently—wildly inaccurate, grossly misleading, superficial and stupid. While it is already in this corrupt and debased form as it is received and assimilated by us as children, with the passage of time most of us only become increasingly confined within this terribly defective and infantile way of seeing and describing ourselves (and others) to ourselves.

More than a hundred years ago, Nietzsche wrote:

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world…A great deal later—only now—it dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error. (Human, All too Human, sect. 11)

Nietzsche’s claim—about language constituting a ‘separate world’ set up beside the other (‘real’) world—is rather more sweeping and comprehensive in its scope than the problem I want to touch upon here, but I am in general agreement with him in his assessment of what happened during the ‘prehistory’ of our species.[1] Culture and reason depend, of course, upon language and the use of concepts, which mediate between man and nature—that ‘other world’ of which Nietzsche makes casual mention. Nietzsche shrewdly—and I believe fittingly—makes note of the pride that man claimed for himself when he raised himself ‘above the animal’ by means of language. Or, perhaps it was man’s belief that in language he had acquired a means by which he could master the ‘other world’—perhaps this questionable belief is the source of man’s overweening pride and his inflated sense of importance in the ‘cosmos.’ We will refrain, for the moment, from pursuing the question, ‘Can there even be an experienceable ‘cosmos’ without the preexistence of language and concepts, along with the myths and stories that are made possible by them?’

The point I want to raise here—one which follows Nietzsche’s bold initiative—is that in their use of this marvelous faculty, this verbal-conceptual faculty of language, our ancestors seem to have been inclined to widen and deepen the gap between man and nature (or ‘the animal’) rather than employ this equivocal faculty chiefly to establish and maintain a harmony between ourselves and nature. We, the descendants of these distant, course-plotting ancestors—armed and reinforced with scientific, instrumental, and technological powers that would have boggled the imaginations of our forebears—nevertheless continue down the same path of proud mastery and ruthless domination, rather than utilize these formidable powers in a campaign to restore balance between man and nature. Anyone who is not blind or mentally impaired sees and feels the conspicuous symptoms of this perilous imbalance—even young children—and yet, like programmed robots or demon-possessed puppets, we race faster and faster towards the cliff ahead.

Where do such dark, unconscious compulsions come from and why are we so powerless to resist them? Do animals—upon which we proudly look down from our superior heights—fall prey to these same epidemics of collective madness that are sweeping like a brushfire through human societies everywhere we turn our iPhone cameras? In their ‘ignorance,’ animals cannot choose but to obey and respect the unswerving and unforgiving order of nature—as it is imprinted in their guiding and controlling instincts—but man’s dogged, multi-generational crusade to commandeer nature (and natural, balance-inducing instincts and inclinations) by means of the distancing and controlling possibilities granted to him by language, reason, and artificial concepts may very well be bringing us and our children closer and closer to the brink of a systemic showdown (or meltdown). This could never have happened if even a portion of the will and intelligence that has been devoted to overpowering nature (both within ourselves and outside) had been dedicated, instead, to the maintenance of a respectful balance and harmony with nature as a whole—not simply those parts of her which served our short-sighted, immediate cravings. Blinded by our collective arrogance, we seem to have convinced ourselves that our species is bigger, smarter, and stronger than nature herself. We seem to believe that our marvelous ingenuity will get us through the rough times that almost certainly lie ahead. But intoxicated with pride and defiance, driven by the restless need to consume far more than we need, and made passive by cynicism, we race at an ever-accelerating pace towards our own collective ruin. Anticipating such a dismal and probably irreversible dénouement, it is difficult to suppress the horrible thought that, as a species, we were a dreadful mistake, a grotesque aberration, a lamentable waste and pissing away of potential. I used to experience outrage and disbelief when I contemplated these matters. Now I just feel sad, remorseful, and a bit ashamed for all of us.

The deeply depressing insight that has emerged like a black moth from the cocoon of these dark reflections is that with the emergence of language (and the advantages that its use afforded mankind), greed and the hankering after power still remain the primary driving forces behind human civilization, established religious institutions, and much of culture itself. While my acknowledgement of this practically indisputable fact about our species is by no means novel, it never ceases to threaten me with a kind of despair and paralysis of the will when I ponder too deeply on these things.

[1] Of course, our ‘prehistory’ is very much alive and kicking in the present—just a few ‘inches’ below the thin topsoil of our ‘civilized’ ego-consciousness. As is evident from any newspaper or local broadcast news report in any large American city, this ‘savage prehistory’ is not only to be found in the bloody thoughts, aggressive impulses, and violent actions of the ‘primitives’ of New Guinea and the Brazilian rainforests or long ago, hidden within the primeval mists of forgotten time.

Game Theory: Leaders and Dealers (12/11)

If we liken the present cultural-political situation to a game—a game, as it turns out, where the acquisition and wielding of power (over others) is the generally acknowledged objective—we can see a division into two familiar groups: the few and the many. Generally speaking, for those among ‘the few’ it is ‘every man for himself,’ while for the many, the aim is quite different: each ‘unit,’ rather than seeking to arrogate and amass power for itself (or its own)—as with the few—strives to dissolve itself in the herd, or mass, enabling this enormous group to function like a single-minded beast, an army with a more or less unified will that is under the command of a powerful leader from among the few. It might be a Pompey or it might be a Julius Caesar that the mobilized mob follows and obeys—but the power of the tyrant depends, of course, upon the size and heft of his herd of devoted servants and followers. Since power is what all players in the game are either directly or indirectly after, everyone is exploiting everyone else as a means to that end, even where appearances seem to suggest the contrary. When the isolated herd member relinquishes his/her ‘individual’ power in order to merge seamlessly into the mass, we must wonder if there ever was very much ‘individuality’ or autonomous will there to begin with. The little member of the mob doesn’t see himself giving up any power or sovereignty whatsoever as this droplet merges with the surging sea of fellow Democrats, Republicans, Tea Partiers, Christians, Muslims, Jews, or what have you. Au contraire! Paradoxically, he experiences an enhancement of power, of personal significance, of value, and importance in the very act of surrendering his actual (seedlike, scarcely germinated) individual will to the much larger and more powerful herd.

But herds without a shepherd (or pastor, the Greek word for ‘shepherd’) are dangerous, unpredictable, skittish, and—most importantly—a regrettable waste of a precious resource to anyone who knows how to exploit the situation for all it’s worth.

What are the hidden—or less conspicuous—opportunities available in an anti-hierarchical age of (democratic) chaos and confusion such as ours? For, let there be no mistake: all the million and one rules, regulations, protocols, authorized procedures, official (and back-) channels of today are no more than ramshackle, makeshift, stopgap measures to temporarily delay the collapse of an overheated, overstressed, undernourished monstrosity of a system that is being eaten away both from the inside and from the outside.

To put it differently: What is the obvious option open to someone seated at a table where a deck of cards is being shuffled, and where there is no designated dealer? Rare is that man who will attempt to argue that no game is preferable to some game—and the bold and inspired dealer who ‘steps up’ seizes the opportunity to introduce a new game. And if he wants his successor to continue with this newly introduced game—building upon it and adding interesting twists to deepen and enrich it—he had better not fail to get things started off on a solid, favorable footing. The game must be both challenging and satisfying to players of all levels of skill and ability. This is a tall order to fill, is it not? Such a game must make an appeal to all imaginations—finding each player ‘where he lives’—and at the same time provide him or her with one or more paths that lead onwards to new and uncharted territory. In such a game, if a player gets stuck, it would not be the game’s fault, but due to a failure of imagination or spirit on the part of the player. Such a game would not be linear (i.e., with a final ending) or circular (repeating itself without change for eternity) in its essential structure and trajectory, but a mixture of both at once. Hence, it would resemble that mysterious form encountered in nature: the spiral.

Such a game-changer and divinely appointed dealer would be a pastor for pastors, would he not—a shepherd and messenger for the few? Only such a shepherd and messenger would be able to present an alternative to the few that would unquestionably appear to be preferable to fleecing and exploiting the many, always their default position. Only such a shepherd would possess the gift for introducing the kinds of goals that make all the other goals and pursuits pale in comparison, for the new goals would expose the tiresomeness and tawdriness, the barrenness and the Sisyphean futility of the ‘default’ game, with its banal and demeaning objectives and prizes. Such game-changers have appeared from time to time in our shared human past and some of us know who they were. A peculiar, fluttering sound is audible to a handful of persons today—the sound of cards being shuffled.

Confessions of Tension (8/09)

Perhaps more commonly than is generally recognized, many of us are afforded a vision or two, usually while we are still young—visions of (or from) a ‘higher’ world, a subtler level of reality than the surface realm presented to our eyes. Initially, we register these ‘transcendent’ experiences with all of the awe and rapturous reverence due to them. And then, with no more than the occasional mild flashback or pale simulacrum of the original vision, with all its uncanny subtlety and its pungent aroma of eternity, we are imperceptibly and utterly swallowed up by our busy mundane plans and routines, with only our dim, bug-encrusted headlights to guide us. For a few, however, who have been visited by such perplexing and unearthly visions, the memory of the anomalous high beam experience will exert a steady, gentle tug upon the earthly life course. Etched indelibly into the soul, it will not simply go away and leave us be. The recollection of its preternatural grandeur and inscrutable authority stands in stark contrast to the usually brash, presumptuous, and popularly supported banality of the daily round, with its contemptibly-comfortably-familiar dramatis personae.

Increasingly, I have come to regard these early visions (in my own case) as magical seeds that were planted in the soil of my otherwise unremarkable little life. The real and urgent question has always been “Will these seeds grow into the fully developed ‘tree’ that is potentially contained therein?” It would certainly have been easier (again, for me) if my ‘tree’ happened to point in the same direction that prevailing winds of my social and cultural environment were blowing, but alas, I cannot boast of having enjoyed such favorable and obliging conditions. The growth of my tree has, for the most part, always been against the wind. Except for a few ‘breaks’ from time to time (which I instinctively regarded with mild suspicion) Going with the flow has never been a viable option for me. I do not need to deliberately make things difficult for myself—or to assume a polemical posture simply for the sake of stirring up trouble. The difficulty and the trouble are built in. They are, in fact, essential ingredients of my growth—as that growth is informed and oriented by the polestar provided by those visions that came uninvited to (and unexpected by) me as a callow youth.

The slow and periodically interrupted growth of my ‘tree’ (or is it a burning little ‘bush’?) has consisted, for the most part, in my groping attempts to reconcile or link those early insights with the world as it is. As I’ve already noted, these insights do not fit comfortably or harmoniously with the apparent world in its collective or conventionally recognized form(s). Nonetheless, I have never been comfortable with some form of metaphysical dualism to account for the divergence of these two worlds—the apparent one and the transcendent realm of visions.   And if I am constitutionally resistant to a dualistic scheme where the transcendent insights lie on one side of a great divide and the immanent ‘ways of the world’ lie on the other, I am equally opposed to professing some contrived, makeshift ‘harmony’ or shotgun marriage between this celestial groom and this terrestrial bride. Instead, what I recognize as the fitting and inevitable relationship between the mundane and transcendent dimensions (or perspectives) is one of high tension. At times, the tension slackens or seems to collapse, and must be resumed, but the tension itself is ineradicable, so long as the immanent and the transcendent are consciously juxtaposed. I would argue that without this tension, there can be no genuine creativity—either in the individual life or in the culture as a whole. My own understanding of this creative tension arises from my early experience of the gap stretching between the realm pointed to by my visionary experiences, on the one hand, and—on the other—by the world of my family, friends, society, and culture. Once ‘inseminated’ by the early experiences of the transcendent dimension (which I could scarcely make sense of in articulate conceptual terms at the time), I could not simply deny or ignore their possible relevance to the mundane world in which I felt myself to be ticklishly immersed. I felt that I had to find a suitable language, first of all, in which I could begin to express these strange musings and impressions. I recall lying at dusk in my bed at age sixteen and having the following lines practically dictated to me by some visiting presence inside my head, which I quickly wrote down:

Every aspect of each facet of existence I want tangent to my soul; I long to witness the unseen, hear the inaudible, taste the atmosphere of that which is unknown; I wish my life to be one of perpetual productivity and intake simultaneously; as each day flows past, I find a feverish desire to express what I feel inside; perhaps someday the words will come; I’ve started.    

Trite verse, perhaps, but it summed up my newly intuited task quite spiffily. At any event, I had the distinct feeling that my experiences were by no means unique or isolated—and that if I searched I would find corroborating testimony from others who had undergone similar inner experiences—or ‘disturbances,’ as some would no doubt prefer to call them.

But the point of importance I wish to stress here is this: I eventually came to the realization that, just as my own spiritual growth and maturation depended on maintaining the creative tension between the subtle and the gross aspects of my being, the same principle held true for the culture at large. As soon as the transformative tension slackens or collapses, the individual falls into an inner split that is crippling and disorienting. When this same tension slackens or collapses for a culture, barbarism assails it both from within and without.