After the Future

Beast + Angel = Mensch

 

 

I hope you'll forgive my mania for diagrams lately.  I'm just practicing for stuff I have to do for work.  But a couple of years ago I put up a reflection piece on Steinbeck's East of Eden entitled "Shrewd as Serpents, Guileless as Doves." About a year before I reread The Brothers Karamazov.  I don't know the secondary literature well enough, but I'm sure others have made the connection between the two books.  This diagram shows how the two map onto one another I think pretty neatly, and it gives me a chance to riff on a theme I've been thinking a lot about lately.

I don't want to make too much of it; it's just an opportunity for me to make a diagram, but the diagram summarizes a basic Kierkegaardian idea that I doubt either was aware of, and it is in the background of my piece Metaxis--to be human is to be pulled in two opposite directions at the same time--toward the eternal and ideal on the right, and toward the particular and finite on the left-- and the people who reach what I think of as "Menschhood" are those who live in the space between these opposing forces, hold them together, and over time marry or integrate the two. 

Those who don't hold it together tend toward either Hell West--which is the conventional idea of Hell--the realm of the seven deadly sins, the human life driven by instinct unmixed with grace. It's where Papa Karamazov and Smerdyakov are situated in The Brothers K, and Cathy, the sociopath brothel madame and mother to the two brothers, Aron and Cal, in East of Eden. But Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, and Steinbeck point out that's only the western wing of hell; the east wing is occupied by those who are seduced by angelism. Both Ivan and Aron live there, and Adam, the brothers' father, spends a lot of time there as well.

Garry Wills NYRB piece on 'All Things Shining'

I came across Garry Wills New York Review of Books review of ATS last night. He pretty much hated it. "It is written by well-regarded professors," he says "(one of them the chairman of the Harvard philosophy department). This made me rub my eyes with astonishment as I read the book itself, so inept and shallow is it." I'll leave it to you to read the rest of the review. Now I don't want to oversell Dreyfus's and Kelly's book, because I think its objectives are fairly modest. But I think Wills's misreading of it is hilarious. It's a classic case of someone who plows in one field being incapable of understanding the work being done in another.

More Thoughts on "All Things Shining"

 

 

I’ve been thinking more about All Things Shining and why I am drawn to it and why I have problems with it. I think the easiest way for me explain my thinking about the book is by reference to the diagram above.  ATS is Quadrant 1 thinking, and it’s very interesting and helpful within that context, but the thinking in other quadrants is also useful, even if it is out of season. I’ll explain the seasonal logic of this diagram below, but first a word about my approach to the history of ideas in the West, which is really what ATS is all about.

My basic approach to the great thinkers in the history of the West is not to judge him as right or wrong, but to see their philosophy as a more or less successful attempt to articulate a fundamental insight or intuition that tells us something important. The problems arise when these thinkers or their followers get inflated notions about how their philosophy has some exclusive claim on the truth. None does—each is a limited perspective, but this kind of perspectivalism doesn’t mean that what comes into view within a particular perspective isn’t a significant truth. 

So it’s not about agreeing or disagreeing with Descartes or Schopenhauer or Plato. The challenge is to look at their philosophies as poem-like texts that reveal or disclose aspects of Being that cumulatively tell us about what it means to be human in a world. It’s silly to say that one was wrong or that his mistake is at the root of some fundamental cultural malady. They are spokespersons or articulators of a particular perspective, and our task as their readers is to accept the validity of what comes into view within that perspective, and then to see it as best we can in relationship to other perspectives. The diagram above is a scheme I’ve been tinkering with over the years that attempts to understand the relationships between these perspectives.

Tea Party at the Mall

Liberal and rationalist Steve Benen asks what do these people want?  He can't figure it out, but I don't think it's that difficult.  They want the United States to be what it was before the Civil War.  I don't think it's primarily driven by racism; racism is a part of it because that's the way people were then--it's part of the ante-bellum social imaginary. Sure this is a story about people being manipulated by the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, and astro-turf organizations like Freedom Works, but what interests me is the underlying sub-rational mythos that makes their manipulations possible in the first place. If you cannot understand the appeal that the Tea Party has for many Americans, it's probably because you have no feel for that underlying mythos, which makes you immune from the rhetorical manipulation.

I'm working on a longer post on this subject drawing on Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution and Christopher Lasch's Revolt of the Elites.  The goal is to understand the persistence of this mindset/mythos that once for good reason had its day. Wood lays out the architecture of that mindset, its strengths and weaknesses with remarkable detail and lucidity, and Lasch is interesting to me for being a former leftist whose positions toward the end of his life resonate with many of the Tea Party themes and concerns, but at a higher level of credibility and seriousness.

Although I think he's wrong, Lasch is always a man to grapple with. I think he's wrong because in the final analysis he makes the mistake that all conservatives do, which is to spend too much time lamenting what what has been irretrievably lost, and because I think he underestimates a certain resiliency decency in the underlying culture that does not depend on conscious knowledge about or respect for the tradition.  Yes I agree that secularists and liberals owe the tradition a debt, but the most intelligent liberals understand that. The point is that while there might be a lot of silliness in Liberal attitudes, that silliness is not the whole story.  There's a basic decency there as well, and that can't be discounted.  It's not one or the other; it's both. But I'll argue that point in the essay I'll be posting later in the week.

2012 or Apocalypse Now (really)

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf     
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind     
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.    
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.     
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,     
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends     
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.     
(From T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland")

***

For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. Romans 8: 20-23

2012--I haven't watched the movie, and I don't intend to, but I want to think out loud a bit about our fear of, or is it our need for, or perhaps longing for, "apocalypse".

The word in Greek means 'revelation' as in uncovering something hidden, and perhaps it is such a revelation we really want while fearing that the only way we get it is with the violence. If we have any sense, we recognize that things just can't keep going this way--something has to give. It just isn't working, and given our consensus materialist assumptions, I'd argue that we simply haven't the imagination of a way out of this impasse, or if we had an idea, we haven't the will to act on it. So since radical change is something we seem incapable of choosing, it's something we want ambivalently to happen to us, to suffer passively, and we therefore fear what we long for most.

We yearn for Apocalypse, an empowering revelation, some cleaning of the slate and the arrival of a political leader, an avatar, saint, bodhisattva, or the return of Quetzacoatl, or King Arthur, or Jesus on clouds with his angels.  For they will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  But of course, it just doesn't work that way.  (Does it?)

Nevertheless, we long for and fear some breaking of the dam, so that the world can be washed clean of everything in the current normal reality that obstructs the flourishing of what is healthful and sane. This is an archetypal longing felt most intensely during periods of decay. We're mostly sick of normal reality, because it just doesn't deliver.  It provides lots and lots of stuff, but little value.  Quality, or any natural sense for it,  is drowned in this torrent of quantity and our greed for even more. We've lost our collective sense of what matters and what doesn't, and we're reduced to arguing for the sake of arguing, because at least it gives some feeble sense that we're alive.  And so, if we have any sense, we're seeing normal more clearly for its insanity--that "normal" is, in fact, consensus insanity--and deep down we'd just as soon be rid of it. But there's the comfort factor; we'd just as soon not have to deal with too much change or too much reality.

Honor

The word has mostly positive connotations for us--it's a good thing to be a man of honor, or to give one's word of honor.  But I've always thought there was something fishy about honor and the honor culture from which it originates--it seemed to be too concerned with reputation and public perception rather than with virtue, too concerned about  being well thought of and "honored" and not concerned enough about living a life of interior integrity, as if one's standing in society mattered more than one's standing before God--or that both were the same thing. 

And the more you learn about honor's origins the fouler the smell. They lie in a primitive warrior ethic which in turn is a part of the master/slave complex. Honor is accorded to both parties in conflict so long as neither backs down. It's is better to fight and die than to refuse the fight and submit to the other. Submission is always dishonorable and slavish. The logic of the duel, a practice that lasted well into the nineteenth century in America in the South and West, and the the blood feud follow this basic honor logic. In an honor culture, if one has been dishonored in any of a number of complex ways, it's as if someone took away your existence, and the only way you can get it back is by killing the one who took it from you.