Borders & Edges.
Every-thing is just so frustratingly approximative — so
imprecise and squishy. This is true of all things, of those things of a physis sort (re: nature & the
natural) as with things of a kosmos
sort (re: intellect & the interpretative). For a refresher course on this distinction,
have a look at the Phrontisterion
essay on Anti-conversion
in “An Existential Moment” (February 2013).
Trying
to determine the exact boundaries or edges of physical things, for example, which
seem so very clear and so very observably
present to our senses, is notoriously difficult in an imprecise and squishy
kind of world. The classical illustration of this idea for students of
philosophy is the good old-fashioned table (or chair): my body tells me that the
table is one sort of a thing—it is solid, ponderously weighty, and does not
seem to be going anywhere at any given speed; it seems to just want to hang out
in the space that it presently occupies. In contrast, however, my mind tells me
that the table is also a constituted kind of a thing—it is made up of an
unimaginable number of invisible, itsy-bity teeny-weeny other-things that are
all zinging around at warp-speed, and which are not at all concrete and stationary
like the table-thing of which they are the composing elements. Now which of
these two tables, the one that is speaking to my body or the one that is
comprehended by my mind, is the most nearly-true definition of this particular
table at which I sit and write? It seems obvious that both ‘truths’ are somehow
implicated in the thing that is this table, but only one of the truths is
actually experienced by me. From one point of view—the body’s—the edges of the
table seem quite distinct from the edges of me the writer, but from a second
point of view both the table and I seem inseparably implicated in the dance of
sub-physical, invisible other-realities that frame the symphonic composition of
things that are the visible world.
Language,
in contrast to our table, is obviously a very cosmetic sort of thing. And although
it is the primary means by which humans speak out their recognition of the
world, it is also perhaps one of the most disturbingly approximative forms of
identifying and articulating objects. One has only to look at the idea of
denotations and connotations, which sets the boundaries for words. The denotative
world of a word is actually quite straightjacketed and narrow, and has therefore
at least some degree of precision because it is more exclusive, while a word’s connotative
world is infinitely richer and inclusive, brimming with associative images and
suggestions, and overflowing with emotional and figurative relationships. The
word ‘invitation’, for example, is denotatively a “written or verbal request
inviting someone to go somewhere or to do something,” as in a wedding or
birthday party invitation. Connotatively, however, an ‘invitation’ lives in an
entirely different space –it is an incitement to venture out into strange new
corridors of the world, a bidding to try new things, a giving of permission to
go through doors that stand open but which may, at first blush, seem to us
forbidding and ominous.
Toward Enlightenment.
In
the historical intervals that have followed upon the heels of enlightenment in
the West, we are offered rare glimpses into an interpretative world, a kosmos,
that is almost entirely illuminated and articulated by purely human categories
of thinking. Enlightenment creates The Individual. This was obviously the case
in the first period of Western enlightenment in ancient Greece, which gave rise
to philosophy as the very first human scientia
of things natural, and also in the second period of enlightenment in 18th
century Europe, which superintended the fairly radical dethronement of the
Religious Mind and the gradual enthronement of the rational and thoroughly
human Mind as the measure and interpreter of man in his world.
In
the first period of Western enlightenment, the “Space” where The Individual “happens”
(—for many philosophers make the case that Socrates was in fact the West’s
first individual and that he taught a philosophy where the individual mattered
as individuum—) can be measured on a gradation
that separates two influential Greek thinkers from the classical period: on the
extreme rationalist end of our Scale of Individuality there is the Greek
architect-philosopher, Hippodamus (498-408 BC), who originally hailed from
Miletus in Asia Minor, and on the spiritualizing end of that scale there is the
famous Athenian philosopher, Plato (ca. 428-347 BC).
According
to the Wiki-world on Hippodamus, we discover how, through this first urban
planner, Man presumed to impose upon the real topography of the real physical
world of hills & valleys and streams & rivers, the rationalizing and abstracted
geographical grid-frames of strictly human and cosmetic thought. This was the
birthright of rationalism, at its worst.
“Hippodamus… was an ancient Greek architect, urban
planner, physician, mathematician, meteorologist and philosopher and is
considered to be the “father” of urban planning, the namesake of Hippodamian
plan of city layouts (grid plan). […] According to Aristotle, Hippodamus was
the first author who wrote upon the theory of government, without any knowledge
of practical affairs. His plans of Greek cities were characterised by order and
regularity in contrast to the intricacy and confusion common to cities of that
period, even Athens. He is seen as the originator of the idea that a town plan
might formally embody and clarify a rational social order.”
On the other hand, although his dialogue The Republic has been almost entirely
co-opted by political philosophers and re-constructed as some kind of feeble
humbuggery disguised as a rational ‘theory of state’, Plato in fact allegorizes
for us in The Republic, through the
analogy of the State, the interior structures—the types of Souls—that can be
found among Individual Men. In an aside, however, neither this idea nor this
metaphor originates with Plato, because we find already a first incarnation of
both in the nature poem of the Pre-Socratic philosopher-poet, Parmenides.
If
we follow out the broad strokes of the narrative in Plato’s Republic, Plato’s initiatory intent throughout
his mythic “republican” allegory becomes obvious, an idea that can be said to
be confirmed through later usage not only by the Christian apostle, Paul, who
appropriated and employed the structure of that allegory to good effect in his
New Testament letter to the Church in Corinth (I Corinthians 15:45ff), but also
through usage by Neo-Platonic philosophers, such as the late 5th
century Boethius, who, in Book IV of the Consolation
of Philosophy, divides man’s life journey into either a descent toward the embodiment
of the life of the beasts (evil) or an ascent toward becoming gods (good).
At
a very basic level, in the Republic Plato
means to portray for us in the Gyges myth (Book II) the ‘earthy’ man (Paul’s psychikon or soulish man, i.e., a man
like the First Adam/Man; v 46-47) who burrows into the earth and discovers, but
does not grasp the importance of, the limitations of earthly dreams and
aspirations. Allegorically speaking, as an alternative to the life of burrowing
and tunneling into the bowels of the earth, Plato tells us in Book VII a second
story/allegory, the well-known allegory of the Cave, where we learn about the
man who seeks enlightenment (Paul’s pneumatikon
or heavenly/spiritual man, a man like the Second Adam/Man; v 46-47), who
struggles to free himself from the earthly Cave, and who discovers, during his
ascent out of the earth-womb, the higher, and indeed the highest truths in,
about, and behind the World. In Plato’s final myth in the Republic (Book X), we discover a character whose name is Er. In this
last myth Plato hopes for the Reader to understand that the choice is given to
each of us as to how to live, either as the earthy man or the sky-bound man—the
only choice that necessity imposes upon us is that we necessarily must choose
the direction of our journey: either our lives will be as diggers and burrowers
in the darkness, or as climbers toward the sunlight and the stars. Choose—we
must; which direction–there is the rub!
The
one constant in the enlightened Greece of antiquity is the shift of philosophers
and poets away from the gods. And in that shifting away from the Religious
Mind, it is possible for us to cherry-pick illustrations of those thinkers who
leaned toward the rationalizing interpretative framework of Hippodamus just as
easily as one can those who tended to spiritualize Man after the way of Plato
and his followers.
In the second period of Western
enlightenment, the “Space” of The Individual is measurable by the progression
of the democratic ideal from its small Western cradle to its pervasively global
nesting grounds; and the cornerstone for this enlightenment vision is the idea
of The Individual. As an idea, The Individual replaced the idea of the Divine Right of Kings (Phrontisterion essay,
February 2015).
“The model for the democratic vision, of course, is European
enlightenment, and flows organically from the beheading of the idea of the
divine right of kings. When the one king is dead, then ‘We the People’ is
assigned the burden of kingship – each one his own little bit. Upon reflection, though, in the
democratic model how does one
so tie the power of state to the individual, both philosophically and
functionally, that the state is ensured a long, even if complex life?
Historically speaking, the model of democracy in the west, inspired by the
ideas of enlightenment, began life moored to several fundamental principles:
participation in the vote; freedom of expression; separation of religious
interference from the function and power of the state; and a press that badgers
those holding office in order to inhibit the easy spread of corruption.”
At some point in our reflection there must
arise an ambiguity, or perhaps it is only a tension, between The Individual
conceived as physis or as kosmos. Until now, we have been
considering The Individual primarily as a cosmetic entity, as an historical
idea whose boundaries have been greatly expanded around the periods of
enlightenment in the West. This conclusion is generally confirmed among
historians of ideas working in just about every field. In his book Escape From Freedom, for example, the
social psychologist Erik Fromm (Ch. II) agrees that as an idea, The Individual
emerges as a post-enlightenment phenomenon (although he only refers to one
period of Western enlightenment), maintaining that what he calls the ‘process
of individuation’ or the ‘emergence of the individual’ “seems to have reached
its peak in modern history in the centuries between the Reformation and the
present.”
However,
there is also a more denotative aspect to the idea of The Individual, and that
becomes clear when one begins to wonder what it means to be, essentially, “an”
individual, beyond the more connotative elements that accrue to individuals as
a result of their particular historical circumstances. Is there some essential
quantity, or quality, that all men share as humans? Is there such a thing as an
essential and therefore irreducible human nature? There have been two general philosophical
theories on this question, which Phrontisterion
has examined in “The Existentialist ‘Project’ & the Ostensible ‘Problem’ of Existence” (November 2013), which might be characterized as the Camusian
position and the Sartrian position. Camus, following Nietzsche and others,
thinks there is an essentialness to men, which, when considered as a
collective, makes it meaningful to speak of men as Man. Sartre, in contrast,
thinks that a man is, essentially, an empty set = { }, that he is a bundle of possible choices
linked to a specific space in time for a while, then not. In this respect,
Fromm (op cit, 13) is Sartrian in his
thinking about The Individual, for he writes:
“It is not as if we had on the one hand an individual
equipped by nature with certain drives and on the other, society as something
apart from him, either satisfying or frustrating these innate propensities. […]
The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of
a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process
which creates man. […] Man’s nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural
product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and
achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call
history.”
So, we have gained up to this point the
idea that the history of Western enlightenments has been consistently marked by
a shift in the boundaries of men’s view of both themselves as specific objects,
as individuum, and of themselves as
role-players in their world. Both historical shifts toward enlightenment have
been characterized by an otherworldly vision of reality yielding the
right-of-way to a this-worldly interpretation and expression of Man’s world, a
progression from the Religious Mind to the Rational Mind.
Away from Enlightenment.
However,
History pauses for neither man nor idea, but turns itself over and over forever
in response to “another shake of the kaleidoscope,” to borrow on Maurice Gee’s
felicitous expression [Plumb, p. 142]—which
only goes to show, once again, the prescience of old Heraclitus the Obscure,
that rJei√n ta»
o¢la potamouv di÷khn: “It is the way of things […] that, like the currents of the
river, the whole [thing] just streams along” (D/K 12, vol. 1, p. 141; cf B12,
91). And as if in
response to a free-wheeling period of Free-Thinking that followed hard on the
heels of the first period of enlightenment, and which has come to be celebrated
as the birth of Greek philosophy, came the onslaught of the Christian Church. And
enlightenment gave way before it. Consequently, the Religious Mind would hold
intellectual sway in Western History until the rise of the second period of
enlightenment in Europe. And in the period following the second period of
enlightenment, which is the swinging door to our contemporary world, it would
seem that, once again, the Religious Mind is seeking to subjugate or vanquish
entirely the free-thinking enlightenment ways of Western Nations and Men. The children
of the first enlightenment yielded the floor to the Religious Mind and its belief.
The children of the second enlightenment are not obliged to make the same
choices as their intellectual forefathers.
The
Western notion of freedom, which is rooted in the rationalistic notions of The
Enlightenment Individual, is not an absolute or eternal value, identical for
all men at all times. Not all cultures articulate or value freedoms in the same
way; and while the desire to be free may be arguably innate, as Fromm [op cit] thinks, he also suggests that
“the human aspect of freedom” coexists within a coterie of deadly rivals, which
include the longing for submission, and the lust for power. So when all is said
and done it would seem that far from being static and fixed, the idea of freedom
for the individual remains a negotiable quantity—philosophically &
politically.
Our natural world (physis) spins out on a long thread of heat-releasing entropy…
an ongoing give-and-take between order and disorder—and we must make our peace
with that. But this principle must also then hold for the kosmos created by the human mind: the Age of Religion yields to the
Age of Reason, which then yields again to the Religious Mind, which then yields
again to whatever paradigmatic frame arises that can impose itself in the mix
and jostle. And the whole of human history, like the currents of the river with all of its nooks &
crannies and ebbs & flows, just keeps streaming along, sometimes quickly
sometimes slowly; for human history also plays in the streams of entropy where order
(The Age of Religion) submits to disorder (The Age of Reason), and then
disorder to order, in a constant dance of ideas. What is disorder, after all, but the
intrinsic nature that frames the essential idea of “freedom”?
So what does it mean to live in the West,
inside the Western mindset, governed by Reason and the principles of the Rights
of Men? And what happens when there is no longer even a general consensus about
the value of the enlightenment mindset (kosmos-disorder), but where the
children of enlightenment begin to imagine alternative mindsets other than
living in an environment of reasonable enlightenment? Where it becomes possible
to imagine cohabitation between the Religious Mind and the Rational Mind?
The
Sophists of Plato’s day believed they could improve other men through their
wise teaching, but Socrates whole-heartedly disagreed with them (Apology 20B). But if we are to believe
Socrates, who is after all Plato’s great ethical hero, and if we really cannot
improve one another through wise teaching, then at the end of the day we are
left, truly, with only The Individual, who must discover and practice his own
virtue—which, for Socrates, was following Justice. If, then, we side with
Socrates on this idea that the individual is alone to unveil himself through
his practice of virtue (i.e., rightness or justice), then it becomes important
for the rest of us, as both spectators and players on the theatrical stages of
life, and to whatever degree we wish to exemplify virtue, to take our cues from
other fine actors. One man can make the difference. But the cost of making the
difference can be exacting, as the pacifist journalist, Jean Jarres, discovered, who was practically the only man in the whole of France
to publically stand against France and her imperious desire—at all costs, to
enter the first war with Germany. The cost to Jarres was his life, assassinated
in a restaurant.
Have the democratic nations of the West
really reached the effective and unsuccessful end of Enlightenment Reason as
the framework for self-governance? Is a society governed principally by Reason
really just a dystopia patiently awaiting the inevitable return of halcyon days
of innocence and goodness dripping like manna from the hand of one god or
another? This seems to be Western history’s prophetic narrative.
In
an article entitled “kant’s depression, the author suggests that Immanuel Kant anticipated precisely
this very unsatisfactory end-point of human reason:
“… What Kant doesn’t consider is that reason might actually
be connected to depression, rather than stand as its opposite. What if
depression – reason’s failure to achieve self-mastery – is not the failure of
reason but instead the result of reason? What if human reason works “too well,”
and brings us to conclusions that are anathema to the existence of human
beings? What we would have is a “cold rationalism,” shoring up the
anthropocentric conceits of the philosophical endeavor, showing us an
anonymous, faceless world impervious to our hopes and desires. And, in spite of
Kant’s life-long dedication to philosophy and the Enlightenment project, in several
of his writings he allows himself to give voice to this cold rationalism. In
his essay on Leibniz’s optimism he questions the rationale of an all-knowing
God that is at once beneficent towards humanity but also allows human beings to
destroy each other. And in his essay “The End of All Things” Kant not only
questions humanity’s dominion over the world, but he also questions our
presumption to know that – and if – the world will end at all: “But why do
human beings expect an end to the world at all? And if this is conceded to
them, why must it be a terrible end?”
The implication in these and other comments
by Kant is that reason and the “rational estimation of life’s value” may not
have our own best interests in mind, and the self-mastery of reason may not
coincide with the self-mastery of us as human beings (or, indeed, of the
species as a whole). Philosophical reason taken to these lengths would not only
make philosophy improbable (for how could one have philosophy without
philosophers?), but also impractical (and what would be the use of such a
“depressive reason”?). What Kant refers to as depression is simply this stark
realization: that thought is only incidentally human. It would take a later
generation of philosophers to derive the conclusion of this: that thought
thinks us, not the reverse.”
