~by David Aiken~
Borders & Edges.
Every-thing is just so frustratingly approximative—so
imprecise and fluctuating in a very-vague kind of way. 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 this rather hazy kind of
world of ours. 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, and therefore composed kind of ‘event’—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—the mind’s, both the table and I seem inseparably
implicated in the dance of sub-physical, invisible other-reality that frames
the symphonic composition of things-in-the-world that are even now presenting
themselves to our senses as visible and therefore stable. As World
In
contrast to our table, language is obviously a very cosmetic (i.e., from kosmos)
sort of thing. And although it is the primary tool by means of which humans
speak out their recognition of the world, it is also perhaps one of the more
disturbingly approximative forms of identifying and articulating object-events.
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 straitjacketed
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 created ‘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 meaning-giver of man in his world.
In
the first period of Western Enlightenment, the “Space” where The Individual “happens”
(—for there are some philosophers who 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, perhaps already 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. Parenthetically, however, neither this idea nor
this metaphor originates with Plato, because we find already a earlier
incarnation of both in the nature poem of the Pre-Socratic philosopher-poet,
Parmenides. Or, in the even more ancient notion of Hindu castes.
If
we follow out the broad strokes of the narrative in Plato’s Republic, though, Plato’s initiatory intent
throughout his mythical “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 later 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 his 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; I Cor. 15:46-47) 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 in the form of an allegory, the well-known allegory of the
Cave, where we learn about the second man, who seeks enlightenment (Paul’s pneumatikon or heavenly/spiritual man, a
man like the Second Adam/Man; I Cor. 15:46-47), who struggles to free himself
from the earthly Cave, and who, during his ascent out of the earth-womb, discovers
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, a Phoenician, whose name is Er. In this last
republican 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; but in which direction? That is both the reader’s rub, and the
philosophical reason behind Plato’s writing of the Republic!
For
the philosophical comparison in a history-of-ideas kind of way, Plato’s earthy
man or sky-bound man are also conceptually anticipated (QED) in Jainism, in the Śvētāmbara (White-clad)
and Digambara (sky-clad) traditions.
The one constant in the enlightened Greece
of antiquity is the shift of philosophers and poets away from narratives that
are grounded in stories about 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 find illustrations for 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,
obviously, 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 unavoidably
arise an ambiguity, or perhaps it is only a tension, between The Individual
conceived of as physis or as kosmos. Up until this point in our
reflection, 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, forgetting the phenomenon of
Greek philosophy as an 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; what is that ‘whatever’ that is cocooned inside the more connotative
elements that accrue to people as a result of their particular historical
circumstances? Is there some essential quantity, or quality, that all men share
as humans, which also makes them specifically individual? Is there such a thing
as an essential and therefore irreducible human nature?
The two general philosophical
theories on this question, which Phrontisterion
examined in “The
Existentialist ‘Project’ & the Ostensible ‘Problem’ of Existence” (November 2013), might be characterized as the Camusian
position and the Sartrian position. Camus, following Nietzsche and others in
the mainstream of Western philosophical thought, thinks there is an
essentialness to men, which, when considered as a collective, makes it
meaningful to speak of individual men as collective Man. Sartre, in contrast, depicts
man as, 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, up to this point in our reflection we
have gained 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 individual role-players in their world. Both historical shifts
toward Western Enlightenment, first in ancient Greece and then in 18th
century France, have been characterized by a vision of human reality wherein
otherworldliness has yielded the right-of-way to a this-worldly interpretation
and expression of Man in his world, with a resulting progression in thinking from
the Religious Mind to the Rational Mind.
Away from Enlightenment.
History
pauses for neither man nor idea, however, but turns itself over and over constantly
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
historical 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, along came the onslaught of the
Christian Church. And philosophical 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,
in the 18th century. And in the period following the second period
of enlightenment, which is the swinging door connecting 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 of the burgeoning Christian sect and its beliefs. But at our
moment in the historical flow of the West, we, the children of the second
enlightenment, are certainly not obliged to make the same choices as their
intellectual forefathers. For better, as for worse.
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 then this physis-principle must also reasonably hold for
the reality that is created by and anchored in the human mind—the kosmos. Such, anyway, was Friedrich Nietzsche’s intuition and insight.
The Age of
Religion yields to the Religious Mind, which then yields again to the Age of
Reason, which seems to want to, once again, yield to the Religious Mind… and on
and on in ceaseless flow like Siddhartha’s eternally flowing river. Which then
yields again historically 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? Between
order and disorder?
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). Yet, 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. For Socrates, of course, the ideal practice was to follow Justice. If 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 Jaurès, discovered, who was practically the only man in the whole of France
to publicly stand against France and her imperious desire, at all costs, to
enter the first world war with Germany. The cost to Jean Jaurès was his life, assassinated from behind 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 ordered innocence and goodness dripping like manna from the hand of one god
or another? This seems to be Western history’s prophetic narrative, to judge the
future of the West by its intellectual history.
By
way of concluding, neither optimistically nor pessimistically, but
realistically: 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.”
Further
reading:
·
https://www.nouvelobs.com/les-chroniques-de-pierre-jourde/20201020.OBS34966/aux-musulmans-et-en-particulier-aux-eleves-et-parents-d-eleves-qui-desapprouvent-les-caricatures-de-mahomet.html
(Reprised from an original essay published
on Phrontisterion on 01/09/2015)
