~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).
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:
(Reprised from an original essay published on Phrontisterion on 01/09/2015)
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