Dead Gods Wandering Around Lost in the World of Men.

~by David Aiken~

§ I can think of few topics more appropriate to the spring season in the West than Dead and Dying Gods. The season is especially festive for Christians, of course, coming off six weeks of famine-defined Lent, which culminates in Easter festivities and a surfeit of chocolate bunnies, colored eggs, and the Holy Week, which prepares the way for Whitsun (Pentecost) and the descent of the Dove. Apparently in the UK the Christian Whitsun has borrowed some aspects of the Pagan festival of Beltane, the Walpurgis Nacht of Faustian fame, which falls at the half-way point between All Hallows Eve (October 31st) and the beginning of summer. Summer is traditionally ushered in by the June solstice on the 21^st.

Grunewald

For those in the Jewish faith tradition, this season marks the beginning of the Feast of Passover, which commemorates the life of a people over whom the Shadow of Death has passed. 

           

In this springtide season, then, during which men’s fancy seems to turn away from the dying and the dead, and to lightly turn to thoughts of God, the question for our reflection concerns the possibility of verifying authentic religious experience in a period of existential intellectual crisis. The short and honest answer to this question is that, although everyone seems to have an opinion, no one actually knows anything for sure. However, what the Reasoning Man does absolutely know about the possibility of authentic religious knowledge in every period, including those marked by existential silence, is that the onus remains on the Magical Man to demonstrate to all and sundry that Gods are somehow relevant to human existence, which is to say that they can in fact be experienced.

            Insufficient to this task is any pretend-answer that seeks to pawn off on the philosophically shortsighted some religious ritual of faith, which is nothing but a metaphor for interpreting an inexperience or a lack of some quantifiable experience. It is necessary for the Magical Man—the religiously minded—to bring to the round-table of thoughtful citizens neither metaphor nor psychology (i.e., some vague notion of “belief” as a precondition of psycho-experience), but rather some real, verifiable human evidence for an experience of the Gods.

            Let us also be quite clear by saying that although a Socratic philosopher’s naturally skeptical nature is fairly indisposed to the more philosophical concept that gives support to the idea of “Deity,” such a Socratic fellow is not necessarily opposed to the possible historical existence of Gods. So, the odd ‘Socrates’ wandering around in the world can be sure that any Divine Critters, who may potentially also be fellow-wanders in this wilderness, will forgive them if they presume to be so intellectually bold as to pose questions concerning Their relevance and/or existence, and concerning how men might acquire knowledge about such things… But, then, is it not reasonable to suppose that Such Enormities as Gods must be big enough to get over a little philosophizing from a pissant ‘Socrates’?

Yet, let us suppose that the case is truly as Plato has said, quoting Heraclitus (B 83), that “The wisest of men, in contrast to God, appears as an ape in wisdom and beauty and all things.” How is it, then, that Gods really cannot tolerate the pint-sized and irritating musings of thinking ape-like humans, although this is certainly the case if we believe the story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11). If it is indeed true that Gods work on a short ego-leash, then the author of this essay and its readers had better watch out for the bolt of lightning coming our way if we dare to continue reading—for friendly fire is just as deadly as if the bolt were meant for another! The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was intended for just such as this author, whence the name of our Phrontisterion URL: nonimprimatur.

 [The following is condensed from peer-reviewed, internationally published research entitled, “On the Death of God. A Post-mortem Reflection on a 'Life’,” which is archived at Phrontisterion, or here. This research is scheduled for full publication in summer 2019 in the Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte ZRGG 71,3 (Brill).]

§ Other prophets of the Death of God… and other Dead and Dying Gods.

Similar to generic dying God stories typical to agrarian cultures, announcements of the death of a God in the western world may also perhaps be seen to follow cycles. A first important announcement occurred in the mid-first century, at sea off the western coast of Greece, with the proclamation that the Great God Pan was dead. Some believe that this moment marked the beginning of the end of the pagan era. The announcement was heard a second time, in the late 19^th century, when Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, returning into the world of men from a self-imposed exile, encounters a holy man in the wood worshipping, says the Heiliger, “the God who is my God”-- a statement that leaves Zarathustra wondering at the fact that this holy man had not heard in his woods that God is dead. Nietzsche mitigates the matter-of-fact flatness of Zarathustra’s wonder by also composing an exalted, quasi-mystical dirge in the now-famous madman story from the Gay Science.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the greatest of all murderers? … Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Many have been the assertions that “God is dead,” and sundry the variations on the theme: from the “flight of the Gods,” the “Entflohene Götter”, of Hölderlin, to the contemporary God is Dead movement in America. It seems, however, that there is always hidden within the very language of the assertion a second proposition: namely, that the Gods, and especially the God that surfaced in the theological traditions of the Christians, once existed. More philosophically oriented than the German romantics and their “Gods,” the high priests of the American Death of God movement offered up the death of the Christian God not by talking about “Him,” but rather, by talking about how humans seem to have transcended the need, interest, or even the possibility, of Him. So what has been at issue in this Death of God tradition, it would seem, is really not (the) Deity, but rather the human (lack of) interest story.

In the light of the various traditions of God/s in the West, then, and of Their dyings, let us examine a different alternative—let us assume that we moderns do in fact live post mortem Dei christiani. Let us also assume that there are plausible intellectual justifications for why the modern world has moved beyond the Christian faith.

In the Great Conversation, the "death of God" thinkers have laid the theoretical foundations of an idea. For when Plato posited the reality of the Forms to explain how things came into being and (were) moved, it was not long before Aristotle came along to point out that, at the end of the day, the Forms are only a theoretical model with logical issues (e.g., their immovable, yet causative natures, present contradiction), and that a very adequate, persuasive, and almost entirely empirical description of reality could be posited without them. Similarly, I would like to suggest that the modern God-is-Dead propositions and treatments also contain an untenable logical assumption – that the Christian God ever existed.

         The wider evidence of Western history, and not simply the evidence from the history of the Western philosophical tradition, suggests that it is in fact the Christian God, and very specifically The-God-of-the-Bible, who has gone missing. And there is no need of a romantic and exalted post mortem, for the failure of The-God-of-the-Bible, equal to that of His Alter Ego The God of the Christians, is that as a philosophical Fiction derived from debate and consensus, He/They never had any historical reality.

Is the Christian God, the Protagonist of the Bible, really dead? The question is certainly of academic interest to the scholar of religions, and also a challenge for the believer in the fides Christiana.

            Evidence clearly shows that The God of the Christians is not The-God-of-the-Bible; rather “It” is a Concept of philosophy—an extraterritorial Deity of Logic born out of the speculations of the earliest Platonized Christian philosophers. It could in fact be argued that Western philosophy already reached its zenith in the first half of the Common Era with the philosophical conception and articulation of this God, whose genealogy can be traced in its evolution from a Hellenistic Abstraktum, to a Supreme philosophico-religious Idea(l). This “God,” conceived very literally out of season, corresponds to the highest ideals of western neo-platonic thought, and bears no comparison, either in actions or character, to the historico-geographical deities of the Hebrew Bible. There is considerable evidence to substantiate this argument.

§ The-God-of-the-Bible.

Buttressed by archaeology, biblical scholarship has paved a wide road for the articulation of this argument; and much of recent scholarship received its impetus from Albrecht Alt’s groundbreaking 1929 essay on the God of the Fathers, which was so fruitfully furthered by the works of Albright, Gordon, D.N. Freedman, and the Harvard scholar Frank Cross, of Dead Sea Scrolls fame. The Albright “school,” in seeking to identify more fully the various Deities of the Bible in the light of Their ancient Near Eastern origins, has led some to wonder whether the Western Religious narrative has not in fact completely “lost” the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible in its attempt to articulate a philosophical God. Such is R. Friedman’s recent thesis: that the Hebrew Bible is literally a record of the disappearance of God—that it is the story of a God who has gone into retirement, who, like the Canaanite El a thousand years before him, is become deus quiescens.

            This is a troubling state of affairs for the study of western religions. Indeed, it is potentially a worst-case scenario. For in addition to having perhaps identified the wrong deity as God, western religious scholars now must consider the possibility that the Hebrew Bible may be the narrative record of a God-become-absent from the world of men (deus absconditus).  Indeed, it has always been difficult for the missionary to make a persuasive case for a God who is not present to defend himself publicly—the Baalite priests of I Kings 18 learned from Elijah, much to their detriment, that les [dieux] absents ont toujours tort.

The German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch profiled this argument already in a 1920 volume entitled, The Great Deception, in which he argued that, just like the other olden gods: “the Hebrew national god (Nationalgott) belongs also to the ‘anemic’ ones (elîlîm)—as the Old Testament relishes designating the gods of other peoples—and it is impossible that he should be identified … with the most-powerful GOD.” Delitzsch concludes with this: “Israel is not the people of ‘GOD’, but the people of Jaho, as Moab is the people of Kemosh and Assur the people of the god Asur.” In a similar iteration in the Interpreter’s Bible one reads: “The religion of the fathers was not the same as the worship of the thundering Yahweh of Sinai. The God pictured in Genesis is not like the God who reveals himself to Moses in the book of Exodus.”

(Reprised from an original Phrontisterion essay first posted in April 2013)

Lost, But Not-found

~by David Aiken~

Just about every human child born in and after the 1960s knows about existentialism and has probably thrown around the term, or an associative culprit—Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, & Co.—a time or two at some cocktail party or other. All in all, it is a fine and weighty word with which to impress those who are impressionable and to offend those who seek to take offense. ‘Existentialism’ is a word that has enjoyed all the status of a philosophically charged nuclear device being detonated in a conversation in which one seeks evasion from intellectual obligation, from moral responsibility, or in which one just wants to do a little intellectual sparing with a Christian-ly minded opponent.

The term “existentialism,” however, which unquestionably describes a situation of philosophical import, is yet not a philosophy in its own right; or, at least, it is not an identifiable assemblage of ideas and concepts articulated by a unified and deliberate author or faction (i.e., it has no omniscient narrator!), which would allow one to point a finger at someone and say, “Ah ha, there goes an existentialist!” So, existentialism is not a system of thinking. Rather, it is the situation or experience of the mind-world (the kosmos) in which the generally homogenous organization of our social, religious, philosophical, and scientific ideas (for those in the know: the paradigm), has become progressively disrupted and porous, and thus disharmonious or heterogeneous—at which point all hell begins to break loose in terms of how we interpret what has meaning and value in our world.

With the loss of a universalizing or commonly accepted notion of how one might best interpret or best prioritize data or information, which happens when the commonly held truth system or paradigm goes on walkabout for an individual, it will be replaced by any of a nearly infinite variety of possible perspectives and thoughts and opinions that could be entertained in and by the ambient Zeitgeist. In this situation, our intellectual take on the “lay of the land” begins to look like a paradigmatic wasteland, barren of any specific dominant belief or narrative.

We no longer know what to think or believe, or why we should act in some particular way as opposed to almost every other way. To borrow just a little from Schopenhauer’s idea that systematic thinking is an architectural structure: when the foundation begins to crumble, the edifice built upon it also becomes unreliable—so, the London Bridge of interpretive intelligibility comes falling down… and pop goes the weasel in an intellectual no-man’s land!

In this type of situation, a rationalist philosopher like Immanuel Kant might anchor his idea of perception, which is a function of the human mind, in the (for him) necessary deduction that some unknowable Ding-an-sich or thing-in-itself type of worldly reality is present behind the perceptions of my body, that there is an out-there reality which caused or provoked my perceptions in the first place. Yet, this other and original “world” behind the “perceived-world,” which has gotten itself all tangled up in my seeing and hearing and tasting and feeling and smelling, is itself unknown and unknowable precisely because it is outside of the confines of how my body collects data and thus ‘grasps’ the world around it. So as far as Kant is concerned, there is a world out-there beyond my perceptions, but which anchors my perceptions. So, there are two elements in this Kantian equation: 1) the world out-there, and 2) the concept of the world that I construct in my mind, which consists of the out-there world + whatever other changes my body needs to contribute to that original out-there thing in order for me to be able to see it, hear it, taste it, feel it, and smell it. To be sure, this is a lovely philosophical construct in its architectural design.

            Schopenhauer, of course, kindly (or not so, if his curmudgeonly reputation is accurate and well-deserved) takes exception to Kant’s architectural flair, and thus dismisses the Kantian philosophical foundation (the out-there world), but decides to keep the Kantian mental edifice. So Schopenhauer chooses to hoist philosophical anchor in a distinctly non-Kantianesque movement – by arguing that the “world” is in fact no-“thing” other than the mere composition of my perception/imagination (Vorstellung) and my will (Wille).

Now, we all know, more or less, what a conversion is in the religious and philosophical meaning. The individual Turns Away From one path, and Turns Toward (con + vertere) a new path – there is a changing of the mind, which then is supposed to have some application to my actions. As an intellectual event, conversion is an ordering of the mind around a philosophical anchor, a very deliberate turning toward a new organizing idea or principle, which then allows us to put our thinking house in order. What happens, though, when the paradigm surrounding the anchor, which is composed of associative ideas and ancillary beliefs, breaks down? How do we reason philosophically, or even meaningfully, in an intellectual wasteland? What are the rules for thinking during Human History’s more existential and therefore intellectually chaotic moments?

            That this question is still meaningful actually shows why existentialism is not a philosophy in any ordinary sense of that word—for we are not converted to the existential philosophy. Rather, we become persuaded that the organizing worldview, the paradigm that shaped our perceptions about the world surrounding our thinking as we grew up, has become porous and is dissolving, and that it no longer holds sway as truth over our minds. In the moment of that realization we have become anti-converts.

           

However, there certainly were, are, and can be a variety of plausibly meaningful intellectual responses to the existential situation, and these responses certainly can be articulated philosophically. An example of this may be found in Camus’ volume of philosophically oriented essays entitled The Rebel.

           

As a condition marking the human intellectual condition, existentialism is not a state of the physis-world, but rather of the kosmos-world. In the history of the Western philosophical tradition, such a state of mind has always been accompanied by the disintegration of a dominant religious world-view. To date, for example, there have been two clear existential periods in the history of the western thought tradition, both of which have been triggered by a breakdown of a mytho-religious intellectual paradigm. The first dissolution, which began in ancient Greece around the 6^th century B.C.E., resulted in the birth of philosophy with the Greek natural philosophers, such as Thales, Heraclitus, et al. And a Really Big Idea that sprung up from this first and primary breakdown of a mytho-religious paradigm in the West, and which oversaw the birth of Greek philosophy, was the articulation of the Just Life.

            In the Greece of that time, the idea of Justice derived from an understanding of the physis-world as a system where the processes of the world occurred correctly or rightly—which is to say, justly. Philosophically speaking, this idea is not dissimilar to the Asian understanding of the Tao. Human understanding was anchored in the right understanding of the “way” of the natural world – phases of the moon, wind blowing, water flowing, stuff coming into being and leaving being, etc. Naturally then, if there was a rightness inherent in the way the natural or physis-world operated, the next logical step would be to search out the rightness, or justice, that must also be inherent in men’s relationship to their world in general, and to one another in the polis in particular. On the question of Justice, of course, the great Socrates comes to mind among others.

           

The second existential period in the western thought tradition was provoked by the “Fall” of Christianity, by the progressive dissolution of the Christian worldview. Historically, what was to become an anchoring idea for this second existential period, was the articulation of the idea of Man as thinking subject – the Cartesian cogito, an idea that has continued on to the philosophically fantastic, albeit muddling practical success we see around us still today in the form of democracy.

            It is interesting to note that the dominant speculative response to this second breakdown of the mytho-religious paradigm remains, as in the first existential period of Greek antiquity, surrounds the question of justice. Hence, there is Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which the author invites us to observe that God’s justice has no effect on, in, or for this world of men, and that men’s justice is, frankly, no better – for by and large it only manages to muddle its way to concluding that an innocent Dmitri Karamazov is guilty of and should be punished for patricide. Thus, also, Nietzsche’s pale criminal (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, book I) rebuts for his hypocrisy the judge who is standing in judgement over him– there can be no justice (but also no true crime) where all men (including judges) are born native predators, and where all men must, of necessity, work out their native predatory destinies in the world of predatory men. Thus, also, Joseph K’s fruitless search to discover the crime he must have committed, because he has been sentenced to capital punishment for that crime, in Kafka’s The Trial. All that K manages to discover is that he is guilty and that the “system” has the power to exact punishment on him. Thus also, finally, Meursault’s trial in Camus’ The Stranger, in which he is put on trial for the murder of a man, but condemned, really, because he apparently, in his remembering her death, did not show the proper love and appreciation for his mother.

(Reprise from a Phrontisterion essay entitled ‘An Existential Moment’, posted in February 2013)

November's Blog_The Existentialist “Project” & the Ostensible “Problem” of Existence.

Douglas Adam’s computer, in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, famously spits out the following answer –42, when asked the question, what is the meaning of life? So not daring to tread where even fictional computers only go sluggishly and with trepidation, let me distinguish between the hitchhiker’s question concerning the meaning of life, and a much more focused reflection on the so-called “problem” of existence.

… “to make the journey to the truth upon the waters of make-believe” (Salmon Rushdie, Joseph Anton). It is a rather wonderful irony that most of existentialist philosophy is actually existentialist and Nobel Prize winning literature. This makes reading transpositions of existentialist themes and perceptions, from authors such as Luigi Pirandello (1934), Hermann Hesse (1946), André Gide (1947), Albert Camus (1957), Jean-Paul Sartre (1964), and Samuel Beckett (1969), much more interesting, aesthetically satisfying, and emotionally inspiring.

            This is a noteworthy advantage when reading existentialist fiction, because for a rather long time the only other alternative was the point of view represented by the Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann. Kaufmann edited the first, and for a long while only, existentialist primer intended for English-language students of philosophy, so for texts from philosophers of the existentialist persuasion he had the market cornered; and of course on that corner only Kaufmann’s dictum reigned supreme: that the criterion for belonging to the club of existentialists is to be depressed! This, notwithstanding that Kaufmann’s life work was the rehabilitation of the most joyful of all existentialists, Nietzsche, who, if we consider philosophy only historically, was really only a proto-existentialist.

            An exception that confirms our above-stated rule that existentialism is most cogently expressed in the language of prize-winning literati, is the Russian existentialist writer, Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), who, although certainly worthy to be a NP recipient, had the misfortune to flourish well before the onset of Nobel Prizes in Literature, which did not begin until 1901. There is also the Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), an exquisite and exquisitely existentialist writer if ever there was; and if in their infinite wisdom the Nobel Committee did not deem Borges fit to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which they did not, then it must be that the esteemed NP Committee Members had already begun to follow the type of selection peculiarities that would later characterize the train(-wreck) of thought that would lead them to award the Nobel Peace Prize to American President Barack Obama (ostensibly not for the following non-peaceful types of things: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; supporting military intervention in Somalia, Libya, and Syria; escalating the drone war in Pakistan; Guantanamo; extending the Patriot Act; etc.).

            To put clearly the obvious point to the argument: the writing of existentialist littérateurs is significantly and just all-around better than the writing of existentialist philosophers. By way of demonstrating the unfortunate philosophical standard—if you are looking to pass a thoroughly soporific moment, crack one of the covers of existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers who, although obviously superbly educated, reads like a dehydrated mud puddle.

Common to all of these contributors to the existentialist project, of course, is that they follow their own inimitable visions and imaginary fancies concerning the World of Men; and each narrates into existence heuristic forays into that World outside of the normal high-ways and by-ways of the classical thought tradition, thus exposing to our view and for our consideration the almost infinite variety of themes associated with the existentialist realization of Man’s Coming-of-Age, of our radical solitude and vulnerability. In language borrowed from Rushdie (who has only won the Booker Prize for literature), story telling of this philosophical sort is in fact an invitation for us to enter into the existential frame of interiority, to recognize that the World within is without borders. Formulaically, the Open Self equals the Open Universe. So Rushdie writes in Joseph Anton:

Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be. […] There were plenty of people who didn’t want the universe opened, who would, in fact, prefer it to be shut down quite a bit, and so when artists went to the frontier and pushed they often found powerful forces pushing back.

This is a literature that puts us in the awkward position of having to reflect on our lives from womb to tomb; and in that reflection we will be called upon to give an accounting for what we will Stand For in the space & time between the extremes. This is a literature that asks from us that we enter into the world of Symbol; that we allow our life to become transmogrified into a “Standing For”; and that the days of our lives should become representative or reflective of some notion of Otherness, some Idea(l)—that we should strive to embody the Symbolic Life.

Heads & Hands. A common device used by both littérateurs and philosophers, and which is certainly worth our meditating upon, is the rather typical existentialist opposition between Homo Faber, man as maker or doer, and Homo Sapiens, man as thinker or knower. A superb illustration of this device frames Hermann Hesse’s 1930 novel, Narcissus and Goldmund, where Narcissus will represent the life of the mind and Goldmund the “handy” life of the creator or artist; and Hesse’s story-telling talent is such that all the peripeties of his two protagonists will carefully shadow the singular antagonism in our own Western lives between the life of the mind and the life of the body. When one takes this particular device, opposing the doer to the thinker, and applies it to the Western philosophical Life-world, which is becoming ever-more defined by all the various types of materialisms, then the existential dilemma achieves a certain philosophical poignancy and urgency, which is exactly what the NP Committee Members have not failed to recognize in the great existentialist literature of the last 100+ years.

            However, if we had only the philosophers and their generally impermeable writing styles to inform us on this, the very intimate confrontation between our bodies and our minds, then it would look something like the analysis composed by the Stanford professor of German and philosophy, Kurt Reinhardt, in his 1952 book, The Existentialist Revolt. Reinhardt introduces his topic by considering the merits of a diagnosis about Western culture, doomed to materialism and despair, which is advanced by a German philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) in his 1917 masterwork, The End of the West.

There is no doubt that if his premises of an all-inclusive materialism and naturalism were correct, the conclusions presented in The End of the West are logically conclusive and thus equally correct. If the distinguishing mark of man is indeed “his hand” rather than his head, then such a being might actually achieve its greatest triumphs in the creation of “millions and billions of horsepower. But if man’s distinguishing marks are his intellect and free will, then the entire picture changes, and the essentially different premises call for essentially different conclusions and solutions. If in fact the crisis of human existence issues from the confused mind, the sick heart, and the perverted will of modern Western man, then he and his civilization are not irretrievably doomed or lost, because then even at this critical juncture human nature will be able to rouse itself and to rise again, to challenge the “spirit of the age” and to recover the wholeness and balance of a truly human life and civilization.

Reinhardt’s book allows us to cherry-pick yet another splendid illustration of the device of opposing the doer to the thinker, and then applying that to the Western philosophical Life-world. According to Reinhardt, French personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950) frames his thinking in a parallel between “creative nihilism” and “destructive nihilism.” Creative nihilism, which characterizes the thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger, is of the head (Homo Sapiens). It is an intellectual nihilism that sees the death of philosophy and the life of the mind through valuation of faith and the anti-intellectual life. This nihilism is “creative” because it is “preliminary” in nature, which simply means that Reason precedes Action. Destructive nihilism (Homo Faber), on the other hand, is where the hand is occupied with actual physical nihilism, the destruction of man and his planet. This type of nihilism is, to state the obvious, rather definitive in nature.

            There is also Reinhardt on a Nietzschean oppositionalism, citing an 1873 reference concerning barbarism—that “Western hearts had been emptied of the strong and noble sentiments of a heroic past”: ‘…barbarism in human minds, which had lost their sense of direction and orientation, and of the barbarism in human works and deeds which had become the stillborn children of intellectual and moral chaos.’”

            Finally, Reinhardt reminds us, in the words of French Catholic and existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), that Man is Homo Viator (a “traveling man,” a voyager, or explorer), constantly unterwegs between the world-at-hand, as Heidegger might have said, the world he creates with his hands, and the world pulsating in his head, the world of meaning and purpose and intent, the philosophical world. The journey, when conceived of in this Heracleitan kind of way, is between the greater sophon, divine wisdom, which is immanent in the cosmic dialectic, and human phronesis, “introspective listening” to the way, or the being, of the world around us.

Now although the ideas with which Reinhardt is engaged are certainly and obviously interesting and important in and of themselves, and even engrossing, their stylized philosophical articulations have nothing of the littérateur’s je-ne-sais-quoi related to the turning of a phrase in the art of telling the Story. This is perhaps history of philosophy at its best; but it is just not the stuff of a Nobel in Literature.

The Horns of the Human Dilemma. Another component common to collaborators in the existentialist project, is that central to their narrative plots is the “problem” of existence.

                  I should perhaps concede at this point that, before reading existentialist literature, it had never occurred to me that “being here” in the world was especially problematic (beyond muddling through the usual predicaments of growing up, finding a job, thinking about relationships, and difficulties of that sort)… nonetheless, with respect to existence, the philosophical dilemma upon whose horns we are ostensibly poised, is that we are here instead of not here (to speak like Parmenides by way of Heidegger); and so also, by extension, being here, what should we do to pass the time? (When stated like this, though, the problem actually begins to sound a lot more like a religious rather than a philosophical inquiry – a sort of Pirandelloesque, six-characters-in-search-of-an-author (i.e., a god) problem of origins.)

            In another post that also deals with this “problem” of existence, I suggested that we humans, each and every one, are not any particular “thing,” but rather like so many layers of an onion without an actual being or core at the center. I have since come to realize, however, that while I really like my onion metaphor, as I really like being able to “blame” Heraclitus for the philosophical direction of that earlier reflection, I did not really like discovering, as well, that I was following a point of view also shared by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. So I have decided to give equal time for the question to another French existentialist intellectual, Albert Camus. Perhaps it is just that I find Camus more personally likeable than the rancunier Sartre. Color me vindictive.

            On this one question, though, inspired by an intuition from Heraclitus, which Sartre translated into philosophical constructs and I blogified into an onion-like metaphor, Sartre and I have both found it plausible that the human individual is not some essential “thing,” some substantive self, some type of noun-idea.  Rather, Man is a Verbal idea – a Deciding and an Acting. The existentialist conclusion from this premise is then rather straight-forward and unavoidable: that because our decisions and actions are 1) absolutely arbitrary—in the infinite diversity of decisions and actions the ones we choose are simply from among an infinite many, and 2) profoundly irrelevant to some bigger, and specifically pertinent picture—life has no obvious or intrinsic single goal, it would therefore seem that, along with our decisions and actions, which have no specifically ultimate arguable point, neither does Mankind as such have one precise and decisive point to it.

            On this particular question of being, however, unlike Heraclitus, Sartre, and this humble teacher of philosophy, Camus follows Friedrich Nietzsche, holding that the individual is in fact some essential “thing,” and that there is in fact a fundamental nature to the animal that is Man.

            Whatever we think Man is ultimately, though, He is still very much alone in an unanchored kosmos (read: surrounded entirely by immanence with no hope of transcendence); and cocooned by despair and absurdity, He is become defined by a condition of Worldlessness, which is the precondition for the existential possibility of self-creation. Camus will find this idea so persuasive, in fact, that in the 1938 autobiographical collection called Noces, he will even transform the existential life-journey, the adventure of coming-home-to-self, into a type of Odyssean journey Home, a Nostos : « ce n’est pas si facile de devenir ce qu’on est. »  It is on this point, precisely, that Camus, the intellectual and journalist, will oppose Sartre, famous philosopher and arrogant jerk.  

            Philosophical one-upmanship notwithstanding, it is an interesting irony of history that while Sartre may have possibly won the greater academic battle for existentialism on the question of being, it will still be Camus who will most influence general international readers of existential literature, with books such as L’Etranger. After all, who has ever read Sartre’s massive 1943 opus, Etre et le néant (which tips the scales at 722 pages in the French edition), and can still claim to have some kind of a life?

Zarathustra summons from outre-tombe. Another piece of the existentialist project, which goes well beyond how the various story-tellers, both littérateur and philosopher, frame their stories and which devices they use, is that each seeks deliberately to make of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, arguably the West’s first full-bodied albeit fictional existentialist, a paraphrase into real-world categories of human existence. These translations will be multifaceted, certainly, and not necessarily recognizable for any one quality that might bind them together as a particular type. Yet it may still be argued that each translation, each fictional incarnation, no matter how they differ from one another, is a plausible imagined-reflection of some aspect of the Zarathustrian type, as that type could appear in the World of Men. Ultimately, it will be up to the Reader to determine what the various characters in the various narratives symbolize, and whether the journey of those characters on their way to Übermensch-Symbol is actually successful, either as embodying a faithful son of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, or simply as representing a credible Life of Man.

            Zarathustra can look out at us through the eyes of Camus’ Merseult (L’Etranger), for example, as he can be translated through the binary philoso-phrenia of Harry Haller (Steppenwolf). Normally in his writings, Hesse tended to split the mind/body problem classically, such as he does through the characters of Narcissus (mind-intellectual) and Goldmund (body-artist) in the eponymously titled work. His depiction of Haller, though, not unlike that of his Siddhartha, unifies the dichotomy in one person, one body.

            A quality that would seem to knit together many of Sartre’s existential protagonists, is an overwhelming feeling of nausea (Les mains sales; La nausée); but the sine que non characteristic of his Zarathustras, which Sartre makes unmistakably clear in his 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, is that in the person of the existentialist, Zarathustra is a man (or woman) of action.

            In a work such as Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot, on the other hand, the Zarathustrian type might not necessarily be reflected through one of the characters, nor even be implicitly housed in the Omniscient Narrator. Rather, the Reader may be called upon to recognize that the situational outworking of the plot may itself be the subject of the piece, and that Beckett might perhaps be suggesting that the most relevant way to speak of a god who is expected to arrive, to be there (present), is to speak of the God(ot) who is not there (absent).

            Zarathustra is also present in other existentialist literature, but perhaps only as a fragmented composite, where no one character has all the traits that we might associate with an Über-Man, with one who has achieved the freedom of having divested himself, intellectually, of the emotional and irrational accouterments of Culture. Diverse Zarathustrian traits might be shared among various characters, thus giving the impression that each of the players in the novel’s cast of characters is wandering around somewhere on the road toward the liberation of his own Thought-Life. This seems to me to be true of André Gide’s 1902 L’immoraliste.

            There are many ways to become waylaid in our thinking about this novel—that it is about homosexuality, or pedophilia, or evil; but this is to wander along the Holzwege of Gide’s thought-world, instead of daring to tread the high road of his fictional vision. For it is indisputable that Gide is attempting to characterize Zarathustrian qualities in L’immoraliste, which have little to do with specific forms of sexuality or with evil; he is taking us along on the journey back to the natural world (Penguin: 2000, 120), away from the masks (cities, labor, morality) created by men in their histories…. (Ibid, 110). Indeed, it is perhaps only in this way that the principal protagonist, Michel, reflects any recognizable quality of the Zarathustrian hero.

            Gide’s Ménalque, on the other hand, although he plays only a small part in the overall narrative of L’immoraliste, is a Zarathustrian hero of Wildean proportions; and it is through this character that we come to see just how impoverished Michel is, how pathetically dim his illumination, and how very much bound he is to the chains of his shallow thought-life. Ménalque incarnates Man-as-Choosing-Agent who is very much at home in himself in his world. He offers drink to others for their pleasure, but does not himself drink, because, he says, “I find sobriety a more powerful form of intoxication, one where I retain my lucidity. […] I seek to heighten life, not diminish it through intoxication.” Continuing the conversation with Michel, Ménalque lays out the existential underpinnings that explain his life:

. . . I hate resting. Possessions encourage this; when one feels secure one falls asleep. I love life enough to prefer to live it awake. So within all this wealth I preserve a sense of precariousness with which I aggravate, or at least intensify, my life. I can’t claim that I love danger, but I do like life to be risky. I like it to make demands on my courage, my happiness, my health at every moment . . .

Against the life-affirming light of this Zarathustrian existentialism, Michel is able to measure his own intellectual puniness and pastiness: “But how pale are mere words compared to actions! Wasn’t Ménalque’s life, his smallest action, a thousand times more eloquent than my lectures? Now I understood that the moral lessons of the great philosophers of Antiquity were given as much by example as by words, if not more so.”

It seems fitting to close our meandering reflections on the Existentialist “Project” with a sentiment from Gide’s Ménalque, which, because it is so obviously and so fully inspired by Nietzsche’s proto-existentialism, could be said to lie at the heart of the very best of existentialist thought:

The Greeks created their ideals directly from life. The life of the artist was itself an act of poetic creation, the life of the philosopher the enactment of his philosophy. Both are bound up with life: instead of ignoring each other, philosophy fed poetry, and poetry expressed philosophy, with admirably persuasive results. Nowadays beauty no longer appears in action, action no longer aspires to be beautiful, and wisdom exists in a separate sphere.

April's Blog_Dead Gods Wandering Around Lost in the World of Men

(Part I of a loosely knit series).

I can think of few topics more appropriate to this particular season than Dead and Dying Gods. The season is especially festive for Christians, of course, coming off the long season of Lent, which culminates in Easter, a surfeit of chocolate bunnies and Easter eggs, and the Holy Week, which prepares the way for Whitsun (Pentecost) and the descent of the Dove; but also for Jews because it marks the beginning of Passover, and the life of a people over whom the Shadow of Death has passed. 
            The Christian Whitsun also happens to correspond seasonally to the Pagan festival of Beltane, the Walpurgis Nacht of Faustian fame, which, falling six months after All Hallows Eve, marks the beginning of summer (traditionally early May). 

In this springtide season, then, during which men’s fancy seems to turn away from the dying and the dead, and lightly turn to thoughts of God, the question for our reflection concerns the possibility of verifying authentic religious experience in a period of existential intellectual crisis. The short and honest answer to this question is that, although everyone seems to have an opinion, no one actually knows anything for real. HOWEVER, what I, the Reasoning Man, do absolutely know about the possibility of authentic religious knowledge in an existential period, is that the onus remains on the Magical Man TO DEMONSTRATE to all and sundry that Gods are relevant to human existence, which is to say that they can in fact be experienced.

            Insufficient to this task is any pretend-answer that seeks to pawn off on the philosophically shortsighted some religious ritual, which is nothing but a metaphor for interpreting an in-experience, or a lack of some quantifiable experience. It is necessary for the Magical Man—the religiously minded—to bring to the round-table of thoughtful citizens neither metaphor nor psychology (i.e., some vague notion of “belief” as a precondition of psycho-experience), but rather some real, verifiable human evidence for an experience of the Gods.

            Let me also be quite clear when I say that although my naturally critical nature is fairly indisposed to the more philosophical concept that gives support to the idea of “deity,” I am certainly not opposed philosophically to the possible historical existence of Gods, as are some. So I am sure that any Divine Critters out there will forgive me if I presume to be so intellectually bold as to pose questions concerning Their relevance and/or existence, and concerning how men might acquire knowledge about these things… But then I suppose that Such Enormities as Gods must be big enough to get over my little pissant philosophizing.

            However, if it should in fact turn out that the Gods cannot tolerate the pint-sized musings of thinking humans, Dear Reader, which might actually be the case upon closer reading of the story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 15), then you best watch out for the bolt of lighting coming your way if you dare to continue reading this post—friendly fire is just as deadly as if the bolt were meant for you! The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was intended for just such as me, whence the name of our Phrontisterion URL: nonimprimatur.

[The following essay is condensed from research (complete with references) entitled, “On the Death of God. Reflections on His Life and Post-mortem Future (2011),” which is archived on our Phrontisterion site. ]

Other prophets of the Death of God… and other Dead and Dying Gods.

Similar to generic dying God stories typical to agrarian cultures, announcements of the death of a God in the western world may also perhaps be seen to follow cycles. A first important announcement occurred in the mid-first century, at sea off the western coast of Greece, with the proclamation that the Great God Pan was dead. Some believe that this moment marked the beginning of the end of the pagan era. The announcement was heard a second time, in the late 19^th century, when Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, returning into the world of men from a self-imposed exile, encounters a holy man in the wood worshipping, says the Heiliger, “the God who is my God”-- a statement that leaves Zarathustra wondering at the fact that this holy man had not heard in his woods that God is dead. Nietzsche mitigates the matter-of-fact flatness of Zarathustra’s wonder by also composing an exalted, quasi-mystical dirge in the now-famous madman story from the Gay Science.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? … Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Many have been the assertions that “God is dead,” and sundry the variations on the theme: from the “flight of the Gods,” the “Entflohene Götter”, of Hölderlin, to the contemporary God is Dead movement in America. It seems, however, that there is always hidden within the very language of the assertion, a second proposition: namely, that the Gods, and especially the God that surfaced in the theological traditions of the Christians, once existed. More philosophically oriented than the German romantics and their “Gods,” the high priests of the American Death of God movement offered up the death of the Christian God not by talking about “Him,” but rather, by talking about how humans seem to have transcended the need, interest, or even the possibility, of Him. So what has been at issue in this Death of God tradition, it would seem, is really not (the) Deity, but rather the human (lack of) interest story.

         In the light of the various traditions of God/s in the West, then, and of Their dyings, let us examine a different alternative—let us assume that we moderns do in fact live post mortem Dei christiani. Let us also assume that there are plausible intellectual justifications for why the modern world has moved beyond the Christian faith.

In the Great Conversation, the "death of God" thinkers have laid the theoretical foundations of an idea. For when Plato posited the reality of the Forms to explain how things came into being and (were) moved, it was not long before Aristotle came along to point out that, at the end of the day, the Forms are only a theoretical model with logical issues (e.g., their immovable, yet causative natures), and that a very adequate, persuasive, and almost entirely empirical description of reality could be posited without them. Similarly, I would like to suggest that the modern God-is-Dead propositions and treatments also contain an untenable logical assumption – that the Christian God ever existed.

         The wider evidence of Western history, and not simply the evidence from the history of the Western philosophical tradition, suggests that it is in fact the Christian God, and very specifically The-God-of-the-Bible, who has gone missing. And there is no need of a romantic and exalted post mortem: for the failure of The-God-of-the-Bible, equal to that of His Alter Ego The God of the Christians, is that as a philosophical Fiction derived from debate and consensus, He/They never had any historical reality.

Is the Christian God, the Protagonist of the Bible, really dead? The question is certainly of academic interest to the scholar of religions, and also a challenge for the believer in the fides christiana.

            Evidence clearly shows that The God of the Christians is not The-God-of-the-Bible; rather “It” is a Concept of philosophy—an extraterritorial Deity of Logic born out of the speculations of the earliest Platonized Christian philosophers. It could in fact be argued that Western philosophy already reached its zenith in the first half of the Common Era with the philosophical conception and articulation of this God, whose genealogy can be traced in its evolution from a Hellenistic Abstraktum, to a Supreme philosophico-religious Idea(l). This “God,” conceived very literally out of season, corresponds to the highest ideals of western neo-platonic thought, and bears no comparison, either in actions or character, to the historico-geographical deities of the Hebrew Bible. There is considerable evidence to substantiate this argument.

The-God-of-the-Bible.

Buttressed by archaeology, biblical scholarship has paved a wide road for the articulation of this argument; and much of recent scholarship received its impetus from Albrecht Alt’s groundbreaking 1929 essay on the God of the Fathers, which was so fruitfully furthered by the works of Albright, Gordon, D.N. Freedman, and the Harvard scholar Frank Cross, of Dead Sea Scrolls fame. The Albright “school,” in seeking to identify more fully the various Deities of the Bible in the light of Their ancient Near Eastern origins, has led some to wonder whether the Western Religious narrative has not in fact completely “lost” the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible in its attempt to articulate a philosophical God. Such is R. Friedman’s recent thesis: that the Hebrew Bible is literally a record of the disappearance of God—that it is the story of a God who has gone into retirement, who, like the Canaanite El a thousand years before him, is become deus quiescens.

            This is a troubling state of affairs for the study of western religions. Indeed, it is potentially a worst-case scenario. For in addition to having perhaps identified the wrong deity as God, western religious scholars now must consider the possibility that the Hebrew Bible may be the narrative record of a God-become-absent from the world of men (deus absconditus).  Indeed, it has always been difficult for the missionary to make a persuasive case for a God who is not present to defend himself publicly—the Baalite priests of I Kings 18 learned from Elijah, much to their detriment, that les [dieux] absents ont toujours tort.

The German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch profiled this argument already in a 1920 volume entitled, The Great Deception, in which he argued that, just like the other olden gods: “the Hebrew national god (Nationalgott) belongs also to the ‘anemic’ ones (elîlîm)—as the Old Testament relishes designating the gods of other peoples—and it is impossible that he should be identified … with the most-powerful GOD.” Delitzsch concludes with this: “Israel is not the people of ‘GOD’, but the people of Jaho, as Moab is the people of Kemosh and Assur the people of the god Asur.” In a similar iteration in the Interpreter’s Bible one reads: “The religion of the fathers was not the same as the worship of the thundering Yahweh of Sinai. The God pictured in Genesis is not like the God who reveals himself to Moses in the book of Exodus.”

End of Part I.

March's Blog-- Is philosophy a waste of time and space?

Is philosophy a waste of time and space in an existential crisis? Suppose that you wake up one morning only to find yourself stuck right smack in the middle of some kind of a complicated game with a mindboggling number of players, a game that stretches off way beyond all the horizons of time and space and imagination; and suppose, equally, that you have memory neither of how you got into the game, nor of the precise number or identity of the other players, nor of the rules of the game or of its goals. Let us finally suppose that you decide at some point in this waking nightmare that you are not particularly comfortable being enmeshed against your will in this bizarre game, but then you also somehow realize that you do not have the power to just up and quit and to exit the playing field or the Game (—death is no exit; simply another of the infinite doors in the labyrinth-game!).

            So you have no idea what is at stake in this little game of impenetrable rules, and yet you have no choice but to continue playing.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone of Life-Itself – you are on a journey neither sought for nor desired, only to discover that the road map for the remainder of the trip got left behind in some long-past highway rest-stop.

            Where to go…? What to do…? How…? Why…?

Myriad are the tales of rovers in these “foreign” parts we call Life-Itself.

Homer, for example, in the Odyssey, tells us the stories of the travels and woes of one of the most well-known wanderers in human memory: Odysseus.

[1] Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. Yet even so he saved not his comrades, though he desired it sore, for through their own blind folly they perished—fools, who devoured the kine of Helios Hyperion; but he took from them the day of their returning. Of these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, beginning where thou wilt, tell thou even unto us.

[11] Now all the rest, as many as had escaped sheer destruction, were at home, safe from both war and sea, but Odysseus alone, filled with longing for his return and for his wife, did the queenly nymph Calypso, that bright goddess, keep back in her hollow caves, yearning that he should be her husband. But when, as the seasons revolved, the year came in which the gods had ordained that he should return home to Ithaca, not even there was he free from toils, even among his own folk. And all the gods pitied him save Poseidon; but he continued to rage unceasingly against godlike Odysseus until at length he reached his own land.

Tennyson, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, beautifully rendered the obstacle-laden Homecoming (Grk. Nostos) of this ancient Odysseus into a Ulysses well fitted for the 19th century, a wanderer who, in the absence of the gods, was driven onwards by the swells of his own Wanderlust.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed

Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when

Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades2

Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honoured of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy3.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though to breathe were life.

Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this grey spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Another wayfarer, the omniscient narrator in Dante’s Inferno (Canto I), finds himself lost in the Middle of Life, and tells us of his journey through the spiritual realms, until he finally “finds himself” found again.

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;

We are presently living through a period of human existential crisis, with the result that any significance we might attach to our personal passage through the world of Man-existing derives primarily from self-defining, closed interpretive systems—from philosophizing. Such journeys as those described above, and these celebrated travelers, can therefore become roadmaps, and these travelers pathfinders, for each one of us; and if we allow them, if we find the way to make sense of the echo of their voices in the hallways of our own labyrinth, they will become road markers for us modern wayfarers, indicating obstacles for us to avoid, desirable attitudes to cultivate, or not, and helping us to choose out for ourselves from among the almost infinite variety of possible goals that we may freely adopt at one time or another during our own Life-journey.

If this analysis is in fact accurate, then all the resources of Philosophy and Poetry, which are attendant handmaidens in the service of Reason and Inspiration, and which help us to think about and make sense of our Life-journey, can never become exhausted. So as a means of making sense of our world and our journey through it, Philosophy, both as discipline and art, must never be abandoned—that is unless one means to give up entirely on the various interpretive possibilities of human reason and enlightenment. Let it also be clearly said, however, that Philosophy is incapable of yielding just One Single Response/Interpretation of the world upon which all men will agree to hang their hats—rather, it is an ongoing conversation with many layers.

Philosophy in this existential period is fairly persuasively and therefore fairly firmly grounded in the idea of the Subjectum, the cogito, the “I” of Descartes; all other metaphysical ground (read: religious grounding) has been pretty well stripped away—for better and for worse. So it would seem that the “I” who is the Wanderer in this wasteland would be a pretty reasonable philosophical starting place to begin thinking about the World-Life.

            An initial philosophical intuition on the part of some of the earliest thinkers in this modern existentialist period, e.g., German Romantics such Winkelmann, Höldelin, later Heine, etc., and more philosophical types such as Schilling, Hegel, Nietzsche, et al, was to look back into the period of the ancient Greeks in an attempt to discover an original experience of an original world of men as yet unpolluted by centuries of religion.  The strong conception common to these thinkers is that the world of men is tragic (although a variety of different explanations is given in an attempt to explain why this is the case…), and that therefore the experience of men in this world will be defined by Leidenschaft or suffering. From this tragic conception of world and life would also bloom the fine flower of an idea—that the life of the individual is a Work of Art, and that we are all artists. The canvas we paint of our lives is therefore our own.

            Other streams of Philosophy will evolve along other lines of tradition, such as the empirical tradition first articulated by Aristotle, and which will eventually give rise to the 18^th & 19^th century Empiricists like Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Mill, and then the 20^th century Popper; then there will also be the various traditions of (Anglo-American) Analytical Philosophy, developed by Russell, Wittgenstein, Frege, et al, which will include philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and logical positivism. This is Philosophy in her incarnation as a pseudo-empirical science.

            Another persuasive application for Philosophy during the journey of our lives is in trying to discern and to decide how the self can, may, and perhaps should act in the world. This application, popularized of late by the French philosopher Pierre Hadot, also harkens back to the philosophy of the ancient Greek period in order to re-articulate in and for the modern period the Stoic or Socratic life.

            Finally, Philosophy also contains all the elements and tools of enlightenment criticism … so we can, and should, bring all the might of our human understanding to bear critically upon all the bigger questions that interest the individual “I” in the labyrinthine world of men, in this Twilight Zone of Life-Itself. Questions, for instance, concerning what Men should hold sacred, and which touch upon culturally taboo subjects such as:

1.     The received traditions such as religion

2.     The culturally determined ideas – such as State, patriotism, etc.

3.     Of methodologies – science

So, what to do during a journey that you neither asked for nor desired, a journey through a savage (intellectual) wasteland where each step must inevitably be your own? Take a big breath, and Think Big Thoughts… because you cannot be any more lost than you already are.