The Space of a Man

~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 18^th 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 5^th 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 18^th 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 18^th 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)

Nietzsche’s Prophecy: The Great Unlearning of Morality

~by David Aiken~

The media are having a heyday with the assorted moral and legal challenges that are splitting and coring the traditionally held socio-religious beliefs and practices that permeate our Western societies. The affirmation of gay marriage by the US Supreme Court in 2013 effectively guillotined the conventionally held American and Christian belief that marriage is between one man and one woman. And obviously, as has been asserted by some, when traditionally held moral beliefs and religiously held opinions begin dropping like flies on the table, all things then become possible in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. There is no doubt about it: it is mighty slippery on society’s slopes, and the Times They Are (still) A-Changing.

Activist singer Bob Dylan is no doubt surprised to have lived long enough to see the Supreme Court reverse itself and declare de facto, by proclaiming unconstitutional the Voting Rights Act, that race is no longer an issue in America (evidence being, obviously, our black ‘Kenyan-born’ former president). And US Republican Congressional Representative Louie Gohmert, “accomplished idiot” and bigot,  has lived long enough to predict, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s willingness to consider alternative social forms of marital union, that bigamy and polygamy will also eventually become legal forms of family-making and breaking in American. The Future attends us, and we wait breath abated.

So, what if all this social change and all these challenges to traditional morality really do portend the dawning of a new age for America? Is doomsday at hand? Will America, as we know her, cease to exist? Well, yes, and no. Already in the late 19^th century Nietzsche gave prophetic voice to the inevitable advent of profound philosophical changes that must eventually come about both in our actions as well as in our moral consciousness – because we have been too long Christianized. It would seem that the bill is finally coming due for 2000 years of Christian influence. And We the People are once again become the pioneers in a New World adventure. This time, though, America’s Manifest Destiny is leading us into a philosophical wilderness beset with novel and diverse pitfalls and traps, and, failing the emergence of a new Natty Bumppo, “near-fearless warrior” and proto-Marvel superhero, to lead us through the wild highways and byways of this changing intellectual and moral landscape, the only reliable Pathfinder we have to rely on in this new world order is not our Belief, but rather our own Intelligent Reasoning.

My Meditative Philosophical Meandering this month strives to shadow some after-effects of an Idea expressed by Nietzsche perhaps most clearly in his 1888 book The Antichrist, which is the only book completed in what was to have been a four volume series entitled the Will to Power.

Now for reasons that must make sense to them, professional philosophers and other Nietzsche interpreters have chosen to translate into English Nietzsche’s formulation of this Idea, the Umwertung aller Werte, through an unenlightening, immensely unattractive, and scrupulously pompous locution – rendering it as the Transvaluation of Values. Yes, the German expression does mean quite textually: transforming the value of our values; but it is also patently obvious that the English translation is, among many other not-so-nice things, pompous, because it carefully seeks to obscure through hoity-toity and self-important scholarly lingo a rather straightforward philosophical idea – that a time of Great Unlearning is dawning for Western Christianized peoples and cultures.

So while my present Meditative Philosophical Meandering is entirely that of a freewheeling libre-penseur, no blame can be traced back to Nietzsche for this. However, the springboard that propels me into this, my philosophical free-fall, yet remains faithful to Nietzsche’s original idea—the idea of a Great Unlearning, an inversion of morality that is yawning like a philosophical abyss in front of a Western European civilization o’er-hasty for the tumble.

For Nietzsche, in a world in which an individual’s existence is the only anchor for any possible truth about Life and living, the foundational experience for an authentic life must take place in the moment of the Great Unlearning. This is in fact the story of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who was himself destined to become the first voice of this Unlearning, who was himself, much like his antagonistic prototype John the Baptist, an isolated prophet crying out on the highways and byways a new message of good news—“make straight the way of Man.” The Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra is important to this overarching narrative precisely because Zarathustra had himself also to become aware of, and then deliberately unlearn, all the hidden little beliefs, opinions, unarticulated moral principles, and culturally inherited ethical practices (e.g., dead bodies and their need to be honored) that were imperceptibly, but effectively, framing and therefore defining the possibilities of his Thinking. Zarathustra had to unlearn his moral Self before he could get on with the job of becoming a proto-Jack Kerouac come to lay out before the world of the 19^th century and beyond the story of a new “road trip” in which the hero, Man, journeys back from Über-Tier (more-than-animal) to nothing-more-than-Tier (Human All too Human § 40).

           

The details of this psychological journey, this road trip toward the freedom of the individual mind, are then made explicit in Zarathustra’s First Discourse (“The Three Transformations of the Mind”). The first leg of our cognitive transformation comes about when we realize that the Self is a Beast of Burden (= camel, or the Beast + its Burden), when we become aware that we carry around in our minds, for the duration of our stopover in this twilight zone, the Burden of inherited moral, cultural and intellectual baggage. The second leg of our transformation comes about when we seek, and find, the courage to accept the Self as Hero (= lion), when we realize that we must stand, oh how very alone!, in the deserted corners of our mind to fight against the phantasmagorical onslaught of our inherited superstitions and beliefs and values. Finally, the ultimate leg of our transformative journey into freedom, which is to say into the possession of our own Thinking, comes about when we awaken to the Self as New-born (= child), when we have become The Ultimate Outsider, alone in a world packed full of constructed values, now able to “see” that, like a great symphony, the World is also a composition, which is only heard as, in, and through a perceptual and conceptual paradigm called Kosmos. As the Child, the Outsider to the Kosmos, we are finally now free to follow out of our own initiative, unconstrained and with awareness, the paths that the World opens up before us.

         

  In Nietzsche’s vision of the world, for the individual to become free, for him to enter into the possession of himself as a specific and creatively distinct Self, there must be a very deliberate Unlearning of those “culturally” encrusted values that have molded and framed us in our perceptions and conceptions. We must, each and every one individually and in the privacy of our own solitude, shake ourselves loose from society’s “one size fits all” cupcake mold.

            To be sure, Nietzsche’s Great Unlearning was directed principally at inherited moral belief, which is intellectually oppressive precisely because it is anti-here-and-now-human-life, and which grows up out of the religious mind like great unwieldy and bothersome weeds; but of course his greatest battle was pitched against the Dragon of the West, which has been too long protecting the deep-rooted weeds sprung up out of Judaeo-Christian death-promoting morality. So the Great Unlearning in the world of the West would be to become aware of the pervasiveness of the weed-growing root-system of Judaeo-Christian morality, then to fetch the weed-whacker of Reason and whack those weeds into individual and thus collective oblivion; and then to start all over again with constructing for ourselves life-affirming values and principles for action, which would flow out of an essentially pro- and fully- human space. So, Nietzsche writes in the Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht, n. 30; 1888)

The time is coming when we must pay the bill for having been Christian for 2000 years: we have squandered the Center of Gravity [das Schwergewicht] that allows us to live, and for a while we will not know whence we have come or wither we are going. With precisely that same abundance of energy that has generated among men such extreme over-estimations of mankind, we continue unexpectedly to collide with contradictory estimations.

           

When we are birthed into this place, we are not simply popped out neutrally into the big-wide world, and voilà presto, we begin growing as pure, self-defining plants. Rather, we are seeded into a cultural context that, quite independently from our bodies and brains, actually serves, unbidden and automatically, to provide for each one of us a necessary and invisible cultural “shape,” an exoskeleton for our personal I/Self. The question, Who am I?,  does not reference something physical, nor does it point to some brain function. Rather, this “who” is constructed like a puzzle: carefully, unconsciously at first, and piece by piece, out of all the various and sundry cultural influences that surround us. This is one reason why education is so important, and why the study of feral children so fascinating. The one teaches us about journeys whither—toward visions of what we can become if we choose to go on the various journeys the world has on offer; the other shows us a possible journey whence—from what we were and will likely remain, in maybe a more measured, perhaps softer form, if, by choice or laziness, we disregard the Life-world of journeys through the wasteland of Thinking.

The philosophical quest prophesied by Nietzsche now stands before us to accomplish—to transvalue, to deliberately invert our inherited values. What is it that we most value? Justice? Equality? Goodness? Power? Peace? Money? Life? Why is it that we value these ideas, and are these ideas fundamental to the Human Animal in his full glory as both wholly human and profoundly animal?

           

Aside from the obvious importance of the individual journey on this road to personal psyche, there is also the collective journey. In a darker period of modern Western history, Martin Heidegger spoke in his Kanzeler’s Address of the “geistig-volklichen Daseins” of the German people—of the unfolding of the Unenlightenment destiny of the German Volk and its historical blooming into world history as a German moment of self-realization in being-itself. The results of that awakening into Unenlightenment brought the world to its knees, and between 70-85 million individuals, world-wide, into their graves.

For America and the American people, however, because of their historical commitment to Enlightenment philosophical principles, there remain possibilities for a different historical destiny. That said, on the American journey to ‘We the People’, we are now arrived at a philosophical fork in the road. In one direction the road will lead us into a socio-religious life, with its autocratic and unenlightened tendencies, which is even now unfolding before us with its gaping maw yawning like the doors of the thought-prison it is; but it is the predictable because long familiar road. In another direction there is the secular life- the new, the unthought-of, the untested, the unbounded, the free. What is left for us, individuals of interest, to do as We the People approach, by fits and by starts, this fork in the road? That is entirely the question. And the opportunity.

To the Magical Man: it is left to you to drop to your knees to appeal to the Outrageous Deity of the “steep heavens,” and thereby to enter into the Great Silence of the impotent skies. For you others, the Thoughtful Ones, put on your thinking caps, become involved in the life of We the People—for there is much work, much thinking to be done.

Thinking philosophically is a dangerous and lonely game—and certainly not an attractive or comforting enterprise for the normal clan-animal. Especially when the quest that Nietzsche has put before us is nothing less than to see the world of men with new eyes, to reconsider, and to recast the exposed and crumbling intellectual foundations of the moral self in a world becoming new. That bill has now come due.

(Original essay reprised and reworked from Phrontisterion, July 2013)

Further reading on Nietzsche’s Great Unlearning on Phrontisterion:

·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2019/09/great-unlearning-i-elvis-has-left.html

·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2013/09/one-nation-under-god-pseudo-romance.html

·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2014/12/december-januarys-essaysupermen.html

The pursuit of Happiness and the Well-Demoned Life.

~by David Aiken~

We live in a time subjugated by ‘Hallmark Cards’ pseudo- or pop-philosophy, and wir Philosophen, as Nietzsche would have said, “we philosophers,” should definitely be engaged in the quest of examining, eternally and recurrently, the various aspects of this our present maudlin Zeitgeist. The Days of our Lives are being interpreted for us through a lens of sugarcoated fancies. And through our rose-tinted sentimentalist glasses we perceive a world-of-men thoroughly, but implausibly, saturated with saccharine notions of joy & happiness, love & marriage, and ever ready to hum along with the nanny, “raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens…”

            Then, when we finally stride across the threshold of simple-minded belief to enter into the torrential onslaught of Real-Life, we seem startled to find ourselves roaming around the quagmires of an intellectual Wasteland. And slowly, ever-so-painfully-slowly, we realize that we are also troubled by another disturbing ditty that has begun haunting our footsteps, and which sounds strangely familiar, like something Bilbo Baggins might have softly hummed upon leaving his beloved Shire:

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

Now it may well be that Life is like a box of chocolates, as Mrs. Gump one day informed her naïve young son, Forrest; one could just never know what one was going to get. But surely Life seems much more like an exchange with a Cheshire Cat—ONE DAY Alice finds herself wandering around on an Adventure in Wonderland, and so many people seem to her a bit daft… but then she meets a puss from Cheshire that, maybe by way of wanting to comfort her, explains that in fact everyone is mad, to which Alice responds:

But I don't want to go among mad people"(...)
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

The conversation goes downhill from there, of course, when, as Alice politely asks for directions: "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" the Cat laconically responds:

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to" (…).
"I don’t much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

Which brings us right the way ‘round to our meander in the intellectual Wastelands of the world-of-men, and to our question about whether Happiness is really the syrupy kind of subjective past-time suggested by the countless voices of our Zeitgeist. Is Happiness a value or a virtue? Is it a goal to be pursued? Is it even desirable to be happy? Opinions abound.

            But just to problematize the question un tantinet reductively, let us consider whether Hitler, Time Magazine’s 1939 Man of the Year, was a happy camper as he was planning and then setting into motion the new Reich’s takeover of the knowable universe. Now just the idea of a Happy Hitler is generally enough to induce a pukefest in the normal John Q. Citizen of the democratic variety. Yet the answer to our question is undoubtedly “yes,” upon appropriate study and reflection, even though most of us prefer to believe that Hitler was one sick f&%# and that he definitely could not have been happy—not really!

So, just intuitively and just maybe it might perhaps begin to dawn on us that Happiness, which at first blush might be thought to be a value in and of itself, probably is not; and that we should take the time to rethink its position on our virtue/value list!

The point to our little excursion into our crazed social imagination is to suggest that, despite its quasi-unassailable status as an Iconic Idea in the popular view, Happiness per se has no universal definition or value upon which we all might conveniently agree. It is both obvious and inescapable that one man’s happiness can easily be another man’s misery. Indeed, this is precisely the philosophical rub.

The text that serves as the primary springboard for our reflection is from the second section of the Declaration of Independence (adopted July 4, 1776), in which Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) posits the following: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

First, though, is it even possible for us Moderns to reconstruct with any precision what the early American philosophe was thinking when he penned the Declarative and Independently minded expression, ‘the pursuit of Happiness’? Well, in addition to the infinite number and variety of pop-philosophical cultural opinions on the question of Happiness, there are also at least three reasoned schools of scholarly opinion on the question of what ideas were informing the 3^rd U.S. President as he penned these famous and, for us Moderns, famously woolly words. As always, though, scholarly debate is worth just about what you would pay to go hear it, and there is a voice for every viewpoint—the good, the bad, and the lame.

One good opinion, which I happen to favor personally, concerns Jefferson, the philosopher of Epicurean or Stoic thought. Stoicism teaches that personal happiness is integrally allied to self-control or self-governance (cf. Jefferson, vol. XV, 219ff. of the 1903 Library Edition). Jefferson writes in especially enthusiastic terms of Stoic Thinking as it was handed down in the writings of Epictetus, and even considered doing a new translation, “for [Epictetus] has never been tolerably translated into English.” A point on which he and I are in copious agreement.

On Epicurus and Stoic moral thinking, Jefferson sets forth the following formulaic definitions (XV, 223ff): Happiness = the aim of life; Virtue = the foundation of happiness; Utility = the test of virtue; Pleasure = active and Indolent; and Indolence = the absence of pain. By Indolence, it is clear from the context that Jefferson is referring both to the idea of body indolence, from the Latin indolentia, which is to be free from bodily pain, as well as to the Stoic notion of ataraxia, or the tranquility of mind that characterizes someone who is free from worry and distress.

The influence of Stoic philosophy was widespread among early American philosophes, and clearly also informed the thinking of the roughly contemporary American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), which is evident in his famous essay, Self Reliance. This well-documented and pervasive Stoic connection, of course, would seem strongly to suggest that Jefferson’s “pursuit of Happiness” should best be construed as a personal philosophical attitude of Independence of Mind toward the world-of-men.

Very predictably, however, there is also a second scholarly school of thought on this question—that it is rather the English Enlightenment philosopher and empiricist, John Locke (1632-1704), who informs both Emerson’s as well as Jefferson’s thinking, and that Jefferson’s “pursuit of Happiness” is best understood in terms of Enlightenment empiricism imported from England. This is a plausible consideration, and is indeed representative of the mainstream scholarly opinion—that the Jeffersonian “pursuit of Happiness” derives from Locke’s political philosophy and is best interpreted in that light.

To be sure, this is certainly a scholarly opinion; although it is arguably feeble. In each of Jefferson’s references to Locke (cf. Jefferson, vols. VIII, 31; XI, 222; XV, 266; and XVI, 19) he speaks, almost nonchalantly, about Locke the materialist; and while he makes specific references to Locke’s writings, categorizing Locke as ‘the man to read’, Jefferson’s enthusiasm on the subject is certainly, well, stoically restrained. This stands in stark contrast to the glowing and vigorous recommendations he gives for the Stoic philosophers, praising both specific thinkers as well as the moral tradition.

What one can find perhaps most persuasive in the argument for a Lockean influence on Jefferson’s “pursuit of Happiness” is, first, that Jefferson clearly says that Locke is the go-to philosopher for wonderful ideas on materialism, which interests Jefferson as an alternative philosophical framing to the normative Christian worldview.

Even more interesting as an unstated argument, however, is Jefferson’s reliance upon Lockian language-music in his creation of the Declaration of Independence. Locke defines property as a person's "life, liberty, and estate." That is a catchy bit of writing from Mr. Locke, rhythmically speaking; and Jefferson’s writing is in no wise inferior when he writes concerning certain unalienable Rights, among which "are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yet it also seems almost gratuitous to point out that, although it is obvious that Jefferson liked and borrowed the rhythm of Locke’s phrasing, he nevertheless disagreed with the idea of the phrase, thus changing Locke’s English “and estate,” to the American “pursuit of Happiness.”

There is at least one other mainstream scholarly opinion on the question of how to interpret Jefferson’s “pursuit of Happiness,” which is advanced by the historian Garry Wills; but this opinion seems to limp a little too much through the arcane and recherché to be persuasive in the context of this reflection.

§ Wind-up. Additional philosophical support for the interpretation that the “pursuit of Happiness” is best understood as a personal philosophical attitude of Independence of Mind, might also come from Aristotle’s notion of eudaimonia—what Heraclitus might have translated as the well-demoned or well-daimoned life. Let it be said, however, that while there are certainly traces of Aristotle in Jefferson’s writings, relevant to politics, republics, and materialism, there is no indication that he was in any way inspired by the Stagirite’s Virtue Ethic.

For the General Record, though, and because we are reflecting on the question of Happiness as an Idea, it was Aristotle’s contention that we should actually thrive in our lives. Even more, though, according to Aristotle this eudaimoniac-thriving, which we Moderns generally translate as happiness, is in fact the ultimate purpose of human existence. Aristotle’s eudaimonia is linguistically reminiscent of the Socratic Daimon; and we must remember that it is Socrates who gave moral direction both to that philosopher and to Stoic thought in general.

So, even beyond Jefferson’s Declarative Announcement in its favor, there are many philosophical reasons for why Happiness or Thriving or Independence of Mind should come to occupy a prominent place in our hearts and thoughts as a Philosophical Value. Nevertheless, once the foundations of right thinking (read: Philosophy) give way to populist fancies, definitions for ideas such as Happiness become much fuzzier, and we Moderns are left with questions, such as: What does happiness mean to you?, which do not necessarily lead us to meaningful answers, because they also lead us to the admission that Hitler was undoubtedly as happy as a Nazi clam. Any answer to this type of fuzzy question is, philosophically speaking, a castle built on sand.

So, is there more to life than being happy? There are indeed some scientists out there “who are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness”; and others who suggest in the same vein that trying too hard to be happy in fact makes us unhappy. Philosophically, however, it might be argued that such an understanding, and therefore research grounded in that understanding, is fatally flawed by Science’s fundamental mis-understanding about the essentially philosophical (read: non-empirical) nature of the question. But then again, just like all the rest of us, scientists are also subject to “zeitgeistic” opinions and attitudes about happiness, and to the sweepingly sugarcoated, saccharine-fueled sentimentalism that continually seeks to supersede the hard work of Informed Thinking.

To answer this question in kind: For us Moderns, at least in the U.S., who have been nurtured directly or indirectly on the Jeffersonian notion of We the People, is it possible for us to conceive as meaningful, philosophically speaking, an individual life where Thriving, either in body or in mind, is dislocated from the individual life? Or is it possible, philosophically speaking, to conceive of as meaningful a personal life where the individual is called to yield up his Independence of Mind, or where his I of M is trained out of him through tutelage in an impoverished educational system? Would this not be tantamount to an unintentional Abolition of the Cogito, which Heidegger actually intentionally argues for in Being and Time? But this implies the disintegration of the Enlightenment Individual, which must inevitably leave us, both as individuals and as a people, vulnerable to every possible form of totalitarian regime?

In and through his Enlightenment writings Jefferson crafted a philosophical Model of the Reasoning Man, into whose hands he put the reins of Political Power. And the only real burden he placed on this Reasoning Man is that he should be educated, in the sense that he should be informed about Things of State. Because there is nothing more appalling to Reason than to put power over the lives of ‘We the People’ into the hands of those who choose a path of willful ignorance and self-service.

Is there more to life than being happy? If, by happiness, one means to affirm the Individual as Self-governing Thinking-Thing moving toward the Virtue of reason, then, no, there can be nothing greater in life. Following in a long line of earlier and like-minded Stoic philosophers, Jefferson invites us to welcome and embrace Happiness as a Virtuous Habit of the well-demoned Mind, so that we might be faithful in working to secure for ourselves, and then perhaps for the world, those certain unalienable Rights, among which are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of this Happiness.

(Original essay reprised and reworked from Phrontisterion, June 2013)

Further Phrontisterion reading on Stoicism:

·      https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/p/epictetus-handbooklinks.html