Safranski’s bio on Heidegger provides a wonder lived feeling for the intellectual ferment in the first part of the 20th Century. I like this description about Christian Bry’s book, Masked Religions, a best seller in the 1920s.
Anything, Bry wrote, can become a "masked religion," if it becomes "monomaniacally," the sole principle for interpretation of meaning and salvation. Bry, himself a religious man, found a surprisingly simple criterion for distinguishing between religion and substitute religion. A genuine religion educates Man for reverence for the inexplicability of the world. In the light of faith, the world grows bigger, and also darker, because it retains its mystery, and Man sees himself as part of it. For the monomaniac of a "masked religion," on the other hand, the world shrinks. "in each and every thing he finds only the confirmation of is opinion," which he defends with he fervor of faith against the world and against his own doubts.
That’s a good start, and goes far these days to distinguish what I’ve been describing real Christianity from the cultism of Dobson/Fallwell right. But it also provides a good template to describe how secular ideologies function in fact as masked religions. Ernest Becker picks up on this theme in contrasting Kierkegaard’s faith with the causa sui projects of Freud and others in his book The Denial of Death. I want to come back to this idea of causa sui as one of the principal seductions that alienate us from Being or cause us to forget it, which is the same thing. No time to get into it now.
Another quote in Safranski from Max Scheler suggests both that the causa sui projects are the temples of Babel we become obsessed to build and what freedom from such obsession might mean:
It will be like the first step into a flowering garden by a man kept for years in a dark prison. This prison will be our human environment bounded by reason directed solely at what can be measured or mechanized, and the civilization of such an environment. And the garden will be God’s colorful world that–albeit at a distance–we long to salute and have open up to us. And the prisoner will be European Man of today and yesterday, who, sighing and groaning, strides under the burden of his own mechanisms and who, his eyes turned earthward and heaviness in his limbs, has forgotten his God and his world.–Scheler, Attempt at a Philosophy of Life, 1913.
Which segues nicely into this quote by Chesterton sent by Forestwalker a couple of days ago:
We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.
Is this mental calamity something we chose and continue to choose? If we chose it, what did we think we were gaining? Was it freedom and independence? Have we got it? Maybe there was no choice in the matter; the meta-calamity overtook us like like the war or Wal-Mart. They just happen. Nothing we can do; just shrug the shoulders and go mow the lawn. But maybe new choices are a possibility now, and they confront us with the possibility to reclaim in freedom and independence what was lost when the "given world" of the ancestors was left behind.
But if the prison break is to be effected, we must honestly reckon the price we must pay. Would we pay it? Even if there is no sure return on the investment? Or are we ok in our semi-stupor, our complacent state of anesthetization? What will it take to become aroused from our slumber and to remember our names? Is such a thing even possible at this late date? I don’t know. I address these questions to myself, first, but also to anyone interested in thinking about it.
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