Therefore it is necessary to follow the common; but although the Logos is common the many live as though they had a private understanding. –Heraclitus
When we think about the word Thinking today, we ordinarily mean by it something which is confined within our skins or, if you like, in a corner of our brains. But I am asking you to imagine it coming to mean something very different. Just as we look back to a time before Kepler and Newton, when Gravity had such a cramped and parochial meaning–quite other than the spacious one we now attach to it–so, I am persuaded that our descendants will look back, perhaps with amusement, to a time when Thinking and thought had the strangely cramped and parochial meaning which we attach to them today. Because, for them, Thinking will be something saw to which one simply takes it for grated that it permeates the whole world of nature and indeed the whole universe. . . . –Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age
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Spawned in a psychological petri dish in which idleness, boredom and
dissatisfaction with the material rewards of life combined to create
and spread a chronic, generalized, mild depression, it was an ailment
peculiar to the upper middle class. What made audiences susceptible was
the glamour that attached to it. As I watched the attractive
aristocrats and climbers in his films mope through their empty lives, a
part of me wanted to be just like those people: self-absorbed and
miserable, perhaps, but also fashionable and sexy. Stephen Holden in NYT retrospective on the recently deceased Michelangelo AntonioniIt is the [modern human’s] experience of nothingness–of having no content. ‘Perhaps I
am not’; it says uneasily: ‘for one thing is certain. I do not know
what I am. I only know what I am not!’ To this we may add what is not
yet perhaps a typical experience, but an occasional one, a possible
one. Out of the nothingness and uncertainty overtones begin to sound
forth, bringing with them an extraordinarily sweet certainty of their
own. At first this may be a certainty of pure feeling, and then
perhaps a conviction, an absolute knowledge, of the truth that resides
in beauty and imagination. This is the stuff of which the English
Romantic Movement was made. " I am certain of nothing," wrote Keats in
a letter (an he meant every word literally), " but the holiness of the
heart’s affections and the truth of imagination."—-Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age
I grew up in an Antonioni world, not that it was particularly glamorous, but that it was full of relatively affluent, confused, empty people, looking for anyway to distract themselves from the yawning emptiness that was their lives. I do not criticize them for it; it was their "given" because it is the given for everyone who lives in a world alienated from living tradition and nature. Antonioni’s is a Weimar world in which anything goes, and for which there is no moral compass, no sense of direction, no sense of anything being more important than anything else, where everything is for sale, including one’s soul, because it’s not worth anything anyway.
Holden points out that Antonioni identified the collective tendency toward ADD before it was a diagnosable behavior trait. And it has been a theme in film ever since. Mostly we see in film people who do what they have to do to survive and otherwise live lives distracted from distraction by distraction. Sex and violence are distractions that seem to hold the attention a little longer, and as such have proven their value in a culture unable to pay attention to anything for any prolonged span of time. For the emptiness and the Nothing is a cultural given, and its up to the individual to find something that is not Nothing. But the broader cultural struggle in which we are currently engaged is one of trying to find something to which one can say Yes because it is not Nothing. I would argue that it’s possible to to distinguish Nothing from Something, and that very often people who say yes to what they think is Something are really saying Yes to Nothing. If they’re astute, they figure this out and just see it as another distraction that has no effect except to breed more sterility and more emptiness. It’s a world described by Antonioni, but also brilliantly by Jerry Seinfeld and gruesomely by Quentin Tarrantino.
If you don’t think you live in such a world, maybe you’re like all the Seinfeld characters, who live in it without recognizing it. Watching Seinfeld reminds me of the epigraph of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer is taken from Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death: "The specific character of despair is precisely this, it is unaware of being despair." Hope begins in recognizing one’s true predicament. Percy’s Binx Bolling, the main character in The Moviegoer, begins as a Seinfeld character but finds a way to break out of the despair box.
I haven’t been writing much lately in part because I have had a lot of work to attend to, and in the spare time I’ve had I’ve been reading, and thinking about how to go forward in a way that makes sense in this blog format in which it’s really mostly about me thinking out loud. I know there are several readers who are interested to follow what I’m doing, and there are a few who take exception to it. But I fear that I’m going in a direction that has more to do with working out the answers to questions of peculiar interest to me in an idiom that most will find too eccentric to get much value out of it or to be motivated to try to understand. Certainly if you don’t think of yourself living in the worlds explored by Antonioni, Seinfeld, Tarrantino, Percy and others, what I’m doing here probably won’t make much sense. And even if you do, the angle I’m taking is a little odd insofar as I’m using a guy like Owen Barfield as one of my chief guides for navigating in such a world.
I am reminded of this quote about Owen Barfield from his longtime friend, C.S. Lewis:
But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the antiself. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not be your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got all the wrong things out of every one. It is as if he spoke your language but mispronounced it. How can he be so nearly right and yet, invariably, just not right? . . . . When you set out to correct his heresies, you find that he forsooth has decided to correct yours! And then you go at it, hammer and tongs, far into the night, night after night, or walking through fine country that neither give a glance to, each learning the weight of the other’s punches, and often more like mutually respectful enemies than friends. Actually (though it never seems so at the time) you modify one another’s thought; out of this perpetual dogfight a community of mind and a deep affection emerge. But I think he changed me a good deal more than I him. (From Surprised by Joy)
I see myself with most of the people I know, particularly the Christians, as in much the relationship Lewis saw Barfield. Lewis was an erudite defender of Christian orthodoxy and its traditional institutions. So Christians recognize a fellow traveler in the orthodoxy of my beliefs, but find the idiom in which I speak about them something they feel uncomfortable with. I think the key is in the respectful distance I want to keep what I’m doing from what Lewis was doing. There is much I have come to value in things he has written, but he’s someone I see as still very much ensconced in a pre-Nietzschean mental world. He’s someone for whom all the postmodern stuff was nonsense and had no bearing on his imagination of reality.
I think this explains to a large degree his popularity especially with conservative Christians. He lived in and his writings continue to reinforce their middle class sense of decency and right thinking. Lewis, as with so many conservative Christians, lived in a world, which in his experience of it, was not broken down and so had no need of being put together again. His role was primarily as apologist and defender of the faith. That meant finding ways to say No to all those secularists who had it all wrong. I thought he was best when find a way to say Yes. But I don’t think it’s possible to live in Lewis’s mental world anymore, for to me that kind of conservatism, whether it be that of solid, right thinking evangelicals or the kind of sophisticated, Vatican-defending Catholicism found in the journal First Things makes me feel suffocated. They are breathing air that for me is full of allergens.
So while I acknowledge Lewis’s valuable contribution and respect the decency and integrity of many conservative Christians, I find their experience and imagination of the world relates hardly at all to mine. I am orthodox, but I am not conservative, because I see very little in cultural forms that have anything in them worth conserving. I think conservatives are carrying too much dead weight, and they need to get rid of most of it, keep what’s essential, in order to be able to travel lightly and move more nimbly.
The world I live in–and which I think all of us live in whether or not we recognize it–is very much a world structured by disconnection and fragmentation than by any sense of a coherency. If we’re sane, we find a way to manage and to live decently, but people always find a way to survive in the worst of circumstances. The mistake is to accept our circumstances as normal when in fact they are bordering on insane. None of us have much wisdom in circumstances like these, and our judgments are provisional at best. However we make out for ourselves, we should never ever make blanket or formulaic condemnations of others who are trying to find their way. For this reason the conservative Christian condemnation of gays and its bizarrely rigid attitude toward sexuality in general is at best useless and at worst needlessly destructive. The besetting sin of our age is not sex but compulsivity, and as there are forms of sexual compulsivity, they are no more dangerous to the health of the soul than compulsive behaviors related to greed and power, which so many conservative Christians seem to have no problem with.
But I digress: Our sexual, political, and economic dysfunctionality are symptomatic of deeper problems. Barfield understood that in a way that I don’t think Lewis did. For Barfield recognizing that "normal" is not ok, but rather a schizoid state of disconnection and incoherence:
There are two things that are noticeable about the modern psychology I have just referred to. The first is that the root, the subconscious root, of schizophrenia is increasingly being traced to the experience of what I will for the moment call "cut-offness." The second is that that experience is increasingly being regarded, not as one that is peculiar to the patient but in a greater or less degree as one that is the predicament of humanity, or certainly of Western humanity, as a whole. "Everybody without exception must be regarded as schizoid," says, for example, Ronald Fairbairn in his Object-Relations Theory of the Personality. . . .
Thus they speak of the personality, or the self, as being isolated, encapsulated, excluded, estranged, alienated. There are many different ways of putting it. But what the self of each of us feels isolated from, cut off from, by its encapsulation in the nakedly physical reality presented to it by the common sense of contemporary culture, is precisely its own existential source. The trouble is, that such a empirical self, founded as it were on its own physical encapsulation, is a false self, without reality. It is the kind of self which behaviorist psychology has to mention occasionally, in order to deny its existence. The true Self of everyone remains united–not co-extensive but united–with its original source in the spirit. And the mental illness now recognized as schizophrenia comes of the frantic efforts, sometimes aggressive, sometimes defensive, made by the imprisoned personality to fortify and preserve this fictitious self–which is really a nothingness–from destruction. Instead–and that way sanity lies–of taking the hint, as it were, and learning to abandon it in favor of the true Self.
The resulting conflicts and the sickness, sometimes amounting to insanity, that those efforts may end in, arise from an invasion of this artificial self by the true, existential self. The personality remains subconsciously aware of its ultimate dependence on this real self for its very existence, while consciously resisting its still, small voice with every cunning device it can invent. The patient’s unstable behavior is thus a disguised form of evasive action. He is determined, as R.D. Laing has put it, "to evade becoming himself." (From History, Guilt, Habit, pp. 51-53.
In other words, the very common-sense world we live in is a materialist illusion that acts as a prison that cuts us off from who we really are. Compulsive sex, alcohol, drugs, gangs, mob violence, and the primitive emotional unity required to make war are used as strategies to overcome this profound feeling of cut-offness. And the argument that I want to make is that sanity lies in coming to recover what Heraclitus and the Greeks experienced and understood 2500 years ago in the quote excerpted above. Our real existence is in fact not one of cut-offness, but one of union, like cells in a larger organism. Our true individuality thrives to the degree that we are nourished by our being rooted in this larger common spiritual reality. And while our thinking is our own, it is living thinking to the degree that it participates in this larger thinking Heraclitus and others identified as the Logos.
I will explore the implications in future posts, but I think there are two different tasks that I want to work through when I do so. The first is to establish why this idea of the Logos has explanatory power. This is the Neo-Platonic part of the argument I want to make, and it can stand without any reference to Christian belief. That is a big enough challenge, but the second, I think, proceeds from it, which is to show why the Christian identification of the second person of the Trinity with the Logos is a central idea for understanding the meaning of history. In other words, I see the first task as a prerequisite for satisfactorily answering the question: Cur deus homo?
I find most traditional answers to that question (including Lewis’s), if not unconvincing, incomplete or unsatisfactory as a dissociated puzzle piece in a larger picture that remains disassembled and incoherent. But the entire project to put the puzzle pieces together is a dry academic exercise, or just another distraction, unless it’s grounded existentially. It has to be seen as an answer to a pressing question, a solution for an urgent problem. And that problem is the cut-offness that we all of us experience and are so exasperated by. There are regressive solutions to this problem, and that’s the world that we mostly find in popular and highbrow film and fiction. And I would say also in both the politics of the left and the right in this country. Neither moves us forward so long as our political imagination is framed within this schizoid model that constitutes for us the real world. There are progressive solutions, and those are not easily found, at least not in a way that seem to me to be more than band-aid fixes for a far more profound ailment.
We’re talking about a return to sanity and health, not a return to normalcy when the normal is fundamentally schizoid insane. Sanity lies in breaking out of this box. And I think the way to do that is both a task for thinking and for the will. You have to do something about it besides just think, but thinking clears the way and helps to establish an imagination of what the task really is. But I would also argue that ultimately we feel our way out of the darkness and toward health. The Keat’s quote above is a key here. The holiness of the hearts affections is the precondition for real knowledge, insofar as we only know what we truly love. And the imagination is fired to the degree that it participates and is grounded in this larger truth.
And this last point: finding our way is something we each have to chose, but ultimately it’s not something we can accomplish alone. We’re not meant to be alone or to have to do it alone.
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