The Nature and Purpose of Existence
The universal mind, which we may term the collective totality of mind or consciousness, reason, intelligence, or GEIST, having desired to experience everything that can be experienced (or imagined), formed or pushed itself into materiality as such (to borrow Cayce's phrase), into the MAYA, or holographic ILLUSION of reality, physicality, and materiality (which even modern quantum physics tells us is the case). This would have been at the moment of the so-called 'Big Bang', and would have been a form of condensation or ordering--at the same time that it was a vast expansion, similar (and this is the only way I can think to describe it, though it is not very accurate) to the manner in which a crystal forms itself out of a matrix or field.
This includes all forms of life and matter--the forms being merely vehicles for experience. This is why life and matter exist in such numberless and diverse forms--to exponentially increase the possibilities for experience, the opportunities to gain knowledge, etc.
Thus we may say that it is eminently reasonable for the conscious universe (as far as it is conscious) to desire to experience EVERYTHING--including seemingly UNREASONABLE emotion and seeming chaos.
The universal mind, being rational, or having an ordered basis or pattern, can also be described as existing both as a whole AND simultaneously as parts or subsets WITHIN the whole. You and I, as seeming separate human beings, are actually merely ordered or organized subsets of the whole: part and parcel of the greater universe or mind (to which we also contribute experience), and yet discretely organized or set apart unto ourselves, so as to increase the chances for gaining experience, which (once again) merely adds to the total experience and knowledge of the whole universe; for by existing as a seeming separate entity, we accrue valuable, unique and individual perspectives or experiences which others may from time to time partly share, but can never wholly duplicate. This is the glory and purpose of individuality as such. And ALL life, ALL matter, contributes to this totality of experience--each entity or form in its own special chosen way, until it has experienced all it can in that particular form, and is thus ready and able to move on to a more advanced form, so as to (again) increase the opportunities for experience. (This is a form of reincarnation.) ALL forms are thus infinitely (or almost infinitely) valuable for purposes of accruing experience.
All are necessary--all are important--even the seemingly insensate bare rock has its story and experience to contribute--as important a part of the jigsaw-puzzle of the whole as anything else, because IT, TOO can BECOME, and because it is--like everything else--a SINE QUA NON: without which nothing would exist or have value.
How else can I attempt to explain this--how else attempt to clarify it? Existence (mind, Geist) is eminently varied and constantly seeks to evolve into new and more advanced forms precisely BECAUSE it is conscious (however subtly or diffusely) AND SEEKS EXPERIENCE--the experience which only this illusion of materiality (space/time) and diversity can afford.
I realize, of course, that this idea seems to presuppose LINEARITY.
But the answer to this is "Eternal Recurrence"; thus, existence may SEEM to be linear, but only because of our present limited perspective: step back from it in your mind, and existence becomes a CIRCLE--it repeats itself. One way to state this which might be more accessible to some is to imagine the universe after the 'Big Bang' expanding to a point of equilibrium, then gradually contracting back in on itself to an infinitesimally small point filled with all the material of the universe; then, when the point has taken more than it can sustain, rebounding back into materiality and space with the glory of a new creation. An endless cycle of this, on so grand a scale that we can scarcely conceive it.
T.J.White, 21 March,1996--21 January, 1999.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Spiritual Journey: Part Two
Thinking Spurred by Reading Freud's CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
(though the germs of some of the thoughts were present previously)
In the beginning ... was God ... [and] ALL things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
I John 1: 1-3
I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me. ... I form the light, AND CREATE DARKNESS: I make peace, AND CREATE EVIL: I the LORD do all these things.
Isaiah 45:5-7
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.
Revelation 1:8
[emphasis added]
In other words, God is EVERYTHING--IN all and THROUGHOUT all: God is everything, AND EVERYTHING IS GOD. God is good, God is evil; God is light, God is darkness; God is man, woman, AND child, no less than that God is all sentient intelligence and insensate matter, and the glowing stars of the very heavens. God is ALL. God creates every-thing, and since everything is God, everything thus CREATES ITSELF--is its own self-directing agent or force.
We, as semi-sentient agents are not always conscious--in fact, rarely are--of the 'God' within us constantly directing and prodding us. Like the ancient Gnostics said of us, we seem to be asleep to our divine reality. The 'God' within us, if it is not simply the sum total of our entire beings, could just be a matter of our genetic programming, and thus our 'will to live', and our desires for furtherance, growth, happiness, achievement and fulfillment.
Is it not therefore possible, then, that 'evil' and 'good' do not exist at all except as CONCEPTS in the minds of men? Surely the rest of the universe (though still part and parcel of the omnipresence of 'God') is wholly and supremely indifferent to such infantile and purely human classifications.
Humans seem to be inclined to name as 'evil' only that which produces either pain or unhappiness, whether for one person or for many. But is not the larger universe (for all we can tell) indifferent to the occurrences of pain and unhappiness here on this planet? Does not 'evil', then, seem to have as much a place and legitimacy in the realms of real existence and experience as that which human beings call 'good'?
Every thing, then, simply IS--it exists. It is also eternally BECOMING--changing its forms from this one to that one over endless time. Chaos, inconstancy, and flux--ever-repeated within certain patterns sometimes, to be sure--seem to be the supreme laws of the universe (and thus of 'God').
But can it also perhaps be that, in contrast to the apparent chaos and randomness of the universe at large, life as we know it (on this planet) may simply be an example of the universe (and thus 'God') attempting to attain order and law out of chaos, to grow beyond its present confines or state, to become MORE or BETTER than before, to accrete ever-increasing knowledge and experience unto itself, and thus become ever greater than it was before?
This seems (in passing) to be especially true of humankind, but also of all other animal life, and indeed, even of the simplest single-cell organism, which seems somehow compelled to increase, to divide and grow, to REPRODUCE, and, by reproduction, make itself, through taking in nourishment from elsewhere in its universe, greater than it was before.
This, to my mind at least, seems to be what defines 'life' on this planet: a conscious--though conscious at varying levels in different forms of life--attempt at growth and experience, to become more or greater than what one was originally endowed with by the larger universe or 'God'. This would also seem to me to be the best explanation of classic 'evolution': the conscious attempt of all matter and life to expand itself, to grow, to attain power, intelligence, order and knowledge, out of what was previously random chaos.
And it occurs to me that this is what Nietzsche refers to as the "Will to Power" or the "Will to Grow" or the "Will to Be", which he says is THE major motivating force of all life: that paramount desire to grow or accrete, which means that we--and by extension all life--must consume other life forms--other "wills to grow" in order to grow or expand ourselves.
T.J.White, 25 December, 1993--8 February, 1994
(though the germs of some of the thoughts were present previously)
In the beginning ... was God ... [and] ALL things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
I John 1: 1-3
I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me. ... I form the light, AND CREATE DARKNESS: I make peace, AND CREATE EVIL: I the LORD do all these things.
Isaiah 45:5-7
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.
Revelation 1:8
[emphasis added]
In other words, God is EVERYTHING--IN all and THROUGHOUT all: God is everything, AND EVERYTHING IS GOD. God is good, God is evil; God is light, God is darkness; God is man, woman, AND child, no less than that God is all sentient intelligence and insensate matter, and the glowing stars of the very heavens. God is ALL. God creates every-thing, and since everything is God, everything thus CREATES ITSELF--is its own self-directing agent or force.
We, as semi-sentient agents are not always conscious--in fact, rarely are--of the 'God' within us constantly directing and prodding us. Like the ancient Gnostics said of us, we seem to be asleep to our divine reality. The 'God' within us, if it is not simply the sum total of our entire beings, could just be a matter of our genetic programming, and thus our 'will to live', and our desires for furtherance, growth, happiness, achievement and fulfillment.
Is it not therefore possible, then, that 'evil' and 'good' do not exist at all except as CONCEPTS in the minds of men? Surely the rest of the universe (though still part and parcel of the omnipresence of 'God') is wholly and supremely indifferent to such infantile and purely human classifications.
Humans seem to be inclined to name as 'evil' only that which produces either pain or unhappiness, whether for one person or for many. But is not the larger universe (for all we can tell) indifferent to the occurrences of pain and unhappiness here on this planet? Does not 'evil', then, seem to have as much a place and legitimacy in the realms of real existence and experience as that which human beings call 'good'?
Every thing, then, simply IS--it exists. It is also eternally BECOMING--changing its forms from this one to that one over endless time. Chaos, inconstancy, and flux--ever-repeated within certain patterns sometimes, to be sure--seem to be the supreme laws of the universe (and thus of 'God').
But can it also perhaps be that, in contrast to the apparent chaos and randomness of the universe at large, life as we know it (on this planet) may simply be an example of the universe (and thus 'God') attempting to attain order and law out of chaos, to grow beyond its present confines or state, to become MORE or BETTER than before, to accrete ever-increasing knowledge and experience unto itself, and thus become ever greater than it was before?
This seems (in passing) to be especially true of humankind, but also of all other animal life, and indeed, even of the simplest single-cell organism, which seems somehow compelled to increase, to divide and grow, to REPRODUCE, and, by reproduction, make itself, through taking in nourishment from elsewhere in its universe, greater than it was before.
This, to my mind at least, seems to be what defines 'life' on this planet: a conscious--though conscious at varying levels in different forms of life--attempt at growth and experience, to become more or greater than what one was originally endowed with by the larger universe or 'God'. This would also seem to me to be the best explanation of classic 'evolution': the conscious attempt of all matter and life to expand itself, to grow, to attain power, intelligence, order and knowledge, out of what was previously random chaos.
And it occurs to me that this is what Nietzsche refers to as the "Will to Power" or the "Will to Grow" or the "Will to Be", which he says is THE major motivating force of all life: that paramount desire to grow or accrete, which means that we--and by extension all life--must consume other life forms--other "wills to grow" in order to grow or expand ourselves.
T.J.White, 25 December, 1993--8 February, 1994
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Spiritual Journey: Part One
Here follows a series of writings which may serve to illustrate how my spiritual beliefs have evolved over the years. I am not necessarily posting them in chronological order, however, so to see how my beliefs have actually changed over time, one must pay attention to the date associated with each essay.
The great English biologist T.H. Huxley (grandfather of the novelist Aldous of Brave New World fame) once wrote the following often-quoted paragraph on the idea of the search of man for truth, in a letter of the year 1860 to a friend named Charles Kingsley:
"Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing."
(Quoted in Seldes, The Great Thoughts [1980].)
This is exactly what I would also advise for the truth-seeker. I would add, moreover, the following two questions, or lines of thought:
Two Questions, for any honest, open-minded truth-seeker:
One: Are you afraid of the truth? And Two: What if "the truth" turns out to be something entirely different, something you did not at all expect? What if "the truth" turns out to be something that entirely contradicts most of what you previously believed? What then?
Will you accept what you now know (or believe) to be "the truth", letting go of your previously-held and previously-cherished beliefs in the process, or will you rather react with horror and fear by ignoring or turning a blind eye to these new truths--simply so that you can continue to believe all that you have previously believed, in safety and comfort?
What is truth? Jesus was asked this once, whilst being interrogated by Pilate, and we are not told what his answer might have been. The famous medieval German mystic and monk Meister Eckhard (c.1260-1327), however, completed for us what the Gospels left blank. Said he:
"What is truth? Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I would keep to the truth and let God go. (Emphasis added)
He also wrote that
"To get into the core of God at his greatest, one must first get into the core of himself at his least, for no one can know God who has not first known himself."
(Both excerpts quoted in Seldes, op. cit.)
T.J.White, 2 February, 2005.
___________________________
And what is "the Bible"? The "Bible" is nothing other than a scattering of brilliant, priceless diamonds, embedded and hidden in an overwhelming sea of mud and filth; in order to perceive the diamonds, one must first laboriously sift through a great deal of mud, and how many ordinary people ever have the time or mental faculty to do this?
With this thought in mind, I intend over the next few days and weeks to try to help my readers extricate some of the diamonds from the sea of mud, for I have found in my daily journey that occasional pointers from other wise souls who have preceeded me have oftimes been most helpful for myself, and saved me years of seemingly fruitless study-effort on my own part. Hopefully, my own pointers will in turn help others, who, like myself, started out on their own in this search for truth, with precious few guides to point the way.
T.J.White, 2 February, 2005.
___________________________
The poet George Santayana (1863-1952) had written the following, in Soliloquies in England (1922):
"My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety toward the universe and denies only gods fashioned by man in their own image, to be servants of their human interests; and that even in this denial I am no rude iconoclast, but full of secret sympathy with the impulses of idolators."
(Quoted in Seldes, op. cit., page 369.)
In The Age of Napoleon (1975), Chapter XIX "English Philosophy", pages 395-6, the Durants had the following to say regarding Thomas Paine's 1794 book The Age of Reason:
At the outset Paine gave an unexpected reason why he had written the book: not to detroy religion, but to prevent the decay of its irrational forms [i.e., 'fundamentalist' varieties] from undermining social order, "lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true." And he added, reassuringly: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life."
Then he drew his Occam's razor:
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches ... appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. [This sounds much like Nietzsche a hundred years later. ...]
He admired Christ as "a virtuous and an amiable man," and "the morality that he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind"; but the story of his being fathered by a god was just a variation of a myth common among the pagans [Celsus had argued this point as long ago as the second century!].
Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of ... gods ... The intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds. The story, therefore, had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene [once again, almost Celsus' exact words]; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, ... and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God and no more, and had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited [i.e., 'believed' or 'accepted'] the story.
So the Christian mythology was merely the pagan mythology in a new form.
The trinity of the gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand; the statue of Mary succeeded that of Diane of Ephesus; the deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian mythologists had saints for everything; the Church had become as crowded with one as the pantheon had been with the other. ... The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet [i.e., 'still'] remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious ['crawling'?? 'ambitious'??] fraud.
Paine then played his searchlight of reason upon the Book of Genesis, and, having no patience with parables, fell heavily upon Eve and the apple. Like Milton, he was fascinated by Satan, the first of all rebels. Here was an angel who, for trying to depose a monarch, had been plunged into hell, there to suffer time without end. Nevertheless he must have escaped those inextinguishable fires now and then, for he had found his way into the Garden of Eden, and could tempt most sinuously; he could promise knowledge to Eve and half the world to Christ. The Christian mythology, Paine marveled, did Satan wondrous honor; it assumed he could compel the Almighty to send his son down to Judea and be crucified to recover for him at least part of a planet obviously in love with Satan; and despite that crucifixion, the Devil still retained all non-Christian realms, and had millions of servitors in Christendom itself.
All this, said our doubting Thomas, was offered us most solemnly, on the word of the Almighty himself, through a series of amanuenses from Moses to Saint Paul. Paine rejected it as a tale fit for nurseries, and for adults too busy with bread and butter, sickness and mortality, to question the promisory notes sold to them by the theologians. To stronger souls he offered a God not fashioned like man, but conceived as the life of the universe.
It is only in the Creation that all of our ideas ... of God can unite. The Creation speaketh an universal language; ... and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.
Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the Creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abandon with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called scripture, ... but the Scripture called the Creation.
2 February, 2005.
The great English biologist T.H. Huxley (grandfather of the novelist Aldous of Brave New World fame) once wrote the following often-quoted paragraph on the idea of the search of man for truth, in a letter of the year 1860 to a friend named Charles Kingsley:
"Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing."
(Quoted in Seldes, The Great Thoughts [1980].)
This is exactly what I would also advise for the truth-seeker. I would add, moreover, the following two questions, or lines of thought:
Two Questions, for any honest, open-minded truth-seeker:
One: Are you afraid of the truth? And Two: What if "the truth" turns out to be something entirely different, something you did not at all expect? What if "the truth" turns out to be something that entirely contradicts most of what you previously believed? What then?
Will you accept what you now know (or believe) to be "the truth", letting go of your previously-held and previously-cherished beliefs in the process, or will you rather react with horror and fear by ignoring or turning a blind eye to these new truths--simply so that you can continue to believe all that you have previously believed, in safety and comfort?
What is truth? Jesus was asked this once, whilst being interrogated by Pilate, and we are not told what his answer might have been. The famous medieval German mystic and monk Meister Eckhard (c.1260-1327), however, completed for us what the Gospels left blank. Said he:
"What is truth? Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I would keep to the truth and let God go. (Emphasis added)
He also wrote that
"To get into the core of God at his greatest, one must first get into the core of himself at his least, for no one can know God who has not first known himself."
(Both excerpts quoted in Seldes, op. cit.)
T.J.White, 2 February, 2005.
___________________________
And what is "the Bible"? The "Bible" is nothing other than a scattering of brilliant, priceless diamonds, embedded and hidden in an overwhelming sea of mud and filth; in order to perceive the diamonds, one must first laboriously sift through a great deal of mud, and how many ordinary people ever have the time or mental faculty to do this?
With this thought in mind, I intend over the next few days and weeks to try to help my readers extricate some of the diamonds from the sea of mud, for I have found in my daily journey that occasional pointers from other wise souls who have preceeded me have oftimes been most helpful for myself, and saved me years of seemingly fruitless study-effort on my own part. Hopefully, my own pointers will in turn help others, who, like myself, started out on their own in this search for truth, with precious few guides to point the way.
T.J.White, 2 February, 2005.
___________________________
The poet George Santayana (1863-1952) had written the following, in Soliloquies in England (1922):
"My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety toward the universe and denies only gods fashioned by man in their own image, to be servants of their human interests; and that even in this denial I am no rude iconoclast, but full of secret sympathy with the impulses of idolators."
(Quoted in Seldes, op. cit., page 369.)
In The Age of Napoleon (1975), Chapter XIX "English Philosophy", pages 395-6, the Durants had the following to say regarding Thomas Paine's 1794 book The Age of Reason:
At the outset Paine gave an unexpected reason why he had written the book: not to detroy religion, but to prevent the decay of its irrational forms [i.e., 'fundamentalist' varieties] from undermining social order, "lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true." And he added, reassuringly: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life."
Then he drew his Occam's razor:
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches ... appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. [This sounds much like Nietzsche a hundred years later. ...]
He admired Christ as "a virtuous and an amiable man," and "the morality that he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind"; but the story of his being fathered by a god was just a variation of a myth common among the pagans [Celsus had argued this point as long ago as the second century!].
Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of ... gods ... The intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds. The story, therefore, had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene [once again, almost Celsus' exact words]; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, ... and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God and no more, and had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited [i.e., 'believed' or 'accepted'] the story.
So the Christian mythology was merely the pagan mythology in a new form.
The trinity of the gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand; the statue of Mary succeeded that of Diane of Ephesus; the deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian mythologists had saints for everything; the Church had become as crowded with one as the pantheon had been with the other. ... The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet [i.e., 'still'] remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious ['crawling'?? 'ambitious'??] fraud.
Paine then played his searchlight of reason upon the Book of Genesis, and, having no patience with parables, fell heavily upon Eve and the apple. Like Milton, he was fascinated by Satan, the first of all rebels. Here was an angel who, for trying to depose a monarch, had been plunged into hell, there to suffer time without end. Nevertheless he must have escaped those inextinguishable fires now and then, for he had found his way into the Garden of Eden, and could tempt most sinuously; he could promise knowledge to Eve and half the world to Christ. The Christian mythology, Paine marveled, did Satan wondrous honor; it assumed he could compel the Almighty to send his son down to Judea and be crucified to recover for him at least part of a planet obviously in love with Satan; and despite that crucifixion, the Devil still retained all non-Christian realms, and had millions of servitors in Christendom itself.
All this, said our doubting Thomas, was offered us most solemnly, on the word of the Almighty himself, through a series of amanuenses from Moses to Saint Paul. Paine rejected it as a tale fit for nurseries, and for adults too busy with bread and butter, sickness and mortality, to question the promisory notes sold to them by the theologians. To stronger souls he offered a God not fashioned like man, but conceived as the life of the universe.
It is only in the Creation that all of our ideas ... of God can unite. The Creation speaketh an universal language; ... and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.
Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the Creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abandon with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called scripture, ... but the Scripture called the Creation.
2 February, 2005.
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Ionesco on Art as Non-conformity
A creative work of art is, by its very novelty, aggressive; spontaneously aggressive, it strikes out at the public, against the majority; it arouses indignation by its non-conformity, which is, in itself, a form of vindication.
Eugene Ionesco (b.1912),
Rumanian-born French writer,
quoted in Writers in Revolt (1963).
Eugene Ionesco (b.1912),
Rumanian-born French writer,
quoted in Writers in Revolt (1963).
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Where Is The Source of the "Ego" or "Self"?
Monoimos, a second-century C.E. Gnostic ("Christian") teacher (quoted by Pagels, and Freke and Gandy) said it quite well. With apologies to the translators, I have here slightly modified both translations to clarify (as I think it) what Monoimos' message really is--to make it somewhat easier (I hope) to comprehend:
Abandon this "search for God" and "the Creation" and other matters of a similar sort. Look for "God" by taking YOURSELF as the starting point. LEARN who it is WITHIN YOU who takes everything to himself and makes it his own, saying, "MY God, MY mind, MY thought, MY soul, MY body." LEARN where and what is the source of "ego", "self", sorrow, joy, love, and hate; of waking--even though you would rather not; of sleeping--though you would rather not; of getting angry--though you would rather not; and of falling in love--though you would rather not. And if you will carefully and impartially investigate these matters, you will ultimately find "God"--in YOUR SELF.
What did "Christ" say at Luke 17:21? "The Kingdom of Heaven is WITHIN YOU..." (KJV)
This is, of course, echoed by similar statements in the Gnostic "Gospel of Thomas", such as "The kingdom of the Father is spread out on the earth, but people do not see it," and "The kingdom is within AND without..."
And finally, what is perhaps THE most common statement about man's relationship with deity as found in the eastern traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism? "The self is Atman." "'God' is Brahman." "ATMAN IS BRAHMAN." In other words, "God" IS the "Self", or the "Self" is part of "God".
Many scholars (and laymen) are now asking whether Eastern philosophies might not have had a profound influence on the Gnostic form of early Christianity (and I think it probably did).
And throughout the ages since Gnosticism was brutally suppressed, many later mystics and thinkers have also affirmed that the "self" in each of us is only a "spark", "fragment" or "splinter" of God himself, that divinity or "The Divine" resides within each of us, if only we will open our sleepy eyes to see it.
Now, I don't think for a minute that this idea or belief ignores the propensities for 'evil' that seem to be irredeemably inherent in humankind; I tend rather to see both what we puny humans call "Good" AND "Evil" as being part and parcel of "God" or the "Divine'. (GASP!!!! HORRORS!!!!) Well, I have this idea on good authority: no less a person than the Old Testament prophet Isaiah said it, speaking in "God's" voice (and presumably with His Authority too):
"I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil." (Isaiah 45:7) I guess it could be readily admitted (by even the most hardened Evangelical) that if you really THINK about the matter, NOTHING can really exist without "God's" authority, or without "His" permitting it to exist--if, that is, "God" did in fact create EVERYTHING that exists. I, for one, think so, and I also see how this idea harmonizes quite nicely with Monoimos' (and the other mystics') teaching with which I began this little essay.
Early in the twentieth century, German writer Hermann Hesse argued that thinking human beings should move beyond the conventional dichotomy of 'good and evil', and I agree: it is far past the time when the human race should evolve and develop a more MATURE idea of the nature of "God". (Nietzsche hinted at this well over a hundred years ago ...) And here it is definitely ironic that we are being shown the way toward this new conception of deity (and our relationship to it) by the teachings of these sages and prophets and mystics whose ideas have literally been around for two thousand years (and more), but which have been cleverly and deviously kept from the knowledge and awareness of most of us during that time.
"Even so, Lord JESUS, come ..."
T.J.White, 25 January, 2005.
Abandon this "search for God" and "the Creation" and other matters of a similar sort. Look for "God" by taking YOURSELF as the starting point. LEARN who it is WITHIN YOU who takes everything to himself and makes it his own, saying, "MY God, MY mind, MY thought, MY soul, MY body." LEARN where and what is the source of "ego", "self", sorrow, joy, love, and hate; of waking--even though you would rather not; of sleeping--though you would rather not; of getting angry--though you would rather not; and of falling in love--though you would rather not. And if you will carefully and impartially investigate these matters, you will ultimately find "God"--in YOUR SELF.
What did "Christ" say at Luke 17:21? "The Kingdom of Heaven is WITHIN YOU..." (KJV)
This is, of course, echoed by similar statements in the Gnostic "Gospel of Thomas", such as "The kingdom of the Father is spread out on the earth, but people do not see it," and "The kingdom is within AND without..."
And finally, what is perhaps THE most common statement about man's relationship with deity as found in the eastern traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism? "The self is Atman." "'God' is Brahman." "ATMAN IS BRAHMAN." In other words, "God" IS the "Self", or the "Self" is part of "God".
Many scholars (and laymen) are now asking whether Eastern philosophies might not have had a profound influence on the Gnostic form of early Christianity (and I think it probably did).
And throughout the ages since Gnosticism was brutally suppressed, many later mystics and thinkers have also affirmed that the "self" in each of us is only a "spark", "fragment" or "splinter" of God himself, that divinity or "The Divine" resides within each of us, if only we will open our sleepy eyes to see it.
Now, I don't think for a minute that this idea or belief ignores the propensities for 'evil' that seem to be irredeemably inherent in humankind; I tend rather to see both what we puny humans call "Good" AND "Evil" as being part and parcel of "God" or the "Divine'. (GASP!!!! HORRORS!!!!) Well, I have this idea on good authority: no less a person than the Old Testament prophet Isaiah said it, speaking in "God's" voice (and presumably with His Authority too):
"I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil." (Isaiah 45:7) I guess it could be readily admitted (by even the most hardened Evangelical) that if you really THINK about the matter, NOTHING can really exist without "God's" authority, or without "His" permitting it to exist--if, that is, "God" did in fact create EVERYTHING that exists. I, for one, think so, and I also see how this idea harmonizes quite nicely with Monoimos' (and the other mystics') teaching with which I began this little essay.
Early in the twentieth century, German writer Hermann Hesse argued that thinking human beings should move beyond the conventional dichotomy of 'good and evil', and I agree: it is far past the time when the human race should evolve and develop a more MATURE idea of the nature of "God". (Nietzsche hinted at this well over a hundred years ago ...) And here it is definitely ironic that we are being shown the way toward this new conception of deity (and our relationship to it) by the teachings of these sages and prophets and mystics whose ideas have literally been around for two thousand years (and more), but which have been cleverly and deviously kept from the knowledge and awareness of most of us during that time.
"Even so, Lord JESUS, come ..."
T.J.White, 25 January, 2005.
Saturday, January 22, 2005
The School For Geniuses
"The Voice of One crying in the Wilderness ..."
St.John 1:23
Audite vocem meam, Domine.
It seems to me that the growth or development of the 'genius'--his growth through experience--is akin symbolically to the act of relentlessly climbing a mountain--the mountain of experience, of knowledge, of life. And it is a struggle indeed! But when one has finally reached the 'top'--assuming in the first place that one actually does reach a 'top', all things being relative, one gazes around from the top of the moutain-peak of life, and soon notices that there are certain others also situated upon mountain peaks of their own--some higher, some lower than one's own--shining or burning with as bright and visible a luminosity as one feels radiating from within oneself, and also enjoying the rarefied atmosphere of pure, strong, emotional and intellectual experience.
One also notices, however, with an immediate feeling of profound despair and terror, the enormous degree to which one is forever cut off from the multitudes of the so-called 'normal' people--those many still trapped and dwelling blithely and ignorantly in the atmospherically-dense valleys of comfort below. One both wants to be with those in the valleys of ignorance--because one LOVES, and cannot bear to be alone, and yet does not want to be where they are, because--even moreso--one cannot abide the somnolent mediocrity, boredom, and aimlessness of that existence; nor can one trade one's hard-won, immensely-valued knowledge and experience for the ignorance one formerly possessed (and which the vast majority below and around one still possess); one somehow feels, with all one's soul, that this is a negative end to be avoided at all cost.
Thus it is that, because of this profound, terrifying isolation and loneliness, one feels an imperative need to cry out desperately toward those other few souls one glimpses in the distance who have also successfully climbed their mountains of experience. For how else is one to survive where one is? For having only recently arrived at one's new level of experience, one feels much as a newborn child must feel, though unable to articulate or understand it--an acute disorientation and the terrifying fear of the new and unknown, not having had the benefit of any sort of guide in this long uphill struggle--not one single human soul who might have calmed one's fears, who might have explained the true significance of one's sorrows. What else can one do, except call out toward one's fellow-travellers for (if nothing else) the occasional comforting word?
For to be long isolated in such manner from other feeling human souls must lead inevitably to either insanity or suicide, given our present emotional limitations and instabilities; and therefore, since we are loath to return to the valleys of sloth, indolence and ignorance, we find that--simply to survive--we truly MUST seek communion with others of our kind.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
--Tennyson.
T.J.White, 10 February, 1995.
St.John 1:23
Audite vocem meam, Domine.
It seems to me that the growth or development of the 'genius'--his growth through experience--is akin symbolically to the act of relentlessly climbing a mountain--the mountain of experience, of knowledge, of life. And it is a struggle indeed! But when one has finally reached the 'top'--assuming in the first place that one actually does reach a 'top', all things being relative, one gazes around from the top of the moutain-peak of life, and soon notices that there are certain others also situated upon mountain peaks of their own--some higher, some lower than one's own--shining or burning with as bright and visible a luminosity as one feels radiating from within oneself, and also enjoying the rarefied atmosphere of pure, strong, emotional and intellectual experience.
One also notices, however, with an immediate feeling of profound despair and terror, the enormous degree to which one is forever cut off from the multitudes of the so-called 'normal' people--those many still trapped and dwelling blithely and ignorantly in the atmospherically-dense valleys of comfort below. One both wants to be with those in the valleys of ignorance--because one LOVES, and cannot bear to be alone, and yet does not want to be where they are, because--even moreso--one cannot abide the somnolent mediocrity, boredom, and aimlessness of that existence; nor can one trade one's hard-won, immensely-valued knowledge and experience for the ignorance one formerly possessed (and which the vast majority below and around one still possess); one somehow feels, with all one's soul, that this is a negative end to be avoided at all cost.
Thus it is that, because of this profound, terrifying isolation and loneliness, one feels an imperative need to cry out desperately toward those other few souls one glimpses in the distance who have also successfully climbed their mountains of experience. For how else is one to survive where one is? For having only recently arrived at one's new level of experience, one feels much as a newborn child must feel, though unable to articulate or understand it--an acute disorientation and the terrifying fear of the new and unknown, not having had the benefit of any sort of guide in this long uphill struggle--not one single human soul who might have calmed one's fears, who might have explained the true significance of one's sorrows. What else can one do, except call out toward one's fellow-travellers for (if nothing else) the occasional comforting word?
For to be long isolated in such manner from other feeling human souls must lead inevitably to either insanity or suicide, given our present emotional limitations and instabilities; and therefore, since we are loath to return to the valleys of sloth, indolence and ignorance, we find that--simply to survive--we truly MUST seek communion with others of our kind.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
--Tennyson.
T.J.White, 10 February, 1995.
Nietzsche on the Philosopher as Outsider
It seems to me more and more that the philosopher, as a NECESSARY man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and always had to find himself, in oppposition to his today: the ideal of the day was always his enemy. ...
Today, conversely, when only the herd animal is honored and dispenses honors in Europe, and when "equality of rights" could all too easily be converted into an equality in violating rights--by that I mean, into a common war on all that is rare, strange, or privileged, on the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, and on the wealth of creative power and mastery--today the concept of "greatness" entails being noble, wanting to be by oneself, being capable of being different, standing alone, and having to live independently; and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he posits: "He shall be the greatest who can be the loneliest, the most hidden, the most deviating, the human being beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, he that is overrich in will. Precisely this should be called GREATNESS: to be capable of being as manifold as whole, as wide as full." And to ask this once more: today--is greatness POSSIBLE? ...
from BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL (212), transl. Walter Kaufmann
(as hereafter)
_________________________
Revaluation of All Values
This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps not one of them is even living yet. Maybe they will be the readers who understand my ZARATHUSTRA: how COULD I mistake myself for one of those for whom there are ears even now? Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.
The conditions under which I am understood, and then of NECESSITY--I know them only too well. One must be honest in matters of the spirit to the point of hardness before one can even endure my seriousness and my passion. One must be skilled in living on mountains--seeing the wretched ephemeral babble of politics and national self-seeking BENEATH oneself. One must have become indifferent; one must never ask if the truth is useful or if it may prove our undoing. [One must have] The predilection of strength for questions for which no one today has the courage; [One must have] the courage for the FORBIDDEN; [One must have] the predestination to the labyrinth. [One must have] An experience of seven solitudes. [One must have] New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. [One must have] A new conscience for truths that have so far remained mute. AND the will to the economy of the great style: keeping our strength, our ENTHUSIASM in harness. [One must have] Reverence for oneself; love of oneself; unconditional freedom before oneself.
Well then! Such men alone are my readers, my right readers, my predestined readers: what matter the rest? The rest--that is merely mankind. One must be above mankind in strength, in LOFTINESS of soul--in contempt.
from the preface to THE ANTICHRIST. (Editorial additions by T.J.White)
______________________
...As for your principle that truth is always on the side of the more difficult, I admit this in part. However, it is difficult to believe that 2 times 2 is NOT 4; does that make it true? On the other hand, is it really so difficult simply to accept everything that one has been brought up on and that has gradually struck deep roots--what is considered truth in the circle of one's relatives and of many good men, and what, moreover, really comforts and elevates man? Is that more difficult than to strike new paths, fighting the habitual, experiencing the insecurity of independence and the frequent wavering of one's feelings and even one's conscience, proceeding often without any consolation, but ever with the eternal goal of the true, the beautiful, and the good? Is it decisive after all that we arrive at THAT view of God, world, and reconciliation which makes us feel most comfortable? Rather, is not the result of his inquiries something wholly indifferent to the true inquirer? Do we after all seek rest, peace, and pleasure in our inquiries? No, only truth--even if it be the most abhorrent and ugly. Still one last question: if we had believed from childhood that all salvation issued from someone other than Jesus--say, from Mohammed--is it not certain that we should have experienced the same blessings? ...Faith does not offer the least support for a proof of objective truth. Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire. ...*
from his LETTER TO HIS SISTER (1865)
*He was quoting Heine: "If you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then enquire. ..." (Letter to his sister, 1817)
____________________
THE CRIMINAL AND WHAT IS RELATED TO HIM. The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick. He lacks the wilderness, a somehow freer and more dangerous environment and form of existence, where everything that is weapons and armor in the instinct of the strong human being has its rightful place. His VIRTUES are ostracized by society; the most vivid drives with which he is endowed soon grow together with the depressing affects--with suspicion, fear, and dishonor. Yet this is almost the recipe for physiological degeneration. Whoever must do secretly, with long suspense, caution, and cunning, what he can do best and would most like to do, becomes anemic; and because he always harvests only danger, persecution, and calamity from his instincts, his attitude to these instincts is reversed too, and he comes to experience them fatalistically. It is our society, our tame, mediocre, emasculated society, in which a natural human being, who comes from the mountains or from the adventures of the sea necessarily degenerates into a criminal. Or almost necessarily; for there are cases in which such a man proves stronger than society: the Corsican, Napoleon, is the most famous case.
The testimony of Dostoevski is relevant to this problem--Dostoevski, the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn; he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life, even more than my discovery of Stendhal. This PROFOUND human being, who was ten times right in his low estimate of the superficial Germans, lived for a long time among the convicts in Siberia--hardened criminals for whom there was no way back to society--and found them very different from what he himself had expected: they were carved out of just about the best, hardest, and most valuable wood that grows anywhere on Russian soil.
Let us generalize the case of the criminal: let us think of men so constituted that, for one reason or another, they lack public approval and know that they are not felt to be beneficial or useful--that Chandala feeling that one is not considered equal, but an outcast, unworthy, contaminating. All men so constituted have a subterranean hue to their thoughts and actions; everything about them becomes paler than in those whose existence is touched by daylight. Yet almost all forms of existence which we consider distinguished today once lived in this half tomblike atmosphere: the scientific character, the artist, the genius, the free spirit, the actor, the merchant, the great discoverer. As long as the priest was considered the supreme type, EVERY valuable type of human being was devalued. The time will come, I promise, when the priest will be considered the lowest type, OUR Chandala, the most mendacious, the most indecent kind of human being.
I call attention to the fact that even now--under the mildest regimen of morals which has ever ruled on earth, or at least in Europe--every deviation, every long, all-too-long sojourn below, every unusual or opaque form of existence, brings one closer to that type which is perfected in the criminal. All innovators of the spirit must for a time bear the pallid and fatal mark of the Chandala on their foreheads--NOT because they are considered that way by others, but because they themselves feel the terrible cleavage which separates them from everything that is customary or reputable. Almost every genius knows, as one stage of his development, the "Catilinarian existence"--a feeling of hatred, revenge, and rebellion against everything which already IS, which no longer BECOMES. Catiline--the form of pre-existence of EVERY Caesar.
TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS, 45.
Today, conversely, when only the herd animal is honored and dispenses honors in Europe, and when "equality of rights" could all too easily be converted into an equality in violating rights--by that I mean, into a common war on all that is rare, strange, or privileged, on the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, and on the wealth of creative power and mastery--today the concept of "greatness" entails being noble, wanting to be by oneself, being capable of being different, standing alone, and having to live independently; and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he posits: "He shall be the greatest who can be the loneliest, the most hidden, the most deviating, the human being beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, he that is overrich in will. Precisely this should be called GREATNESS: to be capable of being as manifold as whole, as wide as full." And to ask this once more: today--is greatness POSSIBLE? ...
from BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL (212), transl. Walter Kaufmann
(as hereafter)
_________________________
Revaluation of All Values
This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps not one of them is even living yet. Maybe they will be the readers who understand my ZARATHUSTRA: how COULD I mistake myself for one of those for whom there are ears even now? Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.
The conditions under which I am understood, and then of NECESSITY--I know them only too well. One must be honest in matters of the spirit to the point of hardness before one can even endure my seriousness and my passion. One must be skilled in living on mountains--seeing the wretched ephemeral babble of politics and national self-seeking BENEATH oneself. One must have become indifferent; one must never ask if the truth is useful or if it may prove our undoing. [One must have] The predilection of strength for questions for which no one today has the courage; [One must have] the courage for the FORBIDDEN; [One must have] the predestination to the labyrinth. [One must have] An experience of seven solitudes. [One must have] New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. [One must have] A new conscience for truths that have so far remained mute. AND the will to the economy of the great style: keeping our strength, our ENTHUSIASM in harness. [One must have] Reverence for oneself; love of oneself; unconditional freedom before oneself.
Well then! Such men alone are my readers, my right readers, my predestined readers: what matter the rest? The rest--that is merely mankind. One must be above mankind in strength, in LOFTINESS of soul--in contempt.
from the preface to THE ANTICHRIST. (Editorial additions by T.J.White)
______________________
...As for your principle that truth is always on the side of the more difficult, I admit this in part. However, it is difficult to believe that 2 times 2 is NOT 4; does that make it true? On the other hand, is it really so difficult simply to accept everything that one has been brought up on and that has gradually struck deep roots--what is considered truth in the circle of one's relatives and of many good men, and what, moreover, really comforts and elevates man? Is that more difficult than to strike new paths, fighting the habitual, experiencing the insecurity of independence and the frequent wavering of one's feelings and even one's conscience, proceeding often without any consolation, but ever with the eternal goal of the true, the beautiful, and the good? Is it decisive after all that we arrive at THAT view of God, world, and reconciliation which makes us feel most comfortable? Rather, is not the result of his inquiries something wholly indifferent to the true inquirer? Do we after all seek rest, peace, and pleasure in our inquiries? No, only truth--even if it be the most abhorrent and ugly. Still one last question: if we had believed from childhood that all salvation issued from someone other than Jesus--say, from Mohammed--is it not certain that we should have experienced the same blessings? ...Faith does not offer the least support for a proof of objective truth. Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire. ...*
from his LETTER TO HIS SISTER (1865)
*He was quoting Heine: "If you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then enquire. ..." (Letter to his sister, 1817)
____________________
THE CRIMINAL AND WHAT IS RELATED TO HIM. The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong human being made sick. He lacks the wilderness, a somehow freer and more dangerous environment and form of existence, where everything that is weapons and armor in the instinct of the strong human being has its rightful place. His VIRTUES are ostracized by society; the most vivid drives with which he is endowed soon grow together with the depressing affects--with suspicion, fear, and dishonor. Yet this is almost the recipe for physiological degeneration. Whoever must do secretly, with long suspense, caution, and cunning, what he can do best and would most like to do, becomes anemic; and because he always harvests only danger, persecution, and calamity from his instincts, his attitude to these instincts is reversed too, and he comes to experience them fatalistically. It is our society, our tame, mediocre, emasculated society, in which a natural human being, who comes from the mountains or from the adventures of the sea necessarily degenerates into a criminal. Or almost necessarily; for there are cases in which such a man proves stronger than society: the Corsican, Napoleon, is the most famous case.
The testimony of Dostoevski is relevant to this problem--Dostoevski, the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn; he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life, even more than my discovery of Stendhal. This PROFOUND human being, who was ten times right in his low estimate of the superficial Germans, lived for a long time among the convicts in Siberia--hardened criminals for whom there was no way back to society--and found them very different from what he himself had expected: they were carved out of just about the best, hardest, and most valuable wood that grows anywhere on Russian soil.
Let us generalize the case of the criminal: let us think of men so constituted that, for one reason or another, they lack public approval and know that they are not felt to be beneficial or useful--that Chandala feeling that one is not considered equal, but an outcast, unworthy, contaminating. All men so constituted have a subterranean hue to their thoughts and actions; everything about them becomes paler than in those whose existence is touched by daylight. Yet almost all forms of existence which we consider distinguished today once lived in this half tomblike atmosphere: the scientific character, the artist, the genius, the free spirit, the actor, the merchant, the great discoverer. As long as the priest was considered the supreme type, EVERY valuable type of human being was devalued. The time will come, I promise, when the priest will be considered the lowest type, OUR Chandala, the most mendacious, the most indecent kind of human being.
I call attention to the fact that even now--under the mildest regimen of morals which has ever ruled on earth, or at least in Europe--every deviation, every long, all-too-long sojourn below, every unusual or opaque form of existence, brings one closer to that type which is perfected in the criminal. All innovators of the spirit must for a time bear the pallid and fatal mark of the Chandala on their foreheads--NOT because they are considered that way by others, but because they themselves feel the terrible cleavage which separates them from everything that is customary or reputable. Almost every genius knows, as one stage of his development, the "Catilinarian existence"--a feeling of hatred, revenge, and rebellion against everything which already IS, which no longer BECOMES. Catiline--the form of pre-existence of EVERY Caesar.
TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS, 45.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
The School of the Prophets
Those that want [i.e., "lack"] friends to open themselves unto
are cannibals of their own hearts. ... The parable of Pythagoras
is dark, but true; Cor ne edito, 'Eat not the heart'. ...
Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
To wish to feel 'normal' and 'accepted', loved and wanted--is this not an indisputable facet of the human condition? Hence the often overwhelming appeal of the 'herd', or 'popular' peer group. The 'normal' mainstream majority appeals to us because we receive 'positive reinforcement' from most members thereof when we have successfully ingratiated, or conformed, ourselves to it. This, in turn, causes us to feel 'normal' and 'accepted' ourselves. And of course, this feeling of acceptance causes us to desire ever more and more to conform ourselves to the dominant, stasis-loving majority. And behold how many of us are veritable slaves to this basic human need, this condition which is so very difficult to completely turn one's back on!
And yet, to escape from this tunnel-vision way of life (and thinking!) is imperative, if one wishes to grow through experience to discover the ultimate truths and ends of life. Unfortunately, there is just no other way presently seen. One must be willing to become a non-conformist; one must be willing to turn one's back on the society of one's fellow-beings, to spend years (if necessary) in the solitary deserts, like John the Baptist; to climb the mountain alone, as did Moses, before bringing down to humanity a new vision of reality or the Divine. One must be willing to forego the feelings of normalcy and the acceptance of one's peer society--hence one's peace of soul--if one is to follow truth to wherever it may lead. As Nietzsche truly knew and said, to be devoted to truth, one must be prepared for the painful, jarring feelings of dislocation that come from feeling oneself set apart and isolated from all that is or ever will be 'whole', 'normal', 'healthy', or 'popular'. And this is, of course, the paramount task of every real philosopher--this relentless questioning of life and its perceived values, and one's relationship therewith. As Nietzsche also said, one must re-evaluate all values--that is, question everything, take nothing whatsoever for granted. And how many people are able and willing to consistently do this? How many of us run for shelter the minute the storm threatens!
And the end of all this is predetermined: this isolating dislocation, if pursued to its bitter, lonely end, can lead only to either genius, insanity, or suicide, or perhaps all three at once.
"Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny. ..."
C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
T.J. White, July 1st, 1994
are cannibals of their own hearts. ... The parable of Pythagoras
is dark, but true; Cor ne edito, 'Eat not the heart'. ...
Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
To wish to feel 'normal' and 'accepted', loved and wanted--is this not an indisputable facet of the human condition? Hence the often overwhelming appeal of the 'herd', or 'popular' peer group. The 'normal' mainstream majority appeals to us because we receive 'positive reinforcement' from most members thereof when we have successfully ingratiated, or conformed, ourselves to it. This, in turn, causes us to feel 'normal' and 'accepted' ourselves. And of course, this feeling of acceptance causes us to desire ever more and more to conform ourselves to the dominant, stasis-loving majority. And behold how many of us are veritable slaves to this basic human need, this condition which is so very difficult to completely turn one's back on!
And yet, to escape from this tunnel-vision way of life (and thinking!) is imperative, if one wishes to grow through experience to discover the ultimate truths and ends of life. Unfortunately, there is just no other way presently seen. One must be willing to become a non-conformist; one must be willing to turn one's back on the society of one's fellow-beings, to spend years (if necessary) in the solitary deserts, like John the Baptist; to climb the mountain alone, as did Moses, before bringing down to humanity a new vision of reality or the Divine. One must be willing to forego the feelings of normalcy and the acceptance of one's peer society--hence one's peace of soul--if one is to follow truth to wherever it may lead. As Nietzsche truly knew and said, to be devoted to truth, one must be prepared for the painful, jarring feelings of dislocation that come from feeling oneself set apart and isolated from all that is or ever will be 'whole', 'normal', 'healthy', or 'popular'. And this is, of course, the paramount task of every real philosopher--this relentless questioning of life and its perceived values, and one's relationship therewith. As Nietzsche also said, one must re-evaluate all values--that is, question everything, take nothing whatsoever for granted. And how many people are able and willing to consistently do this? How many of us run for shelter the minute the storm threatens!
And the end of all this is predetermined: this isolating dislocation, if pursued to its bitter, lonely end, can lead only to either genius, insanity, or suicide, or perhaps all three at once.
"Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny. ..."
C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
T.J. White, July 1st, 1994
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Concerning a Liberal or Free Society
An Excerpt from the 1973 textbook, An Introduction to Moral and Social Philosophy,
edited by Jeffrie G. Murphy (pp.413-414):
What form of government would a moral man choose for himself and others? The position of liberalism holds (1) that freedom or liberty is the most important value[*] and (2) that democratic forms of government are most likely to maximize this value. According to this position, freedom or liberty is to be understood as the ability, without hindrance from others, to gain satisfaction for one's wants and desires, insofar as this is compatible with a like liberty for others.
John Stuart Mill is generally regarded as the most persuasive spokesman for this kind of liberalism. And one of his great strengths is that he perceives some of the pathologies to which democracy is susceptible. One of these pathologies, which Mill calls the "tyranny of the majority," results from the power that a majority has in a democracy to coerce an unpopular minority. To cure this pathology, Mill suggests that democracies should subscribe (in a legal constitution perhaps) to the following principle: society is justified in coercing any one of its members only to prevent harm to others. Only if the democratic principle of majority rule is limited in this way can the tyranny of the majority be avoided.
Herbert Marcuse [1898-1979], a contemporary Marxist, believes that even a democracy so limited will still have grave defects. Modern technological societies, even those calling themselves democracies, have subtle and terribly dangerous ways of repressing their citizens. This kind of repression is dangerous just because it does not seem repressive at all, since a substantial number of people in the population have most of their needs and desires satisfied. Suppose, however, that those needs and desires are artificial--that is, manufactured and satisfied by the power elite in a society to ensure that citizens remain pliant and cooperative. This supposition forms the basis for Marcuse's disquieting commentary on contemporary Western democracies. To use the language of Marx, the evil of these societies is that, despite the wants they satisfy, they have failed to reduce alienation. Indeed they rest on it. ...
[*Comment by T.J.White:
Notice that he nowhere mentions the value of security or safety, which is so much trumpeted about today. I hold that complete (or near-total) security or safety is wholly incompatible with a free society, one that cherishes the liberty of the individual. One cannot have both. Freedom necessarily entails risk, and it seems that nowadays, our society is (tragically) increasingly unwilling to take that risk to be truly free. Many people in our society would much rather (it seems apparent) give up those freedoms which their forefathers most cherished (and fought and died for) in the name of and for the sake of safety and security, rather than continue to be a truly free people, but constantly risk another "terrorist attack." And even more tragically, it seems equally obvious that there are many in our current government who are attempting to use the threat of "terrorism" and "terror attacks" to stampede the fearful American people (like a herd of buffalo over a cliff) into giving up those freedoms. And it appears clear that they are succeeding. How many more years before Americans will have lost all their basic (worthwhile) freedoms, and will be reduced to the level of serfs or slaves (albeit perhaps happy and contented--if brainless--ones)? How many more years (if we are to be honest) before we must call America the "United Fascist States of America"? I am stating this really somewhat tongue-in-cheek, for I feel that the time is already upon us, and our future condition can differ from our present one only in a matter of degree, not substance.]
edited by Jeffrie G. Murphy (pp.413-414):
What form of government would a moral man choose for himself and others? The position of liberalism holds (1) that freedom or liberty is the most important value[*] and (2) that democratic forms of government are most likely to maximize this value. According to this position, freedom or liberty is to be understood as the ability, without hindrance from others, to gain satisfaction for one's wants and desires, insofar as this is compatible with a like liberty for others.
John Stuart Mill is generally regarded as the most persuasive spokesman for this kind of liberalism. And one of his great strengths is that he perceives some of the pathologies to which democracy is susceptible. One of these pathologies, which Mill calls the "tyranny of the majority," results from the power that a majority has in a democracy to coerce an unpopular minority. To cure this pathology, Mill suggests that democracies should subscribe (in a legal constitution perhaps) to the following principle: society is justified in coercing any one of its members only to prevent harm to others. Only if the democratic principle of majority rule is limited in this way can the tyranny of the majority be avoided.
Herbert Marcuse [1898-1979], a contemporary Marxist, believes that even a democracy so limited will still have grave defects. Modern technological societies, even those calling themselves democracies, have subtle and terribly dangerous ways of repressing their citizens. This kind of repression is dangerous just because it does not seem repressive at all, since a substantial number of people in the population have most of their needs and desires satisfied. Suppose, however, that those needs and desires are artificial--that is, manufactured and satisfied by the power elite in a society to ensure that citizens remain pliant and cooperative. This supposition forms the basis for Marcuse's disquieting commentary on contemporary Western democracies. To use the language of Marx, the evil of these societies is that, despite the wants they satisfy, they have failed to reduce alienation. Indeed they rest on it. ...
[*Comment by T.J.White:
Notice that he nowhere mentions the value of security or safety, which is so much trumpeted about today. I hold that complete (or near-total) security or safety is wholly incompatible with a free society, one that cherishes the liberty of the individual. One cannot have both. Freedom necessarily entails risk, and it seems that nowadays, our society is (tragically) increasingly unwilling to take that risk to be truly free. Many people in our society would much rather (it seems apparent) give up those freedoms which their forefathers most cherished (and fought and died for) in the name of and for the sake of safety and security, rather than continue to be a truly free people, but constantly risk another "terrorist attack." And even more tragically, it seems equally obvious that there are many in our current government who are attempting to use the threat of "terrorism" and "terror attacks" to stampede the fearful American people (like a herd of buffalo over a cliff) into giving up those freedoms. And it appears clear that they are succeeding. How many more years before Americans will have lost all their basic (worthwhile) freedoms, and will be reduced to the level of serfs or slaves (albeit perhaps happy and contented--if brainless--ones)? How many more years (if we are to be honest) before we must call America the "United Fascist States of America"? I am stating this really somewhat tongue-in-cheek, for I feel that the time is already upon us, and our future condition can differ from our present one only in a matter of degree, not substance.]
Society Neglecting Those It Considers Less Valuable
An Excerpt From Erich Fromm's 1965 book Escape From Freedom
The term normal or healthy can be defined in two ways. Firstly, from the standpoint of a functioning society, one can call a person normal or healthy if he is able to fulfill the social role he is to take in that given society. More concretely, this means that he is able to work in the fashion which is required in that particular society, and furthermore that he is able to participate in the reproduction of society, that is, that he can raise a family. Secondly, from the standpoint of the individual, we look upon health or normalcy as the optimum of growth and happiness of the individual.
If the structure of a given society were such that it offered the optimum possibility for individual happiness, both viewpoints would coincide. However, this is not the case in most societies we know, including our own. Although they differ in the degree to which they promote the aims of individual growth, there is a discrepancy between the aims of the smooth functioning of society and of the full development of the individual. This fact makes it imperative to differentiate sharply between the two concepts of health. The one is governed by social necessities, the other by values and norms concerning the aim of individual existence.
Unfortunately, this differentiation is often neglected. Most psychiatrists take the structure of their own society so much for granted that to them the person who is not well adapted assumes the stigma of being less valuable. On the other hand, the well-adapted person is supposed to be the more valuable person in terms of a scale of human values. If we differentiate the two concepts of normal and neurotic, we come to the following conclusion: The person who is normal in terms of being well adapted is often less healthy than the neurotic person in terms of human values. Often he is well adapted only at the expense of having given up his self in order to become more or less the person he believes he is expected to be. All genuine individuality and spontaneity may have been lost. On the other hand, the neurotic person can be characterized as somebody who was not ready to surrender completely in the battle for his self. To be sure, his attempt to save his individual self was not successful, and instead of expressing his self productively he sought salvation through neurotic symptoms and by withdrawing into a phantasy life. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of human values, he is less crippled than the kind of normal person who has lost his individuality altogether. Needless to say, there are persons who are not neurotic and yet have not drowned their individuality in the process of adaptation. But the stigma attached to the neurotic person seems to us to be unfounded and justified only if we think of neurotic in terms of social efficiency. As for a whole society, the term neurotic cannot be applied in this latter sense, since a society could not exist if its members did not function socially. From a standpoint of human values, however, a society could be called neurotic in the sense that its members are crippled in the growth of their personality. Since the term neurotic is so often used to denote a lack of social functioning, we would prefer not to speak of a society in terms of its being neurotic, but rather in terms of its being adverse to human happiness and self-realization.
(pp.159-161)
The term normal or healthy can be defined in two ways. Firstly, from the standpoint of a functioning society, one can call a person normal or healthy if he is able to fulfill the social role he is to take in that given society. More concretely, this means that he is able to work in the fashion which is required in that particular society, and furthermore that he is able to participate in the reproduction of society, that is, that he can raise a family. Secondly, from the standpoint of the individual, we look upon health or normalcy as the optimum of growth and happiness of the individual.
If the structure of a given society were such that it offered the optimum possibility for individual happiness, both viewpoints would coincide. However, this is not the case in most societies we know, including our own. Although they differ in the degree to which they promote the aims of individual growth, there is a discrepancy between the aims of the smooth functioning of society and of the full development of the individual. This fact makes it imperative to differentiate sharply between the two concepts of health. The one is governed by social necessities, the other by values and norms concerning the aim of individual existence.
Unfortunately, this differentiation is often neglected. Most psychiatrists take the structure of their own society so much for granted that to them the person who is not well adapted assumes the stigma of being less valuable. On the other hand, the well-adapted person is supposed to be the more valuable person in terms of a scale of human values. If we differentiate the two concepts of normal and neurotic, we come to the following conclusion: The person who is normal in terms of being well adapted is often less healthy than the neurotic person in terms of human values. Often he is well adapted only at the expense of having given up his self in order to become more or less the person he believes he is expected to be. All genuine individuality and spontaneity may have been lost. On the other hand, the neurotic person can be characterized as somebody who was not ready to surrender completely in the battle for his self. To be sure, his attempt to save his individual self was not successful, and instead of expressing his self productively he sought salvation through neurotic symptoms and by withdrawing into a phantasy life. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of human values, he is less crippled than the kind of normal person who has lost his individuality altogether. Needless to say, there are persons who are not neurotic and yet have not drowned their individuality in the process of adaptation. But the stigma attached to the neurotic person seems to us to be unfounded and justified only if we think of neurotic in terms of social efficiency. As for a whole society, the term neurotic cannot be applied in this latter sense, since a society could not exist if its members did not function socially. From a standpoint of human values, however, a society could be called neurotic in the sense that its members are crippled in the growth of their personality. Since the term neurotic is so often used to denote a lack of social functioning, we would prefer not to speak of a society in terms of its being neurotic, but rather in terms of its being adverse to human happiness and self-realization.
(pp.159-161)
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
The Purpose of Suffering
A Private Meditation on the Purpose and Necessity of Suffering,
and the Frivolity of the General Idea of Being 'Saved' (in the Religious Sense).
Do you not realize that suffering is necessary for the cleansing of the Soul?--that it cannot ever happen any other way? 'Baptism' may be symbolic of the cleansing, but the real thing comes from actual suffering.
Suffering saves us, not 'Jesus' or some other far-off fictional deity. That is the 'old lie'--that Jesus will save us from (from!!) our suffering and sin.
To believe in the 'Jesus' of the religionists is, after all, nothing other than to be weak, unmanly, and effeminate, not to mention disappointing and disgusting. (And I am referring here not to any actual person named 'Jesus' who may or may not have actually existed, but rather to the generally-held Twenty-First Century Western/American idea of the same, which is not by any means an identical thing.) The words of Beethoven are appropriate here:
O Freunde, nicht diese Tone!
You are capable of so much better than this! Live up to your potential as human beings--even, as children of the Living Father!
"There is nothing in your creed," said an astute and wise Roman Emperor once, "beyond the one word believe." And he (Julian) probably knew the early Christians much better than we, especially as he was their contemporary.
Learn to behold the 'God within you'! Your soul is a vehicle for the divine! 'God' is not "out there"--God is here, within you! Salvation comes not from without (as in the idea of "Jesus will save me"), but rather from within. You must save yourselves!
The fact that so few of you realize this (or accept this, which is far more important), is precisely the reason why so many of you live and die lost--"perduto." "Sons of Perdition" are you--banished to outer darkness, except that the 'darkness' is, once again, not "out there", but here, inside your own benighted souls.
And you have the power to redeem and save yourselves, but yet you don't use it!
Instead, you look to an all-powerful, mammoth father-figure, that is entirely the product of your own (and your ancestors') fancy and fear, to save you from yourselves and your own guilt and fear.
The incredible, sad, ironic fact is, that by placing your belief and trust in a 'Jesus' who will save you from your suffering (which is only a product of your guilt and fear), you thereby block yourselves from ever achieving true salvation, true cleansing, which cleansing indeed can only come about through the embracing or acceptance of your own suffering.
T.J.White, 4 September, 2002
_______________________
An Unrelated Addendum
It is their pathetic, pathological need for approval and acceptance from a 'father-figure' or an 'authority'-figure, which causes most Americans to give up their freedoms, and embrace an authoritarian, dictatorial form of government--a fascist-type government by Bureaucracy or Oligarchy. This is exactly what we see occuring even now in America--the one nation in all the world, with its heritage of respect for individual liberties and rights, precisely at the expense of government, where such a thing is most disheartening and dismaying to observe.
T.J.White, 8 September, 2002
and the Frivolity of the General Idea of Being 'Saved' (in the Religious Sense).
Do you not realize that suffering is necessary for the cleansing of the Soul?--that it cannot ever happen any other way? 'Baptism' may be symbolic of the cleansing, but the real thing comes from actual suffering.
Suffering saves us, not 'Jesus' or some other far-off fictional deity. That is the 'old lie'--that Jesus will save us from (from!!) our suffering and sin.
To believe in the 'Jesus' of the religionists is, after all, nothing other than to be weak, unmanly, and effeminate, not to mention disappointing and disgusting. (And I am referring here not to any actual person named 'Jesus' who may or may not have actually existed, but rather to the generally-held Twenty-First Century Western/American idea of the same, which is not by any means an identical thing.) The words of Beethoven are appropriate here:
O Freunde, nicht diese Tone!
You are capable of so much better than this! Live up to your potential as human beings--even, as children of the Living Father!
"There is nothing in your creed," said an astute and wise Roman Emperor once, "beyond the one word believe." And he (Julian) probably knew the early Christians much better than we, especially as he was their contemporary.
Learn to behold the 'God within you'! Your soul is a vehicle for the divine! 'God' is not "out there"--God is here, within you! Salvation comes not from without (as in the idea of "Jesus will save me"), but rather from within. You must save yourselves!
The fact that so few of you realize this (or accept this, which is far more important), is precisely the reason why so many of you live and die lost--"perduto." "Sons of Perdition" are you--banished to outer darkness, except that the 'darkness' is, once again, not "out there", but here, inside your own benighted souls.
And you have the power to redeem and save yourselves, but yet you don't use it!
Instead, you look to an all-powerful, mammoth father-figure, that is entirely the product of your own (and your ancestors') fancy and fear, to save you from yourselves and your own guilt and fear.
The incredible, sad, ironic fact is, that by placing your belief and trust in a 'Jesus' who will save you from your suffering (which is only a product of your guilt and fear), you thereby block yourselves from ever achieving true salvation, true cleansing, which cleansing indeed can only come about through the embracing or acceptance of your own suffering.
T.J.White, 4 September, 2002
_______________________
An Unrelated Addendum
It is their pathetic, pathological need for approval and acceptance from a 'father-figure' or an 'authority'-figure, which causes most Americans to give up their freedoms, and embrace an authoritarian, dictatorial form of government--a fascist-type government by Bureaucracy or Oligarchy. This is exactly what we see occuring even now in America--the one nation in all the world, with its heritage of respect for individual liberties and rights, precisely at the expense of government, where such a thing is most disheartening and dismaying to observe.
T.J.White, 8 September, 2002
An Anonymous Medieval English Quotation
How mow they thanne shryue that synne,
That seyn they haue no gylt therinne?
We Englys men theron shulde thinke.
(translation:)
How can anyone repent of any sin,
If he believes he is not guilty of it?
We Englishmen should really think about this matter.
(Translation by T.J.White)
That seyn they haue no gylt therinne?
We Englys men theron shulde thinke.
(translation:)
How can anyone repent of any sin,
If he believes he is not guilty of it?
We Englishmen should really think about this matter.
(Translation by T.J.White)
Another Useful Poem
"And So I Judged"
I dreamed Death came the other night,
And Heaven's gate swung wide--
With kindly grace an Angel came
And ushered me inside;
And there, to my astonishment,
Stood folks I'd known on Earth:
Some I'd judged and deemed unfit,
And some of little worth;
Indignant words rose to my lips,
But never were set free--
For every face showed stunned surprise--
No one expected ME!
Author Unknown
(to me at any rate)
I dreamed Death came the other night,
And Heaven's gate swung wide--
With kindly grace an Angel came
And ushered me inside;
And there, to my astonishment,
Stood folks I'd known on Earth:
Some I'd judged and deemed unfit,
And some of little worth;
Indignant words rose to my lips,
But never were set free--
For every face showed stunned surprise--
No one expected ME!
Author Unknown
(to me at any rate)
A Poem by Joaquin Miller
In men whom men condemn as ill
I find so much of goodness still,
In men whom men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot,
I hesitate to draw the line
Between the two, where God has not.
Joaquin Miller
(ne Cincinnatus Hiner Miller)
(1841-1913)
American poet
I find so much of goodness still,
In men whom men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot,
I hesitate to draw the line
Between the two, where God has not.
Joaquin Miller
(ne Cincinnatus Hiner Miller)
(1841-1913)
American poet
Monday, January 10, 2005
Toward Understanding Persecution
All known life-forms exhibit the Nietzschean "Will to Power" (also known as the "Will to Live" and/or the "Survival Instinct/Reproductive Urge").
Individual life-forms cannot survive without at least the following two conditions obtaining:
(A) Destroying and consuming (in a sort of cannibalistic sense) other life forms as food (part of the struggle or competition for survival), and
(B) Reproducing their kind. This can be described as passing on their accumulated genetic heritage, which is each species' own unique recorded 'advice' (as it were) on how best to survive in the 'jungle'. In addition to merely reproducing, they must also do their best to see to it that more members of their family, tribe, nation, or species survive and reproduce than members of other families, tribes, nations, or species. This last is really only another adjunct or description of the above destructive impulse; that is, we may basically say that individual life-forms must destroy other life-forms in order to survive, whether as individual or species. This is the so-called "Law of the Jungle": kill or be killed.
Human beings, though (and this is part of what sets us apart from the other animals)--because of their more logical, reasoning, self-intuitive or reflective minds, and their capacity for highly-developed and highly-expressed emotion of altruism--are capable of significantly delaying and somewhat negating the above-described instinctive bio-survival/reproductive urge, and its attendant destructive impulse. Human beings, we may say, are thus not usually as dominated by this urge and its consequences as are most other species.
However, human beings are still somewhat under the influence of this destructive, self-perpetuating urge, to the degree that we are still animalian and still dominated by our animal genetic heritage (including instincts): we human beings still often seek to harm, persecute, or destroy minorities, which we may define as any individual or sub-group which is significantly different from the majority of the population of any given locale, and which thus seems to pose a threat to the individual/species bio-survival of the societal 'majority'.
This xenophobia and persecution would thus be perfectly explainable in terms of humankind's animal genetic heritage, instincts, and responses to the stimuli presented by other, significantly different people, but it would seem to be a stumbling-block, a primitive animal throwback, standing in the way of humankind's evident future evolutionary path--that is, toward greater use of reason, greater display of altruism, and less dependence upon violent, irrational, 'negative' animal emotion and instinct.
We would, of course, wish to see our species advance in this direction, and decry these recurrent primitive throwbacks of hatred, fear, and persecution. Why, we may (with justification) ask, does this bio-survival/reproductive urge (and its corollaries) still frequently cause human beings to seek to harm or destroy others? Why do reason and altruism (assumed to be growing, developing evolutionary traits native to human beings) seem to periodically fail?
The answers lie somewhere in the following area, I believe:
We may say that this persecution occurs because of the following:
One rather simple explanation is in terms of pure xenophobia: we may say that on a very basic , organic level--the level of simple organism versus organism--whatever is perceived as "not me" is therefore seen as something alien and foreign--something to be always cautiously on guard against as a potential threat to bio-survival; something, therefore, to be overcome and vanquished as a potential threat. This will all become much clearer if we picture ourselves on the level of the paramecium, for example. This very primitive and ancient instinctual urge or perception is offset somewhat--but never completely negated--by the additional survival instinct of altruism, that is, the urge toward nurturing our offspring as insurance toward the survival of the personal/tribal/species gene pool.
Another way of stating this would be to say that misunderstanding, fear and hatred are negative and undesirable primitive animal-like emotional reactions to perceived threats to the gene pool, and/or the bio-survival/reproductive urge, and to perceived violations of the cultural 'taboos' which are nominally structured to protect the same, and that
This misunderstanding, fear, and hatred can develop between individuals, or between individuals and groups, or between a 'majority' grouping and a minority or minorities, and that
These undesirable 'negative' emotional reactions occur--in individuals and in entire societies--because reason and altruism fail to counteract or control them.
WHY? Reason and Altruism (I believe) fail to control these undesirable emotional reactions usually because life and survival are still so often so precarious and uncertain for most human beings (as indeed for all other life-forms). In instances of inadequate or failed communication (which can lead to distrust and misunderstanding), and/or instances of unusually strong perceived threats to bio-survival, the gene pool, or 'taboos', most human beings will (naturally and understandably) be unable to interpose with reason and altruism (though this does not excuse them), and will instead react with hatred, fear and violence toward anything or anyone which seems to threaten "my life," "my offspring," "my family," "my tribe," etc., or any other aspect of the comfortable 'status quo' system which supports these ends, and provides most human beings with (necessary, we must remind ourselves) existential security, stability, and comfort. (And this definitely includes 'religious' structures.)
Most average human beings will continue to react in this manner until one or both of the following two conditions obtain:
(A) A substantial majority of individual human beings becomes sufficiently intelligent and knowledgable that reason and altruism must more frequently dominate over animal emotion and instinct (and this is of course an evolutionary process, as I have already said), and
(B) That life and survival are no longer precarious and uncertain for most human beings, and that they therefore may become more complacent and tolerant from lack of worry and extreme.
T.J.White, August, 1994
Individual life-forms cannot survive without at least the following two conditions obtaining:
(A) Destroying and consuming (in a sort of cannibalistic sense) other life forms as food (part of the struggle or competition for survival), and
(B) Reproducing their kind. This can be described as passing on their accumulated genetic heritage, which is each species' own unique recorded 'advice' (as it were) on how best to survive in the 'jungle'. In addition to merely reproducing, they must also do their best to see to it that more members of their family, tribe, nation, or species survive and reproduce than members of other families, tribes, nations, or species. This last is really only another adjunct or description of the above destructive impulse; that is, we may basically say that individual life-forms must destroy other life-forms in order to survive, whether as individual or species. This is the so-called "Law of the Jungle": kill or be killed.
Human beings, though (and this is part of what sets us apart from the other animals)--because of their more logical, reasoning, self-intuitive or reflective minds, and their capacity for highly-developed and highly-expressed emotion of altruism--are capable of significantly delaying and somewhat negating the above-described instinctive bio-survival/reproductive urge, and its attendant destructive impulse. Human beings, we may say, are thus not usually as dominated by this urge and its consequences as are most other species.
However, human beings are still somewhat under the influence of this destructive, self-perpetuating urge, to the degree that we are still animalian and still dominated by our animal genetic heritage (including instincts): we human beings still often seek to harm, persecute, or destroy minorities, which we may define as any individual or sub-group which is significantly different from the majority of the population of any given locale, and which thus seems to pose a threat to the individual/species bio-survival of the societal 'majority'.
This xenophobia and persecution would thus be perfectly explainable in terms of humankind's animal genetic heritage, instincts, and responses to the stimuli presented by other, significantly different people, but it would seem to be a stumbling-block, a primitive animal throwback, standing in the way of humankind's evident future evolutionary path--that is, toward greater use of reason, greater display of altruism, and less dependence upon violent, irrational, 'negative' animal emotion and instinct.
We would, of course, wish to see our species advance in this direction, and decry these recurrent primitive throwbacks of hatred, fear, and persecution. Why, we may (with justification) ask, does this bio-survival/reproductive urge (and its corollaries) still frequently cause human beings to seek to harm or destroy others? Why do reason and altruism (assumed to be growing, developing evolutionary traits native to human beings) seem to periodically fail?
The answers lie somewhere in the following area, I believe:
We may say that this persecution occurs because of the following:
One rather simple explanation is in terms of pure xenophobia: we may say that on a very basic , organic level--the level of simple organism versus organism--whatever is perceived as "not me" is therefore seen as something alien and foreign--something to be always cautiously on guard against as a potential threat to bio-survival; something, therefore, to be overcome and vanquished as a potential threat. This will all become much clearer if we picture ourselves on the level of the paramecium, for example. This very primitive and ancient instinctual urge or perception is offset somewhat--but never completely negated--by the additional survival instinct of altruism, that is, the urge toward nurturing our offspring as insurance toward the survival of the personal/tribal/species gene pool.
Another way of stating this would be to say that misunderstanding, fear and hatred are negative and undesirable primitive animal-like emotional reactions to perceived threats to the gene pool, and/or the bio-survival/reproductive urge, and to perceived violations of the cultural 'taboos' which are nominally structured to protect the same, and that
This misunderstanding, fear, and hatred can develop between individuals, or between individuals and groups, or between a 'majority' grouping and a minority or minorities, and that
These undesirable 'negative' emotional reactions occur--in individuals and in entire societies--because reason and altruism fail to counteract or control them.
WHY? Reason and Altruism (I believe) fail to control these undesirable emotional reactions usually because life and survival are still so often so precarious and uncertain for most human beings (as indeed for all other life-forms). In instances of inadequate or failed communication (which can lead to distrust and misunderstanding), and/or instances of unusually strong perceived threats to bio-survival, the gene pool, or 'taboos', most human beings will (naturally and understandably) be unable to interpose with reason and altruism (though this does not excuse them), and will instead react with hatred, fear and violence toward anything or anyone which seems to threaten "my life," "my offspring," "my family," "my tribe," etc., or any other aspect of the comfortable 'status quo' system which supports these ends, and provides most human beings with (necessary, we must remind ourselves) existential security, stability, and comfort. (And this definitely includes 'religious' structures.)
Most average human beings will continue to react in this manner until one or both of the following two conditions obtain:
(A) A substantial majority of individual human beings becomes sufficiently intelligent and knowledgable that reason and altruism must more frequently dominate over animal emotion and instinct (and this is of course an evolutionary process, as I have already said), and
(B) That life and survival are no longer precarious and uncertain for most human beings, and that they therefore may become more complacent and tolerant from lack of worry and extreme.
T.J.White, August, 1994
Monday, January 03, 2005
Various Thoughts on Nonconfornity
Human will begins in a "no." The "no" is a protest against a world we never made, and it is also the assertion of one's self in the endeavor to remold and reform the world.
Rollo May (b.1909), Existential therapist, humanist,
in Love and Will (1969)
[Quoted in Seldes, The Great Thoughts (1980), as
hereafter, unless otherwise stated.]
__________________
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950),
Maxims for Revolutionists
__________________
Men have always looked before and after, and rebelled against the existing order. But for their divine discontent men would not have been men, and there would have been no progress in human affairs.
Kabir (1400-1499),
Hindu philosopher and reformer
__________________
Innovators have done the greatest service to society. ...
John Addington Symonds (1840-1893),
in Sexual Inversion
__________________
As a child, ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson was, as he put it, "Reluctant to accept the straitjacket of a world I didn't comprehend."
from Birds Over America, quoted in Reader's Digest.
__________________
To be a revolutionary is to love your life enough to change it, to choose struggle instead of exile, to risk everything with only the glimmering hope of a world to win.
Andrew David Kopkind (b.1935),
American writer,
quoted in New York Times Magazine, November 10, 1968.
___________________
Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.
Howard Mumford Jones (1892-1980),
Primer of Intellectual Freedom (1949), "Introduction".
___________________
A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but often of free and secret love, and in this respect, too, the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry, and another for life.
Ellen Key (1849-1926),
Swedish writer and feminist,
quoted in Sprading, Liberty and the Great Libertarians (1913).
___________________
All art is based on non-conformity.
Ben Shahn (1898-1969),
American artist,
contribution, Atlantic, September 1957.
___________________
The degree of non-conformity present--and tolerated--in a society might be looked upon as a symptom of its state of health.
Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content (1957)
___________________
An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.
Orson Welles (1916-198?),
American actor and producer,
quoted in New York Times, August 7, 1966.
___________________
Art for me ... is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.
Emile Zola (1840-1902),
French novelist,
in Mes Haines (1866)
___________________
"I will not cease from mental fight," Blake wrote. Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. ... It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941),
British writer,
contribution, New Republic, October 21, 1940.
___________________
Art is always subversive. It's something that should NOT be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973),
Spanish painter and sculptor,
quoted in Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life With Picasso (1964).
___________________
Every artist and every poet is an anti-social being.
Picasso, quoted in Saturday Review, May 28, 1966
___________________
What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he is a painter, or his ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet, or, if he is a boxer, only his muscle? On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly alert to the heart-rending, burning, or happy events in the world, moulding himself in their likeness.
How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people and because of an ivory-tower indifference, detach yourself from the life they bring with their open hands?
No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war, for attack and defense against the enemy.
Picasso, from a reply to criticism and attacks for joining the French Communist Party during the Spanish Civil War, quoted in Les Lettres Francaises (1944).
___________________
I am a radical of radicals, but I don't belong in any school.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892),
quoted in Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden.
___________________
Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril.
John Dewey,
Characters and Events (1929)
___________________
Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her own person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost; and not until we live in a society where each can exercise his right of sovereignty at all times without clashing with or violating that of others.
To require conformity in the appreciation of sentiments or the interpretation of language, or uniformity of thought, feeling, or action, is a fundamental error in human legislation--a madness which would only be equalled by requiring all to possess the same countenance, the same voice, or the same nature.
Josiah Warren (1799-1874),
American inventor, philosophical anarchist,
credited by John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer with first proclaiming the sovereignty of the individual.
___________________
The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for
unfettered [*] freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily deprives others of the right to listen to those views. [And perhaps have the chance to exchange error for truth. cf. John Stuart Mill]
C. Vann Woodward (b.1908),
American historian,
Woodward Committee, Report on Free Speech, New York Times, January 28, 1975.
* How can this word possibly be qualified, or otherwise limited? (T.J.W.)
____________________
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and rebellion.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900),
The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1895)
____________________
Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness in our society.
Earl Warren (1891-1974),
Chief Justice, U.S. Supreme Court,
Sweezey vs. New Hampshire (1957)
____________________
All political ideas cannot and should not be channeled into the programs of our two major parties. History has amply proved the virtue of political activity by minority, dissident groups, who innumerable times have been the vanguard of democratic thought and whose programs were ultimately accepted.
Earl Warren, op. cit.
____________________
Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistence.
Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924),
28th President, U.S.A.,
Address, New York Press Club, May 9, 1912.
____________________
Theodore Roosevelt picked up this last phrase and, apparently not knowing that Jefferson had made a similar declaration, attacked Wilson as a dangerous radical. Compare the following:
As late as 1958, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when a representative of Americans for Democratic Action read a statement of Thomas Jefferson's, one of the Senators from the State of Utah, A.V. Watkins, denounced it as false and unbelievable. Confronted with the evidence--a letter from Jefferson to Madison in 1787, available in most history books in most of the nation's libraries--Senator Watkins declared, "If Jefferson were here and advocated such a thing, I would move that he be prosecuted." What Jefferson had written to Madison was simply this: "I hold that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing."
George Seldes, The Great Thoughts (1980), Introduction, "Censorship and Suppression".
___________________
Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization. ... The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by [*] beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge. Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes.
Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965),
U.S. Supreme Court Justice,
concurring opinion, Dennis et al. vs. U.S. (1951).
*I would here insert the words 'previously unpopular' (T.J.W.).
____________________
It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions make it impossible to earn a living.
Bertrand Russell (1879-1970),
Skeptical Essays (1928), XII.
Rollo May (b.1909), Existential therapist, humanist,
in Love and Will (1969)
[Quoted in Seldes, The Great Thoughts (1980), as
hereafter, unless otherwise stated.]
__________________
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950),
Maxims for Revolutionists
__________________
Men have always looked before and after, and rebelled against the existing order. But for their divine discontent men would not have been men, and there would have been no progress in human affairs.
Kabir (1400-1499),
Hindu philosopher and reformer
__________________
Innovators have done the greatest service to society. ...
John Addington Symonds (1840-1893),
in Sexual Inversion
__________________
As a child, ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson was, as he put it, "Reluctant to accept the straitjacket of a world I didn't comprehend."
from Birds Over America, quoted in Reader's Digest.
__________________
To be a revolutionary is to love your life enough to change it, to choose struggle instead of exile, to risk everything with only the glimmering hope of a world to win.
Andrew David Kopkind (b.1935),
American writer,
quoted in New York Times Magazine, November 10, 1968.
___________________
Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.
Howard Mumford Jones (1892-1980),
Primer of Intellectual Freedom (1949), "Introduction".
___________________
A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but often of free and secret love, and in this respect, too, the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry, and another for life.
Ellen Key (1849-1926),
Swedish writer and feminist,
quoted in Sprading, Liberty and the Great Libertarians (1913).
___________________
All art is based on non-conformity.
Ben Shahn (1898-1969),
American artist,
contribution, Atlantic, September 1957.
___________________
The degree of non-conformity present--and tolerated--in a society might be looked upon as a symptom of its state of health.
Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content (1957)
___________________
An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.
Orson Welles (1916-198?),
American actor and producer,
quoted in New York Times, August 7, 1966.
___________________
Art for me ... is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.
Emile Zola (1840-1902),
French novelist,
in Mes Haines (1866)
___________________
"I will not cease from mental fight," Blake wrote. Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. ... It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941),
British writer,
contribution, New Republic, October 21, 1940.
___________________
Art is always subversive. It's something that should NOT be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973),
Spanish painter and sculptor,
quoted in Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life With Picasso (1964).
___________________
Every artist and every poet is an anti-social being.
Picasso, quoted in Saturday Review, May 28, 1966
___________________
What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he is a painter, or his ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet, or, if he is a boxer, only his muscle? On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly alert to the heart-rending, burning, or happy events in the world, moulding himself in their likeness.
How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people and because of an ivory-tower indifference, detach yourself from the life they bring with their open hands?
No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war, for attack and defense against the enemy.
Picasso, from a reply to criticism and attacks for joining the French Communist Party during the Spanish Civil War, quoted in Les Lettres Francaises (1944).
___________________
I am a radical of radicals, but I don't belong in any school.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892),
quoted in Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden.
___________________
Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril.
John Dewey,
Characters and Events (1929)
___________________
Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her own person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost; and not until we live in a society where each can exercise his right of sovereignty at all times without clashing with or violating that of others.
To require conformity in the appreciation of sentiments or the interpretation of language, or uniformity of thought, feeling, or action, is a fundamental error in human legislation--a madness which would only be equalled by requiring all to possess the same countenance, the same voice, or the same nature.
Josiah Warren (1799-1874),
American inventor, philosophical anarchist,
credited by John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer with first proclaiming the sovereignty of the individual.
___________________
The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for
unfettered [*] freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily deprives others of the right to listen to those views. [And perhaps have the chance to exchange error for truth. cf. John Stuart Mill]
C. Vann Woodward (b.1908),
American historian,
Woodward Committee, Report on Free Speech, New York Times, January 28, 1975.
* How can this word possibly be qualified, or otherwise limited? (T.J.W.)
____________________
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and rebellion.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900),
The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1895)
____________________
Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness in our society.
Earl Warren (1891-1974),
Chief Justice, U.S. Supreme Court,
Sweezey vs. New Hampshire (1957)
____________________
All political ideas cannot and should not be channeled into the programs of our two major parties. History has amply proved the virtue of political activity by minority, dissident groups, who innumerable times have been the vanguard of democratic thought and whose programs were ultimately accepted.
Earl Warren, op. cit.
____________________
Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistence.
Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924),
28th President, U.S.A.,
Address, New York Press Club, May 9, 1912.
____________________
Theodore Roosevelt picked up this last phrase and, apparently not knowing that Jefferson had made a similar declaration, attacked Wilson as a dangerous radical. Compare the following:
As late as 1958, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when a representative of Americans for Democratic Action read a statement of Thomas Jefferson's, one of the Senators from the State of Utah, A.V. Watkins, denounced it as false and unbelievable. Confronted with the evidence--a letter from Jefferson to Madison in 1787, available in most history books in most of the nation's libraries--Senator Watkins declared, "If Jefferson were here and advocated such a thing, I would move that he be prosecuted." What Jefferson had written to Madison was simply this: "I hold that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing."
George Seldes, The Great Thoughts (1980), Introduction, "Censorship and Suppression".
___________________
Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization. ... The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by [*] beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge. Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes.
Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965),
U.S. Supreme Court Justice,
concurring opinion, Dennis et al. vs. U.S. (1951).
*I would here insert the words 'previously unpopular' (T.J.W.).
____________________
It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions make it impossible to earn a living.
Bertrand Russell (1879-1970),
Skeptical Essays (1928), XII.
____________________
To be nobody-but-myself--in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else--means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
e.e.cummings (1894-1963),
Letter to a high school editor, 1955.
Monday, December 13, 2004
Housman on Nonconformity
'The laws of God, the laws of man'
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.
A.E.Housman (1859-1936),
quoted in "The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse"
Stephen Coote, editor.
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.
A.E.Housman (1859-1936),
quoted in "The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse"
Stephen Coote, editor.
Orwell on Nonconformity
In a society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behavior is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.
George Orwell (1903-1950), ne Eric Blair,
from "Selected Essays",
quoted in Seldes, "The Great Thoughts" (1980).
George Orwell (1903-1950), ne Eric Blair,
from "Selected Essays",
quoted in Seldes, "The Great Thoughts" (1980).
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Freedom from Repression?
Justice demands that all be treated equally--that no one viewpoint be forced upon others who may wish to go their own way--that everyone should be free to go his own way, separate from majorities, if that be his wish, so long as no one else is deprived or harmed thereby.
Camille Paglia is quoted in the Spring, 1995 issue of "Free Inquiry" (pages 6-7) as saying that "the strange truncations, limitations, and repressions of Judeo-Christianity ... have produced the cult of the striving, heroic, turbulent, individual artist. ... [and that] this is part of the greatness of the West. It's based on neurosis and repression. ..."
Or, as interviewer Timothy Madigan paraphrased in the same article: "The artists are somewhat like oysters producing pearls from the irritants of their upbringing."
Firstly, let me say that I am inclined to agree with the accuracy of the above observations. But they raise, however, some intriguing questions--questions which I believe are important enough to deserve honest answers (or honest attempts at answers). Try (if you will) to sharpen your mind on THESE:
Do we not desire a just and equitable society--in other words, a society free from repressions? Do we not desire (as much as reasonably possible) to eradicate those very repressions that (apparently) have historically been the 'friction which produced great art'? Or do we, after all, really wish merely to preserve the 'status quo'--all for the sake of maintaining our present culture, so that still more 'great art' may continue to be produced?
Question: What sort of art would be produced in a society in which such frictions--such repressions--are largely absent? Would it perhaps be nothing more than a visual form of socio-political propagandising, or like the admittedly bland, passionless 'tractor art' of the mid-twentieth-century Soviet Union?
Question: Is adequate justice (or freedom from repression) really POSSIBLE or realistic in present human societies, given our continued ties to and dependence on the primitive, irrational animal emotions of fear, taboo, superstition, and intolerance (or xenophobia)? Are we perhaps fools to desire that the human race evolve away from this animalistic heritage, and to desire moreover that it happen in the short space OF OUR OWN LIFETIMES?
Question: Is a state of freedom from repression (or 'justice') even DESIRABLE in some instances, seeing that such a condition would (so it seems) eradicate the basis of friction which has historically produced great art (or artists)?
It would thus seem that to desire a society where repression is absent is to desire a society where great art or artists (as we have historically known them) WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE.
Question: If great art (and therefore culture) can only be produced under conditions of friction and repression, which do we then desire most--FREEDOM from that repression (and, presumably, more comfortable lives), or great art and culture, and lives made richer because of that culture?--because 'great' art is great, because it speaks more deeply, more directly, more RELEVANTLY, to the archetypes we perceive and feel, or to the strong emotions we experience over the courses of our lives.
Surely, then (I hasten to add), a life or society without great culture would be a fairly BLEAK one--at least to a sensitive, intelligent soul more finely attuned to the emotional or aesthetic content of life--to a human being with the feeling, sensitive soul of a poet (which is the defining hallmark of the true artist, as Thomas Mann said repeatedly earlier in this century).
Well, I frankly admit that I do not have any firm, final answers to these questions I have proposed; like many others before me, I merely seek answers--which phrase I suppose could be more accurately rendered as "I merely seek greater existential security or stability." In this, surely, I am not alone. More directly relevant to the above discussion, I will add that I myself desire both freedom from repression AND great culture. Perhaps I foolishly desire the impossible. ...
And yet ... and yet, we all of us, at some time or another, feel to say that justice and fairness MUST be actual possibilities, beyond mere abstract concepts, because our brains are capable of IMAGINING that they exist. And (more importantly), without the HOPE for a state of (eventual) justice and freedom, how could humankind continue to have the aspirations and the courage to continue living and struggling, and striving to make a better world? I therefore believe that these issues are of fundamental importance.
21 July, 1995--27 February, 1996.
Camille Paglia is quoted in the Spring, 1995 issue of "Free Inquiry" (pages 6-7) as saying that "the strange truncations, limitations, and repressions of Judeo-Christianity ... have produced the cult of the striving, heroic, turbulent, individual artist. ... [and that] this is part of the greatness of the West. It's based on neurosis and repression. ..."
Or, as interviewer Timothy Madigan paraphrased in the same article: "The artists are somewhat like oysters producing pearls from the irritants of their upbringing."
Firstly, let me say that I am inclined to agree with the accuracy of the above observations. But they raise, however, some intriguing questions--questions which I believe are important enough to deserve honest answers (or honest attempts at answers). Try (if you will) to sharpen your mind on THESE:
Do we not desire a just and equitable society--in other words, a society free from repressions? Do we not desire (as much as reasonably possible) to eradicate those very repressions that (apparently) have historically been the 'friction which produced great art'? Or do we, after all, really wish merely to preserve the 'status quo'--all for the sake of maintaining our present culture, so that still more 'great art' may continue to be produced?
Question: What sort of art would be produced in a society in which such frictions--such repressions--are largely absent? Would it perhaps be nothing more than a visual form of socio-political propagandising, or like the admittedly bland, passionless 'tractor art' of the mid-twentieth-century Soviet Union?
Question: Is adequate justice (or freedom from repression) really POSSIBLE or realistic in present human societies, given our continued ties to and dependence on the primitive, irrational animal emotions of fear, taboo, superstition, and intolerance (or xenophobia)? Are we perhaps fools to desire that the human race evolve away from this animalistic heritage, and to desire moreover that it happen in the short space OF OUR OWN LIFETIMES?
Question: Is a state of freedom from repression (or 'justice') even DESIRABLE in some instances, seeing that such a condition would (so it seems) eradicate the basis of friction which has historically produced great art (or artists)?
It would thus seem that to desire a society where repression is absent is to desire a society where great art or artists (as we have historically known them) WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE.
Question: If great art (and therefore culture) can only be produced under conditions of friction and repression, which do we then desire most--FREEDOM from that repression (and, presumably, more comfortable lives), or great art and culture, and lives made richer because of that culture?--because 'great' art is great, because it speaks more deeply, more directly, more RELEVANTLY, to the archetypes we perceive and feel, or to the strong emotions we experience over the courses of our lives.
Surely, then (I hasten to add), a life or society without great culture would be a fairly BLEAK one--at least to a sensitive, intelligent soul more finely attuned to the emotional or aesthetic content of life--to a human being with the feeling, sensitive soul of a poet (which is the defining hallmark of the true artist, as Thomas Mann said repeatedly earlier in this century).
Well, I frankly admit that I do not have any firm, final answers to these questions I have proposed; like many others before me, I merely seek answers--which phrase I suppose could be more accurately rendered as "I merely seek greater existential security or stability." In this, surely, I am not alone. More directly relevant to the above discussion, I will add that I myself desire both freedom from repression AND great culture. Perhaps I foolishly desire the impossible. ...
And yet ... and yet, we all of us, at some time or another, feel to say that justice and fairness MUST be actual possibilities, beyond mere abstract concepts, because our brains are capable of IMAGINING that they exist. And (more importantly), without the HOPE for a state of (eventual) justice and freedom, how could humankind continue to have the aspirations and the courage to continue living and struggling, and striving to make a better world? I therefore believe that these issues are of fundamental importance.
21 July, 1995--27 February, 1996.
To Mortify the Soul
Some years ago, after most of a lifetime spent producing what the world, in its vanity, is pleased to call 'works of art', I came to the realisation and determination that I would henceforth no longer produce any artificial, external 'art' of any great consequence, that the only work of 'art' of any value for me was the art of my own person or SOUL. My great work NOW is, therefore--as Whitman said, to create out of my own flesh and soul A GREAT POEM. This undertaking is, to my way of thinking, the greatest work of 'art' possible in a lifetime--to make one's own soul a great poem. And this is a work of art that most of the world will never see, or comprehend, because they "seeing, see not, and hearing, hear not"; they have not the "eyes with which to see" the glorious work I am in the process of producing--a soul refined and purified by the fires of trial and adversity. This is not so much a mortification of the flesh, as it is a mortification of the SOUL. What they THINK they see is a flat failure of a life (and recall that the same thing was said of Thoreau, by no less an eminent divine than Emerson); but oh! what they DO NOT see! THAT is where my true work lies!
16 February, 2003.
Most people spend an inordinate portion of their everyday lives assiduously avoiding life's pitfalls and the resultant pains; I, in contrast, try (as much as I can) to cultivate the direct, subjective emotional experience, not only of life's pure, simple, and sometimes unexpected joys, but also (and moreso, if it is possible) of life's pains and sorrows. Rather than fleeing from depression or sorrow, I try to cultivate them much as one might cultivate a rare, exotic hothouse bloom, yet realising all the while that the wild, lawless jungle of life, like some vast, primitive, ageless Amazon wilderness, is replete with both incredible beauty AND great peril--full of limitless possibility, yes, but also full of the potential for terror, death, and violent, wanton destruction.
My life is an unbelievably stressful balancing act--"a rope stretched over the abyss": some of the few who are acquainted with me at least suspect that I am light-years beyond their own preceptions or abilities. Some fewer of them still have seen occasional glimpses of the truth, and are no longer in any doubt. I am both the brightest hope and the greatest worry of my own family, a family which possesses both extraordinary brilliance and ability AND a tendency toward mediocrity and fearful, superstitious conformity--sometimes manifested in the selfsame individuals. If an individual's genetic make-up (in terms of personality) can be described as a random shuffling of the traits and abilities of one's ancestors, then, in my own case, most of the talents and brilliance which various of my forebears possessed, AS WELL AS many traits which most people today would unhesitatingly label "negative", have clearly and undeniably manifested themselves in my person.
I could even go so far as to correctly state that, in many ways, I am as fearless concerning the exploration of life and thought and (particularly) sexuality as was the infamous Marquis de Sade, despite the fact that I have no interest whatsoever in certain of his pet predilections. With others of them, however, that is most definitely NOT the case. ...
Suffice it to say that, for better or worse, I was dealt a hand by the Universe that was both a potentially winning hand and a potentially LOSING hand--at least in terms of its being very likely to strongly express itself in either direction: "success" or "failure"; or "good" or "bad" (as the world sees such matters, of course)--infinitely moreso, anyway, than in the average, hopelessly mediocre person.
August, 1998. (specific date unrecorded)
_______________________
The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.
Henry James, Sr. (1811-1882),
American theologian,
letter to his two sons,
William James and Henry James, Jr.;
quoted in Seldes, "The Great Thoughts" (1980).
16 February, 2003.
Most people spend an inordinate portion of their everyday lives assiduously avoiding life's pitfalls and the resultant pains; I, in contrast, try (as much as I can) to cultivate the direct, subjective emotional experience, not only of life's pure, simple, and sometimes unexpected joys, but also (and moreso, if it is possible) of life's pains and sorrows. Rather than fleeing from depression or sorrow, I try to cultivate them much as one might cultivate a rare, exotic hothouse bloom, yet realising all the while that the wild, lawless jungle of life, like some vast, primitive, ageless Amazon wilderness, is replete with both incredible beauty AND great peril--full of limitless possibility, yes, but also full of the potential for terror, death, and violent, wanton destruction.
My life is an unbelievably stressful balancing act--"a rope stretched over the abyss": some of the few who are acquainted with me at least suspect that I am light-years beyond their own preceptions or abilities. Some fewer of them still have seen occasional glimpses of the truth, and are no longer in any doubt. I am both the brightest hope and the greatest worry of my own family, a family which possesses both extraordinary brilliance and ability AND a tendency toward mediocrity and fearful, superstitious conformity--sometimes manifested in the selfsame individuals. If an individual's genetic make-up (in terms of personality) can be described as a random shuffling of the traits and abilities of one's ancestors, then, in my own case, most of the talents and brilliance which various of my forebears possessed, AS WELL AS many traits which most people today would unhesitatingly label "negative", have clearly and undeniably manifested themselves in my person.
I could even go so far as to correctly state that, in many ways, I am as fearless concerning the exploration of life and thought and (particularly) sexuality as was the infamous Marquis de Sade, despite the fact that I have no interest whatsoever in certain of his pet predilections. With others of them, however, that is most definitely NOT the case. ...
Suffice it to say that, for better or worse, I was dealt a hand by the Universe that was both a potentially winning hand and a potentially LOSING hand--at least in terms of its being very likely to strongly express itself in either direction: "success" or "failure"; or "good" or "bad" (as the world sees such matters, of course)--infinitely moreso, anyway, than in the average, hopelessly mediocre person.
August, 1998. (specific date unrecorded)
_______________________
The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.
Henry James, Sr. (1811-1882),
American theologian,
letter to his two sons,
William James and Henry James, Jr.;
quoted in Seldes, "The Great Thoughts" (1980).
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