Part 4
The problem with this arbitrarily politically
defined “independence” and “self-sufficiency”
is that, unlike the Greek polis and its possession
of “common sense”, there really is no “common
sense” to modern adulthood. It has absolutely
nothing held in common that could be considered
a philosophical base as “common sense” was
in the polis. Everyone, therefore, is a “beast”,
and as Hobbes said of individuals purely
determined by their own desires alone, ‘society’
becomes “a war of all against all” in its
basic intent. The English battled out a common
consent to law, both forced and voluntary,
over time from the period of Cromwell’s Protectorate.
This meant that nobles and clergy lost many
of their specified and local privileges.
But the English have a firm sense of national
identity reinforced by regional identities
supportive of the overall identity. They
have a more or less commonly recognized tradition
varied by region, and that itself is part
of the tradition.
In America there is no tradition because
individual independence is the paramount
value. Any semblance of tradition, such as
existed in the polis or exists in England
today, is purely in tiny locales experienced
by outsider Americans as “quaint” or are
momentary fads descended from once real traditions
but are now changing every moment according
to changing circumstances. The world wars
brought everyone off the farm and Vietnam
brought everyone out of the ghetto. “How
ya goin’ to get them back on the farm after
they’ve seen Pari?” The First World War reduced
the rural population, but the Depression
taught the farmer they worked themselves
to death for nothing. The collapse of the
farm economy started long before October
1929 and was ignored then and is ignored
now as a key cause of the Great Depression
that forever changed American consciousness.
Everyone has moved to the city and lost all
tradition. Mobility of the population has
radically erased regional identities.
Since there is no “common sense” or philosophical
or traditional basis even possible for this
simple or pure concept of individuality,
law is respected simply as forceful coercion,
not as something necessary for common concourse.
In fact but, of course, not in theory, this
is simple nihilism in practice. Words of
supposedly “personal belief” are used merely
to achieve practical ends and reflect no
overall structure of common understanding.
This is not just a mortality of theological
language but a reduction to mere ghostliness
all other symbolic language including literature
to ghosts that haunt us. But as ghosts these
things are not given serious attention, both
atheist and ‘believer’ believe and value
the same things vaguely, though sometimes
using different words whose difference in
effective meaning often becomes trivial.
Therefore as ghosts these subterranean undefined,
unclarified thoughts persist in fundamentally
determining how we think. But they come not
in a purposeful, designed, or benevolent
fashion at all. They come as ghosts. Flannery
O’Connor says of the writer in the “bible
belt” South, the last bastion of fundamentalist
Christianity,
But approaching the subject from the standpoint
of the writer, I think it is safe to say
that while the South is hardly Christ-centered,
it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The
Southerner who isn’t convinced of it, is
very much afraid that he may have been formed
in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts
can be very fierce and instructive. They
cast strange shadows, particularly in our
literature. In any case, it is when the freak
can be sensed as a figure for our essential
displacement that he attains some depth in
literature.
“The Grotesque in Southern Literature’, in
COLLECTED WORKS, ed. Fitzerald, The Library
of America, page 818
The ghosts can be fierce because, accounted
trivialities, they roam freely within our
common understanding in language uncontrolled
and unaccounted for, causing confusion and
havoc, passions where there is no real object
of passion, just vague abstractions, meaningless
when actually analyzed. Our main concern
here is Heidegger, and within Heidegger Plato.
In PLATO’S SOPHIST, trans. Rojcewicz &
Schuwer, Indiana, 1997, §1b, page 7 [10],
he says, “Precisely in what we no longer
see, in what has become an everyday matter,
something is at work that was once the object
of the greatest spiritual exertions ever
undertaken in Western history.” He applied
this to Plato, and I apply it here to Plato’s,
Christianity’s, and Heidegger’s Idealism.
This failure of language is achieved and
actually becomes workable as such because
each individual as a mere simple unit is
closed up. The unit within itself may be
‘rich’ or it may be ‘poor’, but this at best
can be communicated poorly or not at all.
It is certainly not shared in any meaningful
sense of the term. And, of course, history
is obliterated, not only world history but
American and regional history to such a point
that the fact of slavery in the United States
came as a terrible shock to those who watched
the television series ROOTS. I was utterly
amazed at the time so many people knew little
of importance, or nothing whatsoever, about
that period in our history which lasted so
long and carved us so deeply. Maybe they
didn’t WANT to know. And the failure of language—a
language that glosses, glosses over, and
no longer understands itself, precisely as
in not confronting whether abstractions are
real objects or not and what that conflict
really means—reflects the failure of morality
which is a morality without unity of meaning,
of contradictory exceptions, and constant
glossing over at points of difficulty such
as the destruction of the Twin Towers as
an act of religion in the name of God and
moral decency. It is like trying to see the
black backside of a mirror through your reflection
of light in the mirror silver. Since that
massive killing was authentically an act
for God and good, then, however much we may
feel we need to reject it, we must authentically
consider that Others consider “we moderns”
to be the blackest evil. This is something
that MUST be first UNDERSTOOD before it is
rejected. There is no place, no topos, for
automatic, unthinking morality any longer.
FINAL PROPOSITION: If ALL emotionalism and
emotional judgment was absolutely stripped
from religion, would there be any religion
left? I am certain 99.99% of all “believers”
would “believe” so. Corollary: If this truly
happened, would there be any morality left?
Emotions are the ghosts of unacknowledged
ideas that persist as ghosts within language
that has always come to us from others, and
that language has been alive—as truly, more
truly, alive as any single human being--for
a hundred-thousand years continuously. It
gives us unfounded delusions of grandeur
and a sense of understanding where is no
understanding whatsoever. What Heidegger
may be saying here in a very round about
way is that the real ground of value may
lie in perception and not in words, and that
we perceive the divine everyday and call
it ordinary when our lives, our “Moment”
occurs only once, occurs only AS “once”.
The main Greek representation of divinity
was the statue, the icon, the image, not
the logos, the “word”. In this, a dog may
have the advantage on us.
|
