On Overarching Systems

or a note about my whole life, maybe

[This essay, if it is one, was occasioned by a poorly worded and now deleted Facebook post of mine that seems to have confused everyone. This fresh effort, however, reminds me of when my graduate adviser told me that my problem was that I kept trying to write my whole dissertation together all at once. But I seem to have, as they say, done it again, as in “I never make the same mistake twice. I make it, you know, five or six times, so I can be sure.”]

On Overarching Systems, or a note about my whole life, maybe

I worry that my whole life may be like William Blake’s “I must create my own System, or be enslaved by another man’s.” Blake certainly created his own memorable, monumental system, but I have never been able to feel I have truly made any sense out of it. Like Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Nathaniel Tarn, or Robert Graves, Blake is one of the poets determined to make sense of the human condition by creating a personal mythology that, in the end, is so genuinely personal that the only way to understand it completely is to be the person who created it, and one cannot be but one person at a time, and in no case is one managing to be them as well as oneself, whether or not one is even managing to be oneself.

The end of that sentence sounds like Gertrude Stein, another of the great personal mythmakers. And I certainly have chased after the examples, in my younger and not so younger days, of mythmakers of all sorts; Thomas Pynchon, who has a monomyth underlying his best work, however much he also goes off in other directions; Jack Kerouac, self-described as “a great rememberer, redeeming life from darkness;” Allen Ginsberg, sort of, but his personal mythology is tied up with the mantra “widen the area of consciousness,” and it was my interest in that injunction, to widen the area of consciousness, that led to all the rest of it for me, tvia he not so personal mythology that masquerades as the various academic disciplines even when they are being methodologically rigorous. Kurt Gödel and Werner Heisenberg and Thomas Kuhn are misused and misunderstood grotesquely, but the basic notion that there are unperceived limits to construction and measurement and languages of any sort can be demonstrated in more fields of activity than were ever imagined by Vaihinger in The Philosophy of “As If.”  The poststructuralists, for the most part, drove this insight into a dead end, even if Deleuze and Guattari’s basic model makes sense once you discard its unnecessary levels of mystification and start using ordinary language to discuss it.

Reading John Clellon Holmes’ essays on Kerouac and Ginsberg in his autobiographical Nothing More to Declare at the same time I was reading Erich Heller’s The Disinherited Mind and George Steiner’s Language and Silence, a year or two before Salmagundi magazine’s special issue The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals, really kickstarted my personal project, which had pretty much been underway since age fourteen anyway, and sent it off in better directions than it had been when I was trying to fold everything into the single model of human existence proposed by Carl Jung. (“Twofold always. May God us keep / From single vision, and Newton’s sleep!” as Norman O. Brown misleadingly quoted from Blake, whose original version of this begins with the “fourfold” and “threefold” of his own system for redeeming life from the single-mindedness of Sir Isaac Newton, who Carlo Rovelli has recently shown to be even more single-minded than Blake thought: Rovelli suggests, in his There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness, that Newton explored alchemy and Biblical interpretation because in his era those were major ways of making sense of the world. He wanted to see how they checked out experimentally, and incorporate them into his body of knowledge if they proved to be appropriate. Newton never published his writings on them because his experiments yielded no publishable results.

Since mostly but not entirely leaving behind the literary (but not the artistic) great synthesizers, I have examined or followed the careers of a dismaying number of people who are determined to figure out why human beings are both so much better and so much worse than any other species on our poor little planet, where we are currently managing to exacerbate the less friendly aspects of its perhaps indifferent multimillion-year fluctuations, enough to have a whole epoch named after us. (I am too willing to at least contemplate James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis to say with the mainstream that the fluctuations are “ultimately or intrinsically indifferent.”) No wonder Pico della Mirandola could celebrate the greatness of humanity in almost the same time frame (he died fifteen years before John Calvin’s birth) in which Calvin’s legalistic mind declared humanity totally depraved. As in all generations, there was ample empirical evidence for both contentions.

In graduate school back in the Late Paleolithic or thereabouts, I was taught that “animal species occupy a niche; human beings occupy a world.” After Frans de Waal has written books like Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, and philosophers such as Thomas Nagel have written about what it is like to be a bat (but C. S. Lewis already summed all that up in his paragraph about the outer and inner life of the trained bear Mr. Bultitude in one of his science fiction novels, probably That Hideous Strength rather than Perelandra or Out of the Silent Planet, demonstrating that whatever you think of it as a whole, there was nothing “mere” about Lewis’ Christianity)—after all that, I think we can agree that animals do more than occupy a totally instinct-controlled niche; they don’t just do that any more than we do (and the answer to that question, of how much we do occupy such a niche, is an open one). But Object Oriented Ontology is probably as much of a dead end in ascribing consciousness to everything in the universe as any other system that agrees with Gerard de Nerval’s (was it? One of the French symbolist poets, anyway) outburst “Everything is sentient!”* I think Jung made some passing remark about this in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and we certainly would be better off if we maintained an I-Thou relationship with our material surroundings instead of treating them as shabbily as we habitually do. (Some cultures don’t, but they sometimes make up for it by treating other humans with distant respect rather than compassion and forgiveness, and other cultures, of course, just think of all of them as machines, to be operated efficiently. As Kenneth Burke said, “Be careful how you think about the world. It is like that.”)

*[It was Nerval, all right, and I highly recommend this translation of “Les Chimeres,” a sequence of poems I hadn’t thought about in many years: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2000/12/les-chimeres-by-gerard-de-nerval ]

I was greatly impressed, in my excessively impressionable adolescence, by a critic’s summation of the Southern Agrarians’ summary of the Southern view of the human condition: “[Humanity] is not, as the Transcendentalists thought, a vessel of divinity; [it] is a container of cussedness.” (The original passage, which I quote from memory, has “Man” and “he” and this fits better, since the collective known as “humanity” is not an “it,” and when the original observation is applied exclusively to males, it is right on target.)

Any reasonable reading of human history and human biology reveals that, really, we are both ape and angel, in different proportions depending on what we do with our dual inheritance.

The thinkers who really interest me are the ones who have tried to figure out, in their personal lives, how to become an angel when they know they are never going to stop being an ape. None of them ever made it to angel status, “It’s a Wonderful Life” notwithstanding, but some came much closer than others.

There is, and perhaps always has been, a division of opinion as to whether any of them had outside help, other than the usual version known as intellectual influences. I have been interested lately in the recent spate of memoirs in which my favorite thinkers finally say what they have concluded on that subject, although some have sensibly declined to say what they really thought, perhaps a different take on the Tao te Ching’s “Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know.” Not because the unutterable cannot be unuttered, which it can’t, but because “the limits of my language are the limits of my world,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein taught us.

I think I have been confusing my friends (though not the ones who commemorate Yom Kippur by fasting but not going to synagogue, and who fast during Lent and during Ramadan in alternate years, but not the same ones) by my recent longing for particular books that I feel like I can’t afford now that I am no longer driving and having to spend so much on Lyft trips. The recent titles of interest represent my trying to tie up loose ends in one aspect of my grand project of trying to make sense of what it is human beings are doing in the world, since we humans have always seemed completely alien to me in spite of my being one of us (as one of my early heroes, Franz Kafka, said about his heritage: “What do I have in common with it? I have scarcely anything in common with myself.” —Which I like better than Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre,” “I is another,” which in English just sounds like a Southern idiom. I’ll spare you what René Daumal said about one of the founders of Traditionalism whose calling card said, basically, “I don’t exist.” It’s a nice zinger, though, and Daumal is worth the trip.)

I have set out to try to tie up the many frayed ends of one or another thread of this tangled weave, because time and again I have been frustrated by the degree to which so many of my favorite thinkers, though not all of them, got so close to finishing their life’s work but didn’t quite do it. Others really only got started at the end, such as E. R. Goodenough, whose twelve-volume Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period was only the preface to his barely begun work on the origins of Christianity, although his short final book, about the origins of religion in general, was distinctly, to quote my professor’s opinion of it, just not good enough. My own gallop through “life, the universe and everything” (to quote the title of Douglas Adams’ once influential novel) may well be the same way.

Mircea Eliade only got three-quarters of the way through his grand summary of his life’s work, which led to my spending years trying to find out what it was that Eliade really thought after he got past his early distortions from having grown up Romanian, if he ever did get fully past them. (See the foregoing paragraphs about human duality, passim, which reminds me that I am not quite sure whether Jeffrey J. Kripal has ever satisfactorily sorted out his repeated assertions about the Human as Two—I obviously haven’t sorted mine out, either, so I should talk.)

The trickster whose name I usually decline to mention has retold, unless he just made them all up himself, Sufi tales about people who see only the last elements of a very long process, and get a very weird idea of what it was all about, thinking it was too profound for them to understand or dismissing it as too silly to be worth bothering with. His version of the story about partial knowledge of a vast overarching system, the tale of the blind men feeling up the elephant, was called “The Elephant in the Dark,” but others have used the same title since that is the title given to the version of this multicultural story as it was retold by Rumi. The trickster definitely didn’t make this one up, since it occurs across more cultures than I had ever realized until I just now looked up “Blind men and an elephant” in Wikipedia.

Strictly for my own peace of mind, I have spent my life trying to turn on the lights, or pull back the curtains, in the room containing the elephant. (My earliest, very very adolescent exposure to this was the Rubaiyat’s “There was the Door to which I found no Key; there was the Veil through which I could not see,” followed fast by encountering an essay by René Daumal in which he tried to find a way to pull back the curtain. It would be a long time before I would encounter his Mount Analogue, but the various essays in that issue of Psychedelic Review found on an Orlando newsstand were terrible stuff to come across so soon after reading Goethe’s Faust and the book titled Oriental Philosophy that my father gave me to read when I turned fourteen. It was a good thing that I never did locate any consciousness-altering substances to do my own experimentation.)

Nietzsche came to the poisonous conclusion that the only way out of the ape vs. angel dilemma, in which the angel was possibly an unattainable illusion, was to imagine a transhuman future in which an as yet unknowable species would succeed in walking the tightrope to the new mode of being, whereas mere humans were doomed always to fall off what Saint John Climacus called the Ladder of Divine Ascent. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, initially thought that everything worth knowing (ethics and aesthetics) was unutterable and the point was to climb up the ladder and throw it away after getting up to the point of understanding that insight. (Later he thought differently, in two different ways of reading that phrase, as in “he changed his opinion” or “he might or might not have changed his opinion, but the way that he thought was really different from the way he previously went about the process of thinking.”) He also wrote, “What is my aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” But Erich Heller, the best interpreter of Nietzsche in my deeply and irresolvably flawed opinion, said that Wittgenstein’s approach led only to “more fly-bottles, and still more fly-bottles.”

Obviously I am joking when I consolidate the ladder symbolism of St John of the Ladder with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, though I am not joking when I suggest that when Wittgenstein said that the unsayable was mystical, he meant mystical, not merely nonsensical. (See Toulmin and Janik, Wittgenstein’s Vienna.) The stress of the dilemma of nineteenth-century knowledge that drove Nietzsche’s fragile physical-mental balance into clinical insanity was handled more productively by Robert Musil in his twists and turns about “the other condition” in The Man Without Qualities, and he was dealing with the post-religious conundrums that Romanticism had wrestled with, as documented in such books as M. H. Abrams’ Natural Supernaturalism, Harold Bloom’s The Ringers in the Tower, and Robert Rosenblum’s Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition. Some of the strands of what the Romantics perceived vaguely were pursued by various borderline investigations into the possibility that mystical practices in the world’s religions had all been drawing on human potentials that are rarely activated and possibly unevenly distributed, just as mathematical, linguistic, athletic, and other capacities are. One of the functions of traditional religious practice is to redistribute the imbalance in each human to produce a less horrific combination of capacities than usually end up making human beings such a godawful mess. Robert Ornstein wrestled a great deal with this in his study of the psychology of consciousness, and could have used some dialogue with people in other academic disciplines, including anthropology. Jeffrey J. Kripal has been trying to prove that there are unusual human capacities at all, and has come to some interesting empirical conclusions that correspond with some made by people whose work, to my knowledge, he has not read. In like fashion, some of the great mystics were empiricists who did not know they were empiricists, which is why so much of their stuff sounds to the skeptical mind like “woo,” and to everyone else like poetry. We are not qualified to say with arrogant confidence what it was they were really discovering, but as Charles Williams wrote, it is unwarranted timidity to join the conventionally religious in retreating to “our little minds were never meant.” As the maxim ascribed to multiple rabbinical sources has it, you are not required to complete the work; neither are you permitted to refrain from it.    

I think two thousand eight hundred words is quite enough of an autobiographical information dump to devote to this subject. I could go on.