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Bringing together the various strands of the task I set myself forty-four years ago is probably more than I can accomplish, but at least the reasons why the strands can and should be tied together has become clearer, for myself if not for anyone else.
I currently find myself facing the task of plowing through large parts of the early nineteenth century that are singularly revelatory in terms of being bridge passages between one characteristic mind set and another—historical territory I’ve traversed before, but only in terms of what this or that thinker believed.
I’m trying to clarify for myself what little I’ve learned about the complex nature of human self-awareness, and about how difficult it is to achieve self-awareness, and how it relates to various conditions of consciousness that are almost never understood by mainstream thinkers—because, whether the conditions in question are mental illness, mathematical insight, or mystical rapture, so few of them ever experience anything remotely similar. They dismiss all of them except when the practical results are so spectacularly successful that they have to mention them in a footnote.
The problem is that everybody is a combination of quirks imposed by early childhood experience occurring in a specific society, within neurological and biochemical limits; education by the prevailing social order, parents, and peer groups; the usual challenges common to all human beings, as modified by the previous two limiting factors; and individual responses to the larger accidents of history that frequently are more fundamental in shaping the human being than any of the deliberate impositions of ideology. (Hurricanes, the Holocaust, what have you...including the dramatic ups and downs of national economies, the ups as well as the downs.)
All this stuff typically doesn’t add up to a completely stable set of components, which is why therapists or spiritual advisors have been around since the Paleolithic, under one name or another, and why human societies exemplify all the weirdnesses that they do.
I happen, for reasons of my own, to be drawn to the test cases of potentially insightful individuals caught between incompatible cultural choices, or ones who find ways to bridge seeming incompatibilities or operate between the options.
I hadn’t realized until revisiting Terragni’s Danteum in the previous post that his geometric Casa del Fascio followed the plan of a particular Renaissance palace exactly, except for all the frills, frou-frous, and cultural accidents. I suspect that the dialectic of Terragni’s encounters with historical forces might be as intriguing as Oscar Niemeyer’s, whose sensuously involving but not always human-scale buildings in Brazil might or might not be profitably discussed in terms of the socialism and atheism that led him to design the headquarters of the French Communist Party while he was in exile during the rule of the generals. One can’t reduce either architect to his politics or his religious beliefs or lack of same, and in general neither can be “reduced” to anything. So it is no wonder we just look at the Casa del Fascio and the Danteum or Niemeyer’s Brasilia and Ibirapuera Park and don’t try to make our way through the tangles of personality and history behind them.
There are so many cases where we can’t begin to guess, in fact, that it does little good to speculate.
But it induces vertigo to realize, for example, that at the moment when the European and American Romantics and their opponents were being enthralled or appalled afresh by the eternal silence of the infinite spaces that had horrified Blaise Pascal, some of their contemporaries further east were blithely explicating the nature of multiple universes and how they might interact, but were not doing so in a way that today’s theorists of the multiverse would find even remotely intelligible. There is neither intellectual profit in trying to explore, nor even the possibility of getting at, the nature of the personalities involved, but it is intriguing that in the early nineteenth century A.D./C.E. this type of complex imaginative cosmology was being spun out near one end of what had been the Silk Road while the Tibetans were working out a similarly involved cosmology of conscious illusion near the other end of it; and Europeans, confronting a less complex traditional worldview, were doggedly plowing ahead with a “Just the facts, if you please” investigation of what could and could not be known about the physical universe. (Whether there was anything that could be known besides the physical universe was one of the dividing lines, of course—but that, too, was a more complex question in those regions than the traditional European duality of “matter and spirit” that the Romantics were resolving in their own fashion.)
Divided in a different way, the “history of the human community” looks considerably different—but of course every part of the human community always also had to figure out who was going to bake the bread and harvest the vegetables and which persons were entitled to have a little more garlic tossed in their soup. “Some of them got it, some of them didn’t,” as Kenneth Rexroth’s poem has it, and some of them were artisans who produced the most exquisite objects the world has ever known, and others were...the list of possibilities goes on and on, obviously, through all the positions of any human society.
And if the original point of this meditation was to figure out why the prescriptions of fairly unimaginative experimenters so seldom succeed in shaping human destinies, maybe we should pick and choose which of these cases to investigate, in which of their dimensions.
We can appreciate, for example, a Yuan Dynasty bowl in and for itself without caring the least bit about the psychology or social circumstances of its maker, although the broad historical outlines of the Yuan Dynasty might give us further grounds for reflection. But first we have to learn to care about Yuan Dynasty bowls, and there are many people who wouldn’t notice they were any different from the ones from the big-box store down the road.
Even investigating the reasons for that lack of understanding is dispiriting; the point would be to get from cluelessness to comprehension in as short a time as possible, and this is something that the world’s traditional psychologies have excelled in doing. Sometimes.
And as the world’s traditional psychologies have taught us (or contemporary interpreters of them pretend they have taught us, anyway), most people will approach the problem from the particular points of view that seem most interesting to them. Other people will find those points of view boring, unintelligible, or both. As you doubtless may find this preliminary note.
I currently find myself facing the task of plowing through large parts of the early nineteenth century that are singularly revelatory in terms of being bridge passages between one characteristic mind set and another—historical territory I’ve traversed before, but only in terms of what this or that thinker believed.
I’m trying to clarify for myself what little I’ve learned about the complex nature of human self-awareness, and about how difficult it is to achieve self-awareness, and how it relates to various conditions of consciousness that are almost never understood by mainstream thinkers—because, whether the conditions in question are mental illness, mathematical insight, or mystical rapture, so few of them ever experience anything remotely similar. They dismiss all of them except when the practical results are so spectacularly successful that they have to mention them in a footnote.
The problem is that everybody is a combination of quirks imposed by early childhood experience occurring in a specific society, within neurological and biochemical limits; education by the prevailing social order, parents, and peer groups; the usual challenges common to all human beings, as modified by the previous two limiting factors; and individual responses to the larger accidents of history that frequently are more fundamental in shaping the human being than any of the deliberate impositions of ideology. (Hurricanes, the Holocaust, what have you...including the dramatic ups and downs of national economies, the ups as well as the downs.)
All this stuff typically doesn’t add up to a completely stable set of components, which is why therapists or spiritual advisors have been around since the Paleolithic, under one name or another, and why human societies exemplify all the weirdnesses that they do.
I happen, for reasons of my own, to be drawn to the test cases of potentially insightful individuals caught between incompatible cultural choices, or ones who find ways to bridge seeming incompatibilities or operate between the options.
I hadn’t realized until revisiting Terragni’s Danteum in the previous post that his geometric Casa del Fascio followed the plan of a particular Renaissance palace exactly, except for all the frills, frou-frous, and cultural accidents. I suspect that the dialectic of Terragni’s encounters with historical forces might be as intriguing as Oscar Niemeyer’s, whose sensuously involving but not always human-scale buildings in Brazil might or might not be profitably discussed in terms of the socialism and atheism that led him to design the headquarters of the French Communist Party while he was in exile during the rule of the generals. One can’t reduce either architect to his politics or his religious beliefs or lack of same, and in general neither can be “reduced” to anything. So it is no wonder we just look at the Casa del Fascio and the Danteum or Niemeyer’s Brasilia and Ibirapuera Park and don’t try to make our way through the tangles of personality and history behind them.
There are so many cases where we can’t begin to guess, in fact, that it does little good to speculate.
But it induces vertigo to realize, for example, that at the moment when the European and American Romantics and their opponents were being enthralled or appalled afresh by the eternal silence of the infinite spaces that had horrified Blaise Pascal, some of their contemporaries further east were blithely explicating the nature of multiple universes and how they might interact, but were not doing so in a way that today’s theorists of the multiverse would find even remotely intelligible. There is neither intellectual profit in trying to explore, nor even the possibility of getting at, the nature of the personalities involved, but it is intriguing that in the early nineteenth century A.D./C.E. this type of complex imaginative cosmology was being spun out near one end of what had been the Silk Road while the Tibetans were working out a similarly involved cosmology of conscious illusion near the other end of it; and Europeans, confronting a less complex traditional worldview, were doggedly plowing ahead with a “Just the facts, if you please” investigation of what could and could not be known about the physical universe. (Whether there was anything that could be known besides the physical universe was one of the dividing lines, of course—but that, too, was a more complex question in those regions than the traditional European duality of “matter and spirit” that the Romantics were resolving in their own fashion.)
Divided in a different way, the “history of the human community” looks considerably different—but of course every part of the human community always also had to figure out who was going to bake the bread and harvest the vegetables and which persons were entitled to have a little more garlic tossed in their soup. “Some of them got it, some of them didn’t,” as Kenneth Rexroth’s poem has it, and some of them were artisans who produced the most exquisite objects the world has ever known, and others were...the list of possibilities goes on and on, obviously, through all the positions of any human society.
And if the original point of this meditation was to figure out why the prescriptions of fairly unimaginative experimenters so seldom succeed in shaping human destinies, maybe we should pick and choose which of these cases to investigate, in which of their dimensions.
We can appreciate, for example, a Yuan Dynasty bowl in and for itself without caring the least bit about the psychology or social circumstances of its maker, although the broad historical outlines of the Yuan Dynasty might give us further grounds for reflection. But first we have to learn to care about Yuan Dynasty bowls, and there are many people who wouldn’t notice they were any different from the ones from the big-box store down the road.
Even investigating the reasons for that lack of understanding is dispiriting; the point would be to get from cluelessness to comprehension in as short a time as possible, and this is something that the world’s traditional psychologies have excelled in doing. Sometimes.
And as the world’s traditional psychologies have taught us (or contemporary interpreters of them pretend they have taught us, anyway), most people will approach the problem from the particular points of view that seem most interesting to them. Other people will find those points of view boring, unintelligible, or both. As you doubtless may find this preliminary note.
