notas.itmens
To Face the Modern
This is still a draft, but I fear it won't be possible for me to finish it.
Introduction#
One of the widely made claims by the so-called pagans nowadays, is that Christianity is the precursor to atheism, and is inherently progressive. Since the majority of the conservatives and the traditionalists in the contemporary world still constitutes of Christians, the claims is often held to be a polemical strategy against Christianity, and nothing more. But this very attitude that regards the accusation of progressivism as something that is inherently evil, that is capable of condemning Christianity, already reveals something, in my subjective view, deeply problematic in the so-called belief of those so-called Christians, namely, that Christianity is, or is at least, about a more-or-less fixed set of laws, rules and orders. Hence, in a sense, their belief is dogmatic.
But it needs to be stressed that, even if it is assumed that dogmatism is inherently problematic, it is not dogmatism itself that is problematic, but rather that which leads to dogmatism. Dogmatism is an accusation that is directed by those that are less dogmatic against those that are more dogmatic, and it doesn't seem possible that there is an ultimate, highest, degree of dogmatism. Being dogmatic is a state that is relative to a state that is less dogmatic. A sense of freedom, in the sense of being freed from some forms of laws, is needed, in order that the judgement that those Christians are dogmatic can be made, by those that are less dogmatic, provided that these latters are accusing other of dogmatism with good faith. This sense of freedom can only be sensible to those that possess it, when those fixed set of laws, rules and orders, albeit being laws, are no longer seen as legitimate, that is, no longer genuinely legitimate. Notice that it is merely assumed that dogmatism is inherently problematic, and this is because of the fact that what's problematic is the genuineness of the source of the legitimacy of those laws and orders.
Now, setting value or moral etc. judgements regarding whether dogmatism is problematic, or more precisely, whether the laws and orders that are under question are no longer genuinely legitimate, aside, it should be fruitful to investigate, instead, first, what does genuinely legitimate mean, what's the sign, the manifestation, of the genuineness, and second, what is the source of genuine legitimacy.
These are deep problems dealt with by moral philosophy, theology and metaphysics, or rather, the whole science and even the whole human activity. All sorts of intricate and complex problems emerge when contemplating over them: Is that which renders a law legitimate is grounded upon a deeper truth, or is the legitimacy genuine by itself? What is it that renders a true statement true? What is the source of truth, in particular the truth that renders a law legitimate? It is more or less hopeless to derive answers to these problems, but since we exist, and we're living, partial, temporal solutions, or even presages to solutions, need to be given, so that we can make judgements, decide, and act. Now one of the characteristics of the modern age, is a general tendency towards skepticism regarding all sorts of principles except for those of natural science, accompanied by a lack in faith regarding the very principles of which the manifestations are those laws and orders. Some principles no longer makes sense. As a result, a lack of purposefulness and meaning, or maybe the senselessness results from the lack of purposefulness and meaning, of which the ground is unclear. Hence, it should be fruitful to make a historical and cultural investigation of the modern age, so that the locus of the doubt felt by those with the aforementioned sense of freedom can be isolated and analyzed.
But now I am not going to make the investigation, since it has been done by many people. What I set out to do here, is to organize and systemize the results, and argue that first, the modern age needs to be faced head on, without recoursing to the so-called traditions, or even paganism, of which the sense I should explain, and second, a teleological account of the cosmic order needs to be developed.
Cosmic order#
Human existence is always conditioned by its being embedded inside an aggregate of symbolic and/or semiotic orders. Oftentimes, if not always, it is by virtue of his behaviours being shaped and formed by the constraints that a certain symbolic order he's embedded inside, in a certain situation, bestowed upon him, that a man is seen as 'behaving like a human being', since meanings and hence the telos of one's existence in that particular circumstance, that particular mode of being, is mediated and conditioned by this order. Furthermore, the external world is first of all a world that is rendered through a metaphysics and a cosmology, not necessarily written out and systematic but always present, that confer intelligibility to it; even more, it is unintelligible to think of a pre-rendered, that is, absolute, as opposed to phenomenological, external world. The symbolic orders, for their inhabitants, converge and unite into a cosmic order, when they're harmoniously organized into a whole by a metaphysics and a cosmology, again, not necessarily written out, so that, for example, the destablizing tensions arising in between different modes of beings do not breach the continuity of the intelligibility of the world, do not introduce too obvious a contradiction in the ethics that guide and regulate human existence.
For a traditional - a pagan - society, the reality as it is presented by the cosmic order is indistinguishable from that which is presented by the so-called physical cosmology, the distinction between which and the metaphysical cosmology only making sense to modern minds. The moderns may speak of supernatural versus natural, but, for traditional societies, the supernatural is something that is intangible, invisible, but at the same time wholly present, that is, immanent and not transcendent, in the natural world. The supernatural permeates the natural like the soul permeates the flesh, and meaning is immanent to the natural world. More accurately speaking, the natural and the supernatural are not decoupled from each other; no proper distinction is made between the two:
This closed world was built upon a sense of identity in which nature and man, God and the world, spirit and matter were conceived as a single unity. This was the broad foundation of the mysticism, sacramentalism, magic and technology of our folk-materialism (not to be confused with the spiritualist materialism of the late enlighteners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). There was a highly complex 'domestic architecture' in which a cult with manifold usages of rite and law regulated the common life ofman and wife, the members of the family and the village (clan) community. Every thing and every animal - every article of clothing, weapon or agricultural tool - had its magical juridical function to fulfil in the house. Each house was a unit of sacral space, organiz- ing correct co-operation between the living and the dead, storing up and administering spiritual welfare through the medium of the festal calendar. […] The festal calendar, understood as a cosmic ordering of things, gave household, family and village their place in the oikoumene, the sacred order for interdependence. Men, animals and things were entirely interdependent. Since everything was in a state of constant danger, from war, famine, pestilence and evil influences of all kinds, it was up to each member of the community - man, animal or thing - to play his part within the right order of things, in his own proper field of service toward all others. (Friedrich Heer, The Intellectual History of Europe, "The Tenth Century")
This cosmic order, ordo, is the manifestation of the metaphysics in the external world, for example in the social organization of traditional societies, in the language of figures like Julius Evola. Since that which is transcendental, metaphysical, and supernatural is not distinguished and indistinguishable from the natural, the natural order is eternal, and hence comes the eternity of the form of a traditional society. For a member of a traditional society, once his position inside the order is given, his function in the operation of the society and the maintainence of the cosmic order is given, and thus the meaning and the telos of his existence. To exist is to exist as a member of a society that embodies a cosmic order, which is perennial and eternal.
Pre-Collapse#
All these are breached once the Logos incarnated and was revealed, and then ascended into heaven as a corporeal being, 'encumbering the Godhead with a thing it had not previously to endure', and furthermore, the End of the World is revealed.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. There is going to be an End to the World. This World, while not an artifact of a demiurge, still lost its inherent meaning; the cosmic order dissolved. With the dissolution of the cosmic order that is in itself sacred, human beings are destined to ascend upward and return to the God, the Absolute, the Infinite. No earthly concern and nothing that is in this world, nothing that is finite, can truly determine the meaning and purpose of human existence, any longer.
The scholastics gradually abstracted out the inherent ordo that permeates the material world, which was once seen as at the same time wholely spiritual. It is extremely complex to give a complete narrative to the process, and the mechanisms are various, but an example should be sufficient:
It was during the Carolingian Renaissance that the music theory of antiquity was put into widespread practical use. A cultural unity needed to be formed inside Christendom, which was realized by the standardization of Latin as learned language and the disciplined spread of ancient learning. In particular liturgical chants were disciplined by the ancient music theory. Built upon the essentially Pythagorean music theory of antiquity, the conceptual harmony of the universe formalized and described in the speculative tradition of music theory became corporeal and concrete in the liturgical chants of the early Middle ages, foreshadowing the autonomy, individuation and becoming self-conscious of music as a discipline, as an instance of art in the modern sense. While previously the music abstracted and reduced to numerical representation of pitches and intervals - or rather the other way around, that is, the pitches and intervals are mere shadows of numbers and their ratios - is thought of as pertaining to the same harmony that binds the celestial bodies and hence the Universe, now, through the actual reception of music theory in the musical practice of the Christian Church, music became an actual embodiment of the harmony that constitutes the Universe, and thence became an autonomous universe of its own.
It was internal to this musical Universe, constrained and shaped by the numerical and geometrical harmony of the ancient Greeks, that all discourses in music unfolded. The logic of music making became systemized and increasingly autonomous, since there was an abstract principle, partaking in which the music was considered legitimate and rational. The constraints imposed upon musical practice became no longer that of practical tradition, no longer a well-defined and structured ritual process to be followed in more-or-less exact manner and possessing inherit practical function, but that of theoretical and speculative tradition. Notice the similarity to how medieval Canon law transformed the notion of Human law, from unchangeable and not subject to reason to changeable and subject to reason. Music obtained a rule of itself and became self-regulating.
The emergence of polyphony in the late Middle ages accompanies the rise of the Mendicant orders and personal piety of the Gothic age, together with the nominalist metaphysics of Ockham and the political theory of Marsilius of Padua with their insistence on the autonomy of individual groups and their mistrust towards an underlying metaphysical and cosmological unity that everything partakes and should partake. While the Roman Church still holds an authoritative power over the written text and a monopoly over knowledge, simultaneously there are apocryphas, pseudepigrapha and various sects that gives different interpretation and exegesis to texts and holds different metaphysics of the universe.
It was an age obsessed with textual commentary. Over a text, multiple instances of comments and interpretations can be superimposed, hyperlinks between texts transformed previous text to hypertext, in short vertical structures were built over a text. Since in the monodic Chant purified music lost any inherit meaning and became a mere vehicle of ritual, there emerged a vacuum for commentary in the form of polyphony: the sound organized vertically, interacting with each other autonomously, in full analogy to how commentaries are built over commentaries and between different commentaries, and to how the interaction between individual and monadic groups such as guilds, universities, municipalities wove together and formed the cosmic order of the late Middle ages.
The Word became flesh. And hence each disciplines became truly flesh: autonomous individuals. And hence each groups, and finally each individuals, became truly autonomous individuals - or rather, are to become. The ordo as a whole was to be absorbed into individual beings, that, as autonomous beings, were now no longer truly in harmony with the order that became external and arbitrary. The darkness comprehended the light not, and God must become transcendent and depart from the World. After the Reformation an external device was needed in order that this departure didn't lead to a total collapse of a now factually defunct but still operating order. That is what characterizes the Baroque age. Recall in John Reilly's retelling of Heer's telling,
The high baroque was a “festival culture,” colorful and profligate. Underneath the gilt and gemütlichkeit, however, there was an unshakeable foreboding. In Heer's telling, the good humor of Mozart's empire was an expression of the understanding that life is based on sacrifice, on self-sacrifice, which was to be carried out with style and without complaint. The music, the painting, and the overwrought architecture all reflected this.
The festival culture was a material guard that stands against the eroding waves of both rational and irrational after the Absolute had been decoupled from the earthly world. Then, after even the festival culture had lost its strength in holding the departing Absolute, and when the Great Chain of Being was in danger of collapse, the manner, "upbringing", "social reason" of the Enlightenment is evoked as a device to perpetuate the presence of the Great Chain of Being, only with the original "fleshy" festive Baroque culture replaced by reason as it was conceived of by the Enlightenment, something that seemed to be more firmly established, but at the sametime devoid of spiritual content. Hence, while the face was saved and the apparent order of Being was maintained, the Absolute, the transcendental, departed even further from the earth. Finally, in the Romantic age's yearning for something that is genuine, namely for the Absolute, and in particular in late Beethoven, the Absolute burst into the phenomenal, through the purest form of music, the paradigm of absolute music, that is, string quartet, without being rendered through words and structured by reason in its Enlightenment sense, germinating modernism.
Modernism#
It is often claimed that modernism signifies a paradigmatic shift against the prevalent literary and aesthetic tradition of the Western world, but this shift is more about anti-meaninglessness rather than anti-tradition. The world is a fallen world, a God-forsaken world without inherent meaning, a world that the transcendent God departed from. It is the world of Jansenism and Protestantism, the world of extreme Augustinianism, where the supernatural is demarcated from the natural, and is, essentially, outside the world. This material world, now evil - as the absence of goodness - in itself, is refused to be understood as a place where human beings inhabit as agents; all that are true has been removed to an abstract world of ideas, and concrete contents are no longer trusted. The value-fact gap has appeared and widened. In so far that the cosmic order is to be a genuine order that harmoniously holds the world together and renders the world intelligible, and in so far that from its shape an axiology should be able to be developed, it is no longer an order; it has collapsed.
Individual disciplines and arts (in the medieval sense) now begin to be truly individualized: there is no longer a cosmic order that bestows meaning to them, and the ethical imperatives that give identity to the disciplines are to be sought after solely in their own self. The decoupling of individual disciplines and arts from the factually collapsed cosmic order, while is a consequence of the collapse, is simultaneously an active force that caused the collapse. An order devoid of genuine content and is perpetuated by shams and lies is not to be adhered to, and since now there's no source of contents, formalism that focuses on 'disembodied' formal principles themselves is to be adopted, and aesthetic autonomy is to be sought after. This is self-perpetuating, in that, the search for autonomous aesthetic and formal principles realize the individuation of a discipline, and the individuation of disciplines further intensify the collapse of an order that is cosmic, that exists by means of holding various disciplines together harmoniously.
The previous contents that are still, in the form of traditional symbols signifying the sublime, or the sense of the sublime, which is still a signifier, that is now defunct, lingering underneath the disembodied, autonomous forms, needs to be purged so that the nihilistic disease infecting the contents can be gotten rid of. The emptying of contents then is an action that must be taken, hence the general tendency towards detachment and noncommitment, or 'irony'. Also the avoidance of sentimentality, since sentimentality is a passive, emotional reaction taken facing the nihilistic substratum over which life is lived. Thus the emergence of avant-garde and the so-called 'chaos' in the modern world: chaos subverts norm, chaos reflects the chaos whose purpose is to subvert the norm, and moreover since the norm itself no longer conforms to the reality the moderns perceive, it itself leads to general instability.
Even though the superficial forms, the external symbols, that have lost their meaning are mercilessly ridiculed, deconstructed, and abandoned, a deeper tradition, that renders traditions genuine traditions, that bestows meaning to external symbols and are that which those external symbols should point to, is still sought after. And it is believed that those myths embodies the core, the source of all meaning from which the Western civilization germinated and developed, and it is believed that once understood, by means of hermenuetic techniques and artistic comprehension, myths are still capable of bestowing meaning to human lives and rejuvenating the civilization. Hence the use of myths as structuring devices in literature and art, and the forming of narratives in the image of various myths.
Subjectivism, as seen in the development from impressionism, which is already fairly subjective, to expressionism and cubism etc., is simply a consequence of the withdrawal from the external symbols that structure the symbolic order, by means of which the now defunct cosmic order manifests itself, and exploring the inner world in order that something genuine can be found.
Various strands of modernism: futurism, structurism, functionalism, traditionalism, etc. all correspond to different ways of conceptualizing the world and understanding the reality, as the shape of the reality depends on how one looks at it; the telos originates in the reality and the reality is also shaped by the telos. For instance, the focus on function itself, and the need for things that perpetuate the shams of the now-defunct tradition to be purged, leads to functionalism. Ornament is Crime:
We are mightily pleased when we see St Peter’s dome or the dome of St Paul’s, and are not aware of the chains that bind them round, and the innumerable sacrifices of good construction made by their architects for the sake of dramatic appearance. We should avoid the absurdity of machine- made ornamentation and the indecency of sprawling wens like London; and painters and sculptors, who, under our present financier-run tyranny, are compelled to be simply mountebanks or lap-dogs, and their works a sort of hot-house flowers, would again find themselves in normal employment as members of a building gang. (Eric Gill, Art)
Agency and Freedom#
Now, we've been saying the cultural unity has 'factually' dissolved, but not on the surface. But what does this 'facutally' means? What's the reality that lies behind mere appearance that renders the old cultural unity defunct?
In order that a cosmic order makes sense, there must be a harmony between the external and the internal, namely between the macrocosmos and the microcosmos. It might be the case that the schematic forms are out there in the 'bare', 'raw' world, not rendered by any cosmology, and by virtue of human existence's being conditioned by these external forms, the criteria for a cosmic order to make sense emerges. It might also be the case that the schematic forms are wholly internal to human existence and are a priori, and the formal variety manifested in different cosmic orders is but a superficial one, underneath which lies an ultimate reality that various cosmic orders must, in various forms, reflect. Regardless, with the presence of an ordo, we observe an absence of freedom and agency.
The Christian faith can be seen as a schema of freedom and agency, in that it blew up the traditional cosmic order which, on the one hand, bestowed meaning and telos to individual, or rather semi-individual, human beings, while on the other hand, by means of structuring human beings as constituents of an eternal cosmic order - a Great Chain of Being - suppressed the agency of human beings and denied the presence of genuine creativity. In Catholic tradition, the whole material universe is sheathed by an organism that gradually, by means of the perpetuation of sacraments, transforms the whole material universe and bring it back to God. In Protestantism, individual human beings are subject to codes of arbitrary laws that serve as shackles that bind the pilgrims in the world who are to be individually reunited with the transcendent God.
Let's suppose that psyche is real. That is, the schematic forms are to some extent internal to human existence and are a priori. Note that, this doesn't necessitate the human existence to possess a class of schematic forms that are static and unchangable, and it doesn't necessitate a Cartesian dualist view of psyche. Psyche is real, and human beings do not have a control over it, even for those parts of the Psyche - by using capital P we are merely supposing purely semantically a sum total psychic entity which do not need to actually exist - that are regarded as being the constituent to a human being, one cannot take control over or even recognize it. The part that is, in a particular circumstance, not in the sight of consciousness, which is the part that is controlled and recognized, is called the unconscious. Now human being as a species is biologically unified. This biological unity, in the light of evolution, can be amalgamated into the concept of the collective unconsicous. Since we observe a higher degree of consciousness in human beings than those species that are more primitive, we might conjecture that Consciousness is generated from the Unconscious. The form of human existence is then potentially given in the collective unconscious, and must be incarnated by living individuals, that is, by means of bring it conscious. The potential for consciousness is present in the collective unconscious, and in particular we may postulate the form of the whole human self transforms. Then we might summarize the thousand-year history in a line:
Human beings, in their form, became truly individuals, and hence truly conscious, free, agents.
In so far as the Christian faith embodies the reality, the reality forces agency and freedom upon us. With agency and freedom comes the responsibility for human beings to find meanings on their own, and we might conclude that, the Modern Age is the manifestation of an adolescent confusion over the purpose of human existence, the purpose of the human species as a whole.
Teleology#
The confusion of the modern age, as a result of freedom and agency, more importantly as a result of the reality that is embodied by the Christian faith, must be faced head on. Since now freedom forbids the supernatural to be re-merged with the natural in a traditional manner that renders the supernatural fully immanent and be coupled to an eternal cosmic order, a teleological myth that genuinely take the Revelation seriously needs to be developed - note that, a myth is simply a narrative that gives a telos to those who are into it; everyone needs a narrative, even if the myth itself is that all myths are false.
But there're many myths, and a particular myth needs to be understood by hermenuetic means. And there must be a ground for hermenuetics that renders what is extracted and interpreted meaningful. For example, as a background over which the interpretation unfold. Briefly speaking, the narrative that is hidden in a myth, while is a constituent factor of something that which makes the world intelligible, still needs to be understood in a partially comprehended world. That is, a corresponding metaphysics and even a corresponding theology need to be developed, so that myth can become a genuine myth, not merely a story. This also means that the whole physical universe, the whole natural science, and mathematics, must all be made sense of, "inasmuch as it gives human beings the necessary knowledge to reach their supernatural end".
Only over a grand myth so conceived is it possible for a philosophico-theological account of anthropology possible, and with it a brand-new, mutable, amorphous but present, cosmic order that holds all the members of human species together in their march towards the End of Time possible:
The three states of the Church. "When the Lord comes in glory, and all his angels with him, death will be no more and all things will be subject to him. But at the present time some of his disciples are pilgrims on earth. Others have died and are being purified, while still others are in glory, contemplating 'in full light, God himself triune and one, exactly as he is'": All of us, however, in varying degrees and in different ways share in the same charity towards God and our neighbors, and we all sing the one hymn of glory to our God. All, indeed, who are of Christ and who have his Spirit form one Church and in Christ cleave together.
2024-03-11