History 6
Presented on: Saturday, August 7, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is History Six and I need to make one emendation. I mentioned last week Unamuno writing about Cervantes, and I mentioned that the title of his work was meditations on Quixote which of course is the work by the great Spanish philosopher, Ortega; Ortega y Gasset. Unamuno's Quixote writings Our Lord Don Quixote occur in the Princeton volume from the Bollingen series. So Our Lord Don Quixote is the Unamuno title and of course you can read Ortega Igaset's meditations on Quixote just as well. I once thought about using Ortega's History as a system, as one of the texts for History but it involved a lot of complications. Not that Hannah Arendt and Tacitus don't have their complications. But at least this is a little more manageable.
We are to the middle of History with History Six and we need to begin to understand politics, and the relationship of politics and law, and politics and law to art, and politics and law and art to History. And as you can see it's a convoluted skein that requires years and years of study in cold drafty cells in monasteries in galaxies far far away and we don't have time or inclination to do it. So what are we to do? I'll do the best that I can to present the major thresholds of challenge and as you verge on those thresholds of challenge, just be aware that I'm not offering an academic rounded form for you to be graded on. This is not a school, not a lecture where everything is hung out to dry. Frankly, the problem at the end of the twentieth century is that what we're talking about now, no one knows. But a few have come far enough to know that asking questions to get answers is the wrong tact. The academic, the scholastic tact was always to look for answers. And the cute little end run in our time was no don't look for answers, look for the right questions. The questions generate their own shadow and if the questions are real, the answers are always shadowy. And if you emphasize the answers, where the answers are real, the questions are shadowy.
So that there's a fundamental physics point involved and it is as simple as the observable mathematical quantum physics actuality that electrons always have holes that accompany them. The smallest particle of electromagnetic energy, the electron, is always accompanied in reality by its hole. And that late twentieth, early twenty-first century materials engineering and manufacturing uses the holes of electrons in manufacturing processes. So that we have to come back to some fundamental non-fundament understanding and that's where we're coming to now because the title of today's lecture is 0 and 1 are a pair.
Anytime 1 occurs, 0 is always there as its hole. So that a profound inquiring highly personable vastly experienced consciousness like Lao Tsu entitles his book Tao Te Ching; the book of Tao Te. It's not called Yin Yang Ching. Tao Te. Tao, Dao always accompanies Te, always. They are a pair. But they are such a. . . . . I have to use a term here and I'm going to use the English term, which is a translation of a term from Karl Jaspers. The term in English translation is encompassing, encompassing. Something which is encompassing, um griefende in German. Tao encompasses Te. So that while Te is the unity, the oneness, the existentiality which has power, has force, it has power as energy, it has force as dynamic, it exists. An atom belongs to the realm of Te. A molecule belongs to the realm of Te. A cell belongs to the realm of Te. And everything built from this, from these, from such have suchness. They have a Te which makes it available for power to happen. And in the human world the word that's used to describe that power that happens from Te is politics.
And Hannah Arendt was one of the major people in our century who put the focus on the fact that this is unacceptable and incomplete and not real and that to think that History as an operation, as a process is allied with politics is both interesting and suspect at the same time. That it seems so graphically apparent that that is so, that is the case, and yet so subtly unsatisfying as to finally reveal that there is something rather questionable about this. But look how insidious the language is; to see that it's questionable turns it into a question for which there must be an answer and you get snared. Not just unconsciously or subconsciously but snared by the very clumsiness of mind and language and method of inquiry, from having any opportunity to approach a threshold of deep understanding such as Jaspers deep understanding that for every factual life in process actuality, there is an unlimited context of encompassing which cannot be ignored.
Now Hannah Arendt studied with Jaspers for a long time. Their letters to each other have been published; many many hundreds of pages, eight hundred plus pages. And Jaspers, her friend for the rest of her life, looked like the . . . . .He looked like either the archetypal philosopher, or he looked like one of those alien figures from This Island Earth. If you saw that science fiction film where the aliens have the white hair that's piled up. Manly Hall used to have that, huge mane of white hair, huge kind of (?), very wise, very grandfatherly; fatherly, Grandfatherly. But she came to Jaspers in a moment of feminine intellectual terrified desperation. She came to him because she was studying with one of the world's most powerful insightful minds at his earliest apex of energy, Martin Heidegger, at Marburg at the University. But she got sexually involved with her professor. She got intellectually involved with her professors outlooks. And she became completely tied into an insoluble knot. One of the translations that just came out, 1999, Indiana University Press. This is a volume that has a lecture given around the time that Hannah Arendt was studying under (literally under) Heidegger. The lecture's called Ontology (the study of being), Ontology - The Hermeneutics of Facticity. Not just facts but facticity. I always think that 'Nyet' should be a German word. Facticity.
But at that time Heidegger was working on something that became one of the fables epical books of twentieth century philosophy. It's the philosophic equivalent of James Joyce's Ulysses. It's the most complex difficult obtuse try it and see how well you do, book. Which he never finished and that's why it's so darn difficult. He projected a huge volume and he only wrote the first half because he could never get to the second half. The first half, published in German, it's called Sein und Zeit. In English translation it's called Being and Time. Being And Time. And the first volume, the volume that's published under the title Being And Time, which he was writing, researching, he was doing while Hanna Arendt was there fallen for his spells. He wrote the Being part but he could never get to the Time part because the Time part, as soon as the structure of Being was developed with this fine filigree with incredible precision and exactness, so that he had it exactly where he wanted to have it and when he put it into motion, the whole thing fell apart. It turned out to be a super sonic tinker toy structure. I refer you to a lecture of mind of two weeks ago for tinker toys.
The gestalt in the Being section of Being And Time, Sein Un Zeit, the gestalt that hold Being together for Heidegger's exposition, the German word is da sein. It's like a gerund, being there. Like Jerzi Kosinski Being There. You're not responsible, you're just there in Being. Heidegger was like that. He didn't have any intention, at the time, that his philosophy would be co-opted by the Nazis and that he would become the most famous philosophy professor in the Third Reich. And it was embarrassing because Hannah Arendt was Jewish. And he was married and he was a university professor, which in Germany at the University of Marburg in the 1920's. . .
This is a very distinguished authoritarian office which was completely existentially exposed by the fact of this woman and his relationship with her. In fact there are a couple of little books on Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Or Arendt and Heidegger, The Fate of The Politico. And has everything to do with why the Nazi Third Reich is truly a terrifying still ongoing threat.
Because it is inherent, not in the German psyche, it's inherent in the human psyche and is the source of Empire. And in fact its closest, if you grab hold to find where does this begin, in all of the convolutions and contortions of the interconnectedness, the History, if you look for the History of this idea, of this whole gestalt of ideas, one of the clearest places in antiquity, where it comes to focus is the founding of the Roman Empire. There the problem is viewable. And curiously enough, there's an anti-Semitic element there also. Unbelievable. And one of the figures in Roman History who exemplifies the kernel of what all of this complication, coming into Auschwitz and beyond, that figure is Caligula who was such a terr-ific monster, that his own people had him killed after four years. He's the one who would have given up his kingdom for a horse, the original one. He's the one who received the deputation of five Jews from Alexandria, headed by Philo, Philo of Alexandria, the great philosopher who came to Rome to the Emperor because there was a pogrom in Alexandria where people were being herded into the stadium, the Hippodrome, their properties confiscated, they were being massacred, and this had never happened in Alexandria before. The Jews had been in Alexandria for three hundred and fifty to almost four hundred years by that time. There never had been a problem like this before. And it was an issue at the time that was so poignant because the only recourse that anyone in Alexandria or anyone in Egypt for that matter had, was to appeal directly to the Emperor, whoever the Emperor was. Because it was the Emperor of the Roman Empire who owned Alexandria. Who owned the whole province of Egypt. That is to say, all of Egypt was the personal property of whoever was the Emperor of the Roman scene. And the city of Alexandria was his personal property. So he was like the absentee landlord of the whole place. And that you couldn't go for redress to any other body in the Roman Empire other than the Emperor personally. And Caligula was certifiably mad. But not only mad, he had a pernicious quality to him. Instead of receiving them, this deputation headed by Philo, instead of receiving them in any kind of chamber, he had them following them as he surveyed the slums in Rome, going from slum apartment to slum apartment, and they were running after him trying to make their points while he was having interruptions all the time of various inspectors and a Kafka type of a nightmare. And from time to time would stop dead in his tracks and yell at them with a ferocity of a madman who owned the world, that they were bugging him and how dare they. And many other things. So that Philo who records this in one of the surviving books said that they finally fell back upon the only point of presence that was accessible to them in this nightmare torrential waterfall of hate, of disregard, of evil. He said we began to just stand and to collect ourselves into a vanishing within. And that this contemplative energizing to a presence that became transcendentally so focused that it disappeared from the world of terror, began to have an effect on Caligula because there was no way for him to relate to it. And that temporarily he would merge into a totality of momentary rationality where then they would get the point across that this was an untenable situation. 1 and 0 are a pair.
When anyone presences pure 0 pure oneness is evoked. It's a universal Yogic technique. It's a technique of Ghandi's Satya Graha. Even in a complete world that is completely nightmarishly psychotic, one pure Bhagavad Gita Spirit Warrior presencing 0 will momentarily evoke a unified world. How to let that extend beyond the flash of an instant is a problem, but at least there's that. What it turns out to be is that there is a magic of consciousness when it is focused in the pureness of the center of the person. But that the intellectual difficulty with that getting in the way all the time is the idea that the center of the person is in the mind. Or the corollary that the center of the person is not so much in the mind but is in the heart. As if the soul belonged in the heart and then thought belonged in the mind, and that somehow in this, with the body thrown in as a third, that the person's identity is somewhere in the body, heart, mind cycle and tandem. And all of this is fallacious. All of this is starting counting from 1 and not recognizing that you count from 0. But that in counting from 0 you cannot count 0 as an element, otherwise it becomes in a hidden way, a deeper more subtle 1. And anything in that bag is a metaphysic.
And one of Hannah Arendt's most poignant criticisms of History is that we are constantly being spoon fed metaphysic at crucial points where we need to wake up from that because the issues facing us are real and are not going to go away and that they are Historical challenges. And that the only way to meet an Historical challenge, it's like Philo and his delegates trying to deal with Caligula, the only way to deal with a History become a nightmare is that there has to be someone there who doesn't flinch. And who knows how to deal in those terms with the actuality of the situation. And the problem at the end of the twentieth century is that there's no one home and the world is really a whirling junkyard. And we're all caught up in it.
With someone like Hannah Arendt, when you see the beauty of the young woman, you recognize how difficult it was for someone like Martin Heidegger, first of all to keep his hands off her. But she was incredibly brilliant. She was intellectual A++. So that he was also involved, not just with the beautiful young Jewess, but with this incredible philosophic poignancy, this mind, this ability. Plus she came from Konigsburg which was the home town of Immanuel Kant. So when she was growing up, she was a teenager, she was thirteen, fourteen, she began to read Immanuel Kant, the local town talisman of the wise man. And when she go into Kant, she got into Kant's issue of how a transcendental consciousness of pure mind is the fulcrum upon which all judgements and decisions are made. So that by the time she came to study under Heidegger at the University of Marburg, she had been reading Kant for six or seven years, very poignantly, assiduously. And when she got involved with the Heidegger of Being and Time her issue that she brought forth, which Heidegger eventually wrote a book on Kant, was that he was dealing with areas that he really wasn't in control of, wasn't in mastery of. He didn't have the intellectual prowess to understand the limits of his intellectuality which of course, decades later, after the Second World War was over and the Nazis lost, and Heidegger went off to live in a lonely cabin, I mean a lonely cabin. He was only allowed a couple of stick furniture things, a table, a chair, a bed, blank paper and some pencils. I think a Coleman lantern or something. And he set aside all of his grand luxurious German European philosophic endeavors and went back to primitive Greek philosophers to try to understand what the beginnings were. And so someone who went from the culmination of the great Western tradition of philosophy, he went all the way back, pendulum like, to the original pre-Socratics and never left there. And wrote thin little books about, like the questions that Heraclitus asked and how puzzling these really were.
In the mean time, Hannah Arendt, after a couple of years with Heidegger in the Sein Und Zeit, the Being and Time era, desperately involved with him, had to find some way to get out. She did what German students usually do, they continue their education but at a different University. So she went to Heidelberg where Jaspers was. And Jaspers was the father figure for her, which she didn't have; she didn't have at all. Her real father suffered from having contracted syphilis as a young man and by the time she was six, he was institutionalized because he literally was physiologically crazy, and died, mercifully, when she was eight, in a mental hospital, corroded by syphilis. Part of the tragedy of Heidegger for her was the betrayal of the confidence in the father figure. And part of the gorgeousness of her life long trust and camaraderie with Jaspers, was that he really was that father. Monumental integrity in a great philosopher, as great as Heidegger. Towards the end of Jaspers life, in a letter to Hannah Arendt, this is 1967, he too dipped back into the early Greeks, back into History, back into Polybius. He writes to her: "Dear Hannah, Many thanks for your letter', etc. etc. "Wonderful how you carry on indefatigably with your work despite the excess demands placed on you." She was the star performer in New York at Columbia and Barnard. She was, she was the kind of internationally famous star figure, marquee professor, that students would talk to each other that she had been sighted at such and such a place and aren't those people fortunate, they got to see her. Jaspers writes to her: "I read, among other things, a lot of Polybius. I was interested but put off by it all the way through. To name him, after Herodotus and Thucydides, as the third great Greek Historian seems ridiculous to me. He is one source of that flat modern Historiography of facile judgements." Experts who write as if they know to impress you with the fact that you don't know. And he goes on with this. He says: "The way he represents the Roman constitution as the source of Roman power and greatness may be essentially correct, but in terms of analysis it falls way below what we understand now. But there again, there are wonderful passages now and then, like the famous scene of Scipio in the Carthage he has destroyed."
Which brings us to the pair. We're not just looking at books; it's not a university course in History or Philosophy. We're doing something no one has ever done before. The pair to Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, is Tacitus, The Annals. Because Tacitus does take up where Thucydides left off. Polybius doesn't really make it. Even though Polybius writes, almost four hundred years before Tacitus, and you would think that, he's in that group, he's a part of that. Polybius was a first hand witness, he was adopted by the Scipio family which was made universally famous in ancient Roman History by Scipio Africanus, one of the greatest generals in world history. The biography of him, standard biography, the subtitle was An Ancient Napoleon. Scipio Africanus was one of the most incredible figures in the Roman Republic and he was always held as the example of, like a George Washington figure. He's the one that beat Hannibal. Not only beat him in military campaigns in Italy, but followed him and his energy, his armies to the source. He went to Carthage and beat them in what is today Tunisia. And then he received orders from the Senate, the Roman Senate that Rome had been terrorized by Hannibal for a whole generation, seventeen or eighteen years. He'd marched up and down the Italian peninsula with his elephants and his armies and he had just, he had shredded the Roman confidence that they had in themselves because on their home turf he was always just beating them. And so they said we need vengeance. We need the kind of vengeance that is final. Therefore we want you to efface Carthage from the face of the earth. Not just to kill everyone in the city, and all the animals, but to tear down all the buildings, to crowbar up all of the foundation stones, to destroy all of the streets and to pour salt on the land so nothing will ever grow there again.
This is a Historical event that's a direct seed of the Holocaust experience in the twentieth century. These people belong to a shadow element that has been dogging us and hounding us and we will erase it forever so that we will have our own pure unity. There will be no penumbra of otherness to interfere with our power. And this is a psychotic element indeed, which when it occurs in an Othello or a Macbeth is high drama, but when it occurs in someone like a Caligula can turn it into death, or a Hitler can turn it into deaths for millions and millions if not hundreds of millions, but can also if left unchecked, like Bertrand Russell said again and again in his essays, "Man will eventually extinguish himself because he will recognize that he is what's wrong with the world". And that only a transformation into maturity can forestall this from eventually happening. Russell said "man has never made a weapon he hasn't used". Eventually, in some way it will be used. And the domino effect of nuclear warfare is an absolute certainty. Everything is tied together. It's the theme of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. It's a doomsday machine which is set up and it's set up on the basis of mechanical distribution of decision power. So our destruction, Russell said, is imminent, maybe one maybe two generations away at the most. But it's inevitable. The Historical situation is such that it will happen. That the only alternative to that is that man must change, that is mature, must learn how to deal with himself in non-power ways, so that it allows him to deal with electrons and their holes together as pairs. 0 and 1 are a pair. And that pairedness, that Tao Te is a pairedness and Tao is always in an encompassing of whatever forms Te has.
And Hannah Arendt learned from Jaspers that one has to pay attention to the encompassing as well as the precision of the forms and, father to her, Jaspers decided that she needed an intellectual investigation, a philosophical investigation which would allow her as a woman, as a desperate young woman trying to get over a relationship with Martin Heidegger and his apex, so he assigned her to inquire about love in a classic philosopher. The philosopher was St. Augustine. And in fact her book, the Ph.D. Thesis is published, Love And St. Augustine. Just published a few years ago, University of Chicago Press, with all kinds of annotations.
It was genius because Augustine becomes the Plato, retrospectively, of the Roman Empire in its Christian form. It is St. Augustine's City Of God, monumental tome, that established the entire mind set for up until today. And so Jaspers, incredibly intelligent man, deeply humane about actualities, knew that it would be a mistake to take her under his wing and be a father to her. This would just make her more vulnerable and the next time she would go repeat that kind of tragic scenario on an even subtler deeper monstrous scale and she wouldn't survive. You cannot shelter someone and have them mature. The principle is to expose yourself for health to the openness of the nature of nature. And in doing so, Hannah Arendt got a sense, got a taste, got an idea about presencing, that the fundamental fulcrum is not a decision in the mind, ala Kant, but is an existential spiritual presencing before what is. And on the basis of that relationality, one then builds a sense of History and a sense of person and a sense of politic. And that that involves an aesthetic quality to the relationality. Very poignant, extremely complex, very profound. And a point which someone like Heidegger could never understand. Tried to understand, could never understand. Went to one of the most mystical of all the German poets, Holderlin, to do a philosophic commentary on Holderlin, and it doesn't fall flat, it sort of stands up like a rusting corroded forest of; it looks like a Max Ernst painting of a surreal world, of these rusted I beams all standing up, and this is not at all what Holderlin is talking about.
We'll come back after the break and try to appreciate how Hannah Arendt and Tacitus together give us this most curious kind of paired eye sight. It's as if we have two very refined telescopes, hundred meter telescopes, not at opposite ends of the world to give us a bifocal vision of the whole planet, but at opposite ends of a form called Western History. She comes at the end and Tacitus comes at the beginning. And so we have these two telescopes, these two observatories working in tandem, that don't look out so much to see how deep we can see into the universe, but how poignantly we can look at the encompassing process of History which has surrounded us in such a dense fog that we have not been able to see realistically for many thousands of years. And that at the beginning of the twenty-first century our joy and our tragedy at the same time is that we can wake up from that fog and realize nobodies been here for a long time.
BREAK
Let's come back to a very interesting collection of elements. And they are so powerful, so charged that the scintillating cloud that they make is rather like in esoteric wisdom, is that cloud out of which a hand comes that helps man. Some of the seventeenth century occult literature used to envision it as a cloud that occurs and out of it comes a hand that's holding a sword or torch or a book or something like that. In a way it's the cloud of unknowing. But the classic cloud of unknowing was not only that it's out there above you, but it's also out there below you. And that in fact you are within it. So that the cloud of unknowing must be dispersed and if you disperse the cloud of unknowing then the sun will shine. Then you will emerge and be shown clear. And this is the meaning that's there in the ancient Greek word phenomena. A phenomena is an objective showing. So that when someone uses, late in the game, a term like phenomenology and someone says well Heidegger is a phenomenological philosopher, it's a very moot point that when he was younger, he prided himself on that, and when he was older he realized he didn't know what that meant. And in that sense he improved.
When Heidegger was younger, one of his mentors, I mean a Real professor, named Edmund Husserl, founded a whole science of philosophy which he called phenomenological. Husserl brought in, Edmund Husserl brought in the sense that there is a phenomenological discipline which is the outcome, which is the emergence, which is the phenomena of disciplined thought that emerges after the cloud of logical unknowing is dispersed. Husserl's early vocation was that of a mathematics professor. He had a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in the 1880's, early 1880's and at the end of this whole skein of, I think he was lecturing in Berlin around the turn of the century, he wrote a big two volume set of books called logical investigations. Out of which he came to understand that the mathematical precision of thought was attainable, but only attainable by someone who could maintain a methodological rigor vis-a-vis the objects of thought and this required, not the discipline of mathematics, but the discipline of a new level of precision in philosophy which was his phenomenology. And just before the First World War broke out, he published, in 1913 (the same year as income tax was passed), he published a book called Ideas which established the philosophic discipline of phenomenological investigation and Heidegger was completely a child of that kind of charisma. Only being a somewhat arrogant child, he wanted to go one better than his professor, Edmund Husserl. Rather than just being a phenomenological account of the world, he wanted to turn it back on himself and make a phenomenological account of his own existential being. And this is the ontological level.
And it's Hannah Arendt studying under Heidegger at the same time that Heidegger is still under the encompassing challenge and authority of Edmund Husserl. It's very interesting to see. One gets the sense of almost like a target. But Husserl himself is the outcome of a generation before him that raised issues that caused consternation in the philosophic world. And one of the most poignant of those figures was a man named Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, who was independently wealthy and also independently frail; he could hardly live a day without just almost succumbing, spent all of his time writing as precise as he could about the actual experiences and thoughts that occurred to him and was the monumental period of his writing. He wrote a book in two volumes called Either Or which he showed that we run into an impasse in this world because we're given a choice of two sets of comportment towards life, both of which have something wrong with them. Either Or, both the Either and the Or. One is we can have an ethical outlook, on the other we can have an aesthetical outlook. Ethics and aesthetics, and that this is generally the choice that we have, and that there is something about both and Kierkegaard said there's an existential quandary that's here because when you write it out, Either/Or the problem is in the / (slash). What is that interface between ethics and aesthetics? Where is that interface? Is that interface in my mind? Is it somewhere, it can't be in my body. Is it in my person? It seems to be also in society, it seems to be in History. Where is this threshold? Where is this line? It was a very big issue for Soren Kierkegaard and part of Husserl's determination to find exactness and precision was to overcome that kind of existential quandary that had been raised, not only by Kierkegaard but by Friedrich Nietzsche. And not only by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche but by the Historian that we talked about a month ago Wilhelm Dilthey.
Dilthey who had come a long way was a friend of Burckhardt. We're going to get to Burckhardt next because Burckhardt is the place that's clearest. It's enormously complex if you try to pursue these issues in someone like Kierkegaard or someone like Nietzsche or someone like Dilthey. Because the problem is not an intellectual problem which philosophy solves at all. In fact it's not a problem, which is like a corollary of a question which has a solution which is a corollary of like an answer. The entire structure of that scenario is still a variation of either/or. And the actual drama is going on in the / (slash). It's going on in the relationality. But is was not apparent at the beginning of the twentieth century and so someone like an Edmund Husserl tried to take mathematical precision into philosophy, creating phenomenology, came to a kind of basic discipline which he thought was going to solve the situation, clear it up. That one had to learn, mentally, to be as objective as the body was ritually to physical objects. That the mind had to be disciplined to relate to mental objectivity in the way that the body relates to things. It can only go so far when things resist. They become palpable, they become quite real. And the intellectual, the mental, the mind knack or trick or technique (he wouldn't even call it a trick; throw you out of class). It was to bracket, mentally, the mental object. To abstract it from the general abstract concourse of the mind. To abstract the center of the abstraction and to present it to oneself mentally as then a (he used the phrase), a phenomenological reduction. To reduce the mental image to its phenomena status so that the mental object was as clear in your mind as a physical object would be to your perception. And he used the Greek term idetic for this. Idetic in Greek, you get the same, you get the cognate out of that which is idea. But you also get idol out of that. You get a graven image.
So that the consciousness, which we have come to appreciate, not to understand, but to appreciate that consciousness is a vision. Consciousness is a process of vision and doesn't necessarily take place in the mind at all. Even someone like Immanuel Kant talked about transcendence, transcendental. Transcendental to what? Transcendental to this world. And that the mind, if it is a part of this world, and it most surely is, the mind is an integrator on very refined high level, but never the less is a part of the cycle of integration itself. And so consciousness is transcendental to that but unfortunately, for someone living a couple of hundred years ago like Kant, the further realization that comes with that is that you have a great deal of difficulty of being phenomenologically conscious of consciousness because consciousness is not amenable to becoming a show. It doesn't show itself as an object no matter how refined the idetic experience is. In fact that's the whole depth of classic yoga.
Eighteen hundred years ago Patanjali and his yoga aphorisms, coming at the end of thousands of years of meditative sophistication, makes very clearly that when you make an idetic bracketing of consciousness per se, that set is empty. The number of items in that bracket is precisely 0. And if you don't know how to understand that, then you have to go back, not to the ashram, but you have to go back to planting rice down in the low lands. Because if you don't understand that, there's no way that you can understand that zero and one are a pair. And like Tao Te Ching, the pairedness, whenever Te is operative, it's the pairedness that's operative. Tao is always happening even though you can't quantify it. It's always happening especially because you can't quantify it. But the powers of quantification into differentiality are like proof positive that 0's count.
For someone like Heidegger, arrogantly assuming that he knew what Husserl was talking about, and then teaching it to others, and Hannah Arendt being extremely profound; even as a young woman in her twenties, she's already extremely very very sharp; had read Kant for almost ten years. Her little lectures on Kant's political philosophy were reproduced by the University of Chicago Press recently too. She raised some issues.
Part of what's totally missing in Husserl is the appreciation of art. Art forms are not amenable to a phenomenological reduction. They're not idetic bracketed objects at all. Do you think that that Rembrandt painting is in your mind? Like some Kantian chair which is in the mind in a philosophic example? No, it's up there in the gallery, mis-lit as usual. I remember seeing the Getty, when they were proud of their new Rembrandts that they had, and we went to see them and they were totally mis-lit so you couldn't see them. I mean you could see them as phenomenological objects, but you couldn't see them as Rembrandts. Rembrandt didn't deal in phenomenological perspective, he dealt with Rembrandt. A Rembrandt is not a phenomena, a Rembrandt painting is a numina. It's numinous, it's not phenomenological at all. In fact all aesthetic objects are numinous. They don't belong in the integral realm at all. That's not where they are real. Works of art are not real in the realm of ritual and symbol. Anything in the realm of ritual can be abstracted into an essential in the realm of symbol. What are you going to do? You're going to grind up the Rembrandt painting and take one piece of dust from that and say this is the essence of the Rembrandt painting? They'll shoot you. It's totally absurd, irrelevant and has nothing whatsoever to do with the reality that's there on that level. A Rembrandt painting is a part of the objective encompassing of the viewing of it as an object. The numinous object, the spiritual person, the work of art is always encompassing of the objective mind, even at its symbolic best, even when it's identically precise, big deal. (There are other words that go with that phrase but we'll leave them out).
Never the less there are people, there are millions of people, who've been making civilization on the basis of those kinds of assumptions and even worse for a long time. So that one of the chapters here in this introduction to Hannah Arendt, very excellent book, just came out, Chapter Two: Politics As Identity Disclosing Action. (Identity disclosing action.) "To a large extent Arendt's major political philosophy stems from a set of definitions the elaboration of which generates a whole world in which there is a place for everything and everything is in its place." She uses the phrase "a well ordered man in a coherent world". "Generates a set of definitions, the elaboration of which generates a whole world in which there is a place for everything and everything is in its place. Utopia, of course, means no place." So that a book like Samuel Butler, where he takes the English word, not no place, but the actual translation is nowhere. And he spells it backwards, and nowhere spelled backwards is erehwon. Before the health food market, there was a book called Erehwon by Samuel Butler. Who was a kind of crazy guy in a way, he thought Homer was a woman. He said look at all this detail in the Odyssey, only a woman knows these things. Because he was the kind of man who had no idea.
Utopia is a nowhere. Which means a utopia is a numinous object and is not a phenomena at all. It is a numinous object which means it does not achieve objectivity in an integral mode. I'm tempted to use the example from Buckaroo Bonsai where Buckaroo Bonsai is displaying to all the press and the military people this kind of fungus sponge that came from the eighth dimension, when he went through the space in between atoms. He says you could grind up and sift through that mountain like bread crumbs forever and you would never find this. Because it doesn't register in the integral mode as an object that is real at all. Its reality, objectively, registers in a different dimensiality. And right away one says, what are you talking about, I don't understand. And that's a good sign. Because if you understood there wouldn't be any more lecture. What kind of different dimension? There's just the three dimensions of space and there's the dimension of time right?
Well Husserl, toward the end of his life realized that there was something (the end of his life were the 1930's, he died in 1938). And he realized there was something which he called the crisis of science; that we were approaching, because the old Husserl had been doing this long enough that he was pretty sharp actually. He realized we're in a terminal apocalyptic crisis that has something to do with science and History and Man. That we are on a collision course with catastrophic end game. And so one of his last books is called The Philosophy of Internal Time Consciousness and The Crisis of European Sciences. Internal time consciousness is dimensional in its indexing power. It's at least as powerful as time in a spatial integral. It's as simple as Virginia Woolf talking, writing in To The Lighthouse, that sometimes internal time is elastic. There are certain moments that are much longer than clock time. There are certain moments that are much slower. The elasticity and the plasticity of internal time consciousness is famous. Everyone has these experiences and they're not throw aways, they're clues, they're indications of emerging out of cluelessness, out of not a cloud of unknowing, but out of a cloud of arrogant false knowing.
It turns out that unknowing is not a cloud at all. Unknowing is an open expanse of something that hasn't been mulched up yet at all. It's just openness. What phenomenological form, identically, considers openness a cloud of unknowing? The ego, sure as hell. And so another student of Husserl, a sibling student who didn't care for Heidegger at all, named Jean Paul Sartre, wrote a little tiny book after his own big book on being. His own big book, not on being and time, but on being and nothingness. He wrote a little tiny book called the Transcendence of the Ego. He said these Germans (he didn't really say it, but he implied it), these Germans have been on the prosecution side, we've been on the victim side and we want to tell you it feels differently. The existential problem is not one of clarity of identifying what to be thrown away, but of trying to stay alive vis-à-vis those who are trying to throw us away. What the hell is going on here. Sartre made his own little cache of errors. He went into long involved adoption of Marxian dialectic as if this was like really the process. Not the idetic process of phenomenology but the dialectical process of Marxian History and that this is going to work out. And it wasn't until towards the end of his life that he wrote a mia culpa confession that this really hadn't been well thought out at all. As Hannah Arendt points out in many places, it wasn't well ordered. That is to say, those thoughts and those observations do not accord with actually what happens. That you don't need a idetic reduction to tell what's happening to you when you are suffering.
But especially there is no idetic reduction possible when you are in love. Because Love is a numinous experiential mode. Therefore Love has something to do with consciousness. It doesn't have much to do, except by way of mythic association, with having. Though it seems at first that that's what's really going on. And she discusses, in her thesis on Augustine and Love, she talks about craving. One wants to have the thing one loves, wants to posses it, have it; gains joy out of anticipation that one is going to have it and this anticipation creates a kind of a future and a joyousness. That too frequently, as soon as you have it, it's not quite what you meant and the joy evaporates. In fact sometimes it freeze dries into fear. Because what you have is not having, but loss. You got what you craved and when you got it, it didn't satisfy the craving at all. And so it turned from love, she says, to fear. Not just disappointment, but something else, a polarity to love comes into play, fear. And if you remember, from the late 1950's where Mel Brooks as a young man was making this interview of the 2000 year old man. And he said what was the basic mode of transportation in those day, and the guy says fear.
So the whole quality that's there in craving; love is a craving, is a desire. Is love a desire? A desire for the objective? One can't wait for one's love to disrobe, which is a phenomenological showing. Is it? Is that what is involved here at all? The classic yoga says that this is indeed Maya. This entire dance is a number and takes place within the mind. It parades itself as being some kind of a magical impresario and actually what it is is a fake a faker. Arrogant faker. No magician at all. The Sanskrit word for a craving like that is Tanha. And Tanha produces a three part quandary: anger, lust and greed. And they follow each other all the time interminably. In Tibetan Thankas they're symbolized by the pig, the rooster and the snake. So at the center of the wheel of life, you see these three images and that's what turns the wheel of Samsara upon which everything is encrusted and cannot get free. One is worrying all the time about chakras and worrying about wanting to be into chakra energy and that whole thing is a scenario of Samsara. The entire thing is like being addicted to popsicles and you can't stop. And you wonder why you're hungry all the time. Because you're craving and wanting something which is extraneous to freedom in actuality. And even if you had it all, had all of your chakras activated and aligned, what are they aligned to? The saharastra chakra? Where is that? It's an encompassing numinousness which has no form that can be counted in an integral at all. And if the mind goes there, it opens so wide that all of its formalness is no longer of use.
The classic description by the Buddha is that when he came to enlightenment, and two passing merchants offered him some food, he realized that he didn't have any hands to grab the bowl to reach to get the food. And the fact that he didn't have a mouth or digestive system with which the food could be processed. And in fact there was no one here that answered to any kind of phenomenological description or recognition of what they were assuming. So whenever he referred to himself after that he called himself Tathata. The Tathagata, the one who is gone. Someone who's phenomena is no longer registering anywhere on the integral mode of actuality. A 0? Yeah. But not a 0 as in nothing, as non thing, but a 0 as in emptiness which pairs beautifully with the 1's of existence. So that while a Buddha is phenomenologically absent from the world, is resonantly real with the Cosmos because the Cosmos also is a differential form, is numinous, is so numinous that its glowingness seems like darkness to phenomenological eyes. Is space black? It's filled with such high energy that you could hardly believe the mathematical read out is like a cereal box of super stuff. Is it black and empty? Hardly. The spatial reality is that it is chock-full of more dimensions than you knew because those four dimensions of space and time are just for openers. There are at least three or four other dimensions that go into that. And that immediately brings us to very serious problem. If consciousness is already a five dimensional continuum, not just a continuum on the integral, but that the fifth, the quintessential dimension of consciousness is always transforming space and time. That the fifth dimension, its dimension is to transform the other four and that when the person comes into play, when the artist comes into play, when there is a Rembrandt on the scene, there is more than just visionary consciousness, there's no Rembrandt, or Cezanne.
Cezanne being on the lower slopes of Mont Sainte-Victoire is not the same as any of us being on the lower slopes of Mont Sainte-Victoire. We're there in four dimensions and maybe five dimensions but we're not there with the sixth dimension of Cezanne, but we can be because there's nothing in a differential mode to forbid us of inhabiting the space/time of Cezanne. It's only if you're in space/time that two objects cannot occupy the same focus. In the sixth dimensional continuum, not only two but hundreds of billions and trillions can occupy the very same focus. Art is a landscape of freedom. Did you never hear of it? Of freedom on a scale that politics never new, never. Never understood. The Romans didn't get it, the Greeks didn't get it, and the Europeans, sure as hell, didn't get it, ever. So it's true in a way, odd way, one has to go back and start all over again. But not to the 0 that they assumed but to the actual 0. The 0 which is always paired with 1. That Tao Te is always operative, always there, accessible.
But it turns out that the challenge is even more daunting than anyone realized because History is a seven dimensional challenge. If you try to find mythic solutions, which are three dimensional and four dimensional at best; the mind can go to a four dimensional solution at best. It's helpless before a seven dimensional challenge. It's helpless before a five dimensional challenge. The mind is blurred instantly out of all possible recognition by an overpowering vision. It isn't a question of what Sir Thomas Moore said that man needs laws because if there were no laws, who could stand up to the winds that blow if we're not protected by laws. Whereas in fact, the laws, all legal forms are logical black magic circles meant to keep the mind safe within its phenomenological corralled conceptions. And that kind of legal-ism is all tied up with politics back to the Greeks and Romans and even before them.
If one looks to find where does all this come from. Where are all these problems that Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, and obviously illuminating all the major issues of our time, where are those problems? They come in clearly to a focus in early Roman Empire times. And they're there clearer than they are for us in our own time because of the complications that have ensued and developed and one goes back to the time of Tacitus and one sees in The Annals of Imperial Rome, Chapter One: From Augustus to Tiberius. And the immediate encompassing numinous consciousness is to say, all right, the form we're going to look at is Augustus, Caesar, on from there, we're going to look at the Caesars and the Flavians, we're going to look at the first century of Roman Empire rulers. What happened just before they came in? What was the prelude, a generation or two to the Roman Empire? And when you look at that you immediately recognize that the problem is illuminated by two figures. One, Julius Caesar, who's the direct ancestor to the Roman Emperors. The Roman Empire Emperors were carrying out the program designed by Julius Caesar. He is the author of that program. He's the Moses of the Roman Empire. He wrote the Torah for the Roman Empire that became the Roman Empire. But he had some opposition.
He had opposition from a man named Cicero and all of our twentieth century's association with Cicero is that he's a teacher of good Latin grammar which little boys were forced, for hundreds of years, to study. Eeuue. Well eeuue on you because that's exactly where one finds insight. One goes back - it's translated as On Duties. What obligations you have to the state. Oh it goes deeper than that. It goes back to rewriting Plato's Republic. Cicero rewrote, at the end of his life, just before he was murdered, de Republica by Cicero. Always bound up with de Legabus, The Laws, because Cicero's Republic and his Laws, by the Roman time, were bound up together because Plato's Republic and Plato's Laws were usually read together in tandem. But when you come to the Republic and you read through to the end, the last book six of the Republic, the very end of the Republic is a classic esoteric treatise which is published separately, in this translation, Studies in Hermetic Tradition, The Dream of Scipio.
Which Scipio. Not Scipio Africanus but his later descendent, his name sake, that Scipio who was the personal friend of Polybius who took him around and showed him things, showed him the family history. The Scipio Africanus who beat Hannibal was also made head of the Roman mystery religions because he was a colossal mysterious numinous individual. The Roman Senate had a motion to censor him because he spared some lives in Carthage, so he strode in his toga with the charges under his arm into the Roman Senate and stood before them and without saying a word tore them up in front of them, threw them on the floor and walked out. And there wasn't anything they could do because the army, the legions respected him and they didn't respect these men parading as authorities.
But the other Scipio was philosophic, he was educated to the numinous visions of things. And in The Republic, The Dream of Scipio, Cicero says at the end, this is a book about founding the Roman Republic in place of a Roman Empire. Of transforming the Roman Republic into a Cosmic visionary human numinousness. He says "But even if future generations should wish to hand down to those yet unborn the eulogies of every one of us which they receive from their fathers, never the less the floods and conflagrations which necessarily happen on the Earth at stated intervals would prevent us from gaining a glory which could be long enduring, much less eternal. But of what importance is it to you to be talked of by those who are born after you when you were never mentioned by those who lived before you who were no less numerous and were certainly better men especially as not one of those who may hear our names can retain any recollection for the space of a single year, much less for people who commonly measure the year, not by the circuit of the sun but by the circuit of all the constellations of stars that make a huge platonic year of twenty-six thousand years." That's the kind of talk that was made by a Roman two thousand years ago, challenging the idea of a phenomenon, a phenomenological reduction of society to a very large form called the Roman Empire.
It's exactly this kind of point that Tacitus makes in the Annals and it's on a Tacitean theme that Hannah Arendt begins to loom ever more important at the beginning of the twenty-first century. More next week.
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