History 9
Presented on: Saturday, September 1, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
With History Nine we enter into the tremendous energy and violence of the twentieth century and the early twenty first century vomiting that has occurred because of it. We're taking two historical...two historians who traced for us, in a very deep way how this happened, how it got there, why it could have been mitigated and why it is so completely unprecedented and that we have no way out except to master it. We're taking Jacob Burckhardt and Karl Jaspers. Jaspers died in 1969 and Burckhardt died in 1897, but a lot of his major works did not come out until the twentieth century, edited by his nephew. One of the last really great works was published as late as 1905. By that time Jaspers was already on his way and became...Jaspers is one of the four or five greatest philosophers of the twentieth century and Burckhardt is probably the greatest historian of the nineteenth century, but whose import was not realised fully until the twentieth century. One conspicuous thing about Jaspers: his wife was Jewish and all during the Nazi regime they did not leave Germany, they did not leave the professorial house where they lived and his wife, Gertrude, was not accosted, was not arrested. And one of the reasons for this is not only the fame of Jaspers as one of the greatest thinkers of all time, but that his long term friend, Martin Heidegger, who was somewhat co-opted by the Nazis, was a lifelong friend and did a lot of behind the scenes defending of Gertrude Jaspers' right to live. She lived into her nineties. One of the closest friends for her whole life was the great Jewish woman philosopher, Hannah Arendt, whose letters to Jaspers are about six or 700 pages. Jaspers himself, interestingly enough, had a precarious health issue as a child. He was born in that area of northern Germany that's very near to Holland, to the Netherlands, about 20 miles from the North Sea coast and his father worked in a bank and so had access to a couple of resort places on some islands in the North Sea and they used to go there. But Jaspers always had difficulty and by the time he was 18 he could not walk more than a couple of miles without having to sit for hours to capture his breath. And it began to be apparent that this was extremely serious and the question at that time of course, 'Could it be tuberculosis?' It was 1901. So they tested him and examined him and they found it wasn't tuberculosis, but that his left lung was damaged and it kept filling with liquid. So they had him sit out a year and go to one of these cure places, where they tilted him with his head below his feet to slowly drain the lungs and to beef him up, because his metabolism was almost, paradoxically, concentration camp initiated. He was six one, he weighed 127 pounds when he went in, he was almost a skeleton. And he was able to survive and to come back, but in the meantime he had lost all taste of following the profession that was chosen for him - that of being a lawyer - and the only thing that interested him was psychology. 'Why is it that we are like we are?' And 'How is it that we are?' He was interested for himself as well. And at that time psychology was very new as a university discipline. The first textbook on psychology was published in 1890, by William James at Harvard, two big volumes. So Jaspers was one of the first to become not only a psychologist on a university level, but to become a psychotherapist and he wrote a textbook which is still in print, called General Psychotherapy. But the more he got into it, the more he realised that it isn't just the mind, it's the person within whom the mind seeks to dominate everything in its own terms and that there are many aspects to us, like our body, which should not be dominated, but should be respected and worked with. And that there are other faculties and capacities of our whole being that are not satisfied by the mind's planning, by the mind's integral and that there are other aspects to this. And one of the largest aspects is our relationship with other people. Not with our mind and their mind, not in a psychology, psychotherapeutic way, but in a wholeness, where the resonances of our mutual wholenesses have a quality. And the quality is that of resonant waves that interpenetrate and as they interpenetrate, they produce what is known in physics as a diffraction pattern. If you introduce light waves into a grating, you will get a diffraction pattern, which has characteristic qualities. If you're old enough to remember 33 LP's, you could hold those vinyl records in such a way that they, not the circles of the sound, but it was a tight spiral that went in and if you held it in just the right way you'd get a rainbow sheen on the record. It's a diffraction pattern. When two human beings are whole and interfaced, there is a rainbow covenant between them, there's an extraordinary actuality. But the rainbow that comes out is like the aura, which can even be photographed with Kirlian front photography. But when you have a number of whole people together, like a whole community, the complexity of the diffraction pattern, that rainbow covenant, becomes a kaleidoscope. And so history is actually kaleidoscopic consciousness, because it involves every human being in terms of their wholeness and not only every human being who's alive, but who has ever lived. So that the kaleidoscope of the planet is a kaleidoscope that may be 30 or 40,000,000,000 people over tens of thousands of years and it is this quality that lies largely unappreciated. When he was a young man, finally capable of holding a job, being a professor, having written a standard textbook already, he was alert to the fact that Germany, his Germany, was funnelling itself into a power plough that was going to bulldoze a great deal of valuation of human beings. And in 1931 he published Man in the Modern Age, which was translated into English by Eden and Cedar Paul, a couple in London and published in New York and London. It was published in 1933, when the Nazis took over Germany, in English, in Germany in 1931. The very first chapter in there is...the introduction, is labelled 'Origin of the Epical Consciousness.' And here are just a few lines. He was at this time 48 years old, very capable. He could see not only what was happening, but he could see with the historical, kaleidoscopic consciousness into how this is happening and is possible and he writes, 'The epical consciousness entered a new phase, beginning as a surge of mental activity which had not in truth recognised itself clearly as epical. It was directed first of all towards the glamour of a well ordered political life.' The marching troops in unison, armed, disciplined, unrelenting, in the streets with all the fanfare and the flags with the symbols.
And then towards human existence as such now were laid the foundations of the thought that whereas hitherto life had been accepted as it was, the human reason was competent to mould life purposefully until it should become what it ought to be. The French Revolution was unprecedented in human history, regarded as the opening of a new era, wherein guided by rational principles, man would shape his own destiny. It was at first enthusiastically acclaimed by the leaders of European thought.
And when the French Revolution was successful and took over, they threw away the calendar and they said, 'This is Year One. We're going to date all time from now and anything before this is disposable and diviable. And we're going to take all of it and portion it out as we see fit.' That political, economic ideology quickly veered into a decline, where the French Revolution, that was about human freedom and dignity and the Social Contract of getting rid of layers of tyranny and authority, within a couple of years the French Revolution, under the Directorate, became known as 'The Terror.' And the answer was the guillotine. 'Anyone who's accused and is not with us, will be guillotined.' Their estates, everything, confiscated. Jaspers writes, 1931:
In none of the earlier revolutions had there been any deliberate intention of transforming human society. Descartes, for instance, was not in revolt against the laws and conventions of his country, but ventured only to think of a revolution in the inner man. He was nonsensically declared to propose the reform of a state by razing it to the ground and starting to rebuild it on entirely new foundations.
And then he goes on from there and finally comes at the end of the book...the section is called 'Contemplative and Active Forecast.' 'But when we return from these remoter estimates'...which the book had gone into in detail.
To the political possibilities, we see that there are others besides the only one in which man could remain true to himself. Apart from the religion embodied in ecclesiastical conditions, there is in the world no philosophical selfhood, no genuine religion, which does not regard any other possibility than that of its true selfhood as an adversary and a spur. All cannot be found in man as an individual. In the contemporary forecast, these adversaries, whose tension as authority and freedom is the life of that spirit which is never completed, must solidarise themselves against the possibility of the null.
The 'Null' is a way of writing, 'It isn't just about death, it's about oblivion.'
If the tension between authority and freedom, in which man, his temporal life must remain, were to become re-established in new forms, substantiality would grow in the machinery of life. No definite or convincing answer can be given to the question, 'What is going to happen?' Man...living man will answer this question through his own being in the course of his activities. A forecast of the future, the active forecast now in the making, the forecast which will become one of the determinates of the future, can aim only at rendering mankind aware of itself.
One of the deepest qualities behind this was the work of Burckhardt. Burckhardt was born in 1818, but lived into his eighties. He was born in Basel, which is Switzerland that juts into southern Germany, so he was Swiss. And when he was a young man, one of his good friends was Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most powerful philosophers of the nineteenth century. And in Burckhardt there is a letter to Nietzsche which is extremely interesting and important.
It may well be that Burckhardt's insistence on the priority of contemplation was what often baffled, disturbed, or irritated his contemporaries and made him seem to Nietzsche given to concealment. The case of Heinrich Wölfflin, whom he chose to succeed him as Professor of Art History in Basel, illustrates the difficulty with that attitude presented. Wölfflin's first impression of Burckhardt in his lectures, coming from a man who was afterwards to owe so much to him, is very instructive. When he first called on Burckhardt in 1882 and found him living in a couple of rooms above a baker's shop in a narrow little street, he was taken aback, not only to say put off the stark simplicity.
In the Germany of the time Herr Professor was one of the pillars of the community, he's living in a couple of bare rooms above a bakery shop. 'The stark simplicity of the old gentleman's establishment,' who had by this time established himself as one of the greatest historians of all time. Lectured for 40 years straight in Basel and his books became increasingly famous. When The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy first came out it was ignored. Most really new things are ignored at first, it takes a while. When it was finally translated into English, in 1878, was the beginning of beginning to realise that the Renaissance is a particular key, but that it had not been appreciated, or understood accurately before. And what Burckhardt introduced into the whole mix here was that a contemplative facing of history yields a new kind of cyclic periodicity, a new kind of ecology of consciousness, of understanding. That to suppose that history is about dates, or battles, or kings, kingless, military battle sequences, is to reduce down everything down to a methos, to a mythic level. To a mythic level where there is a narrative sequence: the beginning, the middle, the end of the way in which one can speak about this because it's based on what we say happened, what the rituals were, what the ritual comportment and actions were and 'Here's what people said and this is what we in our minds make out of this.' But this is specious. This devolves so that the dimension of consciousness is not given its expansion, it doesn't have its resonance. It has instead a tether around its neck that is pulled back into the mentality. 'You are allowed to have a few insights, but not too many and you must be suspicious of having too many, or of having an insight that keeps on going, because this is very close to madness, it's very close to irrationality.' It's close to 'We don't know what will happen to you, you better play it safe and come back where you're with us.' This is called ideology and someone who lives that way is an ideologue and someone who promotes it is a true believer. And Eric Hoffer's classic book, called The True Believer, 1957, said, 'The dangerous thing about a true believer is not just that they're willing to die for their cause, they are willing for you to die for their cause.' And that this becomes something insidious because, 'When there's enough of us and we can single out the yous, we can now go after them. We can hunt them and we can flick them off, so that the complications of our ideology are lessened and the value of our beliefs will rise according to the triumphant glory that we have achieved, exactly the way things should be.'
Burckhardt, when he was first beginning to really understand history as a kaleidoscopic consciousness, that a contemplative openness to it releases from the lenses that refocus the imagery of a methos into a visionary field and our lens by works of art, by spiritual persons, who are the artists. And that if you look to the persons, if you look to the artists, if you look to the works of art, if you look to the lensing, the jewelled cut, refined lenses of art, what comes out of that then is a very powerful, kaleidoscopic interpenetration of resonances, which really is what history is. History is a high-dimensional dynamic that gives us a harmonic between ourselves as prismatic persons, as a community of prismatic human beings, as a species of prismatic, wisdom beings, it gives us a direct harmonic with the cosmos. We don't have to check on the belief list to find out if it's true. We don't have to obey the codes to the letter, to live right. And what is more is that this was understood in high antiquity and that the Renaissance is a rediscovery of what was known some 1500 years before. In his beautiful opening to a book that was edited after he died by his nephew, called The History of Greek Culture, the beginnings of it, there's an essay called 'The Free Personality.' And this is the last little paragraph: 'For the Greeks, the dialogue form is especially congenial.' Not only two people talking together like a chat, but two people talking together to hear each other and to let the hearing and talking sew back and forth between the two of them, so that the thread of understanding sews them together in a mutual resonance that was achieved together, because they really talked openly to each other, they really listened openly to each other. And what came out of it was increasingly the sense of not only deepening, getting down to where we're really talking about specifics, but the resonance telescopes out and we become aware together that what we are doing is generating a context which keeps expanding and that when we come to the exact point of agreement, the point of 'Aletheia,' of the truth of what it is that we're talking about, the context is expanded so that it no longer has any bounds. It is a boundless accuracy that we understand each other, to every degree. The last paragraph of Burckhardt, this was published after he died, published in early twentieth century: 'In any event, the Greeks took pleasure in the dialogue. Even though the dialogue was still assiduously cultivated in the Renaissance, today it has fallen out of favour, perhaps because we no longer take delight in listening to others as men once did.' Plutarch once wrote a special essay on De Recta Ratione Audiendi, The Right Way of Listening. Now, Plutarch was one of the great sages, who was a contemporary of Tacitus. He was born about 50, 55 AD and he lived into the 120's AD. His On Listening to Lectures is in one of the volumes of Plutarch's Moralia. There's 16 volumes of this, collected essays and translated into the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard. This particular volume, Volume One, was published in 1969, the year that Jaspers died. Here's what Plutarch wrote, about 100 AD, who understood not only the Greek world, but the Roman world and was masterful at the whole participation. He writes, 1900 years ago:
But as for those lazy persons whom we have mentioned, let us urge them that when their intelligence has comprehended the main points, they put the rest together by their own efforts and use their memory as a guide in thinking for themselves and taking the discourse of another as a germ and seed, develop it and expand it. For the mind does not require filling, like a bottle, but rather like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth. Imagine then that a man should need to get a fire from a neighbour and upon finding a big, great fire there, should stay there continually, warming himself, just so it is as a man comes to another to share the benefit of a discourse and does not think it necessary to kindle some illumination for himself and thinking of his own, but delighting in the discourse, sits enchanted. He gets, as it were, a bright and ready glow in the form of opinion imparted to him by what is said. But the mouldiness and darkness of his inner mind has not dissipated, nor banished by the warm glow of philosophy. Finally, if there is any other need of any other instruction in regard to listening to a lecture, it is that it is necessary to keep in mind what has here been said and to cultivate independent thinking along with our learning, so that we may acquire a habit of mind that is not sophistic and bent on acquiring mere information, but one that is deeply engrained and philosophic, as we may do if we believe that right listening is the beginning of right living.
And so our learning here is an ancient wisdom, where what is presented is not told, it's not instruction, it's not inculcated, it's specifically held back from all of the earmarks of diagrammatic conviction of the kind of sophistic arguing, to present clearly so that your minds hear it and will understand and thus believe and thus do that such and so. It is an invitation for your freedom, it is in every sense a visionary field that allows for your own lensing to emerge independently real, using just a little bit of kindling, but is your own fire, by whose light not only do you see and be and live, but that your own harmonic to the cosmos becomes apparent to you, becomes apparent because the mind becomes transparent. It is the transparency of the mind that evaporates every diagram, every artificiality, every foisted plan, every code imposed. The problems that remain then are to find others who are equally free and to begin cultivating between us that better humanity who belongs in reality and not in some artificiality. We're gonna take a little break and then come back. It is a difficult thing sometimes to be a free, not a free individual, individuals are never free. Individuals are always the unity of the mind's conclusions. What is free is the person. There are times when it is very difficult to emerge as a free person and one of Jaspers' earliest books take two people who had a hell of a time, Strindberg and Van Gogh. Strindberg, who thought he was going insane and took a fleabag hotel in Paris - he was Swedish - and because he was literate he decided to write the story of his going mad and is called Inferno. And as he kept writing Inferno and days turned into weeks and months, he realised he wasn't going mad, but he was gaining insight. Van Gogh, who tried not to be an artist all his life, made all of his paintings within ten years, because it burst out and he could no longer contain it, he had to paint it. Let's take a break.
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Let's come right back to what is being presented here with the presentation. It's a gifting and that gifting has energy. The field of that energy is a field of nature and of consciousness, that have woven together in a very special way. Nature and consciousness are chirally left-handed and right-handed; they move in opposite spins so that when they interpenetrate, the completeness of the natural field and the perfection of the conscious field, generate an infinite kaleidoscope. It isn't that there's no end to it and no bound to it and no complete, initial beginning as an existential point, but that the origin is beginningless and that any entry into the field of nature is an entry of emergence, not of going into so much, but of emerging out. So that the most primordiality that occurs in reality is actually a birthing and that birthing carries with it all of the packed capacities that are possible. Each time a baby emerges and comes in, there is a particular quality to the unusualness of it. On the news yesterday was a boat, fishing boat, captain who had to help the birthing of a baby from his cook and the only thing he had to go by was a first aid book. And when it came time that the baby would not cry yet, he had to give it CPR, for about eight or nine minutes before it'd start to breathe. Then he had the problem of the umbilical cord: 'Well, how do you tie it off?' No forceps, nothing and he had to deal from the pantry. But the baby is there, survived, the son is there. We're birthing a recalibration of ourselves to re-emerge, not just once, more, like in a rebirth, but to continually refine the vibration of our emergence together. And the more that this happens, the more that the energy of it begins to expand its capacity.
When Strindberg was writing...when Jaspers was writing about Strindberg and published Strindberg and Van Gogh in 1922, it was an extremely revelatory threshold for him. One of the historical scramblings that happened was World War One, from 1916 to 1918...1914 to 1918. And in the middle of 1914 to 1918, in 1916, is the first time that Jaspers was able to present his first vision. It was called The Psychology of World Visions and he was 33 years old. And in The Psychology of World Visions in 1916, right in the midst of the First World War, Jaspers began to see broad enough in the historical energy of kaleidoscopic consciousness, that this was a time and an event for him and for the world, that was getting precariously close to all out oblivion. One of the most profound thinkers and leaders of this entire situation was Max Weber, one of the world's great sociologists. And in a couple of years Max Weber died prematurely, in 1920 and it was Jaspers who delivered the memorial speech, the eulogy, for his friend and teacher, at Heidelberg in Germany. But it was a mixed presentation because Max Weber represented in himself one of the most powerful presentations of why an ideology is necessary for modern man. That it is not possible for modern man to live outside the bounds of the necessity for an ideology and that the ideology, essentially, must include an economic basis. And that the support for this economic basis is the further developments of protecting it and nurturing it, which is the political. And so you have something which had become extraordinarily powerful and right at the end of the First World War, late 1918, early 1919, was a watershed. In the United States education was completely changed from an intellectual, university appreciation of culture and of civilisations, to a business of education, whose ideal was to make more profit for business and that business practices and their legitimate value judgement for profit, increasing profit, was inculcated into the entire university system. A book by Robert Callahan at the University of Chicago was entitled The Cult of Efficiency. And by the early twenty first century, it is de rigueur everywhere in the world, the cult of efficiency for a political economy, which breeds an ideological addiction, not just a tendency towards it, but only rewards and fixes that addictiveness. And one of the most poignant critiques of Max Weber was done by a Roman Catholic writer, is name is Midgley. The Ideology of Max Weber: A Thomist Critique. It's a critique of the ideological tendencies, but on the basis, unbelievably, of an 800 year old ideology, the formal ideology of the Roman Catholic Church. One can see in the face of Max Weber the looming beginnings of not only what became the fascist threat in Nazi Germany, but became the Communist threat in Russia, the Soviet Empire. The two figures that were selected by Weber to exemplify these qualities, one was Friedrich Nietzsche and the other was Karl Marx. Here's a Critique point:
Weber vis-à-vis the other prophets of the re-enchantment. Weber sometimes seems to suggest that value judgements ought not to be propagated in academic work, or at least if they are so propagated, they should be made perfectly explicit, since we have seen Weber's academic writings are full of implicit presuppositions, not made explicit. In Weber's own nomenclature, can only be called 'Value judgements.' One wonders to what extent Weber is deceiving himself and to what extent he is simply deceiving his readers. Certainly, Weber himself is one of the pseudoprophets of the re-enchantment of the world.
This re-enchantment of the world is not the natural methos, it's not the way that we have come to appreciate that myth is the flow, the stream of experience, that carries its imagery, that carries its feeling tones, that is expressed by oral language. This is a re-enchantment that is induced from the mind, from an 'Ism,' from a mentality. The question is not about the 'Ismness,' but about getting the right 'Ism.' And that one re-enchants the world by bringing back the right methos so that people's experience is the way it ought to be and you find the magic of being able to have enough money to go and shop for whatever you'd like to shop and this enchants everything. It's a huge danger. There was a writer, A.W. Gouldner, his article was called Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of a Value Free Society, published in 1964. I remember when it came out. The Minotaur of course is the half-man, half-bull at the centre of the labyrinth. And it is the young men and young women every spring who must be sacrificed to the Minotaur. They are sent into the labyrinth and the only way you can proceed in the labyrinth at all is to go forward and the way forward always leads to the centre, where the minotaur slays them and eats them, consumes them. It is the select men and women of the sacrifice to the Minotaur that keeps the Minotaur happy being at the centre of the labyrinth because it is fed and worshipped there. It is not hard to get to, through the maze to the centre, but to be anti-minotaur is very, very dangerous. It is not easy to kill a Minotaur and it is even more perilous that once you kill the Minotaur, to find your way out of a labyrinth. It took a deep wisdom and a high art of spirit person to be able to construct a labyrinth whose total area once covered, does not trap you at the centre, but frees you from the entirety of the labyrinth for once and for all. Because the centre is the centre of having perfected your freedom to walk over the edges of the labyrinth because you've already completed the labyrinth and as you completed it, its divisions vanished. And having reached the centre of it, you have reached a perfection of freedom, where you're free to walk out of the labyrinth any way that you want to. That kind of a labyrinth, by the way, was put in the centre of the floor in Chartres Cathedral in France, right where the nave and the transept meet. And it is a place at which the person who has walked on the flower, the blossom, of this eight petal maze, stands exactly at the point where the Cathedral, as a huge cross that transcends time, an architectural cross of delivering you exactly at the place at which you are free to leave, because you have mastered in such a way that you have gone into a transcendence of the limitations that would have kept you towing the lines and thinking that you could not just walk over them and walk out. I remember when my daughter was about five and we used to play the line game, walking on the sidewalks, not to step on any lines, or any cracks and to try and always nudge the other so that they would step on a crack and you would lose. And five is right at that age where it's interesting, because they have achieved a completeness of psyche to where they begin to think of themselves in their wholeness and to also have bad dreams, go through a phase. And it's those bad dreams that are a concomitant of finding that you're not precarious by being open with an open self in this world. That the labyrinth of the world is not a perilous danger that is real, it is only an artificiality, an inculcation and a powerful empire, political economy, makes it almost addictively impossible for someone to be free, to be openly, completely and perfectly themselves in a world that seems to all indications, not only dangerous, not only dangerous to life and perilous to the point of death, but also capable of erasing you into oblivion. It is the oblivion that is the trigger on the fear, on the terror. One will have an anxiety over an impaired life, one can be fearful of death, but one is terrified by oblivion. And the use of terror to keep a population of people in the minotaur-centred labyrinth, has been in place ever since cultures have become strong enough to increase themselves to a formal, proto-civilisation.
Here is one of the aspects that Jaspers faced at maturity in his thirties, with his valuable friend and mentor, Max Weber. 'At least we have reason to suspect that in some cases Weber's abstract argumentation against private or academic prophecy, functioned as a camouflage attack upon those who held specific ideologies, or teachings which Weber himself deemed to be objectionable.' There was an ideological thrust to apply pressure, constantly, always, that professors are not entitled to freedom from state control in the manner of expression of values and secondly, if value judgements are to be proclaimed by academics, they must be absolutely explicit. And by absolutely explicit, it meant precisely logical, or it's irrational and should be dismissed. And so the requirement of someone to be completely rational, explicitly, otherwise you're not entitled to a value judgement, other than the ones that the ideology has delivered to you approved by authority and maintains by a judicial tyranny. The judges, who have courts, the courts, who have officers of the court, who are the police, who are backed up by the military, who are supported by the industrial complex and all of this is bound together by the religious binding of all of it, so that this is the way in which it is done. In particular, because of Jasper's trying to find a tab where a human being comes to the point to where they are in a chronic situation of not just facing death and not just facing maiming, but facing the oblivion of madness that he chose to write about Strindberg. As we talked about before the break, Strindberg felt that he was going insane and he feared that he would literally be erased into oblivion by this. And in his Paris, shabby hotel room, he kept a journal, Inferno. Here's what Jaspers wrote and this came out right at the end of the First World War, right after delivering the eulogy for Max Weber, he wrote this and it was published a year later. 'In his report about Strindberg's strange behaviour, [Schlite 23:40] continues, "Nobody should therefore assume that Strindberg was emotionally disturbed. He was always clear, logical, sure in his thinking and respected all arguments with utter calmness."'
Strindberg was a linguistic genius, by the way. He catalogued all of the Chinese works in the Royal Swedish Library, for instance. He was a polymath.
He was always clear, logical. It is possible he tended somewhat towards ideas of being persecuted, they never appeared forth though. But as far as I was able to observe, were rather the reaction to an all-justified distrust.' The latter is undoubtedly incorrect. The reading of Inferno alone convinces one that the opposite was true. However, a rather general decision on the question of whether Strindberg had been mentally disturbed is altogether meaningless, for if one assumes mental illness according to an accepted definition, when a person loses composure, orientation, or orderly thinking, Strindberg would not come under this category. But for two decades Strindberg suffered from a well known, describable process, which we might classify as schizophrenic, paraphrenic, or paranoid. The terminology matters little.
Remember that Jaspers' great first book was the textbook on General Psychopathology as a young man. Because he had gone through most of this himself, like William James, who'd gone through all of it himself. He knew whereby he spoke, he'd faced it all himself. 'By that we mean that Strindberg displays an abundance of experiences, psychologically incomprehensible and heterogeneous, but empirically interconnected, repeated in similar cases and in similar arrangement, which betray a certain form of progress through the years.' The progress begins in the '80's, the 1880's. 'It progresses by means of two major thrusts which occur and pollinate in 1887 and in 1896.' Already you can see that Jaspers is understanding, because taking his cue from someone like Burckhardt, that a contemplative approach to life is completely open. It is what we call here prismatic. All of the resonances are free to occur as they will occur and as they do it becomes apparent more and more that the concentration of a meditation, the inner focusing of a reflection, are not sufficient in themselves. If one becomes very good at reflection, one becomes very quietly verged on an impossibility and just the same way that a meditation will condense more and more to a single pointedness. And the reflecting mind, mentality, innerly faced with a lone, single pointedness, realises it's impossible to maintain this, in this kind of a universe, in this kind of a life, in this kind of a physiology. In this kind of a situation is the most precarious possible place to find oneself. The Minotaur there is the Minotaur of being completely isolated from everything and everyone else and having no way to do anything about it whatsoever. It is the ultimate source of terror. 'If you do not play along with this, obey our authority, you will be let to go there to that centre. You go ahead and reflect in your own way, see where it will get you. You go ahead and meditate and concentrate and you concentrate and meditate until you come to that moment, where there's only one left.' But the beauty of someone like Strindberg is that he was a good enough meditator, a good enough reflector, that that one pointedness vanished and left him pure, then came back and came back as a flower that grew, of his cosmic potential. And one of the most telling of all the plays ever written, Strindberg's Dream Play. The protagonist in the play, who's in Stockholm, is thinking that he's going crazy, he can't keep his own in this complex society, is ruining him and he has nowhere to go and he's contemplating suicide, he's contemplating death, that anything is better than this oblivion. And then the transformation happens and in the Dream Play, what has been a mainstay behind the scene, which is the dome of the City Hall of Stockholm, the dome of political, economy authority, opens like a bud and this beautiful cosmic flower comes out. And in the play Strindberg shows that one is not only free, one is eternally, permanently free and it was just a matter of recognising it. It didn't now just happen, it always was true and that the recognition now is of such a deep harmonic, that the entire cosmos understands and accepts you. You have an infinite context that is so superior on every level, on every order, to what the authorities were. They were not complete, they were artificial, they were impractical in many ways. And so here Jaspers writes:
What is so astounding is the fact that there are cases of such an illness which do not warp, do not destroy in a general sense, but which cause an actual derangement. The cases which are known to us and which are understandable, have the same effect on the mentality of the patient, as that of a hammer wielded against the mechanism of a clock, causing chaotic destruction. These processes, however, have the effect of tampering with the clock's mechanism, modifying its works in some involved manner. It continues to run, but in a different manner, erratically and one is tempted to say that 'The clock runs crazily.'
Later on, when Jaspers begins to develop existential therapy, with a classic book called Existenz, with a 'Z,' one of the earliest practitioners of existential therapy, Medard Boss, used a very simple diagram. He used a cross, a St Andrew's cross and he showed that as long as you keep it exactly right, you can use it like a symbol, but if it tilts the slightest bit either way, it continues to tilt and becomes an 'X,' it becomes an unknown. And the very source of your certainty, the very symbol that tied your certainty into actuality, was secretly a source of anxiety and jeopardy, either way. It doesn't matter which way it falls; you can go far right or far left, it makes no difference whatsoever. That you clung to the belief out of an intuitive insecurity, that it was not questionable and increasingly not questionable, because any question that really questioned and did not receive an answer on the basis of authority, put you in the jeopardy of beginning to go irrational, either too conservative, or too liberal, either one way or the other. All of this came to a head in the 1920's. In the early 1920's, one found increasingly across the board, everywhere that one looked in the world, this quality of the same conundrum repeating itself in every religion, in every social situation. And one of the most profound of all the strategies of dealing with it was developed by Gandhi in India about this time, 1921. He had used a technique called 'Satyagraha.' Of holding truth, the truth that one is able to discover, by interchanging openly, without any limitations, a dialogue of any number of people. And that openness by any number of people, as long as it was completely open, would eventually dissolve the precariousness, would evaporate the anxiety, would establish the truth, not as a truth, but the truth that was discoverable together, that was there. And in 1921 he went to the northern part of India, along the Himalayas. The province area is called Champaran and the British Empire had decreed that the fertile grounds of the Champaran region could only grow one crop, indigo, to make the deep indigo blue dye for British textile industries. They were not allowed to grow food for themselves, though for thousands of years, they'd grown their own food and nobody ever went hungry. Now they had to only grow indigo, sell their crop to the British authorities and out of the money given to them they had to buy food imported by British companies. And they were dying, the entire population, so Gandhi went to Champaran and he set up tables, hundreds of tables and brought in volunteers. People left jobs, they left university positions and they sat for month after month, after month, taking written, documentary interview notes by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, until it became absolutely apparent to everyone in the world that this was not only an unjust situation, this was a madness on the part of the British Empire, that went right to the heart of it. These human beings had become mechanical cogs in a machine of political economy and had nothing to do with them as human beings, much less spiritual persons. They rescinded by world pressure the laws that limited them to growing only indigo and the whole population of people was restored to the beginnings of life and it was in 1921 when they arrested Gandhi for being successful at this. He proudly went to prison and his remark was a remark that Thoreau made when someone said to him, 'Why did you spend a night in jail when you refused to pay your taxes?' He'd refused because he didn't want his taxes to go to hunting slaves. He was part of the abolition movement of making sure the slaves could flee the slave states and find a way to Massachusetts and be free. Thoreau said to his neighbour, he said, 'What are you doing outside of prison? This is the only free place that there is.' And Gandhi quoted that, quoted Thoreau. And after that, Gandhi's satyagraha movement in India became one of the largest non-violent movements in world history.
We're taking Jaspers and taking Burckhardt, to try to appreciate the tremendous energy that history has already accrued and acquired, not only in the integral condensation, but in the radiant capacities for a differential. To free this, frees the world, brings us to our reality of being open in the real, regardless of what artificial constraints appear to be, regardless of what horrible authorities are brought to bear and especially to evaporate that almost mad, lonely, impossible threat of oblivion if we do not obey. We are already free, it's recognition that brings us back. More next week.