Speech as our Matrix (Parts 3-6)

Continuation of Clinton Gardner Essay.

III. SPEECH AND REALITY

 

Without participation in the life of the word through the ages, we become ephemeral. Speaking, thinking, learning, teaching, and writing are the processes into which we must be immersed to become beings. They enable us to occupy a present in the midst of flux. Language receives us into its community; speech admits us to the common boat of humanity in its struggle for orientation on its pilgrimage through space and time.                  
 –Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

 

Man’s language aims at something not aimed at by apes or nightingales: it intends to form the listener into a being which did not exist before he was spoken to. Human speech is formative and it is for this reason that it has become explicit and grammatical
  –Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

 

Does the soul have a grammar? Now, as the Word comes out of the soul, and the truest Word comes straight from the very depths of the soul, .…then, just as the mind has logic, the soul will have a sense of the way words fit together—that is, “grammar”—as its inner structure….He who would explore the soul must fathom the secrets of language.
–Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

 

Our defense of grammar is provoked by the obvious fact that this organon, this matrix form of thinking is not used as a universal method, hitherto.                               
 –Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy 

Those four quotations set the stage for a deeper exploration of the Cross of Reality, a cross which is formed by the four fundamental ways that “words fit together.” As we shall see, that cross is not only a model of the human condition but also points to a “universal method” for the human sciences.  Of course, it was Rosenstock-Huessy’s description of his model and method as a “matrix form of thinking” which inspired me to title this essay “Speech as Our Matrix.”

            Some twenty years after I’d studied with Rosenstock-Huessy at Dartmouth, in 1965, he handed me seven manuscripts on how the Cross of Reality depicted the way language works in us. Indeed, how four basic and contrasting kinds of language created this cross. Finally, how the Cross of Reality suggested itself as a new method for sociology— and all the human sciences, a method based on our four basic ways of speaking. 

            I was smitten again, by the originality and force of his thought. I asked him why he’d never offered a course on language at Dartmouth. He replied that he thought this subject would best be taught at the graduate school level. The athletics-obsessed Dartmouth students were able to digest his teachings on the history of revolutions—and world history, but he had not felt confident about courses on language.

            I offered to group his seven manuscripts into a book and seek a publisher for them. When that effort failed, I proposed to found a publishing company, Argo Books, which could bring out a book on language as well as his other unpublished works. Thus, Speech and Reality saw the light of day in 1970.

            Argo published a closely-related book, The Origin of Speech, in 1981. There he

distinguishes between two kinds of speech. On the one hand, we have the formal or “high” speech that we use “to sing a chorale, to stage tragedy, to enact laws, to compose verse, to say grace, to take an oath, to confess one’s sins, to file a complaint, to write a biography, to make a report, to solve an algebraic problem, to baptize a child, to sign a marriage contract, to bury one’s father.” On the other hand, we have the informal or low speech that we might use to show “a man the direction to the next farm on the road” or to stop “a child from crying.” Such low speech, which makes up “our daily chatter and prattle,” often serves “the same purposes as animal sounds.”




It was only after reading that “Origin” essay that I came to a full appreciation of what Rosenstock-Huessy meant by “speech.” He meant the intentional, relational, and dialogical speech, the fully articulated speech we use when we seek to tell the truth or establish relations with others. It is the language we use to advance any cause, large or small, social or personal.

            It also helps to grasp the idea of high speech when we make a distinction between what we mean by language and what we mean by speech. Language can be simply any use of words, while true speech involves not only speaking but listening. The word that we have heard from another stays with us and frames what we do, from our smallest to our largest actions. In other words, high speech always implies its own enactment. The words that initiate such speech stay alive and guide us through their realization. We never leave the fields of force created by high speech, from a well-timed word of encouragement from a parent or teacher to an order given in combat. While it is certainly not always the higher form, even what goes on inside our minds is speech. As Rosenstock-Huessy puts it, “thinking is nothing but a storage room for speech.”

            Returning now to Speech and Reality, let me sum up its core message—of just how four kinds of speech create that Cross of Reality in which all of us live:   

      1. First, imperative (or vocative) speech toward the future, addresses us as thou. Parents and teachers, religious leaders, and politicians, often address us this way.

      2. Second, the subjective speech of our inner self, our I, arises when we consider our possible reply to an imperative.

      3. Third, historical speech, records what we did in response to imperatives. Such speech preserves the past, telling how we and other people formed and maintained institutions, as we.

      4. Fourth, objective speech can look at what happened in the first three stages of any complete experience—and provide an analysis of them. It considers how we impacted the world, or persons, around us. Now we see persons as he, she, or they. 

            That summary shows us that the Cross of Reality is not a static image. It depicts the process through which we become and remain human. Rosenstock-Huessy once wrote a compact and beautiful statement about that four-stage sequence of speech: 

The soul must be called “thou” before she can ever reply “I,” before she can ever speak of “us,” and finally analyze “it.” Through the four figures, thou, I, we, it, the word walks through us. The word must call our name first. We must have listened and obeyed before we can think or command.   

            The reader may now find it helpful to look at the diagram of the Cross of Reality in Appendix I, since it depicts that sequence—and shows how the four kinds of speech affect every realm of our experience.

 

The Four Forms of High Speech




Rosenstock-Huessy has shown us that all high speech takes just four forms—imperative, subjective, narrative, and objective, as summarized above. Those forms, taken together, create the Cross of Reality, the speech matrix in which we live. Now I’d like to focus, even more closely, on how these quite different ways of speaking orient us throughout our lives.






1. Imperative or Vocative Speech: Toward Future Time




Imperative or vocative speech, addressing us as “thou,” is what calls us to any important undertaking in life. It establishes our commitments, loves, avocations, and (if we are fortunate) our vocations. Thus, “vocative,” which emphasizes “calling,” is another name for the imperative. We hear such speech from parents, teachers, or any other person whose guidance we seek. We hear it as the Ten Commandments or Isaiah; as Luther’s 95 Theses or the Declaration of Independence.




We hear such speech in the words of anybody who cares for us, addressing us as thou. Any speech that casts a net of faith into the future is a vocative, like “Will you marry me?” That is not a request for information.




A person who is starved for such speech cannot discover who he or she is and therefore cannot speak his or her own imperatives. A society that cannot speak its own imperatives gives way to decadence. Decadence is the inability of one generation to communicate imperatives to the next. All education, therefore, that is not simply technical, aims to create and maintain imperatives. This future-creating speech precedes and determines all the others. Until we sense this orientation and feel overwhelmed by it, we never really begin anything new in our lives.




In religious terms, it is hard to imagine a resurrection for the person who has not been moved by the imperative, and lives simply for his or her own time. We are only a little lower than the angels, and we are supernatural, because we are the creature that can hear the call to enter the future.




2. Subjective Speech: Toward Our Inner Space




Subjective speech arises in response to imperatives and vocatives. It creates the inner space, our I, where we begin to feel personally responsible for the appropriate answers to life’s questions. Now just why is it that subjective speech follows the imperative in a necessary sequence? What is the connection between listening to the imperatives of a leader or a teacher who inspired you, and going to the theater, listening to music, or simply sitting and reflecting? Well, after you hear somebody tell you to change your ways, you want to stop and sort things out. That is why the speech that takes us from the call of the future to our inner orientation is in the subjunctive, conditional, or optative mood. We turn inward, start questioning, and consider different responses.




Art, music, literature, poetry—in fact, all the voices of culture—are subjective speech. The arts remind us of all the possible ways to reply to imperatives. We can be the doubting Ivan Karamazov or we can be the faithful Alyosha.




A critical kind of interior speech is prayer. Prayer is a concentrated pondering of one’s reply to the callings of the future. Prayer means a listening to God’s imperatives, a recognizing that we are being addressed.




We develop our unique personality by selecting, from the many imperatives that address us, the particular callings and the particular causes that move us to respond. We are not just bundles of nerves, but we are just bundles of responses.




“Go thou,” the prophets of preceding generations say to us. “I’m not sure whether I’ll go,” we reply. As we question and decide just what we will do, we discover our identity, our I. We then feel different from “the establishment” of any preceding generation. From an orientation toward the future of the whole race, created by the imperative thou, we proceed to the singular, inward space of the individual who replies, I.




3. Narrative Speech: Carrying the Past Forward




We enter historical time when we leave the subjective orientation of I, and decide to express ourselves openly in the world. That means taking responsible action, with some other person or group. This is our answer to the questioning that went on in our second, interior orientation. It may mean marriage or becoming wedded to one’s career, but in every case it forms a dual relationship: You cannot act historically by yourself. You incorporate, you embody. Therefore, our speech and actions are now in the narrative mood and the grammatical person of we.




Marriage is the most obvious dual required to continue past creation, but unmarried persons form generative attachments whenever they relate themselves to some significant cause or institution.




Through narrative speech we participate in past time, not only as a part of the world’s history but also as a part of the “current history” of our own lives.









4. Objective Speech: Toward the Outside World




Our life in the first three speech orientations—imperative, subjective, and narrative—comprises all of our “high” experience. But we cannot live through these experiences, we cannot complete them, understand them, or be open to new experience without our fourth orientation via objective speech. Thus, this strictly rational orientation plays as vital a role in our lives as the first three. The only mistake made by today’s academic, scientific, and technology-obsessed minds has been to identify such speech as the primary and supremely “real” one.




Objective speech states as an outward fact what was first a powerful calling (thou), then an inner secret (I), next a shared experience (we), and now is simply a commonplace for everyone (they, he, she, or it).




In our daily lives we hear objective speech whenever we analyze our own or somebody else’s experience. Most journalism is objective speech. So are all the facts and figures, all the data that we use to organize our lives and our economies. Mathematics and statistics are, of course, quintessentially objective.









The Four Moods of Literature, Music, and Theater




Rosenstock-Huessy made clear that high speech is more than aural when he described how all literature, music, and theater express themselves in just four moods, four primary kinds of speech. And each mood relates to one of the four fronts on the Cross of Reality.




First there is the dramatic, heavy and imperative in style, challenging us to move toward the future. Second, we have the lyric, which is light, personal, and includes comedy. Its inner orientation is subjective. Third comes the epic, the historical narrative, such as the Iliad or the Odyssey. Fourth, and finally, we have the prosaic, the outward and objective presentation of life, the “realistic.” A musically-adept friend of mine told me that the Cross of Reality had seemed an abstract idea to him until I pointed out how these four moods were found in all the performing arts.






IV. THE SPEECH METHOD





In the preceding sections, from Camp William James onward, I have sought to show how the four forms of high speech make up the Cross of Reality in which all of us live, not only today but throughout our history. Thus, I’ve been concentrating on that cross as a model of the human condition. Now I’d like to take up the cross as a method for dealing with our problems—personal, social, and global.





Rosenstock-Huessy sometimes called this new method “the grammatical method,” but he had no objection when I called it “the speech method” in my introduction to Speech and Reality.





He recognized that there was a pedantic sound to the word “grammatical.” Therefore, I will continue here to call it “the speech method.”





In very broad terms, Rosenstock-Huessy said this method “is the way in which man becomes conscious of his place in history (backward), world (outward), society (inward), and destiny (forward).” He called it “an additional development of speech itself, for speech having given man this direction and orientation about his place in the universe through the ages, what is needed today is an additional consciousness of this power of direction and orientation.” What he means by “additional consciousness” here seems to mean consciousness of the Cross of Reality, which leads me to conclude that the model of that cross, as described in sections II and III above, is the heart of the method. Model is intrinsic to method (as I now realize is the case with the “scientific method” by which we unlock the secrets of nature).



This brings me back to what I said, at the beginning of this paper, when I discussed Camp



Camp William James in the light of the Cross of Reality. Let me repeat it: “A person who uses common sense already interprets his or her life and history this way, from the four perspectives that the cross shows us. In other words, the cross simply codifies common sense.” When I used the word “codify,” I was thinking of just what Rosenstock-Huessy meant by the cross as giving us “an additional consciousness” of the powers of speech.



What I’d like to do now is spell out the four common sense elements of the Cross of Reality as method, namely “the Speech method.”



It is only common sense to examine any issue in terms of:



1. One’s hoped-for future outcome, that is the imperatives (or vocatives) involved. Rosenstock-Huessy suggested we call this being “prejective.”



2. One’s subjective inner consideration of what action might be taken, reviewing all


options.



3. Gathering allies and taking the action, thus entering into history. Rosenstock-Huessy suggested we call this being “trajective.”



4. Analyzing whether the goal established at the outset has been achieved, and if so, making this plain to the persons involved—or the general public. Now, of course, we must be objective.



What the Cross of Reality suggests is that we give adequate attention to each phase of that four-part process, and address any issue in that order. This will be exemplified in the following example, based on a paper by Dr. Hans Huessy, Rosenstock-Huessy’s son, who was a professor of child psychiatry at the University of Vermont Medical School.



The Speech Method Applied to Psychiatry and Psychology



Hans Huessy points out that modern psychology began by imitating the natural sciences. It constructed its pyramid of knowledge by starting with the most elementary building stones, the most trivial, objective raw data. This approach put all the emphasis on the physiological level of human functioning: seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, and sex. While much can be learned by studying our behavior on this objective or outer front, the speech method posits that there are three other fronts of equal importance. For example, in our prejective orientation, as we attempt to create the future, we live at the level of love and self-sacrifice. Doctor Huessy says that most psychological and psychiatric theory ignores these higher levels of human performance or “explains them away as pathology.” Thus, psychoanalysis is likely to think of our personal and subjective “artistic creations as a compensation for neurotic complexes.” Similarly, “heroic deeds are explained as defenses against psychopathology.”



He then shows how the Cross of Reality reveals the normal and desirable sequence of any human experience. Emotional disturbance may be described as getting stuck in one particular phase, or it might be the result of an attempt to skip one. The speech method reveals four basic phases in any significant experience: (1) inspiration, (2) communication, (3) institutionalization, and finally, (4) history.



We see this sequence when we fall in love and get married. Our falling in love cannot be an objective or logical experience. We must be swept off our feet, inspired. Then we enter a subjective phase in which we must communicate our new relationship through love letters, singing, and talking. In the third phase, institutionalization, when we marry before witnesses, our experience has begun to enter recorded history. Finally, usually after our first child is born, we experience ourselves as an objective family unit. In each phase we have had new and different emotions.



Doctor Huessy says, “I would view these meaningful experiences as tying up considerable emotional energy, to borrow from psychoanalytic theory, and I think it is essential for us to see these experiences through all four stages so that this emotional energy becomes freed and available for new experiences.” As we go through any important experience, the movement from one phase to the next always involves some change, and change is usually accompanied by pain or “psychiatric symptoms.” But such symptoms are not necessarily indicators of pathology. Psychiatrists may do positive harm by mistaking the symptoms of healthy change for psychiatric illness.



Finally, he challenges Freudian psychology’s assumption that one begins with the ego or I and then works out to include additional members of the social group. The I, he says, is not the first form in which we come to consciousness of ourselves. As a child, and even later in life, we become a subjective I only after having first been addressed vocatively as thou. “One might say that children are spoken into membership in the human race. They are not born into such membership.” In other words, our ego does not produce itself. It is produced by the vocative or imperative address of our parents, our society, and our tradition. Since his specialty was child psychiatry, doctor Huessy was able to document these points. Children, he says, learn the pronoun I last. Autistic children do not learn to use I until very late in their development.



Within the limits of this essay, I cannot cite other applications of the speech method. But I should point out that my discussion in Part II touched on how Rosenstock-Huessy applied the method to describing pre-Christian history as well as the revolutions which filled the second millennium. Then I had earlier provided an application of the method in my presentation of Camp William James.



V. RESPONDEO ETSI MUTABOR



In the Introduction, I referred to W.H. Auden’s comment on Rosenstock-Huessy’s motto, Respondeo etsi mutabor (I respond although I will be changed). Near the end of Out of Revolution Rosenstock-Huessy offered this as a more all-embracing motto than Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am (with its corollary that everything else must be doubted until proven). Rosenstock-Huessy does not deny the usefulness of Cartesian doubt and objectivity when applied to the natural sciences. However, he says we have made the mistake of adopting it, in large measure, for the social sciences.



Besides advocating his new speech method, in his books Soziologie and Speech and Reality, Rosenstock-Huessy suggested that the higher sociology he was seeking might be named “metanomics.” With “nomics” derived from the Greek “nomoi,” for laws, he wanted the proposed science to be grounded in laws provable in social life and history, not on abstract theories.



VI. ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY AND MARTIN BUBER



Early in this paper I noted how Martin Buber had generously applauded Rosenstock-Huessy’s work in the realm of history. However, as founders of what has been called “dialogical thinking”, or “speech-thinking,” the two men took quite different approaches. Buber became world-famed through the publication of his little book Ich und Du (I and Thou) in 1923. There he wrote that any person, an independent I, can choose to have either warm dialogical I-thou relationships or cold objectifying I-it relationships, with others or with God. One does not become a fully realized person until one chooses the I-thou relationship. As Buber put his key insight, “as I become I, I say thou.”



Rosenstock-Huessy, by contrast, maintained that there is no such thing as an independent I. One becomes an I only as one is addressed by others, and by God, as thou. The proper grammatical order is thou-I, not I-thou. It is when we hear imperatives, when we hear ourselves addressed personally as thou, that we enter into the human story. As Rosenstock-Huessy put it, “The first form and the permanent form under which a man can recognize himself and the unity of his existence is the Imperative. We are called a Man and we are summoned by our name long before we are aware of ourselves as an Ego.”



Having discussed Buber, I should note Rosenstock-Huessy’s close friend and intellectual partner, Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who worked closely with Buber, in the 1920s, on a new translation of the Bible. Rosenzweig has been widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. What is often overlooked is that Rosenzweig credits Rosenstock-Huessy with having been “the main influence” in leading him to write his magnum opus, The Star of Redemption, published in 1924. An echo of that influence can be heard in this line from The Star: “One knew that the distinction between immanence and transcendence disappears in language.”



Returning to Buber, I’d like to tell a touching story. One of Rosenstock-Huessy’s students, Marshall Meyer, lived at the Huessy home during 1952, when he was a Dartmouth undergraduate. He went on to become a prominent rabbi in Buenos Aires and then in New York. While at the Huessy’s, he would often drive Rosenstock-Huessy to events and meetings. Meyer recounted a story about driving Eugen to the train station in White River Junction, Vermont, to pick up Buber for a visit. Meyer described his feelings when he watched their warm embrace on the platform. He said their arms seemed to reach back to the early 1920s—to include Franz Rosenzweig who had collaborated with both of them during those postwar years.

Speech as our Matrix (Parts 7--9)

VII. SIX THESES ON SPEECH

We can sum up Rosenstock-Huessy insights on speech in the following six theses:
1. There are four basic types of speech: (a) imperative (vocative), (b) subjective, (c) narrative, and (d) objective. In any significant human experience we experience all four of those kinds of speech in just that order.

 2. Each kind of speech relates to a different personal or group orientation toward times and spaces: (a) imperative toward the future; (b) subjective toward our “inner space,” (c) narrative toward the past, and (d) objective to the outside world.

3. Each kind of speech also relates to a particular person of grammar: (a) the imperative (vocative) to thou; (b) the subjective to I; (c) the narrative to we; (d) the objective to he, she or they.

4.  When we examine the pattern of those speech orientations and grammatical persons, we see that they form a Cross of Reality, a matrix at the center of which any person or group finds itself. A corollary to the axiom of the cross is that its future orientation is the most important; as we hear vocatives or imperatives, we are moved to respond.
5. What we call the human psyche, or soul, is formed as it lives through the “crucial” speech experiences posited by the Cross of Reality.

 

6. . When we realize that the Cross of Reality shows the essential patterns of language in the human mind, we can also perceive that it makes visible a “speech method” for the human sciences. It tells us that any question involving the human being should be examined in the light of all four orientations, and especially we should take into account the tensions among each.

All six of those theses, when taken together, reveal the “speech method” as a fundamentally new way of thinking about the human reality. From elementary observations about language and grammar, about the inner person and the outer world, they proceed to the conclusion that the Cross of Reality provides a new method for sociology—and all the human sciences. I think those theses portray the Cross of Reality as a dynamic model of how we are creatures of the word. 

 In the next and final section, we will explore what has only been hinted at above: that high speech is the embodiment of spirit.

VIII. SPEECH AS SPIRIT

While I have made clear that the Cross of Reality is not a religious image, and certainly not the Cross of Christ, I will now proceed to equate high speech with spirit and, indeed, with what Christians call the Holy Spirit. Let me start with several quotations from Rosenstock-Huessy. First, four which are rather secular in tone:

Speech is the body of the spirit.

Speech is nothing natural: it is a miracle.

Nature is the universe minus speech.

All speech is the precipitation of the intensified respiration which we experience as members of a community, and which is called the Spirit.



And now three which are more clearly religious:

The spirit of man is the Holy Spirit.

God is the power which makes us speak. He puts word of life on our lips.

Everybody who speaks believes in God because he speaks. No declaration of faith is necessary. No religion. Neither God nor man need the paraphernalia of some religion to know of each other.



When we grasp the full import of those seven propositions, we realize that God as spirit, indeed as the Holy Spirit, is already within us, the very source of our humanity. If that is so, we do not need to struggle to believe in God; we have only to recognize his constant creative presence in us. Of course there is a further step. We need to respond to the fact of that presence by living inspired, responsible, and creative lives.



Speech is the Only Supernatural


Rosenstock-Huessy’s most accessible thought on Christianity is in The Christian Future. One line in that book has been running as an undercurrent in my mind as I’ve been writing this essay “The supernatural should not be thought of as a magical force somehow competing with electricity or gravitation in the world of space, but as the power to transcend the past by stepping into an open future.”

Those words sum up what Rosenstock-Huessy told his students about the supernatural. He said that the laws of nature cannot be interrupted by miracles, faith, or prayer. While there is no supernatural in that sense, he said that all creative human speech is supernatural. As he put it, “speech is the only supernatural.” Since we are the animal that speaks, we are “the uphill animal,” the only one able to rise above its natural environment.

Jahve and the Elohim

One of Rosenstock-Huessy’s most powerful statements about our relation to God appears in a closing chapter of Out of Revolution. He writes:


In the Bible there are two names for God: one is grammatically a plural, Elohim; the other is the singular Jahve. The Elohim are the divine powers in creation; Jahve is he who will be what he will be. When man sees through the works of Elohim and discovers Jahve at work, he himself begins to separate past from future. And only he who distinguishes between past and future is a grown person; if most people are not persons, it is because they serve one of the many Elohim. This is a second-rate performance; it deprives man of his birthright as one of the immediate sons of God.


In the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican, Michelangelo shows God creating Adam, and keeping in the folds of his immense robe a score of angels or spirits. Thus at the beginning of the world all the divine powers were on God's side; man was stark naked. We might conceive of a pendant to this picture; the end of creation, in which all the spirits that had accompanied the Creator should have left him and descended to man, helping, strengthening, enlarging his being into the divine. In this picture God would be alone, while Adam would have all the Elohim around him as his companions.



That image of the end of creation, of course, tells us that creation is constantly going on. As I’ve pondered that passage, over the years, I’ve been impressed by how it reminds me of the thought of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948)—whose work Rosenstock-Huessy had encouraged me to study in Paris in 1948. Drawing on both Berdyaev and Rosenstock-Huessy, I’ve been moved to write the following reflection, which is my attempt to express what I think we can say about God without recourse to the supernatural.

God Is Like a Whole Humanity
Toward the end of his book, Spirit and Reality, Berdyaev makes a remarkable statement: "Spirit--the Holy Spirit--is incarnated in human life, but it assumes the form of a whole humanity rather than of authority... God is like a whole humanity rather than like nature, society, or concept..."

In those concise words, Berdyaev suggests how we can get beyond our anthropomorphic and theistic idea of God as a supreme being. “Whole humanity” evidently includes all creation, the earth and universe, since humanity could certainly not exist without this physical setting, this space. Similarly, “whole humanity” includes all time, since we are not whole unless we include our beginnings and our end. And “whole” also points to what makes us whole: in religious terms, the spirit.

To relate Rosenstock-Huessy’s thought with Berdyaev’s, we became human beings as we learned to speak. It is living speech, the dialogue that human beings have with each other, that moved us, over the millennia of evolution, from being inhuman mammals to finally becoming members of whole humanity. We might say that we became cells in God’s body. And we might think of those cells as “sentences.” We are each a sentence in the story of whole humanity, a humanity that becomes holy as speech makes it whole.

If God is like a whole humanity, then he is not aloof from our suffering. He would be involved in the experience of war and revolution that we have had in the last century, indeed in the last millennium.

Perhaps we could even say that God only knows himself in us, only enjoys himself in us, and has no other being than his life in us. That is, if we imagine ourselves as the leading edge of all creation.

 Far from a supreme being above us, we might come to recognize God as his action in us. That echoes what St. Paul wrote: God is he in whom “we live, and move, and have our being.” Similarly, Jesus said, “the Kingdom of God is within you.”

Finally, I should answer the objection that “whole humanity” may sound impersonal, something like Comte’s lifeless “great being.” But God imagined in this way still addresses us personally. That is, all the generations that have gone before us, all over the world, down to our own parents, have spoken the word that addresses us now, summoning us as thou, moving us to respond as I.

 The Trinity and The Cross of Reality

In his 1947 Dartmouth lectures Rosenstock-Huessy would occasionally drop hints that seemed to relate the Trinity with the Cross of Reality. In the years that followed, I kept writing notes about these two “great icons” that had formed in my mind. Both these images seem universal, pertaining to all of reality, yet one is completely religious and the other completely secular. How can we relate them to each other? My answer has come as follows.

 It is the Holy Spirit that inspires us in the imperative, calling us to the future. That is revelation. We hear ourselves addressed as thou.

 The Son is our subjective and personal reply, as I. Subjective speech makes us aware of our responsibility for bringing our inspirations down to earth, and thus redeeming the world.

 Next, we represent the Father as we take creative action. When we make ourselves heard in the narrative of history, we participate in the Father’s creation. As in marriage, we must act with others, thereby forming a we.

 Finally, when our listening, speaking, and acting are completed and visible in the day-to-day world, others can speak about them—objectively. They can see how some part of the world was redeemed by our actions. They now describe us as he, she, or they.

On the Cross of Reality, these relationships appear as follows:











Near the end of his Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts Rosenstock-Huessy makes a remarkable statement that relates to this cross:

The Son establishes the proper relationship between the spoken word and the lived life. Words should be commands that are given and promises that are made. Life consists of commands that are carried out and prophecies that are fulfilled. This, we saw, is the real goal of all speech and all ritual since man first spoke. [DS II - 903]

In those words, Rosenstock-Huessy managed to link the Trinity with the Cross of Reality, without saying that he was doing so.

—The spoken word, commands, and prophecies are how we hear the Spirit’s imperatives toward the future.

—Promises to fulfill those prophecies are our subjective, inward replies as Son.

—Ritual refers to the ceremonies through which we tell the narrative of the Father’s past creation.

—And the word embodied in a person’s life is how the three persons of the Trinity are
present in our daily lives—in the world.


 If we follow this train of thought, we realize that the name God does not refer to “a being who exists” somewhere outside us, but instead to that trinity of powers that we assume as we speak our times and spaces into a whole. We represent and complete the Trinity’s actions as we bring these divine powers down to the earth of the objective world, the world of times and spaces. The three divine Persons, which were once known to us as items of belief, can now be recognized as cate­gories of being and becoming fully human. We represent them whenever we speak beyond the limited frame of our natural body as the mammal Homo sapiens.
 Some years after writing that Huessy-inspired meditation on how we embody the Trinity, I was delighted to find the following lines in a book by the Roman Catholic theologian Gregory Baum:

God is not a supreme being or a supreme person. The divine mystery revealed in the New Testament is a dimension of human life. God is present to human life as its orientation and its source of newness and expansion. The traditional doctrine of the Trinity has enabled us to discern an empirical basis for speaking of God’s presence to man: God is present as summons and gift, in the conversation and communion by which men enter into their humanity. [ref 113 BB]


The Trinity and the Three Millennia
 In his Dartmouth lectures, Rosenstock-Huessy provided another remarkable image of the Trinity when he described the roles of the three millennia after Christ:

The first millennium was devoted to a full realization of how we were made in the image of God: to the Son. This was accomplished through the establishment of the Christian church and the recognition of Christ as the center point of history.

The second millennium was devoted to a full realization of how the planet earth was created as our common home: to the Father. This was accomplished through the exploration of the earth and the establishment of natural science as our means of understanding creation, the world of nature.

 It remains for the third millennium to be devoted to a full realization of how we create a peaceful global society: to the Spirit. Rosenstock-Huessy said that this new millennium would require new unheard-of institutions, and he urged his students to be pioneers of those new institutions —like Camp William James and the US Peace Corps.



IX. IN CONCLUSION: A NEW VISION OF THE HUMAN REALITY


My first purpose in this paper has been to present the Cross of Reality as a new model, a unifying and inspiring paradigm of all we know. At the heart of that new model, or matrix, lies a heightened appreciation of what speech is. As high speech, which rises above the chatter of idle conversation, it is what inspires us to live dedicated, even sacrificial, lives. High speech, Rosenstock-Huessy tells us, can be recognized as spirit, indeed the Holy Spirit.

 My second purpose here has been to suggest that the Cross of Reality points to a method for all the human sciences. Needless to say, I’ve sought only to make a brief introduction. One has to read Rosenstock-Huessy himself—and the books about his work—to get an adequate understanding of this polymath discoverer and his discoveries. [ref books]

 By taking you back to Camp William James—and to Rosenstock-Huessy’s Dartmouth lectures I’ve given you some hints of how the Cross of Reality can illumine any subject on the human agenda. Specifically, I’ve highlighted how that cross delineates the contrasts between the four types of speech which arose in the millennia before Christ: tribal ritual, Egyptian and Chinese templar, Greek poetic-philosophic, and Jewish prophetic.

Then I’ve shown how the orientations on that cross enable us to see the special contribution and new speech of each great revolution, from the Papal (future) to the Russian (future again).

My goal has been to show how four kinds of speech form a Cross of Reality in which each of us finds direction—at every moment of our lives. This new vision of the human reality is common-sensical; it requires no commitment. It offers us a holistic picture of ourselves and all our knowledge of the world. Beyond that vision, I’ve tried to present the Cross of Reality as the energizing motor of metanomics, a social science which might serve the third millennium as theology and then natural science have served the second.

Finally, I’ve said that the Cross of Reality provides an image of the way the Holy Spirit works in us, indeed of how all three persons of the Trinity are alive in all persons of good will. Traditional religion, too often, has told us that God is the wholly other, above and beyond his creation. By contrast with that old vision, Rosenstock-Huessy tells us that there is a transcendental power which is at work within the process of creation, within history, always present in human beings. This power is made manifest whenever we say the word that needs to be spoken; it is the word made flesh in all humanity. It is the progress of that word through us which is made visible on the Cross of Reality.



Note: I was not able to reproduce Mr. Gardner's Appendix 1, The Complete Cross of Reality for this blog. The depiction of it is found elsewhere in this text. He summarizes it as follows:

1. A dynamic model, or matrix, revealing how we are formed by language and live within the tensions of four speech-created orientations.

2. A universal method of personal and social analysis; this "speech method" includes the scientific method but enlarges on it.

3. A unifying paradigm of all our knowledge, one which integrates within itself the human sciences, natural science, and theology.



APPENDIX II: A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPEECH-THINKING


Just who were the forerunners of Rosenstock-Huessy, Rosenzweig, and Buber? Three of the most important were fellow Germans: Johann Georg Hamann

Buber acknowledges the origins of his I and Thou in Feuerbach: “I myself in my youth was given a decisive impetus by Feuerbach....Never before has a philosophical anthropology been so emphatically demanded.” [ref] Rosenzweig wrote of his speech-thinking that “Ludwig Feuerbach was the first to discover it.” [ref] And Rosenstock-Huessy began Speech and Reality with the statement: “Ludwig Feuerbach, one hundred years ago, was the first to state a gram­matical philosophy of man. He was misunderstood by his contem­poraries, especially by Karl Marx.” [ref]

Rosenzweig’s cousin Hans Ehrenberg (1883-1958) saw Feuerbach as such a critical source for the new language-based thinking that he took the trouble, in 1922, to republish Feuerbach’s 1843 Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. The key statement that Feuerbach made in that book was his Principle No. 59:



The single man for himself possesses the essence of man neither in himself as a moral being nor in himself as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community and unity of man with man; it is a unity, however, which rests only on the reality of the distinction between I and thou.” [ref]




(It is remarkable that Hans Ehrenberg also published the first book to introduce Nikolai Berdyaev and his Russian predecessors to a western audience. Under the title Östliches Christentum (Eastern Christendom), this two-volume work included essays by Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) and Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944), men whose work Rosenstock-Huessy read and admired.) [refCF]



Moving back now to Feuerbach’s predecessors, we come to Hamann. Although Rosenstock-Huessy’s interpretation of language was as different from Hamann’s as a car is from a horse and buggy, his eccentric 18th-century intellectual ancestor certainly played a key role in showing that language is a more central category than reason. Isaiah Berlin’s The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism, published in 1994, dealt with just that issue. [ref]



First, Berlin established the 18th-century Hamann as the spiritual father of the 18th- and 19th-century German romantics—from his student Johann Gottfried Herder (1774-1803), to Herder’s friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), to Goethe’s friend Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), and to Goethe’s admirer, Friedrich von Schlegel.



The fact that the title of Berlin’s book on Hamann contains the word “irrationalism” in its title alarms me because I have been trying to present my intellectual heroes as perfectly reasonable. [ref NY Review] In 1959, the University of Münster gave Rosenstock-Huessy an honorary degree, hailing him as “the Hamann of the 20th century.” Unfortunately, being recognized as the “new Hamann” was not entirely a blessing. The old Hamann was decidedly eccentric. He liked to call himself an “ignoramus,” with “a mind like blotting paper.” Still, as a critical inspiration for thinkers from Goethe to Schelling and beyond, he has an undeniable status, one that Berlin fully accords him.



Berlin called Hamann “the most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and, in particular, all forms of rationalism of his time.” He said that “Goethe saw Hamann as a great awakener, the first champion of the unity of man—the union of all his faculties, mental, emotional, physical, in his greatest creations.” And he concluded, “It is doubtful whether without Hamann’s revolt…the worlds of Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, Schiller, and indeed of Goethe too, would have come into being.” [ref]



Whereas Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig, drew on Schelling for the idea that we were now about to embark on a third period in history, the age of the spirit, and whereas they saw Goethe as the first citizen of this new age, Rosenstock-Huessy cites Friedrich Schlegel as a more specific source of inspiration. Schlegel provided Rosenstock-Huessy with two key ideas—seeds, you might say—that blossomed into Out of Revolution, as well as into his writings on language.



First, in Out of Revolution, Rosenstock-Huessy says that his “history of the inspirations of mankind” was “first conceived by Friedrich Schlegel,” a thinker who “foresaw our own attempt to deal with the continuous process of creation in mankind itself.” [ref]



Second, in his 1935 essay, “The Uni-versity of Logic, Language and Literature,” Rosenstock-Huessy pointed to Schlegel as a “predecessor” in disclosing that “language, logic, and literature are various forms of crystallization in one process.” [ref]



After reading that in Rosenstock-Huessy’s essay, I looked up Schlegel’s writings and found what indeed seemed to be the seeds of Rosenstock-Huessy’s understandings of speech and the Cross of Reality. That cross seems prefigured in Schlegel’s 1847 book on language:



The first truth then that psychology arrives at is the internal discord within our fourfold and divided consciousness....It is only in the highest creations of artistic genius, manifesting itself either in poetry or some other form of language...that we meet with the perfect harmony of a complete and united consciousness, in which all its faculties work together in combined and living action. [ref]



I think it makes the Cross of Reality’s foundation in our minds and in language even more understandable when we see it described in such a compact and lively way—as “our fourfold and divided consciousness.”




NOTES




Page references to the books below will appear in the paper’s final text. As of March 2014, those references have not been entered, nor has the list of books below been completed.




AG: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Der Atem des Geistes (Frankfurt: Verlag der Frankfurter Hefte, 1951).


BB: Clinton C. Gardner, Beyond Belief: Discovering Christianity’s New Paradigm (White River Jct., VT: White River Press, 2008).


CF: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946; New York: Harper & Row, 1966). DB: Clinton C. Gardner, D-Day and Beyond: A Memoir of War, Russia, and Discovery (Philadelphia, PA: X-Libris, 2004).


DS: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts [specs]


IA: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, I am an Impure Thinker (Norwich, VT: Argo Books, 1970). Introduction by Clinton C. Gardner and Freya von Moltke,


JD: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed., Judaism Despite Christianity (University AL: University of Alabama Press, 1969).


LM: Clinton C. Gardner, Letters to the Third Millennium: An Experiment in East-West Communication (Norwich, VT: Argo Books, 1981).


OR: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (New York (Norwich, VT: Argo Books, 1969). OS: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Origin of Speech (Norwich, VT: Argo Books, 1981).
PK: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Practical Knowledge of the Soul (Norwich, VT: Argo Books, 1988). Originally published as Angewandte Seelenkunde (Darmstadt: Röther-Verlag, 1924).


SR: Nikolai Berdyaev, Spirit and Reality (London: Bles, 1939).


SPR: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality; introduction by Clinton C. Gardner (Norwich, VT: Argo Books, 1970).


WW:

http://www.valley.net/~transnat/erh.html. Among other Rosenstock-Huessy web resources are:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Rosenstock-Huessy


http://www.argobooks.org


http://groups.google.com/group/ERHSociety


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rosenstock-huessy


http://www.erhroundtable.blogspot.com






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Defending the Honor of Time

Escape from Quantopia. Collective Insanity in Science and Society. Ted Dace. IFF Books. Winchester UK, Washington USA. 2014

I first became acquainted with the work of Ted Dace through an article of his published on the Counterpunch website in December, 2015—“Physics Unhinged.” http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/25/physics-unhinged-2/

Mr. Dace, described as an “independent scholar,” was defending Time against the timeless equations of physics. He wrote that “…if time is like space…everything that happens is a lie, even consciousness itself…Not only materialism, which reduces consciousness to the operations of a causally determined organic machine, but mathematical idealism undermines the intrinsic value of life and all its qualities.”

  I immediately felt a bond with his work. I wrote to him, thanking him, and we commenced a correspondence. In the meantime he had stumbled across my book, Consecrated Venom: The Serpent and the Tree of Knowledge, and he had some very generous and complimentary things to say about it—which both surprised and touched me. In the course of our correspondence I introduced him to the work of Rosenstock-Huessy, who had so many incredible insights regarding time in his book The Origin of Speech and other sources.  Rosenstock believed that the concepts or time and space as deployed by science were first organized by grammar, for “time is created by speech.”

In this paper I want to provide a sort of “Rosenstockian commentary” to Ted Dace’s book, Escape from Quantopia.  First of all, the very fact that Mr. Dace would feel moved to make a defense of time is, in my view, a  highly significant development.  We are not aware for the most part to our debt to time. Just as the fossil fuels which power out modern ways of life are the energy-fruit of times compressed over geological ages, scientific equations, too, and the concepts we throw around here and there to explain the world, have time silently enfolded into them. Rosenstock remarks, in a lapidary statement, that “An object is an act minus its time-element.” (Origin of Speech, p. 65)  Likewise, how much time is assumed in our concept of the atom, of light waves, of evolution or indeed of any concept that we use so freely?  In that same work he comments that we “stultify” our own efforts “…  by not confessing the two opposite kinds of knowledge: knowledge which takes time and knowledge which takes no time. (op. cit., p. 46) 

Any concept we use in science contains the history of science, and before that, the Christian religion as the indispensable preparation for science—and before Christianity, of course, the Greeks. )  [1]  This historical development is something that the raging atheists of today don’t want to hear—maybe because atheism itself is not so much a protest against “God” as it is the lack of time-sense, of historical consciousness. Atheism  is a kind of flypaper. It gets  people stuck in the present moment, with no future because the light from the past has dimmed.

Escape from Quantopia is first of all a protest against the tyranny of the indicative: “where mathematical laws generate everything from atoms to thoughts.” (Quantopia, p.3)  The indicative or objective form of speech is, according to the Rosenstockian “Cross of Reality”, the fourth or final phase of an entire speech-process embracing (1) the you-statement command or imperative (future-creating), (2) subjective, subjunctive or lyrical, “I” statements in which the soul imagines and feels its response to the imperative situation, (3) the we-statement or collective memory, history, ritual and past where we consult former answers to the questions that impassion us. It is only in the fourth or final phase that the deed is done, the fact stated: 2+2=4.

Here is the “Cross of Reality” expressed diagrammatically. The upright pole is the “space” dimension (inner-outer, subject-object); the horizontal or cross-beam is the temporal dimension, past-future:

 

It is apparent that even a quick look at  this diagram offers much richer possibilities than the conventional subject-object division of Western philosophy.  It helps to concretize the mind by dismantling abstractions, in bringing us into real life as a time-process. Rosenstock often made much of the fact that the Greek grammatical tables – “Alexandrian grammar,” he called it—is actually a hindrance to the new grammar of social relations. The new or higher grammar that he explicated in his works  could become the true basic for sociology. But there is yet another way in which modern grammar-awareness differs from the old-fashioned kind. “Grammar,” gramarye, meant ‘magic,’ and ‘glamour’ is a corruption of ‘grammar.” [2]  Perhaps our ancestors saw that “grammar” provides polish, skill, sophistication, the ability to manifest charisma and conviction -- hence ‘glamour.’  In pre-literate societies this may have been so. But today, in society that has become post-literate and crammed with words, advertising jingles, slogans, ideologies, abstraction, ‘grammar’ is needed to step up to the plate in an apocalyptic role: to remind us of the stages of our humanity. It reveals who we are.[3]   And on the contrary, it is words, slogans and ideologies which today convey deception and mental manipulation—which Ted Dace explores in many levels in Escape from Quantopia.  The  irony that is the  modern gramarye  of social science is not in  magic or deception but in  just the reverse: re-concretizing, incarnating, and making real.

As a defender of time,  Ted Dace is drawn to those philosophers in our tradition who have paid attention to time and memory. Charles Sanders Pierce comes to mind, and  Henri Bergson. In our time it is Rupert Sheldrake who has challenged the idealist-materialist-timeless mindset and aroused the ire of the dogmatists. For scientific dogmatism and determinism make strange bedfellows in our modern age, which so prides itself with science. He quotes Einstein, who said that “For us convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is an illusion, although a persistent one.”  Dace finds it an odd statement, as if Einstein disbelieved it himself.  The spatialization of time seems to have led to a “suffocating determinism.”  It certainly has led to the omission of the physicist as a human being, as Einstein’s statement shows.

 C.S. Pierce argued that Nature’s laws might be better understood as “habits,” and Sheldrake further developed this idea with his “morphic resonance.”  In his book The Presence of the Past, Sheldrake defines  morphic fields  “… like the known fields of physics, [to be] non-material regions of influence extending in space and continuing in time.”  Thus “morphic resonance” is “the process by which the past becomes present within morphic fields.” The emphasis is not on timeless laws of nature but on what actually arises and evolves. Hence there can be creativity and novelty in the unfoldment of possibilities in time. Dace puts the matter concisely:  “the question of freedom boils down to the mystery of time” (Q, p. 230)

I believe that Ted Dace’s explication of time according to a revised physics is very compatible with Rosenstock’s researches into the grammatical basis for our history and creativity. Certainly Rosenstock’s definition of the supernatural summarizes this new attitude very well: “…the supernatural should not be thought of as a magical force somehow competing with electricity or gravitation in the world of space, but as the power to transcend the past by stepping into an open future.” [4] Rosenstock believed that scientific notions of time and space were ultimately the result of the kind of ordering activity  that we execute by means of grammatical speech. Always and everywhere, Rosenstock brings thinking back into speech, into speaking – he remarks somewhere that thought is just the storage-room of speech. Thus the Kantian “categories” – time and space—are these but grammatical realities dressed up for their debut in cognition? Rosenstock would have us ask this kind of question, as Ted Dace does too, and also the fellow kindred soul Ortega y Gasset, who said that our task today must consist in the overcoming of idealism. Thought is not primary. Speaking is. And speaking to someone by name is the beginning of human life proper. For I have no doubt that animals have languages. But animals do not give names: and it is the Name which marks the real start of human destiny.

And despite Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, there is no “language instinct.”[5] Fortunately Ted Dace does not get bottled up with the instinct-mutation-genetic question, but asks, very simply and directly—“Isn’t it more likely the motive force for human language was the desire of our ancestors to better understand each other?” (p. 72)  This is putting the question back into the arena of social relations, where it belongs. And Dace’s discussion of science materialists, dogmatists and atheists like Michael Shermer, Dennett, Dawkins, Myers, et al, is illuminating. He paints a picture of socially inept people who somehow resemble dinosaurs of egotism. Tellingly,  Rosenstock remarks somewhere that God cannot speak to a soul that is an “I.” It must become a “You.” In this era of egotism and fanatical self-esteem, the scientists—and the rest of us – must relearn the art of the Second Person. Let us have the modesty to become the “You” that inspires another—friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and writers encountered in unlikely places over the Internet.

Thank you, Ted Dace, for inspiring this little piece. And may you continue to be the Knight of Honorable Time,  defending it from the predations of fame, finance, fortune and the fickleness of thought itself.

---

[1] The works of the late Stanley Jaki are important sources for studying the Christian origins of modern science.

[2]  A study of ‘grammar,’ ‘glamour,’ and ‘gramarye’ in Skeat’s Etymological dictionary is very instructive. Words, unlike plants, are mobile. But like plants they carry their roots with them down the stream of time.

[3] Once again, etymology: ‘apocalypse’ means uncovering or revealing.

[4] Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future: or, The Modern Mind Outrun, p. 123.

[5] I always liked Suzanne K. Langer’s answer to the question of the ‘origin of language’: “This throws us back to an old and mystifying problem. If we find no prototype of speech and the highest animals, and man will not say even the first word by instinct, then how did all his tribes acquire their various languages? Who began the art which we now all have to learn?... The problem is so baffling it is no longer considered respectable.” Philosophy in a New Key,  Harvard, 1942., p. 108.
 

Death before life...

The following is the text of an email (edited)  I sent to a friend, an anthroposophist,  who loaned me George Ritchie's book, Return from Tomorrow: 

Hi....Thanks for loaning me this book. The near-death-experience-movement awakening has been seemingly spearheaded by a Southerner, George Ritchie, and later Raymond Moody, who was also Southern and Christian. Since that beginning, this movement has exploded into the New Age circuit, with a loss of its original Christian focus.

Ritchie's book contained important moments of moral awakening, and this is also something frequently absent in subsequent New Age accounts of after-death experience. For example, note the following passages as he recounts his efforts to integrate his experience into the ongoing path of his life:

~the overcoming of self (“I wondered if we always had to die, some stubborn part of us, before we could see more of Him,” p. 112), 

~the strong sense of purpose to life on earth (“God is busy building a race of men who know how to love,” p. 124) ;

~the awareness of the need for ethics in society (“If we were truly entering the age of atomic power, without knowing the Power that created it, then it was only a matter of time until we destroyed ourselves and our earth as well,” p. 121).

I have to wonder if this afterlife consciousness movement had the potential for a deeper awakening for America which it has somehow failed to attain. The flowering of interest in afterlife experiences in the USA staring in the 1940’s might be loosely compared to the flowering of the Romantic poets in 19th century England. In both cases it seems to me there was the attempt to get away from excessively "objectified" or reductive speech.

What might a true maturation of the afterlife narrative mean?
 

It seems to me that the potential of this afterlife awareness was well enunciated by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy in his book, The Christian Future, published in 1946. He is talking about life in America, the polarity of suburb and factory (yes, we actually still had manufacturing back then) and he says that this environment “is perfect for production and education, and impotent for reproduction and creation.”  It is against this background, he says, that “we have to discuss the qualities necessary for creating future communities.” The heart of his message is this:

“…This creation of Future is a highly costly and difficult process. It can be done but it does not happen by itself. The progress made so far as always been a progress by Christians; especially in the natural sciences, progress is the fruit of Christianity. For Christianity is the embodiment of one single truth through the ages: that death precedes birth, that birth is the fruit of death, and that the soul is precisely this power of transforming an end into a beginning by obeying a new name.” (p.10)

 

George Ritchie’s experience was the true beginning of his life’s deepest purpose. But how can an individual’s discovery of purpose through such an experience be fruitful for the society as a whole? This is the question that awaits America – an America which in 2015 is so bloated with corruption and incompetence that it has become a danger to the entire world. America needs a near-death encounter  to gain the possibility of wisdom. 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Beyond the Fringe...Not

I picked up a book at the library--Fringe-Ology, by Steve Volk (HarperCollins, 2011). Steve Volk is a Philadelphian and has written and published in local publications. I was curious to see what he had to say.

The subject is the vast incommunicable distance between the followers of hard science and those of spirituality, ESP, after-death communication--the whole "New Age" raft of post-religious searching.

Volk himself seems to be more in the hard science camp, and his book was, to me, too apologetic, as if he were somehow to be banished from the inner circle of bien-pensants because of his openness to certain ideas. There were some bizarre experiences in his childhood home--strange rappings and knockings. The family finally called in a priest; the knockings, in one last dramatic flourish, stopped. There isn't much in the way of research or explanation, nor--if truth be had--real drama.  But the lack of dramatic quality in so much modern writing and literature is a topic for another day-- not the occasion for this brief note. (1)

What sparked this brief note was Volk's account of how quantum physics plays a part in the theory of consciousness. He discusses Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose, who came up with something called "orch-OR" or the "orchestrated objective reduction," described in these terms:

" 'The observer effect, in which the wave form is said to 'collapse' into a particular state, is consciousness;   each conscious moment is a collapse.' The Penrose-Hameroff model relates collapse of the wave function/consciousness to fundamental components of the universe--like the properties of space and time. They cannot be explained or reduced because there is nothing to reduce them to."

I could not help thinking that this description sounds like an elaborate, even highly baroque or rococo, detour to get to the fundamentals of human interaction. Those fundamentals are to be found in grammar, not in quantum physics.  It seems to me that a study of Rosenstock-Huessy's writings would help the scientist climb down from his head perch and become aware of his speech, his hands and his feet-- :All language is an attempt to enact the processes of the cosmos always and everywhere," Rosenstock wrote in "How Language Establishes Relations." There's something about our contemporary intellectual culture that keeps coming across as a parody. It's as if people had forgotten something even more basic than the alphabet, like how to say "thank you" or shake hands with somebody.





______________________________
(1) Indeed. "The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profound relationships. From marriage to teaching, from government to handicraft, man's relation to man has become segregated, impatient, non-committal in the machine age. To be non-committal means to keep all relations without important consequences, to rob them of their reproductive, fruit-bearing quality." Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future,1946, 1966, HarperTorchbooks,  p. 19. The lack of dramatic quality in so much modern poetry and singer-songwriters seems to me related.