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.

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[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.





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(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.

Pride, Prejudice...and Perfection

I’ve been taking a bit of a vacation recently-- taking a jaunt on one of my periodic Jane Austen love-fests. I watched the 1995 BBC version of  Pride and Prejudice—with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle—surely one of my favorite movies. Then, for good measure, I re-read the book again. I’ve read it many times. My set of Jane Austen books, a Roberts Brothers Edition, 1892, has been a part of my library since 1964—since I was a junior at Concord Academy. I think it was the best thing that happened to me from my boarding school days. At least it was a most memorable, cherished, and never-to-be-parted with addition to my life.

Pride and Prejudice is justly acclaimed an enduring and beloved work of art, an all-but-flawless comedy of manners. There hardly seems to be a word out of place, a character underdeveloped, or a scene too many. I wonder how Miss Jane wrote it. It almost seems to me “received,” as it were, entire, from the spiritual world—from a place where angels  record and converse,  filling  the gaps of human society with their longer views and superior understanding.

I write these words now because, after the movie on DVD, I watched some of the “bonus” material put out by the producers. It was an outstanding production; every character seemed to be true to Austen’s inspiration. Such excellence is rarely to be met with in the world of film. But why, then, did the director remark that the novel is about “sex and money”? Of course it’s about “sex and money.” But so much more! And that gross reduction of the moral dimensions of this work to “sex and money” is a telling symptom of modern materialism. But that such a coarse and rather dismissive judgment  of the work was made by a director who did such an outstanding job with it—such, such are the contradictions of our era.

In this reading I was struck by the forcefulness of Austen’s portrait of what happens when people persevere “in willful self-deception”—as the clergyman, Mr. Collins, is described. The passage occurs just after Mr. Collins has tendered his most unwelcome offer of marriage to Elizabeth. Her decided refusal he interprets as the  “coquetry and affectation of an elegant female.” Elizabeth finally left the room in silence, deigning no more to address a man so literally incapable of hearing.

Another passage relating to willful deception occurs a few pages later, when sister Jane remarks that  she believes that Mr. Bingley’s sister “is incapable of willfully deceiving anyone.” In this case sister Jane was  subsequently to be proved deceived in her “universal goodwill,” as Elizabeth puts it.  But the occasion of Jane’s expression of goodwill leads to Elizabeth’s finally exclaiming that “The more I see of the world the more am I dissatisfied with it; and everyday confirms my belief in the inconsistency of all human character, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense…”

This novel deals with appearances and reality, with social conformity and prestige; with influence and sycophancy;  with careless, immature,  unformed or ill-informed judgments—all the repertory, in fact, of life in  society. It is speech, social speech, that involves questions that might be debated in philosophy – issues of truth, perception, sincerity, cogency.  Only these are not the questions of philosophy but questions involving happiness. If taken and digested in the inward solitude that is the prerequisite for truthfulness,  there can be creative development, fruitfulness. Or if they are not so taken, if there is lacking that inward solitude and self-reflection, there can be misery, moral mistakes, bad outcomes. Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine, is worthy of that title, for she is, in a manner of speaking, a practicing philosopher: she meets with herself in the crossroads of solitude and battles not only for love, but for the truth of love, or the truth in love. Nor will she have love on any other terms. Truly this is a noble purpose.

In our time the “speech of society” has been taken up into the electronic realm—political speech, the speech of corporations, governments, journalists, the “interests.” Two things have fallen away so fully, so silently,  so completely that we are hardly aware of it: the speech on which happiness depends;  and the speech on which truth depends. For the speech of society depends on dialogue, on the inter-communication of persons. Sometimes it may be an imperative form of speech for the sake of action; at other times it may be disinterested for the sake of truth; still at other times the word may be offered like a life preserver to a drowning man.  But the speech of the television is the monotone or the monologue, "speechifying"-- the speaker versus the mass or the mob. It discourages dialogue if not makes it impossible. 

We have exchanged dialogue, the speech of society, the speech of the village, for the speech of fate. It is thus that modern societies, in periodic intervals, go marching into disaster. To read Pride and Prejudice is to immerse oneself in living speech. For us today this is rather a novelty. That this should be the case is a telling--or is it a tolling?--commentary on our society. But it does allow us a new outlook on the form of the novel--that is, not only the telling of a story but as an embodiment of living speech.    

                                                         

                                  Piano music for Pride and Prejudice

Book Review

Update February 11, 2016: "What a lost pleasure it is in our indispensable nation to be in the presence of someone who thinks, acts and speaks out of conscience and conviction. Even better, these were precisely McGovern’s topics that day three years back: The necessity of careful thought, of honoring one’s inner voice, of acting out of an idea of what is right without regard to success or failure, the win-or-lose of life." From Patrick Smith's Feb. 7 article in Salon on Ray McGovern:
[title]  “Intelligent people know that the empire is on the downhill”: A veteran CIA agent spills the goods on the Deep State and our foreign policy nightmares. Recommended.                            

Book Review: Time No Longer: Americans after the American Century
Patrick L. Smith
Yale, 2013

This is the book we have all been waiting for— for years and years. The book that articulates our deepest misgivings about this country, this nation, the United States, and yet does not cancel hope… indeed, offers us  hope—if we will but accept ourselves as historical beings who live in time. And with this hope the work of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy can be brought forward in the most  natural way possible, seamlessly, as it were, to the top of the heap. The grammatical method, the Cross of Reality, the creation of the future: these deeper meanings from the Rosenstockian language seem already to belong to Patrick Smith’s vocabulary, as if he understood without knowing. This is an experience I too have had, in discovering Rosenstock’s work. But it seems that the discovery, or rather of the mating of the knowing with the understanding, belongs to a particular historical moment and an urgent historical task. This moment and this task is the subject of Patrick’s Smith’s book.

Patrick Smith is a journalist of high repute. He lived in Asia for about eight years, reporting from there, and has published five books. He writes articles for Salon.com and other publications—articles distinguished by their truthfulness and good sense, compared to the mendacious journalism we have today from the corporate and government-fed media outlets. For example, the New York Times – which Patrick Smith  assailed in his Feb. 18 article—“Our embarrassing servile media: does the New York Times just print everything the government tells it? [1]

Time No Longer  in the largest sense explores the difference between myth and history. In a more particular sense it is dedicated to digging up  the myth of “American exceptionalism” and uprooting it—root and branch. And there is “time no longer”—the title may or may not be intentionally reminiscent of  the Book of Revelation—because the decision facing us in America is whether to pretend to go on living in myth or to accept ourselves as living in history, accepting the responsibilities that living in history entails and overcoming our “cruelty of innocence,” as Nietzsche put it. 

“American exceptionalism” is the story that began with a 1630 sermon of John Winthrop-- the  “City upon a Hill.” It is now, says Smith,  an “exhausted narrative.”   It depicts a land immune from time, and there never is  or was such a place: “exceptionalism is a national impediment America can no longer afford.”  It’s an imaginary past, and an imaginary past “requires the unceasing production of an imaginary present.”   The four essays in this book—“History Without Memory,” “A Culture of Representation,” “Cold War Man,” and “Time and Time Again”—return again and again to the theme of what time and being modern mean.  “Time is the medium of all human encounters”  says Patrick Smith, and this is as good as anything found in the pages of Rosenstock-Huessy. For Americans today,  too caught up with the latest techno-fads, the statement that “To be modern one must think historically”  should be the beginning of a new curriculum in social studies,  a field which, Smith says, divorced itself from history and thus became “sterilized.”[2]   Smith does not cite John Lukacs in this work, but surely Lukacs’ summary in his Historical Consciousness, Or the Remembered Past (1968) would be appropriate  here: “I believe that the most important developments in our civilization during the last three or four centuries include not only applications of the scientific method but also the growth of a historical consciousness; and that while we may have exaggerated the importance of the former we have not yet understood sufficiently the implications of the latter.”

Smith often remarks the strange fact that while America is a modern society, dedicated to the furtherance and works of science and belief in progress, it nevertheless possesses a strong 17^th and 18^th century heritage in the form of Protestant evangelism and millenarian thinking.[3] It was as if the new nation were to be an object of belief,   a kind of religion. The new republic erected many barriers against time – as well as against unbelief or dissent.  Confusing  history and myth  leads to narcissism.[4] Nobody else matters; there is no point in learning about other peoples, societies, traditions. But history that passes into myth becomes a history without memory, meaning that “it is unsusceptible to reinterpretation or change from one generation to the next. It is fixed…it leaves those producing it and living by it in a certain state of immobility. They are unable to think anew or to imagine a future that is different from the present or the past.” In order to have continuity there has to be change, a break, re-imagining, dissolution and  renewal--  death and  new life. What is so often missing in this mythologizing of history, says Smith, is “the human agency, and hence a true narrative.”

So, if society and the nation and the history we are living through is something that “just happens” and goes humming along, why worry to renew and repair its institutions, infrastructure, society’s self-understanding? The height of complacency was reached a few years ago when I read, perhaps in a neoconservative publication, that Americans didn’t really have to worry about the quality of our leaders because the institutions we received from the Founders were just so great. How easy it is to spare oneself the confrontation with conscience!

But how great the cost: and this is what Smith’s book is about. In his chapter on the Cold War he has an arresting image: America “spent 50 years staring at its own reflection.”   There was the “Cold War silence”: the inability to speak; ignorance and inflexibility in thinking; the persistence of myths. It was the beginning of the National Security state, when “Fear would be transformed from an individual emotion into a social condition.” Few people understood the relationship between science and security better than John Dewey, whose book The Quest for Certainty was “a vigorous defense of the scientific ‘arts.’” (Smith, p. 93)  Rosenstock-Huessy also  had a few words to say about John Dewey and his"... scientific silently functioning all inclusive cooperative impersonal painless order, an order in which nothing vital has to be settled by force…”
--  summarizing it as follows: "But it borders on social irresponsibility to take the timberwork of society, the beams of authority, decision, faith, love, worship, for granted while everywhere those beams crack.” [5] I feel sure that Patrick Smith would be in accord with this judgment. Everything he says in this book is a call for us to break out of the “unsayable myth” that holds American life in its icy grip. “Gods that age become demons,” I think this was from Strindberg. Never has this been more true than the present.

Although I have issues with Smith’s final chapter “Time and Time Again,” – it deals with the September 11^th event – I can only agree that  it signified the end of the American Century. Smith describes the event as a “collision with history… a war between those dedicated to sustaining sacred time and national myth and those attempting to think historically and place events in a historical context such that Americans could achieve an understanding of them.” This chapter also contains interesting reflections about the increasing atomization of American life, the “de-contextualization”  which tears things out of their social and historical nexus. “To see only individuals in the foreground is to see with a mythologically defined consciousness—without context.” Another word would be—idiotic. The word ‘idiotes’ comes from the Greek, meaning private, individual—that which was not a part of the polis, the city, could not be considered  human in the full sense. It is interesting that, for us, the word has come to signify a low intelligence.[6]

Our most important, urgent task, our imperative, is to achieve the condition of history with memory. This means holding ourselves and others accountable for acts. In no other manner can we be considered responsible; in no other manner would we be able to create future—in contrast to just letting things happen. “Under no circumstances is man a spectator of history,” thunders Rosenstock-Huessy in The Christian Future (83). “We can now see why man’s life must be neither linear nor spiral but crucial.” (ibid) And “things happen not by living but by birth and death. ‘Living’ is but one half of life, the repetitive and predictable part. The other half is the agonizing creation and the creative agony of dying and being born.” (ibid, p. 57) For as Rosenstock again reminds us, “the sloughing off of old stages and the insistence on new ones distinguishes life from mechanism.” (ibid, p. 139) With politics in America reduced to mere spectacle, our social order resembles a mechanism punctuated by outbursts of  violence, leaps of passion that have no fathers and no children, so to speak—solo acts of anarchy.   

Whether or not Patrick Smith considers himself Christian is a question of minor importance. What is significant in Time No Longer is that he enunciates a view and a call for history that reveals the true meaning of Christianity – a true meaning long eviscerated by church history, sectarian squabbles and popular evangelisms. To see ourselves as others see us: this is the imperative for America to throw off, finally, the mythological spectacles that have led us to take a false view of ourselves and our place in the world. Only then can we move forward with purpose toward the creation of future.

 

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[1] Link to article: http://www.salon.com/2015/02/19/our_embarrassing_servile_media
_does_the_new_york_times_just_print_everything_the_government_tells_it/ 

[2] He adds: “And the absence of history—an absence that has marked off American social sciences from Europe’s ever since—would allow American social scientists to serve the exceptionalist mission.” p. 101. In other words, the social sciences in America became a kind of propaganda ministry.

[3] “America was a modern nation with features of a premodern society prominent within it. This produced an identifiably American personality. Americans were unable to understand events but by interpretation, blind to history’s course, deaf to the voices of others.” p. 133.

[4] “An inability to change is symptomatic of a people who consider themselves chosen and who cannot surrender their chosenness.” p. 193

[5] Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future, p. 53.

[6] Rosenstock-Huessy expresses a kindred idea when he says the great temptation of our time is impatience: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. “To be non-committal means to keep all relations without important consequences, to rob them of their reproductive, fruit-bearing quality.” The Christian Future, p. 19.  Historically grounded people engage in the labor of building a viable political order; wounded birds flock to New Age healers and preachers who promise quick salvation.