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. 

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.
 

Speech As Our Matrix (Parts 1 - 2)

Reprinted to this blog with the permission of Mr. Gardner. There may be some slight editing for space considerations.

 

SPEECH AS OUR MATRIX:

Discovering the Cross of Reality

 

Clinton C. Gardner

 

I. INTRODUCTION

Beloved by many generations of Dartmouth students, who recorded and published his lectures, and also kept his books in print, the social philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973), has yet to be welcomed by the academic establishment. He himself predicted that it would be 30 years or more, after his death, before this might occur. I have often thought of him as a latter-day Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who was “discovered” and celebrated as the father of existentialism in the 1920s, some 70 years after his death.
 
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973), has yet to be welcomed by the academic establishment. He himself predicted that it would be 30 years or more, after his death, before this might occur. I have often thought of him as a latter-day Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who was “discovered” and celebrated as the father of existentialism in the 1920s, some 70 years after his death.

This essay will introduce the reader to what I consider the heart of Rosenstock-Huessy’s work: his “discovery” of what he called “the Cross of Reality,” and the related disclosure that “spirit,” which has usually been thought of as ethereal, can now be recognized as our gift of speech.

Born into a Jewish banker’s family in Berlin, Rosenstock-Huessy became a Christian at age 18. Indeed, he became a remarkably-engaged Christian, as we shall see.

Martin Marty, the prominent US historian of religion, has long hailed Rosenstock-Huessy’s work. In a Christian Century book review, Marty described Rosenstock-Huessy as a thinker “ahead of his time,” one who managed to write about Christianity “without old-line appeal to transcendence.”

The poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973) wrote a foreword for one of Rosenstock-Huessy’s books, saying “I have read everything by him that I could lay my hands on,” and closed by citing Rosenstock-Huessy’s motto, Respondeo etsi mutabor (I respond although I will be changed), then adding, “Speaking for myself, I can only say that, by listening to Rosenstock-Huessy, I have been changed.”

The distinguished Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) wrote: “The historical nature of man is the aspect of reality about which we have been basically and emphatically instructed in the epoch of thought beginning with Hegel....Rosenstock-Huessy has concretized this teaching in so living a way as no other thinker before him has done.”

Other prominent thinkers who have admired Rosenstock-Huessy’s work include the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Harvey Cox, as well as the sociologist David Riesman and the social critic Lewis Mumford.

   A likely reason for Rosenstock-Huessy’s long-delayed recognition by academe is that his work bridged so many different disciplines. He was a social philosopher and sociologist, a historian and a religious thinker, yet a scholar whose longest book, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts (The Speech of Humankind) was on the origins and meaning of language. As if that were not enough, he described Academe as the enemy—and urged that it get out of its ivory tower. To do that, he suggested that higher education should incorporate a year of service within its four-year term. Finally, a likely reason for his obscurity is that his “new version of Christianity,” a Christianity that was this-worldly, even secular, kept intruding into his historical and sociological works.

In this essay I will attempt to explicate and applaud those intrusions—because they serve Rosenstock-Huessy’s  goal of presenting our reality “whole” again, before it was divided into the several realms of the hard sciences, the social sciences,  the humanities, and religion. In other words, I will show how he pursued his aim of “realigning” all our fields of knowledge—so that natural science would no longer seem their base, as it has seemed since Descartes (1596-1650).

 Specifically, I will describe what Rosenstock-Huessy called “the Cross of Reality,” an image which shows us how all our knowledge—from the most material of physics to the most spiritual of religion—can be seen as related and forming a whole. Thus, I will be challenging the current trend in intellectual life, in which knowledge has seemed to become increasingly fragmented. I will be arguing that our experience of speech is the glue which holds us together—and that this experience can be seen as the action of spirit in us, in both the secular and religious senses. In sum, speech is our matrix, and the Cross of Reality depicts that matrix.

As if that were not enough for a shortish essay I will endeavor to show how the Cross of Reality points us to a new method for the social sciences, a more universal method than the one disclosed, for the natural sciences, by Descartes and Galileo (1564-1642).  

Before I begin that task, I should introduce myself. I was one of those Dartmouth students who have worked to preserve Rosenstock-Huessy’s legacy. In fact, I have written introductions to two of his books, as well as three books about his work. With his blessing. I founded a little company, Argo Books, which published many of his unpublished manuscripts—and kept all his English works in print. From the outset, I operated Argo Books with the support of Rosenstock-Huessy’s distinguished friend Freya von Moltke.

The text which follows first saw the light of day at a June 2014 conference held at Renison University College, Waterloo, Ontario. Canada. Most of it was drawn from my several books on Rosenstock-Huessy’s work. As of October 2014, it still needs an appended section of notes.

II. THE CROSS OF REALITY 

Ever since he introduced the Cross of Reality, in his 1925 Soziologie, Rosenstock-Huessy has kept that image central to his varied works on history, society, and religion. It is important to note that this cross is not a religious image; it is not the Cross of Christ. Rosenstock-Huessy’s Dartmouth classes made clear that the Cross of Reality was grounded in our everyday experience of secular life. This is evident in my classroom note, from the spring of 1941, which follows:

                                                            

Rosenstock-Huessy says we are all crucified in a Cross of Reality on which we have to face backward to the past, forward to the future, inward toward our selves, and outward toward the world. He brings this cross image to life, not as an abstract idea, not as his idea, but as a new model of the human reality, a model which he invites us to discover with him. When he diagrams the cross on a blackboard, he makes a horizontal line for its time axis, then a vertical line to represent the space axis. This visual depiction becomes an icon for all his students, an icon of our human predicament—and our potential.

Since each of us lives at the center of this cross, our lives are crucial, not only for ourselves but for all humankind. We are constantly torn between the need to be true to the achievements of past time and the need to respond to the new callings of the future. Similarly, on the space axis of our lives, we are constantly trying to relate our personal, subjective inner space to the objective demands of the outer world, the space around us.

     This model applies not only to each person but to any group, even to a nation.

   The Cross of Reality, showing that times are as important as spaces, corrects the scientific subject-object model of reality, the Cartesian model (cogito ergo sum), which is merely spatial, and enlarges on its limited method. All these relationships become clear when Rosenstock-Huessy diagrams the cross on the blackboard:  

                                                             

                                                 

      When the social sciences were born, through Auguste Comte (1798-1857), to make themselves respectable, they adopted the objective methodology of the natural sciences. Measurements and statistics became their tools, just as they had been for the natural sciences.  Rosenstock-Huessy does not suggest that the social sciences abandon measurements and statistics; rather that objectivity should become only one of the four ways we investigate any question that involves the human being in society. In other words, the Cross of Reality is a model that can be turned into a method for sociology—and all the human sciences     

      A few months after I wrote that note, in June of 1941 I found myself in Tunbridge, Vermont as a member of Camp William James, a project which had begun through the efforts of Rosenstock-Huessy students. With the endorsement of President Roosevelt, the camp had started as an experimental camp within the Civilian Conservation Corps, with about 15 members from the regular CCC and about 10 recent graduates of Dartmouth and Harvard. In my diary, I wrote the following note which explained the camp in terms of the four fronts shown on the Cross of Reality—future time, the inner space of the self, past time, and the outer world:     

                                                                                                                                                        

First, we came to Camp William James because we heard a calling toward the future. We wanted to create a new institution, a period of all-out service as part of all young people’s education. It would be the CCC plus Dartmouth and Harvard, an entirely new combination. It’s a breaking-away from the ivory tower of academe into the problems and life of a real community. We heard another calling toward the future when we sent a group to Mexico to help rebuild the town of Colima—recently flattened in an earthquake. This second calling makes clearer that we’re engaged in a “moral equivalent of war,” not just planting trees or helping some farmers. Second, we’re creating our own inner space within the farm building, our headquarters. Of course, it’s also the inner space of our group, the community we have formed here. Third, we have the experience of being connected with past time, with the ongoing life of a rural town whose roots go back for many generations. We go to square dances where the calling is in an Elizabethan style that’s died out in England. Quite a contrast with the rootless suburbs of New York or the slums of New Haven, both places where many of us grew up. Fourth, we are getting national publicity through stories in the Boston Globe and the New York Times. This makes our little inner group known to the outer world, objectively, with both good and bad consequences. It has helped recruiting, but it’s also what led to our losing federal funding. In Congress we were attacked as just another New Deal boondoggle—and had to close our CCC “side-camp” in Sharon. To sum up, the camp has provided each of us with a more intense experience of life, a more crucial experience, than we’d get in any ordinary college year. We have come to see that a period of such service, when integrated into one’s education, would show its participants how we all live historically, drawn toward the past and the future.




I think this note about the camp makes clear that the Cross of Reality is not some elaborate metaphysical concept but simply a commonsense way to interpret any experience. In fact, 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. Unfortunately, huge numbers of people, probably the great majority—be they ideologues, fascists, or communists (all stuck on the “glorious future” front), fundamentalists (stuck on the past front), sentimentalists and pietists (stuck on the subjective front), or even rationalists (stuck on the objective front)—are not guided by common sense.









In 1942 I’d left Camp William James to serve four years in the army. Returning to Dartmouth in 1946, I majored in Philosophy because I wanted to concentrate on Rosenstock-Huessy’s work. The note below is from a course in which he described how humankind had been formed by four quite different kinds of speech, as portrayed on the Cross of Reality:


Universal History

During some 40,000 years before Christ, tribal speech, with its totems and taboos, had oriented us to our ancestors, to the narrative of our past.

Then, in the great empires, such as China and Egypt, already flourishing by 3000 BC, the speech of the temple oriented us to the stars, the rivers, and the fields, the universe of nature, the world outside us.

By 600 BC Greek speech had begun to orient us to our inner selves, through poetry and philosophy.

During that same millennium before Christ, the speech of Israel emerged, orienting us to our future by way of prayer and prophecy.

With the coming of the Christian era, those four ancient modes of speech were fused. After Christ we no longer felt bound by a single orientation. We were no longer simply Greek or Jew, Egyptian or tribesman. For 2,000 years now, we have been moving steadily toward spiritual unity, as we have become increasingly able to articulate all four forms of speech.

Four great types of civilization had reached dead ends at Year Zero of our common era. Christ and his apostles came at the right time. They translated those dead ends into new beginnings, becoming in effect the narrow part of the tube in the hourglass of history. Since that center-time, human history has become one story.

                                                          

            Another course of Rosenstock-Huessy’s was based on his magnum opus Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man. Here he was not explicit about the Cross of Reality orientations, but it seemed clear to me that they undergirded his message. Thus, my summary of the book was as follows:

      Western History         

Just as he tells pre-Christian history in terms of four kinds of speech, so Rosenstock-Huessy sees these four kinds of speech given different emphases in each of the great Western revolutions. The imperatives established in the first millennium of the Christian era made all those revolutions necessary, from what he calls the “Papal Revolution” of the high Middle Ages to the Russian Communist revolution of our own time. Each of these six great revolutions had different orientations and impulses, but they all sought to remake the whole world:

 

1. The Papal Revolution, begun by Pope Gregory in 1076, had a messianic orientation toward the future. It was the first global revolution—and that planetary purpose was repeated in all its successors. Its new speech, the language of theology, with Anselm’s credo ut intelligam (I believe so that I may understand) was first heard in the new institution of universities.

 

2. The German Reformation, begun by Luther in 1517, emphasized our inner conscience, and its greatest new institution was public education. It saw the Bible translated into local languages and introduced the priesthood of all believers, thereby ending the central power of the church. In fact, it began the process of secularization (particularly visible in the emergence of secular art).

 

3. The British Parliamentary or Puritan Revolution (1649-1688) celebrated the laws and traditions of the past. Its new institutions were parliaments and the rule of law. Power was no longer in the hands of the nobility but turned over to the gentry—the Christian gentlemen.

 

4. The French Revolution (1789) focused on the outer front, where reason and objectivity hold sway. For the first time, the lowly bourgeoisie, the common man, was fully      empowered. National literatures and arts, as well as newspapers, appeared. Freed from religion, all the sciences began to flourish. So did capitalism!  

 

          5. The American Revolution (1776) was a happy combination of impulses from both the

    French and the British. It gave them an additional impetus, as they spread over the new

   continent.

 

   6. Finally, the Russian Revolution (1917) turned into a rather unhappy combination of

  future messianism with the new language of objectivity. Still, it was a needed corrective to

  unbridled capitalism’s exploitation of labor. Indeed, its new imperative was freedom from

  economic exploitation. Rosenstock-Huessy wrote that the New Deal, with Social Security,

 the WPA, etc., would have been unthinkable without the preceding communist revolution.

 

            In The Christian Future, Rosenstock-Huessy saw all these six revolutions, and the two World Wars contributing to what he called today’s “Great Society,” the global society that he described as “heiress of state and church.”  This explains why he said that “Christianity is not a religion.” In light of the history told in Out Of Revolution, Christianity was more important in changing secular society than it was as a religion.  

 

 

Re: Gender Gnosticism

Fruit of Lips is Rosenstock-Huessy’s short monograph on the Gospels (Pickwick Publications, Eugene, Oregon, @1978). Like everything he wrote, the book is pregnant with insight and what could be called the simplicity of depth. There is a lot more that could be said about this “simplicity,” such as how difficult it is to achieve, how rare it is, what it is (a moral rather than intellectual condition?), how we have no “measure” or I.Q. for it, why people avoid it like the plague or misunderstand it, willfully or otherwise. But all those questions will have to wait for another time.




  I want to focus solely on what Rosenstock writes about gnosticism, for I think the implications unspool down to our very own time. He characterizes the gnosis as “speech without experience” or “speech to no purpose.” This is in sharp contrast to the language of the Gospels, which, he says, corresponds to the grammar of the Cross:




" In our modern terms, we may say that each Gospel is aware of the perfect cycle of this life from Imperativus personalis to Subjunctivus Lyricus to Narrativus Historicus to Indicativus Abstractus. But each Gospel writer was stirred up by one especially: Matthew who had experienced the violence of a a sudden order: Follow me, took his clue from the Imperativus personalis; Mark wrote for and with the prince of the apostles, took his clue from the fellowship of the twelve, a strongly lyrical note; Luke, who was Paul’s companion…wrote from Christmas on, as any narrator who has a particular time span in common with the events he narrates. And John… took his clue from Jesus’s victory over the endless cycles of ritual, of eons, of revolutions which engulfed the ancient world. He began with the progress brought on by the power of the Word, in his Indicativus Abstractus: In the beginning was the Word. ..”




Then Rosenstock uses the term beloved of spiritual scientists: initiation. He says: ”But until a man is initiated into the cross of grammar as a citizen who listens to the call of duty, as a lover who hears the soul of his life call upon his name, as the patient who sees his chance to get well, as the thinker who realizes the category of freedom for himself despite the laws which his mind thinks up for nature – not until [he] has had at least one of these four experiences, does he use speech to a reasonable purpose.”


Thus he defines the gnostics as people who began to “dabble” with the new facts brought into being by the church, by Christianity: “People tried to think the new life without being touched by it first in some form of call, listening, passion, or change of heart.” He comments that “gnosticism is all over the world today.”




What arrested my attention in particular was this: “During the last century, our last ramparts against the relapse into gnosis have been the earthly love of man and wife.” Dr. Rosenstock could not have glimpsed  the decadent hollows of our current moral and political disorder, with gender now having become the latest serpent sliding out of the shallows—comprised of “fictions, myths, repetitions, suspicions, when words have lost their meaning. We move in a vacuum.” Apparently, physical, incarnated life no longer suffices for people to have the sense of reality. It is simply tossed overboard like so much extra baggage. Truth to say—the metaphor is for a sinking ship.




These thoughts came to mind as I read the latest online issue of The American Conservative, where even a Democratic National Committee true believer is floored by how much gender madness has overtaken Democratic party politics. Correct thinking about gender has come to reign supreme, even usurping the place where the kind of work that must be done to maintain the Democratic Party as a viable political entity is to be done. The article can be read here:




http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/gender-madness-alienates-democratic-insider/




Also in this same issue there is an article reporting on the firing of the local Lutheran Seminary president, Theresa Latini, just a few weeks ago. Twenty years ago Latini had worked with an organization sponsored by the Presbyterian Church, that counselled people dealing with sexual and gender issues. Apparently such mainstream views were no longer welcomed in the Lutheran Seminary, which has seen a 50% enrollment decline in a single decade. The article:




  http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/progressive-christianity-suicide-elca-lutheran/




Even the editor of the extreme-left Chestnut Hill Local, which caters to one of Philadelphia’s best neighborhoods, admitted in March 22 editorial, that “We need a better way to reconcile people with their pasts.” Pete Mazzaccaro noted the irony that Christianity had been founded by Paul, one of the persecutors of the early Christians. Yet Paul had been forgiven. Why could not the so-called Christians at the Lutheran seminary figure out a way to forgive their president, Theresa Latini, for her past “mistake” i.e., working with an organization that held mainstream views about gender? New Gender Orthodoxy is unforgiving indeed!




“The grammar of the Cross”: is the signal contribution needed today. May we raise it to stand alongside the grave of civilization that we keep digging. May it stand in the hope that the honor of speech will be reborn in us before we succeed in destroying the world.

A Champion of Logos

[This is a portion of an essay published by CJ on Rosenstock-Huessy in the June, 2016, issue of Culture Wars magazine, South Bend, Indiana. It has been lightly edited.]

 

“War and marriage are the two cornerstones of serious life with which we cannot experiment.”

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

 

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy could not have foreseen the awful and ironic resonance his words would have for us today. Born July 6, 1888, in Berlin, Eugen Rosenstock grew up in an assimilated German Jewish family. (Upon his marriage to Margrit Huessy, in the Swiss custom he added her name to his.) At about age 17 he became a Christian. Of scholarly bent and with an aptitude for languages,[1] Rosenstock received his doctorate in law, and later in philosophy, and became a professor of medieval constitutional law. In the First World War he was an office in the German army. The war experience shook him to his roots and he believed that “never again can we do things the same way” again. The appearance of a new imperative in individual or social life became an important theme of his writings.  “The future is reached by imperatives,” he wrote. And in his book The Christian Future (1946), in response to William James’ 1910 call for the “moral equivalent of war,” he wrote that “When a new imperative is given and goes unheeded, the results are much worse than they were in the days before the new way into the future was proclaimed.” For James’ call went unheeded and was followed by two devastating world wars. [2]

 

In 1933 Rosenstock emigrated to the U.S. He had a teaching post at Harvard. It was not a successful match because Rosenstock had a way of taking God’s presence in history seriously, and Harvard didn’t know what to do with that. They stowed him away in the theology department for a while. Not long, because he found a better position at Dartmouth, where  he would sometimes ride to his classes on horseback and where he taught until his retirement in 1957. He gained a devoted following amongst his former students, some of whom have recorded and transcribed his lectures, published his works in English, or translated some from the German, and established societies and conferences for the dissemination of his ideas.

 

This brief biographical sketch barely suffices to introduce one of the more interesting thinkers of our time. I  had stumbled upon The Christian Future  some time ago  and used a quote from it for my book, Stewards of History.[3] There, apparently, the matter rested for some years. I don’t recall what it was that sparked my interest to find out more about this author. But I did some internet research, eventually became a member of the Rosenstock-Huessy Society and started this blog in response to his work.  

 

What is it about Rosenstock’s thought that inspired my interest and the devotion of so many of his former students and colleagues? The short answer is that Rosenstock’s “speech-thinking”   affirmed and renewed the Logos – the Word from the beginning. And further, he found a new home for the Logos, so to speak. It is grammar, which can become the method for a new understanding of social relations. “The fundamental classifications of grammar and the fundamental classifications of social relations coincide,” he wrote.[4]  But there were other insights, extraordinary in their simple and compelling nature. Most striking among these was his distinction between formal and informal speech – a distinction I have not read in any other commentator on language. But it seems evident that while communication exists among bees and dolphins, and indeed the language of the quantum says that intercommunication is a property of universal life and matter. But only human beings bestow proper names and possess formal speech. The informal and the casual depend upon the formal and the specified. Thus, “new speech is not created by thinkers or poets but by great and massive political calamities and upheavals.” “What a great day!” Rosenstock says, depends upon “The heavens declare the glory of God.”   And: “…we shall have a science of speech or of language as soon as we have penetrated to the hell of non-speech.”[5]

 

Rosenstock had high words of praise for the Catholic liturgy. While not himself Catholic, he was sometimes considered Catholic in attitude, and collaborated with Joseph Wittig, a priest and author, in the writing of his three-volume Der Alter der Kirche (The Age of the Church – not yet translated.) [6]   In writing of the liturgy, Rosenstock commented:  “It always has aroused my attention that the preface of the Christian Mass, which is one of the most perfect documents of human speech,  should begin with adjectives and, what is more, with a considerable list of adjectives. It runs: Vere dignum et justum est, aequum et salutare, nos tibi semper et ubique gratias agere, Domine sancte... This prayer … is historical and adjectival language at its apex. … in the perfect form of one special style.” [7]

 

Christianity, and specifically Catholic Christianity, has historically been the vehicle of the Logos.[8]  In its classical meaning Logos means ‘word, speech, reason, proportion, intelligence, measure, means,’ etc. In the Gospel of John, Christ is the Logos: the Word became flesh. A contemporary definition of the Logos was offered by the reviewer of E. Michael Jones’s book, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, and published in a letter to Culture Wars: the Logos “…[is] the rational universal order, personified in Jesus Christ, incorporating the earthly political and social order that He embodied in his human nature…” [9]. I would like to offer a slightly different characterization: Logos is how we become cognizant of the realm of moral intelligence.   This moral intelligence may be seen in a threefold dimension, including the physical, [10] comprising the intelligence or laws of nature, the best practices of society which foster civilization and productivity, and the means of intercommunion or communication between the two.  In a manner of speaking this threefold description is a restatement of the Trinity: the realm of the Father being the Law, the realm of the Son being Society, and the realm of communication being the province of the Holy Spirit. Man participates in the Logos by means of language, specifically grammatical language. Semantics, meaning, symbolism, biology, genetics: all these play a role in language.  But it is actually by means of grammar that we become oriented in  space and time, society and world. [11]

 

How, then, does Rosenstock elaborate the Logos of grammar? He diagrams the persons of grammar (you, I, he, she, it, etc.) in what he calls the “Cross of Reality,” first adding to the spatial continuum of the Cartesian Subject-Object (inner space of self-consciousness and external objectified space)  with a temporal axis embracing Future and Past. The temporal axis has, as its future pole, the Imperative voice  (addressed to You: “You must do this!” “Sing to the goddess, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles!”) which is the grammatical person that  demands action and creates future. At the other end of the temporal pole is the ‘We’—the narrative mode, historical remembrance, and ritual -- the community remembering, consecrating and commemorating. The spatial and temporal dimensions form the intersecting poles of the Cross.

 

It is thus that we are conjugated through our human experience: first as “You,” then, thanks to being spoken to, enjoying the privileges of individual self-consciousness (“I”) then as part of a larger community (“We”) and finally, as possessors of “It” – facts, experiences, discoveries, statistics. “Its” are the indicatives; they have been “indicated,” decided, and accounted for. In this manner human life represents and re-enacts this conjugal relation of grammar. Perhaps it is this idea that underlies the significance of marriage, and war, for the serious life. The fact that  today virtually everything in America has become unserious, if not unhinged, underscores the promiscuous nature of our wars and the dissolving character of our marriages.

 

                         Rosenstock’s Cross of Reality

 
Note: See also: http://soul-grammar.blogspot.com/2016/02/speech-as-our-matrix-parts-1-3.html where Mr. Gardner’s article, “Speech is our Matrix,” is reproduced and  describes the Cross of Reality in detail.

 

 

Grammatical health, Rosenstock believed, comes from being able to circulate fully among the four grammatical  poles and to do justice to each of them. In this respect America is seriously unbalanced. We certainly have no deficit of the “I”—the “selfie” pole. Nor any deficit  with “it.” Indicative, that is, scientific and factual statements,  are for the most part the only kinds of statements considered true. Where we have deficits is in the cross pole, Future and Past, Imperative and Remembrance. For example, in 2013 Patrick Smith published Time No Longer: Americans after the American Century,  which argued that we can no longer afford to indulge the idea of American exceptionalism.  It has been the ideology of incessant and ruinous wars and has fostered a spirit of national complacency regarding our politics, schools and quality of life. Has anyone noticed? Have there been any effects from this book?  Aside from a few reviews here and there, the book disappeared without a sound. But the pattern repeats itself again and again. For a nation that prides itself on progress and innovation, the United States is remarkably resistant to dynamic change. This provides an illustration for Chesterton’s quip, that to have anything sudden, you must have something eternal. It is the deficiency in history, in historical memory, that leads to a kind of hermetic stagnation – an inability to hear, to act, and to change appropriately.  Rosenstock often alluded to a kind of “presentism” in the United States:  “The power to connect more than one generation is not given in nature.  In 1702 Cotton Mather complained that America was in danger of res unius aetatis, a matter of one age, and by 1922 Chesterton thought so again. The U.S. has always had trouble living in many generations. ..” [12]

 

“Presentism”  may indicate a stagnation of history, a breakdown of the full circulation of the Cross of Reality. To have history, three generations are necessary. And the Christian story – death precedes birth – is the paradigm of dynamic change.  Is not an accident that the word “paradigm” is a term of grammar specifically, though it is often used as a synonym for “structure.” We must let the idea of American exceptionalism die. Then, in a mood of repentance, we can move forward. But I don’t see the possibility of that happening any time soon.

 

It can be beneficial to look back on the course of one’s life, noting the imperatives in particular. How often it is that it is through the sense of urgent having-to-do something, we have learned to know ourselves.  From such moments that we have spun our destiny, if we were able to wait and to suffer with the threads we hold. That waiting and suffering is important, for  Rosenstock noted that the great temptation of our time is impatience: “We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profound relationships…To be non-committal means to keep all relations without important consequences, to rob them of their reproductive, fruit-bearing quality.” [13] What is unique in Rosenstock’s thinking is the emphasis upon fruitfulness. This concern distinguishes his approach from Western rationalism’s search for truth. It also divides him from the academics who, once they forsook truth, did not find the way to fruitfulness but instead to power, celebrity, and influence, hatching numerous academic fads along the way. .

 

We can only out-think and out-argue this system by finding the words that will awaken the “You” in the human heart. We must awaken conscience through living streams of words. For man alienated from commanding language becomes a beast—or worse. He becomes a heartless predator. But productivity and fruitfulness stand at the gates of  the language  of good will, the speech that has responsibility for truth and for the future. If we cannot awaken language at this level we will have no future. For “the flow of vital speech is the sign of living Christians…A Spirit of Pentecost has become our immediate political necessity.” [14]  We are buried under words today, counterfeit speech—slogans, advertising, political harangues paid for by professional agitators. Have we lost the ability to participate in genuine speech? Rosenstock’s writings provide an important source for social awakening. To be able to respond to genuine speech, to generate it and participate in it: this is our human necessity, and if we lose this, we lose our humanity.

 

---

[1] He was apparently proficient in Gothic, Latin, Greek, Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Celtic, Armenian, Persian, Sanskrit, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and all other Indo-European languages. All Semitic languages, Hebrew, Syrian, Arabic, Egyptian. Fifteen Finno-Ugaric languages. Twenty African languages. 

[2] James made the call in the context of endorsing Voluntary Poverty. He made a startling proposal: ‘What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war... May not voluntarily accepted poverty be 'the strenuous life’ without the need of crushing weaker peoples?” This imperative seems remarkably prescient in the light of subsequent events.

[3] “Jesus… proved that every end could and should be turned into a new beginning, that even absolute failure and death could be made fertile. Herewith the last frontier of the soul was conquered…Death became the carrier of life between souls.”  Harper Torchbooks, p. 66. The quote referenced my ancestor’s loss of his beloved wife, and how his active participation in the anti-slavery movement dates from this period.

[4] “How Language Establishes Relations” an essay in Speech and Reality (Argo Books, Vermont,  1970).

[5] The Origin of Speech, p. 9.

[6] Father Wittig’s stories  were considered  heretical in part and he was excommunicated in 1926. Later study of his case failed to find any objectionable material, and Pope John XXIII  once declared that, had he been Pope at the time, there would have been no “Wittig case.” In 1946 Wittig was restored to full communion with the Church. The third volume of The Age of the Church deals with the Wittig case.

[7] From “How Language Establishes Relations,” in Speech and Reality, Argo Books, Vermont, 1970.

[8] “…the Church, which in spite of everything, is still the only viable vehicle which Logos has left in this world.” From a letter to a reader from E. Michael Jones, Culture Wars, February 2016.

[9] Quoted by John Beaumont in “The Church and the Jews,” Culture Wars, March 2015.

[10] I see “moral intelligence” as including the physical dimension as its means of commission or action. But the physical dimension, in modern philosophy at least, is more often viewed reductively and lacking in any moral dimension. In classical languages, the moral and the physical are not as widely divergent as in modern speech: for example, “pneuma” meant ‘wind’ as well as ‘spirit.’

[11] There is little connection between Noam Chomsky’s “deep grammar” and Rosenstock’s “grammatical method.” While not claiming any extensive familiarity with Chomsky, even a cursory reading of the Wikipedia entry on him reveals a highly academic approach to linguistics, e.g. “The basis to Chomsky's linguistic theory is rooted in biolinguistics, holding that the principles underlying the structure of language are biologically determined in the human mind and hence genetically transmitted.”  Rosenstock’s work deals not with language as academic theory but as “question marks of political history.”  His thinking is rooted in social history and in the real life of peoples, tribes, and nations. 

[12] The Origin of Speech, 78

[13] The Christian Future, p. 19.

[14] The Christian Future, p. 4-6.